Monthly Archives: November 2007

The Twilight of American Culture

This book was on the “must read’ list of business guru Mark Yarnell. I’ll try to add more opinion later, for now, here are some quotes to wet your appetite. Quotes: The United States, as Robert Kaplan suggests, is evolving into a corporate oligarchy that merely wears the trappings of a democracy. (page 3) I worked as a reading and ... Read More »

The Cathedral and the Bazzar – Eric S Raymond

Subtitle: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary I must admit, that when I began this book, I didn’t know who Eric S Raymond was. Per Wikipedia, Raymond became a prominent voice in the open source movement and co-founded the Open Source Initiative in 1998. He also took on the self-appointed role of ambassador of open source ... Read More »

Wikinomics – How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything

Book by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams “But the Internet has caused transactions costs to plunge so steeply that is has become much more useful to read Coase’s law, in effect backward: Nowadays firms should shrink until the cost of performing a transaction no longer exceeds the cost of performing it externally.” The authors give an example using the ... Read More »

The Singularity Is Near – Ray Kurzweil

Here are two quotes from the book to give you the big picture: “What then is the Singularity? It’s a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed…. The key underlying the impending Singularity is that the pace of change of our human-created technology ... Read More »

The Spike – by Damien Broderick

Around 2050, or maybe even 2030, is when a technological Singularity, as it’s been termed, is expected to erupt. That, at any rate, is the considered opinion of a number of informed if unusually adventurous scientists. Professor Vinge called this project event “the technological Singularity,” something of a mouthful. I call it “the Spike”, an upward jab on the chart ... Read More »