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

____________ The Street is fairly busy. Most of the people here are
Americans and Asians-it's early morning in Europe right now. Because of the
preponderance of Americans, the crowd has a garish and surreal look about
it. For the Asians, it's the middle of the day, and they are in their dark
blue suits. For the Americans, it's party time, and they are looking like
just about anything a computer can render.

The moment Hiro steps across the line separating his neighborhood from
the Street, colored shapes begin to swoop down on him from all directions,
like buzzards on fresh road kill. Animerdais are not allowed in Hiro's
neighborhood. But almost anything is allowed in the Street.
A passing fighter plane bursts into flames, falls out of its trajec.
36
SNOW CRASH
tory, and zooms directly toward him at twice the speed of sound. It
plows into the Street fifty feet in front of him, disintegrates, and
explodes, blooming into a tangled cloud of wreckage and flame that skids
across the pavement toward him, growing to envelop him so that all he can
see is turbulent flame, perfectly simulated and rendered.
Then the display freezes, and a man materializes in front of Hiro. He
is a classic bearded, pale, skinny hacker, trying to beef himself up by
wearing a bulky silk windbreaker blazoned with the logo of one of the big
Metaverse amusement parks. Him knows the guy; they used to run into each
other at trade conventions all the time. He's been trying to hire Hiro for
the last two months.
"Hiro, I can't understand why you're holding out on me. We're making
bucks here-Kongbucks and yen-and we can be flexible on pay and bennies.
We're putting together a swords-and-sorcery thing, and we can use a hacker
with your skills. Come on down and talk to me, okay?"
Him walks straight through the display, and it vanishes. Amusement
parks in the Metaverse can be fantastic, offering a wide selection of
interactive three.dimensional movies. But in the end, they're still nothing
more than video games. Hiro's not so poor, yet, that he would go and write
video games for this company. It's owned by the Nipponese, which is no big
deaL But it's also managed by the Nipponese, which means that all the
programmers have to wear white shirts and show up at eight in the morning
and sit in cubicles and go to meetings.
When Hiro learned how to do this, way back fifteen years ago, a hacker
could sit down and write an entire piece of software by himself. Now, that's
no longer possible. Software comes out of factories, and hackers are, to a
greater or lesser extent, assembly-line workers. Worse yet, they may become
managers who never get to write any code themselves.
The prospect of becoming an assembly-line worker gives Hiro some
incentive to go out and find some really good intel tonight.

~ etnes to get himself psyched up, tries to break out of the : argy of
the long.te~ underemployed This intel thing can be
rae et, onde you get yourself jacked into the grid. And Wiui iilS