The Lifecycle of Software Objects

2010
The Lifecycle of Software Objects

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  • Author: Ted Chiang
  • Publisher:
  • ISBN: 9781596063174
  • Category : Artificial intelligence
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 0

What's the best way to create artificial intelligence? In 1950, Alan Turing wrote, "Many people think that a very abstract activity, like the playing of chess, would be best. It can also be maintained that it is best to provide the machine with the best sense organs that money can buy, and then teach it to understand and speak English. This process could follow the normal teaching of a child. Things would be pointed out and named, etc. Again I do not know what the right answer is, but I think both approaches should be tried." The first approach has been tried many times in both science fiction and reality. In this new novella, at over 30,000 words, his longest work to date, Ted Chiang offers a detailed imagining of how the second approach might work within the contemporary landscape of startup companies, massively-multiplayer online gaming, and open-source software. It's a story of two people and the artificial intelligences they helped create, following them for more than a decade as they deal with the upgrades and obsolescence that are inevitable in the world of software. At the same time, it's an examination of the difference between processing power and intelligence, and of what it means to have a real relationship with an artificial entity.

Stories of Your Life and Others

2010-10-26
Stories of Your Life and Others

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  • Author: Ted Chiang
  • Publisher: Knopf
  • ISBN: 1931520895
  • Category : Fiction
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 298

From the author of Exhalation, an award-winning short story collection that blends "absorbing storytelling with meditations on the universe, being, time and space ... raises questions about the nature of reality and what it is to be human" (The New York Times). Stories of Your Life and Others delivers dual delights of the very, very strange and the heartbreakingly familiar, often presenting characters who must confront sudden change—the inevitable rise of automatons or the appearance of aliens—with some sense of normalcy. With sharp intelligence and humor, Chiang examines what it means to be alive in a world marked by uncertainty, but also by beauty and wonder. An award-winning collection from one of today's most lauded writers, Stories of Your Life and Others is a contemporary classic. Includes “Story of Your Life”—the basis for the major motion picture Arrival

The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate

2007
The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate

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  • Author: Ted Chiang
  • Publisher:
  • ISBN:
  • Category : Baghdad (Iraq)
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 72

This curious time-travel novella is a gracefully told lesson about accepting fate-or, as better suits this medieval Arabian setting, the will of Allah. A Baghdad merchant discovers an alchemical device that can send a traveler back in time 20 years. Despite the alchemist's warning that "what is made cannot be unmade," and three illustrative tales about others' attempts to alter the past, the merchant is determined to return to an earlier time to save his long-dead wife

Site Reliability Engineering

2016-03-23
Site Reliability Engineering

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  • Author: Niall Richard Murphy
  • Publisher: "O'Reilly Media, Inc."
  • ISBN: 1491951176
  • Category :
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 552

The overwhelming majority of a software system’s lifespan is spent in use, not in design or implementation. So, why does conventional wisdom insist that software engineers focus primarily on the design and development of large-scale computing systems? In this collection of essays and articles, key members of Google’s Site Reliability Team explain how and why their commitment to the entire lifecycle has enabled the company to successfully build, deploy, monitor, and maintain some of the largest software systems in the world. You’ll learn the principles and practices that enable Google engineers to make systems more scalable, reliable, and efficient—lessons directly applicable to your organization. This book is divided into four sections: Introduction—Learn what site reliability engineering is and why it differs from conventional IT industry practices Principles—Examine the patterns, behaviors, and areas of concern that influence the work of a site reliability engineer (SRE) Practices—Understand the theory and practice of an SRE’s day-to-day work: building and operating large distributed computing systems Management—Explore Google's best practices for training, communication, and meetings that your organization can use

Exhalation

2019-05-07
Exhalation

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  • Author: Ted Chiang
  • Publisher: Vintage
  • ISBN: 110194790X
  • Category : Fiction
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 311

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • Nine stunningly original, provocative, and poignant stories—two published for the very first time—all from the mind of the incomparable author of Stories of Your Life and Others Tackling some of humanity’s oldest questions along with new quandaries only he could imagine, these stories will change the way you think, feel, and see the world. They are Ted Chiang at his best: profound, sympathetic, revelatory. Ted Chiang tackles some of humanity’s oldest questions along with new quandaries only he could imagine. In “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” a portal through time forces a fabric seller in ancient Baghdad to grapple with past mistakes and second chances. In “Exhalation,” an alien scientist makes a shocking discovery with ramifications that are literally universal. In “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom,” the ability to glimpse into alternate universes necessitates a radically new examination of the concepts of choice and free will.

Zendegi

2010-06-17
Zendegi

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  • Author: Greg Egan
  • Publisher: Hachette UK
  • ISBN: 0575086211
  • Category : Fiction
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 352

Nasim is a young computer scientist, hoping to work on the Human Connectome Project: a plan to map every neural connection in the human brain. But funding for the project is cancelled, and Nasim ends up devoting her career to Zendegi, a computerised virtual world used by millions of people. Fifteen years later, a revived Connectome Project has published a map of the brain. Zendegi is facing fierce competition from its rivals, and Nasim decides to exploit the map to fill the virtual world with better Proxies: the bit-players that bring its crowd scenes to life. As controversy rages over the nature and rights of the Proxies, a friend with terminal cancer begs Nasim to make a Proxy of him, so some part of him will survive to help raise his orphaned son. But Zendegi is about to become a battlefield ...

Tower of Babylon

2016-05-04
Tower of Babylon

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  • Author: Ted Chiang
  • Publisher: Vintage
  • ISBN: 1101974427
  • Category : Fiction
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 32

A Vintage Shorts “Short Story Month” Selection Together with a crew of other miners and cart-pullers, Hillalum is recruited to climb the Tower of Babylon and unearth what lies beyond the vault of heaven. During his journey, Hillalum discovers entire civilizations of tower-dwellers on the tower—there are those who live inside the mists of clouds, those who raise their vegetables above the sun, and those who have spent their lives under the oppressive weight of an endless, white stratum at the top of the universe. “Tower of Babylon” is a rare gem—a winner of the prestigious Nebula award, the first story Ted Chiang ever published, and the brilliant opening piece to Chiang’s much-lauded first collection, Stories of Your Life and Others, which is soon to be a major motion picture starring Amy Adams. An ebook short.

Flexible, Reliable Software

2011-06-21
Flexible, Reliable Software

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  • Author: Henrik B. Christensen
  • Publisher: CRC Press
  • ISBN: 1420093630
  • Category : Computers
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 523

Flexible, Reliable Software: Using Patterns and Agile Development guides students through the software development process. By describing practical stories, explaining the design and programming process in detail, and using projects as a learning context, the text helps readers understand why a given technique is required and why techniques must be combined to overcome the challenges facing software developers. The presentation is pedagogically organized as a realistic development story in which customer requests require introducing new techniques to combat ever-increasing software complexity. After an overview and introduction of basic terminology, the book presents the core practices, concepts, tools, and analytic skills for designing flexible and reliable software, including test-driven development, refactoring, design patterns, test doubles, and responsibility driven and compositional design. It then provides a collection of design patterns leading to a thorough discussion of frameworks, exemplified by a graphical user interface frramework (MiniDraw). The author also discusses the important topics of configuration management and systematic testing. In the last chapter, projects lead students to design and implement their own frameworks, resulting in a reliable and usable implementation of a large and complex software system complete with a graphical user interface. This text teaches how to design, program, and maintain flexible and reliable software. Installation guides, source code for the examples, exercises, and projects can be found on the author’s website.

Sorry Please Thank You

2012
Sorry Please Thank You

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  • Author: Charles Yu
  • Publisher: Pantheon
  • ISBN: 0307907171
  • Category : Fiction
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 241

Presents a collection of stories featuring a retail employee who is confronted by a zombie, a computer warrior who leads his fighter band across a virtual landscape, and a company that outsources grief.

Java Data Objects

2003-04-22
Java Data Objects

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  • Author: David Jordan
  • Publisher: "O'Reilly Media, Inc."
  • ISBN: 9780596002763
  • Category : Computers
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 388

This is a definitive guide to JDO API. It provides a thorough introduction to JDO (Java Data Objects), starting with a simple application that demonstrates many of JDO's capabilities. It shows the reader how to make classes persistent, how to configure JDO at runtime, how to make queries and more.