Authors: Eric A. Marks.
Hardcover, 330 pages
Publisher: Wiley
Publication Date: 2008-09-02


Reviews :

    A must-have guide for all companies undertaking service-oriented architecture (SOA) and IT governance

Service-Oriented Architecture Governance for the Services Driven Enterprise expertly covers the business, organizational, process, compliance, security, and technology facets of SOA and IT governance. This book provides a comprehensive enterprise view of governance from a strategic and tactical perspective, as well as modeling and planning tools to help evolve a company's ongoing governance requirements. Written by Eric Marks and the industry's leading SOA authorities, this essential book provides a refreshing business-driven perspective to SOA and IT governance....

Authors: Kenneth C Laudon. Carol Guerico Traver.
Hardcover, 896 pages
Publisher: Prentice Hall
Publication Date: 2008-01-07
Edition: 4

Reviews :

    This comprehensive, market-leading book emphasizes the three major driving forces behind e-commerce: technology change, business development, and social controversies. Each of these driving forces is represented in every chapter, and together they provide a coherent conceptual framework for understanding e-commerce, typical of Laudon books. The book offers in-depth and comprehensive coverage of concepts in marketing, economics, IS/IT, privacy and intellectual property. The book contains numerous case studies and an additional case book is available....

Authors: Jordan "DJ Earworm" Roseman.
Paperback, 338 pages
Publisher: Wiley
Publication Date: 2006-06-21


Reviews :

    HERE ARE SOME SOUND IDEAS.

Wonder what would happen if the Big Band sound crashed into heavy metal? Or what the offspring of a balladeer and a rapper might sound like? How about smooth jazz and acid rock? Stop wondering-this book will take you there. You'll explore hardware and software choices first and select what you need; then you'll sample a little music theory. After that, it's step by step to the big mashup. Do what sounds good.

How to mix & mash.

Cool stuff you'll learn:

• How to use mashup construction software
• Basics of songwriting and music theory
• Insider tips on selecting your songs
• How to get your tracks in key and in sync
• Ways to extract vocals from full songs
• Tricks for arranging your mashup for maximum impact
• How to polish up your mashup with mastering and effects
• Rendering, distribution, and legal considerations

Note: CD-ROM/DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of eBook file....

Authors: Byron Acohido. Jon Swartz.
Hardcover, 304 pages
Publisher: Union Square Press
Publication Date: 2008-04-01


Reviews :

   

• The Exploiters: The drug addicts, scam artists, and crime lords who carry out the gritty aspects of data theft and financial fraud;
• The Enablers: The credit card companies, banks, and credit bureaus who broker data;
• The Expediters: The technology experts running the gamut from good guys like Bill Gates to the devious virus writers and database hackers always on the alert for fresh flaws.

...

Authors: T. L. Taylor.
Hardcover, 205 pages
Publisher: The MIT Press
Publication Date: 2006-03-10


Reviews :

    In Play Between Worlds, T. L. Taylor examines multiplayer gaming life as it is lived on the borders, in the gaps—as players slip in and out of complex social networks that cross online and offline space. Taylor questions the common assumption that playing computer games is an isolating and alienating activity indulged in by solitary teenage boys. Massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), in which thousands of players participate in a virtual game world in real time, are in fact actively designed for sociability. Games like the popular Everquest, she argues, are fundamentally social spaces.

Taylor's detailed look at Everquest offers a snapshot of multiplayer culture. Drawing on her own experience as an Everquest player (as a female Gnome Necromancer)—including her attendance at an Everquest Fan Faire, with its blurring of online-and offline life—and extensive research, Taylor not only shows us something about games but raises broader cultural issues. She considers "power gamers," who play in ways that seem closer to work, and examines our underlying notions of what constitutes play—and why play sometimes feels like work and may even be painful, repetitive, and boring. She looks at the women who play Everquest and finds they don't fit the narrow stereotype of women gamers, which may cast into doubt our standardized and preconceived ideas of femininity. And she explores the questions of who owns game space—what happens when emergent player culture confronts the major corporation behind the game....

Authors: Lee Siegel.
Hardcover, 192 pages
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Publication Date: 2008-01-22


Reviews :

   

From the author hailed by the New York Times Book Review for his “drive-by brilliance” and dubbed by the New York Times Magazine as “one of the country’s most eloquent and acid-tongued critics” comes a ruthless challenge to the conventional wisdom about the most consequential cultural development of our time: the Internet.

Of course the Internet is not one thing or another; if anything, its boosters claim, the Web is everything at once. It’s become not only our primary medium for communication and information but also the place we go to shop, to play, to debate, to find love. Lee Siegel argues that our ever-deepening immersion in life online doesn’t just reshape the ordinary rhythms of our days; it also reshapes our minds and culture, in ways with which we haven’t yet reckoned. The web and its cultural correlatives and by-products—such as the dominance of reality television and the rise of the “bourgeois bohemian”—have turned privacy into performance, play into commerce, and confused “self-expression” with art. And even as technology gurus ply their trade using the language of freedom and democracy, we cede more and more control of our freedom and individuality to the needs of the machine—that confluence of business and technology whose boundaries now stretch to encompass almost all human activity.

Siegel’s argument isn’t a Luddite intervention against the Internet itself but rather a bracing appeal for us to contend with how it is transforming us all. Dazzlingly erudite, full of startlingly original insights, and buoyed by sharp wit, Against the Machine will force you to see our culture—for better and worse—in an entirely new way.

...

Authors: Janet H. Murray.
Paperback, 336 pages
Publisher: The MIT Press
Publication Date: 1998-08-27


Reviews :

    "[A] brilliant look at the future of storytelling." -- James Coates, Chicago Tribune

"Hamlet on the Holodeck reaches beyond the scope of interactive narrative and encompasses the global possibilities of emerging technologies." -- Stan Diehl, BYTE

Stories define how we think, play, and understand our lives. In this comprehensive and readable book--already a classic statement of the aesthetics of digital media, acclaimed by practitioners and theorists alike--Janet Murray shows how the computer is reshaping the stories we live by.

Murray discusses the unique properties and pleasures of digital environments and connects them with the traditional satisfactions of narrative. She analyzes the dramatic satisfaction of participatory stories and considers what would be necessary to move interactive fiction from the formats of childish games and confusing labyrinths into a mature and compelling art form. Through a blend of imagination and techno-wizardry, Murray provides both readers and writers with a guide to the storytelling of the future.

(cloth published by Free Press, 1997)

More on Hamlet on the Holodeck...

    Technology changes storytelling--movies don't tell stories in the same manner as wandering bards. Janet H. Murray, director of the Laboratory for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is fascinated with the changes emerging technologies may bring. Interactive tales, more versatile structures, stories as games, and games as stories are among the topics she explores in her very personable and entertaining style. And what about fears that interactive escapism could be the coming addiction? She makes an unblinking examination of this question with insight into both the technological possibilities and the strengths of the human psyche. Strongly recommended for anyone who loves the art of storytelling in any medium....

Authors: Neil Gershenfeld.
Paperback, 288 pages
Publisher: Basic Books
Publication Date: 2007-02-05


Reviews :

    What if you could someday put the manufacturing power of an automobile plant on your desktop? According to Neil Gershenfeld, the renowned MIT scientist and inventor, the next big thing is personal fabrication-the ability to design and produce your own products, in your own home, with a machine that combines consumer electronics and industrial tools. Personal fabricators are about to revolutionize the world just as personal computers did a generation ago, and Fab shows us how....

Authors: Christopher Kelty.
Paperback, 400 pages
Publisher: Duke University Press
Publication Date: 2008


Reviews :

    In Two Bits, Christopher M. Kelty investigates the history and cultural significance of Free Software, revealing the people and practices that have transformed not only software but also music, film, science, and education. Free Software is a set of practices devoted to the collaborative creation of software source code that is made openly and freely available through an unconventional use of copyright law. Kelty explains how these specific practices have reoriented the relations of power around the creation, dissemination, and authorization of all kinds of knowledge. He also makes an important contribution to discussions of public spheres and social imaginaries by demonstrating how Free Software is a “recursive public”—a public organized around the ability to build, modify, and maintain the very infrastructure that gives it life in the first place.

Drawing on ethnographic research that took him from an Internet healthcare start-up company in Boston to media labs in Berlin to young entrepreneurs in Bangalore, Kelty describes the technologies and the moral vision that bind together hackers, geeks, lawyers, and other Free Software advocates. In each case, he shows how their practices and way of life include not only the sharing of software source code but also ways of conceptualizing openness, writing copyright licenses, coordinating collaboration, and proselytizing. By exploring in detail how these practices came together as the Free Software movement from the 1970s to the 1990s, Kelty also considers how it is possible to understand the new movements emerging from Free Software: projects such as Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that creates copyright licenses, and Connexions, a project to create an online scholarly textbook commons....

Authors: Fredrik Nilsson. Communications Axis.
Paperback, 440 pages
Publisher: CRC
Publication Date: 2008-09-10
Edition: 1

Reviews :

    This is the first resource to provide detailed coverage of advanced digital networking and intelligent video capabilities and optimization. It addresses general concepts, explains why IP-based systems provide better image quality and more scalable and flexible systems at a lower cost, and provides current information on cameras and DVRs. It also discusses frame rate control, indoor/outdoor installations, and specifications on MPEG-4 and other digital video formats. The book is accompanied by a CD containing tools for deploying and optimizing an installation. It is an essential resource for security system designers, consultants, and intallers, as well as business and security managers....