OFF TOPIC Snow Crash [was Re: Hello World]

[alister]

On Tue, 23 Dec 2014 16:20:10 +0000, Grant Edwards wrote:

> 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.

I am reading it now thanks to this list & I currently agree that it is 
quite annoying

what feels like 3 or 4 chapters in & it is still trying to set the scene, 
an exercise in stylish writing with very little content so far.
even early scifi written for magazines on a per word basis were not this 
excessive (because if they were they would probably have been rejected or 
seriously edited).

Hopefully it will finally settle down & amend my current impression.



-- 
Guns don't kill people.  It's those damn bullets.  Guns just make them go
really really fast.
        -- Jake Johanson