A review of "Snow Crash (Bantam Spectra Book)"

Snow Crash (Bantam Spectra Book)

by Neal Stephenson

Cyberpunk is a niche of science-fiction where I found a fascinating milieu steeped in world cultures and technology but never really found what I considered to be great stories. Neal Stephenson doesn’t accomplish it here either with Snow Crash, but it’s nevertheless a fun ride. And one that isn’t so utterly bleak, in contrast to Gibson. The characters never stray too far from cookie-cutter personas with the exception of Y.T. Hiro mostly serves to move the plot along. And with the Librarian, he’s an exposition device for Stephenson’s elaborate ideas on language and cognition which provide the true value for the book.

The painting of this cyberpunk universe in the very first chapter is what resonates so clearly for me in these uncertain times. Ridiculous inflation of the dollar. Global trade imbalances. Utilizing data mining to reengineer the most mundane of business processes. All converging towards an empty backyard swimming pool.

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Comparing Inspirons

Inspiron 7000

• Pentium II 300MHz
• 256MB RAM

Since the CPU is several years old, I decided to go with a minimal Gentoo installation. My original intent was to just install screen, ruby, rails, mono, lighttpd, and sqlite. Now that I've discovered overlays, I think it'll be a nice place to smoke-test new GNOME releases and the evolving C# bindings for DBus. Thanks to steev, I'll also be able to see if I can get the Ruby bindings up to speed with the latest DBus release (0.91). There's already a project on RubyForge which hasn't seen love in many moons, so I'm very tempted to dive headfirst into it.

Inspiron 8200

• Pentium 4 1.6GHz
• 256MB RAM

Ubuntu Dapper is a little too memory hungry for 256MB, but this laptop has better battery life and expandability. I'm currently straddling the fence on purchasing a Dell TrueMobile 1150 mini PCI wireless card (an Orinoco-based chipset that's fully supported by Linux) and some more RAM. While the memory limit is supposed to be 1GB, there are successful reports of installing 2GB. I don't think spending $320 on this laptop is quite worth it at the moment though (that's almost a Nokia 770!). So I think I'll settle for a 512MB SODIMM and the wireless card.