Reviews for Active Fault Tolerant Control Systems

The average rating for Active Fault Tolerant Control Systems based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-02-11 00:00:00 Sylvie Laflamme Executive Summary: don't bother; the Beginner's Guide to the Singularity still needs to be written. (But see "Bonus Points" at end of review for an interesting link.) I was looking forward to liking this book: the title is an obvious reference to the tech singularity, and a good introduction to the subject would have been a useful book. But this ain't it. First, Dooling spends far too much effort being clever. Now, I don't mind clever: if the author stays on topic, it can be a delightful addition to the right book. For example, Mary Roach does an excellent job of combining a smart-but-goofy sense of humor with her scientific subject matter (although there are definitely folks that don't like her style, either). But Dooling doesn't just toss in cute allusions or snarky footnotes, but entire paragraphs or subchapters wander off topic. Second, Dooling couldn't decide who his audience is. Someone technical enough to understand all those in-jokes and off-topic nonsense will be bored to tears with explanations of why one should do backups, and will probably be scornful of his assertion that everyday folks need to learn programming languages. (One of the biggest goals of software design is ease-of-use: explicitly trying to get computers to compensate for human limits. But Dooling wants everyone to learn to program because a computer of the future, uh, "will have a sentimental fondness for its mother tongue." Astonishingly errant nonsense.) Many of those same clever jokes are going to leave the average non-technical reader confused, or worse: distracted. Translating an Emily Dickinson poem into the programming language Python was vaguely amusing, but it only held my attention because I'm enough of a programmer that I tried to actually decipher how Python compares with the many programming languages I know. For the average reader: bewildering waste of time. Third, he couldn't quite decide what the book was about. Is it about the singularity? Well, some chapters more-or-less stick to that subject. But why is that intermixed with his fondness for Unix and command line interpreters, or his biases towards text editors over word processors? Or the book-ending digression into something about religion, cognition, evolution and flying spaghetti monsters? Chapter Ten is titled "Be Prepared!" and attempts, clumsily, to tell us how to get ready for the time when technology will change everything, even if it isn't as apocalyptic as Kurzweil's vision of the singularity. It isn't too well thought out (this is the chapter that, among other things, tells folks to learn to program), but I suspect a fuzzy notion of such preparation is how he was able to convince himself that discussions of Open Source software and Post-Rapture Religion would be useful. They aren't. There were definitely good points in the book. He clearly did quite a bit of research, so there are quotes galore to lead the interested reader to further study. And he tosses in a silly story about how Dad and Son, needing to keep a play date with their World of Warcraft buddies, have to deceive and manipulate Mom who simply doesn't get it. Fun, but not actually useful. The only portion of the book that I really enjoyed was the reminder that Bill Joy ("The Other Bill") wrote a cautionary article on the future for Wired Magazine back in April 2000 (see the Technology concerns subheading in Joy's Wikipedia page, or the article's Wikipedia page, or the article itself). Many foolishly focused on Joy's depiction of runaway nanotechnology (the "grey goo scenario"), but I was more impressed by his nightmares over "KMD": knowledge-enabled mass destruction. Global destruction by out-of-control Von Neumann machine is quite unlikely, but the inexorably descending barriers to some destructive technologies (such as genetic engineering -- the "knowledge") will enable future terrorism far worse than we've ever seen. Dooling also reminds us that Theodore Kaczynski -- the Unabomber -- wrote scathingly and brilliantly on the technological future. (I have always resented Bill Joy because I was forced to learn and use Sendmail, but I have since learned that he isn't responsible for that atrocity, so I guess now I only resent him because he's a tech millionaire.) But even that chapter ends poorly when Dooling compares the dark side of tech to research and development of atomic weapons, and proceeds to ham-fistedly distort the era's complex social history as well as the motivations of the scientists. Grossly oversimplifying such a fraught time to provide a poorly thought-out lesson and a bit of trivial entertainment was very distasteful. OK, bonus points for providing this link to Paul Boutin's blog essay "Biowar for Dummies". Definitely worth reading. ­

Review # 2 was written on 2013-09-21 00:00:00 Ashlyn Zeller I wouldn't say I'm sorry I read the book, as there were quite a few quotes and ideas that I hadn't run into before. The book fell short, however, in that it wasn't really the Singularity primer I had hoped for. The author's condescending prose, while sometimes funny (the passage about the Estonian hacker's fitness was interesting), was heavy and depressing. It made me feel as if Dooling doesn't particularly like humanity, or himself for that matter. Dooling's constant use of footnotes to define even the most basic terms made me wonder who he thought his target audience is. The title is "Ratpure for Geeks" but he writes as if he believes my grandmother saw this on the shelf and decided to pick it up. The author also came off as strangely arrogant. He writes as if he thinks having a linux installation on his machine makes him God's gift to technology. And speaking of God. I wish he would have layed off the religion. I was going to rank this book as a 3.5 until I got to the last chapter, where he rips apart Dawkins and starts quoting Einstein in a way that would make anyone believe that Einstein was a theist (which at least towards the end of his life, he clearly was NOT). Then he quotes Dostoyevsky, in a way that rephrases the age-old argument that without religion there can be no morality. I had to double check the quote, and sure enough it came from the Brothers Dostoyevsky. This struck me as intellectually dishonest. It is basically lying to quote a person for a passage in a novel and pass it off as their own beliefs. It made me immediately suspicious of every other quote he used in this book. Dooling ends the book basically implying that he's going to focus on his soul and the afterlife, which I thought was nauseating. I strongly suspect that there was a lot more injection of his own religious beliefs in the book that was lost in editing. There were some good parts. It was the first time I heard about the Darwin Among the Machines article, as well as the Kurzweil poetry engine. So I give it two stars. Not a total waste of time, but I wouldn't recommend it. btw - There were WAY too many Warcraft references in this book. It got tedious. At the end in the acknowledgments, he admits that he's never played the game. What a poser.