标签: Books

In the 70s and 80s, when I was still in South Africa, it was fairly difficult for me to keep up with technology. I had set up my own company and bought myself an Intel MDS II development system. The cost of the system was more than the cost of my house. But the real problem was the cost of software for both the Intel system and later PC software. When you translated the cost in South African rands and compared it to the cost of living, it was impossible to fund the purchases. What might cost an American one month's salary would cost a South African a year's salary or more. This problem persists around the world. As a result, I must admit there were times that I was less than fully legal in my use of software.   When my book, Excel by Example , was published in 2004, within four or five months a copy appeared on the EDAboard.com website. I believe the forum was based in Eastern Europe. Its philosophy was that it was OK for anyone to upload any book until the author or publisher objected. I decided to engage the participants of the forum and proceeded to call them a bunch of pirates. There was some reaction. As you can see in the quote below, one respondent actually threatened me if I requested that the site take down my book:   I forget to say, if you don't give up EDAboard with your complaints, I going to put your book at rapidshare.de and others file share web sites (and spread it to any know EBOOK forum to me, only 10 multiply each 100000 users). That means 10 of thousands free of charge downloads. That I gonna do for all your publishers, and all theirs books that I have (round 200). Other users think same, as I think about that. You gonna suffer, because you exposed your name here, and you will be "crucified". EDAbord just have (or have had) your book, that someone took from somewhere at internet, and simply upload it. There is numerous places that post your book, there are not gonna remove it by your request like EDAboard easily do. Just ask, don't harm all users. Whats done is done. I managed to download 30Gb science book just from one place for just one night. Give me your email I'll send list to you. Round 7000 titles. Lot of Newnes books, few houndred. You can't do that from edaboard. Just 300 Mb max downloads for one month here. What do you what, I can put them in circling .Let Newnes harm EDAboard and me, and your publishers are going to pay . Here is a one example, and that can be done for all. Newnes books. h**p://www.edaboard.com/ftopic122544.html Try to stop that first my angry friend, free sharing. Edaboard gives you bigger benefit than harm (even in your case). Give up, your book is deleted. I don't want any harm to you, don't make harm to me and others!!!!!   Aside from that extreme, there appeared to be two schools of thought. The first seemed to be one of entitlement. I think this was based on the fact -- as I mentioned earlier -- that these books could never be purchased normally and so everybody simply downloaded copies anyway. At that time, there was another web site (rapidshare.de) based in Germany that seemed to have every book under the sun. These were somehow locked until you registered. It was pointed out to me that the knowledge was out there anyway. I passed all the information on to my publisher, but they seemed completely unable to do anything about it.   I got involved in a more philosophical argument with an engineer from Pakistan, in which he took a far more intriguing argument that all knowledge should be free. He made a good case for this point of view in that it was for the betterment of mankind. Sooner or later the copyright would lapse, and it would become public. Besides, he thought, there was nothing really revolutionary in what I had written. On top of those things, I had a job and I was financially supported during my acquisition of the knowledge, some of which happened on company time.   Of course, I countered with the argument of the expenses associated with my education, the hours spent researching the subject, the hours spent writing the book, and the hardware and materials purchased. All of this did not include the publisher's cost of printing the book.   In the end, the forum administrator put the kibosh on the whole discussion and withdrew my book. When I checked just prior to that, it seemed to me that there had been several thousand downloads, so I guess I should take it as a compliment that my book was that popular, even though I saw no financial reward from these downloads. In the years since then, EDAboard.com has cleaned up its act, and there is no pirated stuff there at all. You can still find illegal copies on the Web, though, without really trying too hard.   Nevertheless, my experience in South Africa -- followed by my discussions on EDAboard, have left me conflicted. Certainly, when you go to an event like the Embedded Systems Conference (ESC), the lecturers are not paid, and they present information for free. The same is true for trade magazines  -- the readers get the information for free. Yet books can be quite pricey, and -- when translated into foreign currency -- they can become unaffordable. And as for software …   What do you think?   Aubrey Kagan Engineering Manager Emphatec

I just read an remarkable book titled How to Sharpen Pencils: a Practical Theoretical Treatise on the Artisanal Craft of Pencil Sharpening for Writers, Artists, Contractors, Flange Turners, Anglesmiths, Civil Servants, With Illustrations Showing Current Practice . What? You think I'm joking? Well, click here if you doubt my veracity. Actually, How to Sharpen Pencils is a wonderful book—one of the funniest things I've read recently (and that includes my annual performance review). But then this started me to thinking that it might be fun to compile a list of unusual and/or thought-provoking titles (and authors) for books on engineering and management. I'm thinking of the engineering or management (or science, technology, and math) equivalents of such titles as The Mime Alphabet Book, Knitting with Dog Hair, How to be Inappropriate, or C is for Chafing (where the latter is a kid-friendly A-to-Z on the art of running). Yes, once again, believe it or not, all of these are real titles. What I'm looking for are fictitious titles for books in our technology world—the sort of titles that would make you exclaim, "Say what?" if you saw them on the shelves of your local bookstore.   Now, you probably wouldn't be too surprised to hear that I have a few ideas of my own, but I don't want to interfere with your creative genius. I'll let you go first. Don't forget that, in addition to the title of the book, it would also be great to have an appropriate author name to go with it.  

On the one hand, I would say that I'm generally an upbeat sort of person. I tend to look for the silver lining in most clouds and I'm definitely a full-fledged member of the "glass half full" fraternity. (I even have the t-shirt and know the secret handshake.) On the other hand, some things do tend to niggle at me. One of these things is the sneaking suspicion that we are in danger of losing track of how to do things at the most fundamental levels. If you go back to 1900, for example, there were legions of craftsmen who could create the most wondrous artifacts out of sheet metal by hand. These days, by comparison, we have incredibly sophisticated computer-aided design tools and computer-controlled fabrication machines that can do a lot of the "thinking" and the manufacturing for us—the downside is that it's becoming almost impossible to find anyone who is capable of doing this sort of thing without having access to these tools and machines. Is this really important? Does it really matter? Well, actually I think it does, although I find it difficult to articulate why (I'd appreciate any help you would care to give here). Until recently, one of the things that used to cheer me up was the presence of a small Internet-based company called Lindsay's Technical Books. These tomes were billed as "Exceptional technical books for experimenters, inventors, tinkerers, mad scientists, and 'Thomas-Edison-type'". I've ordered a few odd items from them over the years (some of these items were very odd indeed), and I still have their January 2007 Catalogue #637 in my office, as shown below:   The idea was that Lindsay and friends gained access to old engineering books that were no longer under copyright and were now in the public domain, and they re-printed them on-demand for a modest fee. For example, one series of books explained how to go about building a machine shop from scrap. This started with the construction of a small charcoal foundry, and then led onwards and upwards to building a metal lathe, a metal shaper, a milling machine, a drill press, and so on and so forth. Just glancing through this old catalogue again and cherry-picking a few items for your delectation and delight, we see books on topics like the design of magnets and electromagnets, armature winding and motor repair, making neon signs, electroplating, silver printing (making photographic prints on paper with egg whites), making casts, building a forge, making your own woodworking tools, blacksmithing, working with wrought iron, building a pipe bending machine, working with sheet metal, building a wind turbine, building your own generators and inverters to generate your own electricity, building an alcohol-producing still, the distillation and rectification of alcohol, glass working, barrel making, manufacturing your own bricks and tiles... and the list goes on, and on, and on! In fact, while glancing through this old catalogue as I was penning this column, I ran across one item that is of particular interest to me at the moment with regard to a current hobby project. This little beauty is the 1893 printing of a book titled Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements by Henry T. Brown. Actually, if the truth be told, the full title of this book (the original version of which came out in 1868) is as follows: Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements: Embracing all those which are most important in Dynamics, Hydraulics, Hydrostatics, Pneumatics, Steam Engines, Mill and other Gearing, Presses, Homologous, and Miscellaneous Machinery; and including many movements never before published and several which have only recently come into use. Wow! Now that's what I call a title! As I said, this type of thing is currently of interest to me, so I immediately bounced over to Lindsay's Technical Books website at www.lindsaybks.com . Oh the shock! Oh the horror! They've retired, and Lindsay's Technical Books is no more. Suffice it to say that I was not wearing my happy face. But then I thought to myself: "Maybe a copy of this book is still available somewhere in the world," so I had a quick Google (it's alright, no one was looking) and I was amazed to find that there's a paperback reprint version on Amazon. Even better, it turns out that Google has a digitized copy you can download as a PDF for free by clicking here . I just did so to discover that this little beauty is all I had hoped for and more. Here's an example page:   I cannot wait to spend some quality time rooting through this little rascal. I'd also like to send some "Good Thoughts" to Henry T. Brown. I bet he never imagined that the book he wrote in 1868 would still be finding new readers in 2013. I also bet that if he knew how I'd just downloaded his masterpiece over the Internet he would have been completely blown away. So, maybe we aren't in danger of losing the knowledge of the masters. Maybe we've reached the "cusp" where we can digitise all of this stuff and preserve it before it disappears into the mists of time. What do you think?  

I have to declare that I love science fiction. No matter what else I'm reading, I always have a science fiction book "on the go" at the same time. Over the years I've often thought "I wish they would make this into a film!" , which leads me to the topic of this column: If you had a choice, which science fiction / fantasy books would you most like to see made into a film? Below are a few suggestions in no particular order and off the top of my head, but I reserve the right to add more as comments later: - The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov. This has to be one of the best time-travel stories ever. - The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov. I'm thinking that this could be GREAT if it was done on the same epic scale as The Lord of the Ring trilogy directed by Peter Jackson (I cannot wait for the forthcoming Hobbit Films to come out). - Eon by Greg Bear: This is an amazing book that covers so many genres, including post-apocalypse, time travel, and generation starship, to name but a few. - Titan by John Varley: In 2025 an expedition to Saturn discovers that one of the moons is in fact a humongous living creature in which other races live. The remaining books in the trilogy might be hard to film, but if you took some elements from them and added them into Titan you would have an amazing movie. - Tunnel in the Sky by Robert Heinlein: A group of students are sent through a "Gate" to another planet as part of a survival course ... but the gate fails to reopen to bring them back... - Time for the Stars by Robert Heinlein: Follows the story of two telepathic young lads – identical twins Tom and Pat. Along with other telepaths, they act as "human radios" to communicate between starships and the Earth. But as the ships approach the speed of light, the twins on Earth age faster than their siblings... Now, I can think of a bunch of other books I would live to see as movies, but instead of me waffling on, let me hand the floor over to you...