First, let me say that I last read this in a pirated e-copy. Somewhere, I lost my paperback copy, and it's out of print, and the only way I could re-r First, let me say that I last read this in a pirated e-copy. Somewhere, I lost my paperback copy, and it's out of print, and the only way I could re-read it was to download an illegal copy from the net.
So sue me! Tom Ryan, if you contact me, I'll send you twice your legitimate royalty payment. And the epub I downloaded, which is MUCH better formatted than most books of a similar vintage that I get from legitimate publishing houses. It was a labour of love for somebody, while most of the traditional publishers who put out e-copies of backlists put no effort into it at all.
So, to the story. This is an extremely flawed book. For the technical reasons, see Rob Sawyer's review. There's a lot of hand-waving about how a computer actually achieves consciousness. On a more personal level, having been at the University of Waterloo just shortly after the events set there, I'm ticked that he sets UW in Kitchener (an adjacent city) and clearly knows nothing about the area (though I'd say he was in the Math faculty computer center)—London is not six miles south of Kitchener, that would be Cambridge (or maybe, at the time, Preston). London is more like 60 miles west.
On the other hand, there are moments that are sublime. When Burgess is first talking about hacking an IBM mainframe, his roommate says it can't be done.
"Have you ever tried?" Gregory asked "No. And I don't have to try to know that I can't fly without an airplane."
That's brilliant, as it reflects the belief, less than a century earlier, that heavier-than-air flight was equally impossible.
Sawyer's own books about emerging consciousness in a networked computer (WWW: Wake & sequels) are technically better, but this tale is absolutely seminal! For all its faults, it's the progenitor of the computer-gains-consciousness-takes-control-of-the world genre. Other authors had had intelligent computers, but Ryan was the one who actually tried to explain how it could happen (he was wrong, but at least he tried!). Programming an AI is far more difficult than Ryan would have us believe (which is why there still isn't one, 40 years later), but at the time of writing it sounded believable. I suspect Ryan never got as far in Computer Science as Moore's Law, because he just doesn't think nearly big enough. P-1 is planning a new crystalline storage medium that can contain 4 billion "addresses" in a 150mm x 400mm cylinder. Even assuming an address points to a 64-bit word, that would only be 256GB of memory. In something that's actually much larger than my current laptop, which in one tiny portion of the entire machine has a terabyte hard drive.
But even knowing how badly he got some things wrong, and cringing at his American understanding of Canadian geography, the scope of his vision, and the things he got right make this utterly compelling. And he leaves us completely hanging! These days (or even a few years earlier with Colossus) there'd be a trilogy. A must read!...more
It's not, as advertised, about developing Android "apps", it's about developing Mobile websites. Not an obvious differencWell that was disappointing.
It's not, as advertised, about developing Android "apps", it's about developing Mobile websites. Not an obvious difference to many end-users, but a huge difference to the target audience for this little book....more
This was Kevin D. Mitnick's "get even" book. The sole reason for writing it seems to have been to name everybody who ever did him a bad turn.
The hackThis was Kevin D. Mitnick's "get even" book. The sole reason for writing it seems to have been to name everybody who ever did him a bad turn.
The hacking, and particularly the social engineering, is fascinating, but the character is a louse. He seems to think that just because he didn't intend to make a profit from his hacking, he should be treated as innocent. I'm sorry: like many smart people who go to jail, he spent a good bit of his time learning the law. He knew when he was hacking exactly what laws he was breaking and what the penalties could be. If there hadn't been penalties, he probably wouldn't have found the hacking interesting enough. So don't expect sympathy from us when you finally got caught, and don't expect us to agree with you when your co-conspirators turn out to be spying on your for the FBI....more
When Greg Egan is good, he's great, and this one is a keeper.
Intertwining a perfectly believable near-term future of Iran with highly realistic experiWhen Greg Egan is good, he's great, and this one is a keeper.
Intertwining a perfectly believable near-term future of Iran with highly realistic experimentation into artificial intelligence, it covers human (and AI) rights, life extension, ancient Farsi stories, virtual realities and what it means to be a family; blending it all seamlessly into a touching narrative.
As a computer geek, I'm always eager to read stories about artificial intelligence, and naturally have a pretty high threshold of believability for the subject. This story, and especially the ending, has my belief from start to finish....more