Entries created on Mon, 10 Jan 2005

Heard today on lwn.net:

... knowledge is exactly like power - something to be distributed as widely as humanly possible, for the betterment of all. -- jd

Word!

Neal Stephenson's In The Beginning was the Command Line was recently put online (legally and with permission from Stephenson, of course). I've always heard this was a must read for anyone with even a mild interest in the history of the computer industry. My vertical scrollbar is at about 37% and already I have to agree.

This alone will be worth the read (and it doesn't even have anything to do with computing):

I was in Disney World recently, specifically the part of it called the Magic Kingdom, walking up Main Street USA. This is a perfect gingerbready Victorian small town that culminates in a Disney castle. It was very crowded; we shuffled rather than walked. Directly in front of me was a man with a camcorder. It was one of the new breed of camcorders where instead of peering through a viewfinder you gaze at a flat-panel color screen about the size of a playing card, which televises live coverage of whatever the camcorder is seeing. He was holding the appliance close to his face, so that it obstructed his view. Rather than go see a real small town for free, he had paid money to see a pretend one, and rather than see it with the naked eye he was watching it on television.

And rather than stay home and read a book, I was watching him.

I fell in love with Stephenson's writing style with Snowcrash. The day after I finished Snowcrash, I purchased Cryptonomicon - in hardcover. I have not yet found the time to take on the Baroque trilogy.

Oh yea. There are some mixed feelings about the copy of Command Line linked to. The guy who got Stephenson's okay to put it online felt it necessary to annotate some bits that were slightly out of date. I read the first couple of annotations, couldn't really follow, and skipped the rest. They aren't overly intrusive and might even make sense to a different monkey.