Look, I personally think that it's hard to be rational and *not* tend to oppose the War for Oil. However, resigning from your LUG doesn't do much, and *certainly* isn't realistic. Linux is *definitely* going to be used by the military, as well as all sorts of other things, like fire, knives, x86 processors, and whatnot.
The solution to opposing the Iraq war is to vote against Bush in November and convince others to do the same, not to resign from an influential position unrelated to the war.
Anyone notice how Microsoft programmers posting to Slashdot always seem post AC, even when their posts don't contain any information that would remotely be upsetting to their company?
It will be cool one day, imagining that for a brief moment, the photons, being in a superposition of states, *could* be transferring all the known wealth of the universe to my bank account.
I move that theoretical physicists be added to that "homeland security watch list", if they aren't there already. If they suddenly start making lots of money, I'm going to be suspicious.
I mean, come on. 'BurnAllGIFS.' It practically reeks of professionalism and years of law school.
If emotion was mutually exclusive with competence, we wouldn't have had Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, or most of the United States Founding Fathers.
That being said, the companies involved are all heavy users of patents, in many cases aggresively. They're also using ECMA as their standards body, who has a very premissive policy on patents. For anybody who reads that link, "reasonable and non-discrimantory licensing" means "everybody who uses this 'standard' can be made to cough up some dough.
You know, the *only* time I've heard much about ECMA standards has been in the context of C#.
Here's a list of ECMA standards. I find it a little distressing that the bulk of them relate to data formats and communication protocols -- two areas where Microsoft and other heavy-hitting IP nasties work hardest to leverage IP to prevent free interoperation.
The other problem I heard people complain about (but was not a problem for me) was the "JavaScript" problem -- people on comp.lang.vrml didn't like that their web VRML was human-readable and stealable.
I've always been curious as to how much of a real risk this is. How many contracts do developers *really* lose because someone used a snippit? I write open source C/C++/etc code without worries, because I'm quite comfortable believing that given the vast number of computing needs in the world that aren't being met, the market for people to produce software is not going to vanish (may change a lot, become less lucrative, but not vanish). If Bob Smith writes a "right click save image blocker" Javascript, and Mary Jones uses the same thing, what is the actual chance that Bob Smith was going to get hired in place of Mary Jones? I mean, I can understand it for some things, but a lot of web code is website-specific. The Web is an expanding and rapidly-changing medium, and it's not as if that Javascript snippit is likely to be in use seven years from now.
You've made your point, though. I was absolutely shocked when I realized how few new series were PC-exclusive. Almost everything is released both on console and PC, or is a continuation of old series that took off back when the PC/console sales ratio was tilted more towards the PC.
Now, that doesn't mean that there are necessarily less games for the PC. Given the number of profitable consoles and gaming systems out there, exclusives are are *lot* less common, for the PC or for a console.
The main disadvantage of the lack of exclusives is that developers have to go least-common-denominator when doing their design work.
I would say that it's a bit doubtful, for a couple reasons.
First, Linus is first and foremost a kernel developer. As far as I can tell, Microsoft does not go in for particularly heavy development on their kernel.
Second, they know that it's unlikely that Linus would take it. Linus could make a lot more money by working at Red Hat or similar, but has chosen not to do so to avoid biasing Linux. He really likes doing the open source Linux, and it's unlikely that he'd stop doing something that he really likes doing (for Chrissake, he has a world-famous software product named after him) for something that he doesn't like doing as much but gets more money for.
Third, Linus is a nice, highly visible person. He'd be great for a tech company that wants to say "Linus Torvalds works here", but normally big software companies are going to want to keep their kernel developers a bit more under wraps -- they don't want people and media constantly prodding them and increasing the chance that information about new features will leak.
Fourth, while Linus is a skilled hacker, his most extensive experience is with the Linux kernel. Honestly, there are certainly going to be people out there more familiar with Microsoft's work.
If MS eventally loses enough of the market -- and I think that this will happen, though probably later than sooner -- they will probably quite happily operate selling an "MS Linux" distribution, just like companies that pushed formats competing with CD-R eventually fell into line. There are lots of ways to establish monopolies with a Linux distribution -- Microsoft's favorite tools, closed formats and protocols, are still available. *Then* having Linus onboard might be useful. But, I think, not in the current environment.
Which is a long held tradition in the business world. With the caveat that you cannot always do it -- there's that irritating little bit about freedom of choice. If someone doesn't want to sell their business to you (or, more particularly in this case) work for you, they don't have to.
True, but it's hard to resist a particularly tantalizing offer.
Microsoft is *very* good at targetting people that are a thorn in their side for acquisitions. That doesn't mean that the acquisitions are a bad idea, just that they frequently make them serve double duty as eliminating a pesky competitor.
They acquired Bungie to make their lead game for the XBox. They could have acquired *anyone* to do this, but they chose the leading game developer for their main competitor.
They acquired Connectix, which had been producing stuff for the Mac that was strategically disadvantageous to them.
Se, you can tell that you're an engineer (or scientist) because you can afford to indulge in ethics.
A salesman's boss isn't going to give a damn whether the customer is slightly mislead or not (as long as the customer isn't peeved enough to make an enormous fuss right away)-- the salesman's worth is going to be measured solely by how many dollars he's bringing into the company. If maximizing that requires using quirks in the human psyche, little irrationalities that can be exploited, than he's going to be expected to do so.
In engineering, lying is generally a Bad Thing. If you have a known flaw, it should generally go up the tree to someone who can decide that the company is willing to go ahead despite the flaw -- lying within the company isn't generally all that beneficial to you. You aren't likely to interact too heavily with people *outside* of your company, so you don't need to worry about them as much.
Just thought I'd point that out -- this is a good move and everything, but hiring people that are already well-known in their field is neither A) necessarily good news for those of you stumping for MS jobs, or B) particularly cost-effective for Microsoft.
Mm. It's good from a PR standpoint. It's also important from an informational standpoint. Lots of big companies hire people and expect them (whether it's an ethical expectation or not) to use the information that they have from their old employer. Munich was a big strategic win for SuSE. Presumably, this guy, at the core of SuSE's marketing effort, has a pretty good idea what markets SuSE is aiming at, what strategies they think they've found in Microsoft's marketing strategies, and what techniques they want to use. That data can be worth quite a bit of money.
It's a fair bet that SuSE has hired a couple of ex-Microsoft people, so it's not as if this is a one-way game.
First, not understanding CVs is very much different from not understanding source control. There are people that work all day with, oh, I dunno, PVCS and have never used CVS. CVS happened to be popular in the open source world because it was free. Not everyone used it.
Second of all, it's quite possible to have years of experience working on projects that simply modularized projects well and backed up on a regular basis, and never needed source control. The people that wrote UNIX probably didn't have the benefit of source control, you know?:-)
Marketing generally matters more than product quality in getting sales, depressing as it is to say.
Look at all the successful companies out there that depend heavily on marketing.
* Soda companies sell a little bit of sugar in water with a drop of flavoring -- and in the last few years, *water* -- for exorbant prices. They do well.
* Nike sells a line of shoes. It's not that their shoes are bad, but they aren't three times as nice as the competition.
* Apple sells the iPod line. Not that the iPod is a bad MP3 player, mind you, but there are devices that cost less with more space. Who comes out on top? Apple, with the well-designed marketing campaigns.
* Many car manufacturers provide the same car with different bodies, charge wildly different amounts and sell to different demographics based just on what the body looks like.
* I'm sure everyone here can name masses of games that, while well-designed, did poorly in the marketplace compared to competitors because of poor marketing. My favorite pet peeve is Starcraft and Total Annihilation. TA is technically a much more sophisticated game, but Blizzard has a *very* good and experienced set of marketers, and got much better sales. Just having the developers create a good game isn't enough -- you need to have a good set of marketers make the game a blockbuster.
* A fair amount of pop music. I think Slashdotters are too harsh on pop stars -- I suspect that even Britney Spears has something worth listening to, but pop stars certainly get more attention than their products demand.
* Oracle's DBMS -- their product is hardly the only one that can reliably and securely hold data, but people will pay a lot extra for the impression of reliability given by the Oracle sales rep.
* Creative Labs. (I always thought that "Creative Labs" was a great misnomer, since Creative is not exactly a groundbreaker.) They charge premium prices for their products, but provide little by way of outstanding engineering. They also were the first technology company that I was aware of that sells almost completely different products under the same brand name for marketing purpose. the "Soundblaster Live! Value", for instance describes a huge array of actual products, all sold as "Soundblaster Live! Value".
* Movies. I'm sure everyone here can name some pretty bad movies that did pretty well at the box office.
* AOL. AOL provides minimal actual value for the cost -- their differentiating features have gradually gone away as the Internet's gotten bigger and bigger. Their primary product is a perception of ease-of-use, which is generated by marketing.
As a finishing word -- I'm not intending to bash people that use these products. Not only is everyone affected by marketing -- Western culture is *good* at marketing -- but there are real, legitimate reasons to buy each product. I drink soda, have a Creative sound card, and enjoy Starcraft. It's just that people frequently fail to recognize how important marketing is.
Many top universities have become deeply enmeshed with Microsoft (among them, MIT and Stanford).
Carnegie Mellon had a different experience -- Microsoft already hired all the people from CMU that wanted to work with them, and increased the proportions of faculty on-campus that didn't like 'em much.:-)
I don't know about his other books, but after all the adolation from this website, I picked up Cryptonomicon from the library to give it a shot.
Try Snow Crash at the library -- I was sucked in after a chapter, and I think it's *much* more engaging than Cryptonomicon. I actually didn't think too much of Cryptonomicon...
Little does he know that we only want to know where we can download his ebooks for free.
I know you're trolling, but I think my experience regarding this is interesting.
I like Neal Stephenson's writing, if for no other reason than that I thought that Snow Crash was an absolute blast (if you like Gibson, you're probably going to like Snow Crash).
I own three copies of Snow Crash.
I was mucking about on kast, one of the more interesting (if unlikely to take the world by storm) P2P systems out there, and took a look at the ebook broadcast channel, and there was Snow Crash. Well, I've never had an electronic copy of SC, so I grabbed it. I figured I'd give SC another re-read...but it just plain was too much of a pain in the ass to sit in front of the computer and read the thing. Really, I want to be able to read my books in the bathroom, while sitting on the couch with some chips, while walking somewhere or waiting for someone outside...ebook readers just aren't nice and cheap enough to compete with books yet. The medium itself is an effective piracy deterrent, kinda like CD-ROM games in the days before broadband.
The main reason that I'd like to use ebooks is that I find it incredibly frusterating that physical books go through "printings" -- you have to grab a physical book when it comes out, or you can't have it. Screw that. I want to be able to buy a book I liked ten years from now if I want. Having just spent a while obtaining an out-of-print hardcover book that I wanted, I know how expensive and how much of a pain in the ass it can be to get something even a few years after the printing date. I'm accustomed to the digital world, where one doesn't have to put up with this kind of stuff.
As another aside -- I would pay for an ebook, if I could get a nice, inexpensive, copy in an open format (nothing that requires a reader that isn't going to be produced in three years). I wouldn't pay a lot, but...
Here's an example. I remember the Sampson the Church Cat picture book series from my childhood. The books are wonderfully done -- they have perfectly serious text, and beautifully detailed watercolor illustrations. The text is quite serious, but can be interpreted in a humerous manner by seeing the illustrations. The books are, however, long out of print. I would love to obtain ebook copies at $2 each or so from an automated website, but I can't.
There are a lot of reasons that I like Stephenson's writing, but here's a simple good one. I can read about technology from Stephenson without feeling that my intelligence is being insulted. Most writers (and that includes science fiction writers) just plain don't understant computers very well, and make very silly assumptions that techies have to drag themselves through, rolling their eyes as they go. It breaks the illusion. Stephenson doesn't do that.
Why do people treat fiction authors liek gurus? I saw a robotics aritcleon here the other day where people were seriously talking about Asimov's 3 laws of robotics like they were actually applicable to real life.
I agree that the Three Laws are ridiculously overused, but neither are they a collection of bullshit. You have to come up with some sort of high-level goals for an intelligence -- ours is to have sex, avoid physical pain, eat food, and that sort of thing.
Stephenson *does* have interesting insights. I think that treating social systems as organisms is a *very* interesting concept, for instance. Furthermore, Stephenson was a software developer before becoming a writer -- at least in Snow Crash, he's writing quite directly about things he knows. If someone else collected their best insights and rolled them together into an enjoyable novel, I expect they'd get a fair amount of respect as well.
I thought Crytonomicon dragged at places, actually.
I can happily read very slow-paced novels, but the problem is that NS was using a slow-moving story and a fast-moving story. It reminded me a bit of the problems with the second Matrix movie -- the pacing changes from very fast to very slow. It's jolting, and hard to adjust to one or the other.
Snow Crash had a few slower and faster bits, but transitioned between them a bit more gradually, IMHO.
Really? The gritty, over-the-top style from Snow Crash is what makes me really like him.
I also found some of the insights in his work very interesting. I don't agree with all of them, but...well, let me put it this way. NS work reminds me vaguely of the literary version of The Matrix. The Matrix (the first movie) had lots of ridiculously over-the-top dialog and posturing, and was popular because of a bit of philosophy that was thrown in. NS throws a lot of interesting ideas into his books, and has the same over-the-topness. Plus, Snow Crash has a hacker for a Protagonist. What's not to like?
I think that NS can have a tendancy to bog down sometimes. I can understand someone feeling that the comic-book-style over-the-top approach might be juvenile. However, these just really pale compared to the benefits.
Oh, and NS writes fiction dealing with technology where those of us that know technology don't have to constantly wince at the absurd inaccuracies throughout the book.
Slashdot Mirror
Look, I personally think that it's hard to be rational and *not* tend to oppose the War for Oil. However, resigning from your LUG doesn't do much, and *certainly* isn't realistic. Linux is *definitely* going to be used by the military, as well as all sorts of other things, like fire, knives, x86 processors, and whatnot.
The solution to opposing the Iraq war is to vote against Bush in November and convince others to do the same, not to resign from an influential position unrelated to the war.
Anyone notice how Microsoft programmers posting to Slashdot always seem post AC, even when their posts don't contain any information that would remotely be upsetting to their company?
It will be cool one day, imagining that for a brief moment, the photons, being in a superposition of states, *could* be transferring all the known wealth of the universe to my bank account.
I move that theoretical physicists be added to that "homeland security watch list", if they aren't there already. If they suddenly start making lots of money, I'm going to be suspicious.
I mean, come on. 'BurnAllGIFS.' It practically reeks of professionalism and years of law school.
If emotion was mutually exclusive with competence, we wouldn't have had Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, or most of the United States Founding Fathers.
That being said, the companies involved are all heavy users of patents, in many cases aggresively. They're also using ECMA as their standards body, who has a very premissive policy on patents. For anybody who reads that link, "reasonable and non-discrimantory licensing" means "everybody who uses this 'standard' can be made to cough up some dough.
You know, the *only* time I've heard much about ECMA standards has been in the context of C#.
Here's a list of ECMA standards. I find it a little distressing that the bulk of them relate to data formats and communication protocols -- two areas where Microsoft and other heavy-hitting IP nasties work hardest to leverage IP to prevent free interoperation.
Animations?
Character models?
Fractal models?
The other problem I heard people complain about (but was not a problem for me) was the "JavaScript" problem -- people on comp.lang.vrml didn't like that their web VRML was human-readable and stealable.
I've always been curious as to how much of a real risk this is. How many contracts do developers *really* lose because someone used a snippit? I write open source C/C++/etc code without worries, because I'm quite comfortable believing that given the vast number of computing needs in the world that aren't being met, the market for people to produce software is not going to vanish (may change a lot, become less lucrative, but not vanish). If Bob Smith writes a "right click save image blocker" Javascript, and Mary Jones uses the same thing, what is the actual chance that Bob Smith was going to get hired in place of Mary Jones? I mean, I can understand it for some things, but a lot of web code is website-specific. The Web is an expanding and rapidly-changing medium, and it's not as if that Javascript snippit is likely to be in use seven years from now.
Yes.
You've made your point, though. I was absolutely shocked when I realized how few new series were PC-exclusive. Almost everything is released both on console and PC, or is a continuation of old series that took off back when the PC/console sales ratio was tilted more towards the PC.
Now, that doesn't mean that there are necessarily less games for the PC. Given the number of profitable consoles and gaming systems out there, exclusives are are *lot* less common, for the PC or for a console.
The main disadvantage of the lack of exclusives is that developers have to go least-common-denominator when doing their design work.
I'm curious. Do you feel that these data points are normal, or abnormal?
I think I'd be a bit dubious about making life decisions based on these two data points.
I would say that it's a bit doubtful, for a couple reasons.
First, Linus is first and foremost a kernel developer. As far as I can tell, Microsoft does not go in for particularly heavy development on their kernel.
Second, they know that it's unlikely that Linus would take it. Linus could make a lot more money by working at Red Hat or similar, but has chosen not to do so to avoid biasing Linux. He really likes doing the open source Linux, and it's unlikely that he'd stop doing something that he really likes doing (for Chrissake, he has a world-famous software product named after him) for something that he doesn't like doing as much but gets more money for.
Third, Linus is a nice, highly visible person. He'd be great for a tech company that wants to say "Linus Torvalds works here", but normally big software companies are going to want to keep their kernel developers a bit more under wraps -- they don't want people and media constantly prodding them and increasing the chance that information about new features will leak.
Fourth, while Linus is a skilled hacker, his most extensive experience is with the Linux kernel. Honestly, there are certainly going to be people out there more familiar with Microsoft's work.
If MS eventally loses enough of the market -- and I think that this will happen, though probably later than sooner -- they will probably quite happily operate selling an "MS Linux" distribution, just like companies that pushed formats competing with CD-R eventually fell into line. There are lots of ways to establish monopolies with a Linux distribution -- Microsoft's favorite tools, closed formats and protocols, are still available. *Then* having Linus onboard might be useful. But, I think, not in the current environment.
Which is a long held tradition in the business world. With the caveat that you cannot always do it -- there's that irritating little bit about freedom of choice. If someone doesn't want to sell their business to you (or, more particularly in this case) work for you, they don't have to.
True, but it's hard to resist a particularly tantalizing offer.
Microsoft is *very* good at targetting people that are a thorn in their side for acquisitions. That doesn't mean that the acquisitions are a bad idea, just that they frequently make them serve double duty as eliminating a pesky competitor.
They acquired Bungie to make their lead game for the XBox. They could have acquired *anyone* to do this, but they chose the leading game developer for their main competitor.
They acquired Connectix, which had been producing stuff for the Mac that was strategically disadvantageous to them.
Se, you can tell that you're an engineer (or scientist) because you can afford to indulge in ethics.
A salesman's boss isn't going to give a damn whether the customer is slightly mislead or not (as long as the customer isn't peeved enough to make an enormous fuss right away)-- the salesman's worth is going to be measured solely by how many dollars he's bringing into the company. If maximizing that requires using quirks in the human psyche, little irrationalities that can be exploited, than he's going to be expected to do so.
In engineering, lying is generally a Bad Thing. If you have a known flaw, it should generally go up the tree to someone who can decide that the company is willing to go ahead despite the flaw -- lying within the company isn't generally all that beneficial to you. You aren't likely to interact too heavily with people *outside* of your company, so you don't need to worry about them as much.
Just thought I'd point that out -- this is a good move and everything, but hiring people that are already well-known in their field is neither A) necessarily good news for those of you stumping for MS jobs, or B) particularly cost-effective for Microsoft.
Mm. It's good from a PR standpoint. It's also important from an informational standpoint. Lots of big companies hire people and expect them (whether it's an ethical expectation or not) to use the information that they have from their old employer. Munich was a big strategic win for SuSE. Presumably, this guy, at the core of SuSE's marketing effort, has a pretty good idea what markets SuSE is aiming at, what strategies they think they've found in Microsoft's marketing strategies, and what techniques they want to use. That data can be worth quite a bit of money.
It's a fair bet that SuSE has hired a couple of ex-Microsoft people, so it's not as if this is a one-way game.
It's quite possible.
:-)
First, not understanding CVs is very much different from not understanding source control. There are people that work all day with, oh, I dunno, PVCS and have never used CVS. CVS happened to be popular in the open source world because it was free. Not everyone used it.
Second of all, it's quite possible to have years of experience working on projects that simply modularized projects well and backed up on a regular basis, and never needed source control. The people that wrote UNIX probably didn't have the benefit of source control, you know?
Marketing generally matters more than product quality in getting sales, depressing as it is to say.
Look at all the successful companies out there that depend heavily on marketing.
* Soda companies sell a little bit of sugar in water with a drop of flavoring -- and in the last few years, *water* -- for exorbant prices. They do well.
* Nike sells a line of shoes. It's not that their shoes are bad, but they aren't three times as nice as the competition.
* Apple sells the iPod line. Not that the iPod is a bad MP3 player, mind you, but there are devices that cost less with more space. Who comes out on top? Apple, with the well-designed marketing campaigns.
* Many car manufacturers provide the same car with different bodies, charge wildly different amounts and sell to different demographics based just on what the body looks like.
* I'm sure everyone here can name masses of games that, while well-designed, did poorly in the marketplace compared to competitors because of poor marketing. My favorite pet peeve is Starcraft and Total Annihilation. TA is technically a much more sophisticated game, but Blizzard has a *very* good and experienced set of marketers, and got much better sales. Just having the developers create a good game isn't enough -- you need to have a good set of marketers make the game a blockbuster.
* A fair amount of pop music. I think Slashdotters are too harsh on pop stars -- I suspect that even Britney Spears has something worth listening to, but pop stars certainly get more attention than their products demand.
* Oracle's DBMS -- their product is hardly the only one that can reliably and securely hold data, but people will pay a lot extra for the impression of reliability given by the Oracle sales rep.
* Creative Labs. (I always thought that "Creative Labs" was a great misnomer, since Creative is not exactly a groundbreaker.) They charge premium prices for their products, but provide little by way of outstanding engineering. They also were the first technology company that I was aware of that sells almost completely different products under the same brand name for marketing purpose. the "Soundblaster Live! Value", for instance describes a huge array of actual products, all sold as "Soundblaster Live! Value".
* Movies. I'm sure everyone here can name some pretty bad movies that did pretty well at the box office.
* AOL. AOL provides minimal actual value for the cost -- their differentiating features have gradually gone away as the Internet's gotten bigger and bigger. Their primary product is a perception of ease-of-use, which is generated by marketing.
As a finishing word -- I'm not intending to bash people that use these products. Not only is everyone affected by marketing -- Western culture is *good* at marketing -- but there are real, legitimate reasons to buy each product. I drink soda, have a Creative sound card, and enjoy Starcraft. It's just that people frequently fail to recognize how important marketing is.
Many top universities have become deeply enmeshed with Microsoft (among them, MIT and Stanford).
:-)
Carnegie Mellon had a different experience -- Microsoft already hired all the people from CMU that wanted to work with them, and increased the proportions of faculty on-campus that didn't like 'em much.
I don't know about his other books, but after all the adolation from this website, I picked up Cryptonomicon from the library to give it a shot.
Try Snow Crash at the library -- I was sucked in after a chapter, and I think it's *much* more engaging than Cryptonomicon. I actually didn't think too much of Cryptonomicon...
Little does he know that we only want to know where we can download his ebooks for free.
I know you're trolling, but I think my experience regarding this is interesting.
I like Neal Stephenson's writing, if for no other reason than that I thought that Snow Crash was an absolute blast (if you like Gibson, you're probably going to like Snow Crash).
I own three copies of Snow Crash.
I was mucking about on kast, one of the more interesting (if unlikely to take the world by storm) P2P systems out there, and took a look at the ebook broadcast channel, and there was Snow Crash. Well, I've never had an electronic copy of SC, so I grabbed it. I figured I'd give SC another re-read...but it just plain was too much of a pain in the ass to sit in front of the computer and read the thing. Really, I want to be able to read my books in the bathroom, while sitting on the couch with some chips, while walking somewhere or waiting for someone outside...ebook readers just aren't nice and cheap enough to compete with books yet. The medium itself is an effective piracy deterrent, kinda like CD-ROM games in the days before broadband.
The main reason that I'd like to use ebooks is that I find it incredibly frusterating that physical books go through "printings" -- you have to grab a physical book when it comes out, or you can't have it. Screw that. I want to be able to buy a book I liked ten years from now if I want. Having just spent a while obtaining an out-of-print hardcover book that I wanted, I know how expensive and how much of a pain in the ass it can be to get something even a few years after the printing date. I'm accustomed to the digital world, where one doesn't have to put up with this kind of stuff.
As another aside -- I would pay for an ebook, if I could get a nice, inexpensive, copy in an open format (nothing that requires a reader that isn't going to be produced in three years). I wouldn't pay a lot, but...
Here's an example. I remember the Sampson the Church Cat picture book series from my childhood. The books are wonderfully done -- they have perfectly serious text, and beautifully detailed watercolor illustrations. The text is quite serious, but can be interpreted in a humerous manner by seeing the illustrations. The books are, however, long out of print. I would love to obtain ebook copies at $2 each or so from an automated website, but I can't.
I actually liked Zodiac more than the later books of his that I've read. It's kind of like Snow Crash redux.
I mean, the guy was describing the sound of a pipe organ for two pages.
Don't ever read Donald Knuth's homepage.
Maybe I'm too much of an English major
A scarce resource around Slashdot.
There are a lot of reasons that I like Stephenson's writing, but here's a simple good one. I can read about technology from Stephenson without feeling that my intelligence is being insulted. Most writers (and that includes science fiction writers) just plain don't understant computers very well, and make very silly assumptions that techies have to drag themselves through, rolling their eyes as they go. It breaks the illusion. Stephenson doesn't do that.
Why do people treat fiction authors liek gurus? I saw a robotics aritcleon here the other day where people were seriously talking about Asimov's 3 laws of robotics like they were actually applicable to real life.
I agree that the Three Laws are ridiculously overused, but neither are they a collection of bullshit. You have to come up with some sort of high-level goals for an intelligence -- ours is to have sex, avoid physical pain, eat food, and that sort of thing.
Stephenson *does* have interesting insights. I think that treating social systems as organisms is a *very* interesting concept, for instance. Furthermore, Stephenson was a software developer before becoming a writer -- at least in Snow Crash, he's writing quite directly about things he knows. If someone else collected their best insights and rolled them together into an enjoyable novel, I expect they'd get a fair amount of respect as well.
I thought Crytonomicon dragged at places, actually.
I can happily read very slow-paced novels, but the problem is that NS was using a slow-moving story and a fast-moving story. It reminded me a bit of the problems with the second Matrix movie -- the pacing changes from very fast to very slow. It's jolting, and hard to adjust to one or the other.
Snow Crash had a few slower and faster bits, but transitioned between them a bit more gradually, IMHO.
Stephenson's awesome: an entertaining writer and a geek to boot. Let's not forget which one comes first.
:-)
He worked as a software developer before working as a writer.
I think it's pretty safe to say that NS does, in fact, know the difference.
Really? The gritty, over-the-top style from Snow Crash is what makes me really like him.
I also found some of the insights in his work very interesting. I don't agree with all of them, but...well, let me put it this way. NS work reminds me vaguely of the literary version of The Matrix. The Matrix (the first movie) had lots of ridiculously over-the-top dialog and posturing, and was popular because of a bit of philosophy that was thrown in. NS throws a lot of interesting ideas into his books, and has the same over-the-topness. Plus, Snow Crash has a hacker for a Protagonist. What's not to like?
I think that NS can have a tendancy to bog down sometimes. I can understand someone feeling that the comic-book-style over-the-top approach might be juvenile. However, these just really pale compared to the benefits.
Oh, and NS writes fiction dealing with technology where those of us that know technology don't have to constantly wince at the absurd inaccuracies throughout the book.