Here’s part fourteen of my reading of Bruce Sterling’s brilliant, seminal book The Hacker Crackdown, a 1992 book that recounts the events that led to the founding of The Electronic Frontier Foundation, my former employer.
Zen le Renard, a French reader of my stories, has translated my story When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth, which appeared in my short story collection Overclocked and was released under a Creative Commons license that allows for noncommercial remixing. Zen le Renard reads English, but wanted to share the story with his monolingual sysadmin friends in France, so he took on the project. Voila!
Quand le mobile de Félix se mit à sonner à 2 heures du mat, Kelly se retourna, lui tapa l’épaule et grogna « Pourquoi t’as pas éteint ce putain de téléphone avant qu’on se couche ? »« Par ce que je suis d’astreinte,» lui répondit Félix en s’asseyant au bord du lit. Il attrapa son futal qu’il avait laissé par terre avant de se pieuter et Kelly, en continuant de lui boxer l’épaule, lui dit : «T’es pas un putain de médecin non plus, t’es rien qu’un foutu administrateur système »
« C’est mon boulot,» qu’il lui dit.
« Ils te font bosser plus dur qu’un cheval de trait ! » lui dit Kelly. « Tu sais bien que j’ai raison, bon dieu. T’es un père maintenant, tu peux plus te casser en pleine nuit à chaque fois que quelqu’un perd l’accès à sa dose de porn. Ne réponds pas à ce putain de téléphone »
Il savait bien qu’elle avait raison. Il répondit au téléphone.
Zen le Renard, a French reader of my stories, has translated my story When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth, which appeared in my short story collection Overclocked and was released under a Creative Commons license that allows for noncommercial remixing. Zen le Renard reads English, but wanted to share the story with his monolingual sysadmin friends in France, so he took on the project. Voila!
Quand le mobile de Félix se mit à sonner à 2 heures du mat, Kelly se retourna, lui tapa l’épaule et grogna « Pourquoi t’as pas éteint ce putain de téléphone avant qu’on se couche ? »« Par ce que je suis d’astreinte,» lui répondit Félix en s’asseyant au bord du lit. Il attrapa son futal qu’il avait laissé par terre avant de se pieuter et Kelly, en continuant de lui boxer l’épaule, lui dit : «T’es pas un putain de médecin non plus, t’es rien qu’un foutu administrateur système »
« C’est mon boulot,» qu’il lui dit.
« Ils te font bosser plus dur qu’un cheval de trait ! » lui dit Kelly. « Tu sais bien que j’ai raison, bon dieu. T’es un père maintenant, tu peux plus te casser en pleine nuit à chaque fois que quelqu’un perd l’accès à sa dose de porn. Ne réponds pas à ce putain de téléphone »
Il savait bien qu’elle avait raison. Il répondit au téléphone.
Backup, the German edition of my novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom has just been published by Heyne. Down and Out was the first novel released under a Creative Commons licensed, distributed for free on the same day the book was shipped to stores — and I’m pleased to announce that Backup is the first German translated novel to be released under a CC license on publication day!
Random House is also working on a German translation of my second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe, working with Michael Iwoleit, the translator who worked on Down and Out.
Many thanks to Johannes and Evelyn at Monochrom for their help in translating the oddball concepts like “Whuffie” and “Bitchun Society.”
Backup, the German edition of my novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom has just been published by Heyne. Down and Out was the first novel released under a Creative Commons licensed, distributed for free on the same day the book was shipped to stores — and I’m pleased to announce that Backup is the first German translated novel to be released under a CC license on publication day!
Random House is also working on a German translation of my second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe, working with Michael Iwoleit, the translator who worked on Down and Out.
Many thanks to Johannes and Evelyn at Monochrom for their help in translating the oddball concepts like “Whuffie” and “Bitchun Society.”
Review:
Some Fantastic
Cory Doctorow has the gift of both turning the present day on its head while writing what could be considered hard SF in some cases that doesn’t baffle or lose the less technically-oriented reader, all while never forgetting that it is always the characters that should come first in any story.
Danny Adams, Some Fantastic
InformationWeek’s new department is called “Thinkernet,” and it consists of short essays about the future of the Internet’s evolution. I wrote a piece for it about the coming suite of tools that make it easier to ignore stuff:
Take email: Endless engineer-hours are poured into stopping spam, but virtually no attention is paid to our interaction with our non-spam messages. Our mailer may strive to learn from our ratings what is and is not spam, but it expends practically no effort on figuring out which of the non-spam emails are important and which ones can be safely ignored, dropped into archival folders, or deleted unread.
For example, I’m forever getting cc’d on busy threads by well-meaning colleagues who want to loop me in on some discussion in which I have little interest. Maybe the initial group invitation to a dinner (that I’ll be out of town for) was something I needed to see, but now that I’ve declined, I really don’t need to read the 300+ messages that follow debating the best place to eat.
