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The Satori Effect
One Killer App What the hell is the author of Amistad doing writing a contemporary mystery about hacking, viruses, a computer forensics specialist and the FBI? That was my first thought as I started reading The Satori Effect, the new novel by best-selling author David Pesci. By the time I hit page 20, I could see exactly what he was doing: kicking ass.
Pesci, best known for his novel Amistad (inspiration for the Steven Spielberg movie), steps out of history with The Satori Effect and lands firmly in a future that might be just a few months away. The story, a mystery wrapped around the world of hacking, e-mail viruses and apps, opens with a suicide and quickly moves to a possible homicide: the victim is decapitated when his computer monitor explodes. This turns out to be the second such incident in less than a month. The FBI suspects a Unabomber type, dubbed "The CyberBomber" by the media. A computer forensics tech named Flint, who works in a top-secret government facility, is charged with going through the overwrites on the victims' hard drives in search of clues.
What Flint finds is not the traces of a bomber but pieces of code, one that he comes to believe are part of an app designed specifically to use the system's hardware to kill the user. It's a wild premise, and not even Flint's co-workers believe such an app could be written. But as Flint and his partner (the very hot, seen-it, done-it Special Agent Buhner) begin to investigate, the clues start mounting up. So do the bodies, and it becomes a race to find out who has the app and catch him (or them) before the code is given a replication subroutine and turn it into a full blown Internet virus.
All this is revealed in The Satori Effect's first 120 pages, which are posted online (PDF format) for free at www.thesatorieffect.com. There is also a rich cast of characters, including a dark-hat hacker with a serious information addiction, Flint's boss (who makes Machiavelli look like one of the Backstreet Boys), Flint's co-worker -- a know-it-all wise-ass lesbian tech named Berlow -- and an ever-deepening plot where almost nothing is as it seems on the surface. The writing is first-rate, the details accurate, the story flies and there are more than a few surprises.
My only real hit against The Satori Effect is that it's not available in book form yet. I found out about it after a friend sent me the URL for the book. According to the Matrix-flavored website built around the free pages, Pesci's publishers have hedged on putting this out because he is known as a history writer and they don't think his readers will follow him to technofiction. Pesci, who oozes attitude in the site's copy, has flipped them the bird by posting this online. If readers like the free 120 pages posted on his site for free, the rest is available in PDF format for $10 via PayPal. I quickly found that didn't like reading the book on screen, so I was printing out 100 pages at a time and carrying them around loose, which sucked. Still, I think Pesci's going to get the last laugh on his publishers. The Satori Effect rocks. Neal Stephenson beware: Pesci may be eating your lunch soon, if not your Captain Crunch.
That they've put the first bunches of pages online as a PDF file. If more publishers did this, it would go a long way to help you decide whether or not you like a book - or an author. I wouldn't mind seeing more of this...
This sounds better to me than Stephen Kings idea of digital publishing. There doesn't seem to be the same grief from the author about the same user reading the same story on different platforms. I bought The Plant online just to support the concept in general, but I never really felt that it was all the way there. It would be cool if publishers caught on to this, I would love to be able to read the first few chapters of a book before deciding to buy it.
-This sig intentionally left blank
So if it's being released as a PDF, anyone know of a PDF reader for Palm OS?
The only reason to take the subway into work is so I can sync my palm before I leave, and catch up on the news, etc... it'd be nice if I could download books to it, too, without needing some other piece of hardware to carry with me.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
IMHO, the closer the e-book gets to reality, the closer our society starts to resemble "Fahrenheit 451" and "1984". The government has been lying to us; the final frontier isn't space, it's THEM.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Deavid Pesci has already written the virus that will make your computer decapitate you. He's now using the premise of a free book to place the virus. Once the number of downloads has reached 10,000, he will trigger the payload, and decapitate you all! Fools!
. I quickly found that didn't like reading the book on screen,
I used to have difficulty reading long pieces off the screen. After I really got into fanfic, distributed via mailing lists, I got used to it and now have no problems. It's just a case of getting aclimated.
Now the only time I print something off is to read in bed (still not comfortable curling up with a laptop), to read on the bus or if I need to show it to someone who doesn't have a computer.
Stephen
"Don't write down to your readers, the only people less intelligent than you can't read" - Sign on Newspaper Office Wall
What Flint finds is not the traces of a bomber but pieces of code, one that he comes to believe are part of an app designed specifically to use the system's hardware to kill the user. It's a wild premise, and not even Flint's co-workers believe such an app could be written.
Tell me you haven't ever thought to look at the coronary-heart-disease rates of your average fat bearded sysadmin? Where I work, it may have been the pizza and nachos that pulled the trigger, but it was Unix which cocked the gun.
-- Anne Marie
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
Where is the URL?!
We're on the road to Tycho.
So what does this fictional trick involve then? Darned if I'm going to cough up 10 bucks to find out.
Regards, Ralph.
But releasing the whole book in PDF? That seems kind of self defeating. I think even the most hardcore slashdotters will agree that most of the charm of books is that you can put one in your bag and carry it anywhere, and that you can hold it, and physically flip the pages.
PDF is for spec sheets and boring manuals (though i personally prefer HTML in those instances). But regardless, i think that the electronic book format is cool as a supplement, say if you wanted to search for something, etc. But needing a decent speed PC with you should not be a prerequisite to reading a book. Nor is printing out a good solution if you ask me.
After all, you can't put a PDF file on a shelf with the proud satisfaction of having finished it, so it can stand there until you recommend it to your kids or lend it to a friend.
If it's that good, I really hope they decide to publish it old-school.
Ñ'
Pekka the Finn rings a bell, if not his Captain Crunch...if not his Captain Crunch.
I suppose this has nothing to do with the book review, but this thread can only evolve into a discussion regarding online ditribution, so here goes my 2 cents...
I don't think that online book distribution will catch on for reasons far more mundane than finding the right marketing / payment scheme. The fact of the matter is that almost everybody (the reviewer obviously included) hates reading things on a screen and prefers the tactile sensation of a book in their hands. Face it, even the hardest core get sick of man pages after a while and consult whatever paper guide is closest at hand.
People enjoy books for reasons which transcend the content. I have an early edition of the Lord of the Rings which, I feel, adds to the enjoyment of the book. Not b/c it's rare, but because its rough, feels and smells old -- namely, it has character... something your monitor isn't likely to have, ever.
Someday, perhaps, e-books (the hardware) will mature and replace dead tree books -- good, I like the forests -- but not yet. The market isn't there because people don't want to read 1000 pages of text on a monitor. It's just not the same experience...
-k-
krb1@email.com
John Varley, actually, and it was only 16 years ago. Of course, the seminal work in the net-comes-alive genre is Vernor Vinge's 1980 True Names.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
A while ago slashdot posted an unsettling story of a publisher who published the latter ammount of his/her book via portable data format on an accompanying cdrom. With this then it is technically possible to prevent you from accessing the material that you have without odious possibilities of harm from the DMCA.
PejVHF8LRIgynjB0dqjTuH4/8A-Z9#sSQV74sR>S4983w0cSM
Granted, it's not 120 pages, but OSC has the first 1-4 chapters of most (or all?) of his books up at www.hatrack.com. He even has some short stories in totality. If you don't know him, go buy (or borrow) _Ender's Game_. GREAT scifi book.
It's all about choice, and I think this would be a neat choice for an "e-book" product.
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
Or you could take pictures of the book reader's screen and then analyze them for the letters they contain. Or do as the monks of old did and copy them word by word, letter by letter. In fact once that happens then you can distribute them as much as you want as ascii text files.
PejVHF8LRIgynjB0dqjTuH4/8A-Z9#sSQV74sR>S4983w0cSM
Regards, Ralph.
Just in case you missed it the first two times:
Neal Stephenson beware: Pesci may be eating your lunch soon, if not your Captain Crunch.
Neal Stephenson beware: Pesci may be eating your lunch soon, if not your Captain Crunch.
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there.
Q.Tell me what the trail was.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
One of the best things you can do for yourself is invest in so good high quality low acid bond and use that to print so long range materials (long range being defined as things you really, really, really want to keep like resumes and code with accompanying line numbers, etc). Stories are no different. Also it's independent of power.
PejVHF8LRIgynjB0dqjTuH4/8A-Z9#sSQV74sR>S4983w0cSM
Truth be told the books of the past are really much longer. War and Peace, Hugo's works, Balzac. Also you usually can get through technical works without reading all of them. To combat the size of a book from hurting your psyche just take it in stride and work on the book one day/hour at a time.
PejVHF8LRIgynjB0dqjTuH4/8A-Z9#sSQV74sR>S4983w0cSM
PDF is so nicely formatted that it's used in many instances for formatted computer generated output for printing.
PDF is for spec sheets and boring manuals (though i personally prefer HTML in those instances). But regardless, i think that the electronic book format is cool as a supplement, say if you wanted to search for something,
etc. But needing a decent speed PC with you should not be a prerequisite to reading a book. Nor is printing out a good solution if you ask me.
What I would like to see is a method of being able to alter in a WYSIWYG format the contents of a PDF document or simply create one from scratch in an open source manner. I wonder if such a project exists.
PejVHF8LRIgynjB0dqjTuH4/8A-Z9#sSQV74sR>S4983w0cSM
Isn't this a puzzle from Crystal Kingdom Dizzy?
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
Is making an app that uses computer hardware to kill a user fiction? There are many stories (maybe urban legends) of monitors exploding by changing theiresolution. Or what about trancing the user by displaying rotating objects and then making him touch the electricity wires. just my imagination, a good book inspires it.
I'd much prefer one long page. A la slashdot.org.
Encapsulated in one big bloody table too. Yeah, that'd be neato.
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
Reader 11131719 contributed this review ...
Good lord, they don't even refer to us by name anymore...
What I would like to see is a method of being able to alter in a WYSIWYG format the contents of a PDF document or simply create one from scratch in an open source manner. I wonder if such a project exists.
You're in luck - PDFlib can help. Sadly, your hands are tied if you actually want to release anything you write - Aladdin only allow you free-as-in-beer distribution of your stuff.
Does my bum look big in this?
Hey, prior art!
Yes, after reading the Death Ray hoax, and the XFree86 HowTo, I dreamed up the idea of a virus that would
I thought about this for so long and so hard, that the idea must be kind of out there in the noossphere now, in the world of objective contents of thoughts...
Then, when your fridge and microwave are on the Internet (IPv6, of course), I've got another one...
And the recipe has so much tobasco and what-have-you, that you'll not know whether it's been cooked to a cinder or if it's still raw. In any case, it's teeming with life, and you've just been killed by a computer virus, poisoned by the Internet....
Oh, won't the future be wonderful with Outlook and IPv6 controlling you groceries...
A few thousand years ago, people write books on bamboo slices in China. Then someone invented paper, and then suddenly, everyone write books on paper. And then, guess what, someone complained that books on bamboo are the best, because paper smells bad, it's soft, it's too light, and you don't have the feeling of "having the book on your hand".
Put all books and documents in digital format, I'll buy them in that format. And I'll carry a 50GB HD and have my whole library on it.
Welcome to the future. I'd rather live in the future than in the past.
I use an HP Jornada 548 with 32 MB of RAM. I use the Adobe Access plug-in Acrobat to convert from PDF to text, then use the Microsoft Reader plug-in in Word to convert it to Microsoft Reader format. I sometimes have to go through it and remove page numbers, headers, or footers to make it more legible. Try sticking even a paper back in your shirt pocket. I carry around ten books on my Jornada. Once you get used to it, paper books just seem annoying.
I used to print out my code to read it before IDE's got to where they are now. I guess its just human nature to resist change. But I wouldn't have expected it from Slashdot readers.
That was one of my points. I don't know how you linked "Fahrenheit 451" to the book-burning part (I did separate those two with a two-line gap, didn't I?). I know that F451 wasn't just about burning books; it was about thought control. I see it already; the RIAA, MPAA, and FBI trying to supress "crimethink". I wonder which federal agency will be put in charge with burning all those books, maybe the ATF...
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
z> However I discovered that reading from a PDA (in my case Psion) doesn't overly stress my eyes. PDA's do have nice, sharp screens, for the most part, but I can't imagine reading for pleasure on one! How many tiny, itty-bitty screens does it take to make a book?! Read for five seconds, next page, read for five seconds, next page, etc. Good God, the patience you must have!!!
And that's my $0.32 (adjusted for inflation).
Hmmmmm
a. Satori Effect
b. Snow Crash
a. Code is written which actually manipulates the physical world (monitor blows up)
b. Code is written which actually manipulates the physical world (Hacker put in a Coma)
a. FBI agents investigate
b. A cool ass cyber-skateboarding pizza delivery boy investigates.
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
YMMV, but reading on a PDA fills a certain niche for me. At any given point, I'm plowing through between 2 and 8 various books. There's one by my bed, one in my office, one in the kitchen, one next to the comfy chair...and one on my Palm.
The one on the Palm is for when you're locked in some time-wasting mode; whip out the PDA and fill that time with something better than the dentist's 4 year old People mags (or the CEO's annual state of the company address...) It's portable, and most importantly, always with you, because it's hard to predict when you're really going to need something worthwhile to read.
Added bonus: Andrew Lang's colored fairy books are all in the public domain; several are available in DOC format. If you ever need something to read in the dark to a sick 5 year old at 3 AM, a backlit PDA is a blessing. Pretty good stories for adults too, if you're into that sort of thing. They're the originals, before DisneyCo got their saccharin mouseclaws into them.
"The training he had received to acquire his MIS degree nearly 15 years ago gave him a basic background in program architecture and several programming languages, all of which were no longer in use, except for UNIX, and that had evolved significantly in the interim."
You can never equivocate too much.
I read something somewhere about how someone was making somekind of e-paper. It was made out of lots of tiny bits with black on one side and white on the other that could be flipped electronicly.
The example used was actualy a Uber-book that could become any book, althouth they said a more practical usage might be for re-usable storefront signs.
The above comment was poorly moderated, as the post is mildly sarcastic and genuinely original. Real flamebait would have been, "Ohh, computers that blow up? How original. My mom could kick your mom's ASS!"
--
Make mine methylphenidate.
On that system, it was possible to cause the monitor to "blow" using software by sending a 255 to one of the OUT ports (33, I think - it's been a while). It wasn't usually an explosion, but smoke was definitely involved.
I never did it myself, since I depended on the kindness of the Radio Shack people to let me use their computers before I got my own, but I had a friend who used to love to blow up the demo units in the store.
The particular vulnerability on those machines had to do with poor voltage regulation, I think, but still, it was a cool trick.
Was mich nicht umbringt macht mich hungrig.
The point of the story isn't that books-as-paper were banned -- it's about books-as-ideas.
--
--
I'm leaving my bonus is place on this one so more people can see it, and if it gets modded down, well, that's part of my divine punishment;)
:(
The duplicated sentence was utterly and completely my fault. In the course of editing, I did a copy-and-paste because I'm paranoid about cut-and-paste, and then failed to clean up the original copied item. Repeat: the writer didn't do it, I did.
Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. My apologies to both writer and reader
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Baen books www.baen.com has some of their new books fisrt chapters online. You can also buy a subscription for the whole book, a few chapters at a time.
At least this is a step in the right direction.
All Windows problems are hardware problems. Don't load it on hardware, no problems.
I saw this same plot in a story in the weekly world news the other day. Apparently "hackers" have managed to make a BOMB!!! out of your computer using email. Although for some reason knowing what I do about VB makes this completely believable, I'm still a little suspicious.
People who quote themselves bug the crap out of me -- Me.
Switch turn onto another track...
Why are e-books so expensive in light of the great cost reductions in materials and distribution?
Dr. Frank J. Nagy Fermilab Computing Division Authentication and Directory Services Group
It's funny but just today I was reading Programming Python and thinking a web-pad with thumb-buttons to flip pages would be a lot easier than flipping paper. If a fairly cheap device with easy to read fonts was available to do this I doubt I'd being buying as many printed books as I do today. I'd still buy the really good ones in print because they look good on my bookshelves--of course, I'm already two levels deep in books/mags so it would be a space saver as well.
numb
Just because people like to read paper books doesn't mean that we have to ship paper books around here and there.
Bookshops should just download and print books on customer demand.
Scenario:
Bookstores only stock a few paper copies of the popular books.
You can still look at unstocked books online, when you want one, they just print the whole book for you (better to wait 15 minutes for a book than pay obscene shipping costs). So they just need a fancy book printer, raw materials and the documents.
It's still too much hassle for the public to print their own books - in the real "book" format, and it can actually be more expensive too given the usual consumer grade printers. So bookstores can fill that gap. Plus the publishers may not want to trust the public that much, but it's easier to keep an eye on a few booksellers. They can give accounts to the bookstores and revoke them - just imagine if you're a bookseller and you get banned because you were naughty and printed more than you reported to them.
It has nothing to do with being aclimated, you're putting a tremendous strain on eye muscles that shouldn't be doing that much work.
:) and I just got them. My eyes haven't been bloodshot and haven't bothered me since. Suddenly reading something on a computer is just how it was for me in 1994 when I first got my comp: fun! Those glasses alone may make the difference between whether or not ebooks succeed.
There are reading glasses specifically for using the computer (and they work dandy for reading too
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057
[o]_O
Ok, I went and downloaded the free part. And I'm an avid reader. And I read the first 20 or so pages and it's the tritest, worst characterized stuff I've read in ages. First the depressed guy whose whole family was killed in a car crash. Then the manipulative scum who's trying to get his secretary to cheat on her husband. How about some real characters? This writer has NOTHING on Neal Stephenson - he isn't even favorably comparable to Danielle Steele. Ick, I'm not even gonna read past that point. I didn't even get to the neat techie stuff. Oh well.
Writing is the only socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. (E. L. Doctorow)
Ugh. Non-computer literate person attempting to pass themselves off as one. Almost as bad as those Tom Clancy books.
It's even based around the whole "Good Times" email virus hoax. Blech.
Jason Pollock
Well, maybe some of the crappy ones at the grocery store. But any decent book is going to be published by Vintage International is going to run $10 to $16. Add to that the fact an early release is going to be in Hardback format, which will usually run something in the neighborhood of $20, and I think $10 isn't bad.
In Vino Veritas