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William Gibson on his Tech Life and Latest Novel
An anonymous reader writes "The Philadelphia Inquirer is running a brief article on William Gibson. In it he discusses his tech life, the ad that inspired Neuromancer, and his latest book, Pattern Recognition. He says, 'Between my wife and daughter who still lives at home, I'm always the one with the slowest computer. I don't find that being really up on all the latest tech ever does me any good.'"
"I don't find that being really up on all the latest technology ever does me any good."
Indeed.
I am at the 6th semester of Computer Science and I see a lot of guys who got low grades and don't know even how to code really basic programs looking for top computers. I belive all they want is to play games.
Personally I don't need a top-ultra-fast box to get my programs working or improve my programming skills, and even get some fun (ie. MUD).
Of course if you work with production servers, high definition graphics or movies you need power machines, but regular and ordinary users who only surf on the net, compile some code, edit some texts don't need that all IMHO.
There's also a pretty good interview with4 _2.rm
Gibson on Tech Nation here
http://www.technation.com:8080/ramgen/02100
You might try it sometime. I find the best way to write is to just go at it, damn the spelling errors, not having the perfect word (leave some ** or something to remind myself to come back to it later), screw punctuation, etc. Just go!
Now it may not be a bad idea to just speak it into a recorder or digitize it and then try running it through speach rec. later.
Best advice I can give, just go, don't rely on anything that can hang you up. Nothing kills momentum like having to deal with something like "no goat, not boat, goat, geeez, GOAT you daft machine! ..."
Just get it out of yourself, first then worry about how to assemble it after then momentum has run its course.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
He was also interviewed on Unscrewed last night. Unscrewed Wednesday Episode Not much at that link, but check the schedule to see when it'll be replayed.
The dire thing that multinational globalization seems to be doing is reducing the amount of genuine stuff in the world and replacing it with imitation genuine stuff.
To speak of visionaries, this is actually an important theme in PKD's The Man in the High Castle. Of course, even PKD had a tendency to (unknowingly?) refashion ideas that were first put into writing by Plato and Aristotle. I guess it is true, in some sense, that there is nothing new under the sun.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
He also did a movie called "No Maps For These Territories" that lends a good deal of insight into his personality. I just watched it, and thought it was pretty cool.
"What do you think?" "I think 'What, do you think?!'"
Right. However, there's different mental pathways for talking and writing. So the problem is not necessarily within your computer, it's in your head.
Gentoo Sucks
The Fact Checkers at the Philly Inq missed something: there is another movie based on a Gibson short story - "The New Rose Hotel". Christopher Walken, Willem Dafoe, and the delectable (OMFG where does that tattoo end) Asia Argento. The film was a commercial failure - it's rather slow and amateurish, but it's much better than that awful Keanu/Ice-T mess. I have the DVD right here in my sweaty little hand. Excuse me, gotta go watch Asia in the swimming pool again. Oh, and many thanks to my old buddy Marrow who gave me his copy.
-The Mad Duke
There was a movie made based on New Rose Hotel about corporate extractions. Christopher Walken was in it but it still sucked.
I thought Neuromancer was an amazingly great book! I've only read it once, and that was shortly after it came out (10-15 years ago ?). However, since then I've read Idoru, Mona Lisa Overdrive, and The Difference Engine - all of which were a chore to read. I had to force myself to finish those.
Dave
FPGA, Wireless, ASIC, Verilog, VHDL, HW, 10yr exp, Team Lead, Ottawa (More? Email above. slashdotusername=dgmartin98 )
Breakfast of Champions. Movie version is very very wacky, and has Bruce Willis in it from memory. Also the cute chick from Becker.
http://pcblues.com - Digits and Wood
Any bank that practices fractional banking is scamming you.
But you'd have to actually learn something to understand it. I suggest you do that. Do you think inflation is some mysterious force? Inflation is a tax like any other. The lost buying power of your dollar year after year is not magic.
I've always found people complaining they need to compile their code all again (wait a lot) when they make a small change on the code.
;-)
The advice here is to split your code in several files and use make. It'll just compile the (small) file you've changed, which takes much less time. Using gcc option -O0 also helps (when you don't care about the generated software performance).
It looks a no brainer advice but people still complain about that
Yes, he coined the term. He even had a cameo in David Lynch's "Wild Palms" as himself. Somebody introduces him to one of the characters and says, "this is William Gibson. He invented the term 'cyberspace.'" Gibson responds, "yes, and they'll never let me forget it."
I have to agree. I read Nuromancer in the late '80s back when my Apple //c was state of the art. It blew me away. Up until that point there had been nothing like it. I thought it interesting about Gibson's comment about the lack of cell phones. I'm not sure if after rereading it I would have noticed their absence in the book, but that may be because when I first read it, cell phones weren't very common. I guess it's a matter of perspective. On a side note, I have always wanted to name a server Wintermute, but have always figured I would feel like a tool if I actually did.
If anyone is looking for additional early cyberpunk, I recommend Daniel Keys Moran. His books seem to be back in print.
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. My life is my own.