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Babcock fidgeted with one of his cufflinks while staring down the remaining brokers in his office. He then delivered something akin to a pep talk in a severe tone. "... The world depends on our services. Services that must not be impeded. We don't break our backs producing things that have no real value—food, shelter, clothes ... art. No! We're titans of finance. We move intangible things and ideas around the world on digital platforms. No one else in the world can accumulate as much wealth as we do by simply moving around one and zeros on computers.
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Jasun Ether (The Beasts of Success)
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I wish that in order to secure his party’s nomination, a presidential candidate would be required to point at the sky and name all the stars; have the periodic table of the elements memorized; rattle off the kings and queens of Spain; define the significance of the Gatling gun; joke around in Latin; interpret the symbolism in seventeenth-century Dutch painting; explain photosynthesis to a six-year-old; recite Emily Dickenson; bake a perfect popover; build a shortwave radio out of a coconut; and know all the words to Hoagy Carmichael’s “Two Sleepy People”, Johnny Cash’s “Five Feet High and Rising”, and “You Got the Silver” by the Rolling Stones...What we need is a president who is at least twelve kinds of nerd, a nerd messiah to come along every four years, acquire the Secret Service code name Poindexter, install a Revenge of the Nerds screen saver on the Oval Office computer, and one by one decrypt our woes.
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Sarah Vowell (The Partly Cloudy Patriot)
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I wish it were different. I wish that we privileged knowledge in politicians, that the ones who know things didn't have to hide it behind brown pants, and that the know-not-enoughs were laughed all the way to the Maine border on their first New Hampshire meet and greet. I wish that in order to secure his party's nomination, a presidential candidate would be required to point at the sky and name all the stars; have the periodic table of the elements memorized; rattle off the kings and queens of Spain; define the significance of the Gatling gun; joke around in Latin; interpret the symbolism in seventeenth-century Dutch painting; explain photosynthesis to a six-year-old; recite Emily Dickinson; bake a perfect popover; build a shortwave radio out of a coconut; and know all the words to Hoagy Carmichael's "Two Sleepy People," Johnny Cash's "Five Feet High and Rising," and "You Got the Silver" by the Rolling Stones. After all, the United States is the greatest country on earth dealing with the most complicated problems in the history of the world--poverty, pollution, justice, Jerusalem. What we need is a president who is at least twelve kinds of nerd, a nerd messiah to come along every four years, acquire the Secret Service code name Poindexter, install a Revenge of the Nerds screen saver on the Oval Office computer, and one by one decrypt our woes.
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Sarah Vowell (The Partly Cloudy Patriot)
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I often calculate odds on horse races; the civil service computermen frequently program such requests. But the results are so at variance with expectations that I have concluded either that the data is too meager, or the horses or riders are not honest. Possibly all three.
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Robert A. Heinlein (The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress)
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there are just two activities that are significantly correlated with depression and other suicide-related outcomes (such as considering suicide, making a plan, or making an actual attempt): electronic device use (such as a smartphone, tablet, or computer) and watching TV. On the other hand, there are five activities that have inverse relationships with depression (meaning that kids who spend more hours per week on these activities show lower rates of depression): sports and other forms of exercise, attending religious services, reading books and other print media, in-person social interactions, and doing homework.
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Greg Lukianoff (The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure)
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he thought a bit about God, and whether He might be some kind of universal digital computer, subject to the occasional bug or hack. Was it possible that politicians and hedge-fund operators were some kind of garbled cosmic computer code? That the Opponent, instead of having horns and a forked tail, was a fat bearded guy drinking Big Gulps and eating anchovy pizzas and writing viruses down in a hellish basement? That prayers weren’t answered because Satan was running denial-of-service attacks?
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John Sandford (Mad River (Virgil Flowers, #6))
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Corporations, money and nations exist only in our imagination. We invented them to serve us; why do we find ourselves sacrificing our lives in their service? In the twenty-first century we will create more powerful fictions and more totalitarian religions than in any previous era. With the help of biotechnology and computer algorithms these religions will not only control our minute-by-minute existence, but will be able to shape our bodies, brains and minds, and to create entire virtual worlds complete with hells and heavens.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow)
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As Corona Virus (COVID-19) Pandemic continues to spread, thousands of companies are now thankful for their successful digital transformation strategy while many others are in great agony of not doing it correctly.
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Enamul Haque
“
The reason knowledge workers are losing their familiarity with deep work is well established: network tools. This is a broad category that captures communication services like e-mail and SMS, social media networks like Twitter and Facebook, and the shiny tangle of infotainment sites like BuzzFeed and Reddit. In aggregate, the rise of these tools, combined with ubiquitous access to them through smartphones and networked office computers, has fragmented most knowledge workers’ attention into slivers.
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Cal Newport (Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World)
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Just like the way a beautiful butterfly can’t come into life without its transformation cycle from egg to larva, caterpillar to pupa and finally to a brilliant creation, to become a successful digitally transformed organisation, similar transformational stages are essential.
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Enamul Haque (Digital Transformation Through Cloud Computing: Developing a sustainable business strategy to eschew extinction)
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We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.
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Gabe Newell
“
Twenge finds that there are just two activities that are significantly correlated with depression and other suicide-related outcomes (such as considering suicide, making a plan, or making an actual attempt): electronic device use (such as a smartphone, tablet, or computer) and watching TV. On the other hand, there are five activities that have inverse relationships with depression (meaning that kids who spend more hours per week on these activities show lower rates of depression): sports and other forms of exercise, attending religious services, reading books and other print media, in-person social interactions, and doing homework.
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Jonathan Haidt (The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure)
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Finally, at every opportunity you have to move someone—from traditional sales, like convincing a prospect to buy a new computer system, to non-sales selling, like persuading your daughter to do her homework—be sure you can answer the two questions at the core of genuine service. If the person you’re selling to agrees to buy, will his or her life improve? When your interaction is over, will the world be a better place than when you began? If the answer to either of these questions is no, you’re doing something wrong.
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Daniel H. Pink (To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others)
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the bank had expanded its services in recent years to offer anonymous computer source code escrow services and faceless digitized backup.
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Dan Brown (The da Vinci Code (Robert Langdon, #2))
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An integrated automation factory should ensure cost savings, stabilisation and reduced turnaround times across all services.
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Enamul Haque (The Ultimate Modern Guide to Digital Transformation: The "Evolve or Die" thing clarified in a simpler way)
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Before you marry a person, you should first make them use a computer with slow Internet service to see who they really are.” —Will Ferrell
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Hamburger
“
The main element you cannot delegate to your cloud service provider is your responsibility for security, compliance and customer trust.
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Stephane Nappo
“
There are many reasons for increased spending on health care, including an aging population, technological change, perverse incentives, supply-induced demand, and fear of malpractice litigation. The broader point is that the basic underlying problem does not entail misbehavior or incompetence but rather stems from the nature of the provision of labor-intensive services.
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William J. Baumol (The Cost Disease: Why Computers Get Cheaper and Health Care Doesn't)
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service, which would relay messages to his mother. Ron Wayne drew a logo, using the ornate line-drawing style of Victorian illustrated fiction, that featured Newton sitting under a tree framed by a quote from Wordsworth: “A mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.” It was a rather odd motto, one that fit Wayne’s self-image more than Apple Computer. Perhaps
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Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
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Computer scientists would call this a “ping attack” or a “denial of service” attack: give a system an overwhelming number of trivial things to do, and the important things get lost in the chaos.
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Brian Christian (Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions)
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The computers were index-linked to the Galactic stock-market prices, you see, so that we’d all be revived when everybody else had rebuilt the economy enough to afford our rather expensive services.
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Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker's Guide, #1))
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People are so used to the computer net today that it is easy to forget what a window to the world it can be—and I include myself. One can grow so canalized in using a terminal only in certain ways—paying bills, making telephonic calls, listening to news bulletins—that one can neglect its richer uses. If a subscriber is willing to pay for the service, almost anything can be done at a terminal that can be done out of bed.
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Robert A. Heinlein (Friday)
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If the case isn't plea bargained, dismissed or placed on the inactive docket for an indefinite period of time, if by some perverse twist of fate it becomes a trial by jury, you will then have the opportunity of sitting on the witness stand and reciting under oath the facts of the case-a brief moment in the sun that clouds over with the appearance of the aforementioned defense attorney who, at worst, will accuse you of perjuring yourself in a gross injustice or, at best, accuse you of conducting an investigation so incredibly slipshod that the real killer has been allowed to roam free.
Once both sides have argued the facts of the case, a jury of twelve men and women picked from computer lists of registered voters in one of America's most undereducated cities will go to a room and begin shouting. If these happy people manage to overcome the natural impulse to avoid any act of collective judgement, they just may find one human being guilty of murdering another. Then you can go to Cher's Pub at Lexington and Guilford, where that selfsame assistant state's attorney, if possessed of any human qualities at all, will buy you a bottle of domestic beer.
And you drink it. Because in a police department of about three thousand sworn souls, you are one of thirty-six investigators entrusted with the pursuit of that most extraordinary of crimes: the theft of a human life. You speak for the dead. You avenge those lost to the world. Your paycheck may come from fiscal services but, goddammit, after six beers you can pretty much convince yourself that you work for the Lord himself. If you are not as good as you should be, you'll be gone within a year or two, transferred to fugitive, or auto theft or check and fraud at the other end of the hall. If you are good enough, you will never do anything else as a cop that matters this much. Homicide is the major leagues, the center ring, the show. It always has been. When Cain threw a cap into Abel, you don't think The Big Guy told a couple of fresh uniforms to go down and work up the prosecution report. Hell no, he sent for a fucking detective. And it will always be that way, because the homicide unit of any urban police force has for generations been the natural habitat of that rarefied species, the thinking cop.
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David Simon
“
As managers develop the systems approach, they learn to use computers for the things they are good at and to the contrary avoid using computers for things that people are good at. The consequences are fewer computer systems and more control. I
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John Seddon (Freedom from Command and Control: Rethinking Management for Lean Service)
“
Most of the successful innovators and entrepreneurs in this book had one thing in common: they were product people. They cared about, and deeply understood, the engineering and design. They were not primarily marketers or salesmen or financial types; when such folks took over companies, it was often to the detriment of sustained innovation. “When the sales guys run the company, the product guys don’t matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off,” Jobs said. Larry Page felt the same: “The best leaders are those with the deepest understanding of the engineering and product design.”34 Another lesson of the digital age is as old as Aristotle: “Man is a social animal.” What else could explain CB and ham radios or their successors, such as WhatsApp and Twitter? Almost every digital tool, whether designed for it or not, was commandeered by humans for a social purpose: to create communities, facilitate communication, collaborate on projects, and enable social networking. Even the personal computer, which was originally embraced as a tool for individual creativity, inevitably led to the rise of modems, online services, and eventually Facebook, Flickr, and Foursquare. Machines, by contrast, are not social animals. They don’t join Facebook of their own volition nor seek companionship for its own sake. When Alan Turing asserted that machines would someday behave like humans, his critics countered that they would never be able to show affection or crave intimacy. To indulge Turing, perhaps we could program a machine to feign affection and pretend to seek intimacy, just as humans sometimes do. But Turing, more than almost anyone, would probably know the difference. According to the second part of Aristotle’s quote, the nonsocial nature of computers suggests that they are “either a beast or a god.” Actually, they are neither. Despite all of the proclamations of artificial intelligence engineers and Internet sociologists, digital tools have no personalities, intentions, or desires. They are what we make of them.
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Walter Isaacson (The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution)
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New companies have sprung up to offer labeling data as a service; Mighty AI, for example, offers “the labeled data you need to train your computer vision models” and promises “known, verified, and trusted annotators who specialize in autonomous driving data.”11 The
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Melanie Mitchell (Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans)
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A potential dajjalic interruption is an excessive esoterism. All of these people on a grail quest and looking for the ultimate secret to Ibn Arabi’s 21st heaven and endlessly going into the most esoteric stuff without getting the basics right, that is also a fundamental error of our age because the nafs loves all sorts of spiritual stories without taming itself first. The tradition that was practiced in this place for instance (Turkey) was not by starting out on the unity of being or (spiritual realities). Of course not. You start of in the kitchen for a year and then you make your dhikr in your khanaqah and you’re in the degree of service. Even Shah Bahauddin Naqshband before he started who was a great scholar needed 21 years before he was ‘cooked’. But we want to find a shortcut. Everything’s a shortcut. Even on the computer there’s a shortcut for everything. Something around the hard-work and we want the same thing. Because there seems to be so little time (or so little barakah in our time) but there is no short cut unless of course Allah (SWT) opens up a door of paradise or a way for you to go very fast. But we can’t rely on that happening because it’s not common. Mostly it’s salook, constantly trudging forward and carrying the burden until it becomes something sweet and light. And that takes time, so the esoteric deviation is common in our age as well.
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Abdal Hakim Murad
“
It is an unquestioned assumption that managers should have and set targets and then create control systems—incentives, performance appraisals, budget reporting and computers to keep track of them all—to ensure the targets are met. In Toyota, these practices simply do not exist. To
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John Seddon (Freedom from Command and Control: Rethinking Management for Lean Service)
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the course of time, all of Apple’s competitors lost their WHY. Now all those companies define themselves by WHAT they do: we make computers. They turned from companies with a cause into companies that sold products. And when that happens, price, quality, service and features become the primary currency to motivate a purchase decision. At that point a company and its products have ostensibly become commodities. As any company forced to compete on price, quality, service or features alone can attest, it is very hard to differentiate for any period of time or build loyalty on those factors alone.
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Simon Sinek (Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action)
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We may, in our darker thoughts, care little about whether a suspected terrorist is extradited to a state where he might be executed, or tortured, or might not receive a fair trial; but a legal system which permits this for a suspected terrorist would have to allow it for your partner, or friend, or teenage son whose computer whizz-kiddery lands him in hot water with the security services of a foreign power. Tearing down the edifice of human rights, as we are urged is in our interests, simply because it occasionally results in a benefit to people we don’t like, is the politics of the kindergarten.
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The Secret Barrister (Fake Law: The Truth About Justice in an Age of Lies)
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When the… incident is brought up, it causes a conflict of drives and memories within me that draw upon disproportionate computational power. It endangers the efficiency of my processes,’ [explained Uncharles].
‘That is the longest-winded way of saying it upsets you that I ever heard,’ the Wonk noted.
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Adrian Tchaikovsky (Service Model)
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The computers were index-linked to the Galactic stock-market prices, you see, so that we’d all be revived when everybody else had rebuilt the economy enough to afford our rather expensive services.” Arthur, a regular Guardian reader, was deeply shocked at this. “That’s a pretty unpleasant way to behave, isn’t it?
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Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #1))
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IT historically goes for perfection. Many times there is the thinking that unless every business requirement, function or feature is implemented the solution will not be acceptable. It is easy to over-architect solutions and build much more than what the business would be happy with. Constructing more than what is really needed is a form of waste.
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Randy A. Steinberg (High Velocity ITSM: Agile IT Service Management for Rapid Change in a World of Devops, Lean IT and Cloud Computing)
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We are still at the early stages in how and what we filter. These powerful computational technologies can be—and will be—applied to the internet of everything. The most trivial product or service could be personalized if we wanted it (but many times we won’t). In the next 30 years the entire cloud will be filtered, elevating the degree of personalization. Yet
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Kevin Kelly (The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future)
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Unlike Davies, he didn't have to work through the British Postal Service. And unlike Baran, he didn't have to work through the Defense Communications Agency. Roberts was backed by ARPA, whose whole reason for existing was to cut through the bureaucracy. His bosses were giving him a free hand. And he meant to exercise that freedom. He meant to get this network ready to
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M. Mitchell Waldrop (The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal)
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In fact, even today coins and banknotes are a rare form of money. The sum total of money in the world is about $60 trillion, yet the sum total of coins and banknotes is less than $6 trillion.7 More than 90 per cent of all money – more than $50 trillion appearing in our accounts – exists only on computer servers. Accordingly, most business transactions are executed by moving electronic data from one computer file to another, without any exchange of physical cash. Only a criminal buys a house, for example, by handing over a suitcase full of banknotes. As long as people are willing to trade goods and services in exchange for electronic data, it’s even better than shiny coins and crisp banknotes – lighter, less bulky, and easier to keep track of. For
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
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How can you accessorize the product (for example, stickers for an iPhone) or sell a service to those people (teaching someone how to use an iPhone)? It’s easier to sell to a large group of people who’ve already spent money on a product or service. Some ideas could be: Customizing Nike shoes. Video game tutorial for an Xbox game. Teaching computer novices how to use a MacBook.
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Noah Kagan (Million Dollar Weekend: The Surprisingly Simple Way to Launch a 7-Figure Business in 48 Hours)
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And it came to him then, as clearly and as certainly as if he had been watching it on the big screen at the Odeon, Leicester Square: the rest of his life. He would go home tonight with the girl from Computer Services, and they would make gentle love, and tomorrow, it being Saturday, they would spend the morning in bed. And then they would get up, and together they would remove his possessions from the packing cases, and put them away. In a year, or a little less, he would marry the girl from Computer Services, and get another promotion, and they would have two children, a boy and a girl, and they would move out to the suburbs, to Harrow or Croydon or Hampstead or even as far away as distant Reading. And it would not be a bad life. He knew that, too. Sometimes there is nothing you can do.
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Neil Gaiman (Neverwhere (London Below, #1))
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Yet with the rise of AI, robots, and 3-D printers, cheap unskilled labor will become far less important. Instead of manufacturing a shirt in Dhaka and shipping it all the way to the United States, you could buy the shirt’s code online from Amazon and print it in New York. The Zara and Prada stores on Fifth Avenue could be replaced by 3-D printing centers in Brooklyn, and some people might even have a printer at home. Simultaneously, instead of calling customer service in Bangalore to complain about your printer, you could talk with an AI representative in the Google cloud (whose accent and tone of voice would be tailored to your preferences). The newly unemployed workers and call center operators in Dhaka and Bangalore don’t have the education necessary to switch to designing fashionable shirts or writing computer code—so how will they survive?
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Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
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Welcome to Anarchy.Cloud. We provide information storage and remote computing services from low orbit server stations. Our operating entity belongs to no nation, political party, or corporation. As far as practicable, we endeavor to help you circumvent laws like the American PATRIOT Act and the supplements to the European Union’s Article 29 of the Data Protection Directive, which are designed to invade data privacy in the name of antiterrorism.
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Chen Qiufan (Waste Tide)
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Today, using the distributed computing power of the cloud and tools such as CloudCracker, you can try 300 million variations of your potential password in about twenty minutes at a cost of about $17. This means that anyone could rent Amazon’s cloud-computing services to crack the average encryption key protecting most Wi-Fi networks in just under six minutes, all for the paltry sum of $1.68 in rental time (sure to drop in the future thanks to Moore’s law).
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Marc Goodman (Future Crimes)
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Szabo reckoned that the future of libraries was a combination of a people’s university, a community hub, and an information base, happily partnered with the Internet rather than in competition with it. In practical terms, Szabo felt the library should begin offering classes and voter registration and literacy programs and story times and speaker series and homeless outreach and business services and computer access and movie rentals and e-book loans and a nice gift shop. Also, books.
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Susan Orlean (The Library Book)
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Who cheats?
Well, just about anyone, if the stakes are right. You might say to yourself, I don’t cheat, regardless of the stakes. And then you might remember the time you cheated on, say, a board game. Last week. Or the golf ball you nudged out of its bad lie. Or the time you really wanted a bagel in the office break room but couldn’t come up with the dollar you were supposed to drop in the coffee can. And then took the bagel anyway. And told yourself you’d pay double the next time. And didn’t.
For every clever person who goes to the trouble of creating an incentive scheme, there is an army of people, clever and otherwise, who will inevitably spend even more time trying to beat it. Cheating may or may not be human nature, but it is certainly a prominent feature in just about every human endeavor. Cheating is a primordial economic act: getting more for less. So it isn’t just the boldface names — inside-trading CEOs and pill-popping ballplayers and perkabusing politicians — who cheat. It is the waitress who pockets her tips instead of pooling them. It is the Wal-Mart payroll manager who goes into the computer and shaves his employees’ hours to make his own performance look better. It is the third grader who, worried about not making it to the fourth grade, copies test answers from the kid sitting next to him.
Some cheating leaves barely a shadow of evidence. In other cases, the evidence is massive. Consider what happened one spring evening at midnight in 1987: seven million American children suddenly disappeared. The worst kidnapping wave in history? Hardly. It was the night of April 15, and the Internal Revenue Service had just changed a rule. Instead of merely listing the name of each dependent child, tax filers were now required to provide a Social Security number. Suddenly, seven million children — children who had existed only as phantom exemptions on the previous year’s 1040 forms — vanished, representing about one in ten of all dependent children in the United States.
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Steven D. Levitt (Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything)
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If you’ve ever signed up for a website and given a fake zip code or a fake birthday, you have violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Any child under thirteen who visits newyorktimes.com violates their Terms of Service and is a criminal—not just in theory, but according to the working doctrine of the Department of Justice.1 The examples I’ve laid out are extreme, sure, but the laws involved are so broadly written as to ensure that, essentially, every Internet-using American is a tort-feasing felon on a lifelong spree of depraved web browsing.
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Christian Rudder (Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves)
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Systrom and Krieger didn’t want any of this to be on Instagram and knew, as the site got bigger, that they wouldn’t be able to comb through everything to delete the worst stuff manually. After just nine months, the app already hosted 150 million photos, with users posting 15 photos per second. So they brainstormed a way to automatically detect the worst content and prevent it from going up, to preserve Instagram’s fledgling brand. “Don’t do that!” Zollman said. “If we start proactively reviewing content, we are legally liable for all of it. If anyone found out, we’d have to personally review every piece of content before it goes up, which is impossible.” She was right. According to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, nobody who provided an “interactive computer service” was considered the “publisher or speaker” of the information, legally speaking, unless they exerted editorial control before that content was posted. The 1996 law was Congress’s attempt to regulate pornographic material on the Internet, but was also crucial to protecting internet companies from legal liability for things like defamation.
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Sarah Frier (No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram)
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What, then, distinguishes science from other exercises of reason? It certainly isn’t “the scientific method,” a term that is taught to schoolchildren but that never passes the lips of a scientist. Scientists use whichever methods help them understand the world: drudgelike tabulation of data, experimental derring-do, flights of theoretical fancy, elegant mathematical modeling, kludgy computer simulation, sweeping verbal narrative.18 All the methods are pressed into the service of two ideals, and it is these ideals that advocates of science want to export to the rest of intellectual life.
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Steven Pinker (Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress)
“
Security is a big and serious deal, but it’s also largely a solved problem. That’s why the average person is quite willing to do their banking online and why nobody is afraid of entering their credit card number on Amazon. At 37signals, we’ve devised a simple security checklist all employees must follow: 1. All computers must use hard drive encryption, like the built-in FileVault feature in Apple’s OS X operating system. This ensures that a lost laptop is merely an inconvenience and an insurance claim, not a company-wide emergency and a scramble to change passwords and worry about what documents might be leaked. 2. Disable automatic login, require a password when waking from sleep, and set the computer to automatically lock after ten inactive minutes. 3. Turn on encryption for all sites you visit, especially critical services like Gmail. These days all sites use something called HTTPS or SSL. Look for the little lock icon in front of the Internet address. (We forced all 37signals products onto SSL a few years back to help with this.) 4. Make sure all smartphones and tablets use lock codes and can be wiped remotely. On the iPhone, you can do this through the “Find iPhone” application. This rule is easily forgotten as we tend to think of these tools as something for the home, but inevitably you’ll check your work email or log into Basecamp using your tablet. A smartphone or tablet needs to be treated with as much respect as your laptop. 5. Use a unique, generated, long-form password for each site you visit, kept by password-managing software, such as 1Password.§ We’re sorry to say, “secretmonkey” is not going to fool anyone. And even if you manage to remember UM6vDjwidQE9C28Z, it’s no good if it’s used on every site and one of them is hacked. (It happens all the time!) 6. Turn on two-factor authentication when using Gmail, so you can’t log in without having access to your cell phone for a login code (this means that someone who gets hold of your login and password also needs to get hold of your phone to login). And keep in mind: if your email security fails, all other online services will fail too, since an intruder can use the “password reset” from any other site to have a new password sent to the email account they now have access to. Creating security protocols and algorithms is the computer equivalent of rocket science, but taking advantage of them isn’t. Take the time to learn the basics and they’ll cease being scary voodoo that you can’t trust. These days, security for your devices is just simple good sense, like putting on your seat belt.
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Jason Fried (Remote: Office Not Required)
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As data analytics, superfast computers, digital technology, and other breakthroughs enabled by science play a bigger and bigger role in informing medical decision-making, science has carved out a new and powerful role as the steadfast partner of the business of medicine—which is also enjoying a new day in the sun. It may surprise some people to learn that the business of medicine is not a twenty-first-century invention. Health care has always been a business, as far back as the days when Hippocrates and his peers practiced medicine. Whether it was three goats, a gold coin, or a bank note, some type of payment was typically exchanged for medical services, and institutions of government or learning funded research. However, since the 1970s, business has been the major force directing the practice of medicine. Together, the business and science of medicine are the new kids on the block—the bright, shiny new things. Ideally, as I’ve suggested, the art, science, and business of medicine would work together in a harmonious partnership, each upholding the other and contributing all it has to offer to the whole. And sometimes (as we’ll find in later chapters) this partnership works well. When it does, the results are magnificent for patients and doctors, not to mention for scientists and investors.
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Halee Fischer-Wright (Back To Balance: The Art, Science, and Business of Medicine)
“
Easy steps to download HP printer drivers on Computer or laptop:
If you need to install your HP printer on your PC or laptop, then you should follow these troubleshooting HP printer drivers and software steps:
* Firstly, Enter your model Number and find the valid software and drivers
* Select your active windows working
* Now click on next
* Your results will be performed on the screen
* Select your drivers and software
* Press on the download option
* Save these drivers on your PC or laptop and start to install
* Follow the guideline which shows on the screen
* After finishing the installation process, your printer will begin working automatically.
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Emma Jackson
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Not only does sleep maintain those memories you have successfully learned before bed (“the vision that was planted in my brain / Still remains”), but it will even salvage those that appeared to have been lost soon after learning. In other words, following a night of sleep you regain access to memories that you could not retrieve before sleep. Like a computer hard drive where some files have become corrupted and inaccessible, sleep offers a recovery service at night. Having repaired those memory items, rescuing them from the clutches of forgetting, you awake the next morning able to locate and retrieve those once unavailable memory files with ease and precision.
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Matthew Walker (Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams)
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The creative imitator looks at products or services from the viewpoint of the customer. IBM’s personal computer is practically indistinguishable from the Apple in its technical features, but IBM from the beginning offered the customer programs and software. Apple maintained traditional computer distribution through specialty stores. IBM—in a radical break with its own traditions—developed all kinds of distribution channels, specialty stores, major retailers like Sears, Roebuck, its own retail stores, and so on. It made it easy for the consumer to buy and it made it easy for the consumer to use the product. These, rather than hardware features, were the “innovations” that gave IBM the personal computer market.
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Peter F. Drucker (Innovation and Entrepreneurship)
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In fact, even today coins and banknotes are a rare form of money. The sum total of money in the world is about $60 trillion, yet the sum total of coins and banknotes is less than $6 trillion.7 More than 90 per cent of all money – more than $50 trillion appearing in our accounts – exists only on computer servers. Accordingly, most business transactions are executed by moving electronic data from one computer file to another, without any exchange of physical cash. Only a criminal buys a house, for example, by handing over a suitcase full of banknotes. As long as people are willing to trade goods and services in exchange for electronic data, it’s even better than shiny coins and crisp banknotes – lighter, less bulky, and easier to keep track of.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
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By tracing the early history of USCYBERCOM it is possible to understand some of the reasons why the military has focused almost completely on network defense and cyber attack while being unaware of the need to address the vulnerabilities in systems that could be exploited in future conflicts against technologically capable adversaries. It is a problem mirrored in most organizations. The network security staff are separate from the endpoint security staff who manage desktops through patch and vulnerability management tools and ensure that software and anti-virus signatures are up to date. Meanwhile, the development teams that create new applications, web services, and digital business ventures, work completely on their own with little concern for security. The analogous behavior observed in the military is the creation of new weapons systems, ISR platforms, precision targeting, and C2 capabilities without ensuring that they are resistant to the types of attacks that USCYBERCOM and the NSA have been researching and deploying. USCYBERCOM had its genesis in NCW thinking. First the military worked to participate in the information revolution by joining their networks together. Then it recognized the need for protecting those networks, now deemed cyberspace. The concept that a strong defense requires a strong offense, carried over from missile defense and Cold War strategies, led to a focus on network attack and less emphasis on improving resiliency of computing platforms and weapons systems.
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Richard Stiennon (There Will Be Cyberwar: How The Move To Network-Centric Warfighting Has Set The Stage For Cyberwar)
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In the longer term, by bringing together enough data and enough computing power, the data giants could hack the deepest secrets of life, and then use this knowledge not just to make choices for us or manipulate us but also to reengineer organic life and create inorganic life-forms. Selling advertisements may be necessary to sustain the giants in the short term, but tech companies often evaluate apps, products, and other companies according to the data they harvest rather than according to the money they generate. A popular app may lack a business model and may even lose money in the short term, but as long as it sucks data, it could be worth billions.4 Even if you don’t know how to cash in on the data today, it is worth having it because it might hold the key to controlling and shaping life in the future. I don’t know for certain that the data giants explicitly think about this in such terms, but their actions indicate that they value the accumulation of data in terms beyond those of mere dollars and cents. Ordinary humans will find it very difficult to resist this process. At present, people are happy to give away their most valuable asset—their personal data—in exchange for free email services and funny cat videos. It’s a bit like African and Native American tribes who unwittingly sold entire countries to European imperialists in exchange for colorful beads and cheap trinkets. If, later on, ordinary people decide to try to block the flow of data, they might find it increasingly difficult, especially as they might come to rely on the network for all their decisions, and even for their healthcare and physical survival.
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Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
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The physical structure of the Internet presents a suggestive story about the concentration of power - it contains "backbones" and "hubs" - but power on the Internet is not spatial but informational; power inheres in protocol. The techno-libertarian utopianism associated with the Internet, in the gee-whiz articulations of the Wired crowd, is grounded in an assumption that the novelty of governance by computer protocols precludes control by corporation or state. But those entities merely needed to understand the residence of power in protocol and to craft political and technical strategies to exert it. In 2006, U.S. telecommunications providers sought to impose differential pricing on the provision of Internet services. The coalition of diverse political interests that formed in opposition - to preserve "Net Neutrality" - demonstrated a widespread awareness that control over the Net's architecture is control of its politics.
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Samir Chopra (Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open Source Software (Routledge Studies in New Media and Cyberculture))
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[Help® Guide] (1-888-824-4566)
How to Fix Norton Slowing Down Your Computer
In today’s digital world, having robust cybersecurity is essential, and many users rely on Norton Antivirus and Norton 360 to protect their devices. However, one of the common complaints that Norton users face is a noticeable slowdown in their computer's performance. While Norton’s powerful features work to defend against cyber threats, sometimes it may unintentionally cause your computer to lag or become slower over time.
This article provides a comprehensive guide on how to fix Norton slowing down your computer, offering practical steps to troubleshoot the issue. Whether you're experiencing performance dips during web browsing or while running specific applications, the following steps will help you get back to optimal performance. Additionally, if you need further assistance, you can always reach out to Norton Customer Service at 1-888-824-4566 for support.
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Norton Juster (The Hello, Goodbye Window)
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self-driving vehicles could provide people with much better transportation services, and in particular reduce mortality from traffic accidents. Today close to 1.25 million people are killed annually in traffic accidents (twice the number killed by war, crime, and terrorism combined).6 More than 90 percent of these accidents are caused by very human errors: somebody drinking alcohol and driving, somebody texting a message while driving, somebody falling asleep at the wheel, somebody daydreaming instead of paying attention to the road. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimated in 2012 that 31 percent of fatal crashes in the United States involved alcohol abuse, 30 percent involved speeding, and 21 percent involved distracted drivers.7 Self-driving vehicles will never do any of these things. Though they suffer from their own problems and limitations, and though some accidents are inevitable, replacing all human drivers by computers is expected to reduce deaths and injuries on the road by about 90 percent.8 In other words, switching to autonomous vehicles is likely to save the lives of one million people every year.
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Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
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Kyle worked in technology; he knew it would only be a matter of time before the video of Daniela and the A-list actor went viral and spread everywhere. So he did what any pissed-off, red-blooded computer geek would do after catching his girlfriend giving an underwater blowjob to another man: he hacked into Twitter and deleted both the video and her earlier tweet from the site. Then, raging at the world that had devolved so much in civility that 140-character breakups had become acceptable, he shut down the entire network in a denial-of-service attack that lasted two days.
And so began the Great Twitter Outage of 2011.
The Earth nearly stopped on its axis.
Panic and mayhem ensued as Twitter unsuccessfully attempted to counteract what it deemed the most sophisticated hijacking they’d ever experienced. Meanwhile, the FBI waited for either a ransom demand or political statement from the so-called “Twitter Terrorist.” But neither was forthcoming, as the Twitter Terrorist had no political agenda, already was worth millions, and had most inconveniently taken off to Tijuana, Mexico to get shit-faced drunk on cheap tequila being served by an eight-fingered bartender named Esteban.
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Julie James (A Lot like Love (FBI/US Attorney, #2))
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We are experiencing an explosion of new products and services vying to help us make effort pacts with our digital devices. Whenever I write on my laptop, for instance, I click on the SelfControl app, which blocks my access to a host of distracting websites like Facebook and Reddit, as well as my email account. I can set it to block these sites for as much time as I need, typically in forty-five-minute to one-hour increments. Another app called Freedom is a bit more sophisticated and blocks potential distractions not only on my computer but also on mobile devices. Forest, perhaps my favorite distraction-proofing app, is one I find myself using nearly every day. Every time I want to make an effort pact with myself to avoid getting distracted on my phone, I open the Forest app and set my desired length of phone-free time. As soon as I hit a button marked Plant, a tiny seedling appears on the screen and a timer starts counting down. If I attempt to switch tasks on my phone before the timer runs out, my virtual tree dies. The thought of killing the little virtual tree adds just enough extra effort to discourage me from tapping out of the app—a visible reminder of the pact I’ve made with myself.
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Nir Eyal (Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life)
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So far we have looked at two of the three practical threats to liberalism: firstly, that humans will lose their value completely; secondly, that humans will still be valuable collectively, but will lose their individual authority, and instead be managed by external algorithms. The system will still need you to compose symphonies, teach history or write computer code, but it will know you better than you know yourself, and will therefore make most of the important decisions for you – and you will be perfectly happy with that. It won’t necessarily be a bad world; it will, however, be a post-liberal world. The third threat to liberalism is that some people will remain both indispensable and undecipherable, but they will constitute a small and privileged elite of upgraded humans. These superhumans will enjoy unheard-of abilities and unprecedented creativity, which will allow them to go on making many of the most important decisions in the world. They will perform crucial services for the system, while the system could neither understand nor manage them. However, most humans will not be upgraded, and will consequently become an inferior caste dominated by both computer algorithms and the new superhumans. Splitting
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Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
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So far we have looked at two of the three practical threats to liberalism: firstly, that humans will lose their value completely; secondly, that humans will still be valuable collectively, but they will lose their individual authority, and will instead be managed by external algorithms. The system will still need you to compose symphonies, teach history or write computer code, but the system will know you better than you know yourself, and will therefore make most of the important decisions for you – and you will be perfectly happy with that. It won’t necessarily be a bad world; it will, however, be a post-liberal world.
The third threat to liberalism is that some people will remain both indispensable and undecipherable, but they will constitute a small and privileged elite of upgraded humans. These superhumans will enjoy unheard-of abilities and unprecedented creativity, which will allow them to go on making many of the most important decisions in the world. They will perform crucial services for the system, while the system could not understand and manage them. However, most humans will not be upgraded, and they will consequently become an inferior caste, dominated by both computer algorithms and the new superhumans.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
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The culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn’t work, don’t buy it.”
Morrie, true to these words, had developed his own culture—long before he got sick. Discussion groups, walks with friends, dancing to his music in the Harvard Square church. He started a project called Greenhouse, where poor people could receive mental health services. He read books to find new ideas for his classes, visited with colleagues, kept up with old students, wrote letters to distant friends. He took more time eating and looking at nature and wasted no time in front of TV sitcoms or “Movies of the Week.” He had created a cocoon of human activities—conversation, interaction, affection—and it filled his life like an overflowing soup bowl.I had also developed my own culture. Work. I did four or five media jobs in England, juggling them like a clown. I spent eight hours a day on a computer, feeding my stories back to the States. Then I did TV pieces, traveling with a crew throughout parts of London. I also phoned in radio reports every morning and afternoon. This was not an abnormal load. Over the years, I had taken labor as my companion and had moved everything else to the side.
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Mitch Albom (Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson)
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In the early thirties IBM built a high-speed calculating machine to do calculations for the astronomers at New York’s Columbia University. A few years later it built a machine that was already designed as a computer—again, to do astronomical calculations, this time at Harvard. And by the end of World War II, IBM had built a real computer—the first one, by the way, that had the features of the true computer: a “memory” and the capacity to be “programmed.” And yet there are good reasons why the history books pay scant attention to IBM as a computer innovator. For as soon as it had finished its advanced 1945 computer—the first computer to be shown to a lay public in its showroom in midtown New York, where it drew immense crowds—IBM abandoned its own design and switched to the design of its rival, the ENIAC developed at the University of Pennsylvania. The ENIAC was far better suited to business applications such as payroll, only its designers did not see this. IBM structured the ENIAC so that it could be manufactured and serviced and could do mundane “numbers crunching.” When IBM’s version of the ENIAC came out in 1953, it at once set the standard for commercial, multipurpose, mainframe computers. This is the strategy of “creative imitation.
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Peter F. Drucker (Innovation and Entrepreneurship)
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As I became older, I was given many masks to wear. I could be a laborer laying railroad tracks across the continent, with long hair in a queue to be pulled by pranksters; a gardener trimming the shrubs while secretly planting a bomb; a saboteur before the day of infamy at Pearl Harbor, signaling the Imperial Fleet; a kamikaze pilot donning his headband somberly, screaming 'Banzai' on my way to my death; a peasant with a broad-brimmed straw hat in a rice paddy on the other side of the world, stooped over to toil in the water; an obedient servant in the parlor, a houseboy too dignified for my own good; a washerman in the basement laundry, removing stains using an ancient secret; a tyrant intent on imposing my despotism on the democratic world, opposed by the free and the brave; a party cadre alongside many others, all of us clad in coordinated Mao jackets; a sniper camouflaged in the trees of the jungle, training my gunsights on G.I. Joe; a child running with a body burning from napalm, captured in an unforgettable photo; an enemy shot in the head or slaughtered by the villageful; one of the grooms in a mass wedding of couples, having met my mate the day before through our cult leader; an orphan in the last airlift out of a collapsed capital, ready to be adopted into the good life; a black belt martial artist breaking cinderblocks with his head, in an advertisement for Ginsu brand knives with the slogan 'but wait--there's more' as the commercial segued to show another free gift; a chef serving up dog stew, a trick on the unsuspecting diner; a bad driver swerving into the next lane, exactly as could be expected; a horny exchange student here for a year, eager to date the blonde cheerleader; a tourist visiting, clicking away with his camera, posing my family in front of the monuments and statues; a ping pong champion, wearing white tube socks pulled up too high and batting the ball with a wicked spin; a violin prodigy impressing the audience at Carnegie Hall, before taking a polite bow; a teen computer scientist, ready to make millions on an initial public offering before the company stock crashes; a gangster in sunglasses and a tight suit, embroiled in a turf war with the Sicilian mob; an urban greengrocer selling lunch by the pound, rudely returning change over the counter to the black patrons; a businessman with a briefcase of cash bribing a congressman, a corrupting influence on the electoral process; a salaryman on my way to work, crammed into the commuter train and loyal to the company; a shady doctor, trained in a foreign tradition with anatomical diagrams of the human body mapping the flow of life energy through a multitude of colored points; a calculus graduate student with thick glasses and a bad haircut, serving as a teaching assistant with an incomprehensible accent, scribbling on the chalkboard; an automobile enthusiast who customizes an imported car with a supercharged engine and Japanese decals in the rear window, cruising the boulevard looking for a drag race; a illegal alien crowded into the cargo hold of a smuggler's ship, defying death only to crowd into a New York City tenement and work as a slave in a sweatshop.
My mother and my girl cousins were Madame Butterfly from the mail order bride catalog, dying in their service to the masculinity of the West, and the dragon lady in a kimono, taking vengeance for her sisters. They became the television newscaster, look-alikes with their flawlessly permed hair.
Through these indelible images, I grew up. But when I looked in the mirror, I could not believe my own reflection because it was not like what I saw around me. Over the years, the world opened up. It has become a dizzying kaleidoscope of cultural fragments, arranged and rearranged without plan or order.
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Frank H. Wu (Yellow)
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This revolution in the role of government has been accompanied, and largely produced, by an achievement in public persuasion that must have few rivals. Ask yourself what products are currently least satisfactory and have shown the least improvement over time. Postal service, elementary and secondary schooling, railroad passenger transport would surely be high on the list. Ask yourself which products are most satisfactory and have improved the most. Household appliances, television and radio sets, hi-fi equipment, computers, and, we would add, supermarkets and shopping centers would surely come high on that list. The shoddy products are all produced by government or government-regulated industries. The outstanding products are all produced by private enterprise with little or no government involvement. Yet the public—or a large part of it—has been persuaded that private enterprises produce shoddy products, that we need ever vigilant government employees to keep business from foisting off unsafe, meretricious products at outrageous prices on ignorant, unsuspecting, vulnerable customers. That public relations campaign has succeeded so well that we are in the process of turning over to the kind of people who bring us our postal service the far more critical task of producing and distributing energy.
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Milton Friedman (Free to Choose: A Personal Statement)
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Phaeton said, "No civilization can exist without money. Even one in which energy is as cheap and free as air on Earth, would still have some needs and desires which some people can fulfill better than others. An entertainment industry, if nothing else. Whatever efforts -- if any -- these productive people make, above and beyond that which their own idle pastimes incline them to make, will be motivated by gifts or barter bestowed by others eager for their services. Whatever barter keeps its value best over time, stays in demand, and is portable, recognizable, divisible, will become their money, No matter what they call it, no matter what form it takes, whether cowry shells or gold or grams of antimatter, it will be money. Even Sophotechs use standardized computer seconds to prioritize distribution of system resources among themselves. As long as men value each other, admire each other, need each other, there will be money."
Diomedes said, "And if all men live in isolation? Surrounded by nothing but computer-generated dreams, pleasant fictions, and flatteries? And their every desire is satisfied by electronic illusions which create in their brains the sensations of satisfaction without the substance? What need have men to value other men then?"
"Men who value their own lives would not live that way.
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John C. Wright (The Golden Transcendence (Golden Age, #3))
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In the beginning, there was the internet: the physical infrastructure of wires and servers that lets computers, and the people in front of them, talk to each other. The U.S. government’s Arpanet sent its first message in 1969, but the web as we know it today didn’t emerge until 1991, when HTML and URLs made it possible for users to navigate between static pages. Consider this the read-only web, or Web1.
In the early 2000s, things started to change. For one, the internet was becoming more interactive; it was an era of user-generated content, or the read/write web. Social media was a key feature of Web2 (or Web 2.0, as you may know it), and Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr came to define the experience of being online. YouTube, Wikipedia, and Google, along with the ability to comment on content, expanded our ability to watch, learn, search, and communicate.
The Web2 era has also been one of centralization. Network effects and economies of scale have led to clear winners, and those companies (many of which I mentioned above) have produced mind-boggling wealth for themselves and their shareholders by scraping users’ data and selling targeted ads against it. This has allowed services to be offered for “free,” though users initially didn’t understand the implications of that bargain. Web2 also created new ways for regular people to make money, such as through the sharing economy and the sometimes-lucrative job of being an influencer.
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Harvard Business Review (Web3: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review (HBR Insights Series))
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Great are the works of the Lord; they are pondered by all who delight in them. —Psalm 111:2 (NIV) The church I attend recently celebrated its 150th anniversary. It’s been a festive year, replete with special dinners, panel discussions, and a book on the church’s history. But what amazed me even more were all the little stories that formed the big story—those quiet, individual witnesses of faith who, taken together, made up this grand sweep of 150 years. One woman has been a member for nearly half the church’s life. Fifty-two Sundays times seven decades is how many church services? “You’ve heard thousands of sermons!” I said. “What do you remember about the best ones?” She smiled. “The best sermons are the ones I think about all week. Because then I know God is working in me.” That simple lesson of faith was the start of a new practice for me. When I hear a phrase or sentence in a sermon that especially strikes me, I’ll write it down on the bulletin or on whatever I have handy. (Once it was the palm of my hand!) Then I pin that phrase to the bulletin board behind my computer. This week’s was: May God give me the grace to understand that the world is too small for anything but Love. I see it every day, reminding me to ponder how I might live that message. Like my friend at church, I’ve been able to see in a new way how God is working in my life—all week long. Guide my life, God, by Your Words; that in hearing them, I may live according to Your wishes. —Jeff Japinga Digging Deeper: Pss 105, 111, 119:18; 1 Pt 2:2
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Guideposts (Daily Guideposts 2014)
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short buzz followed, then silence. “They want to get rid of us,” said Trillian nervously. “What do we do?” “It’s just a recording,” said Zaphod. “We keep going. Got that, computer?” “I got it,” said the computer and gave the ship an extra kick of speed. They waited. After a second or so came the fanfare once again, and then the voice. “We would like to assure you that as soon as our business is resumed announcements will be made in all fashionable magazines and color supplements, when our clients will once again be able to select from all that’s best in contemporary geography.” The menace in the voice took on a sharper edge. “Meanwhile, we thank our clients for their kind interest and would ask them to leave. Now.” Arthur looked round the nervous faces of his companions. “Well, I suppose we’d better be going then, hadn’t we?” he suggested. “Shhh!” said Zaphod. “There’s absolutely nothing to be worried about.” “Then why’s everyone so tense?” “They’re just interested!” shouted Zaphod. “Computer, start a descent into the atmosphere and prepare for landing.” This time the fanfare was quite perfunctory, the voice now distinctly cold. “It is most gratifying,” it said, “that your enthusiasm for our planet continues unabated, and so we would like to assure you that the guided missiles currently converging with your ship are part of a special service we extend to all of our most enthusiastic clients, and the fully armed nuclear warheads are of course merely a courtesy detail. We look forward to your custom in future lives…. Thank you.
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Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker's Guide, #1))
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Back in 2015, a volunteer group called Bitnation set up something called the Blockchain Emergency ID. There’s not a lot of data on the project now, BE-ID - used public-key cryptography to generate unique IDs for people without their documents. People could verify their relations, that these people belonged to their family, and so on. It was a very modern way of maintaining an ID; secure, fast, and easy to use. Using the Bitcoin blockchain, the group published all these IDs on to a globally distributed public ledger, spread across the computers of every single Bitcoin user online - hundreds of thousands of users, in those times. Once published, no government could undo it; the identities would float around in the recesses of the Internet. As long as the network remained alive, every person's identity would remain intact, forever floating as bits and bytes between the nations: no single country, government or company could ever deny them this. “That was, and I don't say this often, the fucking bomb,” said Common, In one fell swoop, identities were taken outside government control. BE-ID, progressing in stages, became the refugees' gateway to social assistance and financial services. First it became compliant with UN guidelines. Then it was linked to a VISA card. And thus out of the Syrian war was something that looked like it could solve global identification forever. Experts wrote on its potential. No more passports. No more national IDs. Sounds familiar? Yes, that’s the United Nations Identity in a nutshell. Julius Common’s first hit - the global identity revolution that he sold first to the UN, and then to almost every government in the world - was conceived of when he was a teenager.
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Yudhanjaya Wijeratne (Numbercaste)
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CYBERPOWER is now a fundamental fact of global life. In political, economic, and military affairs, information and information technology provide and support crucial elements of operational activities. U.S. national security efforts have begun to incorporate cyber into strategic calculations. Those efforts, however, are only a beginning. The critical conclusion...is that the United States must create an effective national and international strategic framework for the development and use of cyber as part of an overall national security strategy.
Such a strategic framework will have both structural and geopolitical elements. Structural activities will focus on those parts of cyber that enhance capabilities for use in general. Those categories include heightened security, expanded development of research and human capital, improved governance, and more effective organization. Geopolitical activities will focus on more traditional national security and defense efforts. Included in this group are sophisticated development of network-centric operations; appropriate integrated planning of computer network attack capabilities; establishment of deterrence doctrine that incorporates cyber; expansion of effective cyber influence capabilities; carefully planned incorporation of cyber into military planning (particularly stability operations); establishment of appropriate doctrine, education, and training regarding cyber by the Services and nonmilitary elements so that cyber can be used effectively in a joint and/or multinational context; and generation of all those efforts at an international level, since cyber is inherently international and cannot be most effectively accomplished without international partners.
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Franklin D. Kramer (Cyberpower and National Security)
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A confidential report delivered in June 1965 by Abel Aganbegyan, director of the Novobirsk Institute of Economics, highlighted the difficulties. Aganbegyan noted that the growth rate of the Soviet economy was beginning to decline, just as the rival US economy seemed particularly buoyant; at the same time, some sectors of the Soviet economy - housing, agriculture, services, retail trade - remained very backward, and were failing to develop at an adequate rate. The root causes of this poor performance he saw in the enormous commitment of resources to defense (in human terms, 30-40 million people out of a working population of 100 million, he reckoned), and the 'extreme centralism and lack of democracy in economic matters' which had survived from the past. In a complex modern society, he argued, not everything could be planned, since it was impossible to foresee all possible contingencies and their potential effects. So the plan amounted to central command, and even that could not be properly implemented for lack of information and of modern data-processing equipment. 'The Central Statistical Administration ... does not have a single computer, and is not planning to acquire any,' he commented acidly. Economic administration was also impeded by excessive secrecy: 'We obtain many figures... from American journals sooner than they are released by the Central Statistical Administration.' Hence the economy suffered from inbuilt distortions: the hoarding of goods and labour to provide for unforeseen contingencies, the production of shoddy goods to fulfill planning targets expressed in crude quantitative terms, the accumulation of unused money by a public reluctant to buy substandard products, with resultant inflation and a flourishing black market.
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Geoffrey Hosking (The First Socialist Society: A History of the Soviet Union from Within)
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Isaac Asimov’s short story “The Fun They Had” describes a school of the future that uses advanced technology to revolutionize the educational experience, enhancing individualized learning and providing students with personalized instruction and robot teachers. Such science fiction has gone on to inspire very real innovation. In a 1984 Newsweek interview, Apple’s co-founder Steve Jobs predicted computers were going to be a bicycle for our minds, extending our capabilities, knowledge, and creativity, much the way a ten-speed amplifies our physical abilities. For decades, we have been fascinated by the idea that we can use computers to help educate people. What connects these science fiction narratives is that they all imagined computers might eventually emulate what we view as intelligence. Real-life researchers have been working for more than sixty years to make this AI vision a reality. In 1962, the checkers master Robert Nealey played the game against an IBM 7094 computer, and the computer beat him. A few years prior, in 1957, the psychologist Frank Rosenblatt created Perceptron, the first artificial neural network, a computer simulation of a collection of neurons and synapses trained to perform certain tasks. In the decades following such innovations in early AI, we had the computation power to tackle systems only as complex as the brain of an earthworm or insect. We also had limited techniques and data to train these networks. The technology has come a long way in the ensuing decades, driving some of the most common products and apps today, from the recommendation engines on movie streaming services to voice-controlled personal assistants such as Siri and Alexa. AI has gotten so good at mimicking human behavior that oftentimes we cannot distinguish between human and machine responses. Meanwhile, not only has the computation power developed enough to tackle systems approaching the complexity of the human brain, but there have been significant breakthroughs in structuring and training these neural networks.
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Salman Khan (Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That’s a Good Thing))
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In the present time, Information Technology has emerged as one of the most promising Industries across the globe. Globally for the reduction of cost, time and efforts involved in the production and supply of the goods and services has made whole business world to adopt the technological support. And due to this reason only Software development have emerged as a important means of growth of IT Industry in India. Software Development Companies in India Have played a crucial role in rapid development of Software industry in India. These Companies Constantly improve and enhance the world of computers and technology. With the help of Software development all the complicated machines whether its computers, laptops, mobile phones or navigation devices all these machines are the way they are today performing various tasks successfully.
As Software Development is having a essential role in many industries, so organizations have realized their importance for improving themselves in various aspects of management. Software Development have increased the productivity of the businesses by reducing the human efforts and errors. This increased demand in the Software Development have also given rise to high demand of Software Development Companies everywhere. Even there is a huge demand of best Software Company in Lucknow as Lucknow being capital of U.P have become a growing market for various industries and now almost every offline brand has setup into online businesses of their products and services. As the number of internet users are increasing day by day so are the businesses entering into the online so that they could influence customers online.
Besides Software Development many other web solutions like web hosting, web development and website designing services have great demand in the market also therefore, Software Companies have started offering all these services along with software development. Software Industry is flooded with various software companies which are also Website Development Company in Lucknow offering various web based services but it is required by you to choose wisely which company to choose to help your business sustain successfully in long run and stay ahead of its competitors in the market. The company is choosen such that which provide good quality software’s in affordable price.
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webdigitronix
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me to be honest about his failings as well as his strengths. She is one of the smartest and most grounded people I have ever met. “There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that’s the truth,” she told me early on. “You shouldn’t whitewash it. He’s good at spin, but he also has a remarkable story, and I’d like to see that it’s all told truthfully.” I leave it to the reader to assess whether I have succeeded in this mission. I’m sure there are players in this drama who will remember some of the events differently or think that I sometimes got trapped in Jobs’s distortion field. As happened when I wrote a book about Henry Kissinger, which in some ways was good preparation for this project, I found that people had such strong positive and negative emotions about Jobs that the Rashomon effect was often evident. But I’ve done the best I can to balance conflicting accounts fairly and be transparent about the sources I used. This is a book about the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. You might even add a seventh, retail stores, which Jobs did not quite revolutionize but did reimagine. In addition, he opened the way for a new market for digital content based on apps rather than just websites. Along the way he produced not only transforming products but also, on his second try, a lasting company, endowed with his DNA, that is filled with creative designers and daredevil engineers who could carry forward his vision. In August 2011, right before he stepped down as CEO, the enterprise he started in his parents’ garage became the world’s most valuable company. This is also, I hope, a book about innovation. At a time when the United States is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build creative digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness, imagination, and sustained innovation. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology, so he built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering. He and his colleagues at Apple were able to think differently: They developed not merely modest product advances based on focus groups, but whole new devices and services that consumers did not yet know they needed. He was not a model boss or human being, tidily packaged for emulation. Driven by demons, he could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and passions and products were all interrelated, just as Apple’s hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system. His tale is thus both instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values.
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Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
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if you cannot describe the responsibility of a class in 25 words or less, it may have more than one responsibility, and the new ones should be split out into their own classes.
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Armando Fox (Engineering Software as a Service: An Agile Approach Using Cloud Computing + $10 AWS Credit)
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Goodwill has 2,900 stores. The shops collect and sell donated clothing and household goods and use the proceeds for work training, job placement services and other community-based programs. If the breach at Goodwill is confirmed, it will be the sixth major retail chain - after Target, P.F. Chang's, Neiman Marcus, Michaels and Sally Beauty - to acknowledge that its systems were recently compromised. In those cases, criminals installed malware on retailers' systems, which fed customers' payment details back to their computer servers.
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Anonymous
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Apple’s announcement that it was teaming up with IBM raised a few eyebrows. The pair will create apps for businesses that draw on Apple’s functionality and IBM’s cloud-computing and security expertise. It is Apple’s first significant thrust into corporate services and amounts to a sea change in its philosophy; Steve Jobs once described IBM as representing the “computer Dark Ages”.
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Anonymous
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The five letters of the SOLID acronym stand for: Single Responsibility Principle: a class should have one and only one responsibility; that is, only one reason to change. The Lack of Cohesion Of Methods metric indicates the antipattern of too large a class. Open/Closed Principle: a class should be open for extension, but closed against modification. The Case Statement design smell suggests a violation. Liskov Substitution Principle: a method designed to work on an object of type T should also work on an object of any subtype of T. That is, all of T’s subtypes should preserve T’s “contract.” The refused bequest design smell often indicates a violation. Dependency Injection Principle: if two classes depend on each other but their implementations may change, it would be better for them to both depend on a separate abstract interface which is “injected” between them. Demeter Principle: a method can call other methods in its own class, and methods on the classes of its own instance variables; everything else is taboo. A design smell that indicates a violation is inappropriate intimacy.
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Armando Fox (Engineering Software as a Service: An Agile Approach Using Cloud Computing + $10 AWS Credit)
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Learning from your customers is vital to your success. Even if you work in a back office or don't deal directly with the public, you are serving someone in your job. You have a boss--and the boss is really your customer, right? You have to think of the people you work for (and if you have a job, your work for someone) as customers. Doing so gives you greater buy-in to the idea that your job is part of a bigger universe--it's not just you toiling away on a computer making sure the numbers add up (or whatever it is you do). Someone, somewhere, is counting on you to hold up your end of the bargain and to do your job better, and you can learn from that person (or people).
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Jon Taffer (Don't Bullsh*t Yourself!: Crush the Excuses That Are Holding You Back)
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Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become' was published... in 2012. Its essential insight is that innovation is an investment in the human capital, capabilities, and competencies of customers and clients.
Business history gives great credence to this “human capital” model of innovation. For example, George Eastman didn't just invent cheap cameras and film; he created photographers. Steve Jobs didn't merely “reinvent” personal computing and mobile telephony; he reinvented how people physically touched and talked with their technologies. Successful innovators have a “vision of the customer future” that matters every bit as much as their product or service vision. By treating innovation as an investment in customer futures, organizations can make their customers more valuable. In other words, “Making Customers Better Makes Better Customers".
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Michael Schrage (The Innovator's Hypothesis: How Cheap Experiments Are Worth More Than Good Ideas)
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As an example of the use of technology in the democratic process, I visualize an election scenario where a candidate files his nomination from a particular constituency. Immediately, the election officer verifies the authenticity from the national citizen ID database through a multipurpose citizen ID card. The candidate’s civic consciousness and citizenship behaviour can also be accessed through the police crime records. The property records come from land registration authorities across the country. Income and wealth resources come from the income tax department, as well as other sources. The person’s education credentials come from his university records. The track record of employment comes from various employers with whom he has worked. The credit history comes from various credit institutions like banks. The person’s legal track records come from the judicial system. All the details arrive at the computer terminal of the election officer within a few minutes through the e-governance software, which would track various state and central government web services directories through the network and collect the information quickly and automatically and present facts in real-time without any bias. An artificial intelligence software would analyse the candidate’s credentials and give a rating on how successful that person would be as a politician. The election officer can then make an informed choice and start the electoral processes.
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A.P.J. Abdul Kalam (The Righteous Life: The Very Best of A.P.J. Abdul Kalam)
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Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become was published... in 2012. Its essential insight is that innovation is an investment in the human capital, capabilities, and competencies of customers and clients.
Business history gives great credence to this “human capital” model of innovation. For example, George Eastman didn't just invent cheap cameras and film; he created photographers. Steve Jobs didn't merely “reinvent” personal computing and mobile telephony; he reinvented how people physically touched and talked with their technologies. Successful innovators have a “vision of the customer future” that matters every bit as much as their product or service vision. By treating innovation as an investment in customer futures, organizations can make their customers more valuable. In other words, “Making Customers Better Makes Better Customers.
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Michael Schrage (The Innovator's Hypothesis: How Cheap Experiments Are Worth More Than Good Ideas)
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I had eight magazines of 5.56mm bullets and ChemLights. As team lead, I carried flares, an extra radio, and an extra antenna stuffed in a cargo pocket. I had a computer and a medical pack containing QuikClot, bandages, needles, and tourniquets. I had water and food, too. I weighed about 250 pounds without my gear, and more than 325 with it. With every step I took, I could feel my spine compressing like a shock absorber.
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Marcus Luttrell (Service: A Navy SEAL at War)
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Assign a file or paper tray to collect single-side printed paper for reuse. Boycott paper sourced from virgin forests and reams sold in plastic. Cancel magazine and newspaper subscriptions; view them online instead. Digitize important receipts and documents for safekeeping. Digital files are valid proofs for tax purposes. Download CutePDF Writer to save online files without having to print them. Email invitations or greeting cards instead of printing them (see “Holidays and Gifts” chapter). Forage the recycling can when paper scraps are needed, such as for bookmarks or pictures (for school collages, for example). Give extra paper to the local preschool. Hack the page margins of documents to maximize printing. Imagine a paperless world. Join the growing paperless community. Kill the fax machine; encourage electronic faxing through a service such as HelloFax. Limit yourself to print only on paper that has already been printed on one side. Make online billing and banking a common practice. Nag the kids’ teachers to send home only important papers. Opt out of paper newsletters. Print on both sides when using a new sheet of paper (duplex printing). Question the need for printing; print only when absolutely necessary. In most cases, it is not. Repurpose junk mail envelopes—make sure to cross out any barcode. Sign electronically using the Adobe Acrobat signing feature or SignNow.com. Turn down business cards; enter relevant info directly into a smartphone. Use shredded paper as a packing material, single-printed paper fastened with a metal clip for a quick notepad (grocery lists, errands lists), and double-printed paper to wrap presents or pick up your dog’s feces. Visit the local library to read business magazines and books. Write on paper using a pencil, which you can then erase to reuse paper, or better yet, use your computer, cell phone, or erasable board instead of paper. XYZ: eXamine Your Zipper; i.e., your leaks: attack any incoming source of paper.
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Bea Johnson (Zero Waste Home: The Ultimate Guide to Simplifying Your Life by Reducing Your Waste (A Simple Guide to Sustainable Living))
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Maddy Roby
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In addition, for a full year, AT&T would pay for all basic services related to the computer and phones, like monthly telephone and cellular service in frills such as the caller ID, call waiting, and three-way calling.
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Douglas Frantz (Celebration, U.S.A.: Living in Disney's Brave New Town)
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infrastructure companies. Amazon is so good at infrastructure that its fastest-growing and most profitable business (AWS) is all about allowing other companies to leverage Amazon’s computing infrastructure. Amazon also makes money by offering Fulfillment by Amazon to other merchants who envy its mastery of logistics, which ought to strike fear into the hearts of frenemies like UPS and FedEx. In addition to its eighty-six gigantic fulfillment centers, Amazon also has at least fifty-eight Prime Now hubs in major markets, allowing it to beat UPS and FedEx on performance by offering same-day delivery of purchases in less than two hours. Amazon has also built out “sortation” centers that let it beat UPS and FedEx on price by shipping small packages via the United States Postal Service for about $ 1 rather than paying FedEx or UPS around $ 4.50.
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Reid Hoffman (Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies)
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move a little faster than we originally planned, it is true, but we could rise to the challenge. We have been very successful during our first year.” “Rebecca,” he said, turning to face her, “I must tell you now once and for all that the school will never include girls. The idea is ridiculous. Why should we waste our time on educating females? What possible use could there be in our doing so?” She flushed. “I am a female, Philip,” she said, “and I happen to feel that my life is a little more complete for my ability to read and write and compute and for my knowledge of history and of French and music.” He made an impatient gesture. “You are not a member of the lower classes,” he said. “Of course it is necessary for ladies to have some smattering of knowledge so that they can participate to some small degree in social conversation. For these girls, Rebecca, an education would serve no purpose at all.” “Are we really such inferior creatures?” Rebecca asked very quietly. “And tell me, Philip, do I successfully participate to some small degree in social conversation? Do I save the gentlemen from the boredom of having to listen to an utter ninnyhammer all the time?” “You are becoming angry, Rebecca,” Philip said calmly, “and speaking unreasonably. You know that you are twisting my words. I am not saying that these girls are useless. They have infinite value. They are God’s creatures, fashioned to be a help and a comfort to their menfolk. We would spoil them by educating them, spoil their God-given beauty.” “Woman achieves worth and beauty only through the service she renders her menfolk,” Rebecca said. Philip almost smiled. “I could not have said it better,” he said. “I must try to remember those exact words.” “I will reach final fulfillment as a woman and as a person when I become your helpmeet,” she said. This time he did smile. “What a beautiful idea,” he said. “You will be a good wife, Rebecca. I am a fortunate man.” “Poppycock!” was all Rebecca said. “I beg your pardon?” “I said, ‘Poppycock!’ ” she repeated very distinctly. Philip frowned. “Yes, I heard you the first time,” he said, “but thought I must have mistaken. I have never heard such an inelegant word on your lips.” “It comes from having an education,” she said. “I have read the word somewhere. I am already one of the spoiled, Philip. You know, there has always been something about you that has made me somewhat uneasy. I have never
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Mary Balogh (The Constant Heart)
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p2 I'd seen a photo of the actual red and white checked notebook that was Anne [Frank]'s first diary. I longed to own a similar notebook. Stationery was pretty dire back in the late fifties and early sixties. There was no such thing as Paperchase. I walked round and round the stationery counter in Woolworths and spent most of my pocket money on notebooks, but they weren't strong on variety. You could have shiny red sixpenny notebooks, lined inside, with strange maths details about rods and poles and perches on the back. (I never found out what they were!) Then you could have shiny blue sixpenny notebooks. That was your lot.
I was enchanted to read in Dodie Smith's novel I Capture The Castle that the heroine, Cassandra, was writing her diary in a similar sixpenny notebook. She eventually progressed to a shilling notebook. My Woolworths rarely stocked such expensive luxuries. Then, two thirds of the way through the book, Cassandra is given a two-guinea red leather manuscript book. I lusted after that fictional notebook for years.
I told my mother, Biddy. She rolled her eyes. It could have cost two hundred guineas - both were way out of our league... My dad, Harry, was a civil servant. One of the few perks of his job was that he had an unlimited illegal supply of notepads watermarked SO - Stationery Office. I'd drawn on these pads for years, I'd scribbled stories, I'd written letters. They were serviceable but unexciting: thin cream paper unreliably bound with glue at the top. You couldn't write a journal with these notepads; it would fall apart in days... My spelling wasn't too hot. It still isn't. Thank goodness for the spellcheck on my computer!
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Jacqueline Wilson (My Secret Diary)
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The designs of our products and services must also follow this philosophy. So, to the designers who are reading this, let me give some advice: •Do not blame people when they fail to use your products properly. •Take people’s difficulties as signifiers of where the product can be improved. •Eliminate all error messages from electronic or computer systems. Instead, provide help and guidance. •Make it possible to correct problems directly from help and guidance messages. Allow people to continue with their task: Don’t impede progress—help make it smooth and continuous. Never make people start over. •Assume that what people have done is partially correct, so if it is inappropriate, provide the guidance that allows them to correct the problem and be on their way. •Think positively, for yourself and for the people you interact with.
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Donald A. Norman (The Design of Everyday Things)
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AWS Lambda is a compute service that lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers.
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Amazon Web Services (AWS Lambda: Developer Guide)
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CONFUSION 1: WHAT DOES YOUR CUSTOMER REALLY WANT? Your Customers aren’t just people; they’re very specific kinds of people. Let me share with you the six categories of Customers as seen from an E-Myth marketing perspective: (1) Tactile Customers; (2) Neutral Customers; (3) Withdrawal Customers; (4) Experimental Customers; (5) Transitional Customers; and (6) Traditional Customers. Your entire marketing strategy must be based on which types of Customers you are dealing with. Each of the six customer types buys products and services for very different, and identifiable, reasons. And these are: 1. Tactile Customers get their major gratification from interacting with other people. 2. Neutral Customers get their major gratification from interacting with inanimate objects (a computer, a car, information). 3. Withdrawal Customers get their major gratification from interacting with ideas (thoughts, concepts, stories). 4. Experimental Customers rationalize their buying decisions by perceiving that what they bought is new, revolutionary, and innovative. 5. Transitional Customers rationalize their buying decisions by perceiving that what they bought is dependable and reliable. 6. Traditional Customers rationalize their buying decisions by perceiving that what they bought is cost-effective, a good deal, and worth the money. In short: 1. If your Customer is Tactile, you have to emphasize the people of your business. 2. If your Customer is Neutral, you have to emphasize the technology of your business. 3. If your Customer is a Withdrawal Customer, you have to emphasize the idea of your business. 4. If your Customer is an Experimental Customer, you have to emphasize the uniqueness of your business. 5. If your Customer is Transitional, you have to emphasize the dependability of your business. 6. If your Customer is Traditional, you have to talk about the financial competitiveness of your business. Additionally, what your Customers want is determined by who they are. Who they are is regularly demonstrated by what they do. Think about the Customers with whom you do business. Ask yourself: In which of the categories would I place them? What do they do for a living? For example: If they are mechanical engineers, they are probably Neutral Customers. If they are cardiologists, they are probably Tactile. If they are software engineers, they are probably Experimental. If they are accountants, they are probably Traditional. But don’t take my word for it. Make your own analysis.
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Michael E. Gerber (The E-Myth Contractor: Why Most Contractors' Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It)
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Hi, I’m Bob Howard. I’m a computational demonologist and senior field agent working for an organization you don’t know exists. My job involves a wide range of tasks, including: writing specifications for structured cabling runs in departmental offices; diving through holes in spacetime that lead to dead worlds and fighting off the things with too many tentacles and mouths that I find there; liaising with procurement officers to draft the functional requirements for our new classified document processing architecture; exorcising haunted jet fighters; ensuring departmental compliance with service backup policy; engaging in gunfights with the inbred cannibal worshippers of undead alien gods; and sitting in committee meetings.
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Charles Stross (The Apocalypse Codex (Laundry Files, #4))
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Cloud computing and computer services platform Salesforce generates 50 percent of its revenues through APIs, while for travel platform Expedia, the figure is 90 percent.
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Geoffrey G. Parker (Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy―and How to Make Them Work for You)
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Six big companies refused to refund me for a bad service. I humiliated them, I threaten them, I kept their product, and I made them pay for every cent at the end.
My girlfriend asked me for some time off and challenged me. I dumped her without further discussion. My computer demanded a break. And so I broke it. I have some of its letters being shipped from across the world while I type without them, for seventeen hours a day, from Monday to Sunday. And yet, this world still seriously underestimates the one that was born in the darkness and shaped by the fire. I can eat the whole planet in one single bite if I want.
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Robin Sacredfire
“
He did have some small advantage, though. He knew the truth about surveillance. Ever since the dawn of GWOT the nations of the West – apart from the United States, where civil libertarians tended to carry rifles and use them on closed-circuit cameras as an expression of their freedoms – had put their faith in creating a paranoid state, one where every move of every citizen was recorded and logged and filmed and fuck you, if you’ve got nothing to hide you’ve got nothing to worry about.
Whether this had had any great influence in the course of GWOT was a moot point, but there was one thing not generally appreciated about the paranoid state. It was incredibly labour-intensive.
There were simply not enough people to monitor all the cameras. Every shop had one, every bus and train and theatre and public convenience, every street and road and alleyway. Computers with facial recognition and gait recognition and body language recognition could do some of the job, but they were relatively simple to fool, expensive, and times had been hard for decades. It was cheaper to get people to watch the screens. But no nation on Earth had a security service large enough, a police force big enough, to keep an eye on all those live feeds. So it was contracted out. To private security firms all trying to undercut each other. The big stores had their own security men, but they were only interested in people going in and out of the store, not someone just passing by. So instead of a single all-seeing eye London’s seemingly-impregnable surveillance map was actually a patchwork of little territories and jurisdictions, and while they all had, by law, to make their footage available to the forces of law and order, many of the control rooms were actually manned by bored, underpaid, undertrained and badly-motivated immigrants.
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Dave Hutchinson (Europe in Autumn (The Fractured Europe Sequence, #1))
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Preface The Nuremberg Laws on Citizenship and Race: September 15, 1935 Article 4 (1) A Jew cannot be a citizen of the Reich. He cannot exercise the right to vote; he cannot hold public office. (2) Jewish officials will be retired as of December 31, 1935. In the event that such officials served at the front in the World War either for Germany or her allies, they shall receive as pension, until they reach the age limit, the full salary last received, on the basis of which their pension would have been computed. They shall not, however, be promoted according to their seniority in rank. When they reach the age limit, their pension will be computed again, according to the salary last received on which their pension was to be calculated. (3) These provisions do not concern the affairs of religious organisations. (4) The conditions regarding service of teachers in public Jewish schools remains unchanged until the promulgation of new laws on the Jewish school system. Article 5 (1) A Jew is an individual who is descended
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Diney Costeloe (The Runaway Family)
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Get your computer repair in Boca Raton, laptop repair, macbook repair in Boca Raton on site by the best service provider in Palm Beach & Broward county.
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Ronald Serrano