Slashdot Mirror
0wnz0red
Robotech_Master writes "Salon Magazine is running an interesting and thought-provoking short story/novella by Cory Doctorow, co-editor of the b0ing b0ing weblog. This story, 0wnz0red, features programmer/geek terms and references, Descartes, "trustworthy computing," and what happens when programmers gain the ability to hack their own autonomic functions. A really fun read...like Stephenson's works, it feels like it's aimed squarely at the geeks' demographic."
on that boingboing webpage, the author says that "pr0n" is a synonym for "porn" due to common typing errors, i was under the impression that "pr0n" was used to hide your porn from sysops on multi user systems using find / -name *porn* or something like that.
whos right, me or him ?
Stephenson meets Douglas Coupland, actually.
"fourbucks muffin". Heh.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Seriously. It would be a somewhat entertaining (but second-rate) cyberpunk short story if he hadn't been trying so hard to drop 'leet k-radspeak all over the place.
Sorry Cory, you're 14/\/\3r than Jon Katz
"Interesting and thought provoking" Are these codewords also? This article certainly doesn't come close to falling under the literal definitions for either of these terms. "Boring and redundant" would be a more apt description. Somebody owes me 15 minutes added back to my life timer for suggesting this was a worthwhile read.
Karma: Anything remotely associated with Boy George I have no interest in.
"it feels like it's aimed squarely at the geeks' demographic"
Nothing with word "demographic" in it could truly appeal to the geek demographic.
Wait a minute....
Steve
How dare you post a short story first thing in the morning. And a FRIDAY at that too! I might as well just go home now; I'm not getting anything worthwhile done at work today.
Karma: NaN
You know. I skip through Salon a fair bit. Mainly because of all the links on /. to articles there. I catch most of the interesting stuff there before I see it here. Same goes for a stack of other oft-linked sites.
Where are all the new interesting sources of info, articles, stories etc... Surely there must be better material than this on a smaller site. Its no big deal to find a short story on Salon... find one on geocities!
. A really fun read...like Stephenson's works
In what way? Is there a load of "Look at me - see how cool a geek I am" type writing, or a really bad ending? Does it have a really improbable storyline with random events happening because he can't think of a way to add drama at a certain point? If not then it's nothing like Stephenson's works.
I'd like to thank the submitter of the story for calling it a "weblog" instead of some lame-ass made-up-for-the-sake-of-making-a-name-up name like a "blog" or a "wiki". :)
:)
I'm sure I'm not alone in my praise
siri
...like Stephenson's works, it feels like it's aimed squarely at the geeks' demographic.
Maybe this is a different type of "slashdot effect." Where a content publisher puts up articles knowing they will get linked from slashdot.
Just for CmdrTaco, I would like to differentiate this type by calling it the "slashdot affect."
"And like that
He's probably aiming at writing it in the style of the former for accessibility, but I prefer paragraphs you can sit and think about after having read them for a fuller effect as with Brian Herbert's Dune or Issac Asimov's Foundation (think about what they could have accomplished had they lived to see -- and write about -- the Internet!)
What are you doing? You can't post an article that actually requires people to read it before they respond.. it's against the Slashdot Code of Ethics! Next you'll expect us not to pull comments out of our asses.. yeah, right.
slashdot!=valid HTML
As he aimed his remote at it and initiated the cryptographic handshake -- i.e., unlocked the doors -- he spotted the guy leaning against the car.
Come on! "Cryptographic handshake" as a metaphor for unlocking a car door? Here's a quick writing lesson: if your metaphor is so abstruse that you have to explain it immediately thereafter, you should just cut it.
The writer is clearly enthralled by his own cleverness and understanding of computer lingo past the point where he could be expected to construct a narrative that normal people might enjoy.
Consider the paragraph on the first page where he mentions that the protagonist loses commit privileges on CVS. I know what CVS is, but that's beside the point. I shouldn't have to, because CVS doesn't relate to the story at all! The story is filled with little things like that, things that conspire to make it inaccessible to the average reader for no discernible reason, unless that reason is to heighten its appeal to the (presumed) minority of those interested in computers who give a damn about keeping the average user out of their party.
It's like the whole thing was written by someone who goes around calling everyone uninvolved in the computer industry "sheeple" or "lusers" and automatically assumes that they don't get it, for various definitions of "it", just because their existence doesn't revolve around a microprocessor.
Personally I think the use of l33t-speak is symptomatic of such a juvenile mentality, and should have been a major red flag. If this guy is one of SF's bright young stars, give me the old luminaries any day of the week.
...this stuff about using an inordinate amount of term-dropping in your text is old, and moreso, it makes for a boring read.
The use of advanc3d codewords in his writing just barely covers up the pretty thin plot,
and most importantly it doesn't build up atmosphere, which should be the primary use of this trick.
Gibson used it with success in most of his books (although, at Mona Lisa Overdrive, it did start to bore me) because he had Th3 F33l for it.
Yeah, I just don't get the Stephenson fascination. Everyone said Snow Crash was such a great book, so I read it. I will never read another Stephenson book again. Ever. That was the WORST ending to a decent setup ever. I just couldn't believe what I was reading. It's like he totally gave up on even attempting a reasonable conclusion.
--- witty signature
I found this story very cringe-worthy.
Every couple of lines it reminded me of similar self-indulgent crap I have written myself.
I can see that it is nearly good, but there are too many ideas (as is common in first works, dunno if this is...), the tech-speak sticks out a mile and the particular set of tech-speak chosen makes it look like the author just read the jargon file.
No non-pretentious person uses that much core stuff from the jargon file in everyday speech. Maybe you'd already be using some of it before you read the jargon file, and maybe you'd adopt some more you liked from it, but this stinks of wholesale adoption of a new lingo.
Sorry for being a bit incomprehensible, I am tired and just had to fill in a job application form from hell.
graspee
As someone who's 'website' evolved into an interactive weblog, I happily await the day when the term 'blog' falls into the same pit of disused linguistics as 'cyber', 'breaker, breaker, good buddy' and 'where's the beef'.
As for 'Wiki', the very word gives me the heebie-jeebies and makes me wonder if I should give up computers completely.
(As for your sig, I'd say the only reason to use Netscape 7.x instead of Mozilla is if you're still hanging onto those shares of NSCP, just in case...)
Cheers,
Jim
-- My Weblog.
for you are conductive and can support 110 volts.
Best Slashdot Co
yeah, and 'elite' is written like '31173' or '31337' just to hide the fact that we are really talking about lamers ;)
Isn't this a tad self-referential?
/. pimping a book by Taco or jonkatz.
Posting a positive "news story" about a geek-code short story written by a blogger.
That's as bad as
-Styopa
Since I bothered reading to the end of the story, I have to both agree and disagree with the comments posted. The first couple of pages were remarkably cringe-worthy, dropping as many '1337' terms in as possible, but once it got into the meat of the story, things picked up a bit.
It certianly isn't a masterpiece, but the concepts raised in it are interesting and there's a fairly good plug for anti-palladium issues, in terms that the layman could work through.
The characterisation isn't the best and throughout there is the edge of wanting to be accepted as part of the tech crowd, at the expense of the ordinary reader, but these can be overlooked with an open mind. If you let you mind create and fill out the characters and situtations, it's not a bad read for fifteen minutes.
Ultimately, if you don't like the way it's going don't read it, but a bit of perseverance will see you through to the good bit. If only the author had realised that most readers won't do that and had made the story a little more engaging from the start.
Goblin
It's all fun and games until a 200' robot dinosaur shows up and trashes Neo-Tokyo... Again
Except that judging from the writing around here, most Slashdotters wouldn't know the difference...
Affect and effect are two different words, people.
But seriously, on topic, I really liked that Doctorow story. The beginning was definitely a bit klunky by my standards, but by the middle it started to pick up quite a bit. The self-conscious (or didn't you guys catch that part?) references to '1337-speak' (the written language with no spoken form!) were rather amusing.
It's nice to see someone play with language, and it's nice to see someone who apparently knows a little bit of something (instead of a whole lot of nothing) about computers writing speculative fiction, for a change. Or don't you guys get a little bit annoyed about totally impossible (instead of wildly improbable) computers (and/or technology) in speculative fiction?
Also, another question: Considering all the geek holy wars, can geeks truly be said to have a demographic?
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
What happens when I open slashdot
and I don't know what the hell
you are talking about?
No, no, no! Always
five-seven-five, and never
nine-five-six. Baka!
in regular slashdot tradition I must nitpick
ok, here comes spoilers so if you give a rats ass, yadayadayada
Ok so he takes the shit to somalia. did he forget that when you are "infected" you have to eat 5 cheeseburgers and a box of krispykremes every fucking day? part of the reason life sucks in somalia is the lack of food and malnutrition.
sure he can cure them, but where is he going to find the amount of food to make it work? he didn't bring it with him, since all he has is a laptop.
Amen to that. Snow Crash was, like a lot of SciFi, a bunch of tech concepts wrapped around a narrative that'd earn most high school creative writing students an F.
I fell for the popular buzz surrounding Neuromancer, too, and I found it so dull I couldn't even finish it.
William C. Calvin's Synchronized and its sequel Unlisted are great reading. Kate Medici's phone firewall isn't as dangerous as YT's dentata, but damn if it doesn't look handy after all. (Perhaps a combination of the two would be good. When you get a telemarketer on the line, just press the button...)
Calvin is generally pretty realistic about computer security and crypto -- one-time pads actually run out of bits, and nobody hax0rs an entire network by clicking on a pi symbol in the corner of a web page. Better still, the plot's entertaining, and Our Heroine is a BOFH. Fun stuff, and well worth putting on your handheld for those boring meetings.
Comparing these two books is a little like comparing _Stagecoach_ with _Blazing Saddles_. Both movies are Westerns, after a fashion, but one came at the beginning of the genre and was a movie which everyone took seriously and emulated for years; the other came at the end of the genre and ensured that nobody could take Westerns entirely seriously again.
I prefer _Neuromancer_ to _Snow Crash_. Gibson, to my mind, exhibits a real flair for creating memorable images. Armitage wordlessly breaking his wine glass, Case knocking down the wasp's nest, Case's meetings with Wintermute in various personae. He also occasionally manages a beautiful economy of language (e.g. when Case shoots the image of Julius, "he was right about the blood." Or his finding the picture of Corto: "the eyes were Armitage's.") Compare Gibson's spare prose with Stephenson's exhausting, aggressively illiterate style in _Snow Crash_.
hyacinthus.
Its old news but an okay read. A little Promethean though.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
All of his endings suck. You just have to be prepared for it.
I found neuromancer to be a beautiful zen koan... (but kind of inline with Rush's hemispheres!)
Case is just that- a shell of a person denying the flesh for the mind.
And the wintermute-nueromancer connection is the seperate spheres of humanity coming together- best exemplified by the cryptic things it/they say at the end.
Whereas I think I read shockwave rider (not sure of the title, but it had a techie hero, a manage-a-trois love scene, using eels to splice nerves, etc) and it also had the zen unity angle going for it, but it SUCKED.
just my two bits.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
I still love the diamond age, and think the entire rest of the book completely makes up for it.
Now back to the ending:
No, I didn't "get" the ending. I thought the drummers were mad cool (organic computing... and remember kids, organic means poop!) it was cute everyone had their own quest, the drummers were sacrificing that one chick (I didn't get why or what the "information overload" sacrifice meant) then they saved her, and then...... ?
So if any critical readers out there want to give an interpretation, I'm all ears!
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
No, you got the correct one!
however, for the right one...
THIS is the expurgated version
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Exactly right. It's supposed to be over-the-top in that way. Slashdotters are notorious for missing the nuances in things, and this is no exception.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
Actually I was GLAD it wasn't William Gibson, which allowed me to enjoy it for what it was. (20 minutes worth of reading instead of 2 hours)
...but it was a damn good read, and the Fritz chip might become reality. Though, one thing the story didn't bring up that I had in my head all the time was that this would open for the absolutely best way to break any copy protection:
The piece talks about how the Fritz chip ran at Ring minus one. From the first mentioning of hacking wetware, I saw one thing; your own body runs at Ring minus TWO. So, if you actually could directly interface with your body, you could extract any information that at some time entered your body. Which means that no matter how secure and complicated the media corporations' deliverance to your eyeballs/ears is, the moment it enters your brain, it's yours. I imagined that somebody would 'hack' their brain into feeding out exactly what they received through their senses - movie in, perfectly copyable rip out.
The only way the media corporations would be able to evade THIS would be to check that the person in front of the video screen doesn't have any biological modifications - and there's no way there will be an effective, non-invasive procedure of doing that.
Now, this might be quite some years into the future, but it illustrates that no matter how deeply the media corps entrench their copy prevention systems, there's always the analog hole. And until we can hack our brains, we still have the excellent circumvention techniques known as 'pointing a video camera at the screen' and 'placing a microphone in front of the speaker'.
The sooner RIAA/MPAA realize this, the sooner they can give up trying to lock down everyting and instead try to give the masses what they want instead..
I truly find it awe inspiring that a computer literate person can speak so fluid with common losers.
okay. Perhaps if we would require a common computer literacy test before someone can get online, we could eliminate this mentality that "Computers are Bad, all they do is give me Spam and steal my credit cards"
Or, maybe tests should be given to see how well 'computer literate' people can actually express themselves in English before being hired to jobs that require interaction. Just a thought.
Then again, with something like that you'd be sure the RIAA would write up the text for it, then the MPAA would sue them under the DMCA for copywrite infringement for the use of the work "Hackers"
Uh, yeah okay...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
It's "like stephenson's work" as in "I like stephensons work," and "I like this" and "I have a complete lack of understanding of liturature with which I could construct a statement about this work"
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The ending to snowcrash did suck, and so did the ending to Cryptonomicon.
Sthephenson's work is really more about the trip then the destination. You should really read Cryptonomicon though, don't be put off by Snow Crash (which I enjoyed reading, personaly). Cryptonomicon can't really even be called Sci-fi, and it's a very enjoyable, fun, read.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
In The Big U, the focus is Jayne's bicamerality of the mind
Um, what? I'm not even sure that book has a focus
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Consider the paragraph on the first page where he mentions that the protagonist loses commit privileges on CVS. I know what CVS is, but that's beside the point. I shouldn't have to, because CVS doesn't relate to the story at all!
You know what CVS means, I know what CVS means. If everyone knows what CVS means, then there is no reason not to use it. I don't see how its use could detract from your enjoyment of the story if it doesn't go over you head, other then to make yourself feel smarter then the author for finding flaws in his work.
Also, it does have meaning in the story, it showes that they wouldn't let him make changes to the code directly. Even people who don't know what CVS means spesificaly might pick that up.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
that's fine, then I'm just a moron.
But I guess I can't blame myself for not remembering the title of a lack-luster book...
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
OK, from these posts it's obvious that there's a lot of geek cred to be had by hating everything, but let me just say I enjoyed this story. It was legitimate sci-fi: it told a good story set in a recognizable world that explored the consequences of one "what-if" question. In this case, 'what if human physiology could be "hacked" with a computer?'. That's an interesting question.
I also don't get why people are disparaging it for the leetspeak and acronym-dropping ("CVS" et al.). That's the nomenclature for the world he's describing. It would have been more weird if he had decided *not* to use such terms. Plus, I loved all of the twisted slang of familiar terms: "Fourbucks muffin", "Lo-Cal", "Shallow Alto"...great!
Then again, what do I know, I liked Stephenson's books too.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
Just wondering.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I thought it somewhat similar to Egan's "Blood Music" (which goes in a different direction), and very similar to Barnes's [sic] "Mother of Storms" (*). In the latter book, the protagonist's thought processes are enhanced, and he eventually discovers how to control exactly these autonomous processes.
It's also a damn good book: Barnes either sucks or rocks. This book is in the latter category.
All of Egan's work is highly recommended.
My mom was an English teacher and she told me once how to get over the Its & It's thing.
;-)
If you can substitute 'his' in the context and it still sounds sort of ok, use "its".
Your welcome.
-- My Weblog.
Everyone said Snow Crash was such a great book, so I read it. I will never read another Stephenson book again
reply to above comment :
You should really read Cryptonomicon though
my comment - i suggest you don't take the replier's advice - i felt exactly the same way you did after grimacing my way through the very long-winded, masturbationary text that is cryptonomicon - i.e. i never wanted to go near stephenson's writing again
and by the way, the copy of cryptonomicon I read (which i borrowed from the library) had this fake cut pages effect to it which i've seen in some other american editions - what's up with this? looks like book fetishism to me
I don't know what it is, but a lot of people seem to have this problem of assuming every narrator is omniscient, and calling errors or slang that creep into it "bad writing." The same thing gets Lois Bujold's Vorkosigan novels criticized...because people don't realize it's third-person viewpoint narration, which combines the character-based perspective of first-person with the out-of-bodyism of third-person. We get a window on how the character thinks, and why he does the things he does, and how he instinctively reacts, without the conceit that somehow this person is telling us everything with eiditic recollection of every single word everyone said.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Harlan? Harlan, is that you?
Oper on the Nightstar
Sun One + Java gives us JavaOne
JavaOne gives us JavaOne.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
I think it appeals to the type of person who loves details. And he describes every scene in such amazingly vivid detail that I rarely find people I pictured a sceen vastly diffrent than.
Some peoples minds seem to be inclined to be absurdly precise, and Tolkien caters to this mindset. Apparently, there are other people who don't apreciate this, which is fine.
His inability to discern between that which is important and that which is a triviality is very distressing.
Thats actually what I like the most. I tire sometimes of reading only the "important" and "story moving" parts, Tolkien provides an entire believable portion of history, from the context of the year in the life of some hobbits. A truly amazing task, and it fills me with awe that he can have such a succulent imagination to describe an entire world to the point that it's almost real.
I live in a giant bucket.
Dude, you are SO deprived. If you want a good ending to a good SF story, check out Bujold. The story winds down about 2-3 chapters before the pages run out. The conflict is resolved and then she cleans up all the loose ends and satisfies all your "And then what happened?" cravings.
Cryptonomicon was the best of the three, I'll grant you, but it's still not a good ending to a story. And I don't like to read novels or literature...I like to read stories. Nice, escapist, completely packaged and well-told stories. If I wanted harsh reality I'd put the book down and get back to my life...