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cstrosson The Mummy

It's an unremarkable age gap by Victorian standards. Men above working class status typically waited until they could support a family before marrying, and women typically married young (16-21 was common among the nobility: at 22 an unmarried woman was all but washed-up). Death in childbirth was sky-high by modern standards, and older husbands died of diseases which today would be survivable, so the average duration of a marriage was much the same as it is today -- about 12 years -- even though divorce was difficult hence rare.

(Victorian mores may seem alien to modern eyes because they arose from medical and social constraints we're no longer subject to.)

cstrosson We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus

That actually sounds about right.

cstrosson We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus

I used to go drinking with Iain regularly (we lived in the same city).

Iain was a hard-left socialist -- in US terms, a communist. He's been dead for a decade now, but I'm pretty certain his opinion of Elon Musk as he is self-revealed today would be unprintable: he hated everything billionaires stood for.

Hence: irony being dead.

cstrosson The Cloud Computer

They've reinvented the IBM Mainframe. Big rack-sized box with lots of redundant hardware that serves guest VMs. This is basically a zSeries in drag.

The key difference is the price structure -- IBM leases the hardware wherever they can get away with it, and uses a license manager to control how many of the machine's resources you can access (based on how much you can bear to pay). This, however, is like a mainframe you own.

cstrosson Fifteen Word Processor Commandments (1984)

Bear in mind that prior to desktop publishing tools (which arrived circa 1986-88) laying out a magazine/large format book like WER was a time-consuming and labour intensive job; typesetting was a photographic process using a phototypesetter to etch the printing plates at best (digital phototypesetting was around but very bleeding-edge), and printing was also a mechanical process. Even with a streamlined workflow, allocating an entire month to the production process would make it a tight fit. Then add another month for distribution around the US (most likely via railfreight to intermediate wholesale warehouses before bundles were shipped out to bookstores). Finally note that the date on the cover of a periodical is when the store clerks take the item off sale and strip the covers to return them as evidence of destruction in return for credit (any sold -- no covers provided -- copies must then be paid for, to the wholesaler and ultimately the publisher).

If that sounds like a stone-age process ... well, it's the way publishing used to be done: it predates computerization and containerization by some decades, and it was only beginning to change in the 1980s.

To make matters worse, the writing/editing process would be mediated entirely by sending drafts back and forth via the mail, so you can reasonably add a couple of weeks to the process of writing and then approving a draft compared to what it would take today.

Upshot: this issue was probably finalized 3-4 months before the date on the cover. Microsoft Word was quite possibly not available to reviewers in time to make it into the magazine.

(Source: I used to write software reviews for Computer Shopper -- the British version of the title, not the same as the US one -- in the late 80s to early 90s. Smaller country, different tech by then, but it was still a tedious back-and-forth with printed drafts in envelopes with stamps on them (and sometimes floppy disks!).)

cstrosson The economic cost of populism

It's decades since I read him, but per William Shirer, by 1939 the Third Reich was facing looming bankruptcy (by turning a firehose of cash on its problems—creating make-work jobs, running a massive rearmamanent program, building up huge armed forces, and bread and circuses). Indeed from one perspective the post-1938 expansion of Hitler's reich was driven by the urgent need to steal money and resources from the neighbours to stave off a total economic collapse.

Like turning to bank robbery to pay off the maxed-out credit cards. (Which works for a short while, right up until you hit a bank with a SWAT team waiting for you.)

cstrosson Fusion Foolery

You can't build a bomb using this technology. Period.

But you can achieve plasmas of equivalent density and temperature to those you get in an H-bomb explosion, which is invaluable to weapons researchers if they're not allowed to actually detonate any bombs.

cstrosson Fusion Foolery

The key point about NIF is buried way down in the article:

But the NIF was never “about” societal energy. Its primary purpose is nuclear weapons research. This pesky thing called the nuclear test ban treaty means we can’t just go around detonating nuclear bombs whenever we feel like it. Surely we did not run out of South Pacific island paradises to blow to smithereens. The NIF allows study of matter at extremely high energy density.

NIF was built by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a weapons research and development lab established during the Manhattan Project. Talk of laser fusion as a viable path to commercial fusion reactors is propaganda intended to further the budgetary aims of the nuclear weapons industry. The realistic path to fusion power lies through magnetic confinement reactors (eg. ITER, Wendelstein-7X, etc.)

cstrosson Apple's interactive television box: Hacking the set top box System 7.1 in ROM

>it's somewhat surprising that only one Mac officially could boot the Mac OS entirely from ROM, namely the Macintosh Classic (hold down Cmd-Option-X-O to boot from a hidden HFS volume with System 6.0.3).

This is not actually true: one other Mac could do this -- the Powerbook 100 could boot into System 6.0.8 (going by memory: I owned one).

The PB100 was the entry-level model of the original Powerbook launch range, and differed from the other Powerbooks, the 140 and 170. The latter were 68030 machines, but the PB100 ran on a 68000 and was designed by Sony -- it was physically smaller and lighter than the other two but used a weird lead acid battery that could run it for something like 40-50 minutes. Not sure why it booted MacOS 6 from ROM, but I suspect it might originally have been designed as a floppy-only machine to save battery power relative to the hard disk model they shipped.

cstrosson The Mac Pro’s biggest problem is the MacBook

Just checked on MacTracker -- yes, the 5,5 Pro had firewire; it's immediate predecessor was the Macbook (no pro) 5,1, which didn't have FW but had the removable battery -- the 5,5 added Firewire.

cstrosson The Mac Pro’s biggest problem is the MacBook

> So what will happen? The same thing that happened with all of Apple's bad products- they'll continue to offer it for sale at incredibly high margins for eternity and never attempt to make it more competitive.

There's another thing Apple do with bad products, though. The original 13" Aluminum Macbook launched in November 2008. It was discontinued in June 2009, in favour of the 13" Macbook Pro, which offered a permanently built-in battery (the previous model had a removable battery), and dropped Firewire. That stayed on sale, subject to regular spec bumps, until October 2012, when they bumped the screen to a retina display ...

I'm not an insider, just a long-term Apple watcher (been using Macs since 1991): what seems to happen is they used to get an internal goal to fill a niche in the product range by a certain date, and if the performance target isn't quite achievable they ship whatever they've got -- then iterate on it, possibly with a model branding change.

The Mac Pro looks like a classic case of this: Tim Cook committed Apple to being 100% Apple Silicon across the range by the end of 2022, they missed, but they had to ship something to keep the Mac Pro brand alive. So they shipped a turkey (a Mac Studio with PCI slots and a higher price tag).

What happens next is: either they ship the real Apple Silicon Mac Pro in a year or two (with who-knows-what changes, but something to differentiate it from the top of the Mac Studio range other than price), or they admit defeat and kill the Pro range altogether, or maybe downgrade it to be the name of the top end Mac Studio.

But this model won't be available for more than two years, max.

cstrosson Bolwoningen: Living in spherical homes

Spheres minimize surface area per unit of volume. As heat loss in a building is proportional to its exposed surface area, this means they're potentially very thermally efficient. (Less good for collecting sunlight if you're going to cover them in PV panels, though.)

cstrosson Free Organ

If the Large Hot Pipe Organ showed up on this website I'd have to fight the terrible compulsion to try and find a budget for it ...!

https://archive.org/details/iuma-large_hot_pipe_organ

"The Large Hot Pipe Organ is the world's only MIDI controlled, propane powered explosion organ. The LHPO's pyro-acoustic explodo-rhythmations will throbbatize your earholes and dance-ify your booty and make you realize what "Industrial Music" REALLY means!

"Performing live at contemporary art festivals throughout Austria, Germany, Denmark, and Holland, the LHPO is an experience of sound, light, heat, rhythm and fire you won't want to miss."

(At least it was, as of a couple of decades ago.)

cstrosson ELO Everything

So not to be confused with 70s pomp rock band ELO, aka the Electric Light Orchestra!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Light_Orchestra

cstrosson BBEdit is 30 years old as a commercial product

Nope, adblocker and noscript were disabled.

Update: turns out it's a known bug on their back end service (they're working on a fix). Everything now sorted out manually.

cstrosson BBEdit is 30 years old as a commercial product

Order won't complete (after Paypal payment confirmed) -- "you must accept terms and conditions" message shows up, but no checkbox or other way to accept T&Cs.

(Is the BB order website incompatible with Firefox on macOS, or failing due to load?)

cstrosson Environmental groups sue the FAA over SpaceX launch from Texas

It may seem difficult to avoid creating subjectively negative impacts such as this when launching the largest rocket in history

This outcome was entirely avoidable, right from the beginning of development at Starbase -- and entirely predictable.

It's not even as if SpaceX doesn't already have a second Starship launch pad at Launch Complex 39A, at Kennedy Space Center. (Where they routinely launch rockets without environmental damage lawsuits, up to and including (historically) Saturn V and the Space Shuttle, which are the only vehicles of remotely comparable size to Starship.)

If they don't want lawsuits, they shouldn't have built a potentially explosive chemical plant on a space-constrained sites next to nature reserves full of protected species. Or should ship the Starship elements to KSC by barge for launch. Blaming the nature reserve and conservationists -- they were there first, before SpaceX moved in -- is a dick move.

cstrosson Pirated books thrive on Amazon

> What I'm getting at, is, as a professional author, if you were paid just to live and write, would you still want to be paid-per-copy of your work?

Ideally I'd like to know how many people were reading my work, and whether they liked it -- but I really just want the freedom to write (in reasonable comfort).

Unfortunately actually-existing-capitalism as it is today provides no mechanism for doing this, at least on any scale that can support more than a tiny handful of authors, plus the folks climbing the teaching-MFA LitFic academic career ladder (for whom writing is often simply an extramural career progression activity -- with notable exceptions).

cstrosson Pirated books thrive on Amazon

That's what I'd call living the dream!

cstrosson Pirated books thrive on Amazon

Publishers are very selective about sending authors on tours, because (except for the very biggest names) tours don't make money and cost quite a lot to organize -- they're loss-leaders designed to generate enthusiasm among booksellers (independent bookstores generate disproportionately more sales than you might expect given their usually-small size, and an enthusiastic local seller who feels a sense of amity towards an author can over a period of years produce thousands of additional sales).

I got sent on a couple of book tours when my career was spiking, over a decade ago. Grueling, and no very visible short term impact on sales ... and that's with free ticketing (the events were to generate publicity, not revenue). Many authors are middle-aged introverts and don't really thrive under such conditions -- myself included.

cstrosson Pirated books thrive on Amazon

> why should consumers care of some pirated books appear on Amazon?

Speaking as an author: because I write for a living, and if I can't earn a living at this I'll have to find some other job, which will cause me to stop writing. Piracy is directly rivalrous for the author's revenue-earning product. (Libraries are less so insofar as Public Lending Right and royalties on library editions cause some money to go to the authors.)

Remember, authors are not film studios or rock groups. We don't have merchandising opportunities, we don't perform live for a ticket fee, and we're mostly very small-scale sole trader businesses. Our revenue comes 100% from sales of our books, unlike bands (who make peanuts from streaming but are paid to tour) or film studios (lots of spin-off merchandise).

(Median income for full time novelists working in the UK, per the ALCS in 2022, was around £7000 a year. A tiny handful make millions, a large number are hobbyists doing it in their spare time for pin money, a small number of us earn a middle class income -- not management level, not even programmer or web developer level. It doesn't take much to tip us from "just getting by" to "giving up, have to go stack shelves in a supermarket" territory.)

cstrosson Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg (2011)

Here's a more recent (and non-raving monarchist) biography of Ungern-Sternberg by British historian James Palmer, "The Bloody White Baron":

https://www.amazon.com/Bloody-White-Baron-Extraordinary-Nobl...

cstrosson Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg (2011)

Raging anti-semite, wanted to exterminate all the Jews, rode across Asia under a red banner with a white circle containing a swastika (in 1920!) -- where have we heard this before?

He used to ride into villages and round up all the men. Those who were of an age to fight, he conscripted: the rest he put to the sword -- "they'll fight for us in their next incarnation".

He was a proto-Nazi monster with genocidal ambitions.

cstrosson Atari 800XL Remake

On a related theme, here's the Spectrum Next, Issue 2:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/spectrumnext/zx-spectru...

(Delayed about two years due to supply chain problems -- their FPGA was back-ordered for over a year -- but due to ship in 3-6 months' time: the ultimate Sinclair Spectrum revival.)

cstrosson LokiOS: A new version of CP/M 2.2, written from scratch

I have my own on KS! But you should definitely review it for The Register when it finally arrives!

cstrosson LokiOS: A new version of CP/M 2.2, written from scratch

You are aware that MS-DOS 1.0 was a clone of CP/M-86, right?

cstrosson LokiOS: A new version of CP/M 2.2, written from scratch

As an aside, I gather than CP/M+ (aka CP/M 3.0) runs quite well on the Spectrum Next and is due to be available on the Spectrum Next Issue 2 (whenever they get hold of the FPGAs the project is hung up on). And the Next looks a whole lot like Loki, except with a gonzo modern FPGA pretending to be a really fast Z80, SD card support, and a Raspberry Pi Zero as a GPU(!). It even costs about the same as an original Spectrum 16K did in 1982, adjusted for 40 years of inflation.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/spectrumnext/zx-spectru...

cstrosson ThinkPad 701C with a Framework brain transplant

The Astro Slide is shipping (mine arrived in mid-January!) but it's a little small for touch-typing -- what I'm after is a 65% or larger full-scale keyboard that packs down into something a bit larger than the Gemini/Cosmo/Astro, or their design predecessor the Psion Series 5.

cstrosson Wendelstein 7-X: 8 min Plasma with 1.3 GJ Energy Turnover [video]

Fusion reactor R&D generally avoids actually starting a fusion reaction unless they're ready to trash the reactor: current reactor designs can only manage D+T fusion, which generates a shitload of neutrons and leaves the reactor interior structures highly radioactive, making modification for further experiments problematic. (No-one is anywhere near achieving the energies needed for aneutronic fusion.)

For example, the JET (Joint European Torus) Tokamak at Culham began operation in 1983 but experiments with tritium only started in 1991; maintenance and upgrades after 1998 relied on a remote handling system as it was no longer safe for human technicians to work inside the reactor containment in shutdown.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_European_Torus

cstrosson ThinkPad 701C with a Framework brain transplant

The 701C's butterfly keyboard is surely out of patent protection by now, right?

I'd love to see that style of folding keyboard revived -- either as a standalone bluetooth keyboard for tablets/phones, or as part of on the the 7" to 10" mini-ultrabooks Chinese vendors like GPD and One Netbook sell. Or maybe a Framework mini-ultrabook with a 9" or 10" screen ...?