OFF TOPIC Snow Crash [was Re: Hello World]

[Grant Edwards]

On 2014-12-23, Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> wrote:
> Chris Angelico wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Dec 23, 2014 at 12:15 AM, Roy Smith <roy at panix.com> wrote:
>>> If I really didn't trust something, I'd go to AWS and spin up one of
>>> their free-tier micro instances and run it there :-)
>> 
>> How do you know it won't create console output that stroboscopically
>> infects you with a virus through your eyes? Because that's *totally*
>> what would be done in the town of Eureka.
>
> Anybody in IT who hasn't read Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" needs to hand
> in their Geek Card immediately.

I tried, but I got so tired of the author doing stuff like pointing
out that there were 65536 of something or other (and that it's a power
of TWO, kids!) that I gave up.  The annoying thing was that there was
no real technical reason why the quantity _needed_ to be a power of
two.  Too many of the technical details that you got constantly beat
over the head with were 

  1) not even remotely relevent to the story

  2) mostly an effort by the author to demonstrate that he had a
     junior-high level understanding of a 68K based Macintosh and knew
     lots of cool grown up tech-sounding words -- and even if had only
     a vague idea of what they meant, he could still impress the other
     13-year olds.

  3) just plain wrong

And even _with_ all the technical jibber-jabber, none of it explained
or justified the whole "writing a virus to infect the brain through
the optic nerve" thing which might just have well been magick and
witches.
  
-- 
Grant