In this first volume of the "Mac OS and *OS Internals" trilogy, Jonathan Levin takes on the user mode components of Apple's operating systems. Starting with an introduction as to their layered architecture, touring private frameworks and libraries, and then delving into the internals of applications, process, thread and memory management, Mach messaging, launchd and XPC internals, and wrapping up with advanced debugging and tracing techniques using the most powerful APIs that were hitherto unknown and unused outside Apple's own applications. As with the other books in this series, the approach taken is that of deep reverse engineering, with plenty of hands-on examples, illustrations, pointers to Apple's open sources (when available) and decompilation of code (when not). The book's companion website (NewOSXBook.com) is full of tools, samples and other bonus material for this book. Due to print run issues, NOTE FIRST COPIES WILL SHIP DECEMBER. Read more
Superintelligence asks the questions: what happens when machines surpass humans in general intelligence? Will artificial agents save or destroy us? Nick Bostrom lays the foundation for understanding the future of humanity and intelligent life. The human brain has some capabilities that the brains of other animals lack. It is to these distinctive capabilities that our species owes its dominant position. If machine brains surpassed human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become extremely powerful?possibly beyond our control. As the fate of the gorillas now depends more on humans than on the species itself, so would the fate of humankind depend on the actions of the machine superintelligence. But we have one advantage: we get to make the first move. Will it be possible to construct a seed Artificial Intelligence, to engineer initial conditions so as to make an intelligence explosion survivable? How could one achieve a controlled detonation? This profoundly ambitious a
