non_fiction

The Man Who Broke Capitalism

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With Cisco announcing that they no longer need 12% of their staff this calendar year (5% in February, and another 7% in September), I am left wondering what is so terribly wrong with American Capitalism. Interestingly at about the same time someone recommended I read this book, so here we are -- seeking to understand the behavior of our corporate masters once more. This book starts with this quote: To understand a civilization, consider its heroes. Which is telling because its so true. I think it also works for organizations -- if you want to see the values of an organization, don't look at what they say, look at who they promote and idolize. That's really the author's point though, so I shouldn't take too much credit. It's clear from the start that the author doesn't like Jack Welch or his leadership of General Electric and that he thinks Welch's legacy is toxic. Honestly though, he makes a pretty convincing argument that leaves me not being a huge fan either and certainly GE didn't survive the experience of Welch and those he chose to replace him upon retirement. It is asserted that Welch had three main maneuvers in business: downsizing;…

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Digital Minimalism

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This book argues that technology, especially social media, has been deliberately engineered by Silicon Valley to be addictive, and that often there are detrimental impacts to the products we all use every day. That argument makes sense in that these products are measured by the amount of time they are used per user (and thus the advertising revenue generated), and have evolutionary pressure to find ways to increase user minutes per day. There is also research cited in the book that anxiety levels in teenagers have increased in a manner which correlates with the release of the smart phone. Now, I don't think I could ever be a digital minimalist as described in the book, especially when work expects so much connectivity from me (it will be interesting if a right to switch off ever passes in Australia, put it that way), but I do think there are interesting ideas here. For example, asking why you have certain technology is probably reasonable. The low hanging fruit here seems to be smartphone apps for most people -- can you explain why you have all those apps installed? Especially when many of them are bad for your privacy? The bar proposed by…

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Fifty Things That Made the Modern Economy

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This book is an interesting read coming straight off the back of Human Origins. The book starts out by explaining the impact the invention of the plow had on humanity -- it asserts that farmers being able to produce substantially more than they needed for their own subsistence was a driving factor in the creation of both other specializations (by freeing people up from farming), but also a more unequal society (as it allowed a ruling class to live off resources produced by others). This is an interesting assertion to me. Next the book moves on to observing that with all innovations there is a winner and a loser. An early example is the phonograph -- before the invention of recorded media there was a market for quite-good-but-not-great performers to entertain people. Once there was an ability to record great performers, the earning capacity of the great performers went way up but the earning capacity of the not-quite-great performers went down. So while society overall might benefit from innovation, it is not true that all participants in the market benefit at the time of the innovation. The book then starts walking through a series of inventions. Each is presented as…

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The Cuckoo’s Egg

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In 1986, Clifford Stoll and his coworkers were frustrated by what they thought was a billing error of 75 cents in their monthly accounting. Suspecting a software bug, the new guy (Clifford) was put on to working out the error as a starter problem while he got familiar with the systems he was to manage... I've been home sick this week with a chest infection, and what with having a limited oxygen supply I didn't feel like I was braining super well. So what better way to pass the time between naps than another old book I've read before? This is another book I must have read before I started blogging such things, but discussions of old computing systems made me a bit nostalgic for a good gold fashioned tale of computer hackery. The story has some historical significance too, as shown by this quote from Wikipedia: This was one of the first⁠ —⁠ if not the first ⁠— documented cases of a computer break-in, and Stoll seems to have been the first to keep a daily logbook of the hacker's activities. There are a few things which strike me about this story -- Stoll was lucky. He arguably committed…

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Linkers and Loaders

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I've owned this book since it was new in the year 2000, but it has sat on the shelf alone and unloved for at least 20 years. I think I did probably read it back then, but it pre-dates blogged notes about books like this one. However, with my new found interest in assembly language programming for ancient CPU architectures, this seems like the sort of book which I might enjoy again. That said, let's be honest here -- the content is interesting, and this book is still recommended as the best introduction to this topic, which is impressive after a 25 year lifespan -- but Shakespeare this ain't. So I found the book interesting and enjoyed reading it, but wont say much more than that here. I am left with an urge to understand UEFI more. Maybe I should write a bad boot loader? Either way, I've had to add some books on that to the Amazon wishlist now...

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New Scientist Instant Expert: Human Origins

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This book triggered my weak spot. There I was wandering in a book store and it caught my eye. The combination of the promise of instant expertise and and interesting topic area was too much for my already notably poor impulse control with books and a purchase was made. Covering from our distant origins from probably Asia, to stone tool use on African grasslands, to the invention of cooking and farming. The book asserts that 20% of our basal calorie burn is our brain, which drove the adoption to eating meat. While I'm not disputing the number, 20% seems like a lot to me. I wonder if that explains why I find training courses so tiring, my brain is literally consuming extra energy? As an aside, a study by Richard Wrangham mentioned in this book asserts that to live a leisurely western lifestyle using only raw vegetarian food, you'd have to consume 9% of your bodyweight a day. That certainly meshes with the "eat a salad" weight loss advice! So in the end, do I think I am an expert on human evolution? No, not really. The book was an interesting read and I enjoyed it, but perhaps the title…

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Project Orion

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I was quite excited when this book arrived. It's a bit old (early 2000s) and therefore a bit hard to find, so when Amazon randomly had a "new" copy I snapped it up. This copy is definitely unread, but yet still yellowed with time and the binding is a bit sad. Project Orion is the story of America's attempt to build interstellar space ships powered by small nuclear explosions in the early 1950s. The story is told through the lens of one of the children whose father was a principal researcher on the project and who has now interviewed a lot of the players as well as reading de-classified historical documents. It should be noted that much of the program is still classified -- for example the exact minimum amount of plutonium you need to make a big explosion. The 1950s seem to have been an interesting time for nuclear research, as the technology was seen as both generally hopeful in the sense of finding peaceful uses for this destructive capability, while also being terrifying with the prospect of mutually assured distruction. This project started before NASA existed -- at the time each major branch of the military was competing…

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Non-fiction books you really should read

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I read a lot of books, mostly fiction. That said, occassionally I come across a non-fiction book that genuinely changes how I think about something. In general I can tell those books a while later, because they're the ones I keep referring people to over and over. So here's a list of the non-fiction books I've read since I started keeping records that I think have changed how I think about the world: The Man Who Broke Capitalism: companies should exist for more than mergely hitting quarterly earnings goals -- they should serve their shareholders, but also their employees and the communities they operate in. In return, long term growth is more likely than with a short sighted approach. The Innovators Dilemma: understanding the behaviour of companies in established markets and how disruption occurs changed how I thought about many of the companies I've worked for. Chip War: the history of the semiconductor industry and its globalization was both interesting and informative about how interconnected our global economy has become. Cult of the Dead Cow: how a group of teenagers looking for fun "hacks" accidentally changed an entire industry's attitude towards responsible disclosure of security vulnerabilities. The Mythical Man-Month: genuinely…

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The Innovator’s Dilemma

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So David at work has been talking about this book quite a lot recently, and that meant I had to read it despite the failure of Debugging to delight me. Interestingly, the book starts by telling the story of the hard disk industry, which aligns well with Chip War's approach of telling the story of the semiconductor industry. Apparently the universe thinks I need to know more tech history! The book asserts that disruptive innovation occurs when incumbent players become too good at serving their current market with improved products or services. While this might seem like the result of rational management, often those products end up over delivering compared to what customers want, and as a result then costing more than customers really want to spend. Disruptors on the other hand often launch with a worse product which doesn't meet the needs of the incumbent's customers, but does address the needs of some previously unserviced market segment. That's great for everyone, until the new player adds sufficient functionality to now be competitive with the incumbent player, but at a lower price point -- that's when life gets sad for the incumbent. An interesting point in the discussion is that the…

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Chip War

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I think it was Hugh who recommended this book. I'm greatful as it was an excellent read and definitely didn't make me duck over to eBay to buy an Intel 4004 chip set to play with. The book uses the backdrop of our current struggles to retain supremacy in high tech manufacturing versus an ambitious China to tell the story of the semiconductor industry in general. It's a global story of massive proportion, with a huge amount of the global economy now dependent on a product which didn't exist 75 years ago. The story starts just after world war two, with Fairchild Semiconductor and Texas Instruments battling it out to produce integrated circuits from newfangled transistors for the Apollo and Minuteman 2 programs. Importantly, Silicon Valley saw consumer market adoption of semiconductors and cheap efficient Asian manufacturing as key to driving down prices and increasing yield rates. At the same time the Pentagon saw integrated circuits as key to maintaining a technological advantage over their Cold War rivals -- the Soviet Bloc was winning in terms of quantity of armament, so the plan was to win with quality of armament. Effectively, the Pentagon sought to bankrupt the Russians by making…

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