An accessible account of how Wi-Fi tech became a crucial part of our work, society, and lives.
The story of the creation of Wi-Fi, an epic journey of turning complexity into simplicity.
Younger readers may not even remember when the internet was a technology of wires, cables, and plugs. Wi-Fi connectivity has become so ubiquitous that we don’t even think about it, but as this book shows, it was a long haul to get there. Ennis was at the center of it, first as one of the authors of the technical proposal that became the foundation for Wi-Fi systems and later as the vice president of technology for the Wi-Fi Alliance, the industry association that handles certification and compliance issues. The seed for it was a project to create a system for the Chicago Board of Trade, known for its chaos and corruption. Ennis and his associates were faced with a range of technical and regulatory restrictions. However, once the local area network was built, they could see the potential for expansion and began working on rules to allow for compatibility of hardware and software. The outcome, after much pushing and shoving within the emerging field, was a set of standards known as IEEE 802.11. Going global presented new challenges, but the standards eventually caught on, and the introduction of mobile phone connectivity and video streaming cemented the place of Wi-Fi. Ennis explains all this with the authority of an insider and largely avoids the trap of jargon. He estimates that there are currently 18 billion devices using Wi-Fi, but with a solid set of protocols in place, he sees no limits to growth. “The economic value of Wi-Fi to the world…is expected to be nearly $5 trillion by 2025,” he writes. “More than four billion new Wi-Fi devices are sold every year. The likelihood that Wi-Fi will be replaced anytime soon is very small indeed.”
An accessible account of how Wi-Fi tech became a crucial part of our work, society, and lives.Pub Date: July 18, 2023
ISBN: 9781637587485
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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