This is, again, a fantastic book, and a very worthy wrap to an excellent series! After an action-laden second installment, the focus is back on the wide unexplored expanses of the earth and its many marvels. Having accompanied the cast for so long, it's difficult to say goodbye at the end.
Another great book in the broken earth series! This one is also a gripping read, though (in my experience) not so much through the worlds it builds or characters it describes as through the action and suspense throughout. Lots of badassery from an awesome cast of characters.
Wow, this is an awesome book! Lovely, diverse cast of characters, a beautiful world, a gripping read. It's not a happy story -- there are plenty of hardships, and things get painful at times, and excruciating at one point near the end, but overall it's an inspiring and fun book. Highly recommended!
"The Dream Machine" traces the origins of personal, networked computing to J. C. R. "Lick" Licklider, a psychologist-turned-computer scientist who witnessed (and often supported) almost every major development in 20th-century IT, from integrated circuits to human-computer interaction, to the ARPA- and Internet, inventing the entire field of Cybernetics on the way. It's a fascinating and inspiring account of the idea of a machine as a complement to human thinking and decision-making, and the rise of personal computers. The book follows the big ideas of this rise with its inventions and hacks, as well as its dead ends, squandered opportunities, ego clashes and management failures (which take up a sizable part).
I read a large chunk of this book over Mozfest, and it really struck me how white and male the entire story was (if there was a Bechtel test for books, this would fail disastrously), and it got me thinking how things might have turned out if a more representative crowd (like the one at Mozfest) had gotten the chance to provide input on the tech we use today.