On Tue, 23 Dec 2014 16:20:10 +0000, Grant Edwards wrote: > On 2014-12-23, Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> > wrote: >> Chris Angelico wrote: >> >>> On Tue, Dec 23, 2014 at 12:15 AM, Roy Smith <r...@panix.com> wrote: >>>> If I really didn't trust something, I'd go to AWS and spin up one of >>>> their free-tier micro instances and run it there :-) >>> >>> How do you know it won't create console output that stroboscopically >>> infects you with a virus through your eyes? Because that's *totally* >>> what would be done in the town of Eureka. >> >> Anybody in IT who hasn't read Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" needs to >> hand in their Geek Card immediately. > > I tried, but I got so tired of the author doing stuff like pointing out > that there were 65536 of something or other (and that it's a power of > TWO, kids!) that I gave up. The annoying thing was that there was no > real technical reason why the quantity _needed_ to be a power of two. > Too many of the technical details that you got constantly beat over the > head with were > > 1) not even remotely relevent to the story > > 2) mostly an effort by the author to demonstrate that he had a > junior-high level understanding of a 68K based Macintosh and knew > lots of cool grown up tech-sounding words -- and even if had only a > vague idea of what they meant, he could still impress the other > 13-year olds. > > 3) just plain wrong > > And even _with_ all the technical jibber-jabber, none of it explained or > justified the whole "writing a virus to infect the brain through the > optic nerve" thing which might just have well been magick and witches.
I am reading it now thanks to this list & I currently agree that it is quite annoying what feels like 3 or 4 chapters in & it is still trying to set the scene, an exercise in stylish writing with very little content so far. even early scifi written for magazines on a per word basis were not this excessive (because if they were they would probably have been rejected or seriously edited). Hopefully it will finally settle down & amend my current impression. -- Guns don't kill people. It's those damn bullets. Guns just make them go really really fast. -- Jake Johanson -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list