Book Review: "Bursts" by Albert-László Barabási

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Some of you may be wondering why I've written 3 posts today. Well, as I'm staying at my relatives' house, these relatives are at school or work during the day, so I don't really have a whole lot to do; hence, I've been reading a lot and blogging a lot. (I wish I had a more consistent Internet connection to download and try out some Unixoid distributions as well, but while I'm at it, I might as well wish for a Prancing Horse (Ferrari, for automobile non-enthusiasts).) Yeah, yeah, I have no life.
Also, some of you may be wondering why I've been putting up "(CC-BY-NC-SA Das U-Blog by Prashanth)" at the beginning of these book reviews. "CC-BY-NC-SA" refers to a Creative Commons 3.0 license where you can view, modify, and distribute the work as you like so long as you attribute me ("Das U-Blog by Prashanth") as the original creator, distribute derivative work for non-commercial purposes, and license derivative work with a similar/Creative Commons-compatible license allowing for similar unlimited viewing, modification, and redistribution.
This entire blog's content is already licensed as such. (The license is at the bottom of the blog page.) That said, the license on the pictures may be unclear. I have already provided a citation in the form of a link and the name of the original site for all pictures I have used on this blog that aren't mine. If the picture has no citation/link, it is mine and it is licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike license. I know that a lot of my older pictures (mostly from Unixoid reviews) don't have this explicit license statement, so I felt it was good to make this clear now (rather than never). From now on, any picture that I put up that is mine (i.e. is not from another link) is licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike license.
Anyway, sorry to keep you waiting. Follow the jump for a review of the book.
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Book Review: "Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya" by V. S. Narayana Rao

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This is actually a relative's book; this relative has let me borrow the book for the time being.
I must confess that I haven't read the entire book. But there's a reason for this.
With parents from Karnataka, I am of course proud of Sir M. Visvesvaraya's contributions to the industrialization of India. I am of course amazed by his physical and mental agility even through his 90s.
Yet, I am pained when I read this book. As a work written by an author and journalist, no less (as opposed to an engineer or contemporary with questionable English writing skills), this is one of the worst biographies I have ever written (which should be taken with a grain of salt, as I haven't read too many biographies).
For one, the writing style is way too choppy. The author keeps jumping from Visvesvaraya's life to some background about one of Visvesvaraya's work sites without any transition at all.
More importantly than that, though, is that it portrays Visvesvaraya like a saint. It talks about how morally pure he was and how he always won somehow or the other in the face of adversity (and if Visvesvaraya loses in some dispute, the author spins it to make it look like it was Visvesvaraya's gain and the adversary's loss). While it may be true that Visvesvaraya was as morally pure and principled as described in the book, I am immediately suspicious of a book that doesn't even attempt to offer any kind of criticism. Even at the end (which I have read), the book is almost apologetic that Visvesvaraya had to die after living up to the ripe old age of 102 (and even here, the book is inconsistent with itself, because his given lifespan doesn't correspond to the difference between his birth and death dates).
If you come upon this book, please save yourself the trouble of reading it. It's not worth reading at all.

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Book Review: "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson

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I had actually started reading this book over a year ago but never had the time to get past the first few chapters, so when I picked it up again just over a month ago, I decided to read it in full, from the beginning.
I guess another appropriate title for this would be "A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Nonfiction) by Not Douglas Adams". It really is a comprehensive guide to atomic physics, astronomy, chemistry, and biology for the layperson.
Bryson starts by discussing the origins of the universe and its measurement, both in terms of age and size. He continues by going into the developments of measurements of the Earth's age, chemistry, and modern physics. He then segues into the origins of life, continuing into full-blown biology, and finally concludes with a history of mankind.
Even though this is not a textbook by any means, I thoroughly enjoy it as an overview of the sciences for several reasons.
First, Bryson always tries to engage the reader by making the tone very conversational and by (rightfully) assuming that the average reader has no prior technical expertise in any of the fields; in fact, part of the humor comes from Bryson being humorously scornful of topics that are too technical for the average reader to understand. More important than that, though, is that Bryson makes the whole study of science more human by keeping the technical aspects at a minimum and focusing more on the personalities that have discovered the various sciences. For example, Carl von Linné (better known as Carolus Linnaeus) is hailed as the person who saved taxonomy by introducing the revolutionary 7-tiered classification system. However, I never knew that he was ridiculously obsessed with the methods that sometimes start human reproduction (I will not say that word here because this blog may then be blocked by parental controls). Those few pages of the book were enormously entertaining and enlightening (in that they shed light on the kind of character Linnaeus was). There are many other such pages of the book. Through it all, Bryson succeeds in bringing science to the layperson through his ability to show a very human side of science. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn a little more about science but finds conventional resources too technical (and hence, too inaccessible).

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Book Review: "Wired for War" by P. W. Singer

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I actually got the idea of getting this book after watching an episode of The Daily Show with John Stewart and its interview of this book's author (who was there to promote this very book). It piqued my curiosity because I am very much into computers and robots.
Let me say that this book, just like the robots it discusses, is "frakin' cool".
The book starts out by describing typical scenes of robotic battle in Iraq and Afghanistan today alongside descriptions of the daily goings-on at the offices of the manufacturers of these robotic warriors. It goes on to discuss the history of robots and what constitutes robots in laypeople's terms. It continues to talk about how the development of the robotics sector is exponential rather than linear in pace; it then talks about future robotic warriors and their creators. To conclude Part One, the book discusses science fiction's influence on robotic development as well as the culture of roboticists who choose to conduct research while rejecting military funding for their research.
Part Two starts with a discussion of revolutions in military affairs (RMAs) and whether the computer, Internet, or robotics revolution would be the RMA du jour; it continues by talking about human-robot interactions on the battlefield when robots become adversaries, as well as when robots end up in the hands of enemies. It further discusses the decentralization of power with the advent of the Internet and robotics and how power is shifting away from governments and towards individuals, organizations, and contracting companies. It then talks about how the public is becoming more apathetic towards the realities of war now that soldiers themselves are being separated from the battlefield, as well as what this change means for the soldiers and their families. It finally explores the possible scenarios of a robot revolt and the feasibility of programming ethics into robots.
It's a great read because it accurately conveys the excitement of the author in dealing with the subject. (Really, it's a great read because I'm into robots.) But there is one concern that I have that the book also does discuss: in today's warfare, the enemy is not fazed by the loss of their own life (in fact, such loss of life is revered as a sort of martyrdom), while the enemy looks upon our use of robotic technologies not with shock and awe at their technical prowess but with disdain at what they perceive is indicative of our cowardice. With that combination, we will never win.

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Red Hat, Fedora, and Small Towns

I was visiting $relative's house in a small town, where access to the cutting edge in technology is not the easiest to come by. First, I was surprised to find a digital photo frame (and a big one, at that) hanging on the wall. Then, $relative asked me to turn on the computer so that I could show some recent family pictures to other relatives. I turned on the computer, expecting to find nothing more than the Microsoft Windows XP loading screen. To my shock (which quickly morphed into delight), I was greeted instead by this (note: not verbatim):

GNU GRUB Version 0.97

Please choose which operating system to start:

Fedora Core 6

Microsoft Windows XP

I wasn't sure if $relative used Fedora or Windows, so I left it at Fedora. It stopped at the login screen; by then, $relative came in and restarted the computer (to start with Windows) as $relative didn't know the login information for Fedora, so the question of how their Fedora installation was became moot.
(For those who don't know, up till version 7, the official Fedora releases were termed Fedora Core because the base installation only had the official Red Hat code, while the extra downloadables were community-supported extras.)
This leads me into my next point: RHEL 6 is coming out soon! The great site Dedoimedo has a nice review of a beta release of it (though this beta is fairly representative of the upcoming official release, as far as I know). The review also expresses excitement over the near-simultaneous release of CentOS 6, CentOS being the free-of-charge community version of RHEL, as it brings a stable yet modern operating system to the desktop once more. (Fedora was supposed to be the community version of RHEL when it started, but it decided to go for cutting-edge technologies while RHEL stayed with stability above all else.)
But, Dedoimedo, may I remind you of Scientific Linux. It has all of the stable goodness of CentOS with the added goodies of proprietary codecs preinstalled as well as some useful scientific tools preinstalled.
So let me say that while I am certainly excited about RHEL 6 and CentOS 6, I am really excited about Scientific Linux 6.

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A Victory for Software Innovation

A new article (Paul Matthews, New Zealand Computer Society) reports that the latest version of New Zealand's new patent bill has once again excluded software from patentability.
This is a great move in itself, but what's even more significant is that the people leading the charge against software patents are actually the 2 largest software companies in New Zealand. This means that the companies (and not just individual high-profile developers) are the ones who are aware of the counterproductive effects patents have on innovation. If only US software companies were like that...
On a slightly related note, Pink Floyd's former manager has spoken out (Barry Collins, PCPro) against trying to stop online music sharing.
What's significant is that it's coming from the manager of a band that sold music under the conventional labels — it's not coming from an independent musician (i.e. outside the system) like Jill Sobule. What's even better is that the arguments against preventing file sharing are both economic and societal in nature — he knows that the most efficient production point is where the price equals the marginal cost of the good, and as the marginal cost of pretty much any digital software/files is $0, the price should follow suit. In addition to this, he realizes that the law is useless as a deterrent because the idea of copying as being wrong has not entered (and will not enter) the social consciousness; on the other hand, frivolous lawsuits will just make consumers resentful.
That said, I must disagree with what quoted economist Will Page says about file sharing sites damaging legitimate sites like Spotify. Looking at the data of pre- and post-DRM-free iTunes vs. music downloads on file sharing sites, iTunes sales shot up like anything after DRM was removed and all songs were set at $0.99, while file sharing music downloads fell off the charts when this happened. People will obtain goods legally if it is easier/more convenient than doing so illegally, and download data supports this.

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An All-In-One RIAA bash

I never thought something like this would happen, but I have seen 3 articles today bashing the RIAA (and one doing so for the MPAA) for different reasons.
The first (Ray Beckerman, Recording Industry vs. The People) summarizes how the RIAA, to get a certain (relatively small, for the RIAA) sum of money back, spent at least 50 times that sum of money on legal fees alone. (They spent $20 million in legal fees to recover $0.4 million in probable lost revenue.)
Well, now we know that the money recovered probably isn't going towards the artists that the RIAA claims are harmed by music sharing.
Actually, on that note, the second article (Mike Masnick, TechDirt) talks about just that. Though the RIAA claims to speak for artists and musicians, the record labels make millions of dollars, while the artists themselves net absolutely no money. I won't go into the numbers here because the analysis in the original article is much more thorough anyway. What I will say is that when labels like Sony-BMG and industry groups like the RIAA claim that piracy hurts the industry, carefully consider who is actually hurt by lost sales (hint: not the artists).
There is a third article (Mike Masnick, TechDirt) that talks about related screwy accounting with MPAA revenue figures. Basically, film companies manage to claim losses on blockbuster movies because a lot of the supposed costs are actually the company paying a studio or themselves (as far as I understand). Thankfully, this can't last because a few companies are now losing lawsuits relating to these bogus claims of monetary losses. Hopefully a similar thing will happen with the record companies.
If you think all hope is lost for artists who can't possibly make a dime under the conventional system, follow the jump to read the solution.
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