The Girl with the NSObject Class Reference tattoo What better occupation, at this time of year, than to polish up one's IT skills with some background reading? What have the great programming publishers got lined up for our delectation in 2011? Alas, as far as this reviewer is concerned, these rhetorical questions must remain unanswered. A certain Amazon parcel, containing …
It's worth noting that the translator of TGWTTDT, Steven T. Murray, was so enamoured with how his translation was "revised" by the editor at the publishing house, he eventually persuaded the publisher to release the translation under the nom de plume "Reg Keeland". Apparently the screenplay for the forthcoming Hollywood version starring Daniel Craig is more closely based on Steve's original, unedited, translation, removing some of the idiosyncrasies of the book translation.
I saw a ticket machine in an Italian station (*) rebooting, it was running OS/2 and I think the boot sequence mentioned HPFS.
(*) the ticket machines are about a million times better than the festering British embarassments - you can find out when the trains are and it will sell you tickets with a price based on the actual train rather than the British ones which have vague unhelpful disclaimers on the lines of 'you may or may not be able to use this ticket on any particular train, if not you will have to pay the 500 pound non-discounted fair and like it'.
... the detective is probably Camilleri's "Salvo Montalbano".
Good to know RAI is still making *something* worth exporting, even if they've only managed to sell two episodes to the UK so far. (Both shown in 2008, but one was apparently repeated last month.)
I won't wank on about the novels—if you can't read Italian, there's little point going on about them—but RAI did a very good job making them work on TV.
...is Zen. I only saw a small bit of it, in which the eponymous hero gains a bit of cred for driving a black Alfa Romeo. However Dr Larrington sat through the whole thing and says it's utter bobbins, not least for Rufus Sewell having to pretend that his legs are six inches shorter than they actually are, that he might both pass for an Italian and drive said Alfa. The only person I know with an Alfa is 5'6".
The "El" Reg Keeland translation of the Millennium Trilogy is a bit, OK, a lot, clunky but the Swedish films are worth watching.
...and I thought it was just me that had noticed this rampant fanboiism. Thanks Stob!
And yes, the other books are just as bad, if not worse here and there. Tech bits aside, though, they're not bad reading.
I have noticed that any author using fruity products tends to describe them in loads of (irrelevant) detail, whereas those using non-fruity products seem to stick to the plot (and get equally many techie bits wrong). I can't help but wonder why that is... Does Apple pay for product placement? Or do these guys get decent service when their kit breaks?
@ LHO & others on William Gibson:
Having read the Bigend books recently, I don't think the Apple=good, PC=bad is as clear cut as in TGWTDT.
Gibson has said that despite the "tech" aspects of his books, he is not very computer literate himself. He uses a Mac to write and research his books, and that is about it. Word processing and web browsing. In this case it really is a matter of writing about what he knows. He actually uses a Mac, but if you read his comments he isn't much of a fanboy. Having started on a Mac pre-Windows, he hasn't needed or wanted to move.
He also has said that the people in the Bigend trilogy use iPhones and Macs because he felt that that is what the people of this social type (arty/creative) use. You notice that Milgrim doesn't use an iPhone, and he isn't a bad guy. And nor is Hollis' boyfriend whats-his-name.
The Bigend books are very much about branding, descriptions include liberal use of them. It isn't an anonymous SUV but an armoured Toyota, or the plane is a Cessna, or the jeans are Levis. Are these fanboy references? It was a deliberate choice and Apple was a part of it, how its brand is everywhere until you get sick of it.
I also had another thought about the Apples/PCs in these books while making my argument. Apple's product style is almost unique to the Apple brand or at least is most attributed to it, and it is possible that the very ubiquity of PCs makes them anonymous with their generic style and nonsense lettered/numbered model names.
The Bigend trilogy are set very much in the now, whereas the Sprawl and Bridge trilogies aren't. I don't think there was any mention of Apple products in these books, despite their being written on Apple computers, and indeed he has said that Neuromancer was inspired by an Apple IIe commercial.
Disclaimer: I should point out that I own a Mac, a Power Mac 8100/100 from 1995, so I must be biased. Other than that I own 6 Windows and Linux-based PCs.
I believe Apple must pay Hollywood for product placement. For many years now I've noticed that in movies, the good guys always use Apple and the villains always use PC. There may be one or two exceptions but right now I can't think of any. It's overwhelming, far more than can be put down just to chance or directors' preferences.
Yes, the sscanfdinavians do have a non-British-English set of vowels, and there is mirth and/or confusion to be had there. Anybody see the TV movie version of the Wallander novel where Inspector Forehead's love interest is a computer programmer, and when she's not guessing his password ("fiske" -- bit easy that) she's lecturing him about a programming language called Eeeyava? And suggesting he read the documentation with something called Acrobott?
A programme is a thing you get on a television, a set list, or a pre-defined series of events.
A program is something you punch into a computer. Occasionally with fists if you have to maintain legacy code. It is derived from the US English spelling of the word programme but is spelt that way on both sides of the pond, due to the early development of commercial computing being largely US led, hence them getting to come up with the nomenclature.
Is grammatically incorrect. Although in many instances programme equates to the American program, within the IT world a computer program has always been such on both sides of the pond. Probably to differentiate it from any type of programme. Computer programme has never been the correct usage.
In the same way that Roald Dahl did not write about a Great Glass Lift.
For sheer unadulterated techoporn, try Jeffery Deaver's _The Blue Nowhere_.
Set around 2000 in the early days of commercialising the web. It features astounding viruses, astonishing feats of decryption and of encryption as an automatic response to incoming hackers.
And it has all the techie, nerdy words you can think of, many of them strung together in sentences more reminiscent of Willam Burrough's cut-up writing than of deep technical knowledge:
> But the leaders of the Knights [a legendary hacking crew] were skilled
> software writers, so good that they didn't even bother to compile
> many of their programs....
didn't our great Belfast export, Ken Branagh, also do the Firewall storyline in English?
I quite liked the whole feel of the BBC Wallanders, nice and relaxed for a Sunday evening despite plot foibles and Branagh blubbing rather too often and it's Midsomer-ish stylings at times in the beautiful Skane. I also thought that in the 2nd series the director of photography was just showing off a lot of the time. It also made me want an XC70, but not an SE phone.
... do not confuse hexen with haxen if you're german nor vixen with vaxen if you're english. Or sexes with saxons. Gives me a thought, "vaxons" sounds nice ...
Crushing apples makes cider - does crushing macs make rainwater ?
In any case, thanks for the article. Made me laugh almost as much as a friday afternoon BofH.
I noticed F. Salander's preference for Macs, but missed the others. As I recall, the Swedish title of TGWTDT translates literally to "Some Men Hate Women". Perhaps Ms. Stob could give us a follow up with "Some Men Hate Windows", to reach the US market as "The Girl with the Apple Tattoo"?
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TBH I'll take product placement/fanboi-ism over the use of markup languages as code!
Seriously - paging through some XML (or worse, HTML) is not a good representation of code analysis. You'd think they could mock up a screendump of softice or something similar in a minute flat. But no, "view source" on the Beebs website and change the colours to green on black - that's far more realistic... ^^
Love the take on the Dell box btw.
I used to work for Apple in the 90s/00s. They had a team of people entirely devoted to product-placement in movies and general plugging of Apple products. Not sure how they did it with books though :-)
Every now and then a breathless email would get sent companywide telling us to make sure to watch the Nth episode of 'Friends' where an iMac could be seen in the background, or to see how many G4 Cubes you could spot in 'About a Boy'.
I remember they nearly creamed themselves in the 'Independence Day' email.
Going Anon in case his Steveness is a Reg reader. Hi Steve :-)
Lots of attention paid to Salander's Mac. Lots of translucent Terminal.app windows, Remote Desktop screen sharing, and Expose.
I noticed that in an early scene, the wealthy industrialist who hires Blomkvist has a Lenovo box on his desk. He doesn't turn out to be a villain.
"This fictional account of the day-to-day life of an English gamekeeper is still of interest to outdoor-minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant-raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the occasional gamekeeper. Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savor these sidelights on the management of a Midlands shooting estate, and in this reviewer’s opinion the book cannot take the place of J. R. Miller’s Practical Gamekeeper."
— Field and Stream Magazine's review of Lady Chatterley's Lover, November 1959
AK4 is an abbreviation for ”Automat Karbin modell 4” which translates to approximately “Assault Rifle model 4”. The AK4 is a modified version of the Heckler & Koch G3 assault rifle using 7.26 x 51 Nato ammunition. The AK4 has since 1986 more or less been replaced by the lighter AK5 (5.56 Nato) which a licensed version of the Belgian FN FNC assault rifle.
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