181–190 of 334 posts
On Vernor Vinge's connection to free software: https://lwn.net/Articles/310463/
He taught classes that going through the actual 68000 assembly to perform the context switch between threads in an interrupt service routine (copy the saved registers from the running thread on the stack to a separate area, and overwrite them on the stack with the registers from the thread you want to switch to).
Don't know who Vernor Vinge was, but his name rocks!
If Vernor Vinge doesn't deserve the black banner atop HN, then nobody does.
I went to San Diego State and majored in CompSCi in 2006. Vernor was a bit before my time but heard legendary stories. Rest in peace.
This guy was one of the greats. A deepness in the sky (the sequel) is one of my favourite sci fi books of all time, and even better than Fire upon the deep imo.
Thomas Nau is such a fantastic villain. Not evil for the sake of evil, but rather reasoned decisions with terrible prices.
The Emergents and their system are pretty clearly just evil, and there's never any indication given that they actually care about those terrible prices, or even reflect on them for long. Vinge is very good at channeling the Orwellian language that regimes like these use, but I didn't find his intent at all ambiguous.
The really compelling and ambiguous character in that book is [redacted spoiler], who really does grapple with the moral implications of his decisions, but ultimately chooses the not-evil path. Personally I think this also highlight's Vinge's biggest flaw as an author for me, which is that in all of his books, the most fully realized and believable protagonist is a scheming megalomaniac, with second place going to the abusive misanthrope of Rainbows End, and third to the prickly settlement leader in Marooned in Realtime. All of the more sympathetic characters feel like empty vessels that just react to the plot.
Don't know who Vernor Vinge was, but his name rocks!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imagine that there's a little computer inside each neuron that decides when it needs to do work. Those computers are an implementation detail of the flops being provided by neurons, and would not increase the overall flop count, since that'd be counting them twice. For example, how would you measure the speed of a game boy emulator? Would you take into consideration all the instructions the emulator itself needs to r…
Already considered in my comment. > Imagine that there's a little computer inside each neuron that decides when it needs to do work Yah, there's -bajillions- of floating point operation equivalents happening in a neuron deciding what to do. They're probably not all functional. BUT, that's why I said the "useful parts" of the decision: It may take more than the equivalent of one floating point operation to decide whet…
A lot of love here for A Fire Upon the Deep (predicted fake news via "the net of a thousand lies") and A Deepness in the Sky (great depiction of cognitive enhancement, slower-than-light interstellar trade), but less so for Rainbows End, which is perhaps a less successful story but remains, after almost two decades, the best description of what augmented reality games and ARGs might do to the world.
If you never read Vernor Vinge (except for his essay on the Technological Singularity), what would be the best book to start?
True Names, particularly because it is short.