Computers Audiobooks | Science & Technology

Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World Audiobook

Michael Hyatt, one of the top business bloggers in the world, provides down-to-earth guidance for building and expanding a powerful platform. To be successful in the market today, you must possess two strategic assets: a compelling product and a meaningful platform. In this step-by-step guide, Michael Hyatt, former CEO and current Chairman of Thomas Nelson Publishers, takes readers behind the scenes, into the new world of social media success. He shows you what best-selling authors, public speakers, entrepreneurs, musicians, and other creatives are doing differently to win customers in today’s crowded marketplace. Hyatt speaks from experience. He writes one of the top 800 blogs in the world and has more than 100,000 followers on Twitter. His large and growing platform serves as the foundation for his successful writing, speaking, and consulting practice. In Platform, Hyatt will teach readers not only how to extend their influence, but also how to monetize it and build a sustainable career. The key? By building a platform. It has never been easier, less expensive, or more possible than right now. . . . The book includes: proven strategies easy-to-replicate formulas practical tips Social media technologies have changed everything. Now, for the first time in history, non-celebrities can get noticed—and win big!—in an increasingly noisy world.

Michael Hyatt (Author), Michael Hyatt (Narrator)

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Turing's Cathedral

'It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence,' twenty-four-year-old Alan Turing announced in 1936. In Turing's Cathedral, George Dyson focuses on a small group of men and women, led by John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who built one of the first computers to realize Alan Turing's vision of a Universal Machine. Their work would break the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things'and our universe would never be the same. Using five kilobytes of memory (the amount allocated to displaying the cursor on a computer desktop of today), they achieved unprecedented success in both weather prediction and nuclear weapons design, while tackling, in their spare time, problems ranging from the evolution of viruses to the evolution of stars. Dyson's account, both historic and prophetic, sheds important new light on how the digital universe exploded in the aftermath of World War II. The proliferation of both codes and machines was paralleled by two historic developments: the decoding of self-replicating sequences in biology and the invention of the hydrogen bomb. It's no coincidence that the most destructive and the most constructive of human inventions appeared at exactly the same time. How did code take over the world? In retracing how Alan Turing's one-dimensional model became John von Neumann's two-dimensional implementation, Turing's Cathedral offers a series of provocative suggestions as to where the digital universe, now fully three-dimensional, may be heading next.

George Dyson (Author), Arthur Morey (Narrator)

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DarkMarket

This extraordinarily powerful book demonstrates how utterly we lack the shared supranational tools needed to fight cybercrime. Essential reading.' --Roberto Saviano, author of GommorahThe benefits of living in a digital, globalized society are enormous; so too are the dangers. The world has become a law enforcer's nightmare and every criminal's dream. We bank online; shop online; date, learn, work and live online. But have the institutions that keep us safe on the streets learned to protect us in the burgeoning digital world? Have we become complacent about our personal security sharing our thoughts, beliefs and the details of our daily lives with anyone who might care to relieve us of them? In this fascinating and compelling book, Misha Glenny, author of the international best seller McMafia, explores the three fundamental threats facing us in the twenty-first century: cybercrime, cyberwarfare and cyberindustrial espionage. Governments and the private sector are losing billions of dollars each year fighting an ever-morphing, often invisible and often supersmart new breed of criminal: the hacker. Glenny has traveled and trawled the world. By exploring the rise and fall of the criminal website DarkMarket he has uncovered the most vivid, alarming and illuminating stories. Whether JiLsi or Matrix, Iceman, Master Splynter or Lord Cyric; whether Detective Sergeant Chris Dawson in Scunthorpe, England, or Agent Keith Mularski in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Glenny has tracked down and interviewed all the players the criminals, the geeks, the police, the security experts and the victims and he places everyone and everything in a rich brew of politics, economics and history. The result is simply unputdownable. DarkMarket is authoritative and completely engrossing. It's a must-read for everyone who uses a computer: the essential crime book for our times.From the Hardcover edition.

Misha Glenny (Author), Jonathan Cowley (Narrator)

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The Digital Divide: Writings for and Against Facebook, Youtube, Texting, and the Age of Social Netwo

Mark Bauerlein (Author), Peter Berkrot, Sands Xe (Narrator)

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America the Vulnerable: Inside the New Threat Matrix of Digital Espionage, Crime, and Warfare

A former top-level National Security Agency insider goes behind the headlines to explore America's next great battleground: digital security. An urgent wake-up call that identifies our foes; unveils their methods; and charts the dire consequences for government, business, and individuals. Shortly after 9/11, Joel Brenner entered the inner sanctum of American espionage, first as the inspector general of the National Security Agency, then as the head of counterintelligence for the director of national intelligence. He saw at close range the battleground on which our adversaries are now attacking us-cyberspace. We are at the mercy of a new generation of spies who operate remotely from China, the Middle East, Russia, even France, among many other places. These operatives have already shown their ability to penetrate our power plants, steal our latest submarine technology, rob our banks, and invade the Pentagon's secret communications systems. Incidents like the WikiLeaks posting of secret U.S. State Department cables hint at the urgency of this problem, but they hardly reveal its extent or its danger. Our government and corporations are a "glass house," all but transparent to our adversaries. Counterfeit computer chips have found their way into our fighter aircraft; the Chinese stole a new radar system that the navy spent billions to develop; our own soldiers used intentionally corrupted thumb drives to download classified intel from laptops in Iraq. And much more. Dispatches from the corporate world are just as dire. In 2008, hackers lifted customer files from the Royal Bank of Scotland and used them to withdraw $9 million in half an hour from ATMs in the United States, Britain, and Canada. If that was a traditional heist, it would be counted as one of the largest in history. Worldwide, corporations lose on average $5 million worth of intellectual property apiece annually, and big companies lose many times that.

Joel Brenner (Author), Lloyd James, Lloyd James (Narrator)

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Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond

Gene Kranz was present at the creation of America's manned space program and was a key player in it for three decades. As a flight director in NASA's Mission Control, Kranz witnessed firsthand the making of history. He participated in the space program from the early days of the Mercury program to the last Apollo mission, and beyond. He endured the disastrous first years when rockets blew up and the United States seemed to fall further behind the Soviet Union in the space race. He helped to launch Alan Shepard and John Glenn, then assumed the flight director's role in the Gemini program, which he guided to fruition. With his teammates, he accepted the challenge to carry out President John F. Kennedy's commitment to land a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s. Kranz was flight director for both Apollo 11, the mission in which Neil Armstrong fulfilled President Kennedy's pledge, and Apollo 13. He headed the Tiger Team that had to figure out how to bring the three Apollo 13 astronauts safely back to Earth. (In the film Apollo 13, Kranz was played by the actor Ed Harris, who earned an Academy Award nomination for his performance.) In Failure Is Not an Option, Gene Kranz recounts these thrilling historic events and offers new information about the famous flights. What appeared as nearly flawless missions to the moon were, in fact, a series of hair-raising near misses. When the space technology failed, as it sometimes did, the controllers' only recourse was to rely on their skills and those of their teammates. Kranz takes us inside Mission Control and introduces us to some of the whiz kids—still in their twenties, only a few years out of college—who had to figure it all out as they went along, creating a great and daring enterprise. He reveals behind-the-scenes details to demonstrate the leadership, discipline, trust, and teamwork that made the space program a success. Finally, Kranz reflects on what has happened to the space program and offers his own bold suggestions about what we ought to be doing in space now. This is a fascinating firsthand account written by a veteran mission controller of one of America's greatest achievements.

Gene Kranz (Author), Danny Campbell (Narrator)

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WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy

It was the biggest leak in history. WikiLeaks infuriated the world's greatest superpower, embarrassed the British royal family and helped cause a revolution in Africa. The man behind it was Julian Assange, one of the strangest figures ever to become a worldwide celebrity. Was he an internet messiah or a cyber-terrorist? Information freedom fighter or sex criminal? The debate would echo around the globe as US politicians called for his assassination. Award-winning Guardian journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding have been at the centre of a unique publishing drama that involved the release of some 250,000 secret diplomatic cables and classified files from the Afghan and Iraq wars. At one point the platinum-haired hacker was hiding from the CIA in David Leigh's London house. Now, together with the paper's investigative reporting team, Leigh and Harding reveal the startling inside story of the man and the leak.

David Leigh, Luke Harding (Author), Paul Michael Garcia (Narrator)

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High Noon: The Inside Story of Scott McNealy and the Rise of Sun Microsystems

In 1982, a little upstart named Sun was making waves in the high-tech industry with its groundbreaking workstation technology, even as early competitors dismissed the company as not worth losing sleep over. Since then, Sun Microsystems has become a formidable presence in the industry, making its own rules and taking no prisoners, and is currently poised to reach the highest point of its ascendancy'the challenge of Microsoft's dominance over the future of computing. The driving force behind this once fledgling company is a man who has been described as brash, unconventional, ambitious, forward-looking, and sometimes his own worst enemy. Scott McNealy turned Sun into the multibillion-dollar success it is today'a developer of innovative software like Java that is revolutionizing the computing landscape. High Noon is the inside story of Sun's rise to power, from its shaky start in Silicon Valley through its transformation under the aggressive and inspirational leadership of McNealy. Karen Southwick reveals the behind-the-scenes maneuverings of McNealy and Sun, with candid interviews from the key players and insights into the inner workings of the high-tech industry. This book examines how scrappy underdog Sun overcame its larger and supposedly tougher competitors, combining hard work, tenacity, and talented people to build a more innovative and flexible company. Among High Noon's revelations: * A new perspective on how the complex, contradictory McNealy shaped his company and fashioned its strategy * Insight into central issues facing the high-tech industry, such as network computers and the future of the Internet * An insider view of the maneuverings of industry powerhouses, including Microsoft, Oracle, Netscape, IBM, and Intel * Both entertaining and instructive, High Noon offers valuable lessons for taking charge of your destiny and succeeding in a fast-paced, unpredictable, and even hostile environment 'High Noon captures the electricity and drama of one of the most important high-tech sagas of our time. Rich with insight as well as previously undisclosed stories.''Jim Moore, Founder, GeoPartners Research, Inc. and author of The Death of Competition

Karen Southwick (Author), Sneha Mathan (Narrator)

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Cyberdeterrence and Cyberwar

The protection of cyberspace, the information medium, has become a vital national interest because of its importance both to the economy and to military power. An attacker may tamper with networks to steal information for money or to disrupt operations. Future wars are likely to be carried out, in part or perhaps entirely, in cyberspace. It might therefore seem obvious that maneuvering in cyberspace is like maneuvering in other media, but nothing would be more misleading. Cyberspace has its own laws. It is easy to hide identities and difficult to predict or even understand battle damage, and attacks deplete themselves quickly. Cyberwar is nothing so much as the manipulation of ambiguity. Martin Libicki explores these topics in detail and uses the results to address such issues as the pros and cons of counterattack, the value of deterrence and vigilance, and other actions the United States and the U.S. Air Force can take to protect itself in the face of deliberate cyberattack. Praise for Conquest in Cyberspace: "Conquest in Cyberspace is an admirable work. It covers much territory and serves the important role of provoking thought and redirecting inquiry. By crossing disciplinary boundaries, Martin Libicki has enriched our understanding of the relationship between information technology and international politics."-Chris Bronk, Journal of Information Technology & Politics

Martin C. Libicki (Author), Erik Sandvold (Narrator)

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A Program or be Programmed

Doug Rushkoff (Author), Doug Rushkoff (Narrator)

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A Talk Based on

Doug Rushkoff (Author), Doug Rushkoff (Narrator)

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The Man Who Invented the Computer

From one of our most acclaimed novelists, a David-and-Goliath biography for the digital age. One night in the late 1930s, in a bar on the Illinois–Iowa border, John Vincent Atanasoff, a professor of physics at Iowa State University, after a frustrating day performing tedious mathematical calculations in his lab, hit on the idea that the binary number system and electronic switches, com¬bined with an array of capacitors on a moving drum to serve as memory, could yield a computing machine that would make his life and the lives of other similarly burdened scientists easier. Then he went back and built the machine. It worked. The whole world changed. Why don't we know the name of John Atanasoff as well as we know those of Alan Turing and John von Neumann? Because he never patented the device, and because the developers of the far-better-known ENIAC almost certainly stole critical ideas from him. But in 1973 a court declared that the patent on that Sperry Rand device was invalid, opening the intellectual property gates to the computer revolution. Jane Smiley tells the quintessentially American story of the child of immigrants John Atanasoff with technical clarity and narrative drive, making the race to develop digital computing as gripping as a real-life techno-thriller.

Jane Smiley (Author), Kathe Mazur (Narrator)

Audiobook

Computers Audiobooks in Science & Technology