Re:Can you have read the same book?
on
Anathem
·
· Score: 2, Informative
What a disappointing review.
Most of the facts stated by the review's author are opinions -- and not especially well-formed opinions. Some comments are purposefully misleading (see "Munroe's Law").
One of the best things about Anathem is how absolutely accurately the novel pegs the myriad ways in which very intelligent people interact with other very intelligent people -- largely by demanding fact over opinion and by recognizing when something is reasonable over when something is desirable. The author of this review is very enthusiastic about his position, but he is incorrect in most of his statements.
He entirely neglects to mention -- at the risk of spoiling the story, I'm sure, though after warning away most possible readers it's a disingenuous concern -- that Anathem builds to the most fantastically bad-ass set of scenes and set pieces to grace traditional science-fiction in a very, very long time. And the more deeply you've grasped the conceptual framework that the author laid before you, the more its conclusion will reverberate in your brain for some time to come.
Anathem is like a clockwork of fantastical proportions; if all you want to do is check the time as you pass, you're set. Breeze on through and it'll be the quickest 900+ pages you've ever read. But if want to follow the inner workings all the way through then there's an extremely rewarding experience in front of you. I strongly recommend that smart people read this novel.
I think the author meant not the slight and frequently encountered difference between how Americans spell and how most other English-speakers spell, but the great difference between saying:
"This is older than all human civilizations."...versus...
"This is older than the earliest Egyptian civilization."
The write-up from the original news story allows for human civilizations older than the ancient Egyptians.
In e-mail I just received from Apple, announcing this change to my January 10th order, they note that while they're upgrading my machine to 2GHz they're also delaying its shipment by 3 days, from the 15th to the 18th. Ostensibly this is in order to give me time to decide whether or not to give them $300 for an extra.1GHz (for a ~5% speed increase; I'd rather have 5% more battery than 5% more processor, since that's unlikely to be the bottleneck for how I'll be using the system). In reality, this is a drag -- I was looking forward to using my machine before then. What's three days slip in the scheme of things? Not much, but it's still frustrating. (If I chose to upgrade to the 2.1GHz, the e-mail warns, I can expect additional delays.)
Why is Apple upgrading the Mac Book Pros? It's not because they like their customers; altruism goes over poorly with the stockholders when you're reporting your quarterly numbers. I'm guessing it's some combination of Intel running late on the lower-end chips -- perhaps because all the Windows laptop vendors are trying to crank out their cheaper machines faster and in greater volume, and Apple doesn't yet rate at its end of the supply chain -- and in exchange for some Apple program manager releasing his or her grip on an Intel program manager's testicles the chip manufacturer has offered to "upgrade" the shipment.
Perhaps Apple simply didn't sell as many Mac Book Pros as they'd hoped, and slipped out of the range they needed to hit in order to get the break on quantity they wanted. Maybe everyone who wanted a Mac laptop bought one before Christmas, since they'd just revised the PowerBooks. Or perhaps Apple has had Intel redirect the lower-end chips to the factory where another new Mac is being built, in order to accelerate their production there. I'm glad I waited until after the MacWorld Keynote, myself.
It's unfortunate that Sourcefire's licensing doesn't let you model the hosts on your LAN, only as many IPs as you paid for (and it's quite dear).
For something with only limited ability to peer into packets, limited stream reconstruction (too expensive, CPU-wise, for most platforms), and virtually no application-level protocol understanding -- not to mention zero insight into firewall evasion techniques like HTTP tunneling -- it's an extremely limited solution for something that can't even tell you write a policy about what should be allowed in the first place.
Anything that:
* simply accepts what your network is doing as "baseline" without any thought to security best practices, * doesn't give you anything more than a limited version of 2001-era layer-3 visibility into your traffic -- * and tacks on a terrible enterprise-wide management and aggregation console and no role-based access across security zones... isn't really worth the trouble to deploy.
But man, aren't those 3D graphs cool? They don't mean anything, but wow.
Patrick Dennis
PS Reminds me of something I saw on a Navy base back in 2002. Some guys in the NOC were talking about this cool solution they'd bought, Silent Runner (long since bought by CA and vanished, like all such things).
"It's got this awesome visualizer," the guy said. "It's a headset you put on, and there's a dedicated SGI box that gives you a stereo image of what your network's doing. It's cyberspace for real, I'm telling you. And it puts a little rotating 'skull and crossbones' over bad hosts, so you can see when a Chinese hacker is coming in at you."
"That's really cool! I'd love to see it. Can I try it out?"
"Aw," he said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder, "it's in the closet somewhere."
I'll agree with an earlier poster that the original Danger Hiptop (T-Mobile Sidekick) has the best keyboard of any other like device, it has the absolute worst connectivity. The likelihood of getting my data off the thing dropped as near to zero as made no difference, so I gave up on it.
The old Apple eMate -- a Newton laptop -- did me well for years. It's got a tripod mount on the bottom, it gets 12 hours of battery life with no problem, it's a real trooper. They only made them for educational folk, but you can find them on eBay still for pretty cheap -- there are a number there now, from $28 to $100. And hey, no moving parts plus a great keyboard. It's the relatively modern equivalent of the '80s word processors mentioned above.
Today, the Sharp Zaurus is the most awesome thing I've used in some time. By that I mean the C750-class clamshell machine, on through the modern 3000 & 1000 devices, only produced for Japan but also available on eBay. And there's OpenBSD for the durn things now, too. Only drawback is battery life. And price -- you're looking at >$500 for one of those.
The best laptop I've ever owned was by Tom Bihn. Get the Brain Bag with the padded laptop sleeve -- no one's ever suspected I've had a laptop in there, it looks just like a big travelling pack with a belt to distribute the weight, lots of pockets, tightening straps on the sides, and you can beat the hell out of it.
Additionally, the Snake Charmer is great for keeping your cables together and fits neatly in the space above the laptop in the rear zipper pocket.
(I don't work for these people, but I bought a bag at their Santa Cruz store before they moved up north -- I've had it for five years, taken it trans-Atlantic more than that number of times, and never had a problem with it.)
Did anyone discover an encrypted message in any of the Baroque Cycle books? I noticed that they were relatively free of typos, but a friend of mine (who gets involved in too little sleep and too much thinking as a result) began to see a pattern in the typos in Cryptonomicon.
And while I remembered a lot of typos in that book, I wondered what would happen if I made note of them. I mentioned this to my friend, and he naturally had already written them all down. Between first and next e-mails on the subject, he'd done a bit of experimenting.
"I find deliberate errors on pages 43, 86, 129, 155, 283, 319, 341, 342, 357, 385, 430, 437, 462, 477, 479, 481, 483, 526, 534, 535, 539, 574, 585, 611, 620, 887, and 918. Hope I didn't miss one there.
"take the delta between each page number and run it through a mod 26 function - like solitaire, from the book? - there's first a block of 16 seemingly garbage letters (two bytes?) beginning with a Q, followed by three Bs in a row (spacing characters?) and another Q, then the words HADIK ZIMTER. whattf?!"
Another friend of mine, Douglas Barnes, read the first draft of Cryptonomicon, which had a lot more text than the final printed copy. The eerie thing is, and this is what makes me think it worth mentioning to the slashdot crowd, early drafts had none of the typos that the first-printing hardback ended up with. Doug swears that the text was actually very clean, and that he wondered what was up when he saw the first edition, as though the typos had been inserted on purpose.
Enoch Root care to weigh in on the matter? Any budding young crytologists think they can answer Mr. Stephenson's message? Who or what is HADIK ZIMTER?
Slashdot Mirror
What a disappointing review.
Most of the facts stated by the review's author are opinions -- and not especially well-formed opinions. Some comments are purposefully misleading (see "Munroe's Law").
One of the best things about Anathem is how absolutely accurately the novel pegs the myriad ways in which very intelligent people interact with other very intelligent people -- largely by demanding fact over opinion and by recognizing when something is reasonable over when something is desirable. The author of this review is very enthusiastic about his position, but he is incorrect in most of his statements.
He entirely neglects to mention -- at the risk of spoiling the story, I'm sure, though after warning away most possible readers it's a disingenuous concern -- that Anathem builds to the most fantastically bad-ass set of scenes and set pieces to grace traditional science-fiction in a very, very long time. And the more deeply you've grasped the conceptual framework that the author laid before you, the more its conclusion will reverberate in your brain for some time to come.
Anathem is like a clockwork of fantastical proportions; if all you want to do is check the time as you pass, you're set. Breeze on through and it'll be the quickest 900+ pages you've ever read. But if want to follow the inner workings all the way through then there's an extremely rewarding experience in front of you. I strongly recommend that smart people read this novel.
I think the author meant not the slight and frequently encountered difference between how Americans spell and how most other English-speakers spell, but the great difference between saying:
...versus...
"This is older than all human civilizations."
"This is older than the earliest Egyptian civilization."
The write-up from the original news story allows for human civilizations older than the ancient Egyptians.
Actually, all MacBook Pro shipments have been delayed till the 28th. Upgrade? Cool. Delay? Not cool.
In e-mail I just received from Apple, announcing this change to my January 10th order, they note that while they're upgrading my machine to 2GHz they're also delaying its shipment by 3 days, from the 15th to the 18th. Ostensibly this is in order to give me time to decide whether or not to give them $300 for an extra .1GHz (for a ~5% speed increase; I'd rather have 5% more battery than 5% more processor, since that's unlikely to be the bottleneck for how I'll be using the system). In reality, this is a drag -- I was looking forward to using my machine before then. What's three days slip in the scheme of things? Not much, but it's still frustrating. (If I chose to upgrade to the 2.1GHz, the e-mail warns, I can expect additional delays.)
Why is Apple upgrading the Mac Book Pros? It's not because they like their customers; altruism goes over poorly with the stockholders when you're reporting your quarterly numbers. I'm guessing it's some combination of Intel running late on the lower-end chips -- perhaps because all the Windows laptop vendors are trying to crank out their cheaper machines faster and in greater volume, and Apple doesn't yet rate at its end of the supply chain -- and in exchange for some Apple program manager releasing his or her grip on an Intel program manager's testicles the chip manufacturer has offered to "upgrade" the shipment.
Perhaps Apple simply didn't sell as many Mac Book Pros as they'd hoped, and slipped out of the range they needed to hit in order to get the break on quantity they wanted. Maybe everyone who wanted a Mac laptop bought one before Christmas, since they'd just revised the PowerBooks. Or perhaps Apple has had Intel redirect the lower-end chips to the factory where another new Mac is being built, in order to accelerate their production there. I'm glad I waited until after the MacWorld Keynote, myself.
It's unfortunate that Sourcefire's licensing doesn't let you model the hosts on your LAN, only as many IPs as you paid for (and it's quite dear).
... isn't really worth the trouble to deploy.
For something with only limited ability to peer into packets, limited stream reconstruction (too expensive, CPU-wise, for most platforms), and virtually no application-level protocol understanding -- not to mention zero insight into firewall evasion techniques like HTTP tunneling -- it's an extremely limited solution for something that can't even tell you write a policy about what should be allowed in the first place.
Anything that:
* simply accepts what your network is doing as "baseline" without any thought to security best practices,
* doesn't give you anything more than a limited version of 2001-era layer-3 visibility into your traffic --
* and tacks on a terrible enterprise-wide management and aggregation console and no role-based access across security zones
But man, aren't those 3D graphs cool? They don't mean anything, but wow.
Patrick Dennis
PS Reminds me of something I saw on a Navy base back in 2002. Some guys in the NOC were talking about this cool solution they'd bought, Silent Runner (long since bought by CA and vanished, like all such things).
"It's got this awesome visualizer," the guy said. "It's a headset you put on, and there's a dedicated SGI box that gives you a stereo image of what your network's doing. It's cyberspace for real, I'm telling you. And it puts a little rotating 'skull and crossbones' over bad hosts, so you can see when a Chinese hacker is coming in at you."
"That's really cool! I'd love to see it. Can I try it out?"
"Aw," he said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder, "it's in the closet somewhere."
I'll agree with an earlier poster that the original Danger Hiptop (T-Mobile Sidekick) has the best keyboard of any other like device, it has the absolute worst connectivity. The likelihood of getting my data off the thing dropped as near to zero as made no difference, so I gave up on it.
The old Apple eMate -- a Newton laptop -- did me well for years. It's got a tripod mount on the bottom, it gets 12 hours of battery life with no problem, it's a real trooper. They only made them for educational folk, but you can find them on eBay still for pretty cheap -- there are a number there now, from $28 to $100. And hey, no moving parts plus a great keyboard. It's the relatively modern equivalent of the '80s word processors mentioned above.
Today, the Sharp Zaurus is the most awesome thing I've used in some time. By that I mean the C750-class clamshell machine, on through the modern 3000 & 1000 devices, only produced for Japan but also available on eBay. And there's OpenBSD for the durn things now, too. Only drawback is battery life. And price -- you're looking at >$500 for one of those.
The best laptop I've ever owned was by Tom Bihn. Get the Brain Bag with the padded laptop sleeve -- no one's ever suspected I've had a laptop in there, it looks just like a big travelling pack with a belt to distribute the weight, lots of pockets, tightening straps on the sides, and you can beat the hell out of it.
e en=PROD&Product_Code=TB0104&Category_Code=TBP&Prod uct_Count=5
http://www.tombihn.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Scr
Additionally, the Snake Charmer is great for keeping your cables together and fits neatly in the space above the laptop in the rear zipper pocket.
(I don't work for these people, but I bought a bag at their Santa Cruz store before they moved up north -- I've had it for five years, taken it trans-Atlantic more than that number of times, and never had a problem with it.)
Did anyone discover an encrypted message in any of the Baroque Cycle books? I noticed that they were relatively free of typos, but a friend of mine (who gets involved in too little sleep and too much thinking as a result) began to see a pattern in the typos in Cryptonomicon.
And while I remembered a lot of typos in that book, I wondered what would happen if I made note of them. I mentioned this to my friend, and he naturally had already written them all down. Between first and next e-mails on the subject, he'd done a bit of experimenting.
"I find deliberate errors on pages 43, 86, 129, 155, 283, 319, 341, 342, 357, 385, 430, 437, 462, 477, 479, 481, 483, 526, 534, 535, 539, 574, 585, 611, 620, 887, and 918. Hope I didn't miss one there.
"take the delta between each page number and run it through a mod 26 function - like solitaire, from the book? - there's first a block of 16 seemingly garbage letters (two bytes?) beginning with a Q, followed by three Bs in a row (spacing characters?) and another Q, then the words HADIK ZIMTER. whattf?!"
Another friend of mine, Douglas Barnes, read the first draft of Cryptonomicon, which had a lot more text than the final printed copy. The eerie thing is, and this is what makes me think it worth mentioning to the slashdot crowd, early drafts had none of the typos that the first-printing hardback ended up with. Doug swears that the text was actually very clean, and that he wondered what was up when he saw the first edition, as though the typos had been inserted on purpose.
Enoch Root care to weigh in on the matter? Any budding young crytologists think they can answer Mr. Stephenson's message? Who or what is HADIK ZIMTER?
energylad