"A change in circumstances can be surprisingly disorienting. Consider Little Dorrit, the Charles Dickens' protagonist who was born and lived her entire life within the walls of the Marshalsea debtors' prison. Upon learning that she and her family were not only free to leave, but were also wealthy, Little Dorrit promptly fainted. Similarly, Windows and Mac users confronting a Unix-based operating system for the first time--while not reacting quite so dramatically as Little Dorrit--may find the experience disconcerting. But, there is help available to ease the transition. "Learning Red Hat Linux, Third Edition" by Bill McCarty (O'Reilly, US $39.95) provides a comprehensive yet gentle entry to the world of Linux with new users in mind, specifically, the popular Red Hat distribution of Linux.
OK, maybe this isn't fair since both Windows and Mac actually do have rich heritages of their own, but I love the image of Windows as a debtor's prison, and users falling away in a faint when they realize that not only are they free, but they are rich. A great bit of theater.
I also think that publicist Kathryn Barrett's literary efforts definitely take the art of PR to a new level. Beyond Cluetrain! Cluetrain said to skip the corporate speak and enter into conversations. Kathryn is showing us a new type of entertaining conversational gambit.
Other recent press releases have compared the job of the webmaster to the horse-carrot theorem in thermodynamics, and genetic sequence analysis to bird watching, each time with great eclat. If you're looking for a rich new source of metaphors for technical topics, you can't do better than to follow Kathyrn's work.
Tim O'Reilly is the founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Inc., thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world. In addition to Foo Camps ("Friends of O'Reilly" Camps, which gave rise to the "un-conference" movement), O'Reilly Media also hosts conferences on technology topics, including the Web 2.0 Summit, the Web 2.0 Expo, the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, the Gov 2.0 Summit, and the Gov 2.0 Expo. Tim's blog, the O'Reilly Radar, "watches the alpha geeks" to determine emerging technology trends, and serves as a platform for advocacy about issues of importance to the technical community. Tim's long-term vision for his company is to change the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators. In addition to O'Reilly Media, Tim is a founder of Safari Books Online, a pioneering subscription service for accessing books online, and O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, an early-stage venture firm.
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