Clive Cussler's Dark Vector

[KEV67]

This is the first Clive Cussler book I have started reading. I thought I would give one a go. Only I noticed it was written by Graham Brown. So how does that work then? Actually it is quite a good story. It is fairly cinematographic. I could imagine Tom Cruise in it. A freighter carrying two supercomputers has been sent to the bottom of the sea. You would think that would be be bad for the computers, but no, because they are liquid cooled anyway. I wondered about that, because water is not very good for integrated circuit boards, especially salt water. You would think it would short circuit the PCBs. I suppose the PCBs were coated with some waterproof covering.

[KEV67]

Definitely Tom Cruise material. TBF it would make quite an entertaining film.

[KEV67]

I was thinking about the supercomputer McGuffin. Unless these computers were a huge leap in technology it hardly seems worth the bother. I seem to remember a time when people talked about these amazingly powerful computers, but a year or two later there would be even more advanced computers. I saw a supercomputer at Reading University. I think it was used for predicting the weather. It was a basement full of racks of PCs all connected up together.  There are technologies like quantum computing and parallel processing. I have not been keeping up, but I think the idea of quantum  computing is that the bits can have more states than 1 and 0. Not sure about that. Anyway,  I would have thought the designs were more important than the actual computers. I would think it was pretty difficult to reverse engineer a supercomputer with a novel architecture. The book talks about trading one or two of the computers for the operating system and source code. There are people around clever enough to write operating systems. Again, I would have thought it would be even more difficult to do without the designs. 

 

I used to work at a company where one of the brainier engineers wrote the operating system to a product. How do you even go about doing that? Then the company hired an even brainier engineer to write code for its successor product, including its operating system. I sometimes saw job adverts for bare metal micro-controller coders. Micro-controllers are easier than micro-processors, but still take quite a lot of knowhow.  I attended a public lecture by one of the academics from Cambridge University who designed the Raspberry Pi. He intended it as an educational tool. He recounted how he was initially disappointed when one of his students said she could not get on with its operating system, so she coded her own!

Edited March 6 by KEV67

[KEV67]

Finished it. Glad to report that

 

Spoiler

the good guys won and were very successful in their mission. 

 

Also glad to report

Spoiler

the nasty baddy died only I suspect he survived because they did not look for the body.

 

So, not exactly like a Joseph Conrad book or a Thomas Hardy. But that is why Conrad and Hardy are great authors, but Cussler probably has his own executive jet, a superyacht and a very pretty young girlfriend. I don't know any of the above is true. If Clive Cussler is reading this then I withdraw all these remarks without reservation. 

Edited March 14 by KEV67

[lunababymoonchild]

Clive Cussler is deceased (in 2020) so can't deny or verify.

[KEV67]

19 hours ago, lunababymoonchild said:

Clive Cussler is deceased (in 2020) so can't deny or verify.

Maybe that explains why it was written by Graham Brown. The copyright page says it was first published in 2022. 

[KEV67]

There have been eight Clive Cussler books since he died. The titles are proceeded with "Clive Cussler's"

He was 88 when he died. It must have been that dangerously young girlfriend that did for him.

[lunababymoonchild]

9 hours ago, KEV67 said:

Maybe that explains why it was written by Graham Brown. The copyright page says it was first published in 2022. 

Ah-ha!