Authors: Fredric Alan Maxwell.
Paperback, 288 pages
Publisher: Collins Business
Publication Date: 2003-11-01


Reviews :

   

The unauthorized biography of an immigrant's son whobecame a multibillionaire working for Bill Gates, and probably the highest-paid employee in American history.

In January 2000, Bill Gates gave his vast responsibilities and title of Microsoft CEO to his best friend Steve Ballmer, a man relatively unknown to the public. Based on in-depth study and interviews with classmates and Microsoft insiders, Fredric Alan Maxwell vividly brings to life one of the technology industry's most colorful and controversial figures: Steven Anthony Ballmer. From Ballmer's relatively humble suburban Detroit beginnings (where he and his archrival Scott McNealy went to competing high schools) and his 1974 meeting with Gates in a Harvard dorm, Maxwell richly details how the competition addicts Ballmer and Gates have worked together for the past twenty years to form Microsoft's ego and id. The up-by-the-bootstraps saga reveals both the good boy Ballmer -- the dedicated son, great friend, and supportive schoolmate -- and the bad boy Ballmer -- the ruthless businessman who earned the nickname "The Em-balmer."

...

Authors: Lisa Palac.
Hardcover, 214 pages
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Publication Date: 1997-09-09
Edition: 1st

Reviews :

    In a lively and poignant autobiography, next-wave pornographer, cybersex pioneer, and hopeful romantic Lisa Palac takes a frank, funny, and completely fearless look at the evolution of her sexual persona and the cultural influences that have had their way with her. Eight pages of photos....

    In the early '90s, after a stint as a senior editor at the groundbreaking lesbian sex journal On Our Backs, Lisa Palac took charge of a new magazine called Future Sex. Tapping into the "cyber" ethos that permeated the Bay Area scene--Mondo 2000 was in its ascendancy, while Wired was still a full year away--the magazine achieved a quick burst of mainstream notoriety and became a longterm underground icon. But you won't need to don a full-body cybersex interface to appreciate Palac's The Edge of the Bed.

With disarming honesty and self-deprecating humor, Palac writes about how she began to gain control of her sexuality. When she found a boyfriend's stash of pornography, her kneejerk reaction was to tell him that if it didn't go, she would. He managed to convince her to watch a video with her; that led to another, and another...soon, Palac was renting her own tapes and started writing her own erotic stories.

Although sex-positive feminism can be a powerfully liberating philosophy, Palac does not sugarcoat the hardships. Not every sexual encounter was wonderful; sometimes there wasn't even any sex. ("I was a perfect candidate for cybersex," she drolly comments at one point. "I wasn't getting laid, I liked to masturbate, and I could type.") But the story of Palac's spiritual and physical awakening and her efforts to maintain honesty and integrity will continue to inspire long after they've finished titillating--and that's a mighty long time....

Authors: James Essinger.
Paperback, 320 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Publication Date: 2007-05-21


Reviews :

    Circuits from silk? Today's technophiles probably have no idea how much today's computer technology owes to the invention of one ingenuous textile manufacturer in nineteenth-century France. Here, master storyteller James Essinger shows through a series of remarkable and meticulously researched historical connections how the Jacquard loom kick-started a process of scientific evolution which would lead directly to the development of the modern computer.
Jacquard's 1804 invention, a loom which used punch cards with stored instructions for weaving different patterns and designs, enabled the master silk-weavers of Lyons to weave fabrics 25 times faster than the competition. Here, Essinger reveals the plethora of extraordinary links between that innovation in weaving and today's computer age, introducing us to the intriguing and colorful people who paved the way. The book concludes by bringing the story completely up-to-date with the latest developments in the World Wide Web and the fascinating phenomenon of artificial intelligence.
Attractively illustrated and compellingly narrated, Jacquard's Web presents an eye-opening and scarcely known history that will prove fascinating to readers of popular science, especially those interested in the history of science, technology, and computing, as well as professional scientists, historians, and students....

Authors: Betty Boyd Caroli.
Paperback, 496 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Publication Date: 1995-09-28
Edition: Expanded

Reviews :

    As we move toward the year 2000, Americans continue to debate the job of First Lady. How much power does the position actually hold? How publicly should that power be wielded? First Ladies tells the story of this curious institution and the evolution of these women's role from ceremonial backdrop to substantive world figure. This expanded edition brings us up to the present, examining the legacies of our three most recent First Ladies: Nancy Reagan, credited with raising the job to that of "Associate President"; Barbara Bush, who took a more traditional approach); and Hillary Rodham Clinton, widely billed as the person responsible for changing the job completely. Covering all thirty-nine women from Martha Washington to our current First Lady and including the daughters, daughters-in-law, and sisters of presidents who sometimes served as First Ladies, Betty Boyd Caroli explores the background, marriage, and accomplishments and failures in office of each woman. This remarkably diverse lot included Abigail Adams, whose "remember the ladies" became a twentieth-century feminist refrain; Edith Wilson, who alone controlled access to the President when he suffered a stroke; Jane Pierce, who prayed her husband would lose the election; Helen Taft, who insisted on living in the White House, although her husband would have preferred a judgeship; and Pat Nixon, who perfected what some have called "the robot image." They ranged in age from early 20's to late 60's; some received superb educations for their time, while others had little or no schooling. Including the courageous and adventurous, the emotionally unstable, the ambitious, and the reserved, these women often did not fit the traditional expectations of a presidential helpmate.
Depicting how these women used the "magic wand" given to them, Caroli reveals not only how each First Lady changed the role, but also how the role changed in response to American culture. Because of their position, these women left remarkably complete records, and their stories offer us an insider's view not only of their lives but also of the history of American women in general....

Authors: Richard Baumann.
Kindle Edition, pages
Publisher: National Identity Theft Resource Organization
Publication Date: 2008-03-06


Reviews :

    The True Life Story of a Con Artist, Carny, and Identity Thief. My entire life has been one big lie. Actually thousands of them all mixed up with just enough truth that sometimes even I can't tell the difference

anymore, which is probably why no one else can either.

I didn't set out in life to become a liar, con artist, hustler, or identity thief, who would? But that’s exactly what I've been, ever since I stole my first identity, wrote my first bad check, and ran my first con, over thirty years ago and long before they invented the catchy and now familiar label "Identity Thief"

I stole my first identity after running away from a boy’s home at the age of fourteen, and joined the United States Army. Since then I've also been in the U.S. Navy, a cook, bartender, cab driver, truck driver, sales clerk, store detective, hotel detective, construction worker, electrician, foundry worker, telemarketer, hospital orderly, maintenance technician, cable TV installer, delivery man, ranch hand, disc jockey, bouncer,

...

Authors: an Wang.
Hardcover, 288 pages
Publisher: Addison Wesley Publishing Company
Publication Date: 1986-09

Authors: Richard S. Tedlow.
Paperback, 592 pages
Publisher: Portfolio Trade
Publication Date: 2007-10-30


Reviews :

    Any short list of the world’s most admired business people would include Andy Grove, the chairman and CEO of Intel during its years of explosive growth. During Grove’s career, Intel became the model for Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley became the model for the world. And Grove became Time’s Man of the Year—an icon of the promise of the American life.

Born in Hungary in 1936, Grove survived the Holocaust only to face the Soviet invasion. He escaped to New York, penniless, at age twenty, and embraced America, putting himself through college and graduate school. He joined Intel at its founding in 1968, rose to CEO in 1987, then led the company into the stratosphere, with compound annual profit growth at 34 percent for the next eleven years.

Despite decades of media scrutiny and six of Grove’s own books, there remains a powerful element of mystery about him. This definitive biography, by a Harvard Business School professor with unprecedented access, finally cracks the code of who Andy Grove really is, how his mind works, how he attacks impossible problems, and how he leads others to exceed their own expectations of themselves....

Authors: David Kushner.
Hardcover, 352 pages
Publisher: Random House
Publication Date: 2003-05-06


Reviews :

    “To my taste, the greatest American myth of cosmogenesis features the maladjusted, antisocial, genius teenage boy who, in the insular laboratory of his own bedroom, invents the universe from scratch. Masters of Doom is a particularly inspired rendition. Dave Kushner chronicles the saga of video game virtuosi Carmack and Romero with terrific brio. This is a page-turning, mythopoeic cyber-soap opera about two glamorous geek geniuses—and it should be read while scarfing down pepperoni pizza and swilling Diet Coke, with Queens of the Stone Age cranked up all the way.” —Mark Leyner, author of I Smell Esther Williams

Masters of Doom is the amazing true story of the Lennon and McCartney of video games: John Carmack and John Romero. Together, they ruled big business. They transformed popular culture. And they provoked a national controversy. More than anything, they lived a unique and rollicking American Dream, escaping the broken homes of their youth to co-create the most notoriously successful game franchises in history—Doom and Quake—until the games they made tore them apart.

Americans spend more money on video games than on movie tickets. Masters of Doom is the first book to chronicle this industry’s greatest story, written by one of the medium’s leading observers. David Kushner takes readers inside the rags-to-riches adventure of two rebellious entrepreneurs who came of age to shape a generation. The vivid portrait reveals why their games are so violent and why their immersion in their brilliantly designed fantasy worlds offered them solace. And it shows how they channeled their fury and imagination into products that are a formative influence on our culture, from MTV to the Internet to Columbine. This is a story of friendship and betrayal, commerce and artistry—a powerful and compassionate account of what it’s like to be young, driven, and wildly creative....

    Doom, the video game in which you navigate a dungeon in the first person and messily lay waste to everything that crosses your path, represented a milestone in many areas. It was a technical landmark, in that its graphics engine delivered brilliant performance on ordinary PC hardware. It was a social phenomenon, with individuals and companies hooking up networks specifically for Doom tournaments and staying up for days to blast away on them (well before the Internet went big-time). The game's publisher, id Software, used an unusual shareware marketing strategy (give away the first levels, charge for the more advanced ones) that worked very well. On top of it all, the gore-filled game raised serious questions about decency in products meant for use by school-age kids. Masters of Doom explores the Doom phenomenon, as well as the lives and personalities of the two men behind it: John Carmack and John Romero.

This book manages, for the most part, to keep clear of the breathless techno-hagiography style that characterizes many books with similar subjects. He tells the story of Carmack, Romero, and id--which includes far more than Doom and its successors--in novel style, and he's done a good job of keeping the action flowing and the characters' motivations clear. Some of the quoted passages of dialog sound like idealized reconstructions that probably never came from the lips of real people, but this is an entertaining and informative book, of interest to anyone who's let rip with a nail gun. --David Wall

Topics covered: The biographies of John Carmack and John Romero, and of their company, id Software. The development and marketing of all major id games (including Wolfenstein, Doom, Doom II, and Quake) get lavish attention....

Authors: Florence M. Stone.
Hardcover, 224 pages
Publisher: AMACOM
Publication Date: 2002-01-15
Edition: 1st

Reviews :

    A study of Larry Ellison and the business strategies behind his software's remarkable success. This book goes behind the scenes of the multi-million dollar company to uncover the breakthrough ideas and winning strategies that propelled Oracle's growth and success. Discover the history of Oracle since its relational database hit the market in 1977. The author identifies and explains strategies such as: forge ahead and fix weaknesses - lessons from when Oracle derailed in the early 1990s; grow the Oracle way - make new products, don't acquire new companies; crush the competition - other must fail; and sales today make markets tomorrow - tap into the sales force to develop products, promote a vision and beat the competition....

Authors: Arnold Bitner.
Paperback, 156 pages
Publisher: iUniverse, Inc.
Publication Date: 2007-11-30
Edition: 0

Reviews :

   

Scrounging the Islands with the Legendary Don the Beachcomber is the life story of the man who created the Mai Tai and more than ninety other original tropical rum drinks. He started the Tiki culture, and his fame as a restaurateur, entrepreneur and business man eventually grew to international proportions. Often thought of as no more than a fictional character by those who never met him, syndicated columnist Jim Bishop wrote: There was and still is a drawing of Don the Beachcomber on the menu cover. A mustached man wearing a battered woven hat. Staring out at the farthest horizons. I never dreamed there was a real Don the Beachcomber. Just a drawing I thought. Then at Suva, on the far side of Fiji, the drawing came to life. Don stepped off an old prop passenger plane. The hat was the same. So were the mustache and quick black eyes.

...