Smokey Maverick

Book: Rapture for the Geeks
by Richard Dooling

A boyhood admiration for the Terminator franchise was awoken with the recent release of the latest installment in the series, Terminator Salvation. While it was no blockbuster, it was still thoroughly enjoyed by fans, with the common theme being the terror of an unstoppable machine hellbent on the heartless destruction of human beings, the familiar characters and the interesting and well executed twist on how the T-800 in T1 came to be.

The central antagonist in the Terminator storyline is Skynet, a powerful computer system developed by the US military that eventually becomes self-aware and starts knocking off humans. Little did I know, until I read Rapture for the Geeks by Richard Dooling, that there is an entire subculture of folks who actually believe this day is coming. Yes, in a sense, they believe a machine driven Judgment Day is not only possible, but a day that we are blasting towards with great haste – although they prefer the less edger term of “Singularity”

Dooling proves many times what we’ve already reported here, technology is moving forward whether we like it or not. He claims computers are shrinking in size and cost so quickly, that we will easily see micro-computers implanted everywhere in our lifetime; in our clothes, in our skin, in our you-name-it. He compares the evolution of automobiles verses computers, and in the course of 20 years, computers have out paced automobiles growth in power by 542 times.

He quotes what tech pundit Robert Cringely has observed of the Windows operating System, “If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon and explode once a year, killing everyone inside”

Within that quote lies the last powerful impact this book made upon me: It’s time to make the jump from Windows to Linux.

For someone who spends more than 60% of their time on a computer, it’s time to get serious about a correct Operating System, and this book pushed me over the edge towards Linux.

He first takes a swipe at the Microsoft Office product suite, and the fact that Word encodes your documents in such a way that only another, licensed Word instance can read other Word documents. No big deal, because everyone has Microsoft Word, right? Well, yes, but will Microsoft Word be around in the next 25 years? 50 years? 75 years? If you plan on archiving electronic documents, may I suggest doing so in a non-proprietary format. In addition to the risk of storing and losing your documents in the Word proprietary format one day, doing so also eats much more of your storage space! Consider a simple plain-text file which contains two words “Hello World” The ASCII plain text file consumes 12 bytes of storage, while saving the same two words in a Word document consumes 19,968 bytes!

Dooling goes onto explain Windows silly licensing payment system, how Unix OS are open source, free and actually safer because you have thousands of nerds pouring of the source code (in effect, covering your back). He takes care to point out:

“this is not a diatribe against Microsoft, or Adobe, for that matter. Microsoft is a corporation. As such it has no obligation to make great software, or to help its customers understand, communicate with, or operate their computers. Microsoft has one obligation: to make money for their shareholders.”

Final Take: At times, Dooling is all over the place in his writing (venturing into religion a bit? can we say ‘Scope creep‘?), thus attributing to some chaotic reading at times, but successfully injects appreciated nerd-saturated humor as needed. Overall an interesting read, and glad it’s helped push me closer towards the world of Linux, as my current (old) rig is now partitioned into Windows and Ubuntu. Would suggest to anyone who is curious about reading up on opinions regarding our technological future.

Other interesting points from Rapture for the Geeks:

• Dooling makes the point that man has an innate urge to tinker – that man cannot sit alone in a room, even with a souped up Super Comptuer in front of him. Man will quickly get bored, and his curiosity will push him forward – even if forward means stumbling upon an “End of the World button” … which would eventually have to be pushed, to see if it’d work or not. He has pseudo code throughout the book, but this clip is my favorite:
  while reach > grasp:
"progress" ∞
  [pg 150]
• While discussing Unix’s demi-dog, Bill Joy, Dooling notes some of the Unix’s core values (which have proven the test of time): 1) Write programs that do one thing and do it well 2) Write programs that work together 3) Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface. These 3 points may be severely abridged, as Doug McCilroy did with: “Do one thing, do it well.” [pg 132]

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