This book presents a broad overview of computer graphics (CG), its history, and the hardware tools it employs. Covering a substantial number of concepts and algorithms, the text describes the techniques, approaches, and algorithms at the core of this field. Emphasis is placed on practical design and implementation, highlighting how graphics software works, and explaining how current CG can generate and display realistic-looking objects. The mathematics is non-rigorous, with the necessary mathematical background introduced in the Appendixes. Features: includes numerous figures, examples and solved exercises; discusses the key 2D and 3D transformations, and the main types of projections; presents an extensive selection of methods, algorithms, and techniques; examines advanced techniques in CG, including the nature and properties of light and color, graphics standards and file formats, and fractals; explores the principles of image compression; describes the important input/output graphics devices.

Uncovers a host of problems and suggested solutions for issues ranging from protecting data from thieves or spies; backing up and storing files; and safeguarding from viruses to choosing bars, chains, and locks to prevent physical removal. Original. (All Users).

In Two Bits, Christopher M. Kelty investigates the history and cultural significance of Free Software, revealing the people and practices that have transformed not only software but also music, film, science, and education. Free Software is a set of practices devoted to the collaborative creation of software source code that is made openly and freely available through an unconventional use of copyright law. Kelty explains how these specific practices have reoriented the relations of power around the creation, dissemination, and authorization of all kinds of knowledge. He also makes an important contribution to discussions of public spheres and social imaginaries by demonstrating how Free Software is a “recursive public”—a public organized around the ability to build, modify, and maintain the very infrastructure that gives it life in the first place. Drawing on ethnographic research that took him from an Internet healthcare start-up company in Boston to media labs in Berlin to young entrepreneurs in Bangalore, Kelty describes the technologies and the moral vision that bind together hackers, geeks, lawyers, and other Free Software advocates. In each case, he shows how their practices and way of life include not only the sharing of software source code but also ways of conceptualizing openness, writing copyright licenses, coordinating collaboration, and proselytizing. By exploring in detail how these practices came together as the Free Software movement from the 1970s to the 1990s, Kelty also considers how it is possible to understand the new movements emerging from Free Software: projects such as Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that creates copyright licenses, and Connexions, a project to create an online scholarly textbook commons.

The creation of the Mac in 1984 catapulted America into the digital millennium, captured a fanatic cult audience, and transformed the computer industry into an unprecedented mix of technology, economics, and show business. Now veteran technology writer and Newsweek senior editor Steven Levy zooms in on the great machine and the fortunes of the unique company responsible for its evolution. Loaded with anecdote and insight, and peppered with sharp commentary, Insanely Great is the definitive book on the most important computer ever made. It is a must-have for anyone curious about how we got to the interactive age.