cstross

12 ms·

61.
by cstross 4y ago
You are aware that MS-DOS 1.0 was a clone of CP/M-86, right?
62.
by cstross 4y ago
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 who
63.
by cstross 4y ago
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&
64.
by cstross 4y ago
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
65.
by cstross 4y ago
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 th
66.
by cstross 4y ago
Yup. I also invite you to contemplate the potential for brand marketing campaigns if your "poison" is intended to boost the prominence of a well-known product, so that ChatGPT relentlessly pushes it in the face of users. (Brand ma
67.
by cstross 4y ago
Qualified disagreement -- it's all about the word modern . The Comet airframe was inherently limited by the decision to embed the engines -- de Havilland Ghost turbojets -- in the wing roots. Obviously this wwas great for drag reducti
68.
Royal Navy nuclear submarine reactor repaired with glue(theguardian.com)
4 points by cstross 4y ago|0 comments
69.
by cstross 4y ago
Goodreads is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amazon. Maybe consider ebook-platform-agnostic sources of book data? (I'm trying to get off Amazon completely. Tight Goodreads integration is therefore a nope for me.)
70.
by cstross 4y ago
Broken on Firefox (v 109, on macOS Ventura) with NoScript -- keeps refreshing too fast to tell NoScript to temporarily allow scripts from some of the sources. Keeps refreshing continuously if I disable all restrictions on that tab. I couldn
71.
by cstross 4y ago
If you had read to the end you would have found your answer(s). Work is in progress: but as airliners are designed for a working life of at least 30 years it will take a while yet before the lessons of MH370 are universally adopted.
72.
by cstross 4y ago
And then again, if you really hate your telesales callers, put them on hold with some hold music like this: https://soundcloud.com/user-237714155/sales-call-abyss Explanation of how/why they came up with it here
73.
by cstross 4y ago
NOTE: antipope.org is my blog, but this was a guest blog essay by qntm, who can more commonly be found at https://qntm.org/ (Mentioning this because I've just seem some drive-by commenters attributing "Lena&quot
74.
by cstross 4y ago
This is a corporate policy issue. 80% of commercial trade book publishing in the US/UK/EU is dominated by five multinationals, the "Big Five" -- Penguin Random House, Simon and Schuster, Macmillan, Hachette, and HarperCo
75.
by cstross 4y ago
I'm 58, have type II diabetes, and BMI over 30, which is the criterion for NHS Scotland to offer semaglutide (currently in the formulation Rybelsus, which is a once-a-day tablet rather than an injection). I've been on Semaglutide
76.
by cstross 4y ago
Not so much "excited" as "interested": it's 30 years old, and just ask yourself how many OSs and CPU architectures and development environments it has been ported across while retaining some degree of continuity. I
77.
by cstross 4y ago
They fixed that particular crash by version 1.04, which shipped with machines sold after the first couple of months on the market. And version 2.0, a for-money upgrade, was much faster at saving overall. (I never bought it, by that point
78.
by cstross 4y ago
Actually, replacing the CCP but retaining the BIOS and BDOS makes perfect sense. However, this was completely obscured from the user ...
79.
by cstross 4y ago
Locoscript (the WP that came bundled with Amstrad's PCW series of Z80 small office machines -- probably the best-selling CP/M boxes ever, first sold in 1985) didn't actually run under CP/M. Locoscript could read and writ
80.
by cstross 4y ago
Received editorial wisdom these days is that you have at most 100 words to capture the reader's attention (and by "capture" I mean "drag it into the back of your serial killer van, sedate it, hog-tie it, then re-enact
81.
by cstross 4y ago
The key word that's almost submerged in the article is molten . Like previous sodium-sulphur batteries this one relies on a molten salt electrolyte, meaning you won't see it in your phone or laptop any time soon! However, as it&#
82.
by cstross 4y ago
I'm not the only SF writer to have gone there, either: Harry Turtledove published one just this year! https://www.amazon.com/Three-Miles-Down-Harry-Turtledove-ebo...
83.
by cstross 4y ago
Just as a reminder, the idea of mining deep sea manganese nodules was developed by Howard Hughes' Glomar subsidiary in the 1970s as a cover story for the CIA's Project AZORIAN, a project to build a "deep sea mining ship"
84.
by cstross 4y ago
Ars Technica is currently publishing an episodic non-technical history of the development of ARM: Part 1: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/09/a-history-of-arm-par... Part 2: https://arstechnica
85.
by cstross 4y ago
Buy a paper copy of it and give it to a friend who hasn't read it? Or buy one of my other books that you haven't read yet. (The keyword here is "buy". I get a percentage of the cover price. Hardcovers or ebooks pay a hig
86.
by cstross 4y ago
Nope, not going there. (You are not going to get me to write a sequel to something I began 25 years ago!)
87.
by cstross 4y ago
/me: waves Be aware that this novel is a cautionary tale, not some kind of technological utopia. And for a contrarian take, I co-wrote another novel with Cory Doctorow, "The Rapture of the Nerds", which is also a free downl
88.
by cstross 4y ago
Roughly 5300 square kilometres. About three times the area of Los Angeles.
89.
by cstross 4y ago
> stop artificially limiting what iPadOS can do Why would they do that when it would remove the incentive for their customers to buy one of each? Give the iPad range Mac features, and it'd cannibalize Macbook sales from the bottom u
90.
by cstross 4y ago
It's worth noting that "Great Britain" is very specifically the name of a geographical land mass -- an island off the coast of Europe that currently includes England, Wales, and Scotland. In political terms it doesn't

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