If you're a Neal Stephenson fan, which I am, then you'll enjoy his interview on Slashdot. If you read Slashdot, you'll enjoy it even more, or at least spend less time getting yourself oriented. I was especially interested in Stephenson's take on the bifurcation of writers because I think there's a similar parallel between people who write code for a patron (i.e. university professors) and those who write code for popular attention (which is a form of compensation and includes people who create open source code, etc.). These two worlds rarely meet and consequently have usually not heard of each other. What's interesting to me is that this bifurcation is relatively recent since people who write code for attention were almost all inside Universities just a decade ago. Now you go to OSCON and almost none of them are. A large part of the reason for that is the "critical review" system that academics are required to play.