Great. So by your argument, Hans Reiser deserves to get off with manslaughter because he was "abused." Gee, I wish his attorney had advised him of that strategy. Maybe they could have... y'know... brought it up in court? Even once?
No, the GP is correct. Making up crap like this to defend a guy who committed capital murder is sick. Your need to defend him is sick.
If you wish to spend your nights reading information from 2+ years ago, that is your problem. The rest of us want today's information, and now.
YES! As another/.er posted to an earlier thread, god forbid we all keep working with an outdated value of pi. Imagine the egg on my face if I walked around assuming hydrogen only had one proton for the rest of my life, because I never checked the Internet.
As a computer user i would really like it if Microsoft go out and buy Yahoo, just to see Microsofts faces when every single user jumps ship to Google instead
Really? It would be worth it "just to see Microsoft's faces"? Meanwhile, Microsoft manages to eliminate another competitor, dramatically narrowing the playing field and allowing to it concentrate all its resources against Google.
If you look at the Wikipedia page you reference, it says quite clearly that "The creator of this image, Don Brown, expressly released all of his work concerning Eamon into the public domain in 1980." I didn't even own a computer in 1980.
That's pretty much what all AIDS drugs have attempted to do, thus far. Making fake cells seems problematic, since you would have to replace the patient's own cells with them until all the virus has been "cleaned up." But interrupting the life cycle of the virus is the main goal of therapy. Viruses typically use enzymes and proteins to move in and out of human cells. Influenza, for example, uses hemagglutinin to break its way into the cell, then later uses neuraminidase to break back out when it's ready to spread further. If you can somehow block the action of either of these proteins, you have managed to disrupt the viral life cycle. If it can't spread, it should eventually die off. Thus, if a doctor gives you medicine to fight a bad flu, he's probably giving you what is called a "neuraminidase inhibitor." Scientists have tried to create many HIV drugs along similar lines. The problem, as always, is that the HIV virus mutates so rapidly that you can't assume that what worked an hour ago will still work now (literally).
Eamon certainly wasn't obscure to me. For those who have never heard of it, it was a basically a text-adventure system with fighting and character-maintenance mechanics. You would start each adventure in the "Main Hall" to heal, outfit, and equip your character, then you'd swap disks to begin whichever adventure you wanted to go on.
What was interesting about it was that it was completely public-domain and written in BASIC, so the people who wrote the adventures could modify the base game engine to do whatever they wanted -- even things that weren't envisioned by the original author of the system. Most of the adventures were likewise public domain (though a few weren't) which meant they could be ordered for about $5 apiece from a variety of sources (in that pre-Internet age). It was great fun and also a good way for kids to develop programming skills.
The author went on to make a commercial version that was essentially the same thing, but since he didn't add considerably much to the game play and the proprietary license meant there were never more than a handful of adventures available (compared to literally hundreds for Eamon), it naturally bombed. Interesting how that works.
But books have always been historically valuable things and the bulk of that value has been in the content.
Which is why, throughout all of human history, there have always been people (non-liberals?) who try to keep knowledge out of the hands of as many people as possible. Giving them the choice between food and knowledge is one way of doing that.
America gets a bad enough rap with the state of our education system today. Don't make it worse by leaving our students behind the rest of the world! Where would we be if our students didn't understand the latest developments in trigonometry or first-semester calculus? The changes in Newtonian physics from year to year alone are enough to keep a team of textbook writers employed around the clock.
I accept the apology. I likewise apologize; you made me hot under the collar, because as you point out above, people in my industry have to take crap like this all the time.
I'll put it to you this way, and then I'll leave it alone, because you've already apologized and it's seriously off-topic anyway: You can say that I or any of my colleagues in the industry are stupid. You can say we don't know what we're talking about. You can say we can't write. You could say you could do a better job than us. You can say we're ugly and we smell, for all I care. None of that matters to me; when you sign your name to something that you publish online, you set yourself up for that. But when you call into question someone's professionalism, their dedication, their standards, and their ethics, and you imply that they're somehow corrupt and easily bought, and you do it in such a way that it sounds like you're stating some kind of incontrovertible facts -- to me, that's not right. When I hear that, I feel compelled to set you straight. The people I have had the pleasure to work alongside in this industry are not prostitutes, nor are they shills for Microsoft or any other company. I suspect people will never quit saying that they are, but I may never cease to be annoyed by it. That's all.
So you are telling me that despite Infoworld employees being given "gifts" by vendors, it does not influence how they write their article, and just because the article written is positive and the writer and/or editor got "gifts" it is not selling out or shilling or even considered unethical?
And I am telling you -- not just making stuff up, as you are doing, but telling you -- that it is specifically against InfoWorld editorial policy to accept gifts of any kind in exchange for editorial coverage. I say this out of firsthand knowledge. On what do you base your repeated claims? An editorial that was written in 2002 on a different topic?
That somehow because I cited a problem in the media, it means I do a shitty job?
No, what I am saying is that by making baseless accusations you are in effect accusing a lot of very talented, very dedicated people of doing shitty jobs. I wouldn't do that to you. What gives you the right? Furthermore, what makes you think you shouldn't be called out on it?
If you had any kind of evidence to support your claims, you would name names, at least, and allow those people to defend themselves. God forbid you should have any actual evidence. But to just say "all the editors take bribes," without so much as naming a single name, makes you not just a liar, but a coward, too.
Most editors and writers got bribed by computer companies to write a good article on their product in exchange for keeping the product plus other gifts.
As a former senior editor at InfoWorld, I request that you either substantiate that claim or keep your opinions to yourself. You obviously have no idea what you're talking about.
For the record, I know for a fact that nobody accepts any kind of gifts in exchange for editorial coverage at InfoWorld. I can't speak for eWeek of my own experience, but I have no reason to believe they're any different.
Incidentally, I'm sure there are plenty of people on Slashdot who will say that you're shitty at your job, too, but it's really none of their business, now is it?
Buying and selling their own name to themselves for 6 years.
Don't forget selling their OS, writing a new one from scratch, shelving it, buying back the old one, then rewriting it again, all the while promising "It's gonna be Linux!" Color me unimpressed.
Incidentally, other posters are correct when they say that QoS can only really manage your upstream bandwidth. When I say the voice quality was bad, I'm talking about the sound of my own voice. The way I check the quality is by calling a different number and leaving a voicemail message. Everything sounds fine to me when I'm speaking, but the voicemail message tends to sound pretty choppy upon playback if there was other traffic on the line at the time and QoS was not enabled.
I also use the Tomato firmware on a WRT54G, and I have exactly the kind of setup the OP describes. I don't even remember what kind of QoS came with the default firmware, but I never had any kind of luck with it, nor with DD-WRT. Tomato has been great so far.
Tomato actually offers fairly sophisticated QoS rules. You can set priorities by MAC address, IP address, port, etc. You can even set bandwidth caps for specific protocols/ports; so, for example, you can set the first 512KB of data transferred over port 80 to "Highest" priority, while anything after that drops back down to "Lowest" -- the effect being that regular ol' Web surfing gets a little kick in the pants, but extended transfers are given less priority. The latest release even added the ability to prioritize small packets (ACK, SYN, etc.)
What's more, Tomato also offers really neat graphing of your traffic. You can actually see, in near real time, what percentage of your outbound traffic falls under which priority category, with a nice pie graph. This is especially helpful when you want to double check that your rules are actually working (and you didn't make a typo when you were entering in a Mac address, for example).
One thing to remember when you're setting up QoS on a router like this, though, is that you need to reserve a certain amount of upstream bandwidth just to manage to QoS overhead. So, say you have 384KB/sec upstream bandwidth. You'll probably want to tell the router to reserve 40KB/sec or so for QoS. YES, that means your maximum upstream bandwidth will in effect be lower than what your provider advertised; call it the cost of doing business with QoS.
I have no empirical measurements to offer. All I know is that with the original, official WRT54G firmware and also DD-WRT I saw virtually no difference whatsoever when QoS was enabled. My outbound voice quality on my VoIP line was very choppy, particularly (but not limited to) when I was doing BitTorrent. With Tomato, on the other hand, there seems to be a marked improvement. I can actually hear the difference when I check and uncheck the "enable QoS" checkbox.
And wondering if you're affected, the compromised PINs seem to have been used at ATMs in 7-Eleven stores.
Actually, it doesn't sound like the cards were used at 7-Elevens. It sounds like they scooped the PINs off a Citibank server that was used for processing transactions for 7-Eleven ATMs. A system was compromised somewhere along 7-Eleven's merchant transaction processing chain, not at the store locations themselves.
OK, you've actually hit on the thing that really bugs me. I was often told this, too. "European ATMs can only use 4-digit PINs." It's still in all the travel guidebooks. But in my experience it is absolutely, in no way true, having successfully used ATMs everywhere from Singapore to Norway with my 6-digit PIN.
But wait! Having told you what I told you in the earlier post -- how do I know it's not true? Maybe it really is true, and my ATM card just has some "cheater" property that lets me get away with it?
Europeans, chime in, please! Have you ever had an ATM card that had a PIN longer than 4 digits?
all models are imprecise I'm not sure it's even helpful to state it this way. It starts to sound like what you're saying is that a model is not a precise representation of real life, but rather is a simplified representation designed to make it easier to extract pertinent data. Mind you, I'm not trying to put words into your mouth or anything...
I have a Bank of America ATM card that has a six-digit PIN. The really interesting thing, though -- which I discovered by accident -- is that on Bank of America ATMs you can simply enter the first four digits and then as many random digits as you want and the code works.
In other words, say my PIN is 443672. I can enter 4436, 44367, or 4436987899979 and it will always work. This seems like a fairly serious security flaw, to me.
I know what you're thinking: "Sounds like you really only have a 4-digit PIN." But no! On other kinds of machines, say at the supermarket, I always have to enter in all 6 digits accurately. It's only Bank of America ATM machines where this is true.
In the past, I have thought about raising this issue with Bank of America, but I have no idea how to approach them such that I can speak to somebody clueful.
On the flip side, the folks i've had to do major repairs and re-installs on were the guys who decided they knew what they were doing and started disabling services, running registry cleaners, messing with settings they had no business messing with, etc.
It's just like Server 2003. Use the wizards, don't manually tweak anything. If you let it go as it's supposed to, you won't have any problems.
You've been lucky with your anecdotal evidence. My current system came from HP with Vista pre-installed, and so far it's had more problems than the Sony system that I upgraded to Vista from XP. I'm not claiming that Vista doesn't work; I use it every day. But it is deeply flawed.
OK, so let's look at what they've got... best read of the last 25 years?
1.) The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. OK, well, 25 years makes for a crowded field, but I did enjoy this book thoroughly. Off to a decent start. Let's see what else we've got...
2.) Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire Ah yes, another literary triumph. Not quite as good as The Road, mind you, but almost. And clearly, someone's thought extensively about this. Note that they didn't drone on and on, naming all the Harry Potter books one after the other. No, they chose to focus on the one book in the series that's actually any good. Which happens to be the fourth one (the one in the middle).
16.) The Handmaid's Tale 17.) Love in the Time of Cholera Hmmm, rankings aren't that good. But what could they really expect? They were competing against Harry Potter. And The Watchmen, which has pictures. Bonus points for Handmaid, though; they at least made a movie out of that.
21.) On Writing Shame on Stephen King. Since 1983 he's written Christine, Pet Sematary, It, Misery, most of the Dark Tower series, Dolores Claiborne, The Green Mile, Hearts in Atlantis, and countless others, but damn him, not one of those books can compare to a 288-page memoir he wrote about what it's like to be a fiction writer. In fact, I'm surprised he even claims to know what it's like. And even this book, in the end, lost out to Bridget Jones's Diary.
40.) His Dark Materials Because, let's face it, Martin Amis is just too potty-mouthed to take the #40 spot. And The Kite Runner is about Afghanistan, and you know how we feel about those people.
71.) The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down A book about the American healthcare system and a culture clash between Western doctors and an ethnic minority that fled the aftermath of the Vietnam War? Interesting choice. Frankly I'm surprised that frivolous stuff like this even made the list. You can see why it rates 25 lower than Neil Gaiman's The Sandman.
80.) Bright Lights, Big City Take that, Bret Easton Ellis! McInerny rates, but you get zip.
87.) The Ruins Now there's real talent for you! Who else but Scott Smith could write publish his second book ever -- a short horror novel about bloodsucking plants -- get it made into a B-movie, then still make the list above Annie Proulx (who won the Pulitzer prize for fiction in 1994)? Way to go, Scott!
96.) The Da Vinci Code Boo, Dan Brown! See how we hate you? We're so tired of hearing your name -- and reading and re-reading all your books on airplane flights -- that we only rated you #96 on the list of the greatest classics of our age. That, and Tom Hanks's hair looked really weird in the movie.
For the sarcasm impaired: Get yourself a library card and go read some real books, already.
Slashdot Mirror
Great. So by your argument, Hans Reiser deserves to get off with manslaughter because he was "abused." Gee, I wish his attorney had advised him of that strategy. Maybe they could have ... y'know... brought it up in court? Even once?
No, the GP is correct. Making up crap like this to defend a guy who committed capital murder is sick. Your need to defend him is sick.
If you wish to spend your nights reading information from 2+ years ago, that is your problem. The rest of us want today's information, and now.
YES! As another /.er posted to an earlier thread, god forbid we all keep working with an outdated value of pi. Imagine the egg on my face if I walked around assuming hydrogen only had one proton for the rest of my life, because I never checked the Internet.
As a computer user i would really like it if Microsoft go out and buy Yahoo, just to see Microsofts faces when every single user jumps ship to Google instead
Really? It would be worth it "just to see Microsoft's faces"? Meanwhile, Microsoft manages to eliminate another competitor, dramatically narrowing the playing field and allowing to it concentrate all its resources against Google.
Didn't Microsoft already decide to abandon the quest for Yahoo! and purchase the search technology from PowerSet?
Funny, but your point only proves that Microsoft it not interested in Yahoo for its search technology.
This means it would take me 44 hours to upload 30 gigabytes with my 1.5mb/s upload speed.
...
Hell, I have an effective 20gigabyte/month upload cap because that's the maximum capacity of my bandwidth
Huh??
If you look at the Wikipedia page you reference, it says quite clearly that "The creator of this image, Don Brown, expressly released all of his work concerning Eamon into the public domain in 1980." I didn't even own a computer in 1980.
That's pretty much what all AIDS drugs have attempted to do, thus far. Making fake cells seems problematic, since you would have to replace the patient's own cells with them until all the virus has been "cleaned up." But interrupting the life cycle of the virus is the main goal of therapy. Viruses typically use enzymes and proteins to move in and out of human cells. Influenza, for example, uses hemagglutinin to break its way into the cell, then later uses neuraminidase to break back out when it's ready to spread further. If you can somehow block the action of either of these proteins, you have managed to disrupt the viral life cycle. If it can't spread, it should eventually die off. Thus, if a doctor gives you medicine to fight a bad flu, he's probably giving you what is called a "neuraminidase inhibitor." Scientists have tried to create many HIV drugs along similar lines. The problem, as always, is that the HIV virus mutates so rapidly that you can't assume that what worked an hour ago will still work now (literally).
whatever function they have, it's probably not as important as not dying of AIDS
Upon what data do you base that assumption? Is not dying of AIDS more important than not dying in screaming agony?
Eamon certainly wasn't obscure to me. For those who have never heard of it, it was a basically a text-adventure system with fighting and character-maintenance mechanics. You would start each adventure in the "Main Hall" to heal, outfit, and equip your character, then you'd swap disks to begin whichever adventure you wanted to go on.
What was interesting about it was that it was completely public-domain and written in BASIC, so the people who wrote the adventures could modify the base game engine to do whatever they wanted -- even things that weren't envisioned by the original author of the system. Most of the adventures were likewise public domain (though a few weren't) which meant they could be ordered for about $5 apiece from a variety of sources (in that pre-Internet age). It was great fun and also a good way for kids to develop programming skills.
The author went on to make a commercial version that was essentially the same thing, but since he didn't add considerably much to the game play and the proprietary license meant there were never more than a handful of adventures available (compared to literally hundreds for Eamon), it naturally bombed. Interesting how that works.
But books have always been historically valuable things and the bulk of that value has been in the content.
Which is why, throughout all of human history, there have always been people (non-liberals?) who try to keep knowledge out of the hands of as many people as possible. Giving them the choice between food and knowledge is one way of doing that.
America gets a bad enough rap with the state of our education system today. Don't make it worse by leaving our students behind the rest of the world! Where would we be if our students didn't understand the latest developments in trigonometry or first-semester calculus? The changes in Newtonian physics from year to year alone are enough to keep a team of textbook writers employed around the clock.
I accept the apology. I likewise apologize; you made me hot under the collar, because as you point out above, people in my industry have to take crap like this all the time.
I'll put it to you this way, and then I'll leave it alone, because you've already apologized and it's seriously off-topic anyway: You can say that I or any of my colleagues in the industry are stupid. You can say we don't know what we're talking about. You can say we can't write. You could say you could do a better job than us. You can say we're ugly and we smell, for all I care. None of that matters to me; when you sign your name to something that you publish online, you set yourself up for that. But when you call into question someone's professionalism, their dedication, their standards, and their ethics, and you imply that they're somehow corrupt and easily bought, and you do it in such a way that it sounds like you're stating some kind of incontrovertible facts -- to me, that's not right. When I hear that, I feel compelled to set you straight. The people I have had the pleasure to work alongside in this industry are not prostitutes, nor are they shills for Microsoft or any other company. I suspect people will never quit saying that they are, but I may never cease to be annoyed by it. That's all.
So you are telling me that despite Infoworld employees being given "gifts" by vendors, it does not influence how they write their article, and just because the article written is positive and the writer and/or editor got "gifts" it is not selling out or shilling or even considered unethical?
And I am telling you -- not just making stuff up, as you are doing, but telling you -- that it is specifically against InfoWorld editorial policy to accept gifts of any kind in exchange for editorial coverage. I say this out of firsthand knowledge. On what do you base your repeated claims? An editorial that was written in 2002 on a different topic?
That somehow because I cited a problem in the media, it means I do a shitty job?
No, what I am saying is that by making baseless accusations you are in effect accusing a lot of very talented, very dedicated people of doing shitty jobs. I wouldn't do that to you. What gives you the right? Furthermore, what makes you think you shouldn't be called out on it?
If you had any kind of evidence to support your claims, you would name names, at least, and allow those people to defend themselves. God forbid you should have any actual evidence. But to just say "all the editors take bribes," without so much as naming a single name, makes you not just a liar, but a coward, too.
Most editors and writers got bribed by computer companies to write a good article on their product in exchange for keeping the product plus other gifts.
As a former senior editor at InfoWorld, I request that you either substantiate that claim or keep your opinions to yourself. You obviously have no idea what you're talking about.
For the record, I know for a fact that nobody accepts any kind of gifts in exchange for editorial coverage at InfoWorld. I can't speak for eWeek of my own experience, but I have no reason to believe they're any different.
Incidentally, I'm sure there are plenty of people on Slashdot who will say that you're shitty at your job, too, but it's really none of their business, now is it?
Buying and selling their own name to themselves for 6 years.
Don't forget selling their OS, writing a new one from scratch, shelving it, buying back the old one, then rewriting it again, all the while promising "It's gonna be Linux!" Color me unimpressed.
My thought exactly. Can Palm really do overnight delivery to Antarctica now?
Incidentally, other posters are correct when they say that QoS can only really manage your upstream bandwidth. When I say the voice quality was bad, I'm talking about the sound of my own voice. The way I check the quality is by calling a different number and leaving a voicemail message. Everything sounds fine to me when I'm speaking, but the voicemail message tends to sound pretty choppy upon playback if there was other traffic on the line at the time and QoS was not enabled.
I also use the Tomato firmware on a WRT54G, and I have exactly the kind of setup the OP describes. I don't even remember what kind of QoS came with the default firmware, but I never had any kind of luck with it, nor with DD-WRT. Tomato has been great so far.
Tomato actually offers fairly sophisticated QoS rules. You can set priorities by MAC address, IP address, port, etc. You can even set bandwidth caps for specific protocols/ports; so, for example, you can set the first 512KB of data transferred over port 80 to "Highest" priority, while anything after that drops back down to "Lowest" -- the effect being that regular ol' Web surfing gets a little kick in the pants, but extended transfers are given less priority. The latest release even added the ability to prioritize small packets (ACK, SYN, etc.)
What's more, Tomato also offers really neat graphing of your traffic. You can actually see, in near real time, what percentage of your outbound traffic falls under which priority category, with a nice pie graph. This is especially helpful when you want to double check that your rules are actually working (and you didn't make a typo when you were entering in a Mac address, for example).
One thing to remember when you're setting up QoS on a router like this, though, is that you need to reserve a certain amount of upstream bandwidth just to manage to QoS overhead. So, say you have 384KB/sec upstream bandwidth. You'll probably want to tell the router to reserve 40KB/sec or so for QoS. YES, that means your maximum upstream bandwidth will in effect be lower than what your provider advertised; call it the cost of doing business with QoS.
I have no empirical measurements to offer. All I know is that with the original, official WRT54G firmware and also DD-WRT I saw virtually no difference whatsoever when QoS was enabled. My outbound voice quality on my VoIP line was very choppy, particularly (but not limited to) when I was doing BitTorrent. With Tomato, on the other hand, there seems to be a marked improvement. I can actually hear the difference when I check and uncheck the "enable QoS" checkbox.
Actually, it doesn't sound like the cards were used at 7-Elevens. It sounds like they scooped the PINs off a Citibank server that was used for processing transactions for 7-Eleven ATMs. A system was compromised somewhere along 7-Eleven's merchant transaction processing chain, not at the store locations themselves.
OK, you've actually hit on the thing that really bugs me. I was often told this, too. "European ATMs can only use 4-digit PINs." It's still in all the travel guidebooks. But in my experience it is absolutely, in no way true, having successfully used ATMs everywhere from Singapore to Norway with my 6-digit PIN.
But wait! Having told you what I told you in the earlier post -- how do I know it's not true? Maybe it really is true, and my ATM card just has some "cheater" property that lets me get away with it?
Europeans, chime in, please! Have you ever had an ATM card that had a PIN longer than 4 digits?
I have a Bank of America ATM card that has a six-digit PIN. The really interesting thing, though -- which I discovered by accident -- is that on Bank of America ATMs you can simply enter the first four digits and then as many random digits as you want and the code works.
In other words, say my PIN is 443672. I can enter 4436, 44367, or 4436987899979 and it will always work. This seems like a fairly serious security flaw, to me.
I know what you're thinking: "Sounds like you really only have a 4-digit PIN." But no! On other kinds of machines, say at the supermarket, I always have to enter in all 6 digits accurately. It's only Bank of America ATM machines where this is true.
In the past, I have thought about raising this issue with Bank of America, but I have no idea how to approach them such that I can speak to somebody clueful.
You've been lucky with your anecdotal evidence. My current system came from HP with Vista pre-installed, and so far it's had more problems than the Sony system that I upgraded to Vista from XP. I'm not claiming that Vista doesn't work; I use it every day. But it is deeply flawed.
OK, so let's look at what they've got ... best read of the last 25 years?
1.) The Road, by Cormac McCarthy.
OK, well, 25 years makes for a crowded field, but I did enjoy this book thoroughly. Off to a decent start. Let's see what else we've got...
2.) Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Ah yes, another literary triumph. Not quite as good as The Road, mind you, but almost. And clearly, someone's thought extensively about this. Note that they didn't drone on and on, naming all the Harry Potter books one after the other. No, they chose to focus on the one book in the series that's actually any good. Which happens to be the fourth one (the one in the middle).
16.) The Handmaid's Tale
17.) Love in the Time of Cholera
Hmmm, rankings aren't that good. But what could they really expect? They were competing against Harry Potter. And The Watchmen, which has pictures. Bonus points for Handmaid, though; they at least made a movie out of that.
21.) On Writing
Shame on Stephen King. Since 1983 he's written Christine, Pet Sematary, It, Misery, most of the Dark Tower series, Dolores Claiborne, The Green Mile, Hearts in Atlantis, and countless others, but damn him, not one of those books can compare to a 288-page memoir he wrote about what it's like to be a fiction writer. In fact, I'm surprised he even claims to know what it's like. And even this book, in the end, lost out to Bridget Jones's Diary.
40.) His Dark Materials
Because, let's face it, Martin Amis is just too potty-mouthed to take the #40 spot. And The Kite Runner is about Afghanistan, and you know how we feel about those people.
71.) The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
A book about the American healthcare system and a culture clash between Western doctors and an ethnic minority that fled the aftermath of the Vietnam War? Interesting choice. Frankly I'm surprised that frivolous stuff like this even made the list. You can see why it rates 25 lower than Neil Gaiman's The Sandman.
80.) Bright Lights, Big City
Take that, Bret Easton Ellis! McInerny rates, but you get zip.
87.) The Ruins
Now there's real talent for you! Who else but Scott Smith could write publish his second book ever -- a short horror novel about bloodsucking plants -- get it made into a B-movie, then still make the list above Annie Proulx (who won the Pulitzer prize for fiction in 1994)? Way to go, Scott!
96.) The Da Vinci Code
Boo, Dan Brown! See how we hate you? We're so tired of hearing your name -- and reading and re-reading all your books on airplane flights -- that we only rated you #96 on the list of the greatest classics of our age. That, and Tom Hanks's hair looked really weird in the movie.
For the sarcasm impaired: Get yourself a library card and go read some real books, already.
Err... SunOS 4 was a BSD OS, true, but what we know today as Solaris is mainly System V derived. Sun switched in the early 1990s.