Loaded with computer jargon and acronyms, this is a story told with gusto by a knowledgeable devotee—but for computer...
There’s no free lunch, but there is abundant free source-code software out there in the ether. Perhaps you have no idea what “source code” is. You will get just the sketchiest of notions here, hidden in a thoroughgoing description of the movement to spread the thing around.
Wayner, a prodigious computernik, shows us a civilization of hackers, by hackers, and for hackers, and his account is of particular interest to that breed of programmers who can write their own superior variant operating systems and say to hell with Windows. It all started in Finland not so long ago when Linus Torvalds, the principal guru of free software, wrote his original operating system on his dinky PC. Then he gave it, gratis, to anyone who wanted it. That fit of altruism earned him more devoted followers than L. Ron Hubbard. His program, Linux, became the system that (together with another from Berkeley) is the wellspring for a universal cadre of hackers who elaborate and enhance the software (which, happily, is amenable to such manipulation). Their hard work and considerable debugging are freely available to all, so nobody needs to buy shrink-wrapped programs. Some enterprising lads, nevertheless, have packaged manuals, CDs, and backups for sale at nominal cost. (Their software may be reproduced freely.) Was the movement, as one leader famously asked, a bazaar of ideas—or more like a cathedral under the benign guidance of one architect? As the hacker garage bands of the Internet formed various allegiances, it became a real free-for-all. Eventually AT&T and Microsoft noticed and, with the whiff of money in the air, lawyers were hired (in a move that was particularly offensive to the attorney-phobic author). The Source Wars are heating up, but it will be a tough fight. Wayner’s money is on the hacker freedom-fighters against the plutocratic suits.
Loaded with computer jargon and acronyms, this is a story told with gusto by a knowledgeable devotee—but for computer illiterates outside cubicle farms, accessibility will be limited.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-06-662050-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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