Excerpt from the book Unix and Linux System Administration Handbook 
by Evi Nemeth , Garth Snyder , Trent R. Hein , and Ben Whaley
![Book cove for "Unix and Linux System Administration Handbook" by Nemeth et al. [Formatted]](http://unwisdom.org/chadspace/wp-content/uploads/unix-000000-formatted.jpg)
Text within quotation marks often has a precise technical meaning. In these cases, we ignore the normal rules of U.S. English and put punctuation outside the quotes so that there can be no confusion about what’s included and what’s not.
Excerpt from the novel Neuromancer by William Gibson
![William Gibson's "Neuromancer" novel art. [Formatted]](http://unwisdom.org/chadspace/wp-content/uploads/william-gibson-000000-formatted.jpg)
Rain woke him, a slow drizzle, his feet tangled in coils of discarded fiberoptics. The arcade’s sea of sound washed over him, receded, returned. Rolling over, he sat up and held his head.
Light from a service hatch at the rear of the arcade showed him broken lengths of damp chipboard and the dripping chassis of a gutted game console. Streamlined Japanese was stenciled across the side of the console in faded pinks and yellows.
He glanced up and saw a sooty plastic window, a faint glow of fluorescents.
His back hurt, his spine.
He got to his feet, brushed wet hair out of his eyes.
Something had happened….
He searched his pockets for money, found nothing, and shivered. Where was his jacket? He tried to find it, looked behind the console, but gave up.
On Ninsei, he took the measure of the crowd. Friday. It had to be a Friday. Linda was probably in the arcade. Might have money, or at least cigarettes… Coughing, wringing rain from the front of his shirt, he edged through the crowd to the arcade’s entrance.
Holograms twisted and shuddered to the roaring of the games, ghosts overlapping in the crowded haze of the place, a smell of sweat and bored tension. A sailor in a white t-shirt nuked Bonn on a Tank War console, an azure flash.
She was playing Wizard’s Castle, lost in it, her gray eyes rimmed with smudged black paintstick.
She looked up as he put his arm around her, smiled. “Hey. How you doin’? Look wet.”
He kissed her.
“You made me blow my game,” she said. “Look there, asshole. Seventh level dungeon and the goddam vampires got me.” She passed him a cigarette. “You look pretty strung, man. Where you been?”
“I don’t know.”
“You high, Case? Drinkin’ again? Eatin’ Zone’s dex?”
“Maybe… how long since you seen me?”
“Hey, it’s a put-on, right?” She peered at him. “Right?”
“No. Some kind of blackout. I… I woke up in the alley.”
“Maybe somebody decked you, baby. Got your roll intact?”
He shook his head.
“There you go. You need a place to sleep, Case?”
“I guess so.”
“Come on, then.” She took his hand. “We’ll get you a coffee and something to eat. Take you home. It’s good to see you, man.” She squeezed his hand.
He smiled.
Something cracked.
Something shifted at the core of things. The arcade froze, vibrated—
She was gone. The weight of memory came down, an entire body of knowledge driven into his head like a microsoft into a socket. Gone. He smelled burning meat.
The sailor in the white t-shirt was gone. The arcade empty, silent. Case turned slowly, his shoulders hunched, teeth bared, his hands bunched into involuntary fists. Empty. A crumpled yellow candy wrapper, balanced on the edge of a console, dropped to the floor and lay amid flattened butts and styrofoam cups.
“I had a cigarette,” Case said, looking down at his white-knuckled fist. “I had a cigarette and a girl and a place to sleep. Do you hear me, you son of a bitch? You hear me?”
Echoes moved through the hollow of the arcade, fading down corridors of consoles.
He stepped into the street. The rain had stopped.
Ninsei was deserted.
Holograms flickered, neon danced. He smelled boiled vegetables from a vendor’s pushcart across the street. An unopened pack of Yeheyuans lay at his feet, beside a book of matches. JULIUS DEANE IMPORT EXPORT. Case stared at the printed logo and its Japanese translation.
“Okay,” he said, picking up the matches and opening the pack of cigarettes. “I hear you.”
Excerpt from the book Unix and Linux System Administration Handbook by Evi Nemeth , Garth Snyder , Trent R. Hein , and Ben Whaley
The Wikipedia page for “system administrator” includes a nice discussion of the tasks that system administration is generally thought to include. This page currently draws a rather sharp distinction between administration and software development, but in our experience, professional administrators spend much of their time writing scripts. That doesn’t make system administrators developers per se, but it does mean that they need many of the same analytical and architectural skills.
Excerpt from the novel Neuromancer by William Gibson
Cyberspace, as the deck presented it, had no particular relationship with the deck’s physical whereabouts. When Case jacked in, he opened his eyes to the familiar configuration of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority’s Aztec pyramid of data.
“How you doing, Dixie?”
“I’m dead, Case. Got enough time in on this Hosaka to figure that one.”
“How’s it feel?”
“It doesn’t.”
“Bother you?”
“What bothers me is, nothin’ does.”
“How’s that?”
“Had me this buddy in the Russian camp, Siberia, his thumb was frostbit. Medics came by and they cut it off. Month later he’s tossin’ all night. Elroy, I said, what’s eatin’ you? Goddam thumb’s itchin’, he says. So I told him, scratch it. McCoy, he says, it’s the other goddam thumb.” When the construct laughed, it came through as something else, not laughter, but a stab of cold down Case’s spine. “Do me a favor, boy.”
“What’s that, Dix?”
“This scam of yours, when it’s over, you erase this goddam thing.”