need more people, not fewer. Consider yourself back on the payroll now. I’ll talk to Mel about it.’
‘I don’t know … uh, Sturge. Maybe this is all for the best. I’m beginning to wonder if I’m really suitable for this job.’
‘You’ve got another offer? Well, just forget it, Fred. We’ll match anything they can pay. How does an immediate raise of twenty-five per cent sound?’
Fred set down his books again. ‘Three-thirty this afternoon?’
‘In conference room forty-three.’ Fellini disappeared, then reappeared, like a music-hall entertainer singing his way offstage. ‘Oh, by the way, I want to talk about Mel. I think he’s been overdoing it, stressing out.’
He then made his exit.
After Sturge Fellini rehired him, Fred suffered a rare attack of conscience. (Surely there was a limit to how much money you could rip off on the basis of one hiring mistake.
Oh, yeah?
he replied.
Sez who?
In arguments with his conscience, Fred usually fell back on lame impersonations of Edward G. Robinson.
As a compromise, he spent the rest of the day making an honest effort to find out what his job really was. First of all, he read the two books thoroughly.
The Dumb Child’s Computer Dictionary
explained to him that the ‘computer’ was a large array of switches called relays. These relays could click on and off. When a relay was on, it represented the binary number 1; off represented 0. Since binary numbers were either 1s or 0s, this made a local area network very adept at handling highspeed communications, using packet-switching, token-ring networks, and data-compression algorithms such as Huffman codes.
In attempting to reread this passage, Fred discovered that several pages of text had been omitted (all the entries between ‘Computer’ and ‘Data Transmission’). He turned to
Talk Good Software
, a book whose cover claimed it could
professionalize your conversation. Do you look blank when someone talks about TRS conflicts? What if the boss asks your opinion of LANs? Do you know one windowing environment from another? Can you talk confidently about stacks, heaps, operating systems, assemblers?
Inside, this book did not explain much. Rather, it contained buzz-words and formulas. If someone dropped the word ‘CD-ROM’, the proper response was evidently:
CD-ROMs (compact disc read-only-memories) are all right in their place, but I feel they’re being oversold. In any case, they’ll soon be supplanted by WORMs (write-once-read-many) which at least we can write to. (N OTE: Never say write
on
, always write
to.)
For ‘CPU’, the good talk was:
(CPU is no longer a buzz-word. By now, nearly everybody knows the CPU is the
central processing unit
, that is, the chip in the middle of the machine that runs the whole ball of wax. All a computer is, really, is a CPU and some PERIPHERALS (q.v.). To make points, talk about ‘multiple CPUs’ and PARALLEL PROCESSING (q.v.).)
Fred looked up ‘Artificial Intelligence’:
Artificial intelligence (call it AI) is not really a meaningful term by itself. I prefer to narrow the discussion to EXPERT SYSTEMS (q.v.), ROBOTICS (q.v.), PATTERN RECOGNITION (q.v.), LANGUAGE MANIPULATION (q.v.), or INFORMATION RETRIEVAL (q.v.).
He tried ‘Robotics’:
Mistakenly applied by most people only to factory robots. In fact, robotics covers the theory and practice of machines that imitate human behaviour of all types. At one extreme, robotics might apply to the development of an artificial prosthetic limb; at the other extreme, it covers sophisticated psychological theories of perception and judgement (i.e., how do humans recognize one another?) etaoinshrldu
N OTE : We have landed and are taking over your world, O puny earthlings. Do not think you can escape our NETWORK (q.v.).
At lunchtime, he cornered Carl Honks and Corky Corcoran and tried to ask intelligent questions.
Carl shook his head. ‘You mean, you don’t know what instantiation is? OK, look.’
‘I don’t know … uh, Sturge. Maybe this is all for the best. I’m beginning to wonder if I’m really suitable for this job.’
‘You’ve got another offer? Well, just forget it, Fred. We’ll match anything they can pay. How does an immediate raise of twenty-five per cent sound?’
Fred set down his books again. ‘Three-thirty this afternoon?’
‘In conference room forty-three.’ Fellini disappeared, then reappeared, like a music-hall entertainer singing his way offstage. ‘Oh, by the way, I want to talk about Mel. I think he’s been overdoing it, stressing out.’
He then made his exit.
After Sturge Fellini rehired him, Fred suffered a rare attack of conscience. (Surely there was a limit to how much money you could rip off on the basis of one hiring mistake.
Oh, yeah?
he replied.
Sez who?
In arguments with his conscience, Fred usually fell back on lame impersonations of Edward G. Robinson.
As a compromise, he spent the rest of the day making an honest effort to find out what his job really was. First of all, he read the two books thoroughly.
The Dumb Child’s Computer Dictionary
explained to him that the ‘computer’ was a large array of switches called relays. These relays could click on and off. When a relay was on, it represented the binary number 1; off represented 0. Since binary numbers were either 1s or 0s, this made a local area network very adept at handling highspeed communications, using packet-switching, token-ring networks, and data-compression algorithms such as Huffman codes.
In attempting to reread this passage, Fred discovered that several pages of text had been omitted (all the entries between ‘Computer’ and ‘Data Transmission’). He turned to
Talk Good Software
, a book whose cover claimed it could
professionalize your conversation. Do you look blank when someone talks about TRS conflicts? What if the boss asks your opinion of LANs? Do you know one windowing environment from another? Can you talk confidently about stacks, heaps, operating systems, assemblers?
Inside, this book did not explain much. Rather, it contained buzz-words and formulas. If someone dropped the word ‘CD-ROM’, the proper response was evidently:
CD-ROMs (compact disc read-only-memories) are all right in their place, but I feel they’re being oversold. In any case, they’ll soon be supplanted by WORMs (write-once-read-many) which at least we can write to. (N OTE: Never say write
on
, always write
to.)
For ‘CPU’, the good talk was:
(CPU is no longer a buzz-word. By now, nearly everybody knows the CPU is the
central processing unit
, that is, the chip in the middle of the machine that runs the whole ball of wax. All a computer is, really, is a CPU and some PERIPHERALS (q.v.). To make points, talk about ‘multiple CPUs’ and PARALLEL PROCESSING (q.v.).)
Fred looked up ‘Artificial Intelligence’:
Artificial intelligence (call it AI) is not really a meaningful term by itself. I prefer to narrow the discussion to EXPERT SYSTEMS (q.v.), ROBOTICS (q.v.), PATTERN RECOGNITION (q.v.), LANGUAGE MANIPULATION (q.v.), or INFORMATION RETRIEVAL (q.v.).
He tried ‘Robotics’:
Mistakenly applied by most people only to factory robots. In fact, robotics covers the theory and practice of machines that imitate human behaviour of all types. At one extreme, robotics might apply to the development of an artificial prosthetic limb; at the other extreme, it covers sophisticated psychological theories of perception and judgement (i.e., how do humans recognize one another?) etaoinshrldu
N OTE : We have landed and are taking over your world, O puny earthlings. Do not think you can escape our NETWORK (q.v.).
At lunchtime, he cornered Carl Honks and Corky Corcoran and tried to ask intelligent questions.
Carl shook his head. ‘You mean, you don’t know what instantiation is? OK, look.’
Similar Books
