Reviews for It Today (Information Technology Today)

The average rating for It Today (Information Technology Today) based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-08-13 00:00:00 Louis Sussman This book takes the position that conservation must begin with with individuals (conservation, recycling, renewable resources, population control) like yourself: as consequence it is more of a polemical screed that technical textbook. I should give Professor Chiras a break. None of us would like to be held to every prediction we made in 1991. Having said that, some of the predictions (ethanol!) here are just embarrassing. He has an unfortunate tendency to report benefits, of technologies he dislikes, on a per day (a smaller number) basis while reporting costs on a per year (a larger number) basis. Is it just me, or is this a little sleazy? He seems oblivious to the Jevons Paradox: you can't talk intelligently about energy/resource policy without understanding this. (Pages 369/370 - Improved energy efficiency . . . could go a long way toward cutting emissions. - is just flat out wrong. Professor Chiras does get some things right. Solar energy is going to make the difference. (Please be gentle in 2031 when you remind me I said this.) Solar (PV thin-film as being implemented at the new Boeing facility in South Carolina) is going to change everything. He also discusses the (pernicious) effect of (most important - the control of) population growth: somehow this issues seems to be something we no longer discuss. It's time to start again. p. 390. He says that About 3.2 million metric tons of oil enters the world's seas every year. About half of the oil that contaminates the ocean comes from natural seepage from offshore deposits. One-fifth comes from well blowouts, breaks in pipelines, and tanker spills. The rest, quite surprisingly, comes from oil disposed of inland and carried to he ocean in rivers.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-01-15 00:00:00 Tim Lee Would have been better to read this closer to when it was published back in 2000. The author talks extensively about furbies, lego mindstorms, the introduction of the world wide web and virtual reality. If you want history and context for these, then you'll like the book. The author aluded to how this technology is impacting our kids and their world view (ie, why should they memorize something when the web is available to look it up at any time from their cell phones). I would have enjoyed him discussing this more, but it remained a footnote in what was otherwise a drawn out history lesson on a few select technologies. Those technologies did fill us with awe at one time, but today are a commonplace, and so the book has lost much of the punch it may have had when it was first published.