TELL US WHAT YOU ARE READING

[James]

Yes, I would agree with the possibility of his being psychotic given his strange penchant for odd diets (fruit only), walking about barefoot even at important board meetings, refusing deodorant, believing that lying was perfectly acceptable as long as his will (which was ALWAYS right) prevailed. A very complex and strange dude to be sure. I'm really enjoying the book.

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[Antony]

I got the Steve Jobs book at the same time as the Michael Jackson book. Haven't touched the Jobs book yet, and still going slowly on the MJ book. I am also spending time on reading programming books.

Well, I am a slow reader.

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[James]

You'll enjoy it, Antony, I'm sure. I should have bought it as an audio book but I got it for my Kindle.

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[Antony]

I had the same thought After getting the book, I checked iTunes. The abridged audio was 9 hours, and the unabridged audio book would take 25 hours.

Oh, forgot to mention, if you feel like to support SillyDog701, you can use following affiliated links
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[natsuto]

I was stuck in the hospital waiting room for a few hours, so I have a good chance to read it without interruption to complete from the beginning.

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[richard mitnick]

I just finished with the Steve Jobs book.

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[James]

Well... what's your overall reaction?

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[Antony]

(My Steve Jobs book is still in the shelf, haven't touched it yet.)

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[richard mitnick]

Hey James-

You know, Steve Jobs was a genius. At one and two levels down, the people who worked for him were geniuses. I have read other pieces about Steve jobs, and I have watched and recorded a fair about of video about Apple.

Unfortunately, Jobs' legacy will always have the question mark of his personality issues.

The saddest thing is of course his attitude toward his cancer. No one knows what would have happened had he had surgery immediately upon the discovery. Pancreatic cancer is about as tough as it gets. But, he would have had more time; "we" would have had more time with him.

I am an Apple stockholder, I value having Apple in the I/T marketplace. They are the bleeding edge of innovation. Look now at what is happening with ultra-books to compete with the Macbook Air. The wholly new creation of the market for tablets.

Apparently, the world is going to judge Tim Cook by the first new Apple product after Apple TV, which is a concept still from Jobs.

So, we will see going forward about Jobs' legacy and the future of Apple.

Isaacson is a splendid writer.

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[James]

Thanks for the response, Richard. The book was very revealing and surprising in that there was no attempt to whitewash anything but to present it as honestly and accurately as possible. I appreciated that although I have read that many hyper-uber-Apple fanboys were very critical of the book and refused to believe that Jobs had a few weird idiosyncrasies along with some rather nasty personal habits. Genius he was and his legacy will live on for generations. One has to feel for Tim Cook.

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[richard mitnick]

The question is, will the users and investors give Tim Cook and Jony Ive a chance.

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[richard mitnick]

New book, HIGGS, Jim Baggott, Oxford University Press, 2012.

This book should be the long story of the "Invention and Discovery of the 'God Particle'.

The reason I bought the book is that the Introduction was written by Nobel Laureate Dr Steven Weinberg. A part of the introduction was was published in the New York Review of Books.

I have been enamored of CERN, the home of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) ever since I saw the 1985 PBS video "Creation of the Universe" I think now on YouTube, by Timothy Ferris. In 1985, the tunnel which now houses the LHC and which will in about 2014 house the HL-LHC [HL prefix = High Luminosity], housed the LEP, the Large Electron Positron Collider. The Tevatron already in 1985 had been built at Fermi National Accelerator Lab [Fermilab]. Until the advent of the LHC, the Tevatron was the most powerful atom smasher in the world. There are two videos about all of this, both finally available at YouTube, The Atom Smashers [2008] and The Big Bang Machine [2008]. The first is primarily about the Tevatron and the people at Fermilab; the second is all about the LHC at CERN. Each center receives some mention in the film about the other.

Another effort to slake my thirst for Higgs was to participate in two Public Distributed Computing projects for CERN. On BOINC software, about 10,000 of us ran simulations of the turns in the beam lines, helping in 1.) calibrating the magnets which kept the spinning particles on their correct trajectories, and 2.) simulating the collision events themselves.

So, anyway, The Tevatron was only capable of power up to one TeV (terra electron volts), not enough to generate the subatomic particles which would yield up the Higgs boson of the Standard Model. But, take it from me, the Tevatron, with Nobel Laureate Dr Leon Lederman at the helm, put up a great battle. The Tevatron was shut down in 2011, it ran for about forty years, producing massive amounts of data, and made real the finding of a number of subatomic particles predicted by theoreticians.

The LHC, at 7 TeV has found a new subatomic particle, definitely a boson, at 5 sigma probability, but not yet with certainty the Higgs. The announcement was made it CERN July 4, 2012. This new book was started in 2010, but was revised after the announcements by ATLAS and CMS, the two CERN experiments with the mission of Higgs.

The first book I read on Higgs, Massive, Ian Sample, 2010, Basic Books, is definitely a great book. It gives all of the background going back to Peter Higgs' 1964 derivation of the theory (he was not alone in predicting on a theoretical basis the necessity for the Higgs "field", a concept in Quantum Mechanics (QM). In QM, everything is related to a "quanta" a particle, even pure energy).

I am hoping for new and more material in this new book..

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[James]

Killing Lincoln by Bill O'Reilly
Trojan Horse by Mark Russinovich

Actually, I'm finishing up "On the Edge of the Falls". I'm saving the above two for our trip to Maui next week.

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[Lorraine]

I am trying to read "The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown," but I have been spending more time
trying to get my email from Hotmail (WLM) and Videotron my ISP, email provider, on my IPAD.

I can receive it on my PC but it seems I am unable to on this IPad. It seems that someone must play in it while I am on th PC.

I am just so fed up with both this windows 7 PC, DLink Router and this Apple IPAD #1. 64 GB

Seems the user name and PW were not correct. I am so fed up of changing it now that I can't remember anything about it anymore. It has been changed so many times . I remove the black plug in the router just to turn it off, when I am on the PC, sometimes I forget and leave it while I eat or whatever. I even saw a different username
there once. It does't seem safe.

As a result, I haven't gotten very far reading "The Lost Symbol". As soon as I open the IPAD a notice tells me they can't send me email and I can't send any either.

SO You know now what I think of the Internet, IE 8 and Apple's IPAD.
-Lorraine

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[James]

Currently reading Killing Kennedy: the End of Camelot. Good read.

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