The Blog of Brad
Posts tagged book
I won a signed copy of Freedom by Daniel Suarez!
Jan 25th
I came home after school to find the FedEx guy looking for an address… turns out it was for me! Just the other day I got an email from Dutton/Penguin (the publisher) stating that I won a free copy of Freedom, signed by the author. In case I haven’t stressed it enough: Daemon and Freedom are AWESOME! They are a great story..
Here’s a quick Youtube Video I shot as soon as I could.
Links:
My favorite:
Daniel Suarez’s site:
Book: Freedom by Daniel Suarez
Jan 12th
Last June I posted my thoughts on a bood, Daemon by Daniel Suarez, a book which is about the revolutionary decisions made by a made a sick (as in ill, dying) computer programmer, Matthew Sobol, whom has made this daemon which upon his death begins terrorizing business and people. The book is reasonably computer savvy and talks about up-to-the-moment computer security issues, most controversially SQL injections. The technology in that book was reasonable, however somehow distant given it’s ease and lack of failure.
In this book, Freedom, the daemon continues, and in this (final) part of the story we see that the daemon has advanced from a niche terror to a social network which is almost entirely powered by the people on the “darknet.”
I started reading this book on January 7, the day it was first available on Kindle, and finished in less than 72 hours later, on Sunday night. I enjoyed the whole story, and will now go back to read the whole series again, probably next semester for english, knowing how it ends. If you want to know more you can check out this Google TechTalk with Daniel Suarez (Author) and the author’s site, thedaemon.com.
Freedom is available on:
- Audible for $27.97, $19.58 for members, or 1 credit. (BTW, using the same great narrator as in Daemon!)
- Amazon Kindle for $16.82
- Amazon hardcover for $17.72
- Chapters (hardcover) for $22.10
- Kobo for $18.29
More information from The Publisher (from Chapters)
The propulsive, shockingly plausible sequel to “New York Times” bestseller “Daemon,” the “Greatest. Techno-thriller. Period.”*
*William O’Brien, former director of cybersecurity and communications systems policy at the White House
2009 saw one of the most inventive techno-thriller debuts in decades as Daniel Suarez introduced his terrifying and tantalizing vision of a new world order. “Daemon” captured the attention of the tech community, became a national bestseller, garnered attention from futurists, literary critics, and the halls of government-leaving readers clamoring for the conclusion to Suarez’s epic story.
In the opening chapters of “Freedom(tm),” the Daemon is well on its way toward firm control of the modern world, using an expanded network of real-world, dispossessed darknet operatives to tear apart civilization and rebuild it anew. Civil war breaks out in the American Midwest, with the mainstream media stoking public fear in the face of this ‘Corn Rebellion’. Former detective Pete Sebeck, now the Daemon’s most famous and most reluctant operative, must lead a small band of enlightened humans in a populist movement designed to protect the new world order.
But the private armies of global business are preparing to crush the Daemon once and for all. In a world of conflicted loyalties, rapidly diminishing government control, and a new choice between free will and the continuing comforts of ignorance, the stakes could not be higher: hanging in the balance is nothing less than democracy’s last hope to survive the technology revolution.
Book: Next by Michael Crichton
Jan 5th
I finished this book on Kindle for PC on December 29, and I loved it. Michael Crichton, in what seems to be a trend of his, touches on important issues. Of course the story itself is ficticious and many of the issues addressed are mere sci-fi for now, however in the near future, this will have been a warning. Next touches on genetic research (ethics & law) and genetic patenting.
This was the first book I read using Kindle for iPhone, and subsequently finished using Kindle for PC. Whenever I read a section I synced it up to Amazon and it was completely seamless to move between PC and iPhone, and presumably the Kindle (device).
I paid $8.39 USD for this Kindle book at Amazon. It was delivered instantly. I was happy.
Is a loved one missing some body parts? Are blondes becoming extinct? Is everyone at your dinner table of the same species? Humans and chimpanzees differ in only 400 genes; is that why a chimp fetus resembles a human being? And should that worry us? There’s a new genetic cure for drug addiction–is it worse than the disease?
What’s coming Next? Get a hint of what Michael Crichton sees on the horizon in this short video clip: high bandwidth or low bandwidth
We live in a time of momentous scientific leaps, a time when it’s possible to sell our eggs and sperm online for thousands of dollars and to test our spouses for genetic maladies.We live in a time when one fifth of all our genes are owned by someone else, and an unsuspecting person and his family can be pursued cross-country because they happen to have certain valuable genes within their chromosomes…
Devilishly clever, Next blends fact and fiction into a breathless tale of a new world where nothing is what it seems and a set of new possibilities can open at every turn.
Next challenges our sense of reality and notions of morality. Balancing the comic and the bizarre with the genuinely frightening and disturbing, Next shatters our assumptions and reveals shocking new choices where we least expect.
The future is closer than you think.
This book costs, $8.39 at Amazon.com, and equates to 560 pages.
This is also available at Audible for $24.48 (or one credit) for ~14 hours of book.
5/5 for sure!
Book: BeOS Bible
Aug 19th
If you’ve followed me on Twitter and my occasional posts you know that I have an unexplainable urge to have as many operating systems as I can, and just about my favorite is BeOS. This book explains this ultralight, media oriented operating system in great detail.
The problem that the authors, Scot Hacker, Henry Bortman, and Chris Herborth, faced was the BeOS climate was always rapidly evolving and changing. How they solved this problem was to write their chapter segments then tie them together and allow the engineers to elaborate what they think is important. There are thirteen interviews and a foreword by Jean-Louis Gassee, the CEO and founder of Be Inc and former head of Macintosh development.
BeOS came onto my radar because Apple considered purchasing them in the nineties as a quick-way into a new operating system. We do know that NextStep won over Be, but it has an interesting and quirky history.
This book is only available through trade as this book was published in 1998 and doesn’t seem to have been updated since.
The BeOS Bible is available “new” on Amazon from $8.76.
The book’s original website is currently maintained with permission from PeachPit Press and includes many chapter excerpts at birdhouse.org.
(Publisher’s Summery)
The BeOS Bible is the largest, most complete guide to using, configuring, tweaking, and understanding BeOS — the world’s most efficient and intelligently designed operating system. BeOS is optimized from the ground up to excel at handling high-bandwidth audio/visual tasks (some call it “The poor man’s SGI”), and is radically fast, no matter what you’re doing. But being media-optimized doesn’t mean you can’t get your daily work done in BeOS too — the system makes even general productivity tasks a joy, thanks to features like fine-grained pervasive multithreading, a fully scriptable architecture, a sophisticated inter-application messaging model, symmetric multiprocessing, and real-time handling of all tasks.
Book: Daemon by Daniel Suarez
Jun 24th
As of now I’m not quite done this book, but it is one of the few fictional stories that I’ve ever gotten into. (Without revealing secrets) This book opens with the announced death of a software giant/genius dyeing after a long battle with brain cancer and seemingly unrelated events and people converge on what could be considered a turning point in history: when it is possible to murder someone from beyond the grave (as quoted from the book) "When you’re safely dead".
On Audible this book is in a half-dramatized, half-narrated story with different characters voice by different actors or actresses, which conveys nicely because this book can be downloaded using Audible’s new ‘E’ format (which bring the file size for this book to about 500MB). This is one of the best applications of the audiobook medium yet; the high quality, great narrators, and a great story. Keep in mind that this book is a significant investment of time, at 15 hours and 57 minutes.
If you like this book, it’s author has a sequel premiering in 2010, Freedom. You can take a look at free chapters on the authors site, here.
Get this book for $31.47 or 1 credit on Audible.
Or get this book in dead-tree format for $16.98 from Amazon.
**PS With credits this book can cost as low as $7.49, or using a sponsored trial (such as from TWiT) you can get it free (with new signup)**
(Publisher’s Summery)
Technology controls almost everything in our modern-day world, from remote entry on our cars to access to our homes, from the flight controls of our airplanes to the movements of the entire world economy. Thousands of autonomous computer programs, or daemons, make our networked world possible, running constantly in the background of our lives, trafficking e-mail, transferring money, and monitoring power grids. For the most part, daemons are benign, but the same can’t always be said for the people who design them.
Matthew Sobol was a legendary computer game designer – the architect behind half-a-dozen popular online games. His premature death depressed both gamers and his company’s stock price. But Sobol’s fans aren’t the only ones to note his passing. When his obituary is posted online, a previously dormant daemon activates, initiating a chain of events intended to unravel the fabric of our hyper-efficient, interconnected world. With Sobol’s secrets buried along with him, and as new layers of his daemon are unleashed at every turn, it’s up to an unlikely alliance to decipher his intricate plans and wrest the world from the grasp of a nameless, faceless enemy – or learn to live in a society in which we are no longer in control. . . .
Computer technology expert Daniel Suarez blends haunting high-tech realism with gripping suspense in an authentic, complex thriller in the tradition of Michael Crichton, Neal Stephenson, and William Gibson.
©2009 Daniel Suarez; (P)2009 Penguin Audio
