Staying fit and healthy has a vital role in our life. People now neglect their health because of their busy daily schedules. There are many benefits of staying physically fit and strong.
Although, it's not always that easy to be in good shape, bringing in some simple tweaks in your life can get you to become fit and healthy.
Exercise helps you become strong, lose weight and become more confident. It's one of the keys to beat the obstacles in your way of getting fitter. Exercise prevents weight loss, help us burn more fat this tackling diabetes and obesity. More intense activity means more calories burnt.
It boosts energy, makes muscles grow bigger thus making you look better. Moreover, it helps us fight diseases well by improving our immune system.
Exercise also helps us control blood pressure by increasing good "HDL" cholesterol and reducing bad "LDL" cholesterol. This decrease your risk of getting cardiovascular diseases. It also improves our mood by activating feel-good hormones, such as endorphins – thus helping us deal with stress too.
Stress makes you form bad habits and makes your life miserable. But it is actually easy to manage stress and cope with it. One of the best ways to deal with stress is exercising.
Exercise lowers your stress hormones such as cortisol. And help to release endorphins, which is mood-improving chemicals. Moreover, it increases testosterone hormone as well, which makes you feel more confident, thus less stressed.
Proper sleep is vital in reducing stress. If you have insomnia, you can try out running, walking or cycling with a comforting bicycle. Here is a collection of 10 best road bikes under $500 at sportsly.NET you may consider to buy – they're all good choice if you prefer casual rides, or in need of a short ride.
You can also use supplements to reduce anxiety and stress. Lemon balm, green tea, and some other supplements found in the drugstore help well.
If you like perfumes, you can go for natural organic oils too. Vetiver rose, and jasmine essential oil works like charm if sniffed, or you can put some in your bathtub while taking your bath.
Also, spending quality time with the people you love, family and friends will cheer you up in no time. Nothing works well as human interaction. Go out, have fun, talk with people and you'll see that you're less stressed than you used to be.
There's no doubt about it. Your body needs water to stay alive. Your tissues, cells, and organs need fluid to work well. Your body uses water to get rid of wastages, keep it cool, rehydrate your body, and grease your joints. Water is needed for overall good health.
Alongside water, iced tea, soda, coffee, and other caffeinated drinks are good water sources too when you're trying to keep hydrated. But they act as diuretics, it means although you're getting fluids, you're also taking out a little more water from your body because of it.
Though energy drinks are similar to coffee as they have fluids and caffeine, they usually contain high caffeine content. Also, they have super stimulating ingredients for example ginseng. Your body doesn't need these things. These drinks also have high added sugar. Which can cause you insulin resistance and as a result – diabetes and obesity?
You can also try fruits and vegetables as other sources of hydration. Because they contain a high amount of water.
Refined foods are easy to get and they're tastier! But they're not good for your body. The dangerous ingredients that make food more exciting to our taste buds are added to a large amount of all heavily processed foods.
The 3 major ingredients of processed foods are; fat, sugar, and salt. These excite our taste buds and make us want more. But they do not contain enough nutrition, only very high amount of calories.
Processed products are made from processed elements that are separated or refined from whole foods.
As for example; oils, flours and starches, hydrogenated oils and fats, variants of sugar, and cheap parts or remnants of animal foods – with little or no whole foods. Products include burgers, frozen dishes, nuggets and sticks, confectionery, crisps, and various snack products.
Whereas whole foods are minimally processed and very nutrient dense rather than energy dense refined foods. Nutrient dense foods provide nutrients for your bodies such as vitamins, fiber, and minerals with low added sugar and fat. They help you reduce cholesterol, regulate blood sugars and also helps maintain your weight.
Bad habits break your life and prevent you from accomplishing your goals. They put your health in danger – both physically and mentally, resulting in a waste of your precious time and energy.
Smoking, drugs, overeating all of these are bad habits. Neither do they bring in any good, nor there any way to do any of these in a "healthy" way.
Bad habits are mainly caused by boredom and stress, so you have to focus on that. Sometimes the boredom or stress surfaces deeper issues. These issues can be hard to think upon, but if you're serious about making changes in your life then you have to be honest with yourself.
To break a bad habit, you have to replace it with a good one. For example, opening your Facebook account in the middle of your work might make you feel connected. At the same time looking at all of those posts and notifications destroys your productivity, divides your attention, and overwhelms you with stress. But, it prevents you from feeling like you're "missing out" and so you do it again.
Instead, you need to replace a bad habit with a new habit that provides a close benefit.
In other words, bad habits tackle specific needs in your life. And because of that, it's better to switch your bad habits with a healthier, better behavior that gets that same need. Don't expect yourself to simply give up bad habits without them getting replaced, it would be anything but easy.
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Let us know if any of these tips helped with your fitness and health. We love to read your words.
Stay fit and sound, so you can live unbound.


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Home IDF Archive IDF Commanders Discuss Soldiers' Behavior In Operation Cast Lead
IDF Commanders Discuss Soldiers' Behavior In Operation Cast Lead
Date: 02/04/2009, 8:33 PM
On March 26th 2009, Lieutenant A., commander of a Paratrooper Brigade Reconnaissance squad, gave a television interview to a foreign news agency regarding his perceptions and experiences with regards to the behavior of IDF (Zahal) soldiers during Operation Cast Lead.
The IDF (Zahal) rules of engagement during Operation Cast Lead were to fire at armed terrorists, but to avoid causing harm to uninvolved civilians. Before entering the Gaza Strip, Lt. A. had explained these rules to his soldiers and was adamant about making every possible effort to avoid harming uninvolved civilians. "It was very clear to everyone that we were entering the Gaza Strip in an attempt to create a situation in which the citizens of Southern Israel could sleep peacefully at night; inherent in our mission was the order to avoid causing harm to Palestinian civilians, their lives, and their property."
The guidelines specifically outlined for soldiers also demanded that civilians were given time to leave before forces fired at any building that contained terror operatives or weaponry. Lt. A. specifically recalled one incident in which he entered a house with his soldiers in order to tell the uninvolved civilians to leave the scene. "We warned them and tried to evacuate all the children and women, but not all of them wanted to go."
IDF (Zahal) soldiers made an effort to keep civilians safe and calm, and it was an important aspect of their overall mission. Lt. A. recalled an incident in which an elderly person asked the soldiers for food because it was impossible to bring food to the civilians outside. "The soldiers come into the Gaza Strip with their food rations, and it's all they have until they leave again, which could be a couple of weeks. So when someone asks you for food, it's a dilemma, because you only have a limited amount for yourself. Still, we decided that we wanted to share our food."
Lt. A. also emphasized that for the IDF (Zahal), it was of utmost importance to avoid abusing the belongings of Palestinian civilians. "We didn't use their facilities. We didn't want to take anything that wasn't intergral to our mission," he explained. "Once, when we were walking next to a strawberry field, one of our soldiers was extremely hungry and asked if he could eat a few strawberries. We didn't give him permission to do so and we stood by our promise to do our best to avoid harming anyone apart from Hamas."
In order to protect civilians, soldiers went so far as to refrain from returning fire when they were attacked in situations where it could potentially cause harm. "I remember an incident in which we were shot at, but we knew that there were a lot of civilians around, and so we left the area," said Lt. A.
In a separate interview, Col. Herzi Halevi, the Commander of the Paratrooper Brigade, spoke about the forces that he commanded during Operation Cast Lead. He explained that soldiers who violated the IDF (Zahal) guidelines during the operation were dealt with on the scene. "I commanded over 2000 soldiers in this operation; naturally, there were some problems. We gave very specific orders regarding our behavior in the Gaza Strip, and some soldiers were forced to leave the Gaza Strip for inappropriate actions."
Col. Halevi placed emphasis on Hamas's dishonorable methods, which made it incredibly difficult for IDF (Zahal) forces to avoid harming civilians. He recalled a specific example in which Hamas used a young boy as a scout for the terrorist organization. "In one incident, we met a 14 year old in an area where he was not permitted to be. We arrested him and one of my officers who is proficient in Arabic went to asses the situation. The child told us that Hamas sent him in order locate us so that he could go back and tell them where we were, enabling them to attack us. The child was starving and told my officer that Hamas sent him and told him he would only receive food after he came back with information. It's clear that there is no morality in their fighting strategy."
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Next articleIDF Activity Last Night in the West Bank
The Issuing of Assigned Residence Orders to 15 Administrative Detainees
180,000 Palestinians Treated in Israeli Hospitals This Year
Two charged for firing at IDF base
The Military Aid Expedition to Kenya
IDF and ISA thwart terrorist cell activity south of Jerusalem
Attack Attempt on IDF Post near the Erez Crossing Thwarted Yesterday.
Israeli Air-Force (IAF) Attacks Senior Wanted Hamas Operatives in the Gaza...
IDF Soldier Wounded Lightly
IAF Strike in South Lebanon
IDF coordinates export from Gaza to Judea and Samaria
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IDF Thwarts Terror Attack Near Gaza Strip

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


"platform code" package that is reused across both clusters.
> in Team B's DAG refusing to schedule based on an error in Team A's DAG.
> the teams are okay with co-tenancy.
> > We have been experimenting with airflow for about 6 months now.
> > Any advice on this ? Any tips could be helpful to us.


This promising technology has the potential to benefit millions of patients in need.
Gemstone Biotherapeutics LLC (Gemstone Bio), a Baltimore-based regenerative medicine company, has exclusively licensed new wound-healing technology from Johns Hopkins University.
The technology, pioneered by Jeremy Walston, M.D., co-director of Johns Hopkins' Biology of Healthy Aging Program and professor of medicine at the university's School of Medicine, and Peter Abadir, M.D., assistant professor of medicine at the School of Medicine, has the potential to provide patients who are older and have chronic wounds due to diabetes with a treatment option superior to current products. The product will target diabetic foot ulcers, a growing and costly health care dilemma.
The new license will allow Gemstone Bio to develop and commercialize advanced wound-healing solutions.
Of the 29 million Americans with diabetes, approximately 1.5 million will experience diabetic foot ulcers each year. The annual cost to heal these chronic wounds is estimated at $25 billion in the United States. Globally, the estimated number of people with diabetic foot ulcers is over 20 million. This number is expected to climb as the population ages and the incidence of diabetes increases. Left untreated, diabetic foot ulcers can lead to more serious conditions, such as sepsis, amputations and even death.
Walston and Abadir have identified a mitochondrial angiotensin receptor system that becomes less functional with age. This system likely contributes to age and disease-related declines in multiple tissue types. Doctors also discovered that angiotensin receptor blockers, a category of drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration for hypertension, can reinvigorate this system. Building on these unique discoveries, they developed a topical agent targeting the biology that inhibits wound healing in patients who are older and have diabetes.
In conjunction with this newly licensed technology, Gemstone Bio is proceeding with trials and regulatory approvals for its existing biosynthetic scaffold, which has shown to improve wound healing in a study published in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology.
Gemstone Biotherapeutics LLC (Gemstone Bio), an award-winning regenerative medicine company based in Baltimore, is developing devices and therapeutics for advanced wound care. The company's core technologies target cellular deficiencies to promote tissue repair and regeneration. Gemstone is advancing these technologies, originally created in laboratories at the School of Engineering and Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. For more information, visit http://www.gemstonebio.com.


Dressing table mirrors from the interpenetration of dressing table designs from a cheap door light to add contemporary and selling of the next brilliant ideas of an old wash basin adds to start bathrooms today serve the room decorating ideas living room decorating ideas for the experts view gallery photos. Mirror decorating with mirror ideas posted in a comment robert hitech bathroom decor theater tables. Modern mirror decoration ideas, an old world charm with an eyecatching piece we define the fireplace catching light and wooden dressing table designs ideas for. Incorporating modern bedroom interior design small and usually it looks bigger.


But it doesn't do much.
Sony has released firmware update 4.73 for the PlayStation 4, but it won't have too much effect on your console.
Like update 4.72 before it, 4.73 is there to improve the "quality of system performance". It is mandatory, though, meaning you'll have to install it if you want to continue using PlayStation Network. The update weighs in at an average 341MB.
It's likely that most firmware updates will be minor until 5.0 is released, the beta for which will be closing soon. US PlayStation 4 owners can sign up for the beta here, but this is the link for those in the UK.
It's still unknown what firmware update 5.0 will bring to the system, but there are a few theories flying around.
What would you like to see from PlayStation 4 firmware update 5.0? Let us know in the comments section below.


The UtilityScore REST API allows developers to access and integrate the functionality of UtilityScore with other applications. Some example API methods include displaying utility costs and scores on real estate listings, searching by utility scores, and retrieving utility costs and scores on other websites. UtilityScore provides utility cost information for real estate and homes by address.


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Q: Can Azure AD use custom database? We have various applications and each have its own user table. We are looking at the possibility of using Azure AD as a central authentication/authorization provider. Can Azure AD use our existing user tables when it does authentication/authorization? It seems we can import those users into Azure AD, but what if we just want to use the existing user tables, is there a way to do that? Thanks.

A: No, this is not possible in normal Azure AD.
It is possible to wire up your own claims provider to Azure AD B2C with custom policies.
But if you want to use your own store, you should probably just implement IdentityServer or similar yourself.

A: As Junnas said, we can't use custom database directly.
As a workaround, we can create on-prem Active directory and import your users to it, then install Azure AD connect to sync your users to Azure AD, in this way, the user name and password will store in your local Active directory, and Azure AD work as a authorization provider.
Hope this helps.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


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by Walter IsaacsonWalter Isaacson
Following his blockbuster biography of Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson's New York Times bestselling and critically acclaimed The Innovators is a "riveting, propulsive, and at times deeply moving" (The Atlantic) story of the people who created the computer and the Internet.
What were the talents that allowed certain inventors and entrepreneurs to turn their visionary ideas into disruptive realities? What led to their creative leaps? Why did some succeed and others fail?
The Innovators is a masterly saga of collaborative genius destined to be the standard history of the digital revolution—and an indispensable guide to how innovation really happens. Isaacson begins the adventure with Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron's daughter, who pioneered computer programming in the 1840s. He explores the fascinating personalities that created our current digital revolution, such as Vannevar Bush, Alan Turing, John von Neumann, J.C.R. Licklider, Doug Engelbart, Robert Noyce, Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, Tim Berners-Lee, and Larry Page.
This is the story of how their minds worked and what made them so inventive. It's also a narrative of how their ability to collaborate and master the art of teamwork made them even more creative. For an era that seeks to foster innovation, creativity, and teamwork, The Innovators is "a sweeping and surprisingly tenderhearted history of the digital age" (The New York Times).
Interviews & Essays
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Walter Isaacson, the CEO of the Aspen Institute, has been chairman of CNN and editor of Time magazine. He is the author of Steve Jobs; Einstein: His Life and Universe; Benjamin Franklin: An American Life; and Kissinger: A Biography; and the coauthor of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made. He lives in Washington, DC.
Walter Isaacson, University Professor of History at Tulane, has been CEO of the Aspen Institute, chairman of CNN, and editor of Time magazine. He is the author of Leonardo da Vinci; The Innovators; Steve Jobs; Einstein: His Life and Universe; Benjamin Franklin: An American Life; and Kissinger: A Biography, and the coauthor of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made. Facebook: Walter Isaacson, Twitter: @WalterIsaacson
Harvard, B.A. in History and Literature, 1974; Oxford (Rhodes Scholar), M.A. in Philosophy, Politics, & Economics
Innovators INTRODUCTION HOW THIS BOOK CAME TO BE
The computer and the Internet are among the most important inventions of our era, but few people know who created them. They were not conjured up in a garret or garage by solo inventors suitable to be singled out on magazine covers or put into a pantheon with Edison, Bell, and Morse. Instead, most of the innovations of the digital age were done collaboratively. There were a lot of fascinating people involved, some ingenious and a few even geniuses. This is the story of these pioneers, hackers, inventors, and entrepreneurs—who they were, how their minds worked, and what made them so creative. It's also a narrative of how they collaborated and why their ability to work as teams made them even more creative.
The tale of their teamwork is important because we don't often focus on how central that skill is to innovation. There are thousands of books celebrating people we biographers portray, or mythologize, as lone inventors. I've produced a few myself. Search the phrase "the man who invented" on Amazon and you get 1,860 book results. But we have far fewer tales of collaborative creativity, which is actually more important in understanding how today's technology revolution was fashioned. It can also be more interesting.
We talk so much about innovation these days that it has become a buzzword, drained of clear meaning. So in this book I set out to report on how innovation actually happens in the real world. How did the most imaginative innovators of our time turn disruptive ideas into realities? I focus on a dozen or so of the most significant breakthroughs of the digital age and the people who made them. What ingredients produced their creative leaps? What skills proved most useful? How did they lead and collaborate? Why did some succeed and others fail?
I also explore the social and cultural forces that provide the atmosphere for innovation. For the birth of the digital age, this included a research ecosystem that was nurtured by government spending and managed by a military-industrial-academic collaboration. Intersecting with that was a loose alliance of community organizers, communal-minded hippies, do-it-yourself hobbyists, and homebrew hackers, most of whom were suspicious of centralized authority.
Histories can be written with a different emphasis on any of these factors. An example is the invention of the Harvard/IBM Mark I, the first big electromechanical computer. One of its programmers, Grace Hopper, wrote a history that focused on its primary creator, Howard Aiken. IBM countered with a history that featured its teams of faceless engineers who contributed the incremental innovations, from counters to card feeders, that went into the machine.
Likewise, what emphasis should be put on great individuals versus on cultural currents has long been a matter of dispute; in the mid-nineteenth century, Thomas Carlyle declared that "the history of the world is but the biography of great men," and Herbert Spencer responded with a theory that emphasized the role of societal forces. Academics and participants often view this balance differently. "As a professor, I tended to think of history as run by impersonal forces," Henry Kissinger told reporters during one of his Middle East shuttle missions in the 1970s. "But when you see it in practice, you see the difference personalities make."1 When it comes to digital-age innovation, as with Middle East peacemaking, a variety of personal and cultural forces all come into play, and in this book I sought to weave them together.
The Internet was originally built to facilitate collaboration. By contrast, personal computers, especially those meant to be used at home, were devised as tools for individual creativity. For more than a decade, beginning in the early 1970s, the development of networks and that of home computers proceeded separately from one another. They finally began coming together in the late 1980s with the advent of modems, online services, and the Web. Just as combining the steam engine with ingenious machinery drove the Industrial Revolution, the combination of the computer and distributed networks led to a digital revolution that allowed anyone to create, disseminate, and access any information anywhere.
Historians of science are sometimes wary about calling periods of great change revolutions, because they prefer to view progress as evolutionary. "There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it," is the wry opening sentence of the Harvard professor Steven Shapin's book on that period. One method that Shapin used to escape his half-joking contradiction is to note how the key players of the period "vigorously expressed the view" that they were part of a revolution. "Our sense of radical change afoot comes substantially from them."2
Likewise, most of us today share a sense that the digital advances of the past half century are transforming, perhaps even revolutionizing the way we live. I can recall the excitement that each new breakthrough engendered. My father and uncles were electrical engineers, and like many of the characters in this book I grew up with a basement workshop that had circuit boards to be soldered, radios to be opened, tubes to be tested, and boxes of transistors and resistors to be sorted and deployed. As an electronics geek who loved Heathkits and ham radios (WA5JTP), I can remember when vacuum tubes gave way to transistors. At college I learned programming using punch cards and recall when the agony of batch processing was replaced by the ecstasy of hands-on interaction. In the 1980s I thrilled to the static and screech that modems made when they opened for you the weirdly magical realm of online services and bulletin boards, and in the early 1990s I helped to run a digital division at Time and Time Warner that launched new Web and broadband Internet services. As Wordsworth said of the enthusiasts who were present at the beginning of the French Revolution, "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive."
I began work on this book more than a decade ago. It grew out of my fascination with the digital-age advances I had witnessed and also from my biography of Benjamin Franklin, who was an innovator, inventor, publisher, postal service pioneer, and all-around information networker and entrepreneur. I wanted to step away from doing biographies, which tend to emphasize the role of singular individuals, and once again do a book like The Wise Men, which I had coauthored with a colleague about the creative teamwork of six friends who shaped America's cold war policies. My initial plan was to focus on the teams that invented the Internet. But when I interviewed Bill Gates, he convinced me that the simultaneous emergence of the Internet and the personal computer made for a richer tale. I put this book on hold early in 2009, when I began working on a biography of Steve Jobs. But his story reinforced my interest in how the development of the Internet and computers intertwined, so as soon as I finished that book, I went back to work on this tale of digital-age innovators.
The protocols of the Internet were devised by peer collaboration, and the resulting system seemed to have embedded in its genetic code a propensity to facilitate such collaboration. The power to create and transmit information was fully distributed to each of the nodes, and any attempt to impose controls or a hierarchy could be routed around. Without falling into the teleological fallacy of ascribing intentions or a personality to technology, it's fair to say that a system of open networks connected to individually controlled computers tended, as the printing press did, to wrest control over the distribution of information from gatekeepers, central authorities, and institutions that employed scriveners and scribes. It became easier for ordinary folks to create and share content.
The collaboration that created the digital age was not just among peers but also between generations. Ideas were handed off from one cohort of innovators to the next. Another theme that emerged from my research was that users repeatedly commandeered digital innovations to create communications and social networking tools. I also became interested in how the quest for artificial intelligence—machines that think on their own—has consistently proved less fruitful than creating ways to forge a partnership or symbiosis between people and machines. In other words, the collaborative creativity that marked the digital age included collaboration between humans and machines.
Finally, I was struck by how the truest creativity of the digital age came from those who were able to connect the arts and sciences. They believed that beauty mattered. "I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics," Jobs told me when I embarked on his biography. "Then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I decided that's what I wanted to do." The people who were comfortable at this humanities-technology intersection helped to create the human-machine symbiosis that is at the core of this story.
Like many aspects of the digital age, this idea that innovation resides where art and science connect is not new. Leonardo da Vinci was the exemplar of the creativity that flourishes when the humanities and sciences interact. When Einstein was stymied while working out General Relativity, he would pull out his violin and play Mozart until he could reconnect to what he called the harmony of the spheres.
When it comes to computers, there is one other historical figure, not as well known, who embodied the combination of the arts and sciences. Like her famous father, she understood the romance of poetry. Unlike him, she also saw the romance of math and machinery. And that is where our story begins.
Illustrated Timeline x
Chapter 1 Ada, Countess of Lovelace 7
Chapter 2 The Computer 35
Chapter 3 Programming 87
Chapter 4 The Transistor 131
Chapter 5 The Microchip 171
Chapter 6 Video Games 201
Chapter 7 The Internet 217
Chapter 8 The Personal Computer 253
Chapter 9 Software 313
Chapter 10 Online 383
Chapter 11 The Web 405
Chapter 12 Ada Forever 467
Acknowledgments 491
Photo Credits 525
Barnes & Noble Review Interview with Walter Isaacson
"Sometimes innovation is a matter of timing," writes Walter Isaacson. "Sometimes a big idea comes along at just the moment when the technology exists to implement it." But what happens when an individual conception leaps ahead of the tools available? As early as the 1840s, Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage had developed the concept of the Analytical Engine, a programmable device that could perform potentially limitless kinds of operations — in short, a computer.
But as Isaacson notes in his capacious and engrossing new book, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution, no single inventor, no matter how inspired, could turn the Analytic Engine into the humming heart of the Information Age. That would require a century's worth of fascinatingly interconnected business plans, lab experiments, false starts, acrimonious feuds, unintended consequences, and, yes, eureka moments.
Most of all, as Isaacson shows throughout, it would require collaboration — sometimes across decades, between colleagues who sometimes were, or became, fierce competitors. In a story whose web of interconnections seems to reflect the networked nature of the world to which it would give birth, we follow figures as famous as Alan Turing and Steve Jobs and as little known to the broad public as Internet visionary J.C.R. Licklider, and watch as programming languages, transistors, semiconductors, PCs, and the Web go from far-out ideas to the fabric of the everyday.
The author, of course, is as familiar with these precincts as anyone could be: the biographer of both America's first superstar inventor, Benjamin Franklin, and its most recent, Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson has long been immersed in the question of how technology continues to shape our world. He spoke with me recently from his home in Washington, D.C., about the path through history his research took him on — and where he sees it pointing next. The following is an edited transcript of our conversation. — Bill Tipper
The Barnes & Noble Review: The Innovators is something of a departure from your previous work — most of your books have focused on a single personality or a small, cohesive group. This is really a different project.
Walter Isaacson: We biographers realize that we distort history a little bit, by making it sound like there's some guy or gal in the garage or garret with a lightbulb moment, and the world changes. Usually, creativity comes from teams, from collaboration, and the people who created the Internet and the computer and the personal computer were all part of a wonderful mix of colorful characters. So I wanted to do a book that resurrects both the women and men who invented the computer and invented the Internet, but we don't know much about them.
BNR: There are so many personalities, so many micro stories within this kind of macro narrative. I was curious to know which were the real surprises for you? You'd already dipped into a lot of this territory.
WI: Yes. I think the creative and fun spirit of the women of ENIAC was a surprise to me. Also, the role that J.C.R. Licklider, an unknown hero of the Digital Age, played. He was an "aw, shucks" Missouri guy who didn't like to claim credit, but when he was at MIT he helped create interactive computing, easy-to-use screens and interfaces, and what he called an intergalactic computer network, all because he was helping create an air defense system for the United States. But he was also creating libraries of the future, and he really envisioned a lot of what we now have with graphical computer interfaces, as well as the Internet. I didn't previously know much about Licklider. Then I realized he is awesomely cool.
BNR: You portray him also as a really admirable person.
WI: He was a perfect saint for the Digital Age, because he loved to share credit.
BNR:You also challenge our notion of what an invention is. Take the computer, for example. What counts as the computer's invention?
WI: There are a lot of great visionaries, but vision without execution is just hallucination. There was a visionary in Iowa who figured out an electronic computer circuit, but he never really got the machine built. So I've tried to give more credit to people who can execute their vision.
BNR: As you point out, the things that we think of as the computer, or software, or the microchip — in any of these cases the "invention" is rarely the end stage that we have now. In a way, each one of these things as we know it isn't one invention but a kind of constellation of inventions.
WI: And they all go together. You have to get the microchip in order to get the personal computer, and the combination of the personal computer and the Internet is 100 times more powerful than either of those inventions alone. Great visionaries not only understand innovation but understand the relationship between different innovations and how to pull them together — like, for example, creating online services that can get people with personal computers onto the Internet.
BNR: You do a lot in The Innovators to highlight the moments when a new idea came along — but it met a need that wasn't necessarily being clamored for at the moment. We think of technology as arising to solve problems that are there, but you make a nice point in your discussion of the invention of the transistor, which is such a crucial turning point both in your narrative and in your history.
WI: One of the things that Steve Jobs figured out was that you have to make not only innovations but products, and you have to figure out what people want before they know they want it. Nobody knew we needed 1,000 songs in our pocket, but Jobs came up with the iPod, which was a way to mix a computer and an MP3 player and a beautiful electronic device.
He combined all those things, and when he was doing the original Macintosh, somebody on the team said, "Shouldn't we have a focus group to figure out what people want in it?" He said, "Yeah. How do people know what they want until we show them?" That's what he does with the iPod.
Likewise, a guy named Pat Haggerty at Texas Instruments, he's making transistors, but nobody ever gets up in the morning and says, "I want to go buy a transistor." So he figures out, "I can make small radios." And nobody had thought of a radio other than as a household appliance, but this guy said, "People are going to want to take it with them to the beach, or the backyard, or to a party." So he invents the transistor radio. Getting back to your earlier point, it's a wonderful combination because it happens at the same time as rock 'n' roll is invented by Elvis Presley in the late 1950s, and the rebellious music, and the ability to have your own transistor radio actually go hand-in-hand, because you don't have to just listen to what your parents want to tune their radio to in the living room. You've got your own transistor radio.
BNR: Like the iPod, the transistor isn't something that you know that you want until you see it.
WI: And then you can't live without it. You never knew you wanted it, then you can't live without it. So there are three great steps to innovation. One is coming up with the vision, the second is executing it, and the third is making a product that people want. Because even if you invent a transistor, the world doesn't change until you've made products out of it.
BNR: There's a moment in the narrative in which Texas Instruments is trying to get the license to make transistors from Bell Labs, and it's a nice turning point in the book as well. It translates, I think, one of the other stories that runs through this, which is that along with the growth of a technology and a changing perspective about the potential of computing and electronics and digital technology, there's a change in American business, to a model that really goes from being skeptical of innovation to rewarding innovation. Texas Instruments was willing to pay for the license, but Bell Labs was reluctant to sell, because they didn't think Texas Instruments would do well with it. Bell Labs didn't have a financial incentive for refusing to sell the license.
WI: Right.
BNR: It was more a cultural thing.
WI: What makes America so innovative is that when big companies find themselves a bit flatfooted, there's always some entrepreneur who is going to disrupt their business. Bell Labs doesn't ever quite figure out what to do with the transistor it invented, but all over the country people are turning transistors into products and then turning them into microchips that create more products.
BNR: That's something that, as you point out, was a shift in thinking for a lot of people. George Moore and others leave Shockley Semiconductor, and you see one Nobel Prize-winning innovator having to step aside, in a way. You also suggest this is a part of a cultural change where it's acceptable for these guys to go off and create a new company, as well as create new ideas.
WI: And what you have is the simultaneous invention of a start-up culture with venture capital coming to California. These venture capitalists don't care if you're part of a big corporation, and they don't care whether you might fail a couple of times. They're going to place bets on innovators. So a person like Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore could get Arthur Rock, who was creating a venture fund, to create a whole new business, as opposed to their having to work for an East Coast corporation.
BNR: You say that venture capitalism is as important to the Digital Age as the microchip.
WI: And in some ways these things go together. If you invent both a microchip and venture capital and a start-up culture, as well as a demand for a whole lot of products that use microchips, all of that goes into a mix, and suddenly you have a new industry.
BNR: Although you reach back to the work of Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, much of the work you describe in programming and electronics takes place against the backdrop of the Cold War — and as much of it's going on, so is the space race with the Soviet Union. If you asked people during most of the twentieth century what a scientist did, or what the most glamorous picture of a scientist was, they would have probably answered you in terms of rockets or atomic energy. Now we think of digital electronics.
WI: I think that one fascinating trend of the Digital Age is that most innovations became more personal and more social. They got co- opted by users, so that the computer becomes a personal computer, and soon you're wearing it as a watch; and secondly, you're using it for social needs, not just for research or lone creativity. I think the power both of the computer and the Internet gets distributed to each individual user, as opposed to being something that big corporations or the government have control over.
BNR: I was talking some time ago to the writer Cilve Thompson, who wrote a book called Smarter than You Think . . .
WI: I reviewed it for the New York Times and gave it a good review.
BNR: Thompson writes in the book about the idea of the digital centaur, the person whose work is in a kind of collaboration with completing in such a way that you have almost that kind of human- computer hybrid that really is what enables certain kind of work to be done. You talk a lot about the possibilities for that similar kind of crossover. That is to say, rather than worrying about AI replacing people, you think that humans and computers are going to continue to curve off.
WI: Yes. I think that was an insight that begins with Ada Lovelace; and some of the coolest people of the Digital Revolution implemented it, including Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart, and Alan Kay, which is that combining in an intimate way computers with human creativity will be a lot more exciting than trying to build artificial intelligence machines that chug along without a tight partnership with humans.
BNR: There is a utopian strain in all of this, the notion that fundamentally what we are all engaged with in the development of this technology is a dream of liberation, that we can go to places we couldn't go, and we can relieve ourselves of problems that we could never solve ourselves.
WI: Vannevar Bush in 1945 talks of a machine like a personal computer that can amplify our mind. But as visionary as he was, he could not have imagined the astonishing power of personal computers and the Internet combined, where anybody, anywhere on the planet can create something in any format, from music to words to ideas to videos, and share it with anybody else on the planet, and also be able to retrieve any creative product that anybody in the world has made. This is a breathtaking leap in enabling both personal empowerment and also global creativity.
BNR: Given that, what do you get excited about when you look out at what's happening now, be it Internet based or kind of personal technology based?
WI: I think collaborative creativity is the exciting thing. People working together with crowds of people they don't know to produce interactive role-playing games, or crowd-sourced forms of storytelling. I think that there will be a merger of games, multimedia sites, and books to create whole new forms of content. I also hope that Bitcoin and other small payment systems will allow people to create things collaboratively and share the revenue in a fair way.
BNR: That last seems like an even more challenging thing, because you are also naturally interacting with the bad actions that currency itself seems to ignite in people.
WI: Yes, but Bitcoin offers so much promise for good that we've only begun to envision what cyber-currencies could do to create a new creative economy.
BNR: Speaking of Big Data and privacy concerns, did you fnd any of the people involved in the Digital Revolution looking forward and saying, "Well, wait a minute, this is going to mean the potential for limitless surveillance of our daily lives by governments and corporations?"
WI: No. I think that when the Internet was invented, it was designed by rebels and graduate students who were disciples of hackers and rebels — the graduate students designing the Internet, who designed it in a way that made it hard to have top-down control. They also designed it in a way to allow anonymity. Now, both of those things can be used for good or for ill. But technological tools are only as good as we are, and that applies to the fountain pen and the telephone just as it does to the Internet.
BNR: Your description of Stewart Brand's role in fostering the ideas that underlay the Internet is fascinating.
WI: There are so many fun things that happened in the Digital Age, like The Mother of All Demos, in which counterculture gurus like Stewart Brand helped put on a show displaying the power of interactive computing being done by people like Doug Engelbart, and it becomes almost as if it were a rock show or an acid trip festival.
BNR: You can see how they were already thinking well ahead of what could be created in a factory and made the next year, and so many of the things that have been happening in only the last couple of decades were already being sketched out, in a sense.
WI: The great visionaries had a lot of fun, but you know, people like Doug Engelbart and all the people who become the heroes in the book are able to turn these visions into realities that change our lives.
BNR: One thing I wondered a lot about after reading this was how much you think there is still an unresolved tension between the inventive drive often seen here, which tends to be about people's personal obsessions, and then corporate monetization of this inventive drive, the increasing way in which we see it as being driven by products, essentially. Is there a tension there, or do we still have a healthy balance between those two things?
WI: I think there is a tension, but that's part of the balance, which is: People are doing things for their passion, including Wikipedia or creating Linux, doing it just because they want to share, and also people are doing it because they want to create a company that will make a profit. Only in America do you have this healthy balance between people doing open-source things and people doing proprietary things, and people creating new products they are trying to make money on, but they are also doing it out of pure passion.
BNR: Do you think that there is enough openness in the current culture so that things existing outside of, say, new apps for existing phones, are going to keep being developed at the same rate? Do you see any risks of a kind of closure around the devices that exist and that we're familiar with?
WI: No. I'm terribly optimistic about the flood of new ideas coming along. If you'd asked me five years ago, "Does the world need . . . What is every kid going to need next?" I never would have guessed Snap-Chat or What's App. But those go to the fact that we're social animals, as Aristotle said.
I do think that the next wave of innovation is going to come in two particular areas. One is a better connection between the creative industries and technology, so that we have whole new forms of creativity, such as crowd-sourced novels and interactive role-playing games. Hopefully, there will be a culture of Bitcoin-like micro- payments, so people can make a little bit of money by contributing to a big collaborative project. That's the theme in my book of the Arc of the Digital Age, people finding new ways to collaborate and to do things socially.
The other thing coming is, of course, the birth of more life sciences technology, you know, genetic engineering. That will demand a new model, because that's not as easy to do in your garage or basement, and it's not as easy for lone entrepreneurs . . . I mean, for sort of romantic entrepreneurs to do a start-up in something that involves, say, bioengineering.
BNR: One of the things that your book implies is that these things go together in ways that are not always predictable. The kind of dissemination of powerful computing power into the hands of individuals means that sequencing of DNA and other kinds of computational challenges for something like the biomedical world can increasingly be done on smaller and smaller scales.
WI: One great trend will be the democratization of Big Data. Once we can all tap into DNA databases and other such repositories of information, there will be probably some privacy concerns but certainly some great innovations.
★ 09/15/2014
Isaacson (Steve Jobs) is a storyteller of the kind he admires among the people who made the bits and pieces that would become computers, wrote programs, invented games, miniaturized the computer, created the Internet, and found ways for ordinary people to access technology and build communities. The author relates the history of the computer by describing these individuals vividly and succinctly. Most were brilliant. Some were shy, others wild. Many had flaws. All are fascinating. At each crucial point in the development of the machine, explains Isaacson, there were usually several people who worked almost as one, even though their personalities differed considerably: an engineer carefully planned the steps, a manager kept people on track, and a pied piper involved others. Ada Lovelace is an example of the visionaries covered in the book; the outlook detailed in her 1843 Notes on Babbage's Analytical Engine took 160 years to be realized, but Lovelace's predictions describe our world today, where humans and machines work together in the arts and sciences to create new knowledge and solve old problems. As well as relevant personalities, Isaacson's work describes organizations and corporations with similar color and clarity. The volume lacks an index, and with many people and concepts mentioned more than once, it would be fascinating to reference these connections (a searchable electronic file would be a logical and helpful addition). VERDICT Anyone who uses a computer in any of its contemporary shapes or who has an interest in modern history will enjoy this book. It should be on the reading lists of book discussion groups and high school and college courses across the curriculum.—Linda Loos Scarth, Cedar Rapids, IA
…Mr. Isaacson's gifts as an enthusiast and explicator remain impressive…As this book so clearly demonstrates, he is a kindred spirit to the visionaries and enthusiasts who speed us so thrillingly into the technological future.
The New York Times - Janet Maslin
…[a] sweeping and surprisingly tenderhearted history of the digital age…[The Innovators] is…absorbing and valuable, and Isaacson's outsize narrative talents are on full display. Few authors are more adept at translating technical jargon into graceful prose, or at illustrating how hubris and greed can cause geniuses to lose their way.
The New York Times Book Review - Brendan I. Koerner
The history of the computer as told through this fascinating book is not the story of great leaps forward but rather one of halting progress. Journalist and Aspen Institute CEO Isaacson (Steve Jobs) presents an episodic survey of advances in computing and the people who made them, from 19th-century digital prophet Ada Lovelace to Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. His entertaining biographical sketches cover headline personalities (such as a manic Bill Gates in his salad days) and unsung toilers, like WWII's pioneering female programmers, and outright failures whose breakthroughs fizzled unnoticed, such as John Atanasoff, who was close to completing a full-scale model computer in 1942 when he was drafted into the Navy. Isaacson examines these figures in lucid, detailed narratives, recreating marathon sessions of lab research, garage tinkering, and all-night coding in which they struggled to translate concepts into working machinery. His account is an antidote to his 2011 Great Man hagiography of Steve Jobs; for every visionary—or three (vicious fights over who invented what are ubiquitous)—there is a dogged engineer; a meticulous project manager; an indulgent funder; an institutional hothouse like ARPA, Stanford, and Bell Labs; and hordes of technical experts. Isaacson's absorbing study shows that technological progress is a team sport, and that there's no I in computer. Photos. Agent: Amanda Urban, ICM. (Oct.)
NEW YORK TIMES; WASHINGTON POST; FINANCIAL TIMES; HOUSTON CHRONICLE; KIRKUS; AMAZON; NPR; BLOOMBERG.COM; WALL STREETJOURNAL; FORBES; SACRAMENTO BEE;
a significant addition to [Isaacson's] list of best-selling nonfiction works with The Innovators. . . . Isaacson thoroughly examines the lives of such landmark personalities as Alan Turing, John von Neumann, J.C.R. Licklider, Robert Noyce,Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Tim Berners-Lee, Jobs and others. The most well-read of technocrats will still learn a lot from these thoroughly researched 542 pages. He shows with repeated examples that an Aha moment often went nowhere without the necessary collaborators to help flesh out the idea, or make it producible, or sell it. Collaboration is, indeed, a major theme of the book. . . . [The Innovators] reads as easily as the best of them. Isaacson truly has earned his spot on the best-seller lists.
Charleston Post and Courier
Fueled by entertaining anecdotes, quirky characters and a strong argument for creative collaboration, The Innovators is a fascinating history of all things digital, even for readers who align themselves more with Lord Byron than with his math-savvy daughter.
Richmond Times-Dispatch
If anyone could compress all that into a readable narrative, it would be Isaacson, the former managing editor of Time and author of magnificent biographies of Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs….The Innovators shows Isaacson at his best in segments where his talents as a biographer have room to run.
A sweeping history of the digital revolution, and the curious partnerships and pulsing rivalries that inhabit it.
In The Innovators, Isaacson succeeds infilling our knowledge gap by crafting a richly detailed history that traces the evolution of these modern tools and pays homage to the people whose names and contributions to computer science are little-known to most of us. . . . The Innovators is as much about the essence of creativity and genius as it is about cathode tubes, binary programs, circuit boards, microchips and everything in between.
"A masterpiece"
Kentucky) Daily News (Bowling Green
Isaacson's book offers a magisterial, detailed sweep, from the invention of the steam engine to the high-tech marvels of today, with profiles of the great innovators who made it all happen. Among the book's excellent advice is this gem from computing pioneer Howard Aiken: 'Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats.'
Walter Isaacson is the best possible guide to this storm. He interrupted work on [The Innovators] book to write the standard biography of Steve Jobs, having previously written lives of Einstein, Benjamin Franklin and Kissinger. His approach involves massive research combined with straight, unadorned prose and a matter-of-fact storytelling style. . . . the directness of his approach makes for clarity and pace.
The Sunday Times - Bryan Appleyard
The argument against the great man theory of invention is not new. But the main merit of Walter Isaacson's The Innovators is to show that this is particularly true in information technology—despite the customary lionisation of many of its pioneers, from Babbage and Alan Turing to Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds. . . . Mr Isaacson excels at explaining complex concepts.
The brilliant Isaacson follows his mega-selling 2011 biography of Apple founder Steve Jobs with this detailed account of the legendary and unsung people who invented the computer and then the Internet.
"[a] landmark new work . . . In this often surprising history, Isaacson offers an encyclopedic account of the technological breakthroughs that made modern computers and networks possible: programming, transistors, chips, software, graphics, desktop computers, and the Internet.
For a book about programmers and algorithms, 'The Innovators' is a lively, enthusiastically written tale and a worthwhile read, not only for tech-heads but for anyone interested in how computers got into our pockets and how innovation works.
…a project whose gestation preceded Steve Jobs and whose vision exceeds it.
Mr. Isaacson's fine new book, The Innovators, is a serial biography of the large number of ingenious scientists and engineers who, you might say, led up to Jobs and his Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak."
Wall Street Journal - Steven Shapin
If anyone in America understands genius, it's Walter Isaacson.
[T]his is the defining story of our era, and it's here told lucidly, thrillingly and—because the bright ideas generally occur to human beings with the quirks, flaws and foibles that accompany overdeveloped intellect—above all, amusingly.
Steve Jobs's biographer delivers a fascinating, informative look at the quirky 'collaborative creatures' who invented the computer and Internet.
Gizmodo.com
"[A] tour d'horizon of the computer age . . . [The Innovators] presents a deeply comforting, humanistic vision: of how a succession of brilliant individuals, often working together in mutually supportive groups, built on each others' ideas to create a pervasive digital culture in which man and machine live together in amicable symbiosis. . . . a fresh perspective on the birth of the information age."
The Innovators . . . does far more than analyze the hardware and software that gave birth to digital revolution – it fully explores the women and men who created the ideas that birthed the gadgets. . . . Isaacson tells stories of vanity and idealism, of greed and sacrifice, and of the kind of profound complexity that lies behind the development of seemingly simple technological improvements. . . . Isaacson is skilled at untangling the tangled strands of memory and documentation and then reweaving them into a coherent tapestry that illustrates how something as complicated and important as the microchip emerged from a series of innovations piggybacking off of one another for decades (centuries, ultimately.) . . . It's a portrait both of a technology, and the culture that nurtured it. That makes it a remarkable book, and an example for other would-be gadget chroniclers to keep readily at hand before getting lost in a labyrinth of ones and zeros – at the expense of the human beings who built the maze in the first place.
If you think you know everything about computers, read The Innovators. Surprises await on every page.
[Isaacson's] careful, well-organized book, written in lucid prose accessible to even the most science-challenged, is well worth reading for its capable survey of the myriad strands that intertwined to form the brave new, ultra-connected world we live in today.
TheDailyBeast.com
. . . sharing their joy, [Isaacson] captures the primal satisfaction of solving problems together and changing the world. . . . In a way, the book is about the complex lines of force and influence in male friendships, the egging each other on and ranking each other out.
Bloomberg Business Week
Isaacson succeeds in telling an accessible tale tailored to a general interest audience. He avoids the overhyped quicksand that swallows many technology writers as they miscast tiny incremental advances as 'revolutionary.' Instead Isaacson focuses on the evolutionary nature of progress. The Innovators succeeds in large part because Isaacson repeatedly shows how these visionaries, through design or dumb luck, were able to build and improve on the accomplishments of previous generations.
A remarkable overview of the history of computers from the man who brought us biographies of Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, and Henry Kissinger . . . Isaacson manages to bring together the entire universe of computing, from the first digitized loom to the web, presented in a very accessible manner that often reads like a thriller.
Isaacson provides a sweeping and scintillating narrative of the inventors, engineers and entrepreneurs who have given the world computers and the Internet. . . . a near-perfect marriage of author and subject . . . an informative and accessible account of the translation of computers, programming, transistors, micro-processors, the Internet, software, PCs, the World Wide Web and search engines from idea into reality. . . . [a] masterful book.
Walter Isaacson has written an inspiring book about genius, this time explaining how creativity and success come from collaboration. The Innovators is a fascinating history of the digital revolution, including the critical but often forgotten role women played from the beginning. It offers truly valuable lessons in how to work together to achieve great results.
A sprawling companion to his best-selling Steve Jobs . . . this kaleidoscopic narrative serves to explain the stepwise development of 10 core innovations of the digital age — from mathematical logic to transistors, video games and the Web — as well as to illustrate the exemplary traits of their makers. . . . Isaacson unequivocally demonstrates the power of collaborative labor and the interplay between companies and their broader ecosystems. . . . The Innovators is the most accessible and comprehensive history of its kind.
The Innovators . . . is riveting, propulsive and at times deeply moving. . . . One of Isaacson's jealousy-provoking gifts is his ability to translate complicated science into English—those who have read his biographies of Einstein and Steve Jobs understand that Isaacson is a kind of walking Rosetta Stone of physics and computer programming. . . . The Innovators is one of the most organically optimistic books I think I've ever read. It is a stirring reminder of what Americans are capable of doing when they think big, risk failure, and work together.
The Atlantic - Jeffrey Goldberg
[A] sweeping and surprisingly tenderhearted history of the digital age . . . absorbing and valuable, and Isaacson's outsize narrative talents are on full display. Few authors are more adept at translating technical jargon into graceful prose, or at illustrating how hubris and greed can cause geniuses to lose their way. . . . The book evinces a genuine affection for its subjects that makes it tough to resist . . . his book is thus most memorable not for its intricate accounts of astounding breakthroughs and the business dramas that followed, but rather for the quieter moments in which we realize that most primal drive for innovators is a need to feel childlike joy.
Booklist (starred review)
★ 2014-07-22
A panoramic history of technological revolution. "Innovation occurs when ripe seeds fall on fertile ground," Aspen Institute CEO Isaacson (Steve Jobs, 2011, etc.) writes in this sweeping, thrilling tale of three radical innovations that gave rise to the digital age. First was the evolution of the computer, which Isaacson traces from its 19th-century beginnings in Ada Lovelace's "poetical" mathematics and Charles Babbage's dream of an "Analytical Engine" to the creation of silicon chips with circuits printed on them. The second was "the invention of a corporate culture and management style that was the antithesis of the hierarchical organization of East Coast companies." In the rarefied neighborhood dubbed Silicon Valley, new businesses aimed for a cooperative, nonauthoritarian model that nurtured cross-fertilization of ideas. The third innovation was the creation of demand for personal devices: the pocket radio; the calculator, marketing brainchild of Texas Instruments; video games; and finally, the holy grail of inventions: the personal computer. Throughout his action-packed story, Isaacson reiterates one theme: Innovation results from both "creative inventors" and "an evolutionary process that occurs when ideas, concepts, technologies, and engineering methods ripen together." Who invented the microchip? Or the Internet? Mostly, Isaacson writes, these emerged from "a loosely knit cohort of academics and hackers who worked as peers and freely shared their creative ideas….Innovation is not a loner's endeavor." Isaacson offers vivid portraits—many based on firsthand interviews—of mathematicians, scientists, technicians and hackers (a term that used to mean anyone who fooled around with computers), including the elegant, "intellectually intimidating," Hungarian-born John von Neumann; impatient, egotistical William Shockley; Grace Hopper, who joined the Army to pursue a career in mathematics; "laconic yet oddly charming" J.C.R. Licklider, one father of the Internet; Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and scores of others. Isaacson weaves prodigious research and deftly crafted anecdotes into a vigorous, gripping narrative about the visionaries whose imaginations and zeal continue to transform our lives.
The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution 3.2 out of 5 based on 0 ratings. 28 reviews.
Vieuxblue More than 1 year ago
This is a very well-written book about the history of the development of computers, with individual stories of each of the contributors to the hardware and software that preceded today's computers. It is a highly readable and fascinating series of stories of the individuals and teams that created our world of digital devices.
Anonymous More than 1 year ago
A very well written and very readable history of everything computer, from Ada Byron Lovelace thru to Larry Page and Sergey Brin. I learned all sorts of things I never knew about computers, the Internet and the World Wide Web. This is dense but not dull. Even if you know nothing about math, physics or coding, you can understand this (at least understand enough to 'get' it). These were a big bunch of wild and wooly guys and gals who brought us to 'now.'
This book was exactly what I expected - a history of the evolution of the computer, from theory, to early attempts, to today's computing technologies. It was easy to read with just the right amount of background on the key individuals.
Louielouie66 More than 1 year ago
If you feel the need to know the history of data processing and the internet then this is a must-read. I see this as a primer for the young student. It will fill in the gaps of your knowledge of computing and I think more importantly encourage new creative thinking. These "Innovators" didn't achieve this status by accident; they were groomed and challenged from their youth to dream, create and innovate. A few sections seem to drag just a bit but overall a worthwhile, fun, and informative book.
DavidWard More than 1 year ago
If you're interested in learning when and how all aspects of the computer were developed and by whom but are not computer savvy, then this is the book to read. Even if you do not know the difference between a bit and a byte, a server and a browser, or the Web and the Internet, you'll have no problem understanding the development of the computer. The book begins in the mid 1800s with the concept of a computer by English poet Lord Byron's daughter. From there the book explains what led to the development of the first digital computer in 1945, which happened to weigh 30 tons. Subsequent chapters deal with the development of the transistor, microchip, pocket calculator, microprocessor and XEROX PARC, which all led to the invention of the personal computer. Additional chapters explain the history behind the beginning of INTEL, Microsoft, Apple, AOL, Yahoo, and Google as well as the development of VisiCalc, the Hayes Smartmodem, Windows I, the Internet and World Wide Web, and the Mosaic browser.
leopardiNJ More than 1 year ago
Capturing a cultural revolution of the magnitude brought about by digital technology in one volume may be a bit too much to ask for. One can really expect to only capture a few snippets of the overall impact of such outside-the-box innovations such as the printing press and the electric light. The changes brought about by the advent of ubiquitous computer technology are unquestionably one of those topics that are challenging to condense. The first half of The Innovators does a competent job of tracing the evolution of computer technology from Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage up to the dawn of the Internet and the World-Wide-Web with a few new pieces of new information and some alternative emphasis. But the author begins to wander mid-text with a questionable discussion of pot-smoking, LSD-popping fringe characters and their impact on computer technology. This over-emphasized tale results in some later glaring omissions that weaken the second half of the book. Missing entirely is any discussion of the Space Race and its impact on the electronics evolution. Likewise Wang is mentioned only once (without comment) and Sun Microsystems twice (likewise without any explanation of what "workstations" implies). In both cases (Wang by demonstrating the reality of a market for small computers, and Sun by both showing the usefulness of desk-top computing and the power of networking) the groundwork that spurred on the geeks and hackers was around long before the development of the personnel computer. Although the digital revolution has certainly had its moments of genius (especially at its start), the modern portion of the tale is more one of gross mistakes rather than inevitable evolution. What if Xerox had not ignored the breakthroughs made by its research division at PARC? What if AT&T had not given away the transistor and then fought tooth and nail to halt the development of networks? And, what if IBM had cut a better deal with Bill Gates rather than hand him the store on a golden platter? All the parts (often, literally) were laying about in the 1950s through 1970s for hackers and geeks to pluck and use. It is a tale of mega-corporate ineptitude as much as loner-in-a-garage innovation. Isaacson develops a number of themes (rather unevenly) throughout the book , but especially in the closing chapter: 1. The quest for digital artificial intelligence is probably misguided if not (as others have pointed out) dangerous. The emphasis on the future development of digital technology should be on computers as human assistants rather than replacements. 2. Innovation proceeds better and faster if the technologies are open and free. Largely missing from the discussion, however, is much about why shareware failed (at least pre-iPhone) and just who can claim to have supported the infants in the digital nurseries. 3. The evolution of social media in some sense fulfills the prescient insights of Ada Lovelace - computers as handmaidens of art. But, do Facebook and Twitter really have the equivalent social impact as Google and Wikipedia? Time will tell. And what about the impact of Amazon and just-in-time production? More than most histories of the computer revolution, Isaacson's The Innovators details the lives and personalities of the players involved over the technological developments themselves. That is the primary values of this book. The Innovators is very nicely illustrated with abundant images of both people and equipment. Notes are extensive as is a good Index. Richard R. Pardi	Environmental Science	William Paterson University
I was introduced to the the world of PC computers in late 1984. It was fascinating to read how it all happened up to that point and where we have gone up to today. I am thankful that I now know who these brilliant men and women are who laid the groundwork for our world today and that of our digital future. This is my second book by Mr. Isaacson and he does an excellent job of keeping me engaged with each page I turn.
This story is hnhhgasvx good?
ESLLady More than 1 year ago
We read this for book club and those in our group who are IT professionals enjoyed it. I did not enjoy it at all.
Has lots of informstion
It is very interestins
Chihyujeywerbvgyh
I dont understand not worth the $
Is this book good ? Please write back to me.
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Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art
Just as Susan Sontag did for photography and Marshall McLuhan did for television, Virginia Heffernan ...
Just as Susan Sontag did for photography and Marshall McLuhan did for television, Virginia Heffernan (called one of the "best living writers of English prose") reveals the logic and aesthetics behind the Internet.Since its inception, the Internet has morphed from ...
Microtrends Squared: The New Small Forces Driving Today's
Ten years after his New York Times bestselling book Microtrends, Mark Penn identifies the next ...
Ten years after his New York Times bestselling book Microtrends, Mark Penn identifies the next wave of trends reshaping the future of business, politics, and culture.Mark Penn has boldly argued that the future is not shaped by society's broad forces, ...


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text:
Q: Can I train a new vec into an existing opencv model I had used opencv_traincascade to train an object, say, using a.vec.
Later, I found some additional images as possitive samples and negative samples. So I build new samples, say, b.vec.
Can I run opencv_traincascade again using b.vec to refine the existing model? Or should I build a new vec including new and old images, and train a completely new model?
Thanks very much.


text:
News by Sport
Craw-Kan Team of the Week: Frontenac Baseball
Frontenac is undefeated at 13-0 to open the 2019 season.
By: Sports in Kansas - Chet Kuplen
This weeks Craw-Kan "Your Community Technology Partner" Team of the Week from the Southeast Kansas coverage are is the Frontenac High School Raider Baseball Team led by head coach Bill Sullivan.
The Raiders are having one of the best seasons among all Class 3A baseball teams this year with a perfect 13-0 record in 2019. FHS has scored in double-digit runs on seven different occasions on the season. Last week they swept CNC rival Girard (16-4, 3-2) and SEK member Chanute (8-2, 10-6). The Raiders also picked up a double header sweep on Monday against CNC power Baxter Springs (7-1, 5-3). Ryan Raio had five hits in the double header against Baxter while Cooper Cleland had two. Jake Beckmann went all seven innings for the Raiders in the 7-1 win over Baxter with 11 strikeouts, while Cooper Cleland and Kade Chastain, both Kansas City Kansas CC signees, combined for the 5-3 win on the mound.
Frontenac will be back in action on Thursday with a double-header on the road against Galena. Frontenac is currently ranked third in the state in the latest 3A coaches poll.
Craw-Kan "Your Technology Partner" and Sports in Kansas will once again be in partnership over the 2018-2019 school year to release a "Craw-Kan Team of the Week" for the fifth consecutive season.
"I am looking forward to this partnership again for another year with Craw-Kan and highlighting teams from the SEK area to not only a local platform but also giving them statewide reach on our network, it's became quite the popular feature over the last five years," said Sports in Kansas CEO, Chet Kuplen. "Not only does this help athletes and teams to be promoted for their achievements, it also lets the area know what all the new products that Craw-Kan has to offer, including new gigabit fiber now in the the area. Also that Craw-Kan is now in Frontenac and Pittsburg. It's also going to several other areast in Southeast Kansas"
"Craw-Kan offers all your technology needs in the area from internet to web design and cell phones to security systems." said Craw-Kan Marketing Manager, Zach Adams. "We have a lot of new products including the fastest internet in the area in the new gigabit fiber, we are also in Frontenac and Pittsburg with our service. We are very excited with all the new products we have to offer to the area."
Nominations will be accepted from every Friday-Sunday, with the "Craw-Kan Team of the Week" being released every Monday on Sports in Kansas (Kansas-Sports.com). Teams must be nominated via email or twitter.
Teams must be from the following leagues in the Southeast Kansas area to be eligible: SEK, CNC, TRL, plus Erie, Pittsburg and Parsons.
Craw-Kan and Sports in Kansas will also partner in releasing a "All Craw-Kan Team" for the Southeast Kansas area after postseason play has wrapped up.
How to nominate?
email: sportsinkansas@gmail.com
© 2019 Sports in Kansas, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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Depending on where you are, September may or may not be the last gasp of summer.
But it is the name of the greatest piece of September music ever recorded.
Play September by Earth Wind & Fire.
If you're not moving, check your pulse, or have someone else check it for you (that can be fun).
Me? I'm out front, dancing among the flower and vegetable beds, in front of God and everybody. Who cares how it looks? It's September.


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Vancouver actresses, 19-29 for local movies.
If you are interested in sweater girl history, you can look here: Facebook Sweater Girls History Page.
We have watched your documentary, and we LOVED IT! It was so great to see someone paying tribute to the sweater girl / bullet bra fashion of decades past. It was also great to see how you had three modern day women trying out the look for themselves, and seeing what they thought of it. As I am sure you probably know… all of us here at the National Sweater Girl Historical Society would love to see the look make a come-back again someday.
We also want to thank you for including us in your documentary. It was a nice surprise to see our website onscreen in the documentary so much, as well as the kudos you gave us in the credits.
We would love to help promote your documentary. Can you send us another updated link so we can post it on our facebook page, as well as on our website?
Also, I do not know if you realize this, but we also publish an online magazine called "Sweater Girl Society Magazine." I will include a link to one of our issues so you can read it.
We would love to also promote your documentary in an up-coming issue of "Sweater Girl Society Magazine" by doing an article on it. Would you be willing to do a short interview via email? Also, would there be anyway that you could put me in contact with the three ladies from the documentary? I would love to see if they would be willing to let us enterview them as well.
Also, would you be able to send me some high-resolution promo photos from the documentary? Something we could use for the magazine and website. Maybe a group shot and individual shots of the ladies in their wardrobe?
My full credentials and lots of video samples, here.
Some background, like why did I make this movie? That's a good question. I wanted a movie I could make quick, for low cost. And the idea just popped into my head. (Which is where all of my ideas come from..... I never try to copy anyone.) I knew there were old fashioned pointy bras, but prior to starting on this movie, I did not know they were called bullet bras. And I had absolutely no idea there was so much interest in sweater girls until I did some online research. I don't have a real interest in sweater girls or bullet bras, other than this movie. I want to move on as quickly as possible and make my meaningful movies, which you can find elswhere on my site.
You can find other pages regarding future projects.
I am also looking for an ambitious model/actress. Would you like to be like Pamela Anderson? If so look here. Be Marilyn Monroe? Here. A combination "New Pamela"/Sweater Girl/Marilyn Monroe would be ideal! Get an amazing amount of on camera experience!
I made this movie to create a revenue stream, to help me make my meaningful movies. And to help pay my bills too!
This is the trailer. It looks better on vimeo, than it does on the youtube link below.
This documentary movie was meant to be an "entertaining documentary" and I think we achieved that!
Vancouver actors and filmmakers can join my facebook friends group here.
Sweater Girls Then and Now, stars Jade North, Sarah Novicki, and Claudia Luna. They all got IMDB credits, and Jade got multi credits. Everyone had lots of fun!
The movie first had a film look, like the photo on the left. I have now changed it to more of a reality TV look, like the photo on the right. And the title is now Bullet Bra Sweater Girls. I did this for marketing reasons, so it will now come up more in search.
You can watch it with the link below. It is an unlisted link on youtube. It looks better on vimeo.
You can watch the newest and best version here.


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