I was surprised to find Jerry Pournelle still writing about IT, this time at Dr. Dobb's Journal. [Thanks to JohnO for forwarding me that stack of "dead tree" IT magazines].
I had a great respect for Jerry in the late 80s and early to mid-'90s, when I was a subscriber of the legendary printed edition of Byte magazine. But lately I've read his "Chaos Manor" web page and found that he sounds like those classic right-wing wackos.... half-supportive of the Iraq war ("since our troops are there, we now must support them" kind of arguments), and spreading skepticism about Global Warming, by buying the arguments of -and forwarding them- every article that questions it.
Back to the war topic, for instance on "The view from Chaos Manor" you can read: "The proper way to occupy Iraq is to build a comfortable enclave with good defenses and secure perimeter, garrison that, then bring in a client army to do the actual occupation. The client army should be from a state in which, or near which, we maintain a substantial garrison, so that the homeland is held hostage (although we would NEVER say it that way) to the good behavior of the field army doing the dirty work. There are plenty of countries that would like to rent out their soldiers and would actually welcome a substantial US force in their mids".
I remember that his writing style was always somewhat convoluted and at times hard to follow. He sometimes seemed to trip on his own words and make a long tirade out of nothing, describing everything -down to the hotel he was staying in- in painstaking detail and branching the "line of thought" several times.
But getting back to the point, I finally found something in Pournelle's January 2006 Dr. Dobb's article that caught my eye, because I surely remembered that from some of his past columns: Pournelle's amazing Double-Negatives!.
The last paragraph of his Jan 2006 Dr.Dobb's article reads:
"There is NO CHANCE you WON'T learn something important from reading this book".
Wow. Why not say "Chances are you will learn something by reading this book?".
Amazing, simply amazing!. ROFL.
I swear there is NO CHANCE I won't save time by NOT READING Chaos Manor ever again!.
