As a tech blogger and journalist I’ve been following Google pretty closely since 2006, and I was using their products before that. But for the most part I’ve focused on the parts of Google that everyone sees: the finished products. Steven Levy took a peek behind the scenes and paints an intriguing picture of a […]
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Review: Force of Nature (on the greening of Walmart)
There are a lot of reasons to hate Walmart, and while Humes skims over them he doesn’t ignore them. The company puts smaller stores out of business, squeezes its suppliers so that it’s tough to make a profit (but it’s tough to say no to the biggest retailer in the world), doesn’t pay its employees […]
Mini-review: A Princess of Mars
A Princess of Mars: John Carter of Mars, Book One by Edgar Rice BurroughsMy rating: 3 of 5 stars After seeing a couple of trailers for the new movie John Carter I was wondering what the heck I just saw… and decided to give the first book in the series I try. It takes a […]
Book review: The Deal From Hell by James O’Shea
O’Shea may think he’s written a book about how profit-driven, ego-centric people ruined some of the nation’s largest papers, but that’s because his own biases are at work here. Actually what this book does is paint a picture of why it’s hard to run a newspaper as a for-profit business with the goal of constantly […]
Crypto
Crypto by Steven Levy My rating: 3 of 5 stars Steven Levy has an amazing talent for taking complicated, technical material and turning into engaging narrative. I’m not particularly interested in cryptography, but knowing that Levy was interested enough to write a book about it prompted me to pick up Crypto and give it a […]
Rule 34
Rule 34 by Charles Stross My rating: 4 of 5 stars Stross does a good job of fleshing out the near-future world first introduced in Halting State, and of introducing new characters. The second-person narration does a good job of trying to get you into the head of the characters, but it falls a little […]