I stand corrected!

p. 175: "... he and Boone open the square doors at the rear and load the bags." Hummer H2 has only one rear door; the other is a glass hatch.

p.176: "Bigend turns on the wipers, spatular things that swing from the top of the glass rather than the bottom." Mini Hummer wipers pivot from the bottom of the windscreen.

Page 302, middle of last paragraph:

"This room is larger, but filled with a makeshift cube farm, workstations walled off with sheets of unpainted composite board..."

Is that an Apple Cube(s) farm? Then Cube should be capitalized, like in page 3. Or is that more like a "makeshift cubicle farm? That would make more sense, a cubicle pen made not from shiny plastic and canvas walls but rather from grunge materials...

And yes gaijin, I guess most people here would jump at the opportunity to work for GW. Tuning our admiration/worshipping gene, I guess.

PS: Wait a second... it just got to me... does all this mean I'm gonna have to buy the paperback version, too? Mmhhh...

cube farm tends to refer to the physical environmnent programmers are penned into a la Dilbert, so uncapitalised C is fine. It's the modern equivalent of the production line (discounting the fact that we some countries that still have a manufacturing base also still have production lines).

p.273 and elsewhere later on:

Zamoskvareche would be more correctly transliterated as Zamoskvorechye (possibly Zamoskvarechye)

p.273, same paragraph - Moskow instead of Moscow. It could be deliberate, but if Stella can spell Kremlin, personally I find it unlikely she would misspell the name of the city.

p.273, same paragraph - "Bolshaya Yakimanka street, it means little Yakimanka". In fact, it means big Yakimanka, and this is corroborated in the next sentence.

I'm also almost sure that there is no street named Big Stone Bridge (Bolshoi Kamenniy Most) in Moscow; if it's relevant, I can do a look-up and correct things a bit.

I think this was mentinoed above, but anyway - on p.311 there's a font error, "When the boy from the counter sorts it for her, she writes:" should be in the general text body font, not email.

Not a typo or error as such, but the beginning of the paragraph mid-page on p.271 has an ironic twist - Lenin's tomb IS a military review stand and is used as such by the President whenever a military parade is held there [it is also possible that I misunderstand the meaning of "military review stand", which is okay, after all, I have had Bruce Sterling to explain me what "mincome arcology" is quite a while back ]

/\/\ike

So I went and looked it up anyway - there's no Big Stone Bridge street at all, 'Caffeine' is located on Bolshaya Dmitrovka (Greater Dmitrovka or Big Dmitrovka if you wish); I don't think it's worth to actually morph stuff in the book, but if there's a wish, one can change Big Stone Bridge to at least an existing Kuznetskiy Most - Smith's Bridge, and it's even on the same block with 'Caffeine'.

/\/\ike

quote:

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I've never seen a UK plug with a switch on.

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Sometimes there's a switch on the plug that goes into the kettle end, but in that case there wouldn't be a switch on the kettle itself.

Larry

Is there a paperback edd in the usa already? I tried to order it last night at the book store and was told no such thing.

Airliners don't fly hundreds of thousands of feet above the ocean. Tens of thousands?

Well, if you look at it logarithmically, 35,000 ft is closer to 100,000 ft than it is to 10,000 ft. Don't spoil the poetry.

quote:

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Originally posted by mc:
Airliners don't fly hundreds of thousands of feet above the ocean. Tens of thousands?

---

Or look at it in the terms of 20000 leagues under the sea. Verne didn't mean it was that deep, he meant they travelled that far while submerged.

P22 1st para:
"black gaffer's tape"
In England we never use the apostrophe s. I've bought and used my share of it over the years in theatres and clubs. It's just gaffer tape. And in usage it tends to be mostly just gaffer.
As in "pass me the gaffer" or "I need a bit of gaffer on this".

P25 last para:
"seals over the cigarette burn with black gaffer's tape"
likewise.

P58 3rd para:
"Bow Street Tube"
is of course Bow Road tube. (Bow Street is in central London)

P79 4/5th para:
"and over to little Aberdeen"
should be little Inverness.

P88 last para:
"In Aberdeen the market stalls"
should be Inverness, as before.

"P181 about halfway down
Christ," cries Damien from the kitchen, "this khoorma is heaven!"
and
"Russian bread's brilliant but this khoorma–"
Usually written as korma.
Of the literally thousands of indian restaurants i've eaten in over the years, only two ever spelled it "khoorma" and they were highly upmarket non-standard restaurants making a point about the quality of their cuisine. The rest of the UK spells it korma.

Thanks!

"She seats herself in his high-backed workstation chair and clicks the transparent mouse. Stutter of infrared on the pale wood of the long trestle table."

People can't see infrared, stuttering or not. Perhaps it's a red LED?

"Katherine had had doubts about Cayce concluding, it was true, but they had come to an agreement, and had had a good closure." (205)

...But stuttering had hads are all too visible.

Cayce is given (on page 116) a cellphone "Good here, anywhere in Europe, Japan, and the States".

As far as I know, no such phones exist. Japan uses a mixture of CDMA, PDC, and PHS standard phones. Europe uses GSM, and America a mixture of CDMA, GSM, and D-AMPS (TDMA). It's therefore possible to get a phone that will operate in the US/Europe or US/Japan, but not Japan/Europe (or all three). My understanding is that Qualcomm has a chipset with CDMA and GSM hardware in testing, and when this comes into being such phones probably will exist, but we are not there yet.

This is unless Hubertus Bigend has access to some special mobile phone handsets that are unavailable to the rest of us. I suppose he is the sort of person who would.

The "Cypress" typo is on p204 of the (paperback) edition of PR sold in Australia.

Re the "stuttering had hads" - they're not a typo, they're correct grammar.

Katherine has doubts

Katherine had doubts

Katherine has had doubts

Katherine had had doubts

Whether it would have been better to avoid having 2 "had hads" in the one sentence is another issue of course!

quote:

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Japan uses a mixture of CDMA, PDC, and PHS standard phones. Europe uses GSM, and America a mixture of CDMA, GSM, and D-AMPS (TDMA). It's therefore possible to get a phone that will operate in the US/Europe or US/Japan, but not Japan/Europe (or all three).

---

You may be right, but the ads for J-Phone/Vodophone in Japan certainly imply that you can use their phones in Europe. This, of course, could just be bald-faced false advertising on their part.

Whatever happened to the hybrid CDMA/GSM phones I wonder?

Well, anyway, I think Bigend having access to impossible tech is justifiable. After all, nothing like the Footage or F:F:F exists either.

Ne? Ne!

You may be right, but the ads for J-Phone/Vodophone in Japan certainly imply that you can use their phones in Europe. This, of course, could just be bald-faced false advertising on their part.

The European/Japanese 3G standard (W-CDMA) has been designed so that it can handle roaming from 3G networks to existing 2G (GSM) networks. J-Phone is offering phones that work on the 3G network in Japan and can also work on GSM networks elsewhere. I do not believe that such phones were being offered at the time the book was set, however. (Even now, they don't work very well). To work in the US the phone would have to be tri-band GSM as well as all the rest. Motorola has such a phone coming soon which I think will be the first phone that actually does satisfy the description WG in the book. However, such things didn't exist a year ago.

Whatever happened to the hybrid CDMA/GSM phones I wonder?

They're coming. That's what I was talking about when I mentioned the Qualcomm chipset. I think they will be the easiest way to manage a true global phone. Certainly they will at first be more reliable than the sort of thing I am talking about above.

P221 of the British hardback edition:

'She remembers something about a recent television special having generated a wave of newbies. Are these unfamiliar names then?'

Personally, I think this makes more sense if the last word is 'them' instead of 'then'.

Am I right, WG?

On page 189, Cayce and Damien sit in what is presumably a Starbucks clone, described as "diagonally opposite Camden Town station", presumably in Camden High Street. The paragraph opens with "You pay more, here, to sit with your coffee. Take away is less expensive. They probably do that in Tokyo, too, but she hadn't noticed.

Now, there is a Starbucks clone diagonally opposite Camden Town station, but this is a Costa Coffee, which charges the same for take away or sit in. There is another Starbucks clone and also a genuine Starbucks in Parkway nearby, but neither of these chains charge extra for sit in, either. Of the major chains of Starbucks clones in Britain, the one that does charge extra to sit in is Cafe Nero. They do have a store nearby, but it is a several blocks north in Jamestown road, which could not even creatively be described as diagonally opposite Camden Town station.

Of course it is possible that some of this has changed over the last 12 months, but I doubt it.