"Нейл Стефенсон. Snow Crash (Снежная лавина, англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

the computer-graphics ninja overlords of the Association for Computing
Machinery's Global Multimedia Protocol Group. The Street seems to be a grand
boulevard going all the way around the equator of a black sphere with a
radius of a bit more than ten thousand kilometers. That makes it 65,536
kilometers around, which is considerably bigger than Earth.
The number 65,536 is an awkward figure to everyone except a hacker, who
recognizes it more readily than his own mother's date of birth: It happens
to be a power of 2_216 power to be exact-and even the exponent 16 is equal
to 2~, and 4 is equal to 22. Along with 256; 32,768; and 2,147,483,648;
65,536 is one of the foundation stones of the hacker universe, in which 2 is
the only really important number because that's how many digits a computer
can recognize. One of those digits is 0, and the other is 1. Any number that
can be created by fetishistically multiplying 2s by each other, and
subtracting the occasional 1, will be instantly recognizable to a hacker.
Like any place in Reality, the Street is subject to development.
Developers can build their own small streets feeding off of the main one.
They can build buildings, parks, signs, as well as things that do not exist
in Reality, such as vast hovering overhead light shows, special
neighborhoods where the rules of three-dimensional spacetime are ignored,
and free-combat zones where people can go to hunt and kill each other.
The only difference is that since the Street does not really exist-it's
just a computer-graphics protocol written down on a piece of paper
somewhere-none of these things is being physically built. They are, rather,
pieces of software, made available to the public over the worldwide
fiber-optics network. When Hiro goes into the Metaverse and looks down the
Street and sees buildings and electric signs stretching off into the
darkness, disappearing over the curve of the globe, he is actually staring
at the
SNOW CRASH
graphic representations-the user interfaces-of a myriad different
pieces of software that have been engineered by major corporations. In order
to place these things on the Street, they have had to get approval from the
Global Multimedia Protocol Group, have had to buy frontage on the Street,
get zoning approval, obtain permits, bribe inspectors, the whole bit. The
money these corporations pay to build things on the Street all goes into a
trust fund owned and operated by the GMPG, which pays for developing and
expanding the machinery that enables the Street to exist.
Hiro has a house in a neighborhood just off the busiest part of the
Street. it is a very old neighborhood by Street standards. About ten years
ago, when the Street protocol was first written, Hiro and some of his
buddies pooled their money and bought one of the first development licenses,
created a little neighborhood of hackers. At the time, it was just a little
patchwork of light amid a vast blackness. Back then, the Street was just a
necklace of streetlights around a black ball in space.
Since then, the neighborhood hasn't changed much, but the Street has.
By getting in on it early, Hiro's buddies got a head start on the whole
business. Some of them even got very rich off of it.
That's why Hiro has a nice big house in the Metaverse but has to share
a 20-by-30 in Reality. Real estate acumen does not always extend across
universes.