Annoying Anomalies
Currently listening the By Schism Reapt Asunder
The hero ask a computer to find anomalies between two sets of records. Specifically, finding records of people who are assigned to different to several enclaves at the same time.
The quote that annoyed me was:
OWL was a fast computer, and it only took him two minutes to find the answer, even though there were millions of people in those records.
I just winced hearing that, I felt like shouting, that is not the way it works at all.
Comments
OWL was running Microsoft Access
I have a very fast computer, too. It only takes me 2 minutes to load google.com, even though the server is thousands of miles away.
I'm not keeping up with you ( I prefer the print before the audio), but I know what you mean - the story weber writes in this series is incredible and detailed, but these types of things can snap me out of the story and bring me back to this world.
For example, in the first book "off armageddon reef", how many times does weber write a close variation of "had he been a being of flesh and blood he would have held his breath". I started counting once but decided to stop at 8 lest it ruin the book for me.
If you can ignore these odd snippets that break immersion, the story and world are incredible.
somehow I don't think "OWL was a computer programmed with algorithms to search for the answer in O(log n) time." would have quite hit the spot.
Philip,
Agreed.
"the being that was once Nimue Alban" is even more annoying :-)
Seriously though, think of it this way: My old pentium 100 with windows 95 took about 30 seconds to boot. My new dual proc dual core machine with 4gb of RAM and windows Vista takes about 30 seconds to boot. Also, a lot of people write shitty programs with shitty solutions to problems (www.worsethanfailure.com) that do dumb things. You honestly thing that this is going to change ever? Clearly whomever wrote "OWL" was not a good programmer and wasn't using NHibernate. Maybe they were constrained to only use stored procs?