If you cannot afford Quickbooks, you have no business doing freelance web design. You are a business, you a not a fucking hippie charity.
Quickbooks is a god damn scam for sure--they "upgrade" every year and do crap like stop supporting one year old software and force you to upgrade at full price so it runs on vista. But dammit, you are a business person and so you should think like one. Your accountant uses it, you can invoice your clients with PDF files, and it works. It is only $190 tops and if you can't afford something you use for billing, quit now while your ahead.
Please, get off your high horse.
Nobody said anything about not being able to afford it. They said OSS.
I generate invoices with an Excel spreadsheet -- no fuss, no muss. My business has so few material costs that Quickbooks is overkill for me. What expenses do you need to track for Web development, exactly?
Your paragraph about how badly Quickbooks sucks and how much hamstring you with bogus upgrades and poor support kinda undermines your righteous indignation at people who choose not to use it.
I haven't done any freelance coding in a long while, but when I did, most of my clients had a "standard contract" of their own. In this case, it may be advisable to retain a lawyer who can go over other people's contracts for you and let you know whether they contain the stuff you need. One thing many young people don't understand is that a "boilerplate" contract is almost always subject to change, if you ask. If you object to a certain clause, ask them to modify it or delete it altogether. If they're completely inflexible then it may be a red flag. In my experience, however, any time I told somebody something like, "This clause is bullshit, it says I have to choose arbitration over court if I have a problem with you, but it says nothing about what you can do to me," they have always agreed to my changes. Writing a contract to your own advantage may be kinda sneaky but it's not really the same thing as screwing the other guy, and it doesn't really pay to get so offended that you turn down work. Instead, just learn to expect a little legal wrangling and watch your back.
Well, in most of the US, if you want to get a real job (something to do during the day rather than sit on the front doorstep getting stoned all day)...you better believe it. Still a LOT of jobs out there that have drug tests. I'd call that a stigma.
You can call it that... but is it? If you had a job driving a truck they might give regular piss-tests, or if you worked at a factory using heavy machinery... but maybe there's good reason for that. Meanwhile, I've never had a job that tested for drugs and I'd probably be pretty skeptical of one that did (and I don't use drugs). If you need to work on government contracts they might test you... but is that because they're concerned about performance or because they want to cover their ass by following the letter of the law? If the latter, then it's just a matter of changing the law.
*GASP* marijuana! There's such a large social stigma on it at this point, lots of people don't think about the subject logically
Eh? I think you must be thinking of Nancy Reagan's 80's. These days you can barely buy a mainstream rap or rock album without hearing about marijuana. Most of my friends' parents grew up smoking weed (and we grew up in the 80s). In San Francisco, Tenderloin residents regularly smoke weed on their doorstops and the foot patrols walk right past. Hell, even my Reagen Republican parents don't talk about marijuana when they go off on some kind of "lousy drug users" rant -- it's always coke and meth. Seriously, does anybody in U.S.A. 2008 really still harbor a "social stigma" about marijuana?
if someone tries to legalize it, they meet resistance without reason from so many people that most career politicians don't want to be bothered.
I think you hit closer to the truth with "career politicians" than with anything else you said. Who do career politicians listen to most of the time? Voters? Try again.
Where the heck are you people finding free beer? I look for it and I can never find it, it always costs me where ever I go.
You should tip better. A buck a beer won't really break the bank and in time it will pay off. Also, you people who treat bartenders like vending machines need to get your acts together, too. It's the service industry, true; but in the real world that's a two-way street.
*sigh* I wonder if this means Sun is going to pull out of Orbit [slashdot.org] and come up with some J2ME version of JavaFX?
I don't know about Orbit, but a JavaME version of JavaFX is definitely in the works. And to clarify, JavaFX Mobile will be provided to handset manufacturers as a binary distribution, for which Sun will charge a per-unit royalty.
I remember reading a Spirit graphic novel called Life on Another Planet many years ago
That was by Spirit creator Will Eisner, but it did not feature the Spirit characters.
but I certainly dont remember lots of sexy ladies and hammy dialogue.
The Spirit comics have some measure of both, but it's handled with infinitely more style and subtlety than could be ever be distilled from the morbidly stunted gray matter of Frank Miller. For a guy who claims to be one of Eisner's best buddies, he seems determined to shit all over everything the man stood for.
For a good comparison of the approaches of the two men, look for the book Eisner/Miller, published by Dark Horse Comics in 2005. Some samples from the book:
Eisner: In that book [you wrote], what was there that you regard as funny? Miller: There's a running gag in it where our hero is hit by a car...
Eisner: The way I tell stories, I'm writing a letter to somebody. And I'm telling them about the past. I'm telling somebody what happened yesterday. Miller: And I feel like I'm giving them a harassing phone call [laughter]!
people who cut their teeth on BASIC with GOTO have a hell of a time learning a structured language
Like who? You're probably talking about any computer programmer born between 1968 and 1988, here. How many of them are still writing C64 BASIC with line numbers?
Computer programs, he argues, are nothing more than long proofs. Each function you write is equivalent to a predicate in logical calculus, or a function in mathematics... I think that is the argument he is making and as a University professor, I tend to agree. I've seen some of my students test an array by using an if-statement for every single element of the array, where as a loop would have been infinitely more suitable.
I believe I speak for several generations of self-taught programmers when I say that lack of understanding of lambda calculus is not what causes this behavior. I leave it to keener minds to come up with an appropriate adjective that explains it.
How will the be able to portray R. Daneel Oliwav and R. Giskard Reventlov and their brain wave mind bending of humans without it looking corny on screen BUT as amazing as it is written?
Probably about the same as they usually portray characters thinking things and acting upon those thoughts.
How will they portray the mule without it looking like a bad version of Alien?
I dunno... like a skinny guy with a big nose and sad eyes, kinda like he's portrayed in the book?
How are they going to be able to flesh out the vast amount of social undertones that are perfused in all the books? Recently I have though "This is becoming like Trantor" when I see infrastructure "collapsing" around me in this real world we live in.
You realize that the Galactic Empire was just an analog to earth events, including the Roman Empire as well as pre-revolutionary France, etc.?
They better be some spectacular screen writer adaptors to even scratch the surface.
It sounds like you're really saying, "There better be some spectacular SFX artists to come up with SFX for aspects of the story that need none."
Do the new technologies really do this? Or does it just make it more difficult to see the "obvious" MVC patterns?
In the Old Days, you could see pretty easily what an MVC Web app might look like: There was a piece of code that generated static HTML pages that displayed data, and this was the View. There was another piece that caught input from the browser and used it to do things, and that was the Controller. And then, perhaps, the Model was represented by the database.
But did any application really ever have it that easy?
The thing that makes MVC a more advanced skill than what you might learn in undergrad computer programming classes is that it requires more than a good understanding of a programming languages and related tools. It requires you to think things through, plan ahead, and make choices.
YES, it is probably possible to implement "even some of the Model," as the article, says, in JavaScript in the browser. Is that a smart idea?
It's a pretty common to see apps that use the database like it's a big storage closet, ignore stored procedures completely, and implement all data manipulation functions in Java. Is that a smart idea?
On the other hand, is MVC the right model for every application?
I think a lot of textbook programming paradigms, including MVC, are ultimately pie-in-the-sky, and somewhere along the line a real-world application is always going to end up making some kind of unfortunate compromise. That doesn't mean you shouldn't be aiming for the sky anyway. If you're actually trying to write well-disciplined, maintainable code, that's always a Good Thing.
The real problem with the Web development environment is that it makes it very easy for developers to choose not to do that and just knock out solutions to problems quickly, instead, without really thinking things through. That's not MVC's fault, nor should one blame one's tools.
God help me, I think the real answer might be... effective management. Christ, did I really just say that?
Re:Yeah, and get flooded with "tech support" calls
on
Houses With Tails
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· Score: 4, Insightful
My mom lives in a gated retirement community, where the overwhelming majority of the population is seniors. Many of them have computers, which they use to do all sorts of things, from browsing the Web to making Skype calls to their family around the country. Few of them are really what you would call "computer literate." Most of them seem to know some guy who lives in the neighborhood who has taken it upon himself to be smarter than your average bear. They might not necessarily pay that guy out at "market rates," but when you start to add up free dinners, free bottles of scotch, etc., plus just being a well-known and respected member of your community, being the local "tech guy" has its plus side.
Re:I'll have to read it now...
on
Anathem
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· Score: 1
But those are plain in their intentions -- they're speculative. Stephenson's story is supposed to be the story we live in now. Hitler doesn't live, the Japanese don't take over California, etc. Everything is the same, only Stephenson is taking us on a tour of a history that never happened. I'm just not interested in a book that says, "Here is how the world economy would work and this is what all this would mean for human society if everything happened the way I say it did, which it didn't."
Though I must admit... I'm not really offended by alternative-WWII settings, but they don't exactly leap off the bookshelves at me, either. I'll give Stephenson points for being more original.
It's true, Hello Kitty makes hella money. I can only guess that brands like Ultraman and Godzilla keep selling to boys well into their teenage and young adult years worldwide, while outside Japan Hello Kitty sales drop off dramatically among adolescent and teenage women. The 15-25 year old demographic loves to part with its disposable cash. I don't have figures, but that's my hunch.
You're the one who wants to call white Americans a "race," dude. I never even used the term. And why you want to bring gender into it is beyond me. I'm merely making a cultural observation. Globally-minded is one thing "mainstream" Americans are not -- but, speaking as an immigrant, I confess to bias. Truth is, "white Americans" is a lot quicker to type than "native-born, native-English-speaking U.S. citizens with no extant ties to other countries, languages, or cultures," but it gets the point across just the same.
Racist? Are you implying that white Americans buy more merchandising for such characters as Godzilla and Ultraman than Asian Japanese people do? Cuz I think you'll find that's not the case.
The main reason I phrased it that way, though, is because in my experience, white, middle-class Americans are generally more ignorant about the rest of the world than anybody else on the planet -- hence why the white, middle-class American who wrote this Wired blog would think there's something novel about Toho entertainment lawyers suing people. You'd think a rational person would assume that suing people on behalf of entertainment companies is what entertainment lawyers do. Any rational person might further conclude that a brand that rakes in billions would have more aggressive lawyers than one that doesn't. But this blogger thinks he has a story because he (and half of America) thinks Japanese culture is just kitschy and cute, and he doesn't realize how much money a brand like Godzilla actually commands. If the company was Toyota instead of Toho, this would be a non-article.
A key passage from the blog:
Shephard speculates, "If they used Star Wars or Simpsons characters, I guarantee you they would have sought permission. It's surprising how much this character is misused in a variety of contexts, especially by major advertisers."
Re:Halfway through the book, and ...
on
Anathem
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· Score: 1
I'm exactly that sort of reader. I pay close attention to details and am interested in seeing them be developed. Snow Crash and The Diamond Age definitely reward the reader for paying attention. The dead ends the reviewer describes would ruin such a book for me.
I noticed no such dead ends. "Things that go unexplained" are not dead ends, to me -- but I can't really recall any of those, either.
Some things that are kept vague in Anathem are due to the narrative voice. The real nature of the government, for example, is left very sketchy -- because our protagonist has no interest in such things, due to training that has been carried out in the same fashion for thousands of years.
Other times I felt compelled to pick holes in Stephenson's world -- it's natural, since I historically have not liked his work at all -- but by the end of the book he had me beat. For example, at one point I was asking myself, if all these fraas and suurs are having "liaisons" all the time, where are all the babies in the concent? It's explained. I have to give him credit. If you really are a careful, attentive reader, Stephenson reveals a lot, even when it's not directly related to the plot.
Just because it's foreign (and maybe a little silly) doesn't mean it's not a high-powered brand. Middle-class American white folks might not realize it, but Ultraman is the third most merchandised character in the world, right after Mickey Mouse and Charlie Brown (and before Superman). And the people who command that kind of market share have lawyers? Color me shocked.
Re:I'll have to read it now...
on
Anathem
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· Score: 1
It's the story of how humans dealt with and brought about the birth of modern science and the culture and the ways of thinking that went along with it.
Except it's not, because half of the "history" is made-up, when it suits Stephenson's objectives to do so. It's not really an "account" of anything, other than Neal Stephenson's view of the world, culture, and how it all works, transposed onto real-life people who are no longer around to object to Stephenson rewriting their lives. I find that sort of offensive. Compared to your average historical novel, Stephenson's approach is dishonest, and in reaching for intellectual heights it becomes a protracted intellectual fraud.
Cute. But since you brought it up: yes, he does write his books by hand. With a fountain pen. Some printings of the Baroque Cycle novels include reproductions of some of his original pages. So nyah.
Re:Sadly Stephenson is suffering from Dickens Synd
on
Anathem
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· Score: 1
And if you don't like Dickens, try Dumas (who had a lot more debts to pay off). Don't get me wrong, though -- both authors are great, and even Dumas' most sprawling books rank among the most entertaining novels I've read.
Once I got through all the introductory material, I thought this was one of the most entertaining books I've read in a good while, and I read a lot.
I absolutely agree, and I also read a lot. What's more, the light distaste I felt for Stephenson after Cryptonomicon had erupted into violent, almost physical loathing by the time I put down Quicksilver. And yet I thought Anathem was great.
Note that the protagonist of Anathem is pointedly not a Mark Twain, a Norman Mailer, or a Hemmingway. The whole point of the book is that Erasmas was raised from childhood to be a hyperintellectual. I believe Stephenson does have some problems with his verbiage (the Baroque Cycle was illegible) but here he plays to his strengths.
Re:Halfway through the book, and ...
on
Anathem
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· Score: 1
The made-up words that littered the first part of the story were amazingly painful to slog through, at least in the beginning.
Those "made-up" words are known as neologisms, and what makes them interesting is that they aren't made-up -- at least not completely. If you understand the word he's referring to with something like "fraa," "suur," or "saecular," and moreover you understand why he chose not to use the original word, then you have a better understanding of the world he's created. (It becomes even more interesting when the guy from Laterre shows up.)
Slashdot Mirror
If you cannot afford Quickbooks, you have no business doing freelance web design. You are a business, you a not a fucking hippie charity. Quickbooks is a god damn scam for sure--they "upgrade" every year and do crap like stop supporting one year old software and force you to upgrade at full price so it runs on vista. But dammit, you are a business person and so you should think like one. Your accountant uses it, you can invoice your clients with PDF files, and it works. It is only $190 tops and if you can't afford something you use for billing, quit now while your ahead.
Please, get off your high horse.
I haven't done any freelance coding in a long while, but when I did, most of my clients had a "standard contract" of their own. In this case, it may be advisable to retain a lawyer who can go over other people's contracts for you and let you know whether they contain the stuff you need. One thing many young people don't understand is that a "boilerplate" contract is almost always subject to change, if you ask. If you object to a certain clause, ask them to modify it or delete it altogether. If they're completely inflexible then it may be a red flag. In my experience, however, any time I told somebody something like, "This clause is bullshit, it says I have to choose arbitration over court if I have a problem with you, but it says nothing about what you can do to me," they have always agreed to my changes. Writing a contract to your own advantage may be kinda sneaky but it's not really the same thing as screwing the other guy, and it doesn't really pay to get so offended that you turn down work. Instead, just learn to expect a little legal wrangling and watch your back.
Well, in most of the US, if you want to get a real job (something to do during the day rather than sit on the front doorstep getting stoned all day)...you better believe it. Still a LOT of jobs out there that have drug tests. I'd call that a stigma.
You can call it that ... but is it? If you had a job driving a truck they might give regular piss-tests, or if you worked at a factory using heavy machinery ... but maybe there's good reason for that. Meanwhile, I've never had a job that tested for drugs and I'd probably be pretty skeptical of one that did (and I don't use drugs). If you need to work on government contracts they might test you ... but is that because they're concerned about performance or because they want to cover their ass by following the letter of the law? If the latter, then it's just a matter of changing the law.
*GASP* marijuana! There's such a large social stigma on it at this point, lots of people don't think about the subject logically
Eh? I think you must be thinking of Nancy Reagan's 80's. These days you can barely buy a mainstream rap or rock album without hearing about marijuana. Most of my friends' parents grew up smoking weed (and we grew up in the 80s). In San Francisco, Tenderloin residents regularly smoke weed on their doorstops and the foot patrols walk right past. Hell, even my Reagen Republican parents don't talk about marijuana when they go off on some kind of "lousy drug users" rant -- it's always coke and meth. Seriously, does anybody in U.S.A. 2008 really still harbor a "social stigma" about marijuana?
if someone tries to legalize it, they meet resistance without reason from so many people that most career politicians don't want to be bothered.
I think you hit closer to the truth with "career politicians" than with anything else you said. Who do career politicians listen to most of the time? Voters? Try again.
5. Chevy or Ford
Actually, this last one seems pretty relevant right now.
Where the heck are you people finding free beer? I look for it and I can never find it, it always costs me where ever I go.
You should tip better. A buck a beer won't really break the bank and in time it will pay off. Also, you people who treat bartenders like vending machines need to get your acts together, too. It's the service industry, true; but in the real world that's a two-way street.
*sigh* I wonder if this means Sun is going to pull out of Orbit [slashdot.org] and come up with some J2ME version of JavaFX?
I don't know about Orbit, but a JavaME version of JavaFX is definitely in the works. And to clarify, JavaFX Mobile will be provided to handset manufacturers as a binary distribution, for which Sun will charge a per-unit royalty.
I remember reading a Spirit graphic novel called Life on Another Planet many years ago
That was by Spirit creator Will Eisner, but it did not feature the Spirit characters.
but I certainly dont remember lots of sexy ladies and hammy dialogue.
The Spirit comics have some measure of both, but it's handled with infinitely more style and subtlety than could be ever be distilled from the morbidly stunted gray matter of Frank Miller. For a guy who claims to be one of Eisner's best buddies, he seems determined to shit all over everything the man stood for.
For a good comparison of the approaches of the two men, look for the book Eisner/Miller, published by Dark Horse Comics in 2005. Some samples from the book:
Eisner: In that book [you wrote], what was there that you regard as funny?
Miller: There's a running gag in it where our hero is hit by a car...
Eisner: The way I tell stories, I'm writing a letter to somebody. And I'm telling them about the past. I'm telling somebody what happened yesterday.
Miller: And I feel like I'm giving them a harassing phone call [laughter]!
people who cut their teeth on BASIC with GOTO have a hell of a time learning a structured language
Like who? You're probably talking about any computer programmer born between 1968 and 1988, here. How many of them are still writing C64 BASIC with line numbers?
Computer programs, he argues, are nothing more than long proofs. Each function you write is equivalent to a predicate in logical calculus, or a function in mathematics ... I think that is the argument he is making and as a University professor, I tend to agree. I've seen some of my students test an array by using an if-statement for every single element of the array, where as a loop would have been infinitely more suitable.
I believe I speak for several generations of self-taught programmers when I say that lack of understanding of lambda calculus is not what causes this behavior. I leave it to keener minds to come up with an appropriate adjective that explains it.
How will the be able to portray R. Daneel Oliwav and R. Giskard Reventlov and their brain wave mind bending of humans without it looking corny on screen BUT as amazing as it is written?
Probably about the same as they usually portray characters thinking things and acting upon those thoughts.
How will they portray the mule without it looking like a bad version of Alien?
I dunno... like a skinny guy with a big nose and sad eyes, kinda like he's portrayed in the book?
How are they going to be able to flesh out the vast amount of social undertones that are perfused in all the books? Recently I have though "This is becoming like Trantor" when I see infrastructure "collapsing" around me in this real world we live in.
You realize that the Galactic Empire was just an analog to earth events, including the Roman Empire as well as pre-revolutionary France, etc.?
They better be some spectacular screen writer adaptors to even scratch the surface.
It sounds like you're really saying, "There better be some spectacular SFX artists to come up with SFX for aspects of the story that need none."
Do the new technologies really do this? Or does it just make it more difficult to see the "obvious" MVC patterns?
In the Old Days, you could see pretty easily what an MVC Web app might look like: There was a piece of code that generated static HTML pages that displayed data, and this was the View. There was another piece that caught input from the browser and used it to do things, and that was the Controller. And then, perhaps, the Model was represented by the database.
But did any application really ever have it that easy?
The thing that makes MVC a more advanced skill than what you might learn in undergrad computer programming classes is that it requires more than a good understanding of a programming languages and related tools. It requires you to think things through, plan ahead, and make choices.
YES, it is probably possible to implement "even some of the Model," as the article, says, in JavaScript in the browser. Is that a smart idea?
It's a pretty common to see apps that use the database like it's a big storage closet, ignore stored procedures completely, and implement all data manipulation functions in Java. Is that a smart idea?
On the other hand, is MVC the right model for every application?
I think a lot of textbook programming paradigms, including MVC, are ultimately pie-in-the-sky, and somewhere along the line a real-world application is always going to end up making some kind of unfortunate compromise. That doesn't mean you shouldn't be aiming for the sky anyway. If you're actually trying to write well-disciplined, maintainable code, that's always a Good Thing.
The real problem with the Web development environment is that it makes it very easy for developers to choose not to do that and just knock out solutions to problems quickly, instead, without really thinking things through. That's not MVC's fault, nor should one blame one's tools.
God help me, I think the real answer might be ... effective management. Christ, did I really just say that?
My mom lives in a gated retirement community, where the overwhelming majority of the population is seniors. Many of them have computers, which they use to do all sorts of things, from browsing the Web to making Skype calls to their family around the country. Few of them are really what you would call "computer literate." Most of them seem to know some guy who lives in the neighborhood who has taken it upon himself to be smarter than your average bear. They might not necessarily pay that guy out at "market rates," but when you start to add up free dinners, free bottles of scotch, etc., plus just being a well-known and respected member of your community, being the local "tech guy" has its plus side.
But those are plain in their intentions -- they're speculative. Stephenson's story is supposed to be the story we live in now. Hitler doesn't live, the Japanese don't take over California, etc. Everything is the same, only Stephenson is taking us on a tour of a history that never happened. I'm just not interested in a book that says, "Here is how the world economy would work and this is what all this would mean for human society if everything happened the way I say it did, which it didn't."
Though I must admit ... I'm not really offended by alternative-WWII settings, but they don't exactly leap off the bookshelves at me, either. I'll give Stephenson points for being more original.
It's true, Hello Kitty makes hella money. I can only guess that brands like Ultraman and Godzilla keep selling to boys well into their teenage and young adult years worldwide, while outside Japan Hello Kitty sales drop off dramatically among adolescent and teenage women. The 15-25 year old demographic loves to part with its disposable cash. I don't have figures, but that's my hunch.
You're the one who wants to call white Americans a "race," dude. I never even used the term. And why you want to bring gender into it is beyond me. I'm merely making a cultural observation. Globally-minded is one thing "mainstream" Americans are not -- but, speaking as an immigrant, I confess to bias. Truth is, "white Americans" is a lot quicker to type than "native-born, native-English-speaking U.S. citizens with no extant ties to other countries, languages, or cultures," but it gets the point across just the same.
Color you shocked? How about color you racist?
Racist? Are you implying that white Americans buy more merchandising for such characters as Godzilla and Ultraman than Asian Japanese people do? Cuz I think you'll find that's not the case.
The main reason I phrased it that way, though, is because in my experience, white, middle-class Americans are generally more ignorant about the rest of the world than anybody else on the planet -- hence why the white, middle-class American who wrote this Wired blog would think there's something novel about Toho entertainment lawyers suing people. You'd think a rational person would assume that suing people on behalf of entertainment companies is what entertainment lawyers do. Any rational person might further conclude that a brand that rakes in billions would have more aggressive lawyers than one that doesn't. But this blogger thinks he has a story because he (and half of America) thinks Japanese culture is just kitschy and cute, and he doesn't realize how much money a brand like Godzilla actually commands. If the company was Toyota instead of Toho, this would be a non-article.
A key passage from the blog:
Shephard speculates, "If they used Star Wars or Simpsons characters, I guarantee you they would have sought permission. It's surprising how much this character is misused in a variety of contexts, especially by major advertisers."
I'm exactly that sort of reader. I pay close attention to details and am interested in seeing them be developed. Snow Crash and The Diamond Age definitely reward the reader for paying attention. The dead ends the reviewer describes would ruin such a book for me.
I noticed no such dead ends. "Things that go unexplained" are not dead ends, to me -- but I can't really recall any of those, either.
Some things that are kept vague in Anathem are due to the narrative voice. The real nature of the government, for example, is left very sketchy -- because our protagonist has no interest in such things, due to training that has been carried out in the same fashion for thousands of years.
Other times I felt compelled to pick holes in Stephenson's world -- it's natural, since I historically have not liked his work at all -- but by the end of the book he had me beat. For example, at one point I was asking myself, if all these fraas and suurs are having "liaisons" all the time, where are all the babies in the concent? It's explained. I have to give him credit. If you really are a careful, attentive reader, Stephenson reveals a lot, even when it's not directly related to the plot.
I say give it a crack. What do you have to lose?
Just because it's foreign (and maybe a little silly) doesn't mean it's not a high-powered brand. Middle-class American white folks might not realize it, but Ultraman is the third most merchandised character in the world, right after Mickey Mouse and Charlie Brown (and before Superman). And the people who command that kind of market share have lawyers? Color me shocked.
It's the story of how humans dealt with and brought about the birth of modern science and the culture and the ways of thinking that went along with it.
Except it's not, because half of the "history" is made-up, when it suits Stephenson's objectives to do so. It's not really an "account" of anything, other than Neal Stephenson's view of the world, culture, and how it all works, transposed onto real-life people who are no longer around to object to Stephenson rewriting their lives. I find that sort of offensive. Compared to your average historical novel, Stephenson's approach is dishonest, and in reaching for intellectual heights it becomes a protracted intellectual fraud.
Cute. But since you brought it up: yes, he does write his books by hand. With a fountain pen. Some printings of the Baroque Cycle novels include reproductions of some of his original pages. So nyah.
And if you don't like Dickens, try Dumas (who had a lot more debts to pay off). Don't get me wrong, though -- both authors are great, and even Dumas' most sprawling books rank among the most entertaining novels I've read.
Once I got through all the introductory material, I thought this was one of the most entertaining books I've read in a good while, and I read a lot.
I absolutely agree, and I also read a lot. What's more, the light distaste I felt for Stephenson after Cryptonomicon had erupted into violent, almost physical loathing by the time I put down Quicksilver. And yet I thought Anathem was great.
Note that the protagonist of Anathem is pointedly not a Mark Twain, a Norman Mailer, or a Hemmingway. The whole point of the book is that Erasmas was raised from childhood to be a hyperintellectual. I believe Stephenson does have some problems with his verbiage (the Baroque Cycle was illegible) but here he plays to his strengths.
The made-up words that littered the first part of the story were amazingly painful to slog through, at least in the beginning.
Those "made-up" words are known as neologisms, and what makes them interesting is that they aren't made-up -- at least not completely. If you understand the word he's referring to with something like "fraa," "suur," or "saecular," and moreover you understand why he chose not to use the original word, then you have a better understanding of the world he's created. (It becomes even more interesting when the guy from Laterre shows up.)