In the middle of the extended essay about operating systems is this riff on David Foster Wallace’s “E Unibus Pluram”

“The problem is that once you have done away with the ability ot make judgments as to right and wrong, true and false, etc. there’s no real culture left. All that remains is clog danceing and macrame. The ability to make judgments, to believe things, is the entire point of having a culture.”

http://www.spack.org/wiki/InTheBeginningWasTheCommandLine and http://artlung.com/smorgasborg/C_R_Y_P_T_O_N_O_M_I_C_O_N.shtml

A pretty basic review… I like Stephenson’s writing, but the topic that he covers uses dated information.

(Talking about the computer industry in 2000? Gasp!)

I liked the ‘Unix Philosophy’ better.

This was a quick, impressive read. Superficially it’s about Wintels, Macs, BeOS and Linux boxen. At a deeper level it’s about the underlying each and what they tell us about society. I especially liked his comparision of what Disney sells (a fantasy, an image) to Microsoft and Apple.