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The Mountain View reviewer says that "much of the book consists of a rehash of familiar and/or obvious information." Well, that information is familiar now precisely because the first edition of Internet Bubble made it so. The Perkins brothers were the first to dissect the financial food chain that
exists between VCs and investment bankers. I read that first edition, and I'm glad I did. It saved me from losing my shirt.
Given their track record, and the fact that I'm still keeping some of my assets in stock, how could I not read the second edition?
As for the Doerr quote, I was frankly amazed to see it, because the Perkins certainly don't treat the guy with kid gloves in the book. Maybe Doerr was just being honest when he called Internet Bubble the best researched book on Silicon Vallley ever. I know I agree.
I run the lamest bookstore in the world. We have no books and I haven't necessarily read the one I'm reviewing. So what difference does that make? I'll probably outlast Amazon and no one paid any attention to my review of the Internet Bubble in 1999 (at least I didn't) so this is just perfect for our through-the-looking-glass-world of today. OK, maybe I had a peek at the galleys and I can say that The Revised Edition will be an even bigger success then its predecessor. Michael Perkins and his brother Tony are the ultimate insiders as founders of the Red Herring Magazine (the only magazine we carry). These guys simply ran the math and said, in the first edition, (I paraphrase) that we were living in a house of cards so flimsy that when a slight breeze came by the Internet stock market was going to come tumbling down and all the kings horses...
They provided a long list of stocks with the recommendation to sell immediately. I must admit that I was swept away but the promise of unearned riches so I ignored the warning and I was even all set to move my little gray-haired mother into some pretty snappy startups (I had all the hot tips). She was so old fashioned that she decided to buy certificates of deposit, a piece of a Hollywood movie and a trailer park in Santa Barbara. The CD's barely broke 4% and the trailer park moved up smartly but the movie (an embarrassing teen flick) has returned about 250%. And she hasn't even seen the movie! "Is an average net pretax of 140% good?" she asks with a straight face.
The Revised Edition summarizes our fall from grace but also shines light on many new areas of the business from which the next great thing will hopefully emerge.
In Silicon Valley we continue to demonstrate brilliance, toughness and an unquenchable optimism and this means we will learn from the past and keep on creating the future. You would do well to heed the Bubble books and when in doubt, listen to your mother.
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Growing up in the 60s and 70s, it was not at all uncommon, at least in Canada, for one's circle of friends to include Marxist-Leninists ' particularly once you got to University. I actually had a rather close friend who not only adopted this political philosophy, but also actively espoused the cause of Soviet Russia ' to the point of making excuses for Stalin. This made for extremely lively debates. In retrospect, knowing what we now know about communist Russia, I rather think my friend needed at the very least a good thrashing. For it was people like him, and the left-leaning western media, that gave succor to, and in a way legitimized, what we now know was one of the must shocking brutal, tyrannies ever to disgrace our planet.
The subject of the culpability of the western media, fellow travelers and communist sympathizers is covered by Richard Pipes, in 'Russia Under the Bolsheviks'. These people have, in a very real sense, blood on their hands, and I often tremble with rage when I recall the facile and damaging lies that they propagated. Under the noses of these gullible and willfully naïve 'liberal thinkers', 35 million people died, either as the result of political terror or deliberate starvation.
Alexander Yakovlev now reinforces the point with a harrowing, grim collection of essays, 'A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia.' Yakovlev was an advisor to Gorbachev and is now the head of a commission charged with analyzing and cataloging the horrors of Soviet Russia. In my review of Pipes' book (mentioned above), I had occasion to remark that in that book, Lenin came in for the thrashing that he so richly deserved. Lenin has had it easy. When the full horrors of the Stalinist period became known, Marxists and Socialists to a man rushed to point out that Stalin was an anomaly, that he and his regime had nothing to do with the gentle, humane, philosophical Lenin (and, in any event, 'one had to break eggs to make an omlette'). Some people still believe this. Do you? Well here is Yakovlev's trenchant, damning summing up:
'Exponent of mass terror, violence, the dictatorship of the proletariat, class struggle and other inhuman concepts. Organizer of fratricidal Russian civil war and concentration camps, including camps for children. Incessant in his demands for arrests and capital punishment by bullet or rope. Personally responsible for the deaths of millions of Russian citizens. By every norm of international law, posthumously indicted for crimes against humanity.'
Shockingly, Russians (as well and never-say-die communists throughout the world) continue to revere Lenin. This horrifies Yakovlev who notes that 'to this day the country proliferates with monuments to Lenin and streets names after him.' Worse than this, a shockingly large segment of Russian society today believes that Stalin is in need of rehabilitation, that he did nor good than bad for Russia. Stalin has become nothing more than a name to most people in the world. When Saddam Hussein was compared to Stalin, when it was noted that he had actually studied Stalin, this tended to make little impression - because most of the world has forgotten. Men like Conquest, Pipes, Figes and Yakovlev write so that we will NOT forget. Their books should be required reading, because men like Lenin and Stalin NEVER go away, they are always with us and we must be forever vigilant and on our guard that they do not take root again.
Yakovlev documents the atrocities--to the peasants, the church, the jews, ethnic groups, the inteligensia, to political dissidents, to prisoners of war and saddest of all to children and families of those considered dangerous to the regime. For Yakovlev Russia must purge itself of Bolshevism in order to once again move forward. At times an emotional journey, it nevertheless gives an accurate accounting. Well done.
In A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia, Yakovlev presents the tragedy of Russia under Lenin and Stalin. He examines in separate chapters how various constituents of the Soviet Union fared under Communism: Political parties other than the Bolsheviks, the peasants, the intelligentsia, the clergy, the military, the numerous non-Russian nationalities, the Jews. All were exploited, when possible, to further the Bolshevik hold on Russia, and executed, exiled, or enslaved when political exploitation was not possible. Yakovlev holds Lenin and Stalin responsible for 60 million deaths. These include peasants that starved as a direct result of the collectivization of agriculture and World War II deaths, many of which were a direct result of Stalin's purge of competent military officers on the eve of the war and the unwarranted trust he placed in the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact. Some have questioned the legitimacy of attributing these deaths to Stalin. Rather than debate that responsibility here, the reader is referred to Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, and Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime.
Yakovlev traces all of the totalitarian acts of terror associated with Stalin's rule to their beginnings under Lenin, demolishing the myth that Stalin somehow perverted the more humane party of Lenin. The book is a somber read, 200 plus pages documenting murders, torture, slave labor in the name of an ideology that is morally, intellectually, and (now, thankfully) financially bankrupt.
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There is very minimum amount of info on important topics like Applets etc. where it has just one chapter on the applet.
It is more of a remake of Help database, with 75% of the material similar to the Help.
It would have been useful to the user if there was more explanation and examples.
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The parts dealing with the C-74 and C-124 (which are presumably why the majority of purchasers would want this book) leave far, far too much of the story of this interesting transport untold. There is a good book to be written on the Globemaster story but this is not it.
A further annoyance is that the book is absolutely littered with spelling mistakes.
Buy this only if you're a real die-hard Globemaster enthusiast.
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I think there are gender differences no one talks about except this author. He gives exercises to wake up feelings and ways that are more in men than women. They made the whole book come to life for me and then I saw that men were making me better offers than I realized.
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The software itself is very powerful - it's a shame there isn't a book to help us take advantage of it's power.
Guess I may have to buy Photoshop....if for nothing else, it at least has comprehensive documentation.
This is just ONE small example of many.
This manual, like most on the photoimpact software, is really quite useless
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Much of this THIN tome is spent on self-evident bromides. Environmental degradation = bad. Solidarity = good. The distinction between left and right ain't what it used to be. You don't say! The rest is taken up by pious good intentions about social democracy renewing itself. Any second-rate political speech writer could've come up with roughly the same set of homilies.
Giddens is a brilliant sociologist, but this book never gets off the ground. It's too bad, really, because Blair style new-new-leftism really could use a coherent defense from a skilfull theorist. Instead, what it gets out of this book is a half baked homily that betrays an alarming degree of political naivete for such an eminent social scientists. It's a mess, really.
Two years on, and the inflatable man is back. There is no shortage of hot air rushing from place to place in this sequal to The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy. There's almost nothing to disagree with here -- which is part of the problem.
The story so far goes something like this: the good guys in politics are called 'social democrats'. They care about things like equality and a fair deal for the underdog. The bad guys are called 'neoliberals.' They go round beating people with handbags and making jokes about bombing the Soviet Union. Their aim is to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. But there's a problem. Up until now being a social democrat has meant responding to every new social problem with an increase in the size and scope of government (tax and spend). However during the 1980s most left-leaning politicians figured out that was exactly the kind of thing which lost elections. So around the world, left of center governments abandoned Keynsianism, cracked down on welfare and started privatizing. And the he voters liked it. But this success also created a problem. The chattering classes accused their politicians of selling out to neoliberalism.
So this is where Giddens steps in. While the third way worked well in practice, to convince the critics it also needs to work in theory. Giddens sets out to persuade the intellectual left that the third way is sheep in wolf's clothing. Sure on the outside it looks like a toned-down version of Reagan/Thatcher but deep down it's a caring sharing lamb. Social democratic practice is past its use-by date, but there's no need, says Giddens, to identify social democracy with specific policies. Instead, social democratic goals can be expressed through new policies--like making welfare recipients work, getting tough on crime and cutting the bureaucracy. It's all a matter of how you look at it.
In Britain and Europe the term 'social democracy' has become a kind of brand name with some serious brand loyalty. Giddens is fighting to keep that brand for the new product line. It's a bit like Levi Strauss saying "sure they're not jeans... but they ARE Levis and you know how much you like those."
Tony Giddens offers a concise, but clear, discussion of what the Third Way is all about, and if a reader approaches the text with a willingness to think outside of the left-right consciousness, then it offers a significant contribution to new thinking about politics. It reconceptualizes politics as the continual reconciliation of the failure of governments and markets. It is, at its simplest, about appreciating that meaningful political thinking requires reflexivity and a willingness to change opinions and policies as circumstances change around us. It is not about selling-out to the capitalists; it is not about tax-and-spend politics. This is a book about solutions.
Tony Perkins is a master of getting invitations to events in Silicon Valley and sucking up to the insiders. But trust me, you do not want to waste your money on this cynical, hypocritical advice from someone who is a business failure.