When reading "Books of the Century" I expected a list of the most important, most influential or just best books. Skewed towards the french perspective, given Le Monde as a source. But this was never the goal, just a "what stuck in your mind" question.
For example, 1984 is missing, and Louis Begley Wartime Lies. And I wouldn't have expected Ulysses in there given the french source, for me it was incomprehensible gibberish and I thought only the US ranks it high. But that gibberishness makes it certainly memorable, so given the question it fits.
Ulysses was written in Paris, where James Joyce lived, and was published in Paris by the now legendary Shakespeare & Co. The US and UK banned it for being obscene.
When I don't know, I ask and don't judge (and lacking omniscience, I don't judge anyway).
It's completely irrelevant where it was written, where it was published and where it was banned, I'm talking about how it is seen today. It is possible I am getting this wrong -certainly possible, since I'm taking this impression from English speaking sites like this, that I attribute to the US what should be attributed to England -, but I have seen no argument so far that even strives the point I made.
What is your question? If you just want to know why Ulysses is seen as influential you can start with the wikipedia article. If you want to try again to read it you can try to read it with a guide of some kind, there are multiple, I used this one https://www.ulyssesguide.com/1-telemachus.
No question. It's completely against my being to consider something as good if it can't be enjoyed without a guide. I hated the tendency in computer science to hide simple definitions behind jargon. I'm okay with stuff having hidden meaning, with texts being interpretable, I'm not okay with it just being gibberish when not studying it in closest detail.
I'm aware that some think this book is influential, I'm not clear on how widespread that belief is. Also, whether regular readers really like it. And no, Wikipedia does not clear that up.
Of course it's relevant to how it's seen today. French culture nurtured the author, a French publisher published it, and France didn't ban it while other countries did. This is all evidence that the book was well-liked in France when it was published, and there's no reason to think that would change over time.
If anything, it's surprising that English-speaking countries like it so much.
I disagree, those aren't relevant factors. Just based on those facts it's possible there was one sponsor in France who published the book and then it bombed, never to be read by a significant amount of the public. That it wasn't banned is normal in a free society, but also says nothing about its popularity.
Ulysses was first published in Paris during the 20 years that Joyce lived there.
>I thought only the US ranks it high
Joyce never even set foot in the United States... You could say this about The Great Gatsby, which US sources might rank in the top 5 compared to 46 in this list.
Right, Great Gatsby is another book one could highlight, where it's surprising that it is on the (french) list, while it would be on an US list. But I haven't read it, I do not know whether it is a good example for the difference between a good or important book and a memorable one.
If you found Ulysses confusing, what would you think of Finnegan's Wake? Ulysses is practically a children's book in comparison. As for the lack of 1984, Orwell was an important author sure, but not particularly a good one. People read 1984 and Animal Farm for the messages, not for the exquisite prose that someone like Joyce can manage.
Sorry, I haven't tried to read that one. If it's even more, hm, abstract?, then I won't ever try.
Note that 1984 is listed, just as "Nineteen Eighty-Four". I missed it when searching, didn't think of searching for "Orwell" instead.
I'd disagree with you about its quality, I remember it fondly (well, as much as possible given the topic of having one's identity erased), it was a powerful experience - and I do remember it vividly, so when asked for books one remembers I'd absolutely mention it, and in a list of books of the century it does belong.
Joyce "prose" on the other hand did nothing for me but make me despise his book.
James Joyce wearing his bottle bottom glasses (thick glasses) would like to have a word with you. You can call him genius, dirty, knowledgeable in many languages but certainly not gibberish. He used to hold long book club style readings of his books among the prominent literateur in his times to exactly impinge in their minds that what he writes is clever and not gibberish. In our book club we often discuss for hours what he was trying to say on a page. Sometimes he says things in 3 different dimensions by writing a single sentence.
> He used to hold long book club style readings of his books among the prominent literateur in his times to exactly impinge in their minds that what he writes is clever and not gibberish.
My was so clever, that he had to verbally harangue people into finding his writing clever.
Starting with only 200 titles in the survey, for a final list of 100, seems off to me for starters. Every book surveyed has a 50% chance of making “book of the century”
Obviously 50/50 if random. But even if not random, I estimate 50 Shades would be 500-100,000 times more likely to be a book of the century using a list of 200 with it in it, vs an unaided open ended survey.
Here, pets have always had to be identifiable: historically with a collar, but microchips have been required for some years now as a more effective method.
I used to work for a large enterprise, and tried to get vim ‘approved’ for internal use. I remember this charityware clause caused our legal department to get tied up in all sorts of arguments about how we could be opening ourselves to liability if we used it without donating. It was my first lesson in navigating large company processes.
In the end I just kept quiet about the fact that it ships in all the Linux package repos.
(Just to be clear, I fully support what Bram did here)
Big companies can be incredibly penny wise and pound foolish because their beancounters make them obsess over the wrong metrics. My current company has spent the last year cost cutting every single way to stay afloat and now you need a chain of approvals up the management ladder with detailed explanation for every paperclip you want purchase.
I can't prove it, but I am willing to bet my entire salary that the costs of all the new extra bureaucratic overhead introduced for small purchases, nullified or even exceeded all their savings, when the remaining engineers and managers paid six figures have to spend more of their time writing, reviewing and approving paperclip orders instead of you know, running the company, fulfilling customer demands and innovating.
I'm pretty new to this, but I have a feeling these are all the signs of a company it's worth jumping ship from ASAP as there's no chance of things improving back from this. Sure, AMD managed to turn the ship around with cost cutting, but our CEO is not Lisa Su, he's a boomer who cuts where the clueless $BIG_4 consultants tell him to cut, and big_4 doesn't care about innovation or the company being relevant in 10 years, they care about showing some immediate results/positive cash to justify their outrageous rates.
You write "wherever possible", but: Have you ever seen the beancounting itself having been under scrutiny?
I'd wager a big part of it is also the same politics based asymmetry that's visible everywhere; like nobody ever got fired for buying IBM or people only get credit for managing a crisis, not preventing it in the first place.
I worked at a place like this and we had a software registry, where if you had installed something and it wasn't on the registry somebody would start sending you nasty emails. This kind of thing would happen all the time: maybe the Linux machines weren't in the scans, or anything that came with the OS was whitelisted.
But if you wanted to install it separately on a computer that didn't have it already, then you'd need to get it “approved.”
Honest question, how would you actually detect this? I mean I understand using the package manager install (and that's easy for them to control) but building from source and doing a local install (i.e. no `sudo make install`)? Everything is a file. How would you differentiate without massive amounts of false positives?
if the computer is provided for work, by the company you work for, it is not "yours"
limitations on what you can install on such machines can be quite draconian, including forbidding anything that IT Security and similar departments may not like.
I meant the work laptop you are given through working as a SWE. Are you referring to jobs in IT?
And are you allowed to use your own personal computer (laptop)?
If not, and you have to work on what you have been given, why are people OK with it[1]? In the case of IT jobs?
I cannot imagine being productive without my OS, WM, IDE, configurations and whatnot.
I did work on a desktop in an office before, using their software and it was awful. I could have automated the whole damn thing at home. It was the tax office and obviously I understand why I cannot use their software at home, but for an IT job?
[1] Stupid question, people tolerate much more than this, incl. not getting paid for overtime, being worked to death without a break every day of the week, etc.
>I meant the work laptop you are given through working as a SWE.
Everywhere i've worked, i was not "given" a computer anymore than I was given a desk, a chair or a network connection. Perhaps "provided" would be better.
> And are you allowed to use your own personal computer (laptop)?
Never have been, and never have wanted to be.
>why are people OK with it
It's industry SOP, and people pay you to work that way.
> I cannot imagine being productive without my OS, WM, IDE, configurations and whatnot.
You need to improve your imaginative powers, and your technical knowledge.
I don't get where your surprise comes from. Of course companies have the last word on what tools you are allowed/obliged to use when you're on duty. Uniforms, vehicles, why not software?
I think this is probably quite dependent on what’s normal for ISPs in the region. In the UK for example, every ISP router I’ve had runs a DNS server and it’s that which is given out via DHCP. It then forwards onto the ISPs DNS platform.
American here, most of ISPs here do it as well. With modern router hardware, there is plenty of hardware available to run tiny DNS server that caches and forwards all requests to ISP upstream. Memory overhead is probably about 50MB and CPU overhead is trivial, probably .1% or less.
Owned by Tesla but leased to the public. In the UK it’s common to lease a new car rather than purchasing it, and often the car manufacturer has a financial services arm that manages the lease.
probably not so useful in practise, but still fun and interesting.
Yes, centralised C2 is definitely still a thing in the malware space, for commodity malware it works well enough that there's little real incentive to move to anything more complex.
Not quite, it talks about configuring your home network to resist those things (as per the title). It’s just that the home network happens to be in China.
It’s a useful writeup, I’ve done similar things outside of China to facilitate split tunnelling or bypass geoblocking.
Maybe not on compsci? but when I did electronic engineering it was covered as part of our embedded systems course.
There’s quite a lot of info out there on UEFI, and tiano core is open source. I taught myself enough to implement a small game you had to solve to be able to boot your machine, for example :)
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