Silicon Planet


Book Description

A developer's account of the breakthroughs and battles that made computer chips the foundation of our world. Computer chips, like sand and water, now cover the earth. Each year, more than 60 billion computer chips are shipped inside smartphones, data centers, cars, airplanes, refrigerators, and more. How did we get to this point? And what even is a computer chip? For nearly forty years, author Pat Hays developed state-of-art computer chips, as a designer and entrepreneur. Silicon Planet is his personal story, full of the ideas, people, and drama at the heart of this technology. In it, the reader will learn how computer chips are designed and fabricated while witnessing breakthroughs and battles that have shaped our world. Silicon Planet concludes with an analysis of the Boeing 737 MAX disasters-events that exemplify the risks to safety and security that computer chips have brought alongside their benefits. Silicon Planet will engage general readers as well as engineering professionals.




Valley of Genius


Book Description

"This is the most important book on Silicon Valley I've read in two decades. It will take us all back to our roots in the counterculture, and will remind us of the true nature of the innovation process, before we tried to tame it with slogans and buzzwords." -- Po Bronson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Nudist on the Late Shift and Nurtureshock A candid, colorful, and comprehensive oral history that reveals the secrets of Silicon Valley -- from the origins of Apple and Atari to the present day clashes of Google and Facebook, and all the start-ups and disruptions that happened along the way. Rarely has one economy asserted itself as swiftly--and as aggressively--as the entity we now know as Silicon Valley. Built with a seemingly permanent culture of reinvention, Silicon Valley does not fight change; it embraces it, and now powers the American economy and global innovation. So how did this omnipotent and ever-morphing place come to be? It was not by planning. It was, like many an empire before it, part luck, part timing, and part ambition. And part pure, unbridled genius... Drawing on over two hundred in-depth interviews, Valley of Genius takes readers from the dawn of the personal computer and the internet, through the heyday of the web, up to the very moment when our current technological reality was invented. It interweaves accounts of invention and betrayal, overnight success and underground exploits, to tell the story of Silicon Valley like it has never been told before. Read it to discover the stories that Valley insiders tell each other: the tall tales that are all, improbably, true.




The Star Wars Question & Answer Book about Computers


Book Description

Question and answer format presents information on how computers work, what their insides are like, and the wide variety of uses to which they have been put today--inside robots, in games, and inside human bodies.




Los Angeles Magazine


Book Description

Los Angeles magazine is a regional magazine of national stature. Our combination of award-winning feature writing, investigative reporting, service journalism, and design covers the people, lifestyle, culture, entertainment, fashion, art and architecture, and news that define Southern California. Started in the spring of 1961, Los Angeles magazine has been addressing the needs and interests of our region for 48 years. The magazine continues to be the definitive resource for an affluent population that is intensely interested in a lifestyle that is uniquely Southern Californian.




Escape Emeralda 2


Book Description

Disclosure: This description was prompted and edited by Bill Ritchie, in Microsoft’s current Copilot, an AI text generator for the second volume of Bill H. Ritchie's two-part autobiography. We traverse the years from 1991 to 2023. Ritchie, a trailblazer in the art world continues his life story. In the first book he told how he embarked on a remarkable odyssey that defied convention and reshaped the art, craft, and design of fine art printmaking. At the tender age of 24, Ritchie secured a groundbreaking position—the youngest ever—in the vibrant city of Seattle. His appointment as a teaching artist in fine art printmaking at the University of Washington marked the beginning of a transformative chapter. But this was no ordinary academic journey; Ritchie's innovative spirit would soon set him apart, a maverick in academe. The traditional classroom was too confining for Ritchie. Driven by a hunger for exploration, he wove technology into his art courses in the 1980s. Bill Ritchie's experiments disrupted the staid printmaking department and shocked the UW School of Art. Forced to leave the stifling ivory towers, by the 1990s the emergence of electronic arts opened with the Internet and would extend the boundaries of printmaking. Ritchie's vision blurred the lines between historic creativity and cutting-edge technology, birthing a new era dating back to the Paleolithic era when printmaking was invented. Ritchie pushed the envelope. Printmaking was no longer confined to ink and paper; it now danced with video, performance, computer graphics, and games. His colleagues, patrons, and former students watched in awe, wondering at the audacity of his moves. Telling all, Ritchie weaves rich, detailed tales. In his printed books he placed thousands of pictures to enliven the narrative, capturing moments shared with those who left their marks on his journey. QR codes link videos and backstories, bridging epochs—from prehistoric cave paintings to the digital age. The echoes of ancient handprints resonate, showing that explication transcends time if replicated creatively. In a world illuminated and echoed by electronic media, Ritchie poses a poignant question: "Is there hope?" As climate change and global stressors threaten the future, his words resonate. Whether through brushstrokes or those fleeting, elusive pixels and here in eBook form and auxiliary Read Aloud option, Ritchie's legacy endures—a beacon for students of all ages, urging them to embrace creativity, defy boundaries, and find hope in the interplay of art, technology, and the human imagination.




信息技术英语阅读


Book Description

普通高等院校计算机专业(本科)实用教程系列




The World in a Grain


Book Description

A finalist for the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award The gripping story of the most important overlooked commodity in the world--sand--and the crucial role it plays in our lives. After water and air, sand is the natural resource that we consume more than any other--even more than oil. Every concrete building and paved road on Earth, every computer screen and silicon chip, is made from sand. From Egypt's pyramids to the Hubble telescope, from the world's tallest skyscraper to the sidewalk below it, from Chartres' stained-glass windows to your iPhone, sand shelters us, empowers us, engages us, and inspires us. It's the ingredient that makes possible our cities, our science, our lives--and our future. And, incredibly, we're running out of it. The World in a Grain is the compelling true story of the hugely important and diminishing natural resource that grows more essential every day, and of the people who mine it, sell it, build with it--and sometimes, even kill for it. It's also a provocative examination of the serious human and environmental costs incurred by our dependence on sand, which has received little public attention. Not all sand is created equal: Some of the easiest sand to get to is the least useful. Award-winning journalist Vince Beiser delves deep into this world, taking readers on a journey across the globe, from the United States to remote corners of India, China, and Dubai to explain why sand is so crucial to modern life. Along the way, readers encounter world-changing innovators, island-building entrepreneurs, desert fighters, and murderous sand pirates. The result is an entertaining and eye-opening work, one that is both unexpected and involving, rippling with fascinating detail and filled with surprising characters.




Bound Together


Book Description

Since humans migrated from Africa and dispersed throughout the world, they have found countless ways and reasons to reconnect with each other. In this entertaining book, Nayan Chanda follows the exploits of traders, preachers, adventurers, and warriors throughout history as they have shaped and reshaped the world. For Chanda, globalization is a process of ever-growing interconnectedness and interdependence that began thousands of years ago and continues to this day with increasing speed and ease. In the end, globalization—from the lone adventurer carving out a new trade route to the expanding ambitions of great empires—is the product of myriad aspirations and apprehensions that define just about every aspect of our lives: what we eat, wear, ride, or possess is the product of thousands of years of human endeavor and suffering across the globe. Chanda reviews and illustrates the economic and technological forces at play in globalization today and concludes with a thought-provoking discussion of how we can and should embrace an inevitably global world.




Outta Sbzzz Mind


Book Description

This is my first book containing drawings/cartoons or maybe some can be called an art-toon. All drawings have a story or memory attached with them of fiction or non-fiction Some are funny, strange, weird, eerie or food for thought. I let my brain dribble down to my hand so it could move some ink around on the paper. Id like to believe that this book will inspire others in creating their art and publishing the results of your efforts. There is so much talent out there. What is the gift you have to offer unconditionally without comparing your creations to other artists? Find your style, niche, or desire and draw, doodle, paint, mold, sculpt, design or whatever your medium of art is and produce it for the world to see. Art is wonderful, fun, appealing and life. Art it is all good.




A History of Modern Computing, second edition


Book Description

From the first digital computer to the dot-com crash—a story of individuals, institutions, and the forces that led to a series of dramatic transformations. This engaging history covers modern computing from the development of the first electronic digital computer through the dot-com crash. The author concentrates on five key moments of transition: the transformation of the computer in the late 1940s from a specialized scientific instrument to a commercial product; the emergence of small systems in the late 1960s; the beginning of personal computing in the 1970s; the spread of networking after 1985; and, in a chapter written for this edition, the period 1995-2001. The new material focuses on the Microsoft antitrust suit, the rise and fall of the dot-coms, and the advent of open source software, particularly Linux. Within the chronological narrative, the book traces several overlapping threads: the evolution of the computer's internal design; the effect of economic trends and the Cold War; the long-term role of IBM as a player and as a target for upstart entrepreneurs; the growth of software from a hidden element to a major character in the story of computing; and the recurring issue of the place of information and computing in a democratic society. The focus is on the United States (though Europe and Japan enter the story at crucial points), on computing per se rather than on applications such as artificial intelligence, and on systems that were sold commercially and installed in quantities.