First, an apologia for a technical complication ...
So, with previous books I've been in the habit of writing up my crib notes and blogging them around the time the book comes out in mass-market paperback and the ebook price is cut accordingly, which is traditionally twelve months after the hardcover publication date. However, we live in interesting times and the mass market distribution channel—used for small format paperbacks in the USA—is decaying (it died in the early 90s in the UK). Upshot: there have been no mass market paperback editions of my books in the USA since about 2015, although the UK market still gets small format trade paperbacks (which everyone thinks is a mass market release).
"Empire Games", the first book of the trilogy of that name, is published by Tor in the USA (and Canada) and by Tor in the UK (and EU, and Aus/NZ). Despite their similar-sounding names, these are actually two different companies within a sprawling multinational (Holtzbrinck Publishing Group), and although my US and UK editors work together, they're publishing through different distribution networks (because, historically, books weren't a valuable enough wholesale product to ship internationally). This is why the ebook price drop and small format paperback have already happened in the UK, but the ebook price cut and US trade paperback of "Empire Games" are delayed until December 5th.
(There are no current plans for a mass market release, despite which Amazon.com are optimistically saying that you can pre-order one for delivery on January 1st, 2099. And book 2, "Dark State", is due out on January 11th in the UK and January 9th in the USA.)
As it's the seasonal affective depression time of year and I always get slammed around the winter solstice, without further ado, here are some crib notes for "Empire Games". Spoilers ahoy!
"Empire Games" is a stand-alone-ish trilogy set in the same universe as my earlier "Merchant Princes" series. By stand-alone-ish I mean it should be possible to read it without familiarity with the previous books ... but a bunch of earlier characters re-appear, and it's probably best read as a continuation, 17 years after the end of the first story. (The working title of the project was, you will be shocked and horrified to learn, "Merchant Princes: The Next Generation".) If you want to go back and re-read the original series, I strongly recommend reading the collected omnibus editions instead. (Link goes to the US "buy my books" page; UK version here.) The original series was written circa 2002-2006; I was still learning how to do long-form narrative fiction properly, and I made a lot of minor improvements when I re-mastered the books in 2012.
In my original, 2002, pitch for a four-book series of big fat novels, there was a lump of text titled "The Family Trade"—eventually reassembled and re-released in its planned form as "The Bloodline Feud", for reasons I think I discussed here a few years ago—then three more books. The second book kind of expanded, and is now "The Traders War" and "The Revolution Trade". The entire "Empire Games" trilogy corresponds to book 3 of the original plan, but no plan ever survives contact with the enemy, let alone 15-16 years of wall-clock time and the march of history.
To recap: we live in a multiverse. There are parallel universes, mostly containing versions of Earth, and some people, equipped with a very high-tech bit of intracellular nanomachinery, have the ability to think themselves across to other distinctively different versions of Earth. Our first series revolved around Miriam Beckstein, an adopted 30-ish tech journalist from Boston who discovered she had an extended family the hard way and did what anyone in that situation does, namely tried to improve things and inadvertently triggered a revolution and a nuclear war in two time lines. Series crib sheet here.
"Empire Games" opens in the near future of 2020—please don't blame me? This book was originally planned for publication in 2014—with a rather different adopted child, Rita Douglas, being taken aside by Men in Black and made a job offer she isn't allowed to refuse. It transpires that in the Grim Meathook only slightly glow-in-the-dark Future-USA that emerged from the events at the climax of "The Revolution Trade", the US government has become totally paranoid about world-walkers, and has handed over responsibility for securing the nation against threats from all other parallel universes to the Department of Homeland Security who, in a classic example of Mission Creep have begun to invade and occupy other time lines, engage in large-scale resource extraction (and prototype carbon sequestration operations, by dumping waste CO2 in neighbouring uninhabited Earths), and turned the USA into the kind of total surveillance hell-hole that it turns out (pace Edward Snowden), it already was. (Did I say that writing plausible near-future SF is getting really hard these days?)
Rita, we discover, is Miriam Beckstein's daughter by her first husband, a non-world-walker. As such, she is a carrier of the inactive trait and of no interest to anyone, except that a certain shadowy national laboratory has now worked out how to switch on the world-walking ability in carriers. A couple of decades earlier the Clan was using a fertility clinic in Massachusetts to produce thousands of carriers, in an attempt to breed their way out of a demographic collapse (due to internicene feuding). DHS has got the Clan breeding program records (aka DRAGON'S TEETH), but Rita is a few years older, and unlike the youngsters, her background profile scores very highly for a particular job: paratime spy. She does, admittedly, come with a few drawbacks. For one thing there's her distinctly odd upbringing and her close relationship with her adoptive grandfather Kurt, who defected from East Germany in the late 1960s. For another ... just pay attention to Rita's ethnicity, gender identity, and politics. Her DHS handlers are all too pleased when she is reunited with an old flame late in her training/activation, because it means they've got a handle on her. But perhaps they aren't paying quite enough attention to the nature of the summer camp where Rita and Angie met, or the way their grandparents all grew up in East Germany. After all, who cares about what they may have gotten up to back in a Communist state that collapsed three decades ago?
We fairly rapidly discover that the reason Colonel Smith's unit within the DHS (yes, that Colonel Smith: the original Family Trade Organization was absorbed by DHS and more or less took it over, immediately after the events in "The Revolution Trade") want a human paratime spy is because in the course of their routine exploration of parallel time-lines, most of which are uninhabited or occupied only by paleolithic tribes, they've discovered something excitingly different—a time line with electrified freight railroads, air defense radar, and nuclear-tipped surface-to-air missiles that can shoot down high-altitude drones. For nearly two decades they've suspected the Clan survivors are out there, hiding somewhere in paratime. If they're in this new time line, the approach they used on to the Gruinmarkt at the end of "The Revolution Trade" isn't going to work, and they don't know enough about the target time line to even know what language they speak. Hence Rita's recruitment and activation.
Now let's step through the looking glass ...
Miriam Burgeson (she re-married in exile) is now a middle-aged high-ranking political apparatchik in the government of the New American Commonwealth, the political entity which supplanted the former New British Empire of Time Line Three in the original series, after the revolution that Miriam inadvertently bankrolled (during a fiscal crisis and national bankruptcy a couple of hundred kilograms of gold will go a very long way). In fact, she's one half of a Clinton-esque power couple; as Party Commissioner in charge of the Ministry for Intertemporal Technological Intelligence and head of the Department for Paratime Research (industrial espionage via world-walker) she has both a mission and the leverage to drag the Commonwealth kicking and screaming into the Century of the Fruitbat; and as Commissioner in charge of the State Ministry of Propaganda, her husband Erasmus has the media through which to disseminate her message: "The Americans are Coming." Miriam has dedicated her past two decades to ensuring that when the USA makes first contact with the Commonwealth, it won't be a one-sided struggle.
As William Gibson famously observed, "the future is already here: it's just unevenly distributed". On first visiting the Boston of the New British Empire, Miriam assumed it was an undeveloped, quasi-19th-century world: much steampunk, very zeppelin. But, just as a time traveller to our own 1942 wouldn't necessarily see any signs of the radar, computers, jet engines, ballistic missiles, or nuclear weapons that were all developing rapidly in secret laboratories, Miriam was unaware of the true state of tech in time line three. We meet her now, 17 years later, interrupting the official opening of an 8-bit microprocessor fab line to take a call informing her that the Commonwealth's first spy satellite has made orbit. Rita's 2020 USA is still five decades ahead of the Commonwealth, but the Commonwealth has computers and nukes and world-walkers. And the Commonwealth has something else, something the USA once probably had but has forgotten: a revolutionary democratic ideology and a deep state that believes it has a mission to spread democracy across the multiverse, starting with the USA.
What the Commonwealth means by democracy and what that word is commonly understood to mean in Rita's time line (and ours) are not the same thing at all. Time line three never had a French revolution, or an American war of independence, or a Russian revolution, or an Iranian Islamic revolution. When Miriam gave Adam Burroughs, the leader of the Revolutionary Party histories of all those revolutions and more back in 2003, he decided to learn from other revolutions' mistakes, and so far he's succeeded: the Commonwealth is rapidly outstripping the rival French Empire (capital: St Petersburg) which dominates Africa and Eurasia in this time line, and has its own paratime exploration program to rival the USA's. The future of Democracy looks bright. But the First Man has stage IV cancer, and as he lies in his sick bed it is becoming apparent that the Commonwealth is about to undergo its first change in executive power since the revolution. (The First Man's constitutional powers correspond more to those of the Grand Ayatollah in the Iranian system than to a US president: it's a position occupied for life, by the system's supreme constitutional judge and ceremonial head of state.) Various Party Commissioners are jockeying for position, and across the ocean, the King in Exile is looking to the turbulence as an opportunity for restoration of the monarchy (as happened with the collapse of the English Protectorate in 1660).
A paratime superpower with nuclear weapons and world-walker technology is about to undergo its first serious succession crisis, just as a US government paratime agency that knows none of this stumbles across them and decides to send in the spies. What could possibly go wrong? Read "Dark State" and "Invisible Sun" to find out, because the novel "Empire Games" is only the first third of the story ...
Now for some loose ends.
Mike Fleming from the previous series does not appear in this one. It seems likely that, in the wake of 2003's events, anyone trying a Snowden-style document dump would have been dealt with mercilessly. And Rita's USA is the sort of place where internet censorship goes unquestioned, there's a national ID card system backed by a comprehensive DNA database, there are CCTV cameras on every street corner, and people sometimes disappear in night and fog, vanishing from the social graph without anyone asking questions. (I wrote this pre-Trump, as an attempt at a Grim Meathook Future USA. I gather some folks now read it as optimistic, because at least my GMF-US government is run by competent people who have good reason to be extremely paranoid. Hah fucking hah, joke's on me.)
Iris, Miriam's mother, is dead. (She'd have been in her 70s at this point, and had advanced multiple sclerosis at the time of the first series.) Rita's adoption was Iris's idea, and should be viewed in light of the Clan's internal braid politics and Iris's feud with her own mother, the now-dead Dowager Hildegarde. (Arranged marriages to conserve the world-walking trait pit mothers against daughters on behalf of grand-daughters. By raising Miriam in the USA—where Miriam bore a non-world-walker child—the rebellious Iris has mortally sinned against Hildegarde's dynastic ambitions. However, Iris is wary enough to plan for future contingencies. If Miriam is ever reintroduced to the Clan, she can't be allowed to have a bastard in tow. Hence the arm-twisting-induced adoption.)
Iris's social circle in the 1970s in Boston is mostly countercultural, which is how she meets Kurt Douglas (Anglicized name, after emigration). Kurt's son and wife are first generation products of the Wolf Orchestra (about which, more in the crib notes for "Dark State", next year). Purely by coincidence, this means they have exactly the set of attributes Iris is looking for in foster parents: outwardly law-abiding, quiet, and risk-averse, but privately non-conformist. They'll teach the kid to keep her head down and move under cover, along with other more recondite skills, like fooling polygraph tests and conducting dead-letter drops. What could be wrong with that?
In the back story, the US population lost their collective shit in 2003 (understandably so: the events of 7/16 dwarfed those of 9/11) and didn't get it back together until 2012 or later. I haven't inked in the political time line between 2003 and 2020 in any detail, however there is no President Obama in Rita's world (and no President Trump either). After 2012 power alternates between the authoritarian/national security wing of the Democrats, and the Republicans (among whom the Christian dominionists are making gains, hence the mention of the "no choice" states that Rita refuses to set foot in without good reason). Dominionists aren't the only believers making gains: the Church of Scientology is sufficiently respectable that membership isn't an automatic strike-out for a security clearance, and they're represented in the Homeland Security paratime organization. As for the LDS and parallel universe versions of Earth, there has been a doctrinal amendment and consequently DHS is crawling with members of the Mormon Church hoping to find a set of golden tablets buried in another version of upstate New York. (Much like the CIA). (That DHS has also been penetrated by two other groups, and who they might be, is a spoiler for a later book. Let's just say, if you set up a sprawling rapidly expanding bureaucracy it will become a honeypot for entryism.)
The USA of Rita's world is much less engaged with the outside world, but has directed considerable energy into resource extraction from uninhabited time lines, and its energy economy is still largely carbon-based (hybrids and electric cars are still a niche, rather than taking off in a big way). It's also a world where the 2007/08 financial crash didn't happen. Instead, there was a smaller non-global crash immediately after 7/16 in 2003, then a larger crash after the India-Pakistan nuclear war (World War 2.5). Since then, the recovery has been more focussed on wealth creation, as vast new natural resource deposits have become available in empty parallel earths.
The Dome in the Forest, and the Gate to Nowhere: this gets a lot of coverage in "Dark State". You'll just have to wait to find out where it goes.
Oh, and in the first series? World-walkers were limited to more or less what they could carry by hand, until the late re-discovery of the ability to use an electrostatically insulated carrier, like a wheelchair or a cart, to move larger quantities between time-lines. In "Empire Games", the bar has been raised somewhat higher.
Final-final note, because I forgot to say it earlier: the first series was, thematically, about family and also about economic development traps. This new series is about how to get out of economic development traps, and about the political equivalent of an economic development trap (a suboptimal strange attractor that keeps sucking a polity backwards into autocracy), and whether our idea of democracy as an ideal form of government is actually valid (without veering off into neo-reactionary/monarchist/totalitarian territory). Put it another way: in our universe, nobody has ever tried to implement Rawls' theory of justice or realtime central planning a la Cybersyn in a revolutionary republic. Or tried to build Project ORION). But there's always a first time ...
(Yet another technical complication: some of the hrefs of your links to wikipedia (Snowden, Dragon's Teeth, theory of justice, project Orion) are missing the closing ")". A common Markdown problem, escaping the braces with a "\" seems to be the answer.)
Fixed, I think. Thanks.
s/defected from East Germany in the early 1980s/defected from East Germany in the late 1960s/;
Thanks for that. Whets my appetite for the rest of the trilogy, unfortunately there is a longer than desired timespan between appetizer and the main course, but I will manage to live through it. As I have been reading through them one at a time since a couple of years after the first one came out.
BTW have found that reading a Charlie Stross story much improved on a Kindle. A challenging vocabulary is a lot of fun but is less of an interruption on the Kindle as the built-in and internet connected dictionary and Wikipedia make understanding new words easier than putting the book down and picking up a nearby computing device that the dogs are napping on.
Again, a hearty and well meaning thank you for the occasional blog updates and the ongoing expansion of my reading library.
Speaking of development traps, I have the impression that the USA and the Commonwealth are heading straight into Exploitation Colonialism. You extract resources from a place you don't care about and consume them. Research and development or financial innovation come second to just cranking out more supplies from your colonies/alternate timelines.
At least the bright upside is that lack of research into automating industrial processes and making them more efficient will bring back the high-employment era for low-skill labour. You're getting oil for free, steel for cheap and you can literally dump your ecological concerns outside of this reality. So, you build cars!
Side note re. seasonal affective disorder (SAD): Both my wife and my BFF have had lots of success with "SAD lights". There's some clinical evidence that this kind of phototherapy works*, so I suspect it's not just a placebo effect or anecdata in the two examples I know personally.
One thing that surprised me as not being listed in the risks: insomnia. I suspect that's not a common problem for most people, but since blue light can exacerbate any pre-existing problems with falling asleep at the end of the day, it's worth restricting the treatment to early in the day.
Both my wife and my BFF have had lots of success with "SAD lights"
"Hello, grandma, do you know how to suck eggs?"
(Sorry, but this is not, ahem, a new problem for me. Hint: what latitude do I live at? What are my sunrise/sunset times today?)
Gate to Nowhere
Speaking of that, its distal end is said to be located 8,000 km from a planetary-mass black hole that's believed to be the remains of a crushed Earth. Presumably the hole would be at the barycenter of the Earth and the GtN would have opened on the former surface, as its proximal end does on an extant surface.
But the radius of our Earth is a nominal 6,378 km (actually varies a bit from place to place), so maybe the GtN didn't open onto the surface, but to a place in space some 1,600 km up?
I'm pretty sure I double-checked the distance, so ... metric/imperial conversion error creeping in somewhere?
I thought as I was reading -Empire Games- that it was a shame that Adam Burroughs didn't take a page from the George Washington - John Adams playbook and set up a peaceful transition of power while he's alive.
I'd rather that the NAC not get the equivalent of Vladimir Putin in charge (I can't remember the name of the creep who is trying to do just that in-universe) - I'd rather that the NAC not become a People's Republic of Tyranny.
I shouldn't worry, though-- I'm sure that Charlie wouldn't give us a dystopian outcome.
I seem to remember an image of the sort of LED lamp that would probably need welding glasses to approach.
I was tempted to get one but didn't want to blind the neighbours.
metric/imperial conversion error creeping in somewhere?
Dunno. The diameter is ~8,000 statute miles, so maybe that???
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_radius
Charlie,
One huge question: is there any way to get the damn thing as an .epub? If I buy from Barndroppings&IgNoble, it goes on my ereader... and there's no way to back it up. They've gotten it hidden on the reader in some manner I haven't managed to identify yet. I can mount in in Linux... but there's no there there. I'm assume an alternate SD or whatever card, not accessible when it's not running.....
Charlie noted: "Sorry, but this is not, ahem, a new problem for me. Hint: what latitude do I live at? What are my sunrise/sunset times today?"
I really do get that most people who suffer from a condition have researched it and know the issues better than helpful folk like me and get irate when we try to helpfully mansplain. G
I also know my friend who is/was a SAD sufferer had suffered for many years because when she did her initial research, phototherapy was considered a fringe treatment with little scientific support. So I figured I'd rather take the risk you already knew about it than not mention something useful that you hadn't considered or had considered and disgarded.
I am sitting right underneath one of these.
One huge question: is there any way to get the damn thing as an .epub?
Yes.
It's sold via the Google Play Store as an epub ebook, and per Tor policy, should be available without DRM. (If you buy it and find DRM, let me know and I'll bite some ankles.)
Or you can buy a Kindle version, import into Calibre with the usual DRM-stripper tool, and transcode to epub.
That's the one.
If I ask if they are dimmable will I get laughed at? :)
Nope, they're not dimmable.
Didn't think so.
My house is afflicted with dimmer switches left there by the previous denizens. Have dimmable LEDs in most of the fittings now, but thinking it is time to just change the switches as they are always on max anyway.
Can we drop the discussion of SAD (at least until we're a couple of hundred comments further in)? This is a topic for questions and spoilers on "Empire Games", after all.
USA maybe The Commonwealth has to catch up with the parallel USA .....
65W LED? HOLY COW ( I note the AMZN piece doesn't apparently give the actual light output? ) I'm beginning to realise that the "normal" shops are useless, in my quest to replace all my filament-bulbs with LED's, but I only want approx 12-1500 lLumens ( The equivalent, approx, of an old-fashioned 100W-1120W filament blub.
I note yours are "edison Screw" fitmanr, rather than the usual UK bayonet, as well. I'll have a burrow, because. it's time I dumped all the filaments. ( I have discharge srip lights in the kitchen, though )
so how do they treat SAD in the Commonwealth? Do they have decent LED lighting yet? (SCNR. dr&h)
Just pulled a batch of cornbread from the oven, and while it cools I see a new Crib Sheet. Hurrah!
BTW, Charlie, do not worry about the story being set in the so called near future of 2020. "Empire Games" is not our world. I'm concerned that you feel that you have to explain that. It's a sign of how Fandom has become even more bizarrely fragile about their world view than in the past. I've noticed that Fandom has become more and more shrill when their individual world views collide with novels. I see it crippling the field as people like Robinson put out ludicrous books like New York 2140. More and more authors have dropped off my "to buy" list as they jump the shark like that.
The Greeks had the best view of time. They saw Now as a chariot moving into the Future, with us facing backwards, only seeing the Past clearly. If you turned your head to either side, you could get glimpses of the Future, but only glimpses. The act of looking right or left would produce different Futures each time you turned your head to look.
Empire Games is solid, and does not require reading the earlier trilogy to be trapped by the story.
Well done.
can't remember the name of the creep who is trying to do just that
that would be the party's security director, "Keith" something if I remember right.
It's been a while since I read the book, so I may get some of the details wrong/have forgotten them.
If I remember correctly, the commonwealth controls basically North + South America while the French Empire controls Eurasia? My question is: how is industrialization spread in both empires? Is it contained in 1 area for each empire (Europe for the French and N. America for the Commonwealth)? The reason I'm asking is because in our world, Total Fertility Rate and thus migration are tied to industrialization.
Tied to that, how widespread is the AK-47 equivalent? If it's not widespread, why? This gives me an idea of how the empires are held together. In our history, the AK-47 functioned as "the great equalizer" by making it expensive in terms of both money and soldiers to hold the European Empires together. There's a reason European countries lost most of the decolonization wars after WWII. The US and the Soviet Union maintained control by supporting puppet dictators, is that how both of those Empires maintain control?
Here's my final question: how did the Commonwealth not fragment during its independence/revolution? Or did it fragment and was reconquered?
Mexico likewise fragmented (see the purple and red areas) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexico#/media/File:Mexico%27s_Territorial_Evolution.png
The US had several close calls during the Articles of Confederation and the Whiskey Rebellion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskey_Rebellion
If I remember correctly, the commonwealth controls basically North + South America while the French Empire controls Eurasia? My question is: how is industrialization spread in both empires?
Demographic transition is a plot point in the new trilogy. And there's an essay on the history of time line three in the back of "Dark State". Main point is, they industrialized late, Malthusian trap due to poor agricultural distribution persisted later, Commonwealth is now undergoing demographic transition and desperately investing in the next-gen human capital they know they're going to need. Meanwhile, the French empire is a continuation of the Ancien Regime, and is falling ever further behind ... and beginning to wise up to the fact (ahem: see book 2).
AK-47 equivalent: less than relevant. What's relevant is ammunition factories and distribution networks. I disagree about the AK-47; I think the true break point was the combination of conscript mobilization by railway networks (see Tuchman, "The Guns of August") and the bolt-action rifle. Right now, time line three is in a strategic nuclear stalemate ... but the French Empire is stuck at piston-engined bombers and A-bombs, gawping bemused at the spysats and SSBNs overhead and under the oceans. They've been massively outstripped in fifteen years flat by a rival who, two decades earlier, was on the ropes.
Imperial fragmentation: one point about slower development is that the mechanisms of industrial age imperial dominion have had time to bed in further, and communication systems are better than in our time line. E.g. the New British Empire has its revolution at the same time as 125mph high speed trains and a reasonable telephone network, as compared to the Russian revolution (few telephones, trains limited to 60mph or less). An isochrone diagram would thus show shorter communication lag across the empire, and reconquest would be faster. (Also: the French failed to recognize the significance of the revolution across the water when it happened, due to the lack of any historical precedent known to them. The Radicals, however, knew about other time lines.)
I would submit that they're already there and have been since their inception. The structure of the NAC is very autocratic and highly tyrannical; any specific Big Man at the top might chose not to exercise the power available to him, but that power exists and checks on it are few. It can enter a failure state that's near-impossible to recover from with one sub-optimal succession, which is of course a major plot point.
Charlie,
I had a long conversation with a friend, explaining the series. He had some interesting opinions:
1) The Commonwealth locals understand the absolute need to secure nuclear weapons (in part, because the world-walkers taught them). The world-walkers will be able to steal some, but they won't have massive retaliation ('merely' a few cities).
2) The US can play an extremely strong military and diplomatic card, by putting embassies into the capitals of that world (with a few massed B-52 flyovers for morale).
3) One advantage of being in the USA's timeline is that they are less likely to use nukes. Hiding close by is always an option. And it's really hard for the USA to place panopticon surveillance on most of the territory of the USA, let alone the entire world.
4) The world-walkers can play the diplomatic game right back at the USA - every country in the world desperately wants world-walking ability.
Well, they got rid of the Tsar, they narrowly avoided having a Reign of Terror more by luck than judgement, now Lenin is about to pop his clogs, apparently without having taken effective measures to protect against Stalin coming next...
Which is rather an extreme level of blindness for someone who has been able to foresee his own coming death for rather longer than Lenin, who unlike Lenin has been mentally unclouded throughout his illness, and who has supposedly studied that period of Earth history in order to avoid making the same mistakes.
Which in turn leads me to wonder if there exists some situation maybe such as the alien originators of the mind-controlled molecular machinery still being around, and having now progressed to the level of being able to implement the machinery-controlled mind...
It strikes me also that there is a possible parallel between the Clan refugees and the Jewish diaspora, which in turn opens the possibility of the making of a particularly undesirable type of political hay out of their presence.
Diasporas happen all the time. What's interesting is how the dispersed integrate within a new country.
Felix Dzerzhinsky who re-founded the "new" communist secret-police, regarded Stalin as "too harsh" (!)
Just how severe is the political repression in Empire Games-United States? Aren't you even allowed to point out in public that the Bill of Rights looks like a dead letter without the Stasi coming down on you?
So the Commonwealth had four revolutions to draw lessons from. French revolution: idealists killed or exiled, replaced by dictator. Soviet revolution: idealists killed or exiled, replaced by dictator. Islamic Iranian revolution: idealists killed or exiled, replaced by hardline religious fanatics. American revolution: did NOT become a dictatorship.
Really can't understand why the Commonwealth revolutionaries didn't just say "What those American guys did? Let's do that."
Maybe Miriam had absorbed too much of the "USA is the source of all the world's problems" ideology from time line one?
Whether or not they're called 'mass market', I still like small format paperbacks if I'm not buying the hardcover of a book - they fit my bookshelves better. Nice to see this out.
SLAVES is the answer to that one, I think?
While the NAC seems to be a one party state with an elected head of state for life (and possibly no local elections...? Can't remember but it would surprise me if they did not) they are more economically democratic. IIRC the microprocessor fab line that is opened is referred to as a cooperative.
So even if their political system follows less democratic forms than we're used to (and let's be honest having them hasn't stopped a global slide towards plutarchy) their economic system would seem to empower everyday workers far more than ours.
Really can't understand why the Commonwealth revolutionaries didn't just say "What those American guys did? Let's do that."
What, have an extremely fragmented nation with such a toothless federal authority that the question of dictatorship does not arise?
Given that the Commonwealth need a strong central authority to drive through their industrialization policy that's not exactly an option.
But revolutions in the real world don't repeatedly go wrong in the same ways because the people running them are stupid or ignorant of history. They see the long-term issues, but are too busy staving off the next crisis, coping with the urgent problems, etc. Having established that power comes from the barrel of a gun, putting the djinn back in the bottle and settling down to a nice stable rule of law is really hard.
What, have an extremely fragmented nation with such a toothless federal authority that the question of dictatorship does not arise?
Exactly. Seems a good tradeoff to me.
Given that the Commonwealth need a strong central authority to drive through their industrialization policy that's not exactly an option.
No they don't. The USA was the world's leading industrial economy by no later than 1900 in this timeline, surpassing Great Britain despite the British head start on industrialization. And that's not just modern historians with hindsight (eg Paul Kennedy) but was recognised at the time (eg Mackinder).
And if you're going to say that the Commonwealth is a special case because it's preparing for war, again no not necessary. The USA out produced everybody else in WW2, and the dictatorships were worse at just about everything from incorporating women into the workforce to designing for mass production to choosing R&D goals.
Post WW2, the Soviet Union couldn't catch up to the USA and Western nations. China has only become a technological powerhouse by joining the free market.
If you want to your society to progress - and not just technically, but also socially - a "strong central authority"is the last thing you want.
The problem with no strong central authority is that you get a situation like Somalia, known worldwide for its scientific and cultural progress. The wrong kind of strong central authority gets you places like Venezuela, where the government seems to be marching the country off the cliff.
I think that rule of law is the key metric: "equality before the law, liberty within the law, nobody above the law." as Charlie put it in EG.
In addition, there is a big difference between developing tech for the first time and knowing where you are going.
A huge number of the inventions of the 19th and early 20th century were dead ends, huge amounts of effort and genius wasted for every good idea that changed the world.
These guys already know what works and the necessary dependencies to get there. What they don't have is enough high tech tooling and skilled workers.
They might be in trouble when they catch up with the USA and find they have forgotten how to do basic research but that's a problem for the future.
The world-walkers will be able to steal some, but they won't have massive retaliation ('merely' a few cities).
Wrong. Nuclear weapons are 1940s tech that relies on 1930s physics; the Empire already had an A-bomb program, as did the French, in the original series. By "Empire Games" both sides are nuked-up to late 1960s USSR/USA cold war levels. And the Commonwealth can bushwhack Rita's USA quite easily: they know where all the cities are, and cities can't dodge.
All you need is a (1949-vintage) B-36 Peacemaker bomber-equivalent, with two extra seats for worldwalkers. Fly across your own friendly skies to within about 3 miles of your target, open the bomb bay doors, begin the bomb run, then switch universes. Worldwalker #2 takes you back over after the bomb drops but before it goes off, and you set course for the next target, an hour or two away as the giant piston-powered/turbojet-assisted/or maybe turboprop bomber flies.
(Surface to air missiles are not an air defense magic wand; unless the USA has rolled out really fast interceptor missiles like the Sprint ABM and put them on a hair-trigger alert, they're not going to be able to block a 1950s-vintage subsonic bomber attacking from a parallel universe.)
So at the point where the ~USA encounters the Commonwealth, it's an instant Mexican stand-off with the initial advantage to the Commonwealth (the ~USA doesn't know where all their cities are).
As for the diplomatic game, that's what the next two books in the series are all about.
Just how severe is the political repression in Empire Games-United States?
It's utterly unlike anything in any post-revolutionary republic in our timeline, because they're in terra incognita, making their own (new) mistakes.
In their case: it's the first revolution against monarchism ever to succeed. The ideas of the Enlightenment are not widespread, so the Vanguard Party isn't promoting communism — it's promoting democracy. They have picked a best-of-breed constitution from our time line (hint: revolution that took place in 1979, constitutional framework that has survived more or less intact despite attacks from the dominant superpower and the equivalent of a world war one experience) and deliberately designed a Deep State that keeps parasites from chewing on the fragile shoots of democracy as they take root in the polis.
Upshot: if you're a royalist or opposed to the ideas of the revolution (liberte, egalite, fraternite), they'll come down on your hard — especially as the royalists are bomb-throwers in league with a hostile foreign power. If you buy into the idea of human rights, a universal franchise, and so on, you're inside the magic circle.
(In other words they're like Fox News's worst nightmare — trigger-happy liberals with guns who refuse to take any shit from totalitarians.)
Really can't understand why the Commonwealth revolutionaries didn't just say "What those American guys did? Let's do that."
Because the American revolution didn't happen in a vacuum — it required a pre-existing radicalized population of independent-minded settlers who'd been marinating in Enlightenment philosophy for a couple of generations, in uneasy coalition with a wealthy slaveowning elite.
The political preconditions for duplicating the American revolution simply weren't there. Also, your constitution sucks. (Supporting evidence, item number 1: President Trump was even possible. Supporting evidence number 2: the Civil War happened. Supporting evidence number 3: the Equal Rights Amendment never passed. I could go on ...)
I think the true break point was the combination of conscript mobilization by railway networks ... and the bolt-action rifle
I thought this came a little earlier than WWI. These elements were basically there for Moltke in 1866, enabling Prussian dominance at Königgrätz and elsewhere.
So even if their political system follows less democratic forms than we're used to (and let's be honest having them hasn't stopped a global slide towards plutarchy) their economic system would seem to empower everyday workers far more than ours.
Yep. Also, they have an elected assembly (the magistracy): it's just that in order to run for the legislature you have to pass muster in front of the Radical Party, i.e. the deep state—main criteria being that you are not trying to dismantle democracy from the inside, by promoting monarchism or totalitarianism, and that you're not trying to exploit the workers (their attitude to "corporations are people" would probably involve rolling on the floor, laughing).
If you think this sort of arrangement is impossible, think again—there's a country out there that runs on this very basis today. (Only you need to do a global search/replace between "shi'ite islam" and "democracy".)
I think that rule of law is the key metric: "equality before the law, liberty within the law, nobody above the law." as Charlie put it in EG.
Yep. And while the USA today pays lip-service to that rubric, in practice people with sufficient money and influence are above the law. Witness Trump's boast during the election that he could walk down Fifth Avenue and shoot someone with impunity. Okay, so he was boasting, but the principle remains, and so do the roughly 90% of prisoners in the USA who copped to plea bargains, mostly because they couldn't afford to defend themselves effectively against bullshit charges.
They might be in trouble when they catch up with the USA and find they have forgotten how to do basic research but that's a problem for the future.
This is covered: MITI enforces an "eat your own dogfood" rule, along the lines of the way Kurchatov permitted use of atomic weapons intelligence in the 1940s — he got to read it and veto unproductive lines of research, but the Soviet A-bomb was otherwise home-grown because he wanted to have a viable native infrastructure (in case the A-bomb spies got put away). The exception is where foreign tech is needed to achieve a specific national security goal involving paratime operations.
At some point I really need to write the essay I have planned on how the Commonwealth is gearing up to produce its own computer and software industry and internet, avoiding the security pitfalls and local minima we've stumbled into, while shaving 20% off the time taken to achieve it. But that's another blog entry, probably for after "Dark State" because it would be a bit spoileriffic at this point.
Interesting .... Some of us attempted to steer in a direction that avoided the disasters we could foresee (and which came to pass), but the engineers and mathematicians lost out to the marketeers and demagogues. I shall be interested to see which aspects you have picked up.
The fact that the USA took over from Great Britain as the premier superpower about then was common knowledge before 1930 - see the end of 1066 And All That.
SLAVES is the answer to that one, I think?
Slavery was a world wide institution at the time of the American revolution, and for the French revolution. The American revolutionaries didn't introduce slavery to the Americas, and they were faster than anyone except Great Britain in abolishing it.
In addition, there is a big difference between developing tech for the first time and knowing where you are going.
Agreed, but how do you distinguish between "already know what works" and what might have worked differently?
For one example from J.E. Gordon, in our timeline the pneumatic tire, which makes road transport vastly more efficient, didn't get invented until after the railways were established. A tire is a really simple piece of tech, probably simpler than a high pressure steam boiler or high tensile railway trunnions, but relies on a rubber treatment that was only discovered by accident.
So are railways really the best way to start your industrial buildup? Or should you go for road transport?
Experimentation beats relying on authority, even if you make more mistakes.
Another example, Miriam is a tech reporter from the early 2000s, when electric cars were largely unheard of and/or a joke (Sinclair C5 anyone?) The idea for electric cars has been around almost as long as internal combustion engined cars. But could we have gone straight to electric cars in 1900?
they were faster than anyone except Great Britain in abolishing it.
And they only required 600,000 deaths to abolish slavery!
Unfortunately, when Reconstruction ended in 1877, slavery was back, albeit under a different name.
They have picked a best-of-breed constitution from our time line (hint: revolution that took place in 1979, constitutional framework that has survived more or less intact despite attacks from the dominant superpower and the equivalent of a world war one experience)
The Iranian constitution? The one that allows:
Imprisoning human rights protesters: https://www.amnesty.org.au/iran-vilifies-human-rights-defenders-enemies-state/
Imprisoning trade unionists: https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde13/6147/2017/en/
Institutionalized discrimination against women and religious minorities in the justice system: https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/MDE1327082016ENGLISH.PDF
Execution of homosexuals for being homosexuals, not to mention publically hanging them from construction cranes so everyone gets a better view: https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/MDE1327082016ENGLISH.PDF
Interesting choice.
...Looks like I derped out when phrasing my question. With the United States, I meant the one where Rita grew up.
So it's a bit of a mix of China and Iran. Iran for the life-long supreme leader (what's the NAC's version of the Assembly of Experts?) and the Radical Party acting as the Council of Guardians.
The China vibe comes not just because it seems to be a one party state but because like the CPC the NAC is ruled by a party that predates the state. In fact it seems to have built the state apparatus around itself.
Will we be getting a more in-depth look into the political and economic structure of the NAC? I realise it's not the story but would be interesting to read about a revolutionary socialist super power that had a playbook of what things to avoid.
Another example, Miriam is a tech reporter from the early 2000s, when electric cars were largely unheard of and/or a joke (Sinclair C5 anyone?) The idea for electric cars has been around almost as long as internal combustion engined cars. But could we have gone straight to electric cars in 1900?
What you're getting at is path dependency — the tendency to continue down an established path because of the knowledge base associated with it, rather than trying something new.
It's not terribly clear in "Empire Games" but the VTOL rotorcraft Miriam and Erasmus are picked up by during the nuclear alert triggered by the third US recon drone to appear in Commonwealth skies is not a helicopter — it's a Rotodyne, a type of compound gyroplane that showed a lot of promise in the 1950s but ended up as being a Road Not Taken development (because the British government circa 1960 had rocks in its collective head and thought a horribly loud aircraft with roughly the performance of a V-22 Osprey only half a century earlier was suitable as a city-to-city commuter plane but had no military utility).Path dependency (and pork-barrel politics) lock us into sub-optimal solutions like the aforementioned Osprey — five gearboxes flying in loose formation — because the cost of reducing the noise level of the Rotodyne — an "unproven" technology — requires veering off the beaten track, and existing market incumbents don't want the competition. But I digress: the Commonwealth had no pre-existing helicopter industry when the Revolution happened, so had to start from scratch, and had access to the history of all the also-rans from our time line, and threw some money at relatively-low-tech hopefuls.
Electric cars ... I'm not sure, but I think the cost lies mostly in developing high capacity/fast charge Lithium batteries that don't deflagrate under the driver's seat. We can thank tens of millions of laptops and thousands of millions of smart phones for us getting that technology right. Similarly: modern OLED and LCD displays are one of the most widely overlooked insane-high-tech products out there, and took multiple decades to develop to current tech levels. CRTs, however, can be built starting with 1920s technology.
You seem to be under the impression that the constitution of Iran explicitly enforced these conditions rather than them being due to much more complicated factors. The US constitution existed long before women's/minority rights, the decriminalisation of homosexuality and AFAIK it was still around when the US was detaining people indefinitely and torturing people under the guise of "enhanced interrogation".
I'm not saying the NAC is some perfect utopia of human rights but so far from what we've seen of it its pushing equality, democracy and strong workers rights through cooperatives and unions. Forced to make a choice of emigrating to the NAC or the RL United States I'm not sure I'd choose the latter.
They have picked a best-of-breed constitution from our time line There might be a dispute about that.. How about Britain from 1688 onwards? Constitutional monarchy, enormous strains, especially 1792-1803, but it pulled through & gradually enlarged the franchise & became more & more truly democratic, & with a much lower (proportional) body-count than any of the others. Of course, that is partly because the big body-count was 1642-51, & up to 1669 in Ireland.
* Rolls eyes *
Yeah, so an islamic state is a crapsack place to live if you're anyone but a male patriarchal theocrat: that's not the point.
The point is, they found a way to build a republic with democratic forms of lawmaking that was resilient enough to survive an eight year long war with a fascist dictatorship that killed about 2% of the male population, while facing out-of-area threats by two hegemonic superpowers (later one) and an ideologically hostile regional superpower (Saudi Arabia). They're still having elections, on their own terms.
You (and I) may not approve of the goals of the Iranian government, but you've got to admit they're persistent in the face of overwhelming opposition,
Will we be getting a more in-depth look into the political and economic structure of the NAC?
Yes, including a very drastic failure mode (in "Invisible Sun"). Clue: fledgling democracies with autocratic antecedents are prone to coups, although the outcome is highly sensitive to contingency.
and they were faster than anyone except Great Britain in abolishing it. Utter total cobblers. Try reading this, FIRST Talk about vain US self-important preening!
How about Britain from 1688 onwards?
Tell that to the Irish in 1845-52. Or the Scots in 1715/45. Or anyone who was prosecuted under the Bloody Code (which makes present-day Iran look liberal and enlightened).
... okay, there are a lot of reasons our Constitution sucks, Exhibits A and B being "the Electoral College" and "the Senate" but none of these three rise to that level.
All three of your examples are failures of the populace, not the system. The system is only as good as the people working it, especially in a democratic society where the system gains its legitimacy by supposedly representing and implementing the views and standpoints of those it governs and providing a peaceful method of transferring that legitimacy to another political coalition when the current ruling one loses the confidence of said people.
Someone like Trump being possible and the ERA failing to pass are the result of the country being filled up with enough evil fuckers to wield political power. That's basically not a surmountable problem in any system that wants to be democratically legitimate, as opposed to just pretending to be democratically legitimate. The Civil War, of course, was an extra-political act and could easily have occurred under any other plausibly alternative system. Indeed, a large proximate cause of it was that the south realized the Constitution did nothing to protect their favored ideology from being dismantled, that is, it was far too anti-slavery for their taste.
See also Monmouth's Rebellion ( failed ) compared to William-&-Mary's erm, "hostile takeover" which succeded only 2 years later .....
Charlie, I said 'world-walkers'. The Commonwealth + the world-walkers can put a nuke on every US city and major base quite easily - with trucks, bombers not needed.
However, the Commonwealth military would be well aware of the fact that the USA could and would strike back with a couple of gigatons.
The question is leverage by the USA against governments. For example, the USA could give a serious hand up to the French Empire.
In my friend's opinion, the major goal of thE USA would be to peel apart the government from the world-walkers. Miriam admitting that there was a succession crisis was ill-advised, IMHO.
Well, IMO AIUI the issue with the Electoral College is that some states pro-rata their EC votes according to the percentage each candidate polls; others say that candidate1 won in our state and cast all their EC votes for candidate1.
Charlie, I said 'world-walkers'. The Commonwealth + the world-walkers can put a nuke on every US city and major base quite easily - with trucks, bombers not needed.
However, the Commonwealth military would be well aware of the fact that the USA could and would strike back with a couple of gigatons.
In the strategy of world-walking nuclear war the best deterrent is to display that you have an almost-possible-to-stop second strike capability. That means you need to have some sort of facility that can launch nuclear weapons through timelines and be safely doppelgangered in each of them. Sure you could strap an ARMBAND to an ICBM, launch it at your own city and translate in time to hit theirs but the silo itself is at risk unless you doppleganger it. I've always thought one issue with the DG strategy is that its infinitely recursive, each timeline's protective fortress is vulnerable to timelines without a protective fortress.
Which is where a world-walking Strategic Defence Initiative could come in. It would be very hard to strike at a space station/satellite from another timeline. Even if intelligence had given you its orbit jumping something in at the right time to intercept would be very, very difficult. Even more so if the target was periodically shifting inclination slightly.
If the NAC demonstrate a strong second strike capability then the US likely will be paused on that front and go down the sponsored coup route.
This seems like a bit of a two-step, Charlie; Hugh Fisher brings up outcomes, and you bring up resilience, Greg Tingey brings up resilience, and you bring up outcomes.
Congratulations, you just second-guessed where a chunk of the plot goes in book 3.
i>Some of us attempted to steer in a direction that avoided the disasters we could foresee (and which came to pass), but the engineers and mathematicians lost out to the marketeers and demagogues.
If you take the Internet as an example most of the bad directions taken have to do with the nerds implementing as if no one "bad" would every want to try and use their results for "evil".
Marketers were just a layer on top of the hopelessly idealistic mess, err wonderful new thing, that resulted.
The biggest problem is that gerrymandering has been allowed to get out of control. States are so gerrymandered that it is basically mathematically impossible for Democrats to get elected. I think this has allowed the fringe element to take control because the people getting elected don't have to be moderates to appeal to moderate/liberals/conservatives, they just need to appeal to "enough" bat-s**t crazies and not upset too many hard-core, I'll-always-vote-republican, voters to get elected.
The best thing the remaining sane people in the republican party could do is re-balance the voting districts, that way the crazies would be in the minority again.
"It's not terribly clear in "Empire Games" but the VTOL rotorcraft..."
Oh, I thought it was crystal clear as soon as it made its appearance :)
"Electric cars ... I'm not sure, but I think the cost lies mostly in developing high capacity/fast charge Lithium batteries that don't deflagrate under the driver's seat."
Yes. That's the only bit we haven't had for more than a hundred years. (Can delete "lithium", but the rest is true.) Hence the low-key but long-term success of the milk float and the electric forklift, where the problems of existing batteries don't really matter.
It isn't really a matter of path dependency in that case. When cars were just coming in we tried everything we knew - IC engines, electricity, and steam. It was not clear that IC engines were going to win out until we'd done quite a bit of trying - steam cars got to 120mph when IC cars were still trundling; electric cars were much more reliable than the rather crappy IC engines of the time, and range was less of a concern when people had not acquired the habit of using it.
I'll be blunt: I strongly doubt that Our Gracious Host originally were thinking of the Empire as being that advanced but with uneven distribution: I think it's a retcon, and I'm 'fine with it', given the amount of time between original conception and the book, and given the plausible Gibsonian explanation.
I'm afraid that the intersection of Iris/Miriam with just the right Wolf Orchestra couple seems more fundamentally hinky to me, given the low frequencies of Wolf Orchestra membership—even in Cambridge, Ma. activist circles, sorry, U.S. right-wing loonies. I forget, was Iris in or a close student of Hjalmar[?]'s intelligence service, that might increase the odds that she'd know what to look-for. Still, I think it a stretch that I accept only for the sake of a good story, which so far it is. …also, being blunter than might be Xenia-appropriate, because I've always felt the series to be an attempt to write the deepest, most intelligent, airport techno-thriller, possible—successful, but with some artifacts of that genre, e.g. data-dumps of hardware specs, nigh-inevitably present.
You DID notice the caveats I attached to that statement? And, still a lot less bloody than what happened to the French, & all of the rest of Europe, 1792-1801...
I hate to say it, but the problem isn't the Constitution, it's the people. And maybe the fact that our news agencies print propaganda as fact.
Hmm... Big Man for life", so, "elected king/Queen?" Sounds like some of what happened under feudalism, or, for that matter, in a Certain Old Republic, yes, Princess Leia?
And its still here, as the "prison-industrial" system.
Are you saying that voting districts are different in state & national US elections, otherwise there would be do "Dems" elected anywhere, which is patently not the case. Or have I missed something?
[ Agreed that the US has a very bad gerrymandering problem, which no-ne seems to be addressing - though I would have thought that voter suppression, esp in "the South" might also have something to do with it? ]
The stong federal government can go either way - don't let ideology blind you.
Some of the early part of the USSR saw amazing experiments, crushed, of course, by Stalin. But one of the things I got from Mieville's October was that there was a huge soviet movement throughout Russia prior to the Revolution, that could well have taken the place of a populace used to democracy.
One more note about pre-Revolution Russia: it was, I have read, 90% agricultural. The Soviets had to industrialize a country, which took a good part of a century elsewhere, first gearing up to deal with the West's sanctions, then to deal with Hitler, then to deal with the West.... They had, what, 10? 15? years of reasonable peace, when they weren't preparing for being attacked, and recovering from it?
It'd be interesting to see the US's response to massive attacks from Canada and/or Mexico, with either as world powers.
Please also note that in the US, during WWI, when the railroads were squabbling, and failing to provide the required transportation, the fed established the Railroad Commission, that gave them orders. Worked, too. I'm sure folks here could think of other examples.
One that just hit, of course, was the strong federal gov't of the US, that rammed desegregation down the throats of the Jim Crow South. Was that bad?
Mmmm, how 'bout the US Civil War? I read the first Greene bolt-action rifles saw use then, and trains were massively important, as can be seen by all the attacks on trackage. And boy, did we have conscripts....
I'll be blunt: I strongly doubt that Our Gracious Host originally were thinking of the Empire as being that advanced but with uneven distribution:
Nope, go back to the original series and you'll see the clues scattered about. (Hint" corpuscular petard" is "atom bomb"; "cronosium" is "uranium". Miriam got to see electromechanical calculators with nixie tube displays on pretty much her first trip out in the Empire; airships, sure, but also turbine-powered trains of a type that were experimented with in the 1940s-1950s in our world.)
Again: the big house she bought in "The Bloodline Feud" had electrical lighting and servant bells.
What tripped her (and your) "Victoriana" (or steampunk) alarm was the costumery. Which is down to the price of clothing being much, much higher when you don't have a pool of really cheap low-wage offshore labour to do the sewing, not to mention cheap imported cotton (hint: the Slaveowners Treasonous Rebellion in the New British Empire kicked off a century earlier and went much, much worse for the planters). Conservativism in fashion trend adoption is inversely proportional to the cost of clothing—there's a reason why, prior to the century that saw the invention of the cotton gin and the sewing machine, fashion changed on a roughly 75 year cycle (and today it's more like 7.5 weeks, in those countries that don't enforce religious dress codes).
Broader observation: the commenters on this blog are predominantly male. This means that culturally-male-gendered activities and interests get focussed on, but "feminine" interests (clothing fashion, for example: also cultural activities and social structures) tend to get overlooked, ignored, or actively deprecated. This is a mistake, as witness the chunk of Miriam's speech to the party congress on the subject of washing machines (which I kind of cribbed off the late Hans Rosling's Gapminder Foundation).
the intersection of Iris/Miriam with just the right Wolf Orchestra couple seems more fundamentally hinky
I'll concede that point. As someone-or-other once said, "in any novel the author is allowed one gigantic screaming coincidence". Yes, Iris' brother was merely the head of the Clan's security service, but that point is the big-ass coincidence that book 1 depends on.
As much as I loathe Trump, the electoral college worked exactly as it was supposed to work: it penalized the candidate who ignored multiple "unimportant" states, which is exactly what the Hillary campaign did.
For those who didn't study civics in the U.S., the idea is that a presidential candidate should act like they intend to be the president of the whole country, including the parts that don't like the candidate, and even if the candidates don't need that state's delegates to win. That means the candidate should go (for example) to Wisconson and Indiana and check in, and learn/care about the local problems. The candidate is expected to do this no matter how the candidate feels about those states or how they feel about him/her. The electoral college enforces this.
The awful coda to the whole thing is that Bill Clinton (who might just be good at politics) told the campaign they needed to work the Rust Belt, and he was shouted down by the wonks, who told him that their numbers didn't show any such need.* If you want to know how good a president Hillary would have been,** she was probably called upon to make a final decision between the wonks and the very politically experienced Bill Clinton, and notice which side she chose.
Obviously the framers of the Constitution didn't imagine Donald Trump as a candidate.
** Much better than Trump, obviously, but probably not nearly as good as Obama, Clinton, Carter or Johnson, IMHO.
Not realllly. It’s more like if the US had one Supreme Court judge who was appointed by an elected committee once the last one dies (to compare to Iran...but there’s a whole more complexity there like two entirely separate militaries). That individual would hold a hell of a lot of power by being the ultimate abitier of what laws are constitutional or not, but isn’t necessarily the head of government (though I can’t remember if the NAC has a position like “First Magistar” who is the head of government under the head of state).
To paraphrase Madison, the success of a form of government can't be contingent on the populace's being angelic. I fault Bolshevism because it would never govern a New Soviet Man populace, and Randism because the proper answer to 'Who is John Galt?' is 'Noöne not in an axe-grinding romance novel.'.
A poem from East Germany, from someone with good reason not to be scared:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Lösung
Trump just leveraged what the Republican party setup. See: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/03/us/politics/gerrymandering-supreme-court-wisconsin.html
(Or just google "Wisconsin Gerrymandering").
The Republicans hired a firm to come up with a re-districting plan that makes it practically impossible for the Democrats to win the state. It wouldn't matter how much Clinton campaigned, she would have still lost Wisconsin, even though she had by far won the popular vote.
No, the electoral college has been hacked.
While there is some truth in that, it's actually a secondary issue (though that might surprise you), and I was talking about much more basic and consequential mistakes.
More than Russia or sexism or email coverage or anything else, the campaign's decision to ignore the base (both in policies and in geographic location) was the strategic error that put Trump in power. Schumer phrased the plan as “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin” and that is what they did and that is what doomed them.
Bernie would have won
the success of a form of government can't be contingent on the populace's being angelic.
I'd like to think that a government's success can be contingent on the populace of the country not being complete idiots, but my countrymen are proving me wrong. I'll be very interested to see how OGH handles the political issues in Dark State, particularly if he's cribbing the constitutional system from Iran. I should probably do a little reading, because I've always thought the Iranians were saner that propaganda made them out to be.
Fair enough: I had decoded the 'crepuscular petard' and 'light-kernel cronosium', but had forgot them. I wonder, though, that an empire with a gigantic military would still have so expensive cloth, and (unless I missed it) no treatment for consumption at all, not just (for example) out of reach for such as Erasmus.
I was giving a civics less for those of us who didn't go to school in the U.S., and DELIBERATELY AVOIDING all these other issues (not that I disagree, mind you) because I don't want to get too far away from discussing OGH's new/old book.
Sorry. A "civics lesson."
They had, what, 10? 15? years of reasonable peace, when they weren't preparing for being attacked, and recovering from it? Nowhere near that - an absolute maximum of EIGHT years. Post-revolution civil war ends approx 1922, Lenin dies in 1923, first big push towards terror in 1930 ( De-Kulakisation, esp. in Ukraine ), followed by Kirov's murder in 1934 (?)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Thoughts about parallel development in our world ( & "Empire Games", because htis is before the split ) : Washington & his slaveowning friends would have lost without massive & expensive French assistance. Which then backfired on the French, because the war-bills came in ... French royalist guvmint effectively goes bust & has to summon the estates-general in ... 1789. Um, err ....
"Broader Observation" THANK YOU Charlie ... My father taught me, very early on ... we were watching an old film on TV ( !! ) & he told me to look for two things which were an instant clue to the actual date of production, & that it also appled to "still pictures, of course\; - one was models of cars & road transport, but he also said "Watch the women's fashions, they're a dead give-away." I recently used this to spot that a supposedly-dated picture of a London street in approx 1912 had to be post-1920, because of cloche hats visible in the street!
One, it did nothing of the sort.
Two, while you are right about the fact that the Electoral College did what it is supposed to do in 2016, this is because what it is supposed to do, what it was conceived and implemented for, is an explicitly anti-democratic and authoritarian purpose: to represent the interests of a wealthy minority over the masses, to greatly weight things in favor of land instead of people, and to null out the popular winner if necessary.
It has nothing to do with penalizing candidates who ignore multiple "unimportant" states. Its design doesn't do that at all, among other things. It penalizing candidates who ignore swing states who control the balance of power. That's it.
Candidates are expected to do this, but for the most part they do it as little as possible (Clinton and Trump both only went to California and Texas to fundraise, for example, rather than to out-and-out campaign) and the Electoral College in no way enforces this. I mean, for fucks sake. Trump absolutely did not act in any way, shape, or form like he was running to be president of the whole country and the Electoral College came down on his side, for entirely unrelated reasons.
And they were absolutely correct to do so.
First of all, by "Rust Belt" you really mean "Michigan and Wisconsin." The Clinton campaign spent a ton, I mean an absolutely ton, of time and money in Pennsylvania.
Second of all, you realize your argument is basically anti-empirical and anti-intellectual, right? I've seen it come up time after time after time since the election and it's all post-hoc justifications.
Let's game this out. It's late August, 2016. The Clinton campaign is having a meeting to determine where they're going to spend the next two months, the height of the campaign season. All of the advisors are here. You're here. You say, "Madame Secretary, we need to invest a lot more time, money, and presence in Michigan and Wisconsin. We're vulnerable there."
Across the table, another advisor stares at you. "According to who?" they ask, incredulously. "We are consistently safely up in those states according to the polling. And not just our own internal polling, either. CNN has us safely up. So do NBC, MSNBC, and even Fox News. Let me reiterate, FOX thinks we're safe there. So does Rasmussem, which always has something like a five-point Republican bias. So does Gallup. So does literally every other major polling outfit in the nation. Hell, from what we can discern, the Trump campaigns own internal polling shows that they've got no chance there, which is why Trump isn't planning to spend any time there and why they aren't devoting resources to it. Given all those facts, why the hell should we devote more time and resources to Michigan and Wisconsin than we are? We need those resources, and our candidate, in Pennsylvania. Florida. North Carolina. Virginia. Colorado. Nevada. Those are the purple swing states and we need'em. What empirical, fact-based evidence do you have we should pull resources from them and put them into Michigan and Wisconsin, which, again, even our enemies believe is safe for us?"
They pauses in their increasingly-frustrated speech and take a sip of water. Hillary Clinton nods approvingly, and then turns back to you.
What rebuttal do you have to this that you can construct using only the information available in late August, 2016?
Sure they did. Trump isn't even the first of his kind. He's basically the second go-round of the Jackson administration.
Yep. With the exception of certain classics — the original VW bug, Land Rover, 2CV, Porsche 911 — automotive styling has been fashion-driven ever since the late 1940s, hitting its peak circa 1950-1970 with "built-in obsolescence", in which the designs changed every year or two to drive sales to folks who wanted to be seen to be driving a new car.
(The UK got less of this post-1966 or so thanks to the annual and then semi-annual number plate letter sequences, but it's still noticeable ... and an automobile today can cost an equivalent proportion of an average annual disposable income to a well-tailored suit of clothes in the pre-1800 era.)
MODERATION NOTICE
Further comments on the Trump campaign and ongoing investigation are banned on this thread, and will be deleted. They're derailing.
(If things heat up I might spin up a separate discussion as we seem already to be hitting Watergate-equivalent levels of WTFery in DC.)
Re: the fault is with the electorate, not the system
The system was engineered in order to best identify the electorate's needs as the country grew and its population evolved/matured. Hence the provision for amendments. The current interpretation and use of 'the system' seems to be almost entirely to ensure that the folks who had been initially preferred would continue to have their preferences met regardless of how the country/population changed. It's like insisting that baby formula be the diet throughout a human's life because it was the optimal diet when they were first born. Totally nuts and unhealthy.
As someone else mentioned, this continual referencing of the original make-up of the early Americans by insisting on the same voting outcomes is in reality the by now tried and proven way of getting away with just pretending to be democratically legitimate.
I would have thought that an "eat your own dogfood" rule would come under extreme pressure when there is a need to do things quickly. If you need a high speed rail line, you can either develop your own steel grades, processing methods and rail profiles, or you can just buy a copy of BS EN 13674 which will have it all in for you, but in a strictly metric unit system. 13674 encapsulates knowledge that has taken almost 2 centuries to acquire, the temptation to just use that and move on would be extreme. But once you have done that, you will be tied into entire set of standards through all the cross-referencing they contain. So EN13674 will contain references to standards for NDT & methods for steel chemistry assessment, for instance, and they will link to other standards and so on...
The knowledge is compact, and easily legally accessible through a subscription to one of the standards organizations. The arguments over direct implementation or dog-fooding would be interesting.
How about Kondratiev waves in the presence of extremely external forcing functions?
Pretend that Kondratiev waves are somewhat real and that in OTL we're slightly over the hump of the 5th one (information technology). One could ask what comes next in OTL (AI, CRISPR?) but the relevant question here is what about the NAC, where development has been massively messed with by Miriam and will doubtless continue to experience paratemporal perturbations?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondratiev_wave
The knowledge is compact, and easily legally accessible through a subscription to one of the standards organizations.
IIRC, part of Miriam's program was to have lots and lots of CDs containing TL 2 standards, patents etc. shipped over to TL 3.
(I hope I'm keeping the TLs straight.)
no treatment for consumption at all
Maybe none beyond traditional remedies. Especially in times of rapid development, I don't think it's unreasonable to posit that the medical arts lagged the mechanical ones.
In one of Piper's Paratime stories there is mention of a timeline in which something like that happened: spaceflight developed swiftly, but medicine not so much. And then they went to Venus(*) and came back with a really bad bug, with civilization-destroying consequences.
(*) That was before we knew what Venus is really like.
With respect to dogfooding, it'd be interesting to know how much accidental cross-contamination came across because "work it out for yourself" doesn't necessarily mean you need to use a slide-rule when there's a pallet of HP-48s in the next room when you're designing your rockets and nukes.
This sort of ancillary tooling usage could easily lead to things like C or FORTRAN or ASCII spreading between timelines. On the other hand, I'd love to see the NAC run on Forth or Lisp rather than C.
Don't recall whether you've already discussed this but since you're addressing impact of demographics on a society ...
Pathogens impact the demographic profile of any nation to the same extent as wars, famine, natural disasters, or sophistication of business and military infrastructure.
Human population movements include migrations of pathogens. So although the new worlds now have CRISPR tech, you'd still need a truckload of human samples from each world plus well-equipped bio labs before you could correctly screen for pathogens let alone develop and dispense appropriate vaccines. Wondering how anyone would recruit microbiologists to these labs given the risk of setting off a global pandemic.
Miriam was a tech journalist. I doubt she'd allow anything like cross-timeline computer-language contamination to happen and she probably pushed a different chip technology... RISC instead of CISC maybe?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VP9wkTEgORI
Interesting tidbit here for Man in the High Castle. (PK Dick novel, now an Amazon Prime series, Axis won WWII, USA divided between Japan and Germany. Major suppression effort to prevent dissemination of subversive novel about an Allied victory that sounds like our world.) I've not watched the show yet, wanted to give it some time and find out whether or not the fans are ticked at where the quality went. But this tidbit came up as a teaser. Nazis have discovered "travellers" and are now working on a mechanical means of travel to other worlds.
Makes me wonder if they were directly influenced by the Family Trade or if they're just drawing water from the same memetic well. It's funny how similar ideas will crop up, the same two or three ideas bump together in one writer's head and repeat in another's without any direct influence. Sort of the same way JK Rowling and Neil Gaiman both came up with a brown-haired, bespectacled boy-wizard with a pet owl. It's all there in the soup.
The Guardian notes our interest the elder gods: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/oct/31/searching-for-the-old-ones-lovecraftian-giant-cephalopods-fossil-record
Creatures from the deep have been inspiring fiction authors for generations from H.P.Lovecraft’s Greater Old Ones through to China Miéville’s Kraken (in which the Natural History Museum giant squid specimen has a role to play). Known for their intelligence there may be some substance to ancient brooding organisms living in the depths of the ocean but fortunately, it’s only their beaks and gladii they leave behind.
... or that's what they want us to think.
I want to believe that they're making something like the 6502. Also our world is basically awash in RISC cores I'm sure the tech censor made sure they didn't make the CISC mistake. Even Intel's new stuff is RISC, they just have a hardware transpiler that turns a weird CISC language into machine code.
'MITI enforces an "eat your own dogfood" rule' Is their name a shoutout to these guys?
I hope Miriam also brought them some books about the Meiji Restoration.
Not quite, but it's complicated... Only the simplest chips are actually RISC at heart. Intel and AMD desktop and laptop CPUs are a mix of technologies with no clear RISC/CISC differentiation in the silicon and to quote XKCD, "there's a lot of cacheing involved."
The big tech win in CPU design was ever-smarter branch prediction (and cacheing), the RISC vs. CISC battle was eventually a draw sort-of.
Anyone starting from scratch to design CPUs that are useful for general-purpose computing will go CISC since a complex instruction that takes 8 cycles at 1MHz will take four RISC ops in 20 cycles at the same clock rate along with instruction fetches and RAM accesses at similar clock speeds. RISC is initially for the chips that can be integrated into doorknobs at two dollars a pop where performance doesn't really matter. Further along the line as transistor counts get into nine or ten figures and the caches multiply the RISC/CISC boundary gets fuzzy.
The instruction set remains the same though as the historical software burden necessitates stability in that particular API. I have a graphics package, Corel Draw I run on this 3GHz quad-core CPU in front of me. I first ran the same executable image on a Pentium II machine back in 2002 and I know it would have run on a 386 even without a maths co-processor (the "About" tag of the program, Corel DRAW reports it was released in 1998). Changing the instruction set of the CPU would mean that software investment would be lost without complex and performance-sapping software emulation.
Or tried to build Project ORION. But there's always a first time ...
I caught the bits about the "corpuscular petard," etc., in the first series, but Project Orion slipped by me... was it the rocket project in the Southern Hemisphere?
"We'd love to have friendly and happy relations with the reality next door. But first, let's show you what happens if you violate your treaty terms..."
Changing the instruction set of the CPU would mean that software investment would be lost without complex and performance-sapping software emulation.
Which is very often a price worth paying. At the trivial level there are emulators for old microcomputers and video games that run in all sorts of places - even browsers - because the gulf between what's common now and what the setup requires is so vast.
At a more useful level, on some embedded machines "backwards compatible" involves emulation either in hardware, microcode, or sometimes in the OS. We have 32 bit embedded processors where you can install an OS image that will emulate the 8 bit predecessor (the 16 bit ones are mostly a simple cross-compile). Sometimes you just gotta wear the footprint hit because the 8 bit code is a ball of hand-coded assembly but you still need the functionality. Reporting bugs on this stuff can be a nightmare, but also revealing. Firmware bugs usually get fixed faster than microcode ones and hardware (silicon) bugs even more slowly. Years, in many cases.
Even more prosaically, there are legacy serial emulators in many modern devices, and some of them are a bit nuts. We have a USB+Wifi board that has a 32 bit micro on it that among other things emulates a 16550 serial chip/interface. Just in case you have a physical TTY you want to hook up (actually, many things use that interface).
Which reminds me: always ask how you update the firmware.
This came up when a friend was looking at an IoT sex toy, and wanted advice. The simplest I could boil it down to was the above. If it connects to the internet, it is inevitable that eventually a bug will be discovered. At that point you either update the firmware or throw the thing away. Well, or just accept that your device is now (at best) part of a botnet, but is likely also providing everything it knows to anyone who asks. If you're unlucky it will have known vulnerabilities or be hacked right out of the box. "zero day" in a different way :)
"The argument from ignorance isn't extra convincing when you're extra ignorant".
Have been banging my head against "but I don't know that it can't work" type arguments a lot recently. Saying "then quit bothering people who do know and do whatever it takes to find out" doesn't seem to work.
There was a mention of the delivery of the latest batch of pits at one point.
Well, it's a very useful interface, because it's so bloody simple. You can implement it with a trivial amount of software, or even with no software at all and no CPU, just a few gates and flip-flops. With USB on the other hand you need something more than a common 8-bit CPU just to run the stack, let alone do anything else at the same time, which in technical language is known as a pain in the arse.
(Though USB itself seems to occupy a somewhat similar position higher up the complexity scale, so instead of a 16550 with a PCI interface, you get a 16550 emulator with USB on the other side, hard-wired to a USB-to-PCI interface chip, etc.)
The Commonwealth has to deal with the situation that on the one hand, they want to get up to speed as rapidly as possible, for which purpose it would be distinctly crippling not to be able to take advantage of the vast amount of software already in existence in "our" timeline, but on the other hand so much of that software is written for a CPU architecture that should have been abandoned 30 years ago and really isn't the sort of millstone you want to tie around your own neck. And on the third hand a huge amount of current software is mere bloat plus you probably don't want to use anything released after the existence of the Commonwealth becomes fully known to the US. So it might well make sense for them to go for a simplified architecture plus partial emulation - a CPU that can execute the common/simple x86 instructions natively at full speed, but keeps itself structurally simple by not attempting to execute the more elaborate/rare instructions directly, instead interpreting them as traps to a sequence of native instructions that emulate the relevant function.
The Civil War certainly used trains and conscripts but the first war to leverage rapid pre planned mass mobilization plus rail transport as a first strike weapon was probably the Franco Prussian War
Civil War also featured repeating lever action rifles (the Henry) with relatively large magazines
Don't think about bringing UNIX or Windows over. But if you have FORTRAN, you can grab LAPACK and BLAS and essentially import a few PhD programmer-centuries of work on making math fast.
I think the way to do it is to bring in laptops with Slackware installed (because Slackware is the conceptually-simplest Linux that really works*) and also bring in a few of the best critiques of C. So the idea is to start with C (plus assembler) and develop a native language without C's baggage. You end up with a native version of Rust, Go, ADA or something similar, plus an emphasis on security. This effort is run in parallel with your chip-building and the idea is to build the simplest chip(s) that will run something UNIX-like.
Then rebuild the UNIX kernel and utilities with the new language, (but not the shells or editors - these should be original to your own plane of existence.) The utilities should all get new names and different modes of presenting information. All your high-level programs should be original, with vi and emacs going away first. (In fact, if someone builds vi, emacs, or BASH in the new language, you fucking kill them.)
The next step is to build a really secure network, with encryption built in at the chip level, which can accept firmware upgrades, (you're probably building out your phone network at the same time, which helps) and it is against the law for serial or network ports to be on the motherboard. They are always on a daughterboard, which makes hardware upgrades easy. If you want to get really paranoid you arrange for the chips to randomly negotiate pinouts, voltages, etc., on the fly, just to make for really interesting standards. Then you deprecate standards every couple of years. (And for Bob's sake, build an IP addressing scheme that allows you to simply add an octet if you need it! GRRRRR!)
When your first computers come out they've got their own chips, their own language, their own operating system, and incredible security. The first thing you do is install one at every college or university and start "Model Railroad Clubs." Everything is Open Source, and "Security Fights" (hacking) is a sport with results reported in the newspaper, plus a government rewards program for discovering security holes. Lastly, you develop an HTML-like language for addressing the screen, because hopefully a web-like thing is coming soon, so why build an extra layer?
What made the most lasting impression on me in Palimpsest was the strategy of using the most downtrodden humans as the seeds of new populations. Pick the survivors, not the "winners."
"Never bring a fact to a derp fight." Bitter wisdom of this age.
Anyone starting from scratch to design CPUs that are useful for general-purpose computing will go CISC since a complex instruction that takes 8 cycles at 1MHz will take four RISC ops in 20 cycles at the same clock rate along with instruction fetches and RAM accesses at similar clock speeds. RISC is initially for the chips that can be integrated into doorknobs at two dollars a pop where performance doesn't really matter. Further along the line as transistor counts get into nine or ten figures and the caches multiply the RISC/CISC boundary gets fuzzy.
There's a large number of folks who design semiconductors who would totally disagree. They, and my, opinion on all of this is CISC, err, Intel won due to coming up with a chip set that got put into a device which sold first in the 10s of thousands then into the 100s of millions. Which that much profit that can plow back into R&D you can paper over a lot of inefficiencies. ARM took off because of phones which were another market in millions and now billions. With that much money you can really work hard on fixing bad decisions made in the past.
RISC never got to the numbers and thus never had the R&D funding to deal with rolling out next gen CPUs on an annual basis.
But I've noticed that you and I almost never agree on tech so I'll let this drop now.
"And if you're going to say that the Commonwealth is a special case because it's preparing for war, again no not necessary. The USA out produced everybody else in WW2,"
I think you're trying to pull a fast one there.
Because in WW2 the USA had exactly the sort of strong govt control of a highly regulated economy that you're saying isn't needed.
Rationing, remember? Ration Boards, War Production Boards? A production board in D.C. deciding in 1942 that cars shall not be built in the USA for a few years because the govt needs the factories for something else?
Because the USA in WW2 was not the USA after the revolution, with no tradition of democratic control. There was a slow evolution from a Jeffersonian ideal of a toothless federal govt with no power, to the post-New Deal 20th Century federal govt with vast power. But in doing so the USA developed the democratic traditions around transfer of power that lets you control that monster. A new revolutionary govt in a nation with no democratic tradition doesn't have that culture.
A lot of that change was done during WWII. The administration just did it and Congress mostly went along.
Apologies if this has been dealt with before, but are Annie's and not-then-Erasmus's kids ever getting dealt with? Is it sort of assumed that the orphanage policy in Australia would have killed them off? Or did they get retconned out after the edition I read/get binned as uninteresting? It just seems that a NAC Commissioner would have the pull to look into his essentially stolen children, and him not doing so would be an interesting character development.
CISC and a lot of really neat ideas for general-purpose commodity CPUs like branch prediction and out-of-order processing will work fine if you've got 20nm-resolution silicon exposure plants from day one so you can put billions of transistors on a die that costs a few bucks to manufacture[1]. Start as Intel back in 1974 did with the 8080A using a 6000nm technology the best they could manage was 6,000 transistors for simple instruction decoding using ROMs at about 2MHz consuming 1.3W. Emulation, cacheing, all the really neat stuff we take for granted today takes lots of transistors and power saving from other silicon tech -- an 8-core Ryzen CPU has 4.8 billion transistors at 95W dissipation running everything at 3GHz plus.
Unless the worldwalkers can obtain, transport, set up, maintain, supply, staff and operate a modern silicon line to produce 14-20nm tech chips en masse in their own worldline then they're going to be stuck in the flint knives and bearskins world of 8080A and maybe 68000 (so named because it had 68,000 transistors) tech from day one. If they're only importing knowledge and building silicon lines themselves they're a bit like Cody or the Wright brothers knowing that somewhere else aircraft can do Mach 3 at 25km altitude but they're stuck with wire and doped cotton over spruce struts to build their own planes out of. The good thing is the world-walkers can import a lot of design tools and expertise to make much better versions of simple CPUs locally but it's still likely they will be x86-compatible at the silicon level until their resolution gets good enough to do it in software on-chip because of the available software they can buy off the shelf in our world.
[1] I read one Intel engineer's report of the 8080A rollout. From memory, "The first chip cost us a million bucks. The second one cost fifty cents."
Yes That's wierd. The Henry repeating-rifle was invented & used in the US during their southern treasonous rebellion, BUT ... why didn't they "simply" mass-produce it for most troops, rather than allowing vast numbers of conscripts & volunteers to be killed by the rebels, because they were still using slow-fire muzzle-loaders? Very curious, that.
"If you want to your society to progress - and not just technically, but also socially - a "strong central authority"is the last thing you want."
I agree. But I only agree over the very long term.
(Also, there's a big middle ground between the "very weak" central authority the US had in 1790 and a "strong" central authority, but lets gloss over that because this is interesting...).
Japan, Singapore, China, the Soviets up until 1960, Nazi Germany - they all had economic booms in highly controlled market economies, with strong central government. US during WW2 as well.
Krugman had an interesting article on this a couple of decades ago that I can't now find. He pointed out that central authorities - the govts pushing the "Asian tiger" economies of the 90s, the Soviets of the 50s - are very good at mobilizing resources. They can get capital going where they want, labour going where they want. I think his example was Soviets mobilizing capital so that instead of nobles having gilt plates and peasants digging with shovels, the gilt plates were sold off and the peasants got tractors. That sort of thing makes a huge difference. And has flow-on effects.
But what they tend to be bad at is productivity growth. Getting people working "smarter not harder". Which in the long term is what really matters - but only in the long term.
Which is where the "transition to market economy" part of development economics comes in. Once the govt has interfered to pull the economy up by the bootstraps, it needs to stop interfering.
But that's what govts are worst at - stopping interfering. Stopping supporting industries that were supported in generations past. The way the US govt subsidizes the ranching, farming and the fossil fuel industries in the 21st century are very typical examples of that.
Which gets back to: any revolution has to make it to the long-term, and there are some hard transitions to survive on the way.
Yes / no / maybe What Adam Smith actually said .... That guvmint should what we would now call "Pump-Prime" investment & technological advance & then retreat & allow the "invisible hand" to take over the ehavy-lifting, whilst reaping a share of the profits in increased tax revenues from the greater overall wealth.
[ As opposed to the bollocks talked by the "Adam Smith Society" who have all-too-plainly never read his work. ]
"All you need is a (1949-vintage) B-36 Peacemaker bomber-equivalent"
If you're happy to convert an existing passenger liner, then world walkers stealing planes would be amazingly easy. Book a ticket on the plane you fancy, When airborne and out of range of communications, just world walk, taking the aircraft with you. (MH370?) You also get two trained pilots (and a bunch of passengers that you don't really need, but them's the breaks). You'd probably also need a radio on the ground to let the pilots know what the situation was and where they could land.
One could ask what comes next in OTL (AI, CRISPR?) but the relevant question here is what about the NAC, where development has been massively messed with by Miriam and will doubtless continue to experience paratemporal perturbations?
Kondratiev waves are bunk in the context of a rapidly-developing economy. Apply them to Japan 1860-1910, for example, or South Korea 1970-2000, and they break. Or China, circa 1980-the present. (China in 1985 was still basically third world. China today? In summer I can't walk down my local high street for tripping over Chinese (mainland) tourist groups. If you can afford package holidays on another continent by airliner, then I submit you're probably not a subsistence peasant farmer in an undeveloped nation ...)
(I hope I'm keeping the TLs straight.)
You will be unsurprised to learn that I had trouble with that as well.
In the original draft, I gave the Commonwealth and the USA different and (to them) correct timeline numbering schemes, so the Commonwealth people called theirs time line three (because they inherited their numbering scheme from the Clan), and the US called the Commonwealth something like time-line 2-136-indirect (TL 2 being the Gruinmarkt, 136-indirect being the 136th timeline indirectly reached via time line 2).
Needless to say, this confused the fuck out of me, my editors, and all my test readers, so badly that it was a total train-wreck. So I took a deep breath, and renumbered everything in terms of the Clan nomenclature Miriam used in the first series, including in dialog ... and none of my readers have called me on it so far! WIKTORY!
Note that consumption (tuberculosis) killed up to 30% of the population of Victorian England. And while we have a vaccine and drugs for it today, MDR-TB keeps out-evolving our treatments. The real decline in TB in the UK coincided with a couple of factors: (a) the rise of the automobile and the corresponding fall of horse-drawn urban transit (meaning: decline of urban stables), (b) pasteurization of milk (hint: the bovine TB reservoir), (c) rise of indoor gas/electric/central heating (reduced chill and humidity), and (d) the Clean Air Act (ban on burning coal in urban areas, which also got rid of the smog).
The New British Empire was still mostly coal-powered (hint: late development) so smoggy as hell, and was still using horses widely for urban transport as late as the 1970s (equivalent of the 1890s in the USA). Hence the prevalence of TB.
This sort of ancillary tooling usage could easily lead to things like C or FORTRAN or ASCII spreading between timelines. On the other hand, I'd love to see the NAC run on Forth or Lisp rather than C.
You called it right there. But the point is, C and FORTRAN and ASCII are 1970s/1950s/1960s technologies. By 2010-2020 we've had 40/70/60 years to identify their flaws and weaknesses. We are stuck with them because we have billions of lines of code to maintain. The Commonwealth has the luxury of using them as teaching opportunities for their first crop of CS students, to explain stuff like why null-terminated strings and manual garbage collection are a bad language design decision.
Meanwhile, there's enough prior art to show why Forth and Lisp are extremely useful in their respective roles, and if you want to give kids an 8-bit micro with a programming environment to train on (think Commodore-64/Sinclair Spectrum equivalent) you want to give them one with a rationalized version of Forth in ROM and a basic Lisp-like language as a tape-loadable "this is what real programmers use" environment, rather than garbage like early BASIC. (Don't tell me this is impossible: it nearly happened in our time line. Personally I blame Bill Gates!)
SISAL! The number crunching language of champions! :)
OK, it was a very promising experiment that got killed by the FORTRAN lobby. Nobody really knows how it would have panned out if it had more money thrown at it, but that's the point right?
This still doesn't preclude the possibility that the GCC or YACC you've brought with your Slackware is compromised along Ken Thompson's line on trusting trust. You would really need to be making any compilers from scratch on your novel architecture's machine language, learning from but not actually re-using prior art on the topic.
[I]f you want to give kids an 8-bit micro with a programming environment to train on (think Commodore-64/Sinclair Spectrum equivalent) you want to give them one with a rationalized version of Forth in ROM and a basic Lisp-like language as a tape-loadable "this is what real programmers use" environment, rather than garbage like early BASIC.
Lately I've been reading Commodore 64 and Commodore 128 documentation and programming books from their era, because I'm interested and we have a C=128 lying around in the cellar - could be fun to code something on it, and perhaps show the kids what we had to put up with (for about two minutes until they get bored). There's of course the BASIC, which was quite horrible on the C=64 and less horrible on the C=128 (commands for graphics and sound in the BASIC!), but many books about programming these venerable computers go from BASIC to Assembler.
This is not an improvement. The computers had other languages, of course, and I really have no idea how much they were used in the real world, but it seems to me that much effort was put in writing books about how to program these computers in Assembler. That just teaches even worse tricks than BASIC and even more horribly, many of the tricks are applicable to only that hardware. There are eldritch horrors like self-modifying code and switchable RAM and ROM banks and all kinds of stuff I'm happy nowadays the operating system protects me from with many, many layers.
What the world could've been if those would have had something else easily usable than the BASIC and Assembler! C=128 even had a built-in monitor program for brain-dead coders (it wasn't a symbolic assembler, even).
That's pretty much the sequence.
Start with a simple 8-bit instruction set like the 6502. Use this for your first discrete transistor minicomputers.
As you get the ability to manufacture gate-level ICs, you roll out a 16-bit extended architecture — think early ARM 1 — and build mainframes/minis around it. A bit later, you manually tape out your first 8-bit CPU for mass production, like the 6502. (This is your 1974-equivalent year.) This coincides with LSI showing up and going into the 32-bit version of the architecture.
The 8-bit CPU goes into the "home computers" which are also intended to take a modem and work as an online terminal for the 32-bit city-wide data processing utilities (think MULTICS as originally conceived). Because we're not stupid they cost a bit more but ship with floppy disks and monitors from the start — home cassette tapes and TV sets haven't had decades to get bedded in as consumer items in the Commonwealth yet, so you can't count on the users owning them. These "smart terminals" serve as office computers and educational tools as well as home computers: think in terms of the Amstrad PCW and BBC Model B. (The nearest US equivalent would be an Apple IIe, if it came bundled with build-in floppy disk drive and printer and monitor.)
The next tick of the clock is the 16-bit business/home micro which has a hard disk and runs a GUI front end and also provides VMs for 8-bit apps. (Again: this has been done with commercial success in palmtop form, by the Psion Series 3 operating system, EPOC/16.) Needless to say, it serves as a terminal for The Big Computers that our Cybersyn-like planning software runs on. But it can also run GUI apps, initially one at a time, a bit like a circa-1985 Mac (if the original Mac had arrow keys and could run Apple II software).
By the time we get to 32-bit VLSI microprocessors it should be pretty obvious where this is all going, right?
Other requirements: baked-in code and data memory separation.
Formal verification and proof of correctness of the 8-bit core instruction set and the 8-bit micro architecture — for this, the architects are allowed to go hog-wild with imported US verification tools, as long as they're completely air-gapped from the final product (the masks for which, like the 6502, are taped out by hand). We want a solid foundation, after all.
A network stack that supports end-to-end packet encryption (spiked by the NSA in the mid-80s with TCP, with consequences we are all wearily familiar with).
A hypertext protocol that is used for hypertext, not as a tunnel for god knows what bastardized reinvented-by-idiots version of RPC. Versions of RPC and DCE that mere mortals (like the sort of people who invent web apps with REST and SOAP) can understand and use.
Oh, and most importantly, a billing/subscription model to pay for commercial content delivery, instead of advertising (to try and prevent the spread of clickbait and malware at source).
Yes, of course it's a shout-out. (Remember, Miriam is married to the minister of propaganda? And, per Chomsky, in a democracy the tools of state propaganda have to be a whole lot more subtle than standing on a soapbox yelling "ALL GLORY TO THE HYPNOTOAD".)
Replying to both posts by Icehawk
Someone else pointed out that the absence of central authority gives you Somalia. Good point. So I will modify my position to that historically over-controlling has made things worse.
You're right that the USA stepped up central authority in WW2. But the point I was making is that Germany, which had more central authority over development and production, did much worse.I guess there's a balance point where you have enough but not too much.
Another way of looking at it is that central authority should say "Don't do that" whether it's social issues like discrimination against women in the workforce or technical issues such as using unencrypted protocols. But saying "this is what you should do" is less likely to be right, and discourages initiative.
This is not an improvement.
Though, yes, those 8-bit computers (and even 16-bit computers) taught my generation a lot about hardware. Even doing stuff on an 80386 was quite quickly an exercise in assembler and the interrupt lists available on BBSes were very useful. I never got into the VGA magic, but it was interesting to read about it later. Though I rarely need the hardware understanding in my current life, it comes in handy occasionally.
Kind of what Arduino can be used to teach nowadays. Even that uses something resebling C, though.
Trusting trust attacks can be mostly avoided by simply not implementing compilers in the language they compile.
e.g. running your C compiler on a LISP interpreter that in turn runs on a minimal FORTH like coded in a few hundred lines of well documented ASM on the bare metal isn't going to win any prizes for elegance or performance but there is nowhere for the Thompson hack to hide.
Still got to trust the hardware, but if you can't do that you are screwed anyway.
Greg, David L: your more recent off-topic comments have been deleted, per moderation notice in comment 97.
Missing, presumed dead. (This happens to quite a few minor name-check characters, and some less minor ones.)
You want to wait for "Dark State", which explores this issue in depth. Hint: it's feasible, but it's not as simple as it sounds at first.
We are stuck with them because we have billions of lines of code to maintain. The Commonwealth has the luxury of using them as teaching opportunities for their first crop of CS students, ...
And here we have the perfect recipe for a second system disaster. Redesign everything from the CPU up. What could possibly go wrong?
I don't see CPU architectures as important, it just won't matter if the architecture has been formally proven or not. Programming languages don't matter that much. Personal spreadsheets matter. Email matters. Facebook matters, if only as an example of what not to do. Making sure women and minorities don't get excluded matters.
Ridiculous idea of the day. Cheap hypersonic international travel using black hole gravity assists. You just need an aircraft with a completely sealed, vacuum ready cabin and very good timing.
For a worst case, imagine if the Commonwealth stole the schematics and source code and then insisted on running their Five Year Plans on home-brew LSI-11 hardware (good, but limited — there's a reason DEC sunsetted that architecture when they did—and there was an early Soviet home computer that did just that!) running MUMPS or maybe Pick. And rolled these out as CS teaching platforms, of course ...
Bingo.
Other stuff you don't want to risk importing: microprocessors with a secure enclave running some god-awful blob of unauditable software (hello, Intel!), microprocessors where the mask was compromised to incorporate a hidden secret processor with Ring 0 access to the actual hardware (you can lose an entire Pentium inside a modern chip with 3-4 billion components).
Once the USA realizes the Commonwealth exists they will prioritize finding and attacking any contraband-component supply chains they can identify, as a matter of extreme urgency. Their initial assumption will be that the backward Commonwealth runs on cloned/pirate software and hardware (like the USSR), but they'll wise up rapidly.
In fact, once the Commonwealth realize they've been rumbled, MITI needs to enforce the "eat your own dogfood — NO exceptions" rule rigidly, or they're going to be hit by an enemy who is about 50 years ahead of them in this particular field and who has shown no compunction about waging cyberwar against perceived opponents even during peacetime.
"our news agencies print propaganda as fact"
All mass market media does this.
Oh, God :-( This whole RISC/CISC religious war is a prime example of engineers and mathematicians being replaced by marketeers and demagogues. RISC was a justified reaction against the VAX and later 68Ks, but became a fanatical religion and dogma before it was ever implemented. Good behaviour (including good performance) comes from good design, nothing else, and so-called RISC designs are often MORE complicated (and often slower!) than many of their CISC predecessors. You don't seriously imagine that the designers of discrete-logic machines, when 48 KB was a lot of main memory and suitable memory for microcode was still in the future, put ANY complexity into their designs that they didn't need?
Furthermore, most of the more extreme performance features of modern designs (e.g. the complexity of caches, branch prediction and related horrors) were added almost entirely to cover up the deficiencies of modern software. C++ as she is spoke (NOT as Bjarne intended) is perhaps the worst, but a lot of the more 'modern' and 'better' languages are nearly as bad. In particular, the information that the programmer has about locality, control and data flow is very rarely expressible in the language, and even then is generally thrown away by the compiler, so the hardware is effectively trying to reverse engineer the software on the fly!
And then there's the security issue, but that's better for another post.
Programming languages don't matter that much. Personal spreadsheets matter. Email matters. Facebook matters, if only as an example of what not to do. Making sure women and minorities don't get excluded matters.
This is an issue of network externalities; and it's important not to be trapped in a sub-optimal position, e.g. using Microsoft Word as a default standard for editable business documents (which wastes huge amounts of time in tiny increments every day because its UI is a train wreck collision between two incompatible models for document markup).
Hint: there's a reason I used EPOC16 (aka SIBO) as an example earlier. Alas, the wikipedia entry on it mostly focusses on EPOC32 (later renamed Symbian) and contains errors. Let's just say, it was properly designed and later iterations of the Psion Series 3 crammed the entire pre-emptive multitasking OS and a full, serviceble office suite into 1Mb of ROM.
Yes. Security-through-obscurity doesn't work - it's how governments keep 'official secrets', after all, and we all know how that goes. Furthermore, every complication you add creates the potential for new loopholes and, worse, new and (obviously) unpredictable emergent properties. Modern computers already run programs that are larger than human DNA, based on designs that aren't as much more predictable or even reliable than is generally claimed, with nearly as many states as the human brain. Even worse than the security consequences are the RAS ones - I remember when we (in the IT industry) identified the cause of most bugs, even if we baulked at fixing them - but, now, almost all bugs are bypassed, described as 'features' or simply denied. And, while most of those bugs can be lived with, occasionally one completely prevents the system from working and it is impossible (or almost so) to find even the most inappropriate bypass! Remember when the air traffic control went offline for well over a day, or when National Westminster (if I recall) lost ALL their ability to trade for 2-3 days? The RAS of modern computers is little better than the best ones were in the 1970s, and a lot of the problems are emergent properties or close to it.
The solution is to pick up the successful work of the 1980s on capability machines and systems, where the hardware and software was designed to give mathematically proven security guarantees. That could be extended to programming languages and higher-level interfaces, but almost all of the IT world has been headed in the other direction since about 1980! In languages, Ada and, to some extent, Haskell, (modern) Fortran and a few others are worthy exceptions, but are not mainstream. Another example is the Internet protocols - OSI was a bureaucratic monstrosity, but there was at least an attempt to design it a whole, and it simply did not have many of the problems that bedevil us today.
I can't say that I am sanguine that another civilisation could do better in a short space of time, because the problem with all engineering is that 90% of the hard problems arise as you try to turn the high-level designs into blueprints. And it is absolutely fatal to override the doubters, on the grounds of lack of time - as every mathematician knows, if you can't prove it rigorously, don't assume it's true - and, even if you can, you still need to prove your proof.
I know that whatever happens to the King in Exile will not involve his restoration. However, I do wonder how the King in Exile thinks his restoration will happen.
He's seen that the NAC has greatly changed in the 17 years of his exile, into a polity that is overwhelmingly hostile to the Ancien Régime. How can he hope to be restored aside from a military invasion by the French (impractical due to nuclear weapons) or a well-timed coup (also unlikely to succeed without lots of covert help from within the NAC government)? Shouldn't he just resign himself to being Timeline 3's version of King Michael of Romania?
Of course, the capacity of people (and governments) to deceive themselves should never be underestimated. And who knows? Perhaps the King in Exile thinks he can put himself forward as the next First Man - not dissimilar to another fallen monarch of Timeline 2, Simeon II of Bulgaria, who also served as 48th Prime Minister of Bulgaria. Fat chance, IMO, but you never know.
~
It occurred to me just before I posted: Charlie is making direct comparisons between Iran and the NAC. Perhaps the ~USA will take a page from their own playbook regarding Iran: stage a coup and put the King in Exile in charge, just like they did with the Shah of Iran in 1953. There's no way that that could have negative consequences.
...to explain stuff like why null-terminated strings and manual garbage collection are a bad language design decision.
That's an interesting perspective, as I've spent most of my career in embedded systems (defence avionics, telecom, and consumer). The structures and idioms offered by C/C++ allow the use of both heap and stack; in both "manual" memory management and more automated approaches.
So, to counter your example, please explain how I avoid the garbage collector getting rid of that memory-mapped register object that's been sitting idle for a while? Do you know many Embedded Java programmers?
Yes, getting into the habit of memory management takes more effort, but it's also more efficient when you're limited in memory and clock speed (and makes you a more disciplined software engineer). Back in the 1990s I was doing avionics work in C on 12.5MHz and 25MHz SPARCs, and each processor had at most a megabyte of RAM. There was no disk, we boot-loaded all the code from EEPROM, and the only way to get the necessary processing done in the time available was single-threaded execution, and some really cheesy direct memory management. Then we started to see the first Mil-Spec PowerPC boards, and it was all VxWorks and C++. Yay for VxMP...
Suggesting that we trust a non-deterministic garbage collection algorithm to solve our memory problems in a hard real-time system would have resulted in a certain amount of laughter...
The nice thing about C/C++ is that it operates across most problem domains. Want to try making your eyes bleed with some template metaprogramming? Make the compiler whimper with some weird-ass inheritance schemes? Do some really simple "Hello, World" stuff for an 8-bit processor? Carry on. IMHO, it's not the weight of the past that sees us using C/C++; it's the flexibility. It's analogous to the success of the English language; not perfect, not always best, but "good enough" in nearly all cases.
C++ doesn't borrow concepts and idioms from other languages; it follows them down a dark alley and mugs them. Comes out a bit later, whistling and wearing a new "C++ 11/14/17" suit that might not quite fit yet, but will soon...
(RAII and smart pointers, hurrah!)
If you wanted to make a difference, you could insist on some of the better process improvement initiatives - CMMI, Test-driven development, effective Code and Documentation review techniques...
The Rotodyne failed because it had several rather impressive disadvantages. It even got debated on ARRSE... the comments from an aero engineer were twofold:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35521040
The politics angle is a bit of a red herring IMHO. It was the excuse used by the idiots who tried, failed and continued to try in the face of all evidence and the laws of physics to produce quiet tipjets. Everyone else looked at something that could stop conversation two miles away and decided not to buy it. I doubt even with today's design tools and materials you could do it. Even if you could, the fact that you're putting high pressure air, fuel and ignition power up through a rotating rotor hub where a single failure causes a catastrophic loss would make the safety case distinctly challenging.
and...
No, the manufacturers said they could quieten the tip jets down if only they had more money and time. What they failed to do at any time was demonstrate any noise reduction to anyone. Now, either it's a conspiracy or maybe, just maybe horribly difficult engineering problems are just that.
Sorry. Didn't parse your sentence it the way you intended.
Didn't the iranians model their state on the UK ? - the head of state is also head of state religion, etc.
In our history, the AK-47 functioned as "the great equalizer" by making it expensive in terms of both money and soldiers to hold the European Empires together. There's a reason European countries lost most of the decolonization wars after WWII.
Be careful of that meme of "firearm as equalizer, allowing patriots to stand up against tyranny" - very powerful, very "Second Amendment", and much beloved of the US right.
You might equally argue that the decolonization happened because the emerging middle-class of locals withdrew their consent. Political problems don't typically have military solutions; Britain basically said "help us out in the Second Big Mistake, and we'll give you independence"; then spent a decade or two trying to withdraw. Empire became Commonwealth fairly quickly, all things considered.
You could argue that the decolonization wars (Rhodesia, Congo, Vietnam, Borneo as opposed to insurgencies such as Kenya, Malaya), weren't. They were proxy wars between superpowers or regional powers. Wars are hideously, unbelievably, expensive - no large-state-funded levels of cash injection, means no ammunition, means no (or a lost) war.
Missing, presumed dead. (This happens to quite a few minor name-check characters, and some less minor ones.)
I assume this applies to the Wu worldwalking family as well. Or will they reappear?
Exactly. Agreed completely.
The big tech win in CPU design was ever-smarter branch prediction
Alternatively, you could argue that it was down to ever-greater integration.
Look back forty or fifty years, to what we used to call a "CPU" - it was effectively the ALU, a program counter, and some addressing stuff; all in a simple Von Neumann architecture. It might not even all be on the same chip. As time went on, and with it the ability to generate larger and more complex designs, more and more of the circuitry was moved onto the same piece of silicon.
The architectural techniques that were covered in the "supercomputer design" module of my CS degree back in the mid-80s, are now regarded as entirely normal activities for a consumer-grade CPU; someone even emulated a binary compatible Cray-1 on a $150 FPGA development board...
http://www.chrisfenton.com/homebrew-cray-1a/
"I guess there's a balance point where you have enough but not too much... But saying "this is what you should do" is less likely to be right, and discourages initiative."
A balance point. Exactly. Ideally, we're not trying to make a voyage to the left or right, but to that balance point.
I actually met a MUMPS programmer once. Scary...
I was thinking that if you take the idea of a network chip that does a local, randomized version of pinouts and voltages, that if it detects an attack, it can decide to charge up a capacitor and clobber the other device. Once you've got full control of your network's voltages, "bad, black ice" isn't terribly difficult, though you'd only authorize it under wartime conditions.
I was thinking more about Algeria and Lebanon (more of an edge case as a decolonization war). There were political reasons for those wars ending, but I doubt they would have ended the way they did if the casualties hadn't been anywhere near as high? It's rare to find a decolonization war without foreign influences, but I would argue that that predates WWII as well.
"Be careful of that meme of "firearm as equalizer, allowing patriots to stand up against tyranny" - very powerful, very "Second Amendment", and much beloved of the US right."
It's irrelevant whether or not the US right loves this meme, the question is: is it accurate? Actually, I also agree that the emerging middle class was very important. I would argue that population growth also played a role in it as medical advances percolated from the metropole.
However, the Dutch lost Indonesia. The French lost Vietnam and Algeria (the latter with a VERY vocal settler population). I'm not saying that an AK-47 guarantees that the rebels win (it hasn't helped the Kurds in Turkey), but it does make such wars more costly in terms of casualties for the more advanced power.
What Adam Smith actually said ....
Most people who play the Smith card haven't read him. What he says about the role occupied by modern investment bankers and CEOs is distinctly uncomplimentary.
That's an interesting perspective, as I've spent most of my career in embedded systems (defence avionics, telecom, and consumer).
Sorry, should have said "manual garbage collection and (etc) are a bad idea in user level applications". Obviously you can't avoid it at a certain point — RTOS, kernels, back-end stuff. But it shouldn't be something that's relevant at the application, as opposed to system, level.
I was thinking more about Algeria and Lebanon
The Lebanese civil war wasn't really a decolonization war in the classic sense insofar as the French (colonial power) granted independence in 1943 and pulled all their troops out by 1946 — the war didn't start for nearly a third of a century (although there was a close shave in 1958). Unless you classify the Maronite christian population as "colonists", of course. As the Maronite church goes back to the 5th-7th centuries AD and the christian population of Lebanon was established way back, when it was part of the Ottoman empire, that's a bit of a reach.
Algeria I'll grant you: that was totally a decolonization war. But the AK-47 was strictly irrelevant: what did it was the deployment of classic Maoist insurgency doctrine, along with bombings, assassinations, and massacres of civilians. When you've got hundreds of thousands of men under arms, the choice of rifle doesn't make much difference on its own.
The "tech wins" for modern CPUs aren't based on primarily silicon fab technologies, they're based on squeezing more performance out of existing designs by adding extra stuff. A CPU that can do out-of-order processing is faster at tasks than one that is purely linear, branch prediction makes the optimisation of code a lot simpler and it executes faster.
The bad news for someone bootstrapping silicon production from cold, making six-inch wafers in visible-wavelength processes at 1000nm or worse is that the go-faster trickslike out-of-order require a lot of transistors and they're core parts of the ALU, they can't be fobbed off onto another chip 20nS or more away on the PCB. Cacheing common data and instructions helps a lot but each bit of cache requires more than one transistor what with flags, encoding etc. Wafer-scale might work but it never really did in our world, possibly because we got down to 20nm and finFETs faster than the WSI people could get stuff out of the lab.
Even better, keep the orbital nuclear battle-station in a third timeline. I'm guessing that submarines can't move between worlds due to contact with the water, but orbital and aerial deterrents would work nicely. I wouldn't be surprised if the US is keeping a nuclear bomber force in other timelines for that reason. Though the US, at least, is hampered in setting up orbital battle stations due to other space capable powers in their world getting nervous about that sort of thing.
just passing by ... you are quoted here : https://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=38591
Sorry, I should have been clearer. I was referring to the war between Lebanon and Israel. I didn't even know about the war you mentioned. Thanks for the link.
And the reason I'm adding that war to the list is because I'm not sure whether Israel intended to annex parts of Lebanon similar to the way they annexed Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights, or would have changed their minds and done so had the war proceeded more smoothly? I'm afraid I am not well-versed on that war. That's why I called it a stretch.
Computer wars....
Algeria I'll grant you: that was totally a decolonization war
...with support to the FLN provided by Egypt and Nasser, involving equipment, training, and safe havens. Why do you think the French got involved in the Suez Crisis?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algeria%E2%80%93Egypt_relations#Algerian_revolutionary_movement
I want C. Any language that does not allow you to get into trouble also doesn't allow you to do complex, good things far more easily. At that point, it depends on the experience and competency of the programmer.
Great, all you need is an endless supply of perfectly competent programmers who never ever make a mistake and C will fit the bill for any programming task. Over here in the real world where the sky is not pink and filled with sparkly flying unicorns programming in C is like chainsawing in the nude while blindfolded and drunk, only more dangerous.
C is Assembler on steroids. It has its use cases close to the hardware, bit-bashing registers etc. It has no place anywhere else especially where networking and security is involved. GUI? Nope. Database work? Nope. Anything with user-supplied data in buffers? Nope nope nope. Pointers? Absofuckinglutely nope nope nope.
Data abstractions are your friend. C is not your friend.
Charlie, a question if I may: how much of the NAC's government form was driven by meta-concerns?
That is, it seems like you needed the same group of people to be overtly in charge, that is, wielding direct and powerful centralized authority such that they can order armies to march, factories to be built, dissidents purged, etc. for multi-decade spans.
This is difficult in democracies; the average tenure of a British Prime Minister is something like a decade, but that includes some crazy 18th century outliers; the median is closer to three years. Other parliamentary democracies do even "worse" from a perspective of longevity; I'm looking in your direction, Japan.
It would seem like an American-style strong executive system might do here; being directly elected, theoretically long tenures are possible. However, American Presidents did four to eight years with the exception of FDR, who managed to get 16 years during a period of massive national crisis. And from a narrative standpoint, this sort of system might have negative connotations for how you want to present the NAC; an elected strongman who has ruled for two decades smacks of South American caudillos, of Saddam Hussein, of Vladimir Putin.
American legislative leaders get even briefer tenures than our presidents; while we have a long tradition of people serving in Congress for decades at a time, the median tenure of a Speaker of the House is about four years. (The average is somewhat higher because of the incredible outlier that is Sam Rayburn, who was Speaker for an incredible 17 years.)
All of this, of course, is vastly ill-suited from a perspective of wanting Miriam and associated members of her revolutionary cabal to continue to wield direct and overwhelming political power over a very long timeline, which you need to happen in order to make the plot go, yes? It isn't of much use to you if Burroughs has pulled a George Washington and Miriam is a private businesswoman or one legislative leader among many; you could probably write a good story involving that scenario but it likely isn't the one you wanted to tell.
So you adopt a government form that presents the trappings of democracy in order to maintain the needed ideological bona fides of the NAC for the purposes of your narrative, but also has an enormous strong authoritarian component, with a Supreme Leader who never has to stand for re-election and has immense personal power, thus allowing you to write a narrative where the nation-state in question responds to the wishes of your characters in a timely and efficient manner without an insurmountable amount of baggage.
Or at least, this is how I've reasoned it out. I could be wrong! I'm wrong a lot.
''Sorry, should have said "manual garbage collection and (etc) are a bad idea in user level applications". Obviously you can't avoid it at a certain point — RTOS, kernels, back-end stuff. But it shouldn't be something that's relevant at the application, as opposed to system, level.''
Sorry, but not really, though I agree with the principle of your point.
There are a lot of user level applications where the current fully-automatic garbage collectors cause serious problems - e.g. games (yes, ZDOOM under Wine, I am thinking of you), or anything in the high-performance area. Note that I am talking about factors of 3-10 slowdown, sometimes more. You can resolve some of the problems by adding hacks that disable garbage collection on certain objects or in certain locations (the answer to Martin's memory-mapped issue), but not all. A better solution would be a much better design of memory management, where the programmer can select the category of garbage collector and where it is better integrated with the hardware; Algol 58, Ada and Fortran all allow that, for a secondary stack. So it wouldn't be either entirely manual or entirely automatic.
And, while fully manual memory management is appropriate for the very lowest level stuff, most of the better embedded systems and kernels have at least semi-automatic memory management. Inter alia, some of those systems are the size and complexity of a large application, and have exactly the same problems with debugging, security and RAS. So a better solution would be exactly the same approach, but with a different set of selectable categories.
The reason that we can't have that? It's the languages. C++ is particularly evil in this respect, because it (often unpredictably) generates so many calls to the memory system in unclean contexts, and ways for the program and garbage collector to become at cross-purposes. C++11 safely-derived pointers were an attempt to resolve the latter, but there are still problems; I had an interesting discussion with Hans Boehm about this. And the unclean context is a real nightmare if you want to write high-RAS or high-performance code, especially if portability matters, because the programmer needs to know what the compiler might do behind the scenes, and defend against it, which needs skills that are rare indeed.
Pointers? Absofuckinglutely nope nope nope. Data abstractions are your friend. C is not your friend.
That's rather a blanket assertion, and hopefully you're limiting your tirade specifically to C - because there are some pretty successful GUI and networking libraries and tools out there, written in in C++ (not to mention quite a few written in C).
Anyway, programming is difficult. Pretending that "Language X will prevent below-average or sleep-deprived engineers from making mistakes" is foolish; and sometimes you need that power in order to achieve the task. Claiming that C-style raw pointers are considered harmful just suggests that you have poor discipline when it comes to your design... There's plenty of rubbish and buggy Java, Haskell, and Ada source code out there to make my point for me.
I may be biased, but then I remember changing from programming in Assembler, to programming in C. Then, after five or six years, on to C++ (granted, I was effectively writing C and using a C++ compiler...). I even went back to Assembler for a year, while doing some time-critical low-level networking stuff. There is a big difference between C and Assembler, I can assure you.
Think of C as "a programming language for grownups" ;)
Claiming that C-style raw pointers are considered harmful just suggests that you have poor discipline when it comes to your design...
Discipline is great if you can enforce it 100% of the time on 100% of your programming staff and be certain they never ever make a coding mistake which compiles but only triggers every second Tuesday. Me, I'd rather use an HLL that's not got pointers at all to tempt the unwary, the reckless, the clumsy or the hungover. Sure they can produce some rockstar code -- I've got some code I wrote a while back that uses auto-incrementing indexed pointers in a really neat way but it's horrible code, obfuscated Assembler -- but the programming industry is getting the idea that rockstar coders are bad for business because rockstar code is often problematic in the long run.
Sure you can write bad code in any language (Quantum Intercal, anyone?) but languages should not make it easy to screw up. Data abstractions are your friends.
Wow. You got this completely backwards. The first "fast" computer was the CDC 6000 series. Definitely a RISC like design (built 2 decades before RISC was "invented"). It ticked Watson Jr. off no end, its performance just made the 360 look silly.
The 50 cent CPUs were microcontrollers, not general purpose CPUs. Different rules apply for cost/performance tradeoff.
If I had the chance to do the microprocessor revolution over again, I wouldn't start with the 6502, which you pretty much had to assembly language program. You want to start with a simple, but relatively powerful, architecture that takes HLL into consideration. I would submit something like the National Semi 8900 (aka PACE) which was modeled on the Data General Nova. It came out within a year or two of the 6502 and the ISA is friendly to HLLs. Further, since it was 16 bit to start with making faster versions when more transistors are available (through pipeline, etc.) was possible. The 6502 is an architectural dead-end.
And if you are going to try and avoid T2 mistakes, go right to a 64 bit arch, skip 32 bits. The R4000 came out in '91, I suspect it could have come out earlier.
All IMO of course...
thus allowing you to write a narrative where the nation-state in question responds to the wishes of your characters
Nope. The real issue here is that the Commonwealth is a post-revolutionary empire. Your precedents are France after the revolution/terror, or Russia, or Iran (hint: Persian empire). In all these cases, after an initial period of turbulence/civil war/terror an authoritarian central power emerged. And a common factor was a strong external enemy/threat. (France: Britain. Iran: the USA and Saddam's Iraq. USSR: everybody jumped on them with fists right after the revolution.)
Again, there were some democratic aspects to the early USSR (between civil war and terror, before Stalin got his boots under the table) and Iran features a multi-party system. France ... got Napoleon, who was sui generis, but arguably an early prototype for the 20th century dictators who emerged in post-monarchical power vacuums.
Anyway: the Commonwealth forms in a crisis and is confronted by international (and internal) threats. As an empire I don't see any way it isn't going to gravitate towards an authoritarian core; if anything, Miriam's provision of Cliff's Notes On Revolutions In Time Line Two And Their Failure Modes is a major push towards bedding in democratic values which might otherwise have been submerged by a counter-revolution/terror; but after 15 years, it's wearing thin — and that's roughly when our story starts.
(As for why Miriam is still involved? World-walking. The Commonwealth doesn't have anything like the biotech base needed to build ARMBAND from tissue cultures, so they're dependent on the Clan survivors, and they need paratime transportation because they know the USA is going to come calling sooner or later.)
CDC 6000 series was designed -- and many hand-built -- by Seymour Cray. The Cray-1 instruction set was pretty much identical, but with vector register instructions added. The Cybers used secondary, external processors to handle I/O; these processors were barrel-rolled (that is, they had one "core," but 10 sets of registers, and cycled through them every clock cycle).
If you parse RISC to mean "Reduced Instruction Set Complexity," you pretty much start with the Cybers. (The failing there was that writing to registers A1-A5 would result in a read from the corresponding memory location going to the corresponding X register; A6 and A7 were the same, but wrote to memory. However, instruction parsing was trivial, and all the instructions were implemented in discrete transistors.)
(Fun fact: the CDC 6600 had a foot-long wire that connected two points only about an inch apart. At least one CDC tech broke customer equipment by replacing that wire with a shorter one. See, context switching on the Cybers was done by an eXchange Jump instruction, which just swapped register contents with a memory location. And Seymour, in an effort to cut down on transistor count, used the speed of the wire to avoid temporary space -- it did a read from memory, and then immediately wrote to the memory, using the long wire to act as a buffer. Replace it with a shorter wire, and everything broke. Much hilarity.)
Sorry to rant about one of my favourite computers.
I'm really considering desktop CPU systems, a few thousand bucks in 1970-era money. For those systems a RISC CPU would need more program RAM since it takes more individual instructions to be read from RAM and executed to carry out the same operations as a CISC CPU. More RAM means more expense and the speed advantages of simpler instructions could well be eaten up by the extra read cycle times unless there's on-CPU instruction cache which requires lots of transistors which the silicon fabs couldn't quite manage at the time.
Big Iron systems would cost millions of 1960s dollars and with cost no object, RISC-type instruction sets could have an advantage although the reads might be costly in performance penalties. According to Wikipedia the CDC 6000 series had instruction caches, big enough to hold a complete loop if it was small enough. I don't know the first integrated CPU that had instruction cache, it might have been something like the Cyrix variants of the 386 chip.
Yeah. The best description I saw of C was "a teenage hacker's wet dream". I am teaching software design, starting tomorrow, and will tell the kiddies (i.e. graduates) that their worst enemy when programming is the idiot at the keyboard. 15 years activity on SC22WG14, and other relevant experience, did not make me think any more of C as a suitable language. Yes, I can write C so that it is near-bulletproof and ports (code unchanged, where the standard permits) 25 years later to systems that weren't invented when I wrote it, but damn few people can.
''If you parse RISC to mean "Reduced Instruction Set Complexity," you pretty much start with the Cybers.''
FAR too late! What people now forget is that ALL computers of the 1950s and almost all of the early 1960s were far less complex than ones of today; remember discrete components (or even discrete logic)? Yes, Seymour Cray was influential, but RISC goes back to the very beginning of the modern era. The ICL 1900 range (1964) was designed for reduced complexity, for example, and the initial IBM System/360s were simpler than most RISCs of the RISC era.
I haven't read the book(s) as yet, but if you were going to start the computer revolution, you wouldn't start with desktops, you really do need to build discrete component systems first. You need the compute power in order to run the calculations to build high tech stuff (fun fact, Michigan States first cyclotron was designed using a CDC 6500, later the Super conducting cyclotron (not the big one, the one on the MSU campus) was designed using the CDC 170/750). The CDC 6400 was a lot smaller and about 1/3rd as fast, which allows all sorts of calculations.
As far as a small, discrete component, computer the PDP-8 is usually the benchmark (similar to the CDC's I/O perpherial processors in some ways).
And as I said in an earlier post, for desktops I would start with something like the Nat. Semi. 8900. Not RISC, but not CISC either.
C has it problems (a bad programmer can write bad code in any language...)
But the language the send chills down my spine these days is Javascript. What a nightmare.
My unfavourite one was TeX, until I did some complicated C++ template programming. In neither case, can you introduce any diagnostics or checking without changing the result. I have just spent some time trying and failing to get the LaTeX verbatim class to use a user-defined colour, with the new colour system and can do it with a built-in colour - I could do it with the old one, but the new one has defeated me. Before anyone mentions fancyvrb, I have already got other hacks to cover up other deficiencies of verbatim and don't want to start all over. But attempting to write a decent (i.e. up to the standards of Algol 68 / Fortran / Ada) matrix class in C++ templates has defeated me, Boost and Bjarne Stroustrup.
My point is that there is a huge amount of software that is like that, including most windowing systems.
if you were going to start the computer revolution, you wouldn't start with desktops
The first real usable desktop was probably the Apple II, in my opinion. The first real usable program which made the Apple II a success was Visicalc. Businessmen would go into computer stores and say "Gimme a Visicalc!" Mainframes could not really do "what if" spreadsheet operations as batch jobs and they were not really amenable to run on multitasking OSes, not without some graphical capabilities and the terminals for such were either not fit for purpose (Tek 4014) or horrendously expensive (Whirlwind). An Apple II, a couple of floppy disc drives, a monitor and a copy of Visicalc was two thousand bucks, a business expense almost in the petty cash region.
Word processing is another killer app for desktops[1] but it was the spreadsheet that pried computers out of airconditioned suites and put them onto desks.
[1]I earned a bit of beer money using TROFF on the University VAXes writing up theses for Ph.D students who were being billed 50 pence a page by the departmental secretaries. The fact I could correct stuff, produce proofs etc. on free lineprinter paper before sending the output to the expensive daisywheel printer for them was a bonus. There was, however, no spreadsheet program for the VAXes as far as I could determine.
Charlie, would it make sense for the Commonwealth's computer scientists to have read, and profited decisively from, John Backus's lecture "Can Programming be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?"?
(Best link I could find was this PDF, sorry: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~crary/819-f09/Backus78.pdf.)
The first several pages pretty much nail the gist. Backus knew how to write a technical article.
The key point is the lost opportunity embodied in the unbroken inheritance of inefficient code style from the old times. This goes back to bloated information topologies baked into computer language design -- at an extremely fundamental level -- as a response to the high cost of hardware available during the wartime efforts of the 1940s. The Commonwealth would be faced with a different situation, I think?
Backus's critique of the fundamental style of our timeline's computation might serve as a useful plot point in this story of crosstime competition.
I suspect that the reason isn't the actual weapons as the differing attitudes towards casualties (and the resources required to maintain a fighter). Remember your Kipling:
With home-bred hordes the hillsides teem. The troopships bring us one by one, At vast expense of time and steam, To slay Afridis where they run. The "captives of our bow and spear" Are cheap, alas! as we are dear.
http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_arith.htm
Me, I'd rather use an HLL that's not got pointers at all to tempt the unwary, the reckless, the clumsy or the hungover.
So... how do you plan to achieve indirection?
As a more concrete example, consider a modifiable data structure, say... a list? Insert something half-way-through?
What if you have a program handling structures of large objects, or large structures of small objects - are you going to embed all necessary structures into the language and hide any concept of "pointing", or are you going to accept large amounts of shuffling around, and write off the inefficiencies to Moore's Law?
Personally, I'll stick with the first option in Hoare's perspective: a function is either so simple that there's obviously nothing wrong, or complex enough that there's nothing obviously wrong.
That, and I do love Boost and the STL. Having had to write my own data structures back in the days of C (embedded stuff, so they had to be utterly bulletproof), I'm a firm believer that it's arrogance on a stick to insist that you can do much better than the Boost/STL teams, and with a lower defect density.
Screw the "rockstar code" stuff - I want to win simplicity awards, not "make people gasp in awe at the code complexity". I want it to do just what it says on the tin, without needing patched, until the requirements change. My ideal is for someone to try and maintain what I did, and say "well, that makes sense - this looks easy!" or "OK, so that's obviously what he's trying to do here" because I've commented or documented it to a sensible level.
Basically, hire good people and train them properly. Pick the ones who want to keep learning, not stagnate; and who want to be better today than yesterday. Give them time to think and design, rather than insist that they just get coding. Give them some time to rework and harden, rather than insist on a constant sprint. Give them the tools they need to do the job (build / test / debug tools and infrastructure, not just "here's Eclipse CDT, on you go"). Insist on code reviews and objective quality measurements. Put them in properly-resourced and balanced teams.
Re: '... introduce any diagnostics or checking without changing the result.'
Have wondered why checking SW as it's being written never became standard. I get that the entire OS can be enormous but since most apps are modular (do/connect to only one or a handful of specific things), testing each module before it's added to the OS seems reasonable/prudent.
From personal experience, another screw-up source to consider is consumers who accidentally find a way into the OS and unknowingly bugger everything up, i.e., the leave-all-doors-open-and-see-what-happens school of computer SW architecture.
tuberculosis
Is there a place that summarizes all of this somewhere? Looking for a reference, not an argument.
Someone else pointed out that the absence of central authority gives you Somalia. Good point. So I will modify my position to that historically over-controlling has made things worse.
Worse than Somalia? Not much of that on the planet. They are in the bottom 10% of places to be on earth. IMO.
You're right that the USA stepped up central authority in WW2. But the point I was making is that Germany, which had more central authority over development and production, did much worse.
Germany pretended to not have to switch their consumer industry to war time until very late in the game. The US switched as fast as the Feds printed the money. Interestingly I suspect the population of Germany would have been more in favor of the switch early than that of the US.
There's a essay called "Losing the War" which touches on some of this. http://www.leesandlin.com/articles/LosingTheWar.htm A main point was that the "bad" guys in WWII didn't know how to give up even after they knew it was hopeless. But there's a lot of interesting observations throughout the somewhat long essay.
I decided about 30 years ago that most of what are called programmers are just coders. Only about 10% actually "program". I.E. Write code that does something in a reasonable optimal way.
What you did with all of those embedded systems required the 10%. Or maybe the 1%. Much of what I did back in the day was the same way. Bringing in "good programmers" from a major corp was almost always a disaster. Their mainframe or similar experience had warped them into a "who worries about memory or resources" mindset that most could never get over.
But but but but
Most of what the 10% of us did filtered back up to be used by the 90% without appreciaation of how bad an idea it was to code major payroll applications for 100K people the same way your wrote code for an embedded system controlling a jet engine.
But since the demand was there and the 10% could not come close to filling it we would up with the bottom 30% implementing payroll and such without really an appreciation for what they were doing. Especially in thinking about how things they were doing in the moment would affect things 1 or 5 or 10 years down the road.
but damn few people can.
And only a subset of those actually do.
I wonder how much of current production code is really an experiment that was never cleaned up.
Hmm. I hadn't realized that Kipling wrote about the US Vietnam war.
Basically, hire good people and train them properly. Pick the ones who want to keep learning, not stagnate; and who want to be better today than yesterday. Give them time to think and design, rather than insist that they just get coding. Give them some time to rework and harden, rather than insist on a constant sprint. ....
Great concept.
The problem is that in almost every case you will be taking too long (define as you wish but you're never in charge of all the time lines) and have a very hard time finding these people. Mainly because a lot of other people want them and they will command astronomical pay in the minds of HR. And then 1/2 to 9/10s of the ones you wind up with will after bringing them "up from the minor leagues" will leave in a year or 4 to double their pay over the obscene amount you talked HR into paying them to stay.
My unfavourite one was TeX, until I did some complicated C++ template programming. In neither case, can you introduce any diagnostics or checking without changing the result.
I haven't done anything in TeX (only really made one LaTeX template in addition to using it a lot), but the C++ templates also complicate testing.
I once worked in a large project which was done mainly in C++ (and Qt, which constrained the C++ to a nice limit). Our team was responsible for an application on the system, and we used rigorous unit testing. We had a lot of dependencies to other teams' modules, and for unit testing we mostly wrote simple mock-up versions - it wasn't smart to unit test their code in addition to ours, so the mock-ups just returned easy answers.
Except for this one library, which was originally written in C but a one-person team was assigned to write a C++ interface for that. The interface, while simple in principle, used almost everything you could use in C++, starting from templates and ending with everything happening in the constructor of the class. I spent a couple of days trying to write the mock-up version, then asked a neighbouring team how they handled it and decided to do the same thing: just use the library as-is, as they had tried the same as I had and given up.
In the end we skipped the C++ wrapping and used the C library directly, if my memory is correct.
The Commonwealth doesn't have anything like the biotech base needed to build ARMBAND from tissue cultures, so they're dependent on the Clan survivors, and they need paratime transportation because they know the USA is going to come calling sooner or later. Which means that the Commonwealth need to capture someone using "Armband" & then reverse-engineer the product for themselves.
And at the other extreme is a state with a totally-controlling central authority, with results just as bad, possibly worse than Somalia's - the "DPRK" Which suggests, as is almost always the case in politics, that the "correct" place to be is somewhere in the middle .....
Doesn't it show that the correct place to be is at the top? :)
Except for this one library, which was originally written in C but a one-person team was assigned to write a C++ interface for that. The interface, while simple in principle, used almost everything you could use in C++, starting from templates and ending with everything happening in the constructor of the class.
That's not a flaw of C++, that's a failure of oversight by the rest of the team / team lead. You don't wait until delivery to review the design, and it's not a healthy team if everyone spends their time in a silo...
Anyway, I'm a cynic. At a guess, that one-person team was trying to build up their CV / resume for another job? And reckoned that they could get some hours of practice done on Company time?
Don't knock "how will this look on my CV" as a major factor in the selection of the technology to be used on a new project, particularly among the (shall we say) "more ambitious and self-interested" fraction of the population.
You don't have to be particularly ambitious to take that sort of thing into account. I recently turned down a very interesting looking job largely because the tech they used would lead to CV rot and leave me unemployable* within a few years.
No marketable skills = no leverage, and I do not want to end up trapped.
*in my preferred area anyway.
I agree that the whole thing wasn't about C++, and more managerial control would have helped. The templates were the techical thing which created the most problems there, so I kind of blame them, too.
They are useful sometimes, yes. I think what would like in a software project would be to make testing easy and commonplace, from unit testing to testing the whole system as a whole.
NO - or certainly not at the extremes, where being at the top makes you a real live target.
The trick is to get as much of the countries wealth into your swiss bank account as possible and jump before the revolution.
Guess who used to play too much "dictator" :)
,,,until the neglected foundations collapse under you.
Uh, by keeping a pointer to it? Garbage collection is not swapping, it's about making sure unused memory is reusable.
What is this "secondary stack" of which you speak?
((*) for versions of Fortran <= 77. I know nothing of Fortran >= 90).
Should, of course, read
((*) for versions of Fortran <= 77, I know nothing of Fortran >= 90).
Fucking HTML.
Mainframes could not really do "what if" spreadsheet operations as batch jobs and they were not really amenable to run on multitasking OSes,
Er, no. Mainframes were quite capable running spreadsheets, but a combination of politics & economics actively discouraged it.
Politics: Lots of programmers were employed by IT to develop programs for other departments. Putting out a generic spreadsheet program that anybody could use really undermined job security.
Economics: Mainframe time was expensive. Yes, micros could do the job cheaper.
Of course, having non-programmers generating spreadsheets created all sorts of bad answers.
The ARMBAND devices aren't really something to reverse engineer. It's a bit of cultured Clan-brain goo and a fancy chip to turn it on. The chip isn't the hard part. The hard part is culturing the brain-goo that makes the whole thing go.
"Complete absence of AK47's in all three examples."
It's not really about AK47s. It's about what happens when the locals pick up enough education and technology that it becomes expensive for the colonists to keep them in line. This happens about the time the locals have decent high-schools and the ability to make/pay arms dealers for semi-automatic rifles and explosives.
The AK47 is merely a good pointer to the fact that the colonists don't have enough military advantage to dominate the locals anymore. If anything, it's symbolic.
In Greek terms, the tragedy of Empire Games and Dark State is hubris. The Americans in the books are very typical of my countrymen. They imagine that they are substantially better than their opponents, but the reality is that if they're lucky they're merely running into another Vietnam. If they're not lucky... they get to be the bad guys in a rerun of the final battle from Niven and Pournelle's Footfall, and if I understand OGH's hints above, the Commonwealth is building more than one Orion spacecraft.
In the subsequent inquiry, Colonel Smith will attempt to invoke the "Fithp Amendment," but nobody in dark state U.S. will get the joke.
I should have written "...don't have enough military advantage to dominate the locals cheaply anymore."
Nojay, I expect better of you than this strawman rant.
"I want C" != "all software should be written in C, and everyone should write C", and you know that perfectly well.
High level languages have their place (says the guy who loves awk)... but you do not write an o/s, or drivers, or service-level code in them.
If I were to turn your argument around, I'd offer an entire o/s written in java.
Two more things: programming style is not taught, though perhaps some of it could be. For example, I had to learn while working, but as I used to say when I was jobhunting, I write code such that when I get a call at 16:15 on a Friday, or 02:00, that there's a problem that needs fixing, I don't want to spend hours, nor should anyone else need to do so, if I'm not around, trying to figure out how I'd been so "clever". I want to leave work on time, or go back to bed after fixing it, quickly.
Peer review was supposed to do that. Now, I assume, it's teams... and far too much of the time, that doesn't happen, you just get "looks good to me".
The other is management. It's always management. "Sure, I want to you do good work. Now, you've got 13 hours to write this system, or enhance it, and it needs to go into production tomorrow morning. Do whatever it takes...." And yes, I've been there, and nearly achieved clinical burnout, according to a friend who's a practicing degreed psychologist (if Kelly Higgins is reading, hi!, see you at Windycon, I hope).
You wrote: A main point was that the "bad" guys in WWII didn't know how to give up even after they knew it was hopeless.
Most of the time, it seems, they never do, unless they're forced, like Nixon, or like Trumpolini will be.
Note, for non-USans, no more than two was tradition. After FDR's death, the GOP rammed through a Constitutional Amendment making that so.
Oh. Ghu. The Cyber 6000.
In fall '85, at Temple U, I had an o/s course, and was on a PDP-ll, running RSTS? A time sharing version, and it was lovely to work on. In the spring of '86, I took a compiler design course, and we were on the Cyber 6000. Which ran NOS, which I started referring to as the Noxious Operating System. On the PDP, dial in from work, uppload my code, compile and go. On the CDC and NOS: log in, go into text mode, upload my code, get out of text mode, save my code, and then get it, because it had no idea it already had it before I could compile it.
It may have been fast, but miserable to work with.
Sorry, simpler solution, lower-cost, faster to produce and get on desks: terminals, connected to a mainframe.
With the advantage that it's a LOT harder to steal data, and just stealing a terminal doesn't get you what stealing a desktop computer would.
Und ve know vhere all ze terminals are!
Grin :-) As I posted, "Algol 58" was just finger trouble - Algol 68 did. And it is now 2017 - Fortran 77 was superseded 27 years ago.
It's interesting how NAC might bootstrap a computing industry; as above, maybe going straight for massive parallelism and functional languages.
But there's a warm-body-pipeline problem to bootstrap, and an enormous set of automation low-hanging-fruit - so in our timeline, we ended up with COBOL, simply because there was a large amount of (nevertheless valuable) simple processing to be done on bulk data. (When you have maybe some dozens of cpu-cycles'-worth of code to run per block of stored data, the bottleneck is the IO, not the algorithmic efficiency {or the coder smarts to implement it} ).
"High level languages have their place (says the guy who loves awk)... but you do not write an o/s, or drivers, or service-level code in them."
Yes, people have done, very successfully. Several of the Algols (including Algol 68, as I can personally witness), and I have been told of others (though I now forget the details).
"Two more things: programming style is not taught, ..."
I am doing so at present.
"Path dependency (and pork-barrel politics) lock us into sub-optimal solutions like the aforementioned Osprey — five gearboxes flying in loose formation — because the cost of reducing the noise level of the Rotodyne — an "unproven" technology — requires veering off the beaten track, and existing market incumbents don't want the competition"
Changing direction is hard.
A friend was a senior scientist at Xerox Parc in the glory days. Xerox knew they wanted to change, and did some very smart things but could not overcome their internal organisational inertia.
I like the cigarette lighter in cars as an example. Which I use to run a USB adapter, to charge my flashlight. Evolution leads to local maxima, not to global maxima.
Perhaps you (Charlie) already considered this, but just in case: For seasonal affective disorder (SAD), check for a vitamin D deficiency, or simply include sizeable vitamin D supplements with your diet. 4000 IU/day is the upper end of what is generally recognized as safe. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4673349/
Car cigarette lighters aren't all bad - high current sometimes counts for a lot.
I sometimes use mine to run an inverter that then powers things that would not react well to being run on a USB connector. I need to be careful not to run down the battery though.
I tend to find them slow and awkward to use, and it is accordingly harder to find a suitable slot in time to transfer some concentration from watching the road to using the lighter than it is with an ordinary butane-fuelled lighter. They are also no good for roll-ups, because they rely too much on pressure to achieve heat transfer to work well without the structural integrity of a chemmy to resist the applied force. On the other hand they are rather well suited for the tobaccoless smoking of hash.
Thanks for the note on autogyro hybrids. I did some quick digging and found that the Osprey's range (about 1100 kilometers) is a bit less than the autogyro record range. However, it's a lot less than the record range for a helicopter (2800 km), and that leads to the interesting problem: the USMC currently loves them some Ospreys because of Afghanistan. IIRC, Afghanistan is out of military heliopter range of the Persian Gulf, meaning that if you want to get marines to Afghanistan, you've got to put them in planes, offload them in Kabul or wherever, then put them in helicopters or on the ground to get them to wherever they're needed. That, and the minimum wage the jarheads are collecting, makes them hugely expensive soldiers. Or you can load a couple of squads into an Osprey and fly them right to the firebase.
Since there are stories of stealth helicopters in the US "crown jewels" (secret aircraft used for extreme missions--stealthy birds have been around since at least the Vietnam War), and they supposedly have sound suppressing curved rotor designs, I do wonder if the US secret arsenal includes a stealth rotodyne. It's not impossible, but unlike the stealth helicopters and the flying dorito chips, no one's ever reported one.
"Their mainframe or similar experience had warped them into a "who worries about memory or resources" mindset that most could never get over."
It works the other way round, too... at least, I certainly find I'm so accustomed to thinking in terms of 2k total physical memory that it sticks in my throat to statically allocate a 2k buffer for something even when I've got 32G to play with. And I can't use an interpreted language without constantly fretting over how much elephant grooming is going on behind the scenes when I do some simple thing like concatenating two strings.
Questions from a non-techie:
What is the minimum number of computer languages that a world that's never had computers before would need in order to create its own computing infrastructure? (Which languages and why. It seems that different computer languages were created for different purposes.)
How does AI fit into this computer-lingo Babel given that AI is widely anticipated to become the dominant computing creation? (I'm assuming that a sufficiently advanced AI could end up creating its own language much like every generation of human kiddies adds new words/concepts to our lexicon.)
Lastly - are there any languages that are AI-proof?
As for electric cars, our Bolt weighs 1624 kg, of which 440 kg is the battery, and it gets probably around 400 kilometers on a charge in average driving. A rough comparison car (pulled out of a random orifice) would have a mileage of around 50 km/gallon of gasoline, and gas weighs around 2.86 kg/gallon. So basically, the gas to go 400 km in this hypothetical car would weigh around 22.9 kg, or around 19 times lighter than the Bolt's battery weight.
Now obviously this is a problematic comparison, as the battery can be recharged for around 200,000 km while the gas gets burned. Still, the reason civilization went with petroleum starting 150 years ago or so is that it's ridiculously energy dense. Moreover, when it's gushing out of the ground, it's really cheap to make too. It also lends itself to all sorts of warfighting and other scaling (imagine running a tank running on current generation lithium batteries), where batteries do not (imagine recharging a tank battery in the middle of a blitzkrieg. I suppose you want your BOLO now).
The problem we face now is, as noted, making electric storage as energy dense as gasoline without making them noticeably more dangerous gasoline. However, we also face the problem of making those electricity storage and the associated infrastructure about as functional as current oil infrastructure is. Basically, civilization hangs in the balance on this one, and we can but hope to innovate fast enough.
Indeed, we may be living through some version of the Fermi Paradox right now: if fossil fuels normally accumulate in Gaian-type biospheres, the first intelligent life form that discovers how to use them for fuel ignites a massive boom for its species, only to find out the trap too late to do anything about it. After the crash, the survivors lack the energy (literally) to get off the surface of their planet or even to make powerful radio signals, thereby not inventing starflight or even telling planets in other systems that they exist. They could exist for millions of years thereafter, and there would be no way (short of getting a really, really good space telescope trained onto their planet or inventing star flight), to know that they even existed.
Still, it's not all grimdark: the Bolt has the equivalent of a 200 hp engine under the hood, and unlike a 200 hp gas engine, it also does hypermiling really well too. Electricity is fun to drive, even in the face of a looming crash.
I mean the socket, not the lighter itseld. I don't use them to set fire to things, do use them to power equipment.
Only one language is actually needed, but a reasonable number would be half a dozen, including one 'general purpose', one 'low level' and one scripting (which would have database, Web etc. variants). Plus 3 more for things I haven't thought of :-)
"I'm assuming that a sufficiently advanced AI could end up creating its own language ..."
They don't need to be advanced, and already have.
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-08-03/robots-created-a-language-humans-shouldn-t-panic
"Lastly - are there any languages that are AI-proof?"
I have no idea what you mean.
There's no reason for there to be more than one assembly language, and one high-level language. In a planned computer revolution, you'd probably want to have a couple of different ones, but for the most part, sticking with a variant of Pascal would suffice.
We had so many types of computers, and programming languages, because it was done by multiple groups, competing against each other. Which is not to say that's bad, but it's not necessary if you're looking at what has happened over the last 50 years and starting from scratch -- start with an 8 or 16-bit computer, and then go to 32-bit and 64-bit using an extensible architecture (e.g., ARM).
I'm not sure what you mean by "languages that are AI-proof."
The entire 327x display mode of fill out a form, submit it, wait for a new form, was a big disincentive to the UI that most spread sheet users seem to want.
I never saw a UI on a 327x style terminal that would work for most uses of a spreadsheet. Maybe someone COULD come up with one but none did that anyone noticed or wanted to use.
And maybe some kind of document formatting language.
NOS's filesystem was a tape metaphor, so you had to do things like rewind a file after writing it. And files could have more than one EOF -- you read until you got EOT.
It was not in any way designed to do interactive character work, which was a side-effect of the PP I/O processors handling all I/O.
For our COBOL course, I had a choice of using a Z80-based, 8-inch floppy CPM machine... or using the Cyber. The CPM machine took, literally, 25 minutes to compile an empty program; the Cyber compiled a couple thousand lines a second.
For the assembly-language course, we were to use a PDP-11 running RSTS/E; it was so overloaded that I ended up writing an emulator on an unused 3B5. It was my first C project.
A fairer comparison would be the weight of the energy source plus the power train of each. I suspect even with a 4 wheel drive electric the drive train weighs a lot less than for a 2 wheel IC drive train.
Yes. Maybe. As long as you don't call assembly as a language. It's more of a people friendly way of showing hardware op codes.
And then you get to things like SQL.
It's a very fuzzy world when you start deciding what is and is not a programming language.
Not sure I agree with that. Not personally familiar with the National Semi (is that the hiatus in government before we vote for a new one?) PACE, but looking it up it appears to be very much like an 8086 minus the segment:offset mechanism to allow it to address more than 64k. It does not overcome the principal limitation that the 6502 ran into - which was the 64k memory limit, not the 8-bit arithmetic - but it does strongly suggest something like the 8086 as the next step, which I would submit is probably not the direction we really want to be going in. It is also really bloody slow compared to the 6502.
The 6502 was developed in a situation not unlike that of the Commonwealth in some respects, and has the two advantages of being very simple in terms of its internal circuitry so it is easy to fabricate, and being very fast because it isn't microcoded. As for being a "dead end", the 6502 is still around as a microcontroller core.
I probably wouldn't start with an unmodified 6502, but the alterations I would add are pretty minor in terms of complexity and don't alter its basic character. We might even have seen them on the original chip if it hadn't been constrained to 40 pins by its package. Off the top of my head:
32-bit addressing, of course, which is probably the worst one for complexity, but doesn't really involve much more than some extra duplication of existing circuitry. Fill in the holes in the instruction set (some of the later derivatives did begin to do this). Add the few signals (about 4) needed to permit a byte-slice configuration to handle arithmetic with more bits. Provide more bits for the stack pointer and index registers, and make the stack movable instead of fixed. Provide a register to bank-switch "zero page" so it can be anywhere in memory, which would be very useful for fast context-switching.
(It's worth remembering that at this level of fabrication capability RAM is faster than CPU, unlike now, so cacheing doesn't really come into it yet and the "zero page = lots of registers" idea works.)
Yes. I have always regarded anything that is, in principle, Turing-complete (ignoring resource and I/O format limitations) as a full programming language, but that includes a surprising number of things people don't think of as programming languages. It is useful because, inter alia, all such languages are vulnerable to all of the generic classes of attack. However, there are also things which could be described as partial programming languages.
sendmail configuration is turing complete. :)
I do wonder if the US secret arsenal includes a stealth rotodyne.
Impossible to know, but I will note that to a non-expert a rotodyne is probably indistinguishable from a slightly weird-looking helicopter. I mean, we have helicopters with tandem paired rotors, helicopters with contra-rotating stacked rotors, regular helicopters, NOTAR helicopters, helicopters with shrouded tail rotors, and plenty of choppers with winglets and underslung pods. Precisely how the rotor is spun up is not obvious to a non-specialist.
Re: "languages that are AI-proof."
I mean a language that a human could learn and understand but that an AI could not.
One possibility is: In English one word can have multiple meanings with the intended specific meaning understood only once the utterance is completed. (Not sure how many other languages share this feature.) However, because AI math includes looking at clusters (e.g., context for word usage) this suggests that English is not AI-proof.
Guess I'm actually asking what, if anything, is the underlying fundamental difference between human and AI language because if such a fundamental difference exists then there's also the likelihood of misunderstanding/miscommunication between the two (or secrecy).
Change of subject from the strange attractor of computers to the strange attractor of nukes (sorry Heteromeles).
The Commonwealth is willing to shoot down a stealth drone with a nuclear warhead missile. A nuclear warhead.
Quite apart from the relative costs of nuke and drone (which admittedly for a high tech stealth drone might not be as much as I think), aren't the Commonwealth worried about fallout? Or EMP effects on their own electrical infrastructure?
I'm imaging the USA in timeline 1 deliberately sending drones through on days when the wind is blowing towards the capital...
I keep typing a response, and then starting over, so I think I'm just going to have to quote history: "The question of whether Machines Can Think... is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim."
"Two more things: programming style is not taught, ..."
I am doing so at present.
I agree strongly with Elderly_Cynic on this - I've done it too, albeit on a far less grand scale (namely, to the software apprentices that passed through our team).
IMHO one of the problems is that when many programmers talk about "style", they mean coding style - the low level "camelCaseorunderscore", or "put m_ before the class attributes" stuff. Perhaps they reach the dizzy heights of insisting on Hungarian notation, or banning recursion and multiple inheritance.
Only rarely do you see departmental or corporate style guides that talk about design style - encapsulation, or preferred error handling, or the expectations surrounding complexity.
So, you try and teach by good example. You show the developing engineer some hideous code, and some cleaner stuff. You explain why it's hideous, or clean. You try and explain why those parts of your style relate to quality, those to maintainability, those to robustness, those which to testability. You review what they produce in a constructive way, explaining why (generally on balance) you prefer one way over the other. You couple the concepts of "process" with those of "design" and "style", and try to show how it fits together.
You admit when you're wrong. You acknowledge that there are exceptions to rules - because rules are for the guidance of wise men, and the blind obedience of fools :)
...
Of course, you can just leave them to it, and let them sink or swim. In two or three years, they'll have found something that works for them, they'll be telling themselves that they're now a senior engineer, and who is anyone to tell them how to do their job? They've got years of experience! And in another decade, they'll still have two years of experience, just five times over...
The US had a couple of nuclear air-launched anti-aircraft missiles, the unguided AIR-2 Genie and the guided AIM-26 Falcon. The Genie was test-fired as a live missile, I don't think this happened for the Falcon. No significant EMP, no significant fallout. I expect the Soviet union had similar missiles too.
The US government fired off about 200 atmospheric nuclear tests in western central US over a period of about 15 years. Fallout from those tests was detected in many situations including, famously Sr-90 in teeth but actual noticeable effects, bupkis. For various reasons the human race developed a lot of really sensitive tests for radioactive isotopes and find them when we look for them. Fallout makes for some really kickass game concepts though.
Re: ' ... as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim."'
Okay, I'll bite ...
Yes, this is relevant if the for-earth-ocean-designed sub is sent to and expected to 'swim' in Jupiter's 'oceans'.
but actual noticeable effects, bupkis err ... no I know that Eastman Kodak made representations to the US guvmint (for whom they were a sizeable contractor) warning them that it would be a reallly good idea if atmospheric nuke-testing could be stopped - or at the very least scaled-back a lot ... because the radioactivity being spread around was beginning to noticeably affect photographic film. Which the US guvmint used for aeriel reconnaisance. I think all the other major photo manufactureres were worried about it as well.
Birds fly, aeroplanes fly, but not like (most) birds. Submarines "swim" but not like fishes. AI will "think" but (?) not like a human (?)
Not sure if this is off topic, but it hits one of OGH's hot buttons, hard.
New white paper maps the very real risks that quantum attacks will pose for Bitcoin
Quantum attacks on Bitcoin, and how to protect against them On the other hand, the elliptic curve signature scheme used by Bitcoin is much more at risk, and could be completely broken by a quantum computer as early as 2027, by the most optimistic estimates. (pdf)
Haven't read it yet (will; potentially work-related), but - today's trading (Nov 2): $7,080.27 +4.89%
I do wonder if the US secret arsenal includes a stealth rotodyne.
Easy answer to that - no chance, with a side-dish of "are you insane"?
This is a technology where the noise levels at 300m were similar to someone shouting very loudly at your ear from a range of two feet. Where you don't just have a large rotor disk, you've also got unshrouded propellor disks flashing away to generate lots of HERM. Most of the stealth disadvantages of a V-22 with all of the disadvantages of a CH-53.
As pointed out earlier, you've also got high-pressure fuel and ignition mechanisms, passing through a single unshielded point of failure at the most vulnerable corner of the flight envelope (coming in slowly to land). In terms of resistance to battle damage, it's a joke.
There have been some impressive capabilities - but rather than a Rotodyne, you would be more likely to see CREDIBLE SPORT, STARS, or even an EXINT pod
Re: rotodyne When I found out what this was, I immediately remembered the failed Rotary Rocket SSTO project. (not sure it wouldn't have worked, they just ran out of money).
Re: 'AI will "think" but (?) not like a human (?)'
Agree - however, we're putting a lot more trust in and responsibility on AI vs. your other examples. With humans, we've a fairly good idea about how many and what types of things can go wrong. With AI ... ?
It's the 'but not like a human, so how' that I'm curious about.
The 8900 resembled (very closely) a Data General Nova.
Well, it was always a microcontroller. It just barely worked in early personal computers. As has been pointed out, it was very fast for what it did. Programmers learned how to get a great deal out of it, but why not have sane architecture that you don't have to fight with? (See also: 8088).
The strength of the 6502 is that it was done using 3300 transistors (similar to the 8008), but was actually useful. The weakness is that the compromises to fit in that footprint were, shall we say, not forward-looking.
All those changes you want to put on the 6502, just start with a decent architecture to begin with.
There were other mainframes than IBM and other terminals than 327x. e.g. VT52 on a DEC-10 (and lots of others)
Well, you only actually need machine language :)
In fact, the early CDC OS's were written in octal. They disassembled them later when they got an assembler working....
I'd rather not. My first job involved assembly code for a one-off signal processor stage, designed by a bunch of Swedes. It was a Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) machine, with a 128-bit instruction; four-core SIMD with 12-bit data inputs, and 16-bit internal processing.
Different parts of the CPU were controlled by different "phrases" within that instruction - some related to the current cycle (IIRC the ALU operation, branch tests), some related to the next cycle (setting up the read and write memory address generators), and some related to the next-but-one cycle (parameter memory address generator setups).
A deeply fun experience - after we signed off the production version of code, I spent the next seven years hoping that they wouldn't find a bug and make me go back to it.
There's a bit more to the Rotary Rocket story than "They ran out of money."
A longstanding friend of mine was working there. I was on the phone with her very shortly after the shutdown announcement went out.
aren't the Commonwealth worried about fallout? Or EMP effects on their own electrical infrastructure?
Probably not. At high drone altitudes, say 10 to 20 km, fallout products will be finely dispersed, carried up and fall slowly, meaning that they will be dispersed over wide areas by winds at altitude and have many days to decay. And the wide area EMP producing phenomena that people usually worry about take place at much higher burst altitudes.
That said, it's not the kind of thing I'd recommend doing as a habit.
Yes, I wonder what the mortality rate of pilots would have been had they gone into production. It sounded like a scary beast to land.
The electric vs. petroleum comparison I care about, personally, is range and ease of re-energizing (filling the tank or charging the battery).
The silly-simple way to think of it is that if the energy density of batteries increases by about a factor of 10-20, then batteries take over for most applications (with the exception of main battle tanks and similar), because you can put a battery where you put the gas tank and the range will be the same as for gasoline. Yes, the power train matters too, but we already know how to run civilization on these kinds of energy densities. The rest are hiccups and retoolings. The problem is that battery energy density is 20 times lower, and that requires major accommodations and/or limitations (like using the car solely for short hops and commuting--while this is critically important, it's also specialized, and I'd hate to depend on an eCar to evacuate from a disaster).
Refueling does matter if time is money (or lives, as when refueling a tank during a battle, or a car ahead of a hurricane). If we had small cars with, say, a 120 kWh battery, we could deal with the range anxiety (120 kWh would send a Bolt over 450 miles), and charging overnight would be as good as tanking up, in most but not all cases. Such a car would be a nuisance to road-trip in, because you'd be limited by the car's need to recharge, not your own endurance. But it could be done.
There are some fairly important follow-ons from this, because we've built the US and other countries around technology that can send a car 400-odd miles on a tank of gas and refuel in a short time. If we're stuck with big, slowly charging batteries and no gas, we'll need to rebuild civilization to accommodate them, and this will take a lot of work (and petroleum expenditures) to accomplish (start with how many people have to commute over 100 miles/day and go from there). The more we can make electricity act like gasoline, the less we have to rebuild, and possibly the fewer problems we'll have with this particular part of climate adaptation (assuming humans all follow the better angels of their nature, which of course we always do all the time...). Personally, I think the follow-ons from wide-scale shifts in how we power things are probably more important than how often we tank up, but that's just me. Most people have been conditioned to care more about convenience than consequences.
The ultimate shotgun if you don't have a Test Ban Treaty, I guess. But you're right, it says more for their bomb-making skills than it does for their aim.
Speaking of aim, I wonder how you fly an autonomous, world-walking drone. Those things have a high crash rate to start off with, even when they're being remotely piloted. That crash rate would go up massively if they had to do long-duration flights autonomously, then return to some point, jump, and then pass back under control in order to be landed. What fun.
Being an innately silly person, I wonder why they don't simply rig a U2 with the right equipment and loft that. Those things are close enough to flying transformers as it is. Surely one more module wouldn't mess up the mission that much...
Does what you say hold true if we still follow the 80/20 rule? In other words, electrify only 80 percent of the US's transportation and leave the remaining 20 percent petroleum-powered? How much of the infrastructure would we have to rebuild then?
"it says more for their bomb-making skills than it does for their aim."
Well, that's kind of the point - they're doing the same thing that we did with early nuclear missiles, or on a smaller scale with flak - if you can't aim accurately enough to hit the target, use a bigger bang so it doesn't matter when you miss. (And the altitude is wrong for EMP, and as for fallout, not only do airbursts not produce much but what is produced will be carried by the prevailing winds into enemy territories, so they probably aren't too concerned about it.)
IIRC the US don't actually know this yet; they know something ate their drone, but they don't know what it was, the drone just didn't come back. So they don't yet know that the Commonwealth isn't up to US standards of targeting ability; seeing CRT displays on computers in the railway offices isn't much of a hint, partly because LCD flat panels are a different manufacturing problem from LSI chips, partly because there's no guarantee that an alien line of development would be aiming for them anyway and they have seen a few clues that it might not be, and partly because if it is like this world, you might well expect computer terminals in railway offices to be old and clunky compared to what you get elsewhere. On the other hand it means that the US also don't know that that timeline is much less averse to casually chucking nukes about than their own.
In English one word can have multiple meanings with the intended specific meaning understood only once the utterance is completed.
Mostly. One hopes. Heck I understood the meaning of the word "and" in Charlie's admonition about DT posting differently than he meant it. And I went back and re-read his sentence and decided yes he was right but I wasn't wrong. Big pond issue or fuzziness in English. Pick either one and still there's an issue.
Let's hope this Chinese spaceplane isn't vaporware.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/11/chinas-secretive-spaceplane-may-launch-in-2020/
Note that in my opinion, it sounds too good to be true, but who knows?
Been there. Done that. Got the shirt and hat. No thanks. I'll stop and write an assembler. At least a crude one.
Sort of did once. Way back in ancient times an async controller was not able to do what we needed. But it to use it we had to load a blob of code into the board first. So I looked at the board, saw the 8008 chip, went out and bought an 8008 manual and wrote a dissembler for the code. Quickly added some tags for obvious data and the ability to define labels. We then modified the code to do what we wanted.
Only 2K but they WAS in ancient times.
The mass infrastructure replacement problem arises because we do not have a programme aimed at getting off fossil fuel with the least hassle. (Instead we have isolated things going on which are not concerned with getting off fossil fuel, but which people not involved with them hope will have that result as a side-effect.) If we did have such a programme, the resources currently being used in scattered research into battery chemistry might be redirected into concerted research into the chemistry of artificial photosynthesis. Given that, there would be no need to replace any of the infrastructure apart from the actual oil wells; you just feed the current system with artificially-photosynthesised hydrocarbon feedstock instead of dug-up hydrocarbon feedstock, and keep everything else the same.
Back in the era we are discussing most of the computing was done on IBM mainframes and imitations. There was a lot of other stuff around in somewhat large absolute numbers but still dwarfed by the number of displays connected to IBM type systems. With all of the 327x headaches that created.
And yes minicomputers started to change that but talk about fragmentation. [eye roll] Then personal computers showed up and MS took over and suddenly the user interface options totally changed.
This whole discussion of computer languages and instruction set architectures is fun (though I think, often misguided). However, thinking about this from the point of view of the story, it seems to miss the real areas where borrowed tech matters.
The huge deciding factors in the development of Commonwealth computer technology isn't computer languages with formal proofs or whatnot: it's hardware and organized central planning.
To elaborate, the commonwealth gets to borrow 75 years worth of science, chemistry, semiconductor process technology, physics, and so on ad nauseam. What's that, 40 years of work to develop bright LEDs in every color? Psst here are a few chemistries to try, you should have that figured out in a few months. Integrated circuits? Let's have a little chat. We should be able to double density every few months, how about we call it Miriam's Law?
Having hardware development move at such a rapid pace means that software is really going to be along for the ride in a lot of ways. There simply isn't going to be time to develop a lot of well thought out, polished systems. Adam in #119 mentioned programmer-centuries that have gone into LAPACK etc., but the truth is that we've put that much effort into a dozen different operating systems, countless applications, etc. The commonwealth is trying to build the same thing, but far more rapidly -- they need software now and it takes time to write.
Doing something like formally proving software and hardware components, inventing really good polished high level languages and so on sounds great in theory. In practice, it seems like this scenario has things changing so fast, it's going to be chaos, with lots of shoddy, buggy stuff.
Trying to make everything good from the start, for example a secure TCP? Arguably bad second-system effect stuff. Say you need TCP in year 3, but don't need the security until year 10 (because everything has physical security until then). Not to mention the mathematicians... and on top of that TCP needs to run on tiny computers, but the security need appears when you're up to 32 bit, right? So the answer is to build what you need, but emphasize the ability to forward-port, recompile, etc. as you go, so the transition isn't painful.
The big thing the central planning gives you is the ability to avoid false steps. Segment registers? No, in three generations we're going to do memory mapping this way. You're having an argument about graphics? Not planar thanks. And so on.
Could you please provide documentation of the high drone crash rate, compared to piloted aircraft?
Reason I ask: there's some chatter going around about pilotless passenger transports, and I'd REALLY like to have some Class A mishap rate safety data available to shoot it down. If the remotely-piloted or autonomous drones have higher mishap rates than piloted airplanes, that has dire consequences for remotely-piloted or autonomous passenger and cargo vehicles.
Note: The insurance companies will also be looking at this, and they are known around the world for having No Sense Of Humor At All.
"It's a very fuzzy world when you start deciding what is and is not a programming language.."
I agree completely.
Notions such as "programming", "programming language", "computing", "algorithm", etc make nice intuitive sense. But poke them hard and the limits are not at all clear.
Nor is there any real reason to believe that these notions should have sharp boundaries instead of fuzzy ones. Lots of useful concepts are more like the concept of a "game": not a concept with sharp edges defining what's in and out but instead a bit fuzzy around the edges.
My (unfinished) PhD thesis was on philosophy of computing. I could write you a lot of pages reach that same conclusion if you wanted, but I think you've hit the nail on the head.
"However, thinking about this from the point of view of the story, it seems to miss the real areas where borrowed tech matters."
Absolutely.
Jumping to modern corn, wheat and rice hybrids would likely make a vastly bigger jump in GDP than everything to do with computers. I've no idea about cotton, but expect the same may be true there.
The % of the US workforce that is in agriculture dropped from 35% in 1900 to under 3% in 2000. While moving to producing vastly more food per head of population, of more types, that people like more. That ten-times increase is agricultural yields was a huge deal. I know, better crops didn't do all that - but it did at least a third of it, and moving seeds paratime should have been about as safe and trivial as you can get.
Cows that give more milk. Sheep that grow better wool (and reliably have twins). Etc.
Humanity's created biological capital is a very important part of our wealth.
Here's a quote from wikipedia "Agriculture in the United States":
"In 1870, almost 50 percent of the US population was employed in agriculture.[16] As of 2008, less than 2 percent of the population is directly employed in agriculture.[17][18]"
A 25 times increase in labor productivity is just amazing.
It's the 'but not like a human, so how' that I'm curious about. Aren't we all? But no-one at all seems to be addressing the problem, apart, perhaps from Mr P Watts ...
Looks like Skylon/HOTOL backed by PROPER guvmint money & long-term thinking, as opposed to, you know .... Good luck to them. IF it works, you could see Skylon given a boost, because, IIRC, no-one else is doing this.
Exactly so - the real test of "good code" is not how long it takes to write, but how long it takes to understand 10 years from now, when the guy who wrote it has gone on to other things (or even when he's still here but hasn't looked at it himself since it passed SAT).
And a couple of designs with side by side rotors with independent discs (I can think of a MiL and a Focke-Angelis off-hand), some Kamans with interlaced but not co-axial rotors...
Aircraft and submarines are devices for transporting pink meat, not organisms. UAVs are usually scaled down examples of aircraft (I'm well aware of US types such as the QF-4) and submarines.
Any configuration language that supports...
... is Turing complete.
s/other things/$& in the sky/
Suggest that the concept isn't necessarily wedded to tip rockets. Isn't the same overall concept still there if the main rotor is driven like a conventional helicopter for VTOL, but reverting to auto-rotation for level flight?
Yes, precisely. Defending oneself against a competent, well-funded attacker (especially one that has placed an agent internally) isn't a matter just of securing the main gateways and authority mechanisms, and draconian secrecy rules do nearly as much harm as good. If a configuration is static (fairly common) and only very 'important' and specially cleared people are allowed to view it, how long before an attack would be discovered? And, of course, imprisoning teenagers who hack in from a laptop in their bedroom (show trials 'R' us) is merely denial and vindictiveness.
I think you missed the point there ....
"I mean a language that a human could learn and understand but that an AI could not."
There are plenty, at present. Non-simple English or Japanese, for two - note that, at a certain level, inventing new words and idioms on the fly is part of English usage, at least this side of the pond and down under. Whether one exists at all depends on whether you believe the likes of Penrose and people like Pence, who assert there is more to human minds than emergent properties of describable biological actions. But, even if one doesn't, we don't yet know anything like enough about the human mind to write an AI that will match an intelligent human.
The tip rockets were relatively light, driving the lifting blades via a conventional engine in helicopter fashion means you've got either a large engine cutting into payload during cruise or some horrendously complicated power transfer system between the horizontal engines and the lifting blades. If you were designing a Rotodyne from scratch today you might go for an electric drive for the lifting blades driven by generators on the horizontal engines I suppose.
Ok, if I modify your comment to:
I still don't get what you're talking about -- Algol 68 gave the programmer no control over the garbage collector at all and I still don't see what you mean by "secondary stack", Algol 68 had a stack (for LOC generators) and a heap (for HEAP generators).They trouble with that is that as soon as you go away from the rotor tip drive to a mechanically driven rotor torque reaction rears its ugly head and you need to introduce complications like a tail rotor (or equivalent thereof) or contra-rotating rotors.
The thing about the rotodyne (and other rotor tip drive concepts) was the sheer simplicity, because so much messy, heavy, complicated, mechanically lossy, aerodynamically untidy stuff just goes away...
Sendmail as a Turing machine.
Quite apart from the relative costs of nuke and drone (which admittedly for a high tech stealth drone might not be as much as I think), aren't the Commonwealth worried about fallout? Or EMP effects on their own electrical infrastructure?
No more than the USA was, circa 1958-1988: see the Nike Hercules for a direct comparison.
Note that the Commonwealth air defenses are fine-tuned to deal with a stream of A-bomb toting French strategic bombers that could swarm across the Atlantic, the Arctic, and the Bering Straits at any time. A nuclear missile is used because that's what they've got (and if you wonder why in our time line gun turrets on bombers, and massed bomber formations with aircraft covering each other against interceptors, went out of fashion in the late 1940s/early 1950s, nukes-on-SAMs is precisely the answer you're looking for: it tilted the balance of power drastically towards the defenders).
Note also that, unlike the USA circa 1950, the Commonwealth began rolling out its modern infrastructure in the full knowledge of what EMP does to integrated circuitry. Expect their standards for personal computers to include Tempest shielding and hardening against moderate EMP,, at a minimum.
There is a certain type of person who thinks it is cool to make every little thing turing complete. I used to be one of them, but long ago came to my senses and concluded that they are insane.
The undecidable compiler is simultaneously the coolest and nastiest thing about C++. Who couldn't both be impressed and slightly nauseated by a compile time ray tracer?
"Exactly so - the real test of "good code" is not how long it takes to write, but how long it takes to understand 10 years from now, when the guy who wrote it has gone on to other things "
The C++ codebase I'm working on is from 1993-1994, according to the comments in the headers. Though it has been patched many times since, mostly by people who don't understand it.
Clean initial design, maintained since by illiterate gerbils who have defected in the corners and widdled on everything.
No documentation that I trust to be accurate. No vendor support, they shot the gerbils and gave up on the product.
One day your code will be like this.
As pointed out earlier, you've also got high-pressure fuel and ignition mechanisms, passing through a single unshielded point of failure at the most vulnerable corner of the flight envelope (coming in slowly to land). In terms of resistance to battle damage, it's a joke.
As I understand it, that's not true. Tip jets on gyrodynes are fed by compressed air through the drive shaft; you're not pumping fuel down the blades (unless you're confusing this with Roton?). Or maybe the Hiller Hornet (tip-jet ramjets for propulsion? Yow!).
You've got a somewhat simpler gearbox and rotor hub up top—it's essentially an autogyro, with tip jets to spin up the rotor so it can take off vertically (unlike a classic autogyro). Fairey claimed their design studies suggested they could have cut at least 10dB off the noise output by making some simple changes to the second prototype, never mind the results of a decade or two of active development and new airframes.
(Back to the novels: my thought is, if you want a V-22-like capability and don't have the ability to throw three decades of tiltrotor research and several tens of billions of bucks at the problem, a rotodyne is a much cheaper/lower tech option. Many of the same drawbacks in terms of noise/range/stealth, but it's able to autorotate (hence much simpler gearbox arrangements) and you can build it with 50s tech, not 90s tech.)
OK. CREDIBLE SPORT I knew about — you know the videos of the C-130 trying it for the first time (and failing, spectacularly) are on YouTube? — STARS is something I was looking for the name of (and background details) because I'm using something very like it in a book, but the EXINT pod is just bugfuck crazy. Ahem. Maybe not crazy to the sort of folks who try stowing away in the landing gear of a commercial airliner, but I'd still carry a change of underpants and a lucky charm or sixteen.
Let's hope this Chinese spaceplane isn't vaporware.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: a spacecraft needs wings, a wheeled undercarriage, and a runway like a fish needs a bicycle.
The commonwealth is trying to build the same thing, but far more rapidly -- they need software now and it takes time to write.
Yes. And they also have a huge handicap: lack of human capital.
We've had general-purpose digital computers and programming languages for nearly 70 years, but it's only in the past 35 years or so that programming has become a mass activity — I'd date it to the early 1980s, when computer labs became ubiquitous in high schools and home computers became affordable.
The importance (to Miriam) of rolling out washing machines and launderettes in factories everywhere is that it frees up an immense amount of human capital for activities more productive than bashing fabric on rocks. Similarly, the importance to the Commonwealth of rolling out home computers is that it generates a culture in which a certain proportion of young adults self-teach themselves the basic idea that a computer is programmable, and can then be filtered off and trained to do the job properly.
Lest we forget: around 1980, a "wildly successful" personal computer maybe sold a million units. IBM originally expected the 5150 to sell 50-100,000 (it, and its clones, sold tens of millions.) Many of them sold in the tens of thousands instead. Go back to the mid-1960s and the first truly successful minicomputer, the PDP-8, sold about 50,000 units across its entire life. Today, a "wildly successful" personal computing device is something like the latest iPhone or Samsung flagship, and sells tens of millions in its first week out.
I submit that if you're trying to jumpstart a technological revolution you can't bootstrap the mass skill base you need fast enough with PDP-8s (cost: $140,000 in today's money: one per school, there's a form to sign up for your one hour per week session at the console) — you need Apple IIs ($5000 in today's money: one lab per school, many more schools have them) or BBC Model B's (about $1000 today: entire classrooms, plus lots of them in students' bedrooms), produced in multi-million volumes.
Yes, precisely. Back in the early 1970s, a lot of us predicted a workstation revolution when the price hit 5,000 (pounds or dollars), which could be used to run mini-computer applications, starting in the research arena. The point is that such people (and small businesses) could squeeze that out of existing budgets, but 10,000 needed a special budget. We were dead right, though we were completely wrong about how it would happen! I was expecting one of the Sun/Apollo copiers (who did hit that price point c. 1979) to deliver something usable, but they never did. As it was, the first workstations widely used for practical work were the Apple II, BBC Micro and IBM PC/XT, all of which were marginal in various respects, and the revolution happened when the Intel 386 systems arrived (including the IBM PC/AT). Incidentally, did you know that the original IBM PC wasn't even intended to be used as a free-standing system by IBM Galactic Headquarters, and IBM didn't abandon their belief that the future was PCs serving a mainframe until after the demise of the PS/2?
As you say, where speed is the objective, you need something like a BBC Micro out as fast as possible, followed a few years later by one of the Intel 386 Unixish systems. Setting up services on a modification of one of the better mainframe time-sharing systems (POP II, MTS, Titan, GUTS etc.), would be an alternative to the BBC Micro, but that would probably fall because of the lack of people to run the service.
I'm quite certain that you missed at least one, possibly two, points:-
1) Transport machines do something fundamentally different to animals. 2) There's a silent "Human" in "Artificial Intelligence".
When it comes to flinging around the instant sunshine - we have to understand that we're a generation that has cultural baggage surrounding the tolerance of casualties. AFAIK, none of us has experienced an existential war - but many of us know someone who has.
The generation that lived through the Second Big Mistake had seen civilian populations treated as legitimate targets, and killed by their tens and hundreds of thousands in air raids. Those who watched as the Luftwaffe bombed London, Glasgow, Liverpool, and Coventry; or even those who watched as the IJA tore through Nanking; knew full well that "they" were out to kill "our" families, and became quite happy to accept that "we" were going to make the rubble bounce in "their" cities, or even turn them into glass car parks. If the cost of "not shooting down a bomber" is a fission weapon used on a city, then a few comparatively-clean small-yield airbursts are a perfectly acceptable risk.
The military of that era were willing to balance far higher risks to life in order to gain performance - because every week that your front-line crews are flying against Fw.190 in Hawker Hurricanes instead of Hawker Typhoons, guarantees more dead pilots.
If you look at the crash and fatality rates for the Gloster Meteor in peacetime service, they were incredibly high; a fighter pilot a week, often more. Granted, they weren't completely daft - the Hawker Typhoon was grounded as "too risky to fly in peacetime" almost immediately after VE-Day.
As often said, the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
Would you give me something like 100_000 lines, split roughly equally between stuff developed by a 3rd party using "formal methods" but not supplying their documentation, and stuff my boss and I wrote in-house using the same naming conventions being ported from Ada83 to Ada95, and tested using supplied test data in 4 man months as "at least trying to write good code"?
I think it's true of most blogs and user groups - that is, women are less likely to comment than men are. I don't know the distribution of SF readers by sex, and perhaps men are still more likely than women to read SF.
Like 47 of the other 49 states, Wisconsin awards the electoral college votes on a winner-take-all basis. Had Clinton won the majority of the votes in Wisconsin, she'd have gotten all its electoral votes.
In 2012, there was a movement in states like Wisconsin to award electoral votes by congressional district, but that failed.
I suspect you're right; I tried to do something by sampling the present membership of Follycon (BSFA Eastercon 2018) and gave up when I realised that they'd sorted by forename + if exists midname + surname and I couldn't just count a sample to get a meaningful answer.
No, "bugfuck crazy" is strapping yourself to the outside of an AH-64 to get to a fight - search for "Jugroom Fort Apache rescue".
Somewhat less daft is that I've sat in the doorway with my feet on the skids while a Westland Scout was flying us across Dartmoor; it was a wide back door, and we had two of us on each side. Safety was provided by a strap across the doorway, that you hung your arms over...
These days, the RAF MERT and USAF Pedro teams have the luxury of using bigger helicopters (Chinook and Blackhawk respectively) - that wasn't always the case. The EXINT pod is little different to how armies did CASEVAC from the 1950s to 1990s. Look at the Bell H-13 in the opening sequence of MAS*H". They stuck panniers on the outside to carry a pair of stretchers...
Past 300, so...
BOOK COLLECTORS' OPPORTUNITY ALERT If your trading area features any Dollar General, Family Dollar, Dollar Tree, Big Lots, or their equivalent U.K. shops, walk the aisles until you find a book section, usually 5 or 10 feet of counter space loaded with Bibles, coloring books, teen romance etc. Spend fifteen minutes restacking and rotating the stock from one shelf to the next to spot titles of interest, should have a few gems in the clutter, likely reduced to $1.00 on an original thirty buck hardcover newer than 2012. I found Thomas Wolfe's "Back to Blood", Thomas Pynchon's "Inherent Vice", "Clean Energy Nation" by Congressman J. McNerney formerly a wind turbine developer, and promising translations from Dutch, Swedish and Chilean authors. Also biographies and autobiographies of politicians like H. Clinton, Sarkozy and Leon Panetta. Not bad for a trash wallow. And I enjoyed Inherent Vice so much I found a copy of the 2014 movie on dvd at the library, turns out it was produced by none other than the same Steve Mnuchin currently serving as Secretary of the Treasury. Besides getting three billion for the bank he sold, he also managed to find time funding a slew of movies like "Transformers." Talk about a renaissance man, right down to his Machiavellian foreclosure practices. About time I got something for my tax dollar, the Pynchon movie was virtually word for word from the book.
Slightly. It used to be considerably, but things have changed.
http://www.sfwa.org/2014/01/reads-science-fiction/
I don't know of any competent research on why males are more likely to speak up in public than women, but I do know the politically correct arguments are essentially just polemic. As with the reading demographic, that used not to be the case, but there is something fairly subtle going on; I suspect that I know some factors involved, but could well be wrong, so won't introduce a red herring.
I don't know the distribution of SF readers by sex, and perhaps men are still more likely than women to read SF.
The word I've heard is that women account for the majority of fiction consumed, by about a 60/40 split.
Some genre consumer bases are gendered more heavily than others. Genre romance is about 75% female consumers (but note that 25% is bought by men, and it accounts for roughly 50% of all fiction sales). "Hard SF", with its Cambellian overtones of two-fisted engineering stories, and it's spin-off, MilSF, is predominantly read by men — but it's still about a 65/35 split. Overall, SF is supposed to be about 55/45 male/female readers, and fantasy is an even split (skewing towards 75/25 once you get into paranormal romance, which started out as a subgenre within romance).
But anyway: the overt gender split among the commentariat on this blog isn't representative of the genre readership gender ratio, or even the ratio evident in people who contact me privately by email.
Since it is past 300, yes, he has. None of those easy solutions help much, as I can witness. The only thing that does is wintering in the sun, even if only for a couple of fortnights.
No, "bugfuck crazy" is strapping yourself to the outside of an AH-64 to get to a fight - search for "Jugroom Fort Apache rescue".
When I first heard of this, my reaction was, as near as I remember "These guys are totally bat guano crazy, and exactly the sort of people you want to come looking for you if you go missing in a war zone!"
no ( or maybe not ) and YES - that "silent H" is important.
Problem with AI at present - it's static - trapped inside a rooted-to-the spot casing. Humans & other animals are mobile/motile. What's the (last?) test for intelligence? Ask Prometheus, who gave humans a gift from the gods of fire.
Heh, I always liked the chopper boys from the era of widespread helicopter hunting in NZ from the 50s to late 70s. Rex Forester put out an amazing couple of books on the subject in the 80s, reissued together with ample photos in 2002.
From the early days of seeing how many carcasses you can jamb into an aircraft and still actually fly to the late days of jumping out of a helicopter to wrestle a stag to the ground and tie it up for live recovery, more than half the guys were frankly mad. I especially liked the guy who jumped out of a chopper in the mountains to grab a thar, only to have it kick and start them both tumbling towards a cliff. The pilot judged the angles, flew near the edge, and slipped to one side to move the blades out of the way while his shooter falls over the edge and inside the back, and then drastically tilts the other to stop him falling straight out the open door on the other side. Nuts.
I agree with someone else - half a dozen to a dozen, not more. Yes, I am including assembly, but not you'll probably have more than one assembly language, since it can be architecture-dependent.
C for varying from low-to-mid level (Unless someone wants to argue for PL/1, which I worked in at my first job, and understand it was created to build 360/MVS).
Higher level languages for different kinds of data processing. Hell, a modified version of COBOL (add pointers, and some additional loop controls, so someone like me didn't have to write PERFORM 1000-DUMMY-PARAGRAGH THROUGH 1000-DUMMY-PARAGRAPH-EXIT WHILE You would want something like this to, for example, process federal income tax returns for the country. And this one or two languages would have no trouble accessing d/bs.
A different one for GUI-writing and interactive code. FUCK JAVA!!!
And a utility program or two.
SQL isn't exactly a language. As I have read, it was created for managers to get quick reports, so that they didn't have to wait weeks for DP to cut and test the code. Besides, a relational d/b is NOT the Only answer. In fact, there's a good number of times that Ye Olde hierarchical is better and faster.
Anyone who suggests creating a "language" that secretaries can punch out columns to create a report (RPG) should be shot.
At a low level, I do include formatting. Most students don't, for example, indent, because they just want to get the code written for the class, and will never look at it again.
At the higher level, that's what I meant: structured, encapsulated code. Btw, back when I was working in C a lot, early nineties, a guy I had for an office mate for a while and I agreed: if a function was more than a 25 line screen or two, unless you were moving a ton of fields, it was too long, and you were trying to cram too much into it.
Companies almost never mandate things like error-handling style, or how/whether code should be modular, atc.
ARGH!!!
63-bit words on that damn Cyber....
Um, sorry, the computer revolution was in full swing within a year or two of the intro of the IBM PC. It was new at work in '84... or was that the end of '83?
Oh, and you've got an issue there: the PC-AT was 80286, not a 386. My first Intel box (my first computer having been a RadShack CoCo) was a 286, that I got for a good price in '87.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRGHGHGGHGHGHHGHGHGHHGHGHHGHGHGHHG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
And I've read that the author, Allman, said that the configuration was intended to be easy for the program to interpret, not for the convenience of puny humans....
Read a book a friend loaned me? Gave me? a bunch of years ago, autobiographical, written by a slick pilot about 'Nam.
You want GENUINELY certifiable?
Re: 'If there is such a difference then it's not AI.'
Are you implying that any human-begat AI is merely an amplified cartoon/truncated human?
Yes, but the 286 was pretty much useless in terms of memory addressing IIRC — things only really took off with the 386 (true 32-bit address space as well as backward-compatability modes for running 8086 code). Interestingly, the 386 was implemented with only about 300,000 transistors as I recall—compare to the modern billion-plus component chips? And at one time I worked along with about 15 other folks on a single 386 running UNIX. With 32Mb of RAM and a smart serial terminal i/o box driving a bunch of Wyse terminals it was quite capable of pretending to be a mid-1980s minicomputer.
Naah, THIS guy was certifiable.
Link goes to his obituary because the book is VERY out-of-print; but the obit misses out a lot of the juicy bits. And no, he didn't make just five ejections: he was Martin-Baker's ejector seat test dummy for about a decade (and an Olympic parachutist).
That isn't what was intended to be "the sendmail configuration language", that was intended to be the "somewhat human-readable representation of the rewrite language that sendmail runs", with another layer on top, generating that, that humans interact with. This, as it turns out, eventually materialised as "sendmail.mc" quite a few years later. Sadly, I actually find (correction, found; I am sufficiently out of experience with either these days) sendmail.cf more readable than the slightly more machine-hostile version.
Other languages that had a similar thing was Lisp (what's now considered lisp was the "structured expressions", intended for the interpreter/compiler to deal with, converted from a more human-friendly syntax (m expressions) that really never took off).
The first computer to sell one million units was Commodore's VIC-20, which had 5K, (of which about 3.5 K was available) for the built-in ROM-BASIC. They sold for around U.S. $300.00, and I'm guessing that Miriam's friend could find one on Ebay and ship it across timelines to the Commonwealth. The VIC-20 had a tape drove, and Commodore eventually developed a modem that sold for U.S. $99. There was also an add-on memory device which had 40 K. This was in 1981.
The VIC-20 was replaced by the venerable and much-beloved Commodore-64, at around U.S. $600.00. Since Miriam came from the U.S., this is probably what she's thinking about in terms of how to evolve a computing culture.
If Miriam really knows the history of computing, however, she'll go the PARC-Xerox route and the ROM will contain something more like Smalltalk and less like BASIC. (I think the first PARC computers had around 8K.)
I worked on some software for those, once, and their statistics on spinal damage during ejection were horrifying - until you realise what the alternative was. But, yes, HE was certifiable.
Re: '... the commonwealth gets to borrow 75 years worth of science, chemistry, semiconductor process technology, physics, and so on ad nauseam.'
Not only borrow but sift through to identify the best kernels. Most SF alt-history stories I've read seem to require that the alt-world go through every single step and misstep in development. Why would anyone sane waste their time and resources recapitulating the coal era (incl. smog, lung disease, CO2 GW, etc.) when they can go direct to clean renewables. Also, once you've identified your likeliest energy source, you can work backwards to design the most efficient, lowest cost to build and operate infrastructure. I understand why most of our infrastructure was built directly on or next to older infrastructure, but that's what makes changing it so much more expensive therefore politically difficult.
Tech leap-frogging is not that far-fetched, just look at China, Saudi Arabia and a number of African countries who've opened trade with China and that are leapfrogging and cherry-picking their tech at a much lower cost than the West/US. Ditto leap-frogging of laptops vs. smartphones across first- vs. third-world geographies.
I worked in '286 *nix for a long time. It had a couple of slight problems with its memory management that caused problems -- including one particular run of processors (from AMD) not handling a segment-not-present case, meaning it couldn't handle segment swapping.
But the biggest problem it really had was that C and *nix were taking over when it came out, and C (despite uSoft's attempts) really wasn't set up to handle non-uniform pointer sizes, or complex pointer types. (You can think of the '286 as an attempt to fit Pascal and Ada -- stack, data, and heap in their own segments, and other objects could be in their own segments. Unfortunately, setting a segment register took a painful number of clock cycles.)
The '386 could have been very interesting if they'd used segments on top of pages, instead of mapping on everything on top of a flat address space. (This would have allowed you to have multiple segments, each 4GBytes, which could have had their own permissions and page mapping tables.) Of course, they would still have needed to make the segment loading faster.
The CDC 6600, and its brethren (6400, 6500, 6700, 7600) and descendents (Cyber 70, Cyber 170) central processors had 60-bit words. The peripheral processors used 12-bit words. (The PPs were descended from and VERY similar to the CDC 160A.)
In the eighties when the second wave of personal computers were developed (the 16/32 bit successors to the 8-bit first wave) nobody picked x86 processors apart from IBM. Apple Mac - 68000, Commodore Amiga - 68000, Atari ST - 68000, Acorn Archimedes - developed ARM. Of these (x86, 68k, ARM) the most widely used now is ARM and probably the best to 'borrow' to bootstrap a CPU industry.
Both sides routinely do that.
Look at Eddie Bernice Johnson's (D-TX) district in Dallas. If you can find the older one, it is especially telling. It had a fractal border, having been VERY carefully crafted to create a safe district for a female Democrat of color who was not remotely competent or ethical.
I had the misfortune to live in that district for several years.
There was also the redraw of the Dallas City Council districts, when Judge "Barefoot" Sanders ordered them to abandon at-large election and do a 15-1 single member district plan. As one of the local critics pointed out, it was easy to draw districts that balanced the demographics nicely against the total city, but it was IMPOSSIBLE to do that AND protect the incumbent City Councilcritters.
You have misunderstood what I was saying. Yes, you are right about the PC/AT - the c. 1984 developments were the game-changer, but the 386 was also important because it enabled decent operating systems and the full range of mini-computer applications. I don't know where you are posting from but, in the early 1980s, the use of personal computers was much higher in the UK than anywhere else and, if I recall, was several times as much as in the USA.
The revolution actually started much earlier. By 1977, $5,000 desktops were widespread, but all were set up to run a single application, and their users did not program them. Most of the practical uses of the early IBM PCs were the same (VisiCalc and others). Hobbyist computers took off about 1977, too, but were used almost entirely by 'geeks' and did not impinge much on the general public. That was important, because many of those became serious programmers, later.
An equally serious point was that most of the early personal computers encouraged people to program in BASIC. Most computer scientists and IT professionals dreaded teaching or employing BASIC programmers, as the first thing one had to do was to get them to accept that most of what they had learnt was positively harmful. BBC Basic was slightly better and, more importantly, the BBC Micro was designed to make data capture and machine control easy - so a lot of hobbyists learnt about that.
I was pretty closely involved with IBM at the time. Most of the early IBM PCs tried out by professionals were rejected as a pile of shit or unsuitable for the desired uses, except for the ones used to run a canned application. The IBM PC/AT, MS-DOS 3, Digital Research and others changed that, including by providing compilers for the languages used on mini-computers, but not until about 1984. Inter alia, a wayward program could and did trash the filing system under MS-DOS 2, because a critical table was kept in memory.
IBM also made a 68k based computer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System_9000) at the same time as their original PC.
Re: Gender split - SF/F readership
Just read the article you linked to. Not knowing how the survey was worded, it's difficult to tell what the results actually mean. As you suggest, one issue is how consumers and retailers (not just publishers) label genres. Depending on the bookstore, horror is sometimes in the same section as SF while older/classic horror, SF and spec-fic (Shelley, Welles, Huxley) are in the Literature section. Also, larger book stores may have a larger number of discrete sections and split out Fantasy vs. SciFi vs. YA (whose themes skew toward dystopias, zombies, vampires, etc.).
I imagine that the mil-SF readership gender profile/incidence changed considerably during the years that LMBujold was pumping out her Vor universe series at the rate of about one book per year.
"I don't know of any competent research on why males are more likely to speak up in public than women, but I do know the politically correct arguments are essentially just polemic"
That seems a very odd claim to me. When I taught at university I was, of course, concerned that all the student feel equally free to participate in discussions. As someone who tries to hire & retain the best staff, I have of course worried about this.
And the research is both solidly empirical, very clear, and unequivocal. Women get interrupted far more, and have their ideas ignored more and taken up by the group less. Topic changes by women are more likely than be ignored, their suggestions are less likely to be followed. Their ideas get challenged more, but more than that they get ignored significantly more, and are more likely to be treated negatively if they are criticising others views. Males who speak a lot are rated more highly by their peers, women less highly.
These effects have been measured in classrooms at the primary, secondary and university level, in business meetings, in private conversations. The effects are cross-culturally robust across various English speaking countries and regions. The effects are robust across racial and demographic boundaries.
So we've an extraordinarily well ground empirical fact that men get respected more for speaking up in group settings than women.
The jump from women getting more negative feedback for speaking up to "So this is why they speak up less" is not as well studied. I assume because most people think it's obvious.
Another reason ARM is a good choice is that they provide designs and architecture licenses rather than chips. Apple (A-series) and Qualcom (snapdragon) have both designed ARM variants and fabs like Samsung and TSMC have both been able to build them so there probably aren't any secret IP issues or backdoors to worry about.
You only have to watch any kind of panel discussion on TV / Youtube to see this happening.
Re: Gender bias in the classroom
Lots and lots of research!
Have also seen this myself at a parents' night at prog's school. This school is private, pushes academics, and is on-paper very forward thinking and 'enlightened'. One new teacher showed the same gender bias toward the parents as to the kids in his classroom during the Q&A part of the meeting. When called on it, he fiercely denied it but too many other parents also had noticed and complained. His contract was not renewed. The regular, public (US version) system doesn't have the ability to screen and fire such teachers so this type of social conditioning is likely to go on and be absorbed as this is the way that the world works.
http://www.edchange.org/multicultural/papers/genderbias.html
What did the Jesuits say about 'give me a child for 7 years'?
I think that you have misunderstood me. I am aware of those observations, and have looked at some of the research. But I was referring to the reasons underlying those phenomena, which are massively unclear. Yes, there ARE environments where it can reasonably be said to be 'the patriarchy', but it also occurs under circumstances where that does not apply. In particular, the primary school data makes one wonder whether it is part of the gender differences in the distribution of character traits.
Yes, it happens. And I have seen the converse, too. But the point I was making is also implied by that paper:
"This socialization of femininity begins much earlier than the middle grades. At very early ages, girls begin defining their femininities in relation to boys. ... Reay's research shows that each of the groups of girls defined their own femininities in relation to boys."
But WHY is that? And if it is a taught phenomenon, WHO does the teaching? Because there is evidence that starts before school, even in communities and households where the women are as independent as the men. I have some personal experience of this, and have some speculations on what might be going on.
Check This book out. Note that I'm not an expert, I just listen to the news and have google.
Dude, I remember this first-hand. I was there.
People, please don't try to oldfarsplain the 80s and 90s in computing to someone over 50?
"Tip jets on gyrodynes are fed by compressed air through the drive shaft; you're not pumping fuel down the blades"
The Fairey Rotodyne had a pair of auxiliary compressors driven mechanically from the main turboprops which fed compressed air down the rotor blades to combustion chambers in the tips. Fuel and ignition were delivered up through the centre of the rotor head and then down the blades. That was easy, because it only needs little pipes; it was the high-volume air ducting that complicated things. The tip jets were actual jet engines, not just compressed-air nozzles; the difference was that the rotating bits which are normally inside the engine were in this case a long way away, so the actual engine bit could be much smaller.
Details are here: http://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/1957,pageid_56.html including what alternative rotor drive systems they considered and why they chose what they did.
The tip jet idea itself is considerably older and was apparently originated by Wittgenstein as a means of driving ordinary propellers, before he got into philosophy.
Re: Gender discrimination - classroom
How about social inertia via generational seepage?
Human populations are not all the same age at the same time: several generations (with their generational biases) all act on the newest addition to the human race. My thinking is that this is where a longitudinal study vs. a one-shot cross-sectional, one moment in time survey would help clarify what's going on and identify/weight the key sources/factors. (Plural 'factors', not just one factor.)
Oh, and the 'social inertia' thing is also gender-biased because women's issues are still categorized/dismissed as trivial or secondary, e.g. birth control, abortion, wage parity, rape, even checking for heart attacks in the ER! therefore amplifying the inertia. How to change this: don't reward sexism, and if possible, punish-by-wallet. (Hollywood is currently learning this lesson, 60 years post-Friedan.)
Of course that opens you up to the important questions.
Amiga or ST?
:)
but the 286 was pretty much useless in terms of memory addressing
Which reminds me of the time I was in a briefing on the Munitions List and learned that PC-ATs (80286) were on it. When asked why, the briefer explained that it was because they could be used to design nuclear weapons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Munitions_List
As an aside, I was able to use my 68k* based personal computer to do useful physics calculations well into the 90s.
Wouldn't be seen dead with less than 16gb RAM and 512 CUDA cores these days but the difference in capability between no computer and any computer is far greater than the difference between an 8MHz 68k and something modern.
*Not saying which one until I know which side OGH was on :)
How about a timeline in which Commodore allowed Borland to develop the "Turbo" softwares development environments/compilers for the Amiga? That would have been an interesting future!
With 32Mb of RAM and a smart serial terminal i/o box driving a bunch of Wyse terminals it was quite capable of pretending to be a mid-1980s minicomputer.
Well. It should. Because it was.
Yes, social inertia is possible, but a reason to doubt that it is the whole story is the consistency of the phenomenon. And remember that early conditioning is female-dominated. My view remains that, if you want to solve a problem, you first have to understand it.
"Oh, and the 'social inertia' thing is also gender-biased because women's issues are still categorized/dismissed as trivial or secondary, e.g. birth control, abortion, wage parity, rape, even checking for heart attacks in the ER! therefore amplifying the inertia."
You ARE aware that exactly the same can be said about men's issues, such as prostate cancer (compare with breast cancer) and suicide? Gender differences are not a simple issue.
The one I liked most was the ban on exporting mathematical cryptology to the USSR. Kolmogorov was still alive then, too :-)
Add to the list of languages required something like VHDL. Helps a lot if you can simulate your CPU designs before converting them to hardware, though of course you need an existing platform to run the simulation on. Several of the engineers who'd stayed at Acorn after the ARM spin-out were proficient, Acorn designed some co-processors and support chips for the STB and NC projects using it, and a number of my colleagues who had joined later dabbled.
Neither: Amstrad PCW.
I have some personal experience of this, and have some speculations on what might be going on.
I'd be interested in those speculations. Privately, if you like. my.name@gmail.com will find me…
Don't underestimate how early it begins (studies of how parents touch/look at babies shows different treatment based on perceived gender all the way back to when they're first presented after birth), or peer-group enforcement: masculine behaviour is enforced by peer ridicule of non-masculine behaviour in males, for example. And there are second-order effects. For example, pushback against feminism can come from women who are either strongly invested in the current social hierarchy (and see it as implying loss of relative advantage for themselves), or because of cognitive dissonance (acting to address issues of disempowerment require first admitting that one has been systematically disempowered, which can be unpleasant).
Then there are other really odd interactions with different social hierarchies. Consider how expressions of white western racism against muslims in the west often take the shape of attacks by men against hijab-wearing women, or legislation to enforce female dress codes by "banning the burkha" which are justified in terms of feminism. White supremacism have a strong anti-feminist streak and are obsessively preoccupied with reproductive enslavement of white women. 1930s/40s Nazis were obsessed with the fear of Jewish men inter-marrying with aryan women. And so on.
I am not doing so. My speculations are largely based on the observations of girl children of households with two academic parents, including two daughters of my own with very different characters, especially before the age of 3.
Verilog!
I spent a decade working alongside a bunch of hardware developers. It was interesting to hear one mention that for a while, the choice between the two languages was geographically biased (i.e. Europeans tended to use one, Americans the other). I found both languages frustrating, because they didn’t really do abstraction very well. It was like a trip back to the 80s in language style...
And in an ironic turn, they’re now moving away from SystemVerilog towards coding up their designs in C/C++ and using high-level synthesis tools to achieve better QoR...
Yay ;)
"My view remains that, if you want to solve a problem, you first have to understand it."
If by "understand it" you mean "understand the cause of the problem", then I think that's false. Both in the general case and in this specific one.
General Case:
We didn't need to understand the causal link between tobacco and cancer, or between lead in petrol and paint and brain development, in order to act to solve the problems. Despite the tobacco and oil companies best attempts to claim that we did need to. Some global warming denialist science retreats to the same defense "Dynamic feedbacks! Very complex system! Can't possibly suggest simple solutions if we don't understand the complex system!".
We don't understand how cerebral assymetry and left-handedness work. (Well, we didn't 20 years ago when I read the research) That didn't stop us providing the ability to easily use mice left-handed, or providing young kids with left-handed scissors at school (or ones used easily by either hand - I don't get the trend to "handed-ness" in scissors).
Obviously work done in complete ignorance is likely to fail. And obviously the more we know the more likely we are to have better-focussed solutions. And not all problems are equal - engineering issues tend to have simpler causal relationships.
But typically, once one steps outside the realm of engineering, solutions don't require full understanding of the cause of the problem.
Specific Case:
I'm sure you are aware that there are things that can be done by every teacher, every senior engineer running discussions, and every manager to work to ensure the women speaking up aren't interrupted, that their ideas are being treated with respect, to overcome the bias pretty much everyone in our culture has to ask men questions more than women and not notice we're doing so, etc. Not to mention a zillion details of modelling with young kids.
Maybe that won't "solve the problem" in some perfect sense. But given sufficient time and effort it seems very likely to go a very long way towards it.
pushback against feminism can come from women who are either strongly invested in the current social hierarchy (and see it as implying loss of relative advantage for themselves) The Madwoman form Grantham being a very good example of this. Which reminds me, given the hooh-hah over "Inappropriate" behaviour by MP's irrespecive of party; 1: How did slimy Cecil Piock get away with it, even then? & 2: Even so, there's a lot of fuss - just slap'em round the chops with a wet fish ( or eqivalent) -works almost evert time ....
Bugger Slimy Cecil PRICK
Looked at that - I remember one of the amazing sectional drawings in "The Eagle" of said aircraft ... But I also noticed that there was an underside view of a Mk1 (?) EE LIghtning a couple of pages down. Now there was a scary ( to its opponents) aircraft.
Modern Renewables are high-apex engineering. Enormous supply nets required. If you want to skip coal the most sensible path is something like "Hydro + demograpic transition early so you never have to use anything else" (Copper IUDs can be made and safely inserted/removed at any tech level if you know how, so contraception is really portable) or Hydro - > nuclear, because reactors can be built on top of a much smaller industrial eco-system.
Not just to its opponents, going by some of the pilots' reminiscences you can find about it...
But are the enormous supply nets "required"? Or is it just that we've only started getting into renewables in a big way after the obsession with doing everything in that idiotic fashion has become thoroughly entrenched, and this makes it difficult to imagine doing it differently?
A wind generator, after all, is the same ancient technology as a hydro station; the bit that isn't ancient which is common to both is still well over a century old. The main constituent of a solar panel occurs in quantity on innumerable beaches. A tidal power station is simply a hydro station using salt water, and the idea is similarly ancient. Solar powered steam engines are nearly as old as coal powered ones. There is no actual need to buy this stuff from China, even if we have got the habit of doing that in this timeline.
It seems to me the biggest obstacle in "skipping coal" (or oil) is much the same as in getting off it: batteries. Renewables are intermittent, and therefore require either massive storage or massive excess generation capacity; mobile applications call for high energy density storage. (Probably the most significant such application is in agricultural and related areas; railways and local goods distribution can get by using lead-acid or NiFe, but a battery-powered tractor is kind of tricky, and a battery-powered chainsaw is probably only going to be usable by Schwarzenegger.)
There's also the bootstrap aspect, in that you need to start by reducing large amounts of iron and copper oxides, which pretty much means you have to have carbon.
Still, though, the Commonwealth is not really in a skipping-coal kind of situation; rather, they are already happily using it. But compared to us, they have far more remaining planetary capacity to absorb the consequences, and are in a much better position to take avoiding action before the situation becomes serious.
"I don't get the trend to "handed-ness" in scissors"
I don't get the trend to chirality in mice either. I'd been happily using both scissors and mice for years, with my left hand, without any difficulty, before I discovered that left-handed versions even existed. I still don't recall ever having seen a left-handed version of either.
Come to that, I'm not sure what a left-handed mouse even is. Chiral trackballs, certainly; I much prefer a trackball to a mouse, and it has long pissed me off that once you cross out all the trackballs that are emphatically shaped to fit only the right hand, there's not much choice left. But mice - they are quite the opposite. Practically all mice are bilaterally symmetrical.
(As for "left-handed" mouse configuration settings, as far as I can see all they do is swap all the buttons around, which isn't quite as bad as turning the steering wheel anticlockwise to go right but isn't far off it for daftness. Maybe writing mouse configuration applets is the programming shop equivalent of sending the apprentice for a left-handed screwdriver.)
You want to see 'trivialised'? Try being a male rape survivor.
Somewhat less daft is that I've sat in the doorway with my feet on the skids while a Westland Scout was flying us across Dartmoor; it was a wide back door, and we had two of us on each side. Safety was provided by a strap across the doorway, that you hung your arms over...
I've done that a few times in a UH-1; just looped a rope through one of the cargo D-rings on the floor & ran it around your arm.
For a while Special Forces at Fort Bragg were doing HALO jumps from the AH-64. They'd lay on their stomachs draped over the wing & slid off the back when they were ready to go.
... until the brass caught wind of what they were doing and put a stop to it.
Read a book a friend loaned me? Gave me? a bunch of years ago, autobiographical, written by a slick pilot about 'Nam.
You want GENUINELY certifiable?
Would that have been Robert Mason's "Chickenhawk"?
I'm just-about right-handed ( I could write with either hand at one point, but I shudder to think what it would look like, now. But I use a computer-mouse left-handed, but with the the buttons in the normal configuration. Left-handed for preference with a sword, right-handed ( Because, like 95+% of the population I'm right-eyed ) with a bow or rifle. On the only two occasions I've used a "pistol" I found that either left-hand or double grip was better than right. Um.
Yes, well, the current Westminster hothouse furore seems to be almost entirely about men abusing their power over women, but there are other cases, of course. Incidentally, I've seen this sort of febrile "moral panic" before - 1963-4 "Profumo" (etc), but that was almost-exclusively confined to the tories & contributed to Wislon winning the next election. THIS time, it appears that the scandal/panic is more widespread.
I forgot to include the necessary reference sorry about that.
Wind turbine installations on land require heavy-lift mobile cranes (50 tonne to 200 tonne dead lift to 50m plus heights over base) which are not a trivial item to design, construct and operate, never mind the road construction needed to get them to site in remote areas. Sea-based turbine installations require ships with similar crane capabilities, again not trivial to develop and build.
Silicon solar cells require a lot of quite sophisticated plant to make the silicon substrate, even amorphous panels which are less efficient than crystalline. The chemical soup that goes on top is not trivial to source given the required purity and consistency for large-scale production of good-quality solar panels.
Time was, during the second generation of nuclear plant construction in the early 1970s that pretty much everything was constructed on-site with a lot of welding of "small" segments (5 tonne to 20 tonne) to assemble larger structures such as the reactor vessel and steam generators. Nowadays it is assumed that all large reactor components up to several hundred tonnes in weight will be built and tested in a foundry or factory and then transported to site for installation. These parts are even bigger than the second-generation units since the finishes reactors will typically produce over 1GWe compared to the 2nd gen plants that are in the 500MWe range.
It took the development of quite complex transportation options to make moving a 250-tonne steam generator by sea, rail and road to site as well as some very large cranes to put them in place in the reactor building.
Which reminds me ... What's the population-load & tech level of the rest of the planet in the Commonwealth t-line? Same as, I hate to say it, but a failing of the "Clan" series & this on (IMHO) is that "nowhere exists" outside the para-USA of the series, in the developed world, at any rate... In other words the usual failing of the USA to realise that there are other places with other customs & history. Um. Or am I missing something?
Wind turbine installations on land require heavy-lift mobile cranes (50 tonne to 200 tonne dead lift to 50m plus heights over base) which are not a trivial item to design, construct and operate,
An observation: the railways developed heavy mobile cranes back in the 19th century (because derailments). One might speculate about a wind farm designed around something not too unlike a railway switchyard — lots of parallel tracks running through the farm area, spaced far enough apart that the rows of turbines between the tracks don't interfere too much. Crane access to the turbines made relatively easy. It'd take a bit more ground work than the regular service roads, but the mobile cranes could be decidedly lower tech.
Look into higher end or gaming mice. Basically as soon as you add extra buttons like thumb buttons, which are very very useful, you rapidly start to optimise the shape of the mouse to fit a hand, and it is always optimised for a right hand.
Some of the newer companies like Razer are releasing dedicated left hand mice, but then you run into the second problem. There are two types of left handed people - those that swap button orientation so the index finger is primary click, and those that retain button orientation so that primary click is on the left and done with the middle finger. So that reduces the market even further, since many mice have primary button config locked at a hardware level - you can override it but many apps will ignore the override and get data direct from the mouse.
I used to be ambidextrous with mice for gaming, but ithere are very few good symmetrical mice with sidebuttons available, even now.
They don't need modern renewables. Much of the tech for renewables was invented and made in the early 20th century, if not the 19th. Sure, it wasn't as perfect and efficient as the 21st century equipment, but as the various hydro schemes in Scotland from the 1930's and 40's show, you can do all you need with relatively primitive equipment and skilled labour.
The "big thing" is telescopic cranes, ones that can reach a hundred metres and more vertically with a 100-tonne suspended load. Train-mounted cranes for handling derailments are short and squat and don't lift much over 50 tonnes anyway (steam locomotives and waggons were quite small for a long time).
The alternative for big wind turbines in the 5MW dataplate class (producing on average 1.5MW) is to install a tower crane base separately for a high-lift crane the way they do for high-rise buildings and that's expensive if you need one for each turbine tower since they're widely separated to avoid wind shadow (typically 100 metres and more).
It's interesting to see pictures of the Vogtle and Summer reactor builds which require short but heavy cranes for lifting 500-tonne reactor parts into place -- the biggest crane on each site runs on a circular track between the two reactors rather than having a big semi-mobile crane or two fixed cranes, one for each reactor.
Hydro is the obvious starting point for any plan for cross time uplift, because, well, you could probably manage to build dams with social organization equal to the Ancient Egyptians or any of the more functional empires and a handful of engineers, and that gets you cheap power. If your population is low enough that you can meet demand from that alone, then that is it, you are done with the powersupply side of the equation. But if it is not, well.. People and nations tried very damn hard to make solar/wind work as a grid supply, and mostly, they still just do not work. They are certainly not going to work out if, for example, you are trying to expand abundant power from the alt-earth equivalent of Norway, without a global economy measured in the billions of industrialized citizens. Wind turbines wings are enormously advanced composite-materials engineering, let alone what goes into their gearboxes, and the economic production of worth-while solar cells require enormous volume and high mastery of industrial chemistry. Copying a heavy water reactor requires you to be able to machine steel to decent tolerances.
Admittedly off-topic, but... Greg is after an LED replacement for a 100W bayonet bulb. So was I. But the hunt is over: try LED Hut's (ledhut.co.uk) 11W B22 (Bayonet) Filament LED Bulb - Frosted (3000K). I've now replaced all my old 100W bulbs with these.
You're going to have to expand on 'tried hard to make solar/ wind work as a grid supply but it doesn't'* because here in Scotland we're getting lots of lovely grid wind power from lots of wind turbines.
*paraphrased
That's funny, I've gotten my LED bulbs from a combination of B&Q and Tesco, obviously being careful as to the colour temperature and CRI claims, and it includes at least one 100W equivalent.
Hence the "Mostly". With a global - highly developed world- effort we have gotten to the point where if you happen to be geographically blessed with an unusually good resource and means of storage, it is workable. That is not going to be very helpful the earth-3 equivalent of Poland, to pick a country with the potential to have a whole lot of people in it but bugger-all renewable energy flows to harvest.
Okay, that makes more sense. So you are saying some should go straight out for nuclear, which would make sense if they don't have much renewables.
It would also make sense to impose a strict building insulation code in Earth 3, given the amount of energy that is used for space heating.
GOT IT - thanks.
My experience has been that every off-brand and own-brand LED bulb I have bought in the past several years has failed drastically short of its claimed life. I don't think any have lasted more than 5000 hours and most fall short of even that. So I'm now buying Philips because they might actually last the 15000 hours+ it says on the pack and they will be around to honour the warranty if they don't. (I have had a refund from Amazon for off-brand bulbs that failed inside a year when their claimed 24/7 life was more than three years).
Monocultures can be very vulnerable to pathogens.
Actually, the railways usually solved that sort of problem with a single long feeder-line, with a run-rund loop at the end, & lots of short stub sidings for the individual "Outlets" ( turbines in this case) Let's see if the formatting will allow it:
\ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ ______/
That solves the crane. It does nothing for the fact that the wings of a modern turbine have blades fifty meters long made of space age composites to aeronautical tolerances, all mounted on monstrous gear boxes with self-lubricating gears taller than you are. They are some of the highest expressions of the art of mechanical engineering ever made, and if you try to start a production of them in a place without a long ass tradition of industry, it wont go all that well. China has major problems building these things to spec, despite the fact that the industry as a whole does not even bother to patent things.
Why bother with high tech wind farms? As has been pointed out, water can be done far more low tech and will be more reliable. Somewhere in deepest Derbyshire, I know of an old water mill where the wheel has been hooked up to a microgenerator (made of old tractor bits, and a control board done by the farmers mate at Nottingham uni). Sits feeding into the grid for about 2 decades now.
You can also get a lot of solar energy by using water heating panels-one of my childhood memories was of Dad making some of these from old plumbing and a scrap water tank. Might only raise temperature by ten degrees, but use that as feedwater for your hot water system/boiler and it will add up.
That's like saying "All cars currently existing are Ferraris, therefore the only kind of car it is possible to build is a Ferrari", but while you are arguing about how to build Ferraris, Greg has got in his Land Rover and is already half way there :)
Ha, yes, I remember making them from plastic bags when I was a kid - a transparent bag for the front and a black one for the back, welded together in a zig-zag pattern. (Using solar energy for the welding, too, by means of a magnifying glass.) Worked, but what I didn't manage to do was make a supporting enclosure that could handle the hydrostatic effects.
... That comparison would hold if Ferraris got 10 times the mile per gallon of a normal car.
Windmills are not marvels of engineering because they are penile extenders for the engineers designing them or the workers building them. (although, I have met some of these people, and they do take a whole lot of pride in their work.) They are marvels because that brings down the cost per kilowatt hour of electricity produced, and extends how long they last both between necessary maintenance, and before the end of useful functionality. More primitive designs are massively less economically viable. Talking order of magnitude here. And that matters, if you are building out infrastructure.
Re: Gender differences ... 'My view ... if you want to solve a problem, you first have to understand it.'
Understand it like quantum mechanics where because the math looks clean and the outcome matches predictions, it's okay? Or, understand it down in your bones?
Based on the bits of research I've read about gender differences as well as personal experience, I'd say that we're nowhere near either. Part of this is due to cultural and social factors including varying degrees of inertia, part to not even being aware of what the clues/signs are that we should be looking at, part to teasing out individual differences (genetic, epigenetic, developmental, environmental, etc.) against varied cultural backgrounds, etc.
IMO, the biggest stumbling block is assuming that there may be only one, two or six factors - ever, and for all time - whereas it could be hundreds at different strengths (including zero), plus permutations and combinations. So, yeah - I'm completely on board for more research on this.
That said - regardless of what gender differences there may be, I think that there is one overarching notion that could be agreed upon: they're all humans. And as humans, each has a right to self-respect/autonomy, health, education, etc. according to their individual needs and abilities provided these needs and abilities do not harm other humans. (May sound corny but I really mean and believe it.) In some ways 'human' vs. 'individual' is also a scale problem therefore the need to look at different factors operating at different levels/scales.
BTW, I fully expect individual differences, therefore do not expect myself (or anyone) to be able to predict someone else's actions or reactions 100% across all situations. Seriously - I'd have to be able to monitor their every breath awake or asleep (dreams) in order to get all the requisite data to make such a prediction and only if they never interacted with anything/anyone ever. Doubt I could even make such a prediction about myself and I've been living inside my head all my life.
AI as a data gathering and analysis tool could come in handy in identifying factors that we're currently unaware of provided the programmers/developers of such AI allow for greater scope/breadth in terms of type of data gathered ... plus who knows what other yet to be determined things.
Re: Energy
The research is growing so fast across an increasing number of forms of energy production and techniques that so long as research funding isn't cut off or existing utilities don't kill these new ventures, and people get off the 'but we must have only one universal energy form' dogma bandwagon, most of the planet should be able to source its own energy locally and affordably.
For example, here's another new energy source: water evaporation.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/09/170926125154.htm
Excerpt:
'In the first evaluation of evaporation as a renewable energy source, researchers at Columbia University find that U.S. lakes and reservoirs could generate 325 gigawatts of power, nearly 70 percent of what the United States currently produces.
Though still limited to experiments in the lab, evaporation-harvested power could in principle be made on demand, day or night, overcoming the intermittency problems plaguing solar and wind energy. The researchers' calculations are outlined in the Sept. issue of Nature Communications.'
Meanwhile, already established alternate energy source production techniques continue to be improved:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/08/170828124534.htm
Excerpt:
'Researchers have developed a simple, low-cost, and environmentally sound method for fabricating a highly-efficient selective solar absorber (SSA) to convert sunlight into heat for energy-related applications. The team used a 'dip and dry' approach whereby strips coated with a reactive metal are dipped into a solution containing ions of a less reactive metal to create plasmonic-nanoparticle-coated foils that perform as well or better than existing SSAs, regardless of the sun's angle.'
Geometry
Can't find the paper - it's about PV design and using improved geometry to develop a surface texture that bounces rays back and forth in order for more of the rays to actually touch more surface area thereby extract more energy. (Sorta like origami.)
Here's an older (2012) related study:
https://phys.org/news/2012-04-wrinkles-boost-power-solar-panels.html
Excerpt:
'Jong Bok Kim, a postdoctoral researcher in chemical and biological engineering and the paper's lead author, explained in the Nature Photonics paper that the folds on the surface of the panels channel light waves through the material in much the same way that canals guide water through farmland. By curving the light through the material, the researchers essentially trap the light inside the photovoltaic material for a longer time, which leads to greater absorption of light and generation of energy.
"I expected that it would increase the photocurrent because the folded surface is quite similar to the morphology of leaves, a natural system with high light harvesting efficiency," said Kim, a postdoctoral researcher in chemical and biological engineering. "However, when I actually constructed solar cells on top of the folded surface, its effect was better than my expectations."
Although the technique results in an overall increase in efficiency, the results were particularly significant at the red side of the light spectrum, which has the longest wavelengths of visible light. The efficiency of conventional solar panels drops off radically as light's wavelength increases, and almost no light is absorbed as the spectrum approaches the infrared. But the folding technique increased absorption at this end of the spectrum by roughly 600 percent, the researchers found.'
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2012-04-wrinkles-boost-power-solar-panels.html#jCp
"That's funny, I've gotten my LED bulbs from a combination of B&Q and Tesco"
Well, yes, I'd tried those. No good if you need the same degree of light omni-directionality as normal incandescent ones. But if they work for you...
The average tenure of a UK Prime Minister isn't ten years it is just under four and a half years. Since 4th April 1721 (Walpole appointed first Lord of the Treasury for the second time) there have been 54 Prime Ministers by the standard count in 296.59 years. This works out at 5.49 years. The actual period is slightly less due to occasional vacancies and a couple of abortive appointments.
I think the fundamental problem is embedded in the word "ambidextrous." If it read "ambisinistrous," we'd have a lot fewer problems.
Here's the deal: if you're right-handed, you grow up in a world that's biased in your favor. If your right hand is disabled, you're disabled. If you're left-handed (like me and many others), you grow up in a world that's biased against you, and you learn to do a variety of disparate things either by adapting right-handed tech to your left hand (me with mice) or your "off-hand" (I use scissors right-handed). Left handers are trained by the civilizational bias against us to be more versatile and less handed than are right handers. Like Leonardo, I can even write right-handed a little, although it's easier for me to do so backwards.
I suspect the reason we get things like "left-handed scissors" is that right-handers think it's a good way to reverse the bias and exploit an untapped market of left-handers. While they're appreciated, they're seldom needed, simply because most of us south-paws are used to coping with right-handed tools. While there are certainly cases where left-handed tools are necessary (for me, it was a fencing epee), in the most part they aren't.
This is what I meant about the problem with the word "ambidextrous." It has the sense of having two RIGHT hands. The thing is, right-handers ("north paws?") are innately more handed than we are. To them, a functional left hand is weird. If you want to understand how to use both hands equally, you really need to have to equally functional left hands--ambisinstrous--because that's the way lefties are forced to live. However, ambisinistrous isn't even a word, which tells you how ignorant the world is.
Probably the most significant such application is in agricultural and related areas; railways and local goods distribution can get by using lead-acid or NiFe, but a battery-powered tractor is kind of tricky, and a battery-powered chainsaw is probably only going to be usable by Schwarzenegger.
According to Google, you can get a battery-powered chainsaw at your local big box store (I see three for general sale, by three different manufacturers. They're not as powerful as a gas saw, but they do work.
Similarly, John Deere prototyped an electric tractor last year. We'll see how it works out.
I think what I'm saying is that while I am also left-handed, I've never really noticed the bias of itself. There's some bladed cutting tool which has an asymmetrically ground edge to the blade and tends to wander off if you use it left-handed, but I can't remember what it actually is or what you use it for; lots of power drills have the trigger lock button positioned so that if you're using it left-handed and the bit jams, the sudden twist of the drill body shoves the button into your hand and locks the trigger precisely when you don't want it locked; but apart from that I can't think of anything off the top of my head. What I do notice the bias by is other people complaining about it in ways I don't understand - scissors are the usual example. People say something weird happens when you use scissors left-handed but it's never happened to me; they just work (or if they don't, it's because they're knackered anyway).
The bias I do notice is that against the left eye, because my right eye doesn't work. Many things you have to look through have at the least an eye-cup shaped to fit a right eye, although you can usually squash it enough for it not to matter. The only time I've ever fired a rifle it was a pain in the arse because using my left eye put the bolt on the wrong side, and my camera has various buttons on the rear for no reason, which I can't use because my face gets in the way (although the thing is a complete ergonomic clusterfuck even without that).
Mentioning the camera has reminded me of another factor which also goes unconsidered, even though it is rather more common than monocularism - reduced accommodation range. SLR viewfinders too often assume that the unaided eye can focus at infinity. Mine can't, so with my specs off the image is always blurred, and with them on I can't get my eye close enough to the hole. Which in turn means I can't use manual focussing when the autofocus can't cope...
I bet the tractor doesn't use lead-acid batteries though :) And I can't see the chainsaws being much more than toys. A chainsaw engine usually puts out around 3kW or so; supplying that from a battery you can comfortably carry isn't possible for very long, and if you reduce the power to compensate it'll be too feeble to do any good.
In the context of a civilisation mechanising while trying to avoid fossil fuels, though, you probably won't even get that much, because all the "easy" battery chemistries are heavy. The problem is you have to start mechanising agriculture first so everyone doesn't have to be a farmer, so you're stuck with simple versions of the technologies until you've got going. (Or you can use sailing ships to pinch food off some poor bugger in a distant land, but I'm assuming you're not doing that either.)
I have a vague memory of an old black-and-white photo of an electric chainsaw in use; two blokes wielding it, and a cable to a big battery sitting on the floor which would probably need at least another two to carry it. I think it is probably a false memory, and one reason I think this is that I can't imagine why anyone would bother to make such a thing when IC engines have been invented.
A heavy-battery tractor as we understand it would probably just get irretrievably bogged in the mud, but you could probably manage an electric version of the old steam ploughing engines, that kept to the edges of the field and hauled a plough back and forth across it with a big winch. Not as versatile, but still a lot better than not having it at all.
SLR viewfinders too often assume that the unaided eye can focus at infinity. Mine can't.
Are you sure? My Canon 5D II and 6D both have a little knob, just to above and to the right of the eye hole, marked with '-' and '+'. When I go out shooting I wear my reading specs so I can view the screen, which means of course that I can't focus on infinity. I set the little knob a few clicks to the - direction. My sight is better close with my specs on than it is distance with no specs (I don't have distance glasses), so I can actually judge focus a little better set to '-' with specs than I can set to zero without specs. (though the screens on autofocus cameras aren't designed to allow you to judge focus)
Interestingly, even as a right hander, I find the total lack of left handed SLRs completely baffling. No single SLR model has anything like 10% of the market share. So a good left handed model should instantly be the best selling single model of all (until everyone else copied the idea). Make it the entry level body and you've instantly locked 10% of new customers to your system of lenses. Seems like a total no-brainer.
And I can't see the chainsaws being much more than toys. A chainsaw engine usually puts out around 3kW or so; supplying that from a battery you can comfortably carry isn't possible for very long, and if you reduce the power to compensate it'll be too feeble to do any good.
I suspect the market for them is where sound maters a lot. In an urban area or next similar. But I suspect a lot of them are bought by people who didn't think the intended use through. I just bought a replacement for my worn out 2 cycle gas one. It's small. Only 14". But it will work all day if I buy the gas and oil ahead of time. Plus I have a 12v operated sharpener. You really can't buy a full day's worth of battery charge for such a saw for any amount of money which is practical. Which, when the power is off for 1 to 7 days after a hurricane, might be a point to consider.
But for cutting up small stuff I can see not having to deal with 2 cycle, oil, periodic cleaning, where to store it, etc...
But then again for those situations I get out an electric reciprocating saw with a large tooth blade. I have both battery and corded ones. And have used the corded one to cut out large quantify of roots trying to undermine my house. And a chainsaw blade which has hit dirt is basically a high powered butter knife.
There was a "bridge" 35mm film camera produced which had a left-handed variant, the Yashica Samurai. It was designed for one-handed operation, a bit like a camcorder hence the two versions. Not an SLR though.
But for cutting up small stuff I can see not having to deal with 2 cycle, oil, periodic cleaning, where to store it, etc...
I concur; plenty of people live in suburbs or similar areas and only need a chainsaw a few times a year for relatively brief periods. If the saw can run on either battery or wall power, many users will be happy with a flexible light duty tool. It's useless for professional loggers of course, but they're not the intended market.
It's basically the same comparison we've made between electric commuter cars and large delivery trucks.
Interestingly, even as a right hander, I find the total lack of left handed SLRs completely baffling. ... Seems like a total no-brainer.
You'd think. A few years back I was working for a well known multitool manufacturer. I got to looking at one of the products, then paged through the catalog, and took another look at the tool in my hand, and couldn't figure out a good reason why various bits couldn't be swapped around for a mirror imaged product. So when I had a spare minute I went to a guy who'd been there a while, who happened to be left handed himself, and brought up the idea. Before I even finished asking the question I could see that he'd been over this before. Yes, it should be mechanically possible - but nobody had gotten marketing to offer to offer one and it wasn't clear to the rest of us why such a thing couldn't be sold.
For mechanizing agriculture, you go with ammonia, and the electrosynthesis path. Farmers have to be able to handle the stuff safely regardless, so running the tractors off it is not an issue.
The good news is that most target rifles in my version of the sport come with a left-handed version; if you look at any pictures of the Olympics, etc, there’s normally someone facing a different direction to most. There are even sight adapters that allow the “opposite” eye to be used for aiming. I’ve always been aware of the latter as a coach, because my mother is left-eyed / right-handed... most UK service weapons are right-hand / right-eye only, though. Apocryphal note - the sniper in “Saving Private Ryan” aims and fires left-handed.
Another interesting comment from a friend who was an international fencer, was that nearly half of the top-class fencers are left-handed. They have an advantage in that they’re used to fighting right-handers, the right-handers are less likely to have a left-hander to train against (she’s pretty ambidextrous; injured her right wrist, changed to fighting left-handed, got back into the Scottish team).
There’s a similar line of reasoning in Judo; one of the local clubs teaches its competitive kids to work left-handed. (I actually found that some throws work better for me left-handed than right, to the despair of our instructor)
For applications where electricity just won't do, you could easily run alcohol or other biofuel (e.g. chip fat). If these fuels are planned properly, using waste from agriculture, they're not only cheap but eco friendly too. Granted, you might need to mix in some crude oil products, but you'll probably be using that for lubrication anyway.
There's surely an easier way round electric car charging times (especially if using low tech batteries). Design them all around one or two standard battery packs, and have swapping stations where you'd have petrol stations. Drive in, swap packs, pay a fee to the company who will charge, service and if need be scrap and replace the packs.
References like Java, Python, Ruby or Swift.
you could easily...
A phrase that typically makes me run away.
8 Waves hand *
Perl had references before Java, Ruby, or Swift existed (at least in public), and possibly prior to Python.
I've suggested the same thing a couple times and nobody seems interested. It does seem obvious, however. The problem, of course, is that you end up with multiple batteries for each car, probably at a 2:1 or 3:1 ratio.
Most small-bore clubs had a left-handed BSA Martini in the cupboard for left-hand shooters, or at least something with a neutral stock. Trying to shoot a regular RH-stocked target rifle left-handed left a crease in my cheek.
There were standard drills and competitive shoots in the Practical Pistol discipline that require "weak hand" shooting i.e. using the hand you don't normally use to shoot with. Some folks coped quite well, some didn't. The controls on a typical pistol (safety, slide release etc.) are right-handed and require some finger-bending manipulation to activate in a hurry if used by a left-hander (like myself). Most serious shooters had "space gun" conversion kits that made the controls double-sided just to deal with these kinds of courses of fire.
The "Courier" involved a move-and-shoot sequence with a small briefcase containing a couple of half-bricks handcuffed to your dominant wrist. That was... fun.
Non pointery references have been around for ages before the likes of perl, where in this case "pointery" means you get to do pointer arithmetic.
Tony Hoare apologised for inventing null, but I strongly suspect that if he had avoided it then someone else would have done the deed.
Yes, when I fenced left handed against another left-hander, it was a mess. Here's the little secret: lefthanders don't face other lefthanders any more often than righthanders do, and without that practice, we don't know how to do it either.
Also, as Scott pointed out, there's little point making left-handed multitools simply because the tools last for a long time and only 5-10% of the market might be interested in buying a left-handed tool, so why bother? I can't find it now, but I've seen a video of someone using a machine shop to turn a multitool left-handed. There's certainly an aftermarket for that. CRKT made a symmetrical multitool (the zilla) a few years back. It could be used by lefties, but of course it has been discontinued.
I also suspect that someone could start a left-handed tool company producing left-handed and symmetrical tools for lefties and for survivalists. As for the latter, I've long carried a (now discontinued) knife marketed as a survival knife. It can be opened one handed with either hand, the point being that if one arm is disabled, you can still use the knife. Not that this forum is crawling with entrepreneurs, but if you know someone who wants to make tools and attract a loyal following, feel free to pass the idea on.
...References...
Which (under the hood) are just pointers, which the compiler insists you point at something (i.e. "no nullptr") when you create them. Once you've seen a null reference throw an exception, you become less idealistic about such things...
http://pawlan.com/monica/articles/refobjs/
Forgive me for not seeing much of a difference between the complexities imposed by the need in Java to indicate Soft, Weak, and Phantom references and to handle them correctly (to prevent the Garbage Collector from deleting the referent and leaving you with a null reference); and those surrounding std::sharedptr, std::weakptr, std::unique_ptr etc, etc.
AIUI, Perl uses reference counting in its garbage collector - in other words, the same mechanism as used by the C++ STL smart pointers. Except in C++ it's explicit, and the point of object destruction is deterministic.
Don't get me wrong, I get twitchy every time I see raw pointers in C++ code; but they have their place and their uses (unfortunately, that place is "throughout the Windows API"; I've moved from projects where we delivered to multiple OS targets and abstracted via Boost/STL, to one which is Windows-only and a decade old, with lots of crufty old uncommented, undocumented OS interface code for the I/O stuff).
Ooops, apologies to all the Perl Monks out there - I just discovered that Perl garbage collection is deterministic...
(That's what I get for being unskilled in the industry's least-popular programming language)
Yes, one of them is a bit poor with darker areas and a hotspot, but the other two are fine. I think part of the issue with LED bulbs, apart from poor buying decisions by companies selling them and a general desire to sell the cheapest crap possible, is that the consumers have one bad experience and then swear off them forever. As with CFL's, I've a vague memory of an argumen on here maybe a decade ago with someone like Greg saying CFL's were totally rubbish and useless and myself and others saying hang on, they've come on a bit since you tried them in the 1990's, you should try them again.
CFLs were fine in the 90s too, as long as you:
1) got them from QD or the pound shop or somewhere else cheap. Cheap ones would generally achieve full brightness immediately; it was mostly the more expensive ones that took five minutes to warm up properly.
2) ignored the manufacturer's claims for what wattage incandescent they were equivalent to and went by the evidence of your eyes instead. People who continued to buy 11W CFLs to replace 60W incandescents because they thought that what it said on the box could somehow override the evidence of their eyes that you really needed the next size up have only themselves to blame.
Since nearly all my lights were generally only switched on once a day, I also used to modify CFLs by shorting the filaments with a blob of solder, so they were heated only by bombardment and not resistively as well. It meant they would strike with the filaments dead cold, which isn't ideal, but on the other hand the filaments would be less stressed in continuous operation, so with the kind of use I was giving them they lasted longer overall.
By far the best for durability were the original Philips ones from the 80s with an inductive ballast. These would keep going for years, until half the phosphor had fallen off the inside of the tube. I kept the ballast out of one of these and used it with tubes from pound-shop CFLs, which combination gave similar durability but without the long wait for it to warm up.
What I think MikeA was getting at re B&Q LEDs is the same thing that gets on my tits about them: they seem to be designed for people who think you should be staring at the light bulb itself rather than using it to see other things by, and who freak out if it isn't the same shape as an incandescent usually is. So you get a small number of high-powered and fairly directional emitters mounted inside a casing which is shaped like an incandescent, but unlike an incandescent only illuminates things underneath it and not things round the sides.
When I say "LED bulbs are great" what I mean by an LED bulb is the type with a large number of low-powered emitters mounted on the sides and end of a roughly cylindrical substrate, and it seems that places like Amazon and ebay are the only sources for this type. b22 corn bulb should be a useful search term.
Early days yet, but I think my durability mod for these is going to be to buy one with 3/2 times as many LEDs as the manufacturers think are needed for a given level of illumination, and then replace the ballast capacitor with one 2/3 of the value of the original. Much of the research effort for LEDs has shifted from making them more efficient, to making them keep working at high temperatures - Tj of 180°ree;C or something ridiculous. This means that, almost uniquely for a semiconductor device, they will almost carry on working right up to the point where the smoke comes out instead of conking out long before, and the manufacturers, who have an ingrained aversion to simply making the bulb big enough to have an adequate surface area for heat dissipation, seem rather too keen to push this capability further than it can really go.
Usefully C++ actually had non-nullable pointers as an option. Because C++ is all about the options. I'm also slightly in love with Idtypes.idl which gives me a non-converting integer subtype (so "phonenumber = planduration_months" does not compile).
Sadly for me I started my current project just before Rust was capable of doing what I needed, so I have 3-4 years worth of C++ experience after working in slightly more competent languages for the previous 20-odd. I have spent no small amount of time finding the wee utility classes/templates that make C++ slightly less ugly to use. I find the "C++ Frequently Questioned Answers" useful whenever I discover a new cool trick ... if it's in the FQA it should be used with caution (and thank you to MySQL, whose C++ library throws things that are not exceptions. Of course you can do that, it's C++!).
IMO the Commonwealth would do well to largely ignore all the primitive computing stuff and go straight to 32 bit low power ubiquitous microprocessors. I think focussing more on the problems we are having now makes sense. It's like many African countries going straight from "one telegraph line" to "cellphones everywhere" with no intervening rollout of landlines.
They could quite reasonably decide on a silicon scale that balances manufacturability with resilience with power consumption. So rather than trying to get to 8nm silicon, buy a bunch of cheap-ish commodity 50 to 100nm fab tech and run with it.
That would go with using a modern language/environment as the base, so that mutithreading is less difficult (async everywhere) and having lots of cores becomes easier than trying to hit 4GHz all the time.
I say that as someone who spent 10 years being "the Delphi threading guy", wandering around making threaded Delphi code work properly for various companies. Ye olde worlde procedural languages (with optional object orientation) just make multithreading unnecessarily difficult. Better languages, taught from the start, make asynchronous programming much easier. Rather than forcing kids to learn "when you call a subroutine your code stops and waits", and "when the user clicks a button everything stops while the button click code runs", you teach them that everything uses events and callbacks (which are the same thing). "you write a bunch of independent code fragments, and link those to events that can happen". As they say, if a ten your old can do it what's your problem?
Ah, the Philips thing I think explains something. My dad moved out of the ex-family house last year, and the CFL bulb in the garage failed around that time. He had installed it when we moved in, about 28 years earlier. THat bulb must have been on for days at a time, and yet it lasted so long.
As for LED's, what I think he means is like the issue with the one I have which has an attempt a lense to diffuse the light, but actually it isn't very good and leads to dark and light patches directly underneath it. See, language is difficult because it sparks different chains of association in different people's brains. But you know this. I don't think enough people do though. The one near me just now, I can't tell what it is like inside the round bulb housing, but I think that is designed well to diffuse the light across a hemisphere.
So, why do LED's need ballast in the first place? I thought CFL etc did because they do funky plasma stuff, led's obviously don't. Also the number of LED's will surely be irrelevant, because you can get them in all sorts of shapes, sizes, power, efficiency etc.
It's also not just an issue of surface for heat dissipation, also designing for heat transfer in the first place. You see this with high powered led torches, which I have read a great deal about and own a few. The expensive ones often stick the LED onto a brass or copper lump which is then in contact with the metal case, so can get rather hot in operation but does mean the LED doesn't burn out.
I wish I had a knob like that. Never seen one though...
Hydro is the obvious starting point for any plan for cross time uplift, because, well, you could probably manage to build dams with social organization equal to the Ancient Egyptians
... as we can see by looking at the actual dams built by actual ancient Egyptians. I'm kind of eyerolling at this whole discussion because of the use of hydro and wind power that we know of going back quite a long way. It's the electric part that's new and exciting. Wind mills and pumps likewise... just think about the name for a second "windmill"... why is "mill" in there, it's not as though they're used to grind the wind.
It would be quite possible to start with high-torque, low-speed water power applications, just like our ancestors did, and push the technology forward as their industrial base advances. Just knowing what works and what doesn't, in detail, would help a lot. Forget digging canals everywhere, build railways. We know that... now. Canals are for moving ships between oceans, not pallets of stuff between towns.
On that note, palletised and containerised transport would make a huge difference. Like an army, civilisation marches at the head of a long logistics tail and cleaning that up has flow-on effects everywhere. It's not just about you getting your Amazon order overnight, it's about just in time manufacturing which means you don't have to fill a huge pipeline before anything useful comes out the end. And so on.
I've suggested it too... indeed I seem to remember it was how everyone expected electric cars to develop when there weren't any. You just decide on a standard size battery and then every car has a removable rack that holds a suitable number of these for the size of the car, which you can swap in and out with something along the lines of a pallet truck. The main objection people seem to have is "electric cars now are not designed to allow that, therefore they never can be", which makes no sense.
Canals can move a very large amount of material slowly with simple geo-engineering, usually by modifying existing waterways or connecting adjacent rivers with channels and locks. Canals also tend to start/end at ports which are usually on estuaries because of riverine traffic, the precursor to canals. Chickens, eggs.
Railways require tunnels, bridges, a lot of geo-engineering and movement of soil and rock. The steam shovel and dynamite are the main tools that made railways workable other than in a few places where the geography was already conducive. They also need a lot more ongoing maintenance than canals usually require. They do work better in dry areas though.
So rather than trying to get to 8nm silicon, buy a bunch of cheap-ish commodity 50 to 100nm fab tech and run with it.
There's no "commodity" fab tech out there, it's all custom-rolled and usually under ITAR-like controls as the military applications of silicon fabs are obvious (non-crippled GPS chips, for example, the sort that don't quit working when velocity exceeds 200mph or whatever). The Commonwealth needs to develop their own fab hardware based off existing knowledge but a lot of that is proprietary, not open source and somewhat arcane -- there are horror stories about cursed fab lines built with the best modern kit and finest engineers that took years of pray and try to make them productive.
I've not seen anyone claim to have Hacklab-quality homebrew silicon chip production systems like 3D-printers and desktop CNC which are commonplace in our timeline today. Some of the highly toxic chemicals involved might be one of the reasons, I suppose.
Yea, but I still would not touch a cfl, especially now that led's are available. OK you still get the occasional dodgy led "bulb" but it is so obvious that they are "The way to go. Our local authority, who can usually be guaranteed to fuck it up, have replaced (as far as I can see all of theor normal street-lamos with led ones. The night vision for the punters is much better & they must be saving silly sums of money on the 'leccy bills! Soon, the only place I won't have led lights will be the kitchem, which has two "strip" lights, i.e old-fashioned vapour-discharge tubes - bright, uniform, almost shadowless, good spectrum.
NO The steam-shovel didn't really come aloing until well after railways were already well-established, like 50 years or so. And gunpowder was used for tunnel blasting until dynamite came along ( patented 1867 ) - also well after main-line railway construction. Also canals are only really much use if the gradients are very low, even railways can climb much better than that, even with steam traction .....
Canals... Well, the obvious example isn't the Erie canal, it's the Chinese Grand Canal, the biggest canal ever built AFAIK. It's still (partially) in operation, although a glance at its 2500 year-odd history (!) shows that keeping a canal in operation isn't as simple as digging a big ditch, even if you have an effectively unlimited number of peasants to sacrifice to its construction. Right now, a good chunk of it isn't even usable.
The other thing about rails is that you need a lot of energy to make them work. This isn't about running the trains, which are about as efficient as you can get for overland travel. Rather, the problem is all the energy you need to build the rails and create (and maintain) the straight tracks. They're also kind of resource intensive. IIRC, forests (in places like India) have disappeared into making sleepers for British Imperial tracks.
LEDs need ballast because they are (approximately) constant-voltage devices. Above their turn-on voltage, dV/dI becomes very small, so a tiddly increase in applied voltage causes a many-fold increase in current, and this in turn makes the smoke leak out. So you need to connect them in series with something else that limits the current - a resistor will do, and this is what is used for indicator LEDs. For illumination you want to use something less lossy, and if you're running off AC mains the simplest such thing is a capacitor.
One advantage of using a large number of small emitters is that you can string them all in series to produce an assembly with a large operating voltage but a small current requirement, which means you only need a small ballast capacitor. With a small number of large emitters, the operating voltage is small but the current is large, which means a ballast capacitor would be impractically large, so you use some kind of switched-mode converter instead, which is more complicated, more lossy, and more likely to go wrong.
The other difficulty with large emitters is getting the heat out of the actual LED chip, because of the high power density. You need to mount the chip directly on something with a low thermal resistance to let the heat get away from it easily enough. So you end up with a hefty chunk of aluminium or copper as closely coupled to the chip as the requirements of electrical insulation will allow; this may not be so much of a problem with your torches, but it is undesirable for a more powerful general-purpose light bulb because of the weight, bulk, materials consumption, and cost. With smaller emitters the scaling factor works in your favour and it is much easier to get the heat out of the chip.
Canal locks are often easier to put in than a railway tunnel, cutting or embankment to alleviate a big shift in levels. There are consecutive sets of locks that can move a boat up or down several hundred feet such as the Caen Hill lift in Wiltshire (19 locks lifting 237 feet, a gradient of 1 in 44), now restored after falling into disuse.
The thing is, canals are long skinny pipelines - you just don't get thousand tonne loads doing 100kph in a canal. They're also short, there's no real prospect of a transcontinental canal (the Amazon river is probably the closest approximation, but it's not practical to get it over the Andes no matter how well canals deal with elevation changes).
Certainly making the rails themselves takes a lot of energy, and one of the obstacles to railways really getting going in the first place was producing and handling sufficiently good quality iron in sufficiently large chunks. And it probably helps to have canals to move the coal, ore and rails about. But building the trackbed to put the rails on is an operation that can be fuelled on cows and beer, and apart from the manufacture of replacement rails, maintenance is also mostly a low-energy operation (though you do get "hot spots" that need constant attention, most of the mileage isn't like that).
Round here we have examples of both, more or less side by side - the Tardebigge flight of 30 locks, and the Lickey Incline, 2 miles at 1 in 37. The Lickey, though more massive, is much less complicated a piece of engineering. Both have been an operational pain in the arse since they were built, but the locks rather more so, whereas the Lickey has become much less of a problem in recent years as engine power has increased. To cope with much the same difference in elevation, at Ironbridge they built a special railway to haul the canal boats up and down the hill.
I'm more used to Australia (flat, so ideal for canals except for one tiny problem with the water supply - flood or drought) and Aotearoa where the landscape is a bit too active to make canals viable. It only takes one leak and your whole canal stops working. Ok, that and most of it is porous as all get-out, so you would need a great deal of sealing work as well as a very large number of locks. The Rimataka Spiral springs to mind as an example of something that would be doable but tricky for canal engineers. It was tricky for the railway ones :)
http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-Gov11_06Rail-t1-body-d12.html
No, but you do get to move 1000t of cargo using maybe 50hp...
Canals work because they are pipelines; for every so-much stuff you put in at one end you can take out so-much stuff at the other end, and it doesn't matter that it's not the same stuff because one lump of coal or limestone or whatever is very much like another. You set the overall flow rate to match how much you need on average, and if at some point you have more coming out than you happen to be able to use at the moment, you can always make a big pile of it and keep it for when the flow's not quite enough. It works just fine as long as you remember to shoot people who tell you you can't plan ahead or store things.
THat [CFL] bulb must have been on for days at a time, and yet it lasted so long.
Not surprising. A while back I had a Phillips CFL fail on my, base turned brown and melted, so I contacted Phillips about it and sent their QC engineer some pictures. He wanted to know where it was mounted and how often it was turned off/on, because apparently the two most common causes of failure are overheating from being in an enclosure, and being turned on-and-off rapidly (from, say, being in a closet or hallway).
I remembered from Reliability Engineering classes decades ago that light bulbs burning for years weren't uncommon — it was the shock of turning them on that causes burnouts — and apparently the same is true of fluorescents.
1000t of cargo using maybe 50hp...
I'm seeing 100 tonnes per horse reported as an upper limit, which suggests those are pretty heavy horses you're looking at. I mean, I think canals are cool and I'd quite like to play on one, but I'm also aware from playing with boats that my interest will be short term. I can move a 200 tonne boat by hand, but I don't want to have to drag it 100 kilometres.
It's less about what can be done, and more about what actually works in practice, though. Which is why we don't use (or build) canals for bulk haulage any more. The Commonwealth should really look at this and say "is building canals the best use we have for labour" and IMO decide not. For the same reasons we do today.
Riverboats might be a different thing, there's a reason big cities are often built in estuaries or on navigable rivers.
"The main objection people seem to have is "electric cars now are not designed to allow that, therefore they never can be", which makes no sense."
Battery swap first started in 1896 (no, not 1986, Eighteen Ninety Six).
The model S from Tesla was specifically designed to have battery swaps. Several other lesser known cars as well. Tesla built a few battery swap stations near the places with the highest density of Teslas, along routes to destinations with a lot of traffic. They swapped batteries in approximately 1/3 the time it took to pump a tank of petrol (I'd link to a youtube but I've got an idea that you're in a text only environment).
Tesla kept records of the use of the battery swap station. At first they had quite a few people do the battery swap shuffle. However they had not one single person do it twice. Never, none nada. (well according to Elon anyway) It appeared that either people were willing to try it but found the experience not to their liking, or they wanted to try something they knew they didn't want, just to try it out. Either way, it was dead in the water. The stations sat there for something like a couple of years, gathering cobwebs and eventually they just closed them.
A company called 'Better Place' had a similar experience with different models of cars, but since it was their only business they folded up.
So rather than it being something that no-one ever thought of, it was actually about the first thing they thought of, many cars were designed to do it, but no-one wanted it.
I just looked at some of the details of those events. I had genuinely thought that it was 'quiet a few' who tried the battery swap stations. A little research uncovered that of the nearby drivers who were personally invited by Elon to try the battery swap system, about 2.5% took up the offer and it was announced in the share holder meeting that not one of them had done so twice. One of the stations that cost several million to construct had a total of 6 battery swaps in 2 years.
In the end they decided to fit an armour plate to the bottom of the cars to protect the battery from debris (after a total of one car was damaged) and that ended the battery swap program.
Why bother with high tech wind farms?
That was my thought as well, but I approached it from a slightly different angle. Why not start with low tech wind farms?
I used to subscribe to a magazine called Mother Earth News. It was all about applying 19th century technology to creating low cost 20th century solutions.
Back about the time I was reading the Merchant Princes series the archive was available on CD-ROM. Looks like it's been migrated to newer media now.
Still, Miriam could have scored a copy of those CD-ROMs & maybe a Whole Earth Catalog (subtitle "access to tools") from a used book store to add to the tech library she took across to help force growth in the New American Commonwealth.
Seems to me a lot of low cost, wide spread 19th century technology could jump-start that growth because you wouldn't have to expend as much capital creating the precursors needed to move on to the 20th & 21st centuries
Interesting. I wonder whether there was some kind of unexpected inconvenience factor involved, or whether people who buy electric cars do some odd subset of driving in which they can perfectly plan their routes, times, etc.
I know that as a travelling network engineer I can be re-dispatched to someplace a hundred miles away (and with no infrastructure) on a surprise basis, so for me to own an electric car I'd have to be able to stop somewhere and change the battery in a manner similar to filling my tank.
On the other hand, my friend owns a Nissan Leaf. He drives it to the train station on every work day and plugs it in, upon which he charges his battery for nothing.
And what about people who are making long drives? I drove from Southern California to Oregon during the summer, and of course that was only possible due to being able to fill the tank quickly.
In short, lack of both necessity and battery standardization. IMHO the "battery stations" happened too early.
Short? Please read up on the thousand-mile long Grand Canal. Now I'll admit that the reason it works is that eastern China's basically a plane (canal has an elevational change of 42 m across that).* Still, it's not quite what you'd expect if you're thinking English or American canals.
*One of China's eventual problems with climate change is that if all the ice sheets melt, the Grand Canal and most of the lands east of it will be underwater. That will be thousands of years from now, but they might want to start planning for it.
One thing strongly in favour of canals for the NAC is that they're far more resistant to bombing damage than railways. (aqueducts aside)
Not just China's Grand Canal but Egypt's Canal of the Pharaohs, built millennia before Suez. The advantages of moving ships from the Mediterranean and/or the Nile to the Red Sea have been obvious for literally thousands of years.
And there's another point for low tech transportation. Railroads as we have them presume the ability to cheaply make vast amounts of iron rail, heavy iron objects identical to decent tolerances and spammed out in great numbers. We here are the kind of people who observe that technical point; there's also an economic point that iron has to be dirt cheap before this happens. The peasantry, no matter how downtrodden and impoverished the aristocracy wants to keep them, must have plenty of iron plows, knives, horseshoes, scissors, nails, and everything else a village blacksmith might make. They need to have these before anyone starts leaving tonnes of iron out in the countryside at night, or bits of the rail system will be missing in the morning. Iron has to be cheap and plentiful, which wasn't always the case a few hundred years ago.
IIRC, forests (in places like India) have disappeared into making sleepers for British Imperial tracks. No Both Teak & Jarrah woods were early recognised as very valuable, but also of limited geographical extent - but also renewable. Plantations & a rotation regime were set up. IIRC, re-hased/reorganised continuations of those re-planting cycles are still in operation.
Maybe, matbe not - but You can get a 2000 tonne barge from the Netherlands to the Russian border - once a year I sit by the junction of the Dortmund-Ems & Mitteland Kanals & watch the barges go by!
NO Certainly not with precision bombing ( a.k.a. a cruise missile ) You drop a really large one into the lock when it's full - the bottom gates will blow, then you drop/aim one into the top gates ..... If you drain both ends of the "top pound" then it will take some time to repair - lock gates are large things.
Are the French that accurate?
Anyway, I forgot about locks... You're certainly right. The other thing I didn't think of is that dams are usually needed to supply/control water for a canal system. I think the dam buster squadron proved that dams are vulnerable to air attack even with 1940's tech. An earth wall dam might survive, but probably not and all the water control gear would be destroyed.
Still they're thinking about corpuscular petard attack. A direct hit on a switching yard means no switching yard. A direct hit on a big canal bay means... well a bigger canal bay. Canals would be pretty much immune to an airburst/shockwave/heat. The petard would need to parachute down and explode on contact with the ground/water. In the face of corpuscular tipped SAMs, that might be difficult.
Don't bet on LEDs being more reliable. I have them in the bathroom and on bicycles, and most of them are less reliable than CFDs. As with all fancy technology, it's down to how well and conservatively they are engineered. And, as far as street lighting goes, what we need is less of it - just as we need less requirement for and dependence on driving, rather than just a new motor technology. And, as usual in the UK, the claimed benefits of a new technology or even gimmick are used as a diversion to avoid addressing the real problems.
Ordinary incandescents are good for a great many cycles, but have a limited lifetime; fluorescents are the converse. That is, of course, why the first widespread domestic use of fluorescents was in bathrooms. Yes, really.
"On that note, palletised and containerised transport would make a huge difference."
Oh, yes! If you're talking 1950s-60s technology then without containerization a majority of freight cost, and time taken, for shipping is the loading/unloading cost at port.
I've read an argument that the efficiency gains of containerization pretty much caused the globalization wave of the 1970s to 2000s. Not sure I believe it was "the" cause, but it was a big part of it.
The trouble with getting there is, of course, is overcoming network effects. No point having container ships without ports, or ports without ships.
The deadlock was largely broken by the USA's Dept of Defense pushing containerization in the mid 20th century. But the US DoD had been seriously scarred by the failure to get goods into France after Normandy - and had a Korean War on. So they had both motive and means to influence how shipping worked. Not sure if the Commonwealth could do something similar.
Actually if I was kicking off NAC infrastructure, the main thing I'd do would be to have a decent broad gauge rail. I was frankly amazed when I saw the tracks in NAC were about the same gauge as our timeline. I'm sure there's lots of rail aficionados here who will be happy to correct me, but I always regarded the fact that the broad/narrow debate went to the narrow to be a tragedy. That would also have strongly influenced the size of multimodal shipping containers, and thereby, roads. Frankly, if I was designing from scratch, I'd want the rail gauge to be double or triple the current ones.
You don't HAVE to fuck up the design of references, you know. How they are implemented is irrelevant - the key factor (if they are done right) is that they are scoped more narrowly than the object they point to, so are always valid. That is confounded (nowadays) by them being immutable (i.e. always pointing to the same object), which means that they cannot be used to implement the genuinely 'pointer-based' algorithms, but a less restrictive class of mutable references is possible (vide Algol 68 and others).
C++ allows you to implement classes that provide the equivalent checking but that (a) can't be checked statically and requires (b) that the class programmer is a better software engineer than most 'C++ experts' are and (c) that the user of the classes doesn't use any of the languages back doors and worse, deliberately or accidentally. That last is a real killer, because it's also beyond most 'C++ experts'.
Broad gauge requires more geoengineering for cuttings, tunnels etc. and only provides a small amount of extra benefit in moving, for example, large armoured vehicles to warzones. Japanese local services run on a 3 foot 6 inch gauge, including express services at 150km/hr as well as containerised freight although it is not typically TEU standard because of the smaller gauge and the resulting smaller tunnels.
The high-speed shinkansens operate on a classic British gauge of 4 foot 8.5 inch rail but in a totally separate network.
Soon, the only place I won't have led lights will be the kitchem, which has two "strip" lights, i.e old-fashioned vapour-discharge tubes - bright, uniform, almost shadowless, good spectrum.
For the past few years there have been drop-in LED strip lights — same form factor as the vapour-discharge tubes. You need to replace the ballast circuitry but then you're good to go with LEDs.
Given how long those tube lights last I think you may be using them for a good few more years, but when they next burn out a good quality LED tube should see you out for the rest of your life.
It actually went to the 'middle' gauge - many other gauges were derived from mining etc., and were much narrower. As big as you favour would make them unsuitable for many uses, including commuter transport. But, yes, you are right for long distance, high speed, and heavy freight, because many of serious problems go up with the inverse square of the gauge.
whether people who buy electric cars do some odd subset of driving in which they can perfectly plan their routes, times, etc.
Ever spent a quarter of an hour at a Tesla showroom?
Their cars come with a big-ass screen as its main user interface. There is a GPS/satnav/moving map system, naturally. It also takes into account battery charge and availability of charging points when planning a route, so for long journeys it navigates point-to-point between charging stations (which in the US and UK are rolling out first in areas densely populated by Tesla owners, and second, along interstates/motorways). Upshot: you have to override a bunch of warnings to drive out of range of a charger point, and if you want to drive coast-to-coast in the USA your car will give you a route which, while not necessarily the shortest road distance, will get you to your destination without a flat.
As EVs become ubiquitous the shortest route and the optimum route will become the same. And given that the range of a high-end Tesla is now pushing 300 miles, taking an hour or two off for an enforced meal/sleep break while the car recharges for the next four hour drive would seem like a good idea ...
Note per novel: the Commonwealth has had railways for about a century at this point, so there's lots of in-place infrastructure already on the ground—entirely parallel evolution, hence things like the different signal light conventions (noted in "Empire Games").
The real breakthrough they've made relative to the USA is to electrify their freight tracks (and provide segregated tracks with in-cab signaling for high speed inter-city rail: domestic air travel is still relatively primitive, but they've got trans-continental sleeper service with under-24-hour travel time from NY to the Bay area (and a freight backbone from the Bering Straits to Tierra del Fuego).
"only provides a small amount of extra benefit in moving, for example, large armoured vehicles to warzones"
Which would probably be because large armoured vehicles are designed to fit on existing rail stock. They'd probably be bigger if they could be, given that they're exactly as large as they can possibly be and still fit through European rail tunnels. It seems like that's a design constraint. (Now I've annoyed the tank aficionados too) It's also a constraint on the size of rockets (Elon says the F9 would have been fatter but it wouldn't go on a train). It would be much easier to move factory kit around if they could go on trains and or be made in bigger chunks. So you could probably roll out more factories in a given time. There was some discussion of wind turbines. 3 times wider could also mean 3 times longer for each carriage. So blades would fit, as would nacelles. The length of a carriage is becoming a limiting factor for wind turbine design in our timeline. 55 metre blades seem to be near the limit for rail, but the largest turbines are now running 80 metre blades and that's expected to grow.
http://www.railengineer.com/windlogisticsprojec/55-meter-blade-transport/
You'd also fit 27 times more people in each carriage if it was 3 times higher, longer and wider. Roll On Roll Off freight would work better. Vehicles the size of semi trailers could be driven on and off with ease. It seems like making the right of ways 3 times as wide, and the tunnels 9 times the trouble to dig would be more than paid off with trains that carried 27 times more stuff.
"Note per novel: the Commonwealth has had railways for about a century at this point" Ahhh, that explains it. Thanks.
Interesting. As I am in the process of replacing the 30-year old fluorescent strips in our kitchen, your post has just encouraged me to look them up. Unfortunately, I think that it will be a few years before they are a plausible replacement for fluorescent strips for most uses, for the reasons given in the following references (especially the first):
http://luxreview.com/review/2016/05/led-tubes-to-replace-t8-fluorescent-lamps http://www.premierltg.com/should-you-replace-your-t8-fluorescent-lamps-with-t8-led-tubes-2/
I searched for some where I could replace just a single-tube fitting (5'), which was surprisingly tricky, and found that it would cost 120 quid, even if I could get it in the UK, and the lack of side-lighting would still be a problem. Well, that's about triple what I have spent (at modern prices) on the fluorescent equivalent over 30 years of heavy domestic use (we live in the kitchen).
On the directional aspect, everybody uses LEDs for bicycle safety lighting. They are FAR too directional, because a lot of accidents are at junctions, where the view of the cyclist is at an angle to the cycle's direction. Yet none of the multi-led ones have them at multiple angles - I use multiple, cheap ones to achieve that effect.
domestic air travel is still relatively primitive, but they've got trans-continental sleeper service with under-24-hour travel time from NY to the Bay area
This is something I'd like to travel in. Too bad we don't have the dimensional-hopping tech.
Indeed too bad, I'd love to see some proper re-wilding projects that brought extinct animals back.
You mean like smallpox?
Given the following:
How long would it take to ramp up production and contain an outbreak if hostile world walkers decided to simultaneously reintroduce it in half a dozen cities at once.
Spending a lot more money (twice the size in rail terms would be ten times the cost for tunneling, bridges, rolling stock etc.) to cope with 0.01% of the traffic as special cases such as turbine blades and rocket casings is poor economics, unless Musk and the wind turbine folks are willing to pay for the extra expenses -- answer, no chance. My solution for SpaceX wanting to move rockets around would be to fuel them up and fly them to the launchpad...
Packing twenty times as many people into a train at a platform would pose problems in personnel traffic flows which tend towards the chaotic at the best of times, resulting in long periods between train movements in and out of stations thus obviating the need for such mega-trains.
As for Charlie's idea of a sleeper rail service covering the US coast-to-coast in 24 hours, it's not that likely to actually work out in practice especially if there are intermediate stops on the way. I regularly use a sleeper service in Japan, the Sunrise Seto/Izumo that takes about 8.5 hours to cover 600km on the narrow-gauge "limited express" network between Tokyo and Okayama.
The fluorescent light in Charlie's kitchen was about 30 years old, a conventional-for-the-time choke and capacitor ballast and starter. The tube was dying and it required a sequence of off-and-on clicks of the wallswitch to get it to light. I fitted a more modern electronic ballast unit in place of the originals and the same tube has been lighting up first time every time for the past few years. I did the same for our own kitchen light and the tube's lifespan has increased noticeably, and again it doesn't flicker and make noise when it starts.
"Proper" LED lighting units which cost £30 or more are fit-and-forget for twenty years or so. This justifies their extra cost compared to the LED filament-replacement bulbs which are made down to a cost since folks would be antsy paying real money for a "lightbulb" even if it had proper electronic control circuitry rather than the simple-minded capacitor plus FW bridge plus smoothing cap circuitry fitted to the Poundland bulbs (no real regulation of drive current, no overvoltage protection etc.).
As for Charlie's idea of a sleeper rail service covering the US coast-to-coast in 24 hours, it's not that likely to actually work out in practice especially if there are intermediate stops on the way.
Ah, but if you're crossing the midwest, there aren't any intermediate stops. Or at least, very few indeed with enough passenger density to demand a stop on the coast-to-coast express. More likely a rationally-designed continental passenger rail network would be designed around a handful of very high speed, non-stop services connecting distant metropolitan hubs, with spoke services feeding out to "heartland" cities—possibly also sleepers for some of them. (San Francisco to Denver might well be SF-Chicago, then change, then another sleeper train back to Denver. Not so different from long-haul air travel where Delta, American, etc. tend to feed everything through a small number of hub airports.)
Note that you can't get there from here in today's USA—the legal environment for acquiring right-of-way is impossible. On the other hand, if you posit a despotic monarchy and no fourth amendment rights (or equivalent), yup, it's doable. And the revolutionary government that overthrows the monarchy gets to play the "state of emergency" card and keep building it.
That is the age and technology of the ones I have, too. The ones I am installing seem to have only a choke, but I will check what it actually is. But that is essentially my point. Even assuming a replacement tube and a couple of starters, a 30+ year cost for the fluorescents is a third of that of the LED systems, which are unproven over a 30 year period as well as being excessively directional. LEDs aren't going to replace fluorescents for a while yet.
I agree with everything you say. I've had my unfair share of C++ written by people who weren't as good as they thought they were, and I try very hard not to follow their example. Watching poorly-retrained Java programmers create a memory leak nightmare was particularly irritating.
My defence is that you can't solve poor understanding by hard limits in the language - otherwise we'd all be writing code by plugging together bits of Scratch on a GUI, like the kids do at school (it's an awesome early teaching tool, mind).
While "I would say that, wouldn't I" (as a ~30 year C/C++ user) I'm just not sure that ripping away the ability to do things is the answer - I've also seen the wailing and gnashing of teeth that was our ADA team next door (they had similar productivity in LOC / man year, and similar defect densities - yet we were writing in C).
It's why I like decent static and dynamic analysis tools (cppcheck, Lint, Coverity, Sonar, etc); and coverage tools that are honest about how much your unit tests actually cover. While I try my hardest, I know I'm going to make mistakes, and that the compiler won't catch everything. All assistance is gratefully received...
Not so different from long-haul air travel where Delta, American, etc. tend to feed everything through a small number of hub airports.)
Yeah, that's actually a not-insignificant problem here in the states with the consolidation of airlines doing that and strangling cities as a result.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/airline-consolidation-hits-smaller-cities-hardest-1441912457
http://www.cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2010/04/northwest-delta_merger_hurt_hu.html
https://www.marketplace.org/2010/04/16/business/united-continental-merger/airline-merger-may-hurt-hubs
https://www.usatoday.com/story/todayinthesky/2015/07/15/us-airports-increasingly-dominated-by-1-or-2-carriers/30152927/
When the Wall Street Journal is saying "this isn't good" it is probably worth listening to. Strangle the cities, jobs go away, you get some population flows which collapse real estate prices trapping the rest there and the local economy continues to dip, unrest grows, and the populace starts agitating, and reactionary attitudes soar.
Actually I'd say it's probably easier, using "eminent domain" as it's called in the US, to take land for high-speed rail in the US than it is by compulsory purchase in the UK. There's a new privately-sponsored HSR-ish[a] system being built in Florida. The first phase is along existing RoW and is close to opening but the extension inland to Orlando will be completely new.
I'd also wager that there's a good chance that the true HSR[b] project in California may enter service ahead of Britain's HS2. It is already under construction, and AFAIK no shovels have yet turned for HS2.
The power of the government to take private property for public use is defined in the core Constitution, not the Bill of Rights, and is only limited by the requirement to pay "just compensation".
[a] It meets the US definition of "High-Speed Rail" as capable of speeds of 125mph. [b] Projected speeds of up to 220mph
Why for the love of Ghu would you, in a "skipping coal" scenario, not just plan for intermittency? Have reservoirs and storage sufficient to support a minimum rather than maximum supply and as much as is possible make your loads rather than your generation capacity dispatchable.
Back when I was through the Swedish "let us place you for national service", they (as far as they can) test for dominant eye. With a left-dominant eye, certain roles are (or at least were) unavailable.
One of the funniest things to do to a left-handed fencer is to switch to the left hand. I'm not brilliant fencing with the left, but I'm good enough that the surprise of having to fence a leftie is enough for at least scoring a few points/kills quickly (lefties are usually NOT used to fencing lefties, whereas I seem to always have had at least a single leftie to get used to).
oops correction, it is in the Bill of Rights, the Fifth Amendment, not the core Constitution. Apologies!
As far as I can tell, the main difference between a reference and a pointer is taht it's not semantically obvious how you perform reference + offset arithmetic (and GC gets a lot easier if you do not allow pointer arithmetics, like, say Go).
Shinkansens today run at about 150km/h average speed, maybe a little more, based on trainsets and track and overhead transmission lines that can comfortably cope with peak speeds of 300km/h plus. However that is second or third-generation "high speed rail" which needs computers and CNC machining capabilities which were the realm of SF in the 1960s when the first 100-series bullet trains broke the 200km/hr barrier for regular passenger operations. I'm not sure NAC levels of engineering can reliably transmit 25kV at a couple of thousand amps into a trainset moving at 300km/hr, not without replacing the overhead every couple of weeks due to arcing. Fluid dynamics modelling (a heavy CPU load) and powerful flight control computers for the pantograph systems to prevent them separating and/or crashing the overheads fifty times per kilometre travelled are a big step up the tech ladder.
A nuclear trainset however might work out for them given very long distance travel, no need for five thousand kilometres of overhead and power distribution. On-board gas-turbine generators might work too but they would require fuelling stops (not impossible, but not to shinkansen schedules where stops are typically only a couple of minutes).
An electronic "ballast" for a single 58/70W tube should cost about ten or fifteen bucks and they can be fitted into existing fluorescent tube housings without too much difficulty after you rip out the existing components. There's usually a helpful wiring diagram printed on the ballast casing to indicate how it should be installed. The brand names to look for are Osram and Tridonic.
Is that "Lines Of Code / man year" or "Statements / man year"? They're pretty much the same thing in C*, but in Ada a line is terminated by CR/LF and a statement only by a ";" character. So one Ada statement can (and often should for legibility) run over several lines of text.
Which is exactly what I plan to do, of course.
Pointer arithmetic in C/C++? Not if I can help it...
Much prefer doing a "placement new" onto the mapped memory's base address, or a "construct from base address of I/O buffer", with a properly-defined data structure / container / iterator setup. It may take up one or two more lines of code, but I've been scarred by clipping and slicing in the past...
...it also leaves the "next person" (possibly even yourself in two years' time) in no doubt as to WTF you were up to - and avoids much of the inevitable "hmmm, better recheck this, it looks suspicious" phase, any time you look at it.
Re: '... rationally-designed continental passenger rail network'
Given the difference in relative population densities between worlds, the presence of world walkers esp. from more technologically and/or scientifically advanced worlds with access to maps of natural resources and problems (e.g., tornado alley), personally think it would make sense to do some planning about where the best locations for different needs should be sited. Once you have that in place, plan your cities to use the least amount of materials between and within centers. (That is, hire the opposite of the lunatic that planned/designed Boston area streets. For folks who haven't visited Boston: this area is randomly dotted with five and six-point intersections that look very pretty and star-like when viewed at night from a plane but are a nightmare and energy/time wasteful when driving. No wonder visitors laugh upon seeing 'Thickly Settled'(?) signs here and there.)
https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2014/04/02/the-real-reason-why-bostons-geography-is-the-most-confusing-thing-ever
To be honest, I can't remember. Probably statements.
The lead engineer of the Ada team (about ~30 engineers) had an inferiority complex, and was always insisting that his team produced code that was inherently more correct, because "Ada was a specification language" (it didn't stop them from occasionally screwing up in spectacular style). Our team (about ~30 engineers) were mildly amused because we felt we were delivering "better" code, with slightly fewer defects, requiring less delay to the overall release, and less rework afterwords.
(Mid-90s) we had the numbers because we were on a process-improvement push at the time, and trying to gain CMM Level 3 accreditation. Strangely, I'm not cynical about such exercises - I think CMM (and its successor, CMMI) are rather worthwhile activities.
The early Shinkansen did have a pantograph that frequently lost contact with the catenary, and they relied on intensive maintenance to cope with the rate of damage. When BR came to develop the electric version of the APT they looked at this and thought "they may be able to get away with that in Japan, but we can't here". They then proceeded to solve the problem successfully with 70s techniques. Entirely passive pantographs that can handle 300km/h have existed for a long time.
They also don't have to handle 2kA. 2kA at 25kV is 50MW which is much too high. British catenary is rated at I think typically 0.6kA and the sections are long enough that you can expect to be supplying several trains in each. The TGV is between roughly 6MW and 12MW maximum depending on model.
Gas turbines don't really work for rail use. Below full power output the efficiency falls off a cliff and railway operation typically requires full power rather less than half the time, so the gas turbine is mostly operating in conditions which cause it to drink fuel. The peculiar geography of North America does mean that there are a handful of locations where a gas turbine can operate at full power continuously for long periods, but a handful of locations means a handful of locomotives, and it's much less hassle to just use diesels the same as you use everywhere else and keep it all the same.
Nuclear trains have also been weighed in the balance and found wanting, by both the US and Russia in this timeline. Intermittency of operation is one problem; shielding is another - you need to greatly increase the loading gauge just to have enough width for the thickness of shielding, no matter how small is the reactor inside it.
It doesn't usually matter.
In just about every significant program in just about every modern programming language, the actual incidence of multiple-line statements is less than 1%, which dooms the difference between "Statements" and "Lines of Code" to statistical insignificance. This is emphatically true for both Ada and C/C++. (Also note that there are a lot of "coding standards" out there that still believe the programmers are constrained to 80-column punched cards.)
Enlightened organizations (defined as "organizations that understand the above observation and also understand the concept of statistical insignificance") count carriage returns (or their equivalent), because counting statements requires a lot more work. You basically have to parse the code completely, to locate the statement boundaries. Since the boundary will be the carriage return, over 99% of the time, it isn't worth the effort.
A major reason fossil fuels became popular in the first place is that they are not intermittent; they enable you to get away from the situation of not being able to do things because you can't count on the energy supply. A lot of industrial loads simply can't be switched off* because the process depends on continuous supply; a lot of non-industrial loads are dictated by it getting dark and cold at night, which again isn't something you can control. To keep the steelworks operating and the lights on you need either fossil fuels or something that works just as well, which means enough generating and storage capacity that you always have enough power despite the intermittency. (Nuclear helps.)
*Please, we don't need a repulsive neologism for "can be switched off"...
"different signal light conventions"
Ah yes, this reminds me of something that struck me when I read it... I'm sure there is a reason why blue signals do not exist in this timeline, but I can't remember what it is. It might be as simple as the difficulty of making a good blue light with an oil lamp, but I'm more than half sure it isn't that, but something more perception-related. Insensitivity of the human eye to a blue that's blue enough to be definitely not some other colour? I was kind of hoping Greg might have noticed this and remember it better...
"Ever spent a quarter of an hour at a Tesla showroom?"
Laughs. On my budget?
"...taking an hour or two off for an enforced meal/sleep break while the car recharges for the next four hour drive would seem like a good idea ..."
This is doubtless true for a vacationer, but the math is probably different for a trucker (particularly if team-driven) or a mobile network engineer in a hurry.
"As EVs become ubiquitous the shortest route and the optimum route will become the same."
This is very true, but blah, blah, blah - I think the whole argument is moot, because it looks like we're developing technologies for charging cars more quickly, and when we're down to 5-10 minutes for a charge the stop-time will be perfect - just enough time for a restroom break, a stretch, and a soda.
Probably the biggest advantage of the broad gauge was that it helped the GWR stake out a large geographical territory to itself... Its demise was inevitable, not only because of the much greater mileage of standard gauge, but also because it didn't have any advantage over standard gauge; Brunel's claims for it had not been borne out by experience when the Gauge Commission sat, nor were they ever to be. Current experience shows that standard gauge works just fine for speeds far higher than Brunel ever envisaged - the important factor is not gauge per se but the dynamics of the interaction between wheel and rail, which was not understood until the 1960s because nobody had bothered to investigate it. Standard gauge is more than adequate for speeds high enough to wipe out any environmental advantage of rail by the square-law increase in energy consumption per journey.
For freight, the loading gauge is much more important than the track gauge, and while the broad gauge did bring some increase in loading gauge with it, it wasn't really that much. In the UK, we need special low-slung wagons to handle shipping containers, and we can't do useful things like driving standard lorries onto the back of trains. But in the US, with the same track gauge, the loading gauge is big enough to pile one shipping container on top of another.
We send loads that are too big to fit on the railways at all by road, by highly tortuous and indirect routes to avoid low bridges. They travel very slowly with a police escort and hold up all the other traffic, but it's still rare to get held up by one because there just aren't all that many. By the same token, it isn't worth the trouble of building infrastructure specially to handle them more easily.
Interesting you cite steelworks. Arc furnaces work on an extremely short batch process, wouldn't they be perfect examples of industrial equipment to run when the wind blows?
The early adopters of coal-fired steam engines were mill owners who wanted to run their machines when the wind didn't blow or when the river was drying up and the head over the water wheel dropped to a trickle. The primitive early coal-fired steam engines were more powerful than anything "renewable"; a single engine could power a number of looms or lathes using slip belts on overhead shaft wheels.
snicker Jan '87 through Worldcon '88, I was working for the Scummy Mortgage Co, in Austin, TX (I think I can fill 3 pages of why I have called it that since).
Around late '87 or early '88, they got a REALLY EXPENSIVE brand new machine, which was a 385. They were pricey, having just come out.
Now, the co had this word processing system - literally7, using a d/b, and pulling boilerplate paragraphs, and assembling a letter. On the IBM 4300 mid-frame, it took a day? or was it more, where that was literally the only thing running on the system, while it produced all the letters.
A contractor I worked with rewrote the system from RPG III to RPG II (which was the only compiler for RPG for the '386). And cut it to about 1/3 the amount of code. And it ran the same time on the '386 (esp. with his fixes) as it did on the 4300.
On that list of reasons, oritginal programmers, bottom quarter of the programming class should be in there.
In the US, we really didn't see anything but decks of cards, then terminals, before the IBM PC came out. Where I was working from '83 - '86, they started to come in in later '83, I believe.
And most companies I worked at, it was PC's, overwhelmingly, running DOS, then Win 3, the latter around '90.
"Too early" is probably right in one sense - only appealing to the rather small and peculiar set of people who buy that particular car, and at a time when free charging points still exist. "Too late" in another sense, though, in that you really want to get a useful network of replacement stations, and a standard for the battery (cf. hard drives), in place before people start needing to use it; there should probably have been more, and certainly they should not have been restricted to just one manufacturer. But then since nobody is trying to facilitate the hassle-free use of electric vehicles, that doesn't happen.
Or, of course, it might just be something as simple as that particular design having some pointlessly stupid feature that made it ridiculously awkward for no reason, which put everyone off. Or maybe even it did have a reason, and that reason was to put everyone off so the result can be used as an excuse for not bothering to keep going with it...
Thank you, yes, it was Chickenhawk.
The damage that war did to the US is still here, and is probably part of the reason we're so fucked up.
Riverboats... yes, you remind me that I've been thinking purely in terms of the standard British narrowboat, which can carry maybe 20 tons or so. Bigger boats work well enough that a modern canal was constructed to link the Rhine and the Danube.
The Commonwealth has the same physical geography as the north-east of the US, and that was another area that got right into river transport and making great big canals to link the rivers. So it would rather surprise me if they hadn't done much the same earlier in their industrialisation before we get to see them.
Nope.
Other notes: electrification of rails, in the US, came in during the 20's. The biggie was NYC demanding no smoke in tunnels under the Hudson. It worked so well... the Pennsy electrified north and south, and to Harrisburg on its trackage. Please note, this is still known as the Northeast Corridor.
About 50 hp moving how many tons? How fast. And rails can handle grades: 3% is considered a heavy grade, but some mining and logging rails went up to 4% or even 5% (with geared engines). And it really is a lot less work to cut and grade than dig deep, level canals. There's a reason that the US went from the canal building boom of the 1820's and 1830's to the railroad boom that started in the 1840's.
Dynamite, after the main building? Not in the US: it was used heavily in the 1870's and '80s, building the Northern Pacific.
Hmmm... Maybe I should get the DVD, and then I could surplus my '60s, '70's, and 80's copies of Mother Earth News.
But no, you may not have my copies of the Whole Earth Catalog, the Next Whole Earth Catalog, or The Last Whole Earth Catalog.
About fitting in more passengers... I have just one thing to say: you know, you can fit more passengers into that passenger plane, if you cut the legroom, and can add another row or three to the plane....
Yes, or very close to that. Really old-fashioned railway signal lamps ( Oil-can + wick + paraffin usually ) gave a very yellow light, so the signal spectacles were almost blue, giving a green aspect when viewed by an approaching train driver.... After reliable elctric lighting came along, a reasonable blue could have been got, but by that time, QWERTY rules made sure that it stayed "green". Note - several railways used WHITE for "go" & red for "stop" - until a very sensible desire for uniform standards cut in.
Your first sentence is pretty much what I was saying; the second is a bit dubious. They definitely had large mills powered by water wheels, using line shafting to distribute the power. But they fairly soon started running out of sites with enough water power available, so they adapted mine-pumping technology to drive the line shafting instead.
Small windmills produce little power for their cost-to-build. Large generator/gearbox sets scale up in power vs. cost very nicely -- a 5MW dataplate mill costs about twice as much as a 1.5MW mill, tower included. They're better than nothing but not better and less predictable than coal-fired boilers driving turbogenerator sets when coal is cheap and abundant and that's true at least to start with before the mines start petering out. That will take centuries at normal consumption rates though. The UK which didn't have a great deal of coal to start with took 200 years of industrialisation and urban living to use up most of its reserves but younger nations like the US, China and Germany have hundreds of years of easily-mined coal and lignite left to extract and burn even at current rates.
Even large watermills weren't very powerful, a dry summer could result in a low river level and not enough energy at the mill wheel shaft to drive all the expensive machines, and a competitor could take water from above your mill and divert it away leaving you literally powerless. A steam engine in the factory yard always worked assuming coal could be delivered and stockpiled. Install more machines, another engine or a larger replacement would deliver the extra energy required whereas a given water wheel or set of wheels was limited by the potential energy of the river that fed it and couldn't be increased indefinitely, not without large and expensive ground works to bring in extra water via canals and aqueducts (see the bit about competitors above).
And rails can handle grades: 3% is considered a heavy grade,
It is my understanding that anything above 1% is considered a problem to be avoided.
Burroughs Extended ALGOL, on the B5000 descriptor machines, comes immediately to mind as a counterexample.
I think this is one of those cases where for some reason it sounds like we disagree but actually basically don't...
A lot of British canals aren't particularly narrow gauge, only a few are limited for passage by the width and length of the locks and the gauge turns along their length (the tightest turn in the canal that limits the length of the boat). On some lengths of canal, boats of four metre beam can be accommodated with loose cargo capacities of fifty tonnes and better. There is, of course, the famous Manchester ship canal which can take ships of up to 16 metre beam.
I took this picture myself, showing riverine traffic in one of the world's biggest and highest-tech cities:
http://www.shipsnostalgia.com/gallery/showphoto.php/photo/182239/title/barge-and-tug-2c-akihaba/cat/all
Warning: Shipsnostalgia is a bit like TV Tropes, it can suck you in for HOURS.
"White is right And red is wrong Green means gently go along"
Which I guess is not as bad as German mains cables used to be...
Short? Please read up on the thousand-mile long Grand Canal.
It's remarkable, isn't it? Quite astonishing.
For comparison, to qualify as unusually long a railway has to be more than twice that length. The Trans-Siberian, for example, or the one from Perth to Adelaide. To be genuinely astonishing I think you'd want your railway to be well over 1000 leagues - Santiago to Anchorage or Cape Town to Oslo maybe.
My defence is that you can't solve poor understanding by hard limits in the language
Yes and no. You can outright prevent some problems through language design, but the resulting loss of flexibility may kill the language. Or the sheer difficulty in using the language may kill it.
Rust may have pushed that one too far with their "only one thing that mutate an object" approach, only time will tell. But in the meantime it is a fun discipline to apply to my coding.
I still remember the joy of trying to explain to a room full of people the six ways to pass parameters in Jade and why it mattered (distributed language, passing large things by value will kill your network, passing them as shared will introduce latency). You can completely fix that by making it nigh-impossible to write distributed code in the language - Javascript springs to mind as an example.
It's why I like decent static and dynamic analysis tools (cppcheck, Lint, Coverity, Sonar, etc);
Yep. One of the handy things I do for projects I'm interested in is grab the source code, turn on all the compiler warnings then fix them. Then I run static analysis tools and ditto. 99% of what I do has no effect and the other 1% fixes mysterious problems that no-one has any idea how to solve {eyeroll}.
I say again, utility classes and code tools that turn runtime errors into compiler ones are extremely useful. "modern" programming techniques that do the opposite are disastrous.
My current workplace has an "expert Delphi programmer" who has 2000+ hints and warnings in his main project and for reasons unknown the application crashes a lot. But he is resilient in the face of opportunities to learn or accept assistance, and since he's awesome at managing upward we just have to live with what he does.
Least popular, huh?
'Bout 15 or more years ago, Dr. Dobbs' Journal had an article about it, and referred to it as "the sysadmin's Swiss Army chainsaw".
Yes, and no. I look at an A380. It's about 1/3 capacity of one carriage of my imaginary 3 times bigger railway. About 800 people. Loading and unloading it takes as near as I can tell forever. Certainly when I'm waiting for it to load and unload. So using that as a guide, I can see why Nojay says that carriages with 27 times the capacity would be useless for commuter work. Cramming more people onto existing carriages by cutting seat size, legroom and isle size would put more people on the train, but then you can't get them on and off as fast, so you have to have fewer trains and so the capacity of the line doesn't go up, if anything it goes down.
Yet we have 'carriages' here in Oz that are 1100 passengers in the Manly ferry service. The layout of the ferry isn't optimised to get the absolute most possible people crammed into every available space, jostled together like sardines. It's optimised to get them on and off quickly. The result is that the turnaround at each stop is only a couple of minutes to get 1100 people off and 11000 people on. The isles are wide (narrowing as they get further from the door). The doors themselves are huge. There's one for each deck. The people getting off don't have to fight through the people getting on, they're separate streams (but on the same side). That's all done with 19th century wharf designs. And the ferry can be 2 metres higher or lower when it arrives due to tide and loading, and while it's there it jiggles up and down. If instead you had a train that comes to the same spot every time, you could have walkways to each of the 5 decks. All the people alighting could get off one side, all the people boarding come in the other side. There's no real reason why getting a thousand people on and a thousand off should take much more than one minute if the interior layout is designed for it.
But again, querty. It won't happen. Trains are not much different to how they were in 1820. However shipping... Look at the collier that Captain Cook sailed in 1770. It was rated at about 350 tonnes. The modern equivalent carries about 1000 times more and is roughly, 10 times larger in every dimension. What would international shipping cost if ships were still that size?
I would say that the only good decision I made in the 1990s was refusing to learn perl, purely on the basis of aesthetics.
One of the few cases where I have never regretted my ignorance.
Typo above. 11000 should be 1100.
Anyway, I forgot about locks... You're certainly right. The other thing I didn't think of is that dams are usually needed to supply/control water for a canal system. I think the dam buster squadron proved that dams are vulnerable to air attack even with 1940's tech. An earth wall dam might survive, but probably not and all the water control gear would be destroyed.
I believe the reason the "dam busters" used the bouncing bomb was because it could be put into action fairly quickly with the aircraft that were already available. They didn't use them again after that one raid because of the highly specialized training required to achieve the necessary precision and the high casualty rates for the crews that conducted the raid (over 40%).
At the same time the RAF was already developing Barnes Wallis's Tallboy and Grand Slam earthquake bombs.
Still they're thinking about corpuscular petard attack. A direct hit on a switching yard means no switching yard. A direct hit on a big canal bay means... well a bigger canal bay. Canals would be pretty much immune to an airburst/shockwave/heat. The petard would need to parachute down and explode on contact with the ground/water. In the face of corpuscular tipped SAMs, that might be difficult.
The reason you use a parachute with a nuclear weapon is to retard it sufficiently so the aircraft that drops it can get outside the blast radius.
In attacking a canal or locks, you want the bomb designed to penetrate underground before exploding, creating a camouflet that collapses underneath the target.
That's how the RAF took out the Bielefeld and Arnsberg viaducts that couldn't be destroyed by conventional bombing. It didn't require a direct hit. The bombs exploded deep underground and the collapsing camouflets dropped the ground out from under the support pilings toppling the viaducts. It would work the same way with canal locks and even if a nuclear weapon was used, fallout would be limited as long as the explosion was deep enough. Nor, would an earth wall dam survive because you're not blowing up the dam, you're collapsing the earth out from under it.
Not too long I think. The US had just a tiny sample left at the CDC in Atlanta in 2002 and was on the verge of destroying it. Then the government changed their minds and decided that all of us who were going to Iraq would receive smallpox vaccination before deploying, even those of us old enough to have been previously vaccinated. The US Army had enough doses on hand by October 2003 to vaccinate the 1st Infantry Division, 1st Cavalry Division and three National Guard Brigades being deployed for OIF II which I figure was 45,000+ soldiers (plus Air Force, Navy and Marines, along with whatever was done for civilian contractors).
Heathen! 'Tis a lovely language, if your starting point is the UNIX userland — it's like shell, awk, and sed got together and had a lovechild, then the lovechild grew up and discovered OOP and functional programming.
Airliners are slow to load/unload for many reasons, but the biggest is that they're long and skinny and load from one end only—and that the big 'uns like the A380 may have two aisles, but they also have up to three seats abreast to either side of the aisle, and people are pre-assigned seats, so there's a lot of inevitable shuffling back and forth and people clogging up the aisles to let neighbours in, and then the contest to stuff as much luggage as possible into the overhead bins. Oh, and in economy the seats are so close together that it's almost impossible to stand up, which slows all that shuffling right down ...
I can guarantee you that if you configured an A380 in 100% business/first class seating, boarded by row number (something that's fallen into disuse), and used both jetways (A380 piers are designed to board on the upper and main deck simultaneously) you could get your 150-odd passengers into their seats really fast.
In the US, we really didn't see anything but decks of cards, then terminals, before the IBM PC came out. Where I was working from '83 - '86, they started to come in in later '83, I believe.
Quite a few people used mini-computers. Millions. But they turned out to be a short lived thing as personal computers wiped them out (mostly) by the mid 90s.
hey didn't use them again after that one raid because of the highly specialized training required to achieve the necessary precision and the high casualty rates for the crews that conducted the raid (over 40%)
Ahem: they didn't use them from Lancasters against dams after the one raid. But 618 Squadron, flying Mosquitos equipped with the smaller "highball" bouncing bomb, designed as an anti-shipping weapon, was also formed. They were supposed to nail the Tirpitz, but conventional grand slam bombs sank the battleship. Then they were sent to the far east to go after Japanese shipping in 1945 ... but by that time the IJN wasn't there any more. So they were disbanded before they saw action.
But again, querty. It won't happen
On that note, I (as a Briton), have just moved to Denmark, to work with a group of Germans. We've got 5 separate keyboard layouts spread around the office and laboratory - including the German QWERTZ abomination which swaps the Z and Y entirely. (The others are Danish, Norwegian, US, and a weird US-UK hybrid that just confuses everyone)
Given sufficiently large cohesive groups, it is entirely possible to sustain many variations on a similar theme, because it can be efficient to do so - typing Danish without Å,Æ,Ø on discrete keys is a pain; and if you have the muscle memory, a US keyboard makes writing LaTeX markup pleasanter because the shortcuts were designed around that layout (except that that layout is still wrong, and the Americans should feel bad for it. Yes, all of them.)
It's also a similar story with mains plug sockets - the Danes have a ~unique variation on on the EU mains plug socket, that's incompatible with most EU mains plug sockets. Because... reasons, as near as I can work out.
Canals.
In watching the comments go by I realized this is not something that happened all that much in the US. It is my understanding that many of the canals in the UK still exist mostly as places for house boats. We have no such over here.
But we did basically take all of our big rivers and turn them into canals. But with massively huge locks compared to what most people here are talking about.
Hmmm... Maybe I should get the DVD, and then I could surplus my '60s, '70's, and 80's copies of Mother Earth News.
But no, you may not have my copies of the Whole Earth Catalog, the Next Whole Earth Catalog, or The Last Whole Earth Catalog.
When I bought them they were available on two CD-ROMs. I bought them because due to unforseen circumstances (lost half a roof to Hurricane Fran in 1996) a large part of my collection of "Mother Earth News", along with "National Geographic" going back to the late 50s were destroyed by water damage. I do still have paper copies of the "Whole Earth Catalog" and "The Last Whole Earth Catalog".
In truth, I don't consider CD-ROM, DVD-ROM or even modern memory cards good storage media for such libraries. My ideal is still microfiche. They carry almost as much information density, and in a pinch they can be read with nothing more than a bright light & a magnifying glass.
Still the case for shunting signals in the UK, no?
Yeh, a corpuscular bunker buster would be very effective against both dams and probably make a right mess of a canal system, but they're future tech from NAC's point of view. I don't think they appeared in our timeline until the late nineties (willing to be proven wrong again of course). I don't think the NAC or the French have corpuscular petards that are rugged enough to slam into concrete or solid rock at high supersonic speed, burrow through and then (the tricky bit) detonate reliably. On the other hand, as I said, conventional explosives and 1940's tech is ample to knock down dams and do a bit of bunker busting on the side. However either requires getting your aircraft to fly above the target somewhere above 20 000 ft where you're an absolute sitting duck for corpuscular SAMs.
So it's a tricky one. There's a lot to dislike about canals, but there's a lot to dislike about railways in wartime too. Really the only transport that's been battle proven to withstand an attack (relentless multi year onslaught rather than just 'attack') from the air by an overwhelmingly technically superior force is the bicycle. (well shortly afterwards, replaced by small trucks) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ho_Chi_Minh_trail
I believe the reason the "dam busters" used the bouncing bomb was because it could be put into action fairly quickly with the aircraft that were already available.
Not quite, IIRC. The problem was that in order for a bomb to work, you needed it to land at the base of the dam, with the water behind it to act as a very effective way of tamping the explosion in the direction required. Getting a bomb to slide down the wet wall of the dam is virtually impossible if you drop it vertically; however, if you spun it, and skipped it over the anti-torpedo nets (because the Germans had thought about defending the dams against attack), it would hit the wall and "unwind" downwards until the point where a pressure switch could trigger it.
The UPKEEP mines in Operation CHASTISE (and the lighter HIGHBALL) were very much a specific solution, although as OGH has pointed out, they didn't get used much. That shouldn't demean them; other such "bright ideas" included a naval aviation torpedo attack on an anchored fleet. It was rather successful at Taranto in Operation JUDGEMENT; wasn't used much thereafter, apart from being copied (infamously) by some admirers of the Royal Navy...
...the Fleet Air Arm celebrates "Taranto Night" each year; somehow, I can't see the JMSDF holding a dinner on the anniversary of their Climbing Mount Niitaka...
They didn't use them again after that one raid because of the highly specialized training required to achieve the necessary precision and the high casualty rates for the crews that conducted the raid (over 40%).
In the late 70s, we lived in a village called Wippringsen, just 3km from the Mohne Dam. At the time, they appeared to have paint markers all over the dam ("to help rebuild it next time", someone said unkindly). It wasn't unusual to see RAF aircraft low-flying in the vicinity, can't think why...
I replaced all but three of my downstairs light with filament style LEDs about three years ago. 19 in all. I haven’t needed to replace any of them.
I'd have though the problem that one minor issue is that they're pressurized vessels, so you have to be careful about what the doors look like so that you don't get explosive decompression. Big doors maximized to get people off might not hold pressure all that well, unless they're really cleverly designed.
Doors are solved. Cargo planes derived from passenger planes have huge doors. The issue is, as Charlie pointed out, if you optimise for easy ingress/egress, you can't fit in as many paying passengers. Given that refuelling and luggage remove and reload takes ages, there's no advantage to getting the passengers on and off quickly.
http://www.aircraft.airbus.com/aircraftfamilies/freighter/a330-200f/
"Its 141 X 101-inch main deck door is electrically-controlled and hydraulically-operated, and is derived from the proven cargo door on A300/A310 freighters."
The door on the back of some military transports is big enough to drive a tank down.
https://i2.wp.com/whitefleet.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/M1ontoC5.jpg?ssl=1
You could I guess open both the front and rear doors, make everyone run and change over all the passengers in well under 10 seconds plus the door opening and closing times.
open both the front and rear doors
... as you pass over the airport. More expensive seating gets you a parachute?
Doors have extra weight in a gram-conscious environment. More, bigger doors cost the airlines money every second the thing is in the air. I would have thought that short-haul aircraft especially would be much more obviously optimised for high speed turnarounds. With 30 minute flights and at least that much time on the ground... wtf? Why they don't use the cargo door to swap galley contents, for example.
One thing that continues to puzzle me is the failure to use ground tugs to move aircraft on and off runways. I assume there are good reasons, but shoving air round is much less efficient what driving wheels.
But I assume that someone has done the maths and decided that it's cheaper to do it the way they do. And the cost I'm most concerned about is the "pumping CO2 into my atmosphere, you selfish bastards" one.
One thing that continues to puzzle me is the failure to use ground tugs to move aircraft on and off runways. I assume there are good reasons, but shoving air round is much less efficient what driving wheels.
Time. They used to use the jet engines to back away from the gates. Those days are gone unless you're somewhere without a working tug. And I was never on a plane with wing mounted engines that did it. But the existing tugs are optimized for moving a very large heave thing on wheels slowly for typically very short distances. Hauling a plane out to the end of the runway at faster than a slow walking speed would require a much different tug. At most airports I fly out of we have to go a 1/2 mile to several miles to get near the end of the runway. Larger. Better engine and brakes. All weather cabs. Etc...
open both the front and rear doors, make everyone run and change over all the passengers in well under 10 seconds plus the door opening and closing times.
The market departments would hate this. They like perks they can give to higher paying passengers like early boarding, for sure overhead space, etc...
There have been 1000s of hours studying how to get people on a plane faster. Southwest does it best in the US. But they only have 1 class of service. They divide up the people into 3 groups and then it is first come first serve. And the airlines selling classes of service are NOT going to go there.
And for most planes they get everyone on board and in their seats, with luggage stowed in under 30 minutes. Not bad for over 100 people with kids and crap into a single door and a narrow aisle. This leads to a 1 hour turn for many flights as it typically takes 20 to 25 minutes to unload same.
"... as you pass over the airport. More expensive seating gets you a parachute?"
Well you can open the rear door in flight, the front door... I guess you could 'open' it in flight, but you couldn't close it because your plane would be in little bits over a wide area.
"Doors have extra weight in a gram-conscious environment. More, bigger doors cost the airlines money every second the thing is in the air."
Yep, that's why they don't do it. The airlines optimise for making the most money, and that means cramming in every possible passenger, and changing the passengers doesn't need to be fast because it parallels with other ground activities that take longer. They could do it (which is what I was saying) but there's no advantage to the airlines. Even short haul, it takes longer to get the bags swapped over than the passengers. Heteromeles was saying it might not be possible.
The tug thing, I don't know why either. I know there was a guy at the field I used to fly out of who bought his own tug to minimise engine hours. I never quite figured out how he managed the logistics of it, as he did the whole thing by himself. When there are hundreds of movements a day, you need to get your arse off the active runway quick smart. He did it at one of the busiest airports in the Southern Hemisphere.
And I doubt they'd be keen on leaving the gate without all the engines running and in the green. Personally I'd be pretty annoyed about being dragged out to the end of the runway without the airconditioning running.
Catch the 5:40am EuroStar from London and can be in Lyon by noon.
5hr 15 min to go 600 miles (there's a 1-hr time-zone change). And that includes a 40-minute connection in Paris.
So I can very easily believe a 24-hour sleeper going 5-times further than across America.
Ahh, Phoenix in the summer. With an end of runway wait.
Never done Phoenix that way but have done it in the summer at many other airports such as Dallas and Chicago.
As I think has been said in other words- you're giving languages and especially the English language too much credit for specificity and lack of ambiguity even so. Many of us who aren't hidden nonhuman AIs walking among you
(oops, I'm going to be in so much trouble with the conspiracy... ohoh.)
have trouble with contexts, non-verbal communication - especially, and the sheer rhyming, punnish cussedness of the language in its everyday ambiguities, to agree with the connotations of your statement.
I like Perl for writing one-liners on the command line. For anything bigger, for example anything requiring classes, I find it very difficult to write good Perl. I haven't written anything longer than a command line in about a decade in it.
The one feature I like in the language is the input filter mechanism. Basically it's a system where you can write a Perl module which acts as a filter, that is, everything in the source code file after that filter module include goes through that filter. The code parsed is the output of the filter.
I used it to write a Brainfck interpreter in Perl. The best thing about that was that the Perl required did not use any Brainfuck characters, so the code was equally valid for both my Perl BF interpreter and any other BF interpreter.
This obviously has the potential to be used to write incomprehensible code which looks like Perl but subtly isn't, if the reader misses the filter. Even knowing there is a filter and reading it does not guarantee that the code is readable.
I should hope not, after a mere 3 years. It took rather longer before the ones in my bathroom (20+ of them with 20+ LEDs each) started failing badly enough to replace. In my experience, compact fluorescents generally last for a decade or more.
OK. Answer me this one.
"I require your assistance with ..."
Is this a question or an imperative?
Cause a bit of a blow up on a tech discussion list when someone with apparently a background where their English was from India or similar put forth that statement.
To many of us the person was obviously asking a question. To one person, to which the question was directed, said person took it as a demand and went postal.
Yes - because the white light is on the ground, whereas a white light "Up in the air" (on a signal-post) can be confused with other white lights in the landscape - the advent of electic lighting in reasonable quantities in cities put paid to that idea, because of obvious confusion problems. WHite is still used for direction "Feathers" at junctions of course, but that shows up from any distance as a line, no a point-source
I just replaced a CFL bulb (a 20W Philips "Softone") this morning when it failed totally. However it had been failing for several years, taking a couple of minutes to come to full brightness from a dull orange colour. It was in a location, a central hallway, that requires lighting ten hours a day at this time of year so my best estimate of its lifespan in that socket is at least 20,000 hours and it was second-hand when I got it.
I've replaced it with a Poundworld 9W LED bulb (it cost me £1.50, only the smaller 5W LED bulbs are actually a pound at that store). I wrote today's date on the base as a reference, I'll see how long it lasts assuming I don't die before it does.
Long time ago ... but isn't perl ( like awk) a subset of UNIX?
"I require your assistance with ..." Is this a question or an imperative?
Grammatically, it's neither: it's an indicative statement. A question would be "Would you (please) give me your assistance?" and an imperative would be "Give me your assistance!". The debate is valid, but it's over the meaning of the verb "to require".
Does "You there, I require your assistance!" mean something different to "I say old boy, I require your assistance!". Does "I require your assistance" mean something different to "I need your help". Grammatically those are formed pretty much the same way. And to someone with ESOL, wouldn't the former just sound like a slightly more formal version of the latter?
No, they're different things. UNIX is a group of operating systems, nowadays most likely in many places to be Linux (which was started not from the original UNIX but converged quickly). Operating systems are programs (or, rather, sets of programs) which the computer runs to make anything happen - read keyboard, use disks, put images on the screen.
Perl and awk are programming languages, which are used to give computers instructions in a human-readable way. Both started in the UNIX world, but can be used elsewhere, like in Windows, with some effort. Awk is the older one of these and is geared for processing lines of text. I understand that Perl grew out of the need to extend awk, but it is now a "proper" language capable of doing basically whatever a computer program needs to do.
Perl is also geared for handling lines of text, but has been able to do other stuff pretty much from the beginning.
Both Perl and awk are found on many UNIX systems, but not all of them. Awk is pretty obsolete nowadays, I think, though it's powerful for what it does.
And of course the boundaries are porous. 'perl' and 'awk' are also the names of programs on the system's disk and are sometimes part of the set of programs called 'an operating system'.
Subset: no. You generally expect to get some version of perl (the interpreter) with most versions of Unixes these days because often system scripts rely on it. But unlike awk, it did not originate with the Unix team in Bell labs in the 70s. Perl (the language) was created by Larry Wall in the late 80s and mostly reached its current form with Perl 5 in the early 90s. While it originated in the Unix world, there's a perl interpreter for many, maybe most OS platforms (including, Windows, VMS, OS/2, the old MacOS and Plan 9).
The unusual thing is that Perl the language is defined in terms of its interpreter perl which is unitary - it is maintained as an open source project by the Perl Foundation. This also means that while there are many implementations of, say, awk, there is only one (definitive) implementation of perl.
The other unusual thing is that perl is as much a command line tool as a language interpreter. This includes its famous "awk emulation mode".
I use it rarely enough these days to find irksome the (oft repeated, because I forget) discovery that I have to type "apt-get install perl-doc" before I can type "perldoc -f blah" (to recall the correct syntax for the "blah" function) every year or two after a fresh OS install. Because what the fire truck is wrong with installing by default the online documentation for the tools that you install by default?
Fair enough; I'd actually say that your account is more of a comment on the quality of the coding teams and the mild superiority of C variants over Ada as "fast prototyping languages" than anything else.
grep -c ";" *a
Total time about 10s to type, and a few seconds per MB of code to run.
Oh yes, and Ada encourages passing parameters by named association, not positional; do that with 6 sensibly named parameters and you'll be off the side of the screen unless your IDE supports word-wrapping. Did you mean to suggest that ~0.5% of all Ada statements are (sub-)program calls or declarations? That taking a new line to declare each variable is not good practice?...
What Greg says in #508 is correct; There's also the fact that you get colour shift even with electric incandescent lights viewed through fog.
As you say, with the additional note that following Operation Chastise the Germans deployed an entire air defense regiment to defend their dams against future Upkeep attacks that never came.
Yeh, a corpuscular bunker buster would be very effective against both dams and probably make a right mess of a canal system, but they're future tech from NAC's point of view. I don't think they appeared in our timeline until the late nineties (willing to be proven wrong again of course).
You're wrong.
Bunker-buster weapons go back to WW2 with Barnes Wallis's Grand Slam bomb — conventional explosive but designed to penetrate the roofs of the Valentin U-boat pens, which were up to 21 feet thick and made of reinforced concrete—and th Disney bomb (rocket-assisted concrete-piercing penetrator, specifically designed for attacking deep bunkers. By late-1940s tech, if they'd continued to develop, they'd have been dropping those things off Canberras at low altitude, substituting the bomber's speed for a high altitude drop to build up momentum.
Putting an A-bomb inside such a device would have been practical by the early 1950s, once bombs rugged and compact enough to serve as nuclear artillery warheads were available. After which point, the only real issue is accuracy, which would probably have to wait until the first deployment of laser-guided weapons in the late 1960s.
We didn't develop nuclear bunker-busters historically because in the sort of nuclear war everyone expected it was easier to just reach for a bigger fly swatter (an H-bomb at ground level will crack pretty much any bunker). The late-90s/early-00s stuff was prompted by Dick Cheney wanting an excuse to use small nukes ("mummy, can I play with just a little one?") against non-nuclear-armed nations.
Note: it's possible that since the late 60s/early 70s Israel has nuclear weapons designed for attacking concrete dams, specifically the Aswan Dam. It'd certainly explain Sadat's peace initiative in the late 1970s: if broken, the Aswan Dam would have inundated the entire Nile valley downstream, potentially drowning up to 90% of the population of Egypt.
If you've ever flown on an A380, you'd have noticed that the emergency doors are huge. I mean, pretty much double-width and extra-tall. There are also no windows fore or aft of them for at least a metre, due to the extra hull reinforcement to support them and keep them sealed in flight.
(The A380 is held to the same "get the maximum number of passengers the hull is rated for out and uninjured in 90 seconds" standard as any other airliner. Of course, they run this test with young, healthy adults, no children or disabled/elderly people, and nobody in shock, injured, panicking, waiting to be told what to do, or trying to take their carry-on bags (or, more understandably, a baby in a bassinet). In other words, it's a "can we evacuate everyone in 90 seconds under absolutely ideal circumstances" test, rather than a real world simulation. In the real world, if you have to evacuate an A380 in an emergency you'll be lucky if nobody is killed and you can expect several broken bones and more minor injuries. But still ...)
"(willing to be proven wrong again of course).
You're wrong."
Hahaha, actually LOL.
Forgot about artillery shell nuclear!
With 30 minute flights and at least that much time on the ground... wtf? Why they don't use the cargo door to swap galley contents, for example.
Because that'd put the galley contents on the underfloor (cargo) deck, not where it's needed in flight.
Also: you need doors on both sides of the fuselage for emergency evacuation. So you've usually got the main boarding door up front on the left, opposite the galley ... and another door in the galley, which is used both for emergency evacuation and to swap the galley contents via a truck with a hydraulically raised load bed.
One thing that continues to puzzle me is the failure to use ground tugs to move aircraft on and off runways. I assume there are good reasons, but shoving air round is much less efficient what driving wheels.
The scarce resource in an airport is runway takeoff/landing slots. The engines need to be ready and running the instant the plane enters the runway, and the time overhead of coupling/uncoupling a ground tugs would slow everything up. However, you're right about the blowers being inefficient. Airbus is now marketing an electric taxi system for A320 series planes that adds an electric motor to the nose gear so that it can taxi on electric power from the APU or main engine generators; it's not cheap but supposedly reduces overall fuel burn by about 4% and reduces pollution at ground level (at the cost of (a) paying for the extra equipment, both in money and in payload weight, and (b) increased complexity always increases the risk of something breaking).
Also: the Perl most people are talking about when they discuss the language is Perl 5. About a decade ago Larry began noodling on a new language which ought to have been called "Perl: The Next Generation" and has about as much to do with existing Perl as C++ has to do with C. Unfortunately he called it "Perl 6", which meant actually-existing-Perl version numbers got stuck at 5 point something, thereby giving a lot of non-Perl people the idea that Perl 5.x development had stalled/fallen by the wayside.
(This is not in fact the case, and if I tried to go back to working in Perl these days I'd have a lot of learning to do — google "Modern Perl" for an idea of the scale of the changes the past 15 years have brought.)
Perl 6 actually exists and it's capable of running most Perl 5.x programs, while doing lots of weird-ass stuff of its own that I don't pretend to understand (it's been described as a language for designing and implementing domain-specific programming languages; Perl 5 was killer at lexical analysis, but Perl 6 understands grammar). Alas, I don't see it gaining critical mass any time soon, unless Larry bites the bullet and renames it to something other than Perl 6.
The really big change was from Perl 4 to Perl 5, when Larry Wall let go of the source. Perl 4 was a classic example of one of the worst kinds of C hacking (i.e. the one that omits essentially all error checking and diagnostics and ignores portability) - to describe its code and behaviour as appalling is, if anything, too kind. I half ported it to IBM MVS and, even with decades of experience working on bad codes, was amazed at how bad it was. That mapped into its lack of specification and misbehaviour, too - in addition to having taken over APL's mantle as a write-only language, it was unsuitable for use on any data that mattered. And, yes, I know what it was used for, but the Unixoids of that era didn't generally give a damn about RAS. I swore never again, so can't comment on Perl 5, but heard that even the hackers that took over found those aspects unsatisfactory and improved them considerably.
By the time PERL 5 came out it was too late for me. I had seen PERL 4 and was disinclined to give it a second chance.
I like what Rust is trying to do, even if I've not actually used it myself. The idea of a language that is naturally safe from so many multi-threading problems, and from dangling references and null pointers, and yet is that close to the metal is ... nice. Tracking ownership the way other languages track types is an interesting idea.
(And no GC pauses - gotta like that)
It does seem that a lot of people end up with a cordial dislike of the borrow checker though.
I ported Perl 5 to an IBM machine of some form (z Series?) for one project. It was remarkably easy, but then the source understood a lot of targets by then, and the target in question had a Unixish emulation mode that did what I wanted.
I'm young enough that the only Perl I ever used was 5, and it was the best tool (I knew of) for many things for years. I even wrote half of the program which was the point of my Masters in Perl - the other half in C++ and the whole program from scratch after graduating.
Perl 6 did muddle things up and I dropped Perl 5 in the early 2000's. It wasn't a bad language for many things, but it did make writing clean code more difficult than necessary, in my opinion.
Then what I heard was definitely an understatement - much of the code must have been completely rewritten. The past is another country, and all that.
I suspect there had been a lot of iterations by the time I did it (and I was after a relatively limited functionality, so if it was broken in an area I wasn't using, I never found out about it).
Even so, there are other languages I'd have used these days. As a built-in scripting language, Lua is a lot more light weight. In Perl, I discovered a per-interpreter-instantiation memory leak in Windows. Not a bad one, but if you were building and tearing an interpreter down millions of times, it mounted up. Once that one was sorted, I ended up with a 1 bit per instantiation leak.
No, I don't know how that works. But a couple of GB of RAM is an awful lot of bits, so we stopped worrying.
I think you're making my point for me. World wide English is a bitch to parse and comprehend in many situations without a huge amount of context and knowledge about the speaker's past.
If that.
Operating System is a term with a specific technical meaning that is also used in vernacular English with a somewhat different meaming. Like theory or multitasking. Technically an Operating System is an invisible under-the-hood program which a computer runs at startup and which thereafter manages the hardware and resources of the machine and provides a layer of abstraction for other programs. In the vernacular it means something like the visible user interface, CLI, GUI and standard software installed.
Sure, but awk is definitely not part of a Unix kernel. You can just "not install it" and no-one will ever notice unless they try to write awk scripts.
Airbus is now marketing an electric taxi system for A320 series planes that adds an electric motor to the nose gear
It's a PR puff piece, not an actual item that can be bought today by operators or owners as either an after-sales fit or delivery option.
The idea's been around for a while and there have been non-flying apron demonstrators shown off by various manufacturers but the demand really isn't there. The aircraft regulators (FAA, CAA etc.) will have to weigh in -- affecting how the nose gear works could be a problem since there's now a drive train powering a wheel that was previously free-turning, if the drive train fails and jams the wheel that's going to hurt. The extra weight will require suspension upgrades, power feeds to the motor will need to be rated etc.
I didn't claim awk was part of the Unix kernel. It is part of the POSIX standard commands, in every(?) Linux distro and on my Mac if I type awk in terminal I get
usage: awk [-F fs] [-v var=value] [-f progfile | 'prog'] [file ...]
so it's definitely part of Unix in the vernacular sense.
Of course both iOS and Android are running Unix/Linux under the hood but neither runs standard Unix user software and neither is programmed using standard Unix programming techniques since both have an extra layer of touchy goodness and security on top that programs are written to instead.
It's a PR puff piece, not an actual item that can be bought today by operators or owners as either an after-sales fit or delivery option.
Wrong.
There's a Boeing 737-specific equivalent called WheelTug that received provisional FAA certification for the Boeing 737NG last year; once the FAA sign off on the B737NG as a flying concern next year it'll be going into production. 20 airlines are signed up for it, and Air Transat will be the launch customer.
Safran and Honeywell apparently had a falling-out over EGTS which has put EGTS behind schedule (but with a bunch of airlines wanting it for their fleets, including EasyJet — only around 500 airbuses there); finally, TaxiBot, a robot tug controlled from the flight deck, is already in service at Frankfurt with Lufthansa.
Ahem. iOS is based on the same BSD/Mach architecture as macOS, but with a wholly different GUI layer and set of libraries. Jailbreak it (cough) and you can install a console and command line tools if you want.
Android is based on a sufficiently standard Linux kernel that if you unlock the boot loader and perform a few tricks you can install a standard Linux userland on it and ssh into a terminal on your phone or tablet. Yes, I have edited files using GNU emacs on an Android tablet.
Exactly so - they are Unix under the hood but not normally described as Unix since they don't normally run the Usual Unix UI and user software suite. So even techies think in the vernacular meaning of Unix at times.
Proof by claiming that the man pages are part of the kernel. ;-)
Oh and FWIW I have nawk on some of the PCs here, running under W7.
I'm not claiming the man pages are part of the kernel, I'm showing they are part of the distro. The vernacular meaning of operating system refers to the whole distro. My point is that there is a technical meaning of the term and a vernacular meaning and both coexist.
That something can be part of B doesn't exclude it from also being a part of A
Looking at that, I would have thought that TaxiBot is the way to go - certainly from the p.o.v. of aircraft reliabilty & weight. Also if the TaxiBot fails, you can call-up a spare ....
We didn't develop nuclear bunker-busters historically
The B61-11 has busterish qualities, as did the designed-but-never-deployed W86. So things have gone a bit in that direction. (I have a suspicion that the B61-11 benefited quite a bit from work done on the W86.)
http://www.nukestrat.com/us/afn/B61-11.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W86
"Writing good perl".... One liners? That's what sed and grep, etc are for.
I rewrote a... was it call routing? system in perl, when I worked for a small non-LEC telecom. My manager, the VP, who was 20 years younger than me, and hadn't finished his EE, had, um, written the original.
Let's not go there.
One thing: unlike my manager here, who adores regular expressions, I write programs. All the if/else, etc. They're readable. And I've written them in PL/1, COBOL, and C, for 10 years before I ever finally got to *Nix in '91. So my awk and perl looks like, well, modular, functional code.
And I think I mentioned that, in the early nineties, I wound up writing about 30 100-200 line awk scripts.... The call routing system that I did in '04 was about 800 or 900 lines.
It's writing code that meets what I mentioned in a post above as "job security".
No.
Let me give you a bigger picture: in the begging were the programs, and they had to do EVERYTHING, memory management, driving printers, driving disks... And this was observed to be Not Good, and so the operating system was invented.
The o/s handles all of the lowest-level work, dealing with the actual physical hardware. As a comparison, your autonomous systems in your body takes care of breathing, heartbeat, how to walk, etc. You don't need to tell someone to breath, and keep their heart beating, and how to walk, when you want them to go pick up that box and bring it over here.
The o/s does all that. Programs ask the o/s to do these things for them (unless you cheat, as I understand M$ did in M$ Word for the Mac, that broke when they went from Moto chips to PPC.... This is known as "if you do that, I'll defenestrate you, then fire you".)
Programming languages are more-or-less human readable ways of telling the computer what to do. Languages like C, or COBOL, or Ada, are compiled languages: you write them, then run the compiler on them, then you can run them (hopefully). Languages like awk or perl or python are interpreted scripting languages: the they tell the interpreter what to tell the computer. Much faster for writing, testing, and debugging... but much, much, much slower for dealing with real amounts of data (say, large databases, or GUIs).
Perl is heavily used in modern versions of *Nix (Linux is a version of *Nix) for system utilities, but it's not vaguely part of the o/s.
Is that any clearer? PLEASE TELL ME if it's not, and I'll try to clarify. Otherwise, if it's not clear, and you don't tell me, I'm typing for no good reason, wasting your time and mine.
And awk is most certainly not "obsolete*....
I switched from incandescent to cfl and then spent years taking bags of failed cfl to the recycling centre. Then I replaced all the cfl with LED one by one as they burned out and started taking bags of failed LEDs to the recycling centre. I currently have six failed LEDs and one CFL (an outlier that actually lasted for years) waiting for my next trip. I have bought eight LED bulbs in the last year that were replacements for LED bulbs that failed and there are only about fourteen bulbs in use in the house.
Have you considered having your house electrical system checked by an electrician? Or maybe it's all the radon, he typed jokingly. You seem like the statistical outlier for whome every light bulb stops working after a few months for no reason at all.
Languages like C, or COBOL, or Ada, are compiled languages: you write them, then run the compiler on them, then you can run them (hopefully). Languages like awk or perl or python are interpreted scripting languages: the they tell the interpreter what to tell the computer.
Not actually true (except in the case of awk); both Perl and Python (and most newer scripting languages) are both interpiler languages — precompiled to an intermediate form that then runs rapidly on a runtime (like old-time p-code on steroids, or the Java JVM). Indeed, Perl 6 and Python both have compilers that spit out C that can in turn be compiled to a binary executable.
Speaking of nuclear bunker busters, there was a spate of enthusiasm for new ones at the turn of the century that went under the name of "Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator." The National Academies very commendably sponsored a study of the technical and other issues affecting RNEP that came out in 2005 and is available at
https://www.nap.edu/catalog/11282/effects-of-nuclear-earth-penetrator-and-other-weapons
I did have a run of several SKY boxes fail and get replaced a few years years ago and the technicians joked I had dodgy power... but presently it's only light bulbs that are failing. Unless lightbulbs are more sensitive than other devices?
They were probably only half-joking. That was what sprung to my mind, too. It depends on what other devices you are talking about.
I have a household of standard electrical goods like dishwashers, microwaves, TVs, amplifiers, computers, chargers, freezers, kettles and the only ones that seem to go pop with unusual frequency are the lightbulbs. Which are on one of the two lighting circuits separate from the rings all the other power draws are on.
"We didn't develop nuclear bunker-busters historically
The B61-11 has busterish qualities"
No, Charlie's right. It was the B61-11 that I was specifically thinking of when I said that corpuscular bunker busters were future tech. The 11 didn't come around until the very late 90's which is 'future tech' in the NAC we're seeing in this book. I'd made the mistake of thinking that the USA had built them as soon as they knew how. On the theory that the USA will build any and every weapon it can think of, particularly in the 1950's. I assumed that they couldn't build a robust enough physics package, or they would have built one. He pointed out that the artillery shells have a pretty tough time of things, going from stopped to supersonic in the length of a gun barrel and they were 50's tech.
People can use whatever tools they like. I use many Unix command line tools when needed, but nowadays I don't do much that stuff. Perl, for me, is like awk on steroids, though I've only used awk on the command line, too. The Unix text tools are very nice, but often I find that I remember the Perl syntax faster than I can read man pages.
Probably this is because I used it a lot before learning the older tools. Nowadays I find that if I have to open a file and write more than two lines to it, I prefer Python.
Now, let's not talk about editors.
I've got 27+ LED lights from many manufacturers, along with a bunch of torches and whatnots. I think I changed most of them over from compact fluorescent about 5 or 6 years ago. None have failed yet. I was getting about 10ish years from CFLs in the lights that are on timer to run for about 8 hours a day. Now replaced with no-brand LED. The only place I had a run of failed CFLs was in the shower, and I think the condensing conditions didn't agree with them. Combined with living about 300 m from a surf beach, so plenty of salt air, and being made soaking wet every day, it's not surprising. More than once I've tried to replace the incandescent only to have the bayonet cap crumble and part ways with the glass bulb due to corrosion.
So yeah, I think you're right that there's a deeper issue.
You haven't accidentally arranged your lights into a summoning ring have you?
"Perl 4... to describe its code and behaviour as appalling is, if anything, too kind."
Far too kind.
I must have done something truly appalling in a previous life, for as karmic payback I and my team are the 'experts' a client brings in when their complex framework of 50k+ lines of Perl 4 doesn't do what they want.
A framework written by the sort of Perl mavens who think that taking a readable, simple, clear 10-line method and expressing it as 2 lines of highly complex code that it takes 20 minutes to understand was "elegance".
I am comforted only by knowledge that their karmic payback will be greater than mine.
"People can use whatever tools they like."
I can only assume you don't do work for large corporations.
Sadly inappropriate choice of tools - and a ridiculous unwillingness to fund upgrades to tools used by existing apps - is a feature of life for a lot of us.
"Perl 4... "
Speaking of which, I haven't sparked up on the comments about C++ because I don't have enough experience in modern C++.
But I can say that supporting a very large C++ app written in the early 90s, before standard libraries, is bloody awful. All the flaws of low-level and high-level languages, a macro facility that begs abuse, and an inheritance framework pretty much no-one really understands.
IM(not-very)HO: The start of the art has advanced, and we really have got better at creating programming languages.
Re: Programming languages - the good, bad, ugly ... and AI
When I asked which programming languages were used/liked and why, didn't expect to see so many differences of opinion. Given the limitations of existing computer languages, seems that odds are pretty high that any AI being programmed using any of (or mix of) existing programming languages will do something nuts. Plus, even if all AI under development were built using a completely different language to those mentioned, the fact that said AI would ever have to interface with systems written in a buggy/-prone script suggests potential problems.
Re: O/S (Whitroth, aka 'Senior Curmudgeon') - great explanation, much appreciated! Have a question: most higher organic life forms have two parallel systems whose purpose is to keep the organism functional/alive within specific parameters. Is there such a thing in computers? If yes - what, how?
'The o/s handles all of the lowest-level work, dealing with the actual physical hardware. As a comparison, your autonomous systems in your body takes care of breathing, heartbeat, how to walk, etc. You don't need to tell someone to breath, and keep their heart beating, and how to walk, when you want them to go pick up that box and bring it over here.'
Re: NASA & 3D printers & Habitat
Thought the folks here might be interested.
https://www.constructionequipment.com/nasa-opens-2-million-3rd-phase-3d-printed-habitat-competition
Excerpt:
'The goal of the 3D-Printed Habitat Challenge is to foster the development of new technologies necessary to additively manufacture a habitat using local indigenous materials with, or without, recyclable materials. The vision is that autonomous machines will someday be deployed to the Moon, Mars or beyond to construct shelters for human habitation. On Earth, these same capabilities could be used to produce affordable housing wherever it is needed or where access to conventional building materials and skills are limited.'
I have never gone anywhere near assembler code More years ago than I care to remember, I used an early from of BASIC, then learnt to do quite useful things in FORTRAN IV ( yes 80-chars per line on actual punched cards). Some years later, I breifly toyed with a form ( I can't remember which) of *nix & both perl & awk instructions were inside that set of tools. But - the past is another country & I'm almost-certainly hopelessly out-of-date by now.
Re: '... almost-certainly hopelessly out-of-date by now'
Interesting comment.
So how quickly has code 'evolved'? Which aspects have changed most, and which are almost unchanged? (Reasons/guesses why?)
I remember when we got our first PC for home use (IBM PC, MS DOS) back in the '80s. Initial reaction at home was: how soon would we have to learn yet another language/system/the current PC become obsolete. Reason for this reaction was because there were so many different types of for-office-use PCs/mini-computers already in the business/corporate office marketplace that the opinion was that even IBM wouldn't be able to make much difference. (History shows that IBM - not so much, MSFT - lots!) MSFT was the invisible part of the first home-use PC. Wondering what the new invisible AI component/aspect will be.
"Re: O/S (Whitroth, aka 'Senior Curmudgeon')"
Which makes me the geriatric curmudgeon? :-)
Today's conspiracy theory:
The Panama Papers were leaked by MI5 under orders from Teresa May, in order to divert attention from the antics of her cabinet. You know it makes sense ....
More like 'Curmudgeon (Emeritus)'. You have returned to active teaching, n'est-ce pas? Assumes you'll have less opportunity/time to pop in on this blog, or only intermittently.
Re: Panama Papers/TMay - conspiracy theory
Which will remind folks that her hubbie is a senior banker.
OOC, were any banks mentioned as intermediaries for siphoning funds out of the country and evade taxes?
I don't have enough experience in modern C++.
One of the great things about C++ is that it's always advancing and often very quickly. C++14 is starting to become widely available, C++17 compilers exist, and C++20 is being finalised even as we speak. Then there's Boost, or C++Beta as it's often used, having features that are being considered for future versions (and a whole heap that never made it but are still in Boost for backward compatibility reasons). It's also big enough that the people developing parts of C++ will not be familiar with other parts that are being developed, let alone the weird oddities and edge cases that make C++ so challenging to write tools for.
I think "have enough experience of modern C++" is impossible unless you lower the bar so far that even Trump qualifies.
The whole other question of whether "modern C++" is a thing I will leave aside. Suffice to say that the various "non nullable pointer" implementations I've been playing with over the last week all fail completely and quickly. Some let you compile "mypointer = notnullable_pointer(nullptr);" which is the definitive example of what they're supposed to prevent. We already get runtime errors when we use those, having a library decorate your code to provide the function isn't a benefit.
Going down the "modern C++" path is not a choice that anyone should make, and I suspect even the most die-hard fan of C++ would agree.
"(History shows that IBM - not so much, MSFT - lots!) MSFT was the invisible part of the first home-use PC."
Disagree... μS just provided the OS, and there wasn't anything particularly special about DOS, especially the early versions. Windows was well-established before it became the norm for μS to be the provider of "all" the user applications as well. ("Word processor" used to mean "Wordstar" in DOS days, for instance.)
Much of what got it going was the openness - not only could anyone write software for it, but anyone could produce compatible hardware as well, so there were plenty of clones that could also run the same software but didn't cost IBM amounts of money. (Contrast the Mac which was all locked in Apple's corporate-fascist fist from the off, and remained an expensive rarity.) This (IIRC) was down to IBM.
It also wasn't the first machine of that general nature; there were plenty of office-type CP/M systems which weren't really any less capable than the original PC, as well as officey models of and software for the Commodore PET and other 6502 systems. I think it was having the IBM label on it that made it "respectable" and so gave it an attraction that the alternatives didn't have.
Language evolution... well, I learned C on a DOS PC; now I have a Linux PC, but I still program it in C :)
modern C++
FWIW I'm using C++11, because that's the most recent version that's available with the Linux distro I use. C++14 is theoretically available, if I'm willing to build from source and run unsupported code on production servers.
When I asked which programming languages were used/liked and why, didn't expect to see so many differences of opinion.
Keep in mind that arguing about the merits of different computer languages is what computer geeks do instead of arguing about the merits of different football teams. And when the discussion gets to, say, C++ 11 vs C++ 14, it's at the level of soccer fans debating whether 4-4-2 would a better formation that 1-5-3-1 for their team.
The quality of the people involved in programming usually matters far more to the outcome than which programming language they use.
"It's also big enough that the people developing parts of C++ will not be familiar with other parts that are being developed"
I hate that.
Really, really hate that.
Code is meant to be readable, and easily understood. Most important.
Adding lots of language features makes the code less readable. Because the readers now need to understand (really understand) how code works given lots more features.
The features are added to make it easier to write code in certain corner cases. Big mistake. Writing code isn't the hard part. Reading and understanding code is the hard part.
I think it was having the IBM label on it that made it "respectable" and so gave it an attraction that the alternatives didn't have.
Way back in the first years after the IBM PC came out the processors/system designs were too slow to get much performance out of using the OS APIs for writing to the display. So people went straight to the BIOS. Ditto things like printing to anything more than a character printer.
So many (especially the big products hits like 123) went directly to the BIOS and quickly dropped all pretense of being compatible with MS-DOS APIs. That's when Compaq and a few other did some clean room BIOS implementations and the clone market became just that. Clones of the IBM PC BIOS. Everything else became an amusing footnote in computer history.
Re: '... almost-certainly hopelessly out-of-date by now' Interesting comment. So how quickly has code 'evolved'? Which aspects have changed most, and which are almost unchanged? (Reasons/guesses why?)
Been there and dropped out a couple of decades ago. Picked a career path that gave me a short term chunk of change but took me down a path of a language dead end. By the time I figure out I should beat feet I was way out of date with the "cool kids/languages".
It can only take a couple of years.
As to why? Systems in the 90s and 00s got so much fast so quickly that what people were doing with them changed/expanded rapidly. 20 years ago running payroll or accounts payable on a WinTel box/boxes got you stares in many situations. Now it the only way it is done. (I'm including Linux/Redhat situations in this.)
A friend manages a group for a major cloud provider. They expect all programming to be done using tools which include automatic redundancy in the data centers and across the planet without the programming having to pay too much attention to it. Just like in ancient of days when people rolled their own IO drivers, just a few years ago such redundancy required a large effort on the programmer of the application.
Things keep changing.
I can only assume you don't do work for large corporations.
Sadly inappropriate choice of tools - and a ridiculous unwillingness to fund upgrades to tools used by existing apps - is a feature of life for a lot of us.
Yeah, sorry, I should've said "people can prefer different tools than I do, I don't really care until I need to work with either the people or the tools." It was just easier to type "people can use whatever they want" and think that people understand what I mean.
That is, I'm not really talking about the objective merits of Perl, Unix text tools, or other programming languages, but rather about my and other people's preferences. I haven't been programming that much in the last six years anyway, so I don't really know the state of the art (if I ever really did even when developing software).
And yeah, depending on the company culture things can be difficult. I've worked in relatively large corporations where I could choose my tools and in small ones which were pretty entrenched in what they used. Also the other way round.
"So how quickly has code 'evolved'?"
I think the change in technologies has slowed considerably.
A developer graduating from university with a Comp Sci degree in 1997 would find most modern codebases very readable and comprehensible. A developer from 20 years earlier in 1977 would likely have found a lot of the code written in 1997 quite mysterious.
1977-1997 saw a huge shift from "low-level" to "high-level" languages, and a shift in "high-level" languages towards the "new paradigm" of object-oriented languages. Unix and C became common, and then remained so.
1997-now, not so much. Parallelization is getting treated more seriously, but I'm not sure if we see as much impact of that in programming as we probably should.
The cancerous featuritis of standard C++ (and many other languages and interfaces) is a disaster, in most respects, especially provability, performance(*) and RAS. Few programmers use more than a small subset, on the good grounds that it is quicker and more reliable to write a bit more code using features that you know, rather than use a fancy feature that you could well misunderstand (and might be misimplemented, anyway).
(*) Yes, performance. Many of the features added are nominally for performance - and would improve that, if C++ were a 1970s macro assembler. But they get in the way of optimation and parallelisation. That is why Fortran so often outperforms C++, despite its compiler teams often being one tenth the size of the C++ ones.
Can we form a curmudgeon's club?
Oh dear There is Tax Avoidance - which may or may not be "Morally" reprehansible, but is legal. AND There is Tax Evasion - which gets you fines &/or jail.
IF Parliament really, actually wants to do something about the former, then they have to change the law, in a consistent & understandable fashion (WHich ain't easy - tax law is stupidly complicated) In the meantime all the supposedly "Moral posturing" being done - mostly by those on the "left" of politics, but by one or two on the right, using arguments similar to mine, but then doing pretzel-jobs with them .... is a complete waste of time, space & effort.
I'm probably not the youngest here, I started in '85 programming accounts systems in COBOL on an NCR departmental mini (IMOS/ITX), and I am currently developing in vb.net with a splash of C#.
The thing I have noticed most is the size and complexity of the underlying frameworks - .NET, all the php frameworks like Zend, Symphony etc, all the Babel-like things going on with JavaScript.
A lot of my code feel like assembling Lego - I never have to really think about constructs like Dictionaries, Hashes, Lists and such, I just create a new instance of one. In a way this is good, because I can just address the business logic, but not knowing what constructs might be available that I am unaware of is frustrating.
I really ought to actually learn C#, as my current use of it is pure cargo-cult programming, but I don't have time at work, and home-time is both sacred, and generally spent working on the house.
I apologise for being Off-topic but we're well past 300 ... In the last couple of years, the Poly-Named-One posted a comment explaining it's categorising levels of Meta from M1-M5. I've been completely unable to find this again. Google and the Blog's search engine are failing to track it down, or my search-Fu is hopeless. Anyone remember this and can help me find it?
And the reason for looking is James Bridle has recently posted a long and important essay about algorithmically generated kid's videos on Youtube. Here. https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2 This demands a Wild Hunt because they're stealing our kids. But it's symptomatic and just one example of a much bigger problem. And it felt right up the PolyNamedOne's street. There are layers and layers of Meta here.
Apple's corporate-fascist fist THANK YOU.
- That nails it down, that I've never been able to really, properly express as to why I point-blank refuse to use anything at all from Apple, if I can help it. Yes, I know, shiny ... but so is Hugo Boss clothing like this euw.
I've never gone that far, but I have written text processing programs in awk.
On one notable occasion a client asked if they could get data in a specific format. My reply was "Do you have 10 minutes so we can be sure of getting field orders, widths and decimal places correct?" Their reply was affirmative; they left my office 8 minutes later and impressed with my "rapid prototyping coding".
Er, you do realise that Wendyball is not a language spoken hereabouts?
Oh yes; I have "had courses in Visual Basic", and it was quite obvious that the most recent was just a 5 day "here are all the new sub-programs that we haven't documented" seminar that we were being charged ~£1200 a head to audit.
I see your point; I have memories from about 1992 of a Pascal course that used Macs, and being told that we "couldn't keep our old assignments because you had to do 'funny stuff' with the source files to get them recognised by the compiler" since "the Mac was the computer for the rest of us". Now, to me, a program source file is a text file which ends with a specific string such as ".ads" for an Ada package specification, ".adb" for a package body, ".awk" to identify an awk program...
OT(ish) - Why does this speel-chucker think that 'awk' should be 'awl'?
Also, Microsoft Windows was largely based on IBM Presentation Manager. People said at the time that it was the IBM label, because IBM products never failed - like hell! It wasn't even the first IBM personal computer, but the rest had sunk without trace.
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/pc/pc_1.html
Shakespeare had it right: "There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune." It was pure fluke to catch the zeitgeist. The fact that it survived the crises of a few years later was simply because none of the potential competition got an act together, not because of any merit of the system or anything Microsoft did. The original Microsoft contract shafted IBM, and the technical staff were very angry with the Nazgul for being so arrogant that they failed to check it. IBM had a chance to change the direction with the PowerPC, but corporate politics killed that - I could describe how, if anyone is interested.
the processors/system designs were too slow to get much performance out of using the OS APIs for writing to the display. So people went straight to the BIOS.
Eye-roll time ...
Let us recall that MS-DOS started life as a rip-off of Digital Research's CP/M (called QDOS, bought in a hurry from a one-man shop by Bill Gates when he needed an OS to sell to IBM).
CP/M was a cross-platform 8-bit OS by design. It consisted of two chunks of code: the BIOS and the BDOS (basic disk operating system), plus assorted command tools.
The BIOS was hardware-specific, and exposed a standard API to the BDOS, including basic i/o and the filesystem (which was very simple and didn't incorporate hierarchical subdirectories, although there was a facility for up to 16 "user areas" which were generally invisible to one another, intended to permit concurrent use by multiple users on terminals, and which could be used like folders on a single-user machine). Bits of the BIOS were essentially re-written for each target architecture.
The BDOS in contrast was standardized and provided public APIs for user programs; it called the BIOS to perform serial or parallel i/o, disk access, and so on.
There was no shell in the modern sense, but a CP/M machine booted by loading the BIOS, which then handed control to the BDOS, which then executed a simple batch of commands. After it finished booting it then provided a prompt which could either execute typed commands on the console or load more lists of commands from a batch file. (Flow of control? String substitution? Environment variables? You jest.)
Anyway ... Microsoft licensed MS-DOS with BIOS's tailored for non-IBM hardware to a variety of manufacturers. Properly written MS-DOS applications would then run on any MS-DOS machine ... in theory! In practice, IBM rapidly drove out the competition, which was problematic until some engineers from what would become Compaq performed a white-room cloning operation on IBM's BIOS and began selling MS-DOS machines that were functionally identical to IBM's PC, only cheaper. IBM were slow off the mark and failed to sue them into a smoking hole in the ground until the clone market exploded, causing the PC to become a de-facto industry standard.
But please, let's not forget that it started out as a pirated copy of CP/M and Microsoft guiltily hid the BDOS when they found out how shaky the ground they were standing on was.
Apple started out making a rather nice open-architecture 6502 box that spread like wildfire because it had a cheap expansion bus (lots of card slots! A lid that unclipped so you could get at them!) and reasonably fast floppy disk drives — the Apple II.
Then it grew so fast it accidentally turned corporate. At the same time Corporate Apple was targeting businesses with stuff like the Apple III (remember that?) a rather young Steve Jobs had toured Xerox PARC, got visionary, and decided to build a computer that could sell for $999 and anyone could use. This led to all kinds of in-fighting, as grown-up-corporate-Apple went one way and produced the Lisa (a lovely GUI-driven business workstation that sold for $5000 but had stuff like a bitmapped display, a GUI, multi-tasking windowed office applications, and so on, most of a decade before the IBM lineage got there) and Jobs, running a weird skunk-works team inside Apple who wanted to disrupt everything. Jef Raskin, the Macintosh team lead developer, was pushing for open architecture and customization; Jobs was pushing his vision of the Monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Jobs sort of won ... but both of them were pushed out by corporate-Apple in the end, and the $999 computer for everyone (which, if it had happened, might have been rather more like the Atari ST) emerged as the $1750 astonishing-to-look-at but utterly locked-down Macintosh. Jobs was sacked (but they don't call it that), and due to some historic accidents the Mac accidentally got a lock on the early desktop publishing sector, which niche allowed it to survive.
My memory (the little of which I have failed to suppress) is of CP/M being the OS with only one command, pip (Peripheral Interchange Program?)
I'm sure there were more, but is felt like that was the only one!
Not exactly, but PIP was kind of important! (Copy to anything from anywhere — typical DR, got the argument order ass-backwards from every other system on the planet.)
Whichever version of the history of Personal Computers you examine one thing is very clear - IBM screwed up massively. The most successful machine was the IBM PC and so ubiquitous that the name got shortened to just PC. Yet most of the money in the PC business ended up in other pockets and IBM eventually gave up on PCs completely and sold its remaining PC business to Lenovo. The largest beneficiary was Microsoft.
Going down the "modern C++" path is not a choice that anyone should make, and I suspect even the most die-hard fan of C++ would agree.
I rather like C++11, it's definitely improved things. One of the known issues was the C++11 took well over a decade to deliver - definitely a case of attempting "excellence later" instead of "good enough, sooner". As you've noted, we're on a three-year cycle now. Here are some examples:
Take a 1990s-vintage "for" loop through a container; you probably had to write your own data structures, etc, etc: for (int mapentry = 0; mapentry < mymap.size(); ++mapentry)
21st Century arrives, and we had Boost and the STL; between them, offering all sorts of wondrous things that saved us from engineers who weren't as good at writing exception-safe data structures as they thought.
for (boost::map< myobject >::constiterator mapentry = mymap.begin(); mapentry != mymap.end; ++map_entry)
Of course, C++11 gave us "duck typing" (i.e. it's obvious from the context that I want an iterator): for (const auto mapentry = mymap.begin(); mapentry != mymap.end; ++map_entry)
But C++11 also gave us range-based iterators (because everyone was writing their own FOREACH) for (const auto& mapentry : mymap)
Progress isn't always perfect, but generally it iterates toward improvement. Boost and the STL freed us from the drudgery of writing yet another linked-list implementation; C++11 brings much of Boost into the STL, and makes it easier to handle. Yes, "move constructors" aren't bedded in to everyone's habits yet, but if you just use the STL containers, it will all be done for you ...
You're right that someone from 1997 looking at today's code would understand it, but the reverse isn't necessarily true. I will exclude query languages since I never used them in the early 2000's, and mainly focus on Java and Matlab.
Today's Java uses far more libraries than Java did when I learned it in high school in 2004. After high school, I largely ignored it until a few years ago. I was surprised how much of today's code relies on libraries. Someone who grew up on this might have a problem with the old Java where you had to do a lot more yourself.
In my Undergraduate and Masters programs, the primary software used by the professors and students was Matlab, followed by Mathematica. During my time at university, Matlab added the capability to do symbolic calculus. That required Calculus, Linear Algebra, and Differential Equation professors to completely change the homework assignments. This Matlab program now allows students to cheat on their homework by simply plugging it into Matlab. I'm less clear what role this had in the Mechanical Engineering and Aerospace firms which use Matlab.
I've still got some Apple II prototyping cards tucked away somewhere, very nicely made. The IBM PC bus was better though, more open and less of a hassle to interface stuff to -- the Apple II bus had dedicated slots for things like the floppy controller, the IBM's slots were all universal.
One thing the original IBM PC came with was a nice set of manuals, IBM were famous for documenting everything and led the industry in tech writing standards and quality. It was boring as hell to read through but it was all there, comprehensible and usually verified and indexed. Part of the PC's manual set was a commented Assembler listing of the BIOS. This was a big help for anyone looking to save some code space by reusing BIOS functions as well as helping out the "clean room" folks developing the Compaq and later clones as it ensured there were no hidden booboos they had to code around.
The STL does some things right, but iterators are not one of them. That code is no safer and less clear than using pointers. And, for conventional arrays, indices are clearer, far easy to debug, and FAR more functional - you often need to do calculations on the index. They aren't the disaster on wheels that valarray, gslice and the numeric algorithms are, but I don't use them and don't generally advise their use.
I agree that the range-based iterators are how they should have been done.
Eye-roll time
Seriously?
All those other things were nice and many were superior to MS/PC-DOS but at the end of the day the DOS on the IBM compatibles and others was more and more just a file manager and app launcher. Most of the "money" apps went directly to the IBM BIOS (and later clones) so if you didn't have a real or clone of the IBM BIOS you product stopped selling. I watch that first hand with several vendors. Go to the annual show for a non BIOS compatible one year and there's Lotus, Word Perfect, etc... and a year later they were all gone.
Your timeline is wrong: I (and I know I'll not be alone here) used at least 3 of WordStar, WordPerfect, Lotus 123 and DBase (version numbers not discussed) under 2 or all 3 of CP/M, A Mess Dos 4 to 6 and Windoze3.X.
I think, for me, the main mindbender was WordStar (I think, it MAY have been WordPerfect) running on d/nix, in the early 1990s. It even had "vaguely looks like a preview" (not showing bitmapped layout, but showing the page(s) using VT100 "graphics" so you could check the approximate layout of paragraphs in your document).
For the rest of the world that don't know d/nix from an elbow, it's the multi-core, real-time SysV-compatible Swedish unix system cooked up from a System III source code license, the SVID, and way too much sweat and tears by DIAB Computers (now only remaining as a compiler manufacturer for embedded environments, last I checked a subsidiary/brand of Wind River Systems). Eventually bought by Groupe Bull, then IBM, I think. Famously had a network card that had built-in FTP server and telnet daemon, lokoing to the OS as "an application accessing the file system" and "a bunch of serial terminals".
There was a healthy CP/M market with many machine makers and software vendors before the IBM PC. DR's strange decision to not talk to IBM about licensing CP/M for the IBM PC led to IBM going to Microsoft for an OS. Bill Gates then turned around and acquired a dodgy CP/M clone for about $80000 and the rest is history. CP/M software got a second lease of life with the AMSTRAD PCW machines in the UK.
That sounds like it may have been WordPerfect 5.1 in preview mode.
Certainly pretty much any WordStar I used required you to actually learn the control codes.
Yes, we can. Now get the fuck off my lawn!
Re: Tax evasion vs. avoidance
Yes, am aware of the legal difference between evasion and avoidance. Part of the problem in writing new corporate tax laws is in figuring out how various accounting 'rules' operate in different countries. I'm guessing that a good chunk of revenue legally avoids taxation via the catch-all term 'transfer-payments'. Consider: most of world is accessible online 24/7, most global corps have online capabilities/connectivity yet continue to set up physical offices up to Sr/Exec-VP level (not just Customer Service) in more and more countries. My guess is that although such branch offices are positioned as good PR, their real reason for existing is to geographically locate revenue streams in the best (i.e., no) corporate tax region: Ireland, but not Sweden.
Just found the below when looking up current rules for intra-EU transfer payments. (BTW - senior managers running subs can completely screw up a parent corp's worldwide profitability if their performance bonuses are tied too closely to their particular sales region.)
http://www.euractiv.com/section/economy-jobs/news/eu-eyes-corporate-rules-shake-up-with-law-on-seat-transfer/
'The European Commission is preparing a new directive on the cross-border transfer of company headquarters, a move that could have far-reaching implications for other areas of corporate governance, including tax planning and cross-border mergers, EURACTIV has learned.
With Brexit on the horizon, UK companies are busy weighing their options for keeping a foothold in the European Union. And one of those is to fiddle with the location of their legal headquarters.
Companies already have options to transfer their seats, for example by forming a subsidiary in their host member state and merging it to create a new company elsewhere. Since 2003, they can also create a European cooperative society and transfer the headquarters to another EU country.'
Mentioned this in previous posts: Someone please, please design a SW that contains all current 'tax laws', allows additional laws or amendments and then runs a simulation/comparison of the effects at three levels: gov't tax revenue, corporate net profit after tax, and population at large. The expertise exists, the need exists - it's just a matter of time until someone (corp) comes out with this. Ideally, prefer this innovation came from someone trustworthy and in it for the long haul, i.e., academics and senior civil service.
Ok, a lot on computers....
About the o/s: you can look up rings of protection in wikipedia, but basically, the way most operating systems work is ring 0 is the kernel, and ring 1 are device drivers. Done this way, a device driver is a loadable or unloadable module. An example of what this means is you have a kernel, precompiled, that runs on any machine of x architecture (say, x86_64), and then you load a device driver for, say, your hotspiffyNVida card. Swap the card out for a Radeon: no trouble reboot, and the system will load a Radeon driver module.
Wikipedia notes that ring 2 is for privileged service, while ring 3 is unprivileged userspace.
Why Windows, 95 and after, are such lousy pieces of crap is for one, they put the GUI into ring 0, or maybe it's ring 1. GUI error? you're dead. *Nix, running the X windowing system (or replacements), that sits in what you you say, folks, ring 2? It has issues, oh, well, the o/s is still running, restart X, leaving you to log back in... but nothing else lost.
So, it's not two separate systems, like a bio organism, but layers.
Thank for the Sr. Curmudgeon, I worked long and hard to reach that state, and had a great role model: my late friend Jack McKnight (known as the man who machined the very first Hugos).
Didn't know about python, had forgotten that about perl... but most people using perl don't usually turn it into C code and compile it.
That's Paradise Papers, but yeah... And to answer someone's question, yes, banks are heavily involved. I skimmed an article yesterdy where some big sportsball player lands on... was it the Isle of Man at, like 03:00, and has paid an official to be there, to stamp something, so he gets a VAT refund? And the jet belongs to some holding company, which leases it to another company, held by a bank, which "leases" it back to him....
You can get paralellization, but, at least in my experience, you have to code your program to know what's parallizeable.
We're very slowly migrating from torque to slurm for clustering, which is all about parpallelization, and that, and the compiler deal with it.
We used pip on the TSRS? on a pdp-ll. I liked it. These days... I use rsync.
Beg to differ about WordPerfect.
That was the best word processor... once they hit 5.0 (NOT before that). I would willingly use it. Wordstar, um, no thank you. And in the '90s, every secretary I knew, who knew both WP and M$ Word, hated Word and loved WP. Now, you may not remember this, but M$ was finally taken down in court, and paid real money, for unfair competition, bribing and manipulating hardware makers to not offer anything but Word. That's why WP is a very marginal market the last 15 years.
They never seemed to recover, and everyone who's owned WP has one small problem: their marketers couldn't market their way out of a wet paper bag if they had the Terminator to help.
These days, the competition is LibreOffice. I just with they had a WP interface emulation mode....
Another one, here. I've disliked Apple since the intro of the Mac - locked down, open it and you violate your warranty, overpriced... and on the other side, "here, you can Be Creative! You don't need to know ANYTHING about your computer....)
A craftsman learns their tools. Hiding the tools is bad. Not that not learning your tools can't be done in other systems (he says, thinking of the guy that none of us like working with...)
What I've noticed is when you spec a machine like a Mac, it tends to cost like a Mac. If you can do what you need with lesser hardware, yes, you can save some money, for me, a Mac suits, all but one have functioned well into obsolescence. YMMV, but for me they're economical.
This isn't so. The whole idea of protection rings is essentially one of those ideas from computer history which isn't relevant to how modern software works on commodity hardware.
The way it really works is that there is only privileged (i.e. kernel/supervisor/ring 0/system/etc.) and unprivileged (user/ring 3/etc.). Device drivers run in privileged mode, and this has no relevance to whether the driver can be loaded/unloaded. In reality, the situation is somewhat more complex than this for performance reasons.
The other protection rings are just artifacts, like segment registers, EBCDIC, PAE mode, etc. More relevantly, in modern systems there's a third protection level that's even more privileged, which is used for virtualization. The idea here is to let the guest OS think it's running with full hardware privileges, when it really isn't. Again the reality is more complex for performance reasons.
As for why the idea of splitting the OS into multiple rings isn't useful? Basically, the reason is that it's pointless. Protection rings are built around the idea that you can have a security separation between device drivers and the core OS, but that's simply impossible with commodity peripheral standards. Basically, the device driver software may be limited, but the actual device it's controlling is given carte blanche to control all of the host's memory via the bus. So why bother? Just use two modes, plus virtualization if you want to fake the hardware.
Protection rings are built around the idea that you can have a security separation between device drivers and the core OS, but that's simply impossible with commodity peripheral standards. Basically, the device driver software may be limited, but the actual device it's controlling is given carte blanche to control all of the host's memory via the bus. So why bother?
You might be a bit behind the times, there - ARM produces the ultimate "commodity hardware", and AIUI it's wired in at the hardware level (it certainly exercised some of the people I used to work with)...
https://www.arm.com/products/security-on-arm/trustzone
Selachii thumped the table. 'Very well, then, by jingo!' he snarled. 'Alone!' 'We could certainly do with one,' said Lord Vetinari. 'We need the money. I was about to say that we cannot afford mercinaries.' 'How can this be?' said Lord Downey. 'Don't we pay our Taxes?' 'Ah, I thought we might come to that,' said Lord Vetinari. He raised his hand and, on cue again, his clerk placed a piece of paper in it. 'Let me see now...ah yes. Guild of Assassins...Gross earnings in the last year: AM$13,207,048. Taxes paid in the last year: forty-seven dollars, twenty-two pence and what on examination turned out to be a Hershebian half-dong, worth one-eighth of a penny.' 'That's all perfectly legal! The Guild of Accountants-' 'Ah yes. Guild of Accountants: gross earnings AM$7,999,011. Taxes paid: nil. But, ah, yes, I see they applied for a rebate of AM$200,000.' 'And what we received, I may say, included a Hershebian half-dong,' said Mr Frostrip of the Guild of Accountants. 'What goes around comes around,' said Vetinari calmly. He tossed the paper aside. 'Taxation, gentlemen, is very much like dairy farming. The task is to extract the maximum amount of milk with the minimum of moo. And I am afraid to say that these days all I get is moo.' 'Are you telling us that Ankh-Morpork is bankrupt?' said Downey. 'Of course. While, at the same time, full of rich people. I trust they have been spending their good fortune on swords.' 'And you have allowed this wholesale tax avoidance?' said Lord Selachii. 'Oh, the Taxes haven't been avoided,' said Lord Vetinari. 'Or even evaded. They just haven't been paid.' 'That is a disgusting state of affairs!' The Patrician raised his eyebrows. 'Commander Vimes?' 'Yes, sir?' 'Would you be so good as to assemble a squad of your most experienced men, liaise with the tax gatherers and obtain the accumulated back Taxes, please? My clerk here will give you a list of the prime defaulters.' 'Right, sir. And if they resist, sir?' said Vimes, smiling nastily. 'Oh, how can they resist, commander? This is the will of our civic leaders.' He took the paper his clerk proffered. 'Let me see, now. Top of the list-' Lord Selachii coughed hurriedly. 'Far too late for that sort of nonsense now,' he said. 'Water under the bridge,' said Lord Downey. 'Dead and buried,' said Mr Slant. 'I paid mine,' said Vimes.
Fun historical note: the FPU emulator on Xenix and SysVr3.2 for the '386 ran in ring 1. The kernel ran in ring 0, and user mode ran in ring 3. This allowed the FPU to have a bit of privilege, while having less access than the kernel, and being protected from user mode. (It also allowed the FPU emulator to be loaded when needed, at a time when the kernel didn't have run-time loadable modules.)
Except that they made the user structure two pages long. And since user mode had to be able to write to the FPU registers, this meant that programs could write to every other part of the user structure. Including u_uid.
SCO put the FPU registers in the second of the two pages, and set up protections appropriately, but none of the other vendors at the time did. Meaning that all you needed for a local exploit was to set u.u_uid=0, and spawn a shell.
Ah such good times.
To follow up on that, btw, the main reason the protection rings aren't used is because, on the x86, context switching from one ring to another is expensive (many, many clock cycles), which causes problems with device drivers. The cost-benefit ratio just wasn't there, so very few systems used it.
Ohhh! Temper. As senior curmudgeaon I protest ....
I'm guessing that a good chunk of revenue legally avoids taxation via the catch-all term 'transfer-payments'. NOT a guess - ferpectly correct ( As Obleix would say)
A craftsman learns their tools.
Learns how to use them. Not necessarily how to make them.
I have a friend who's an absolute whiz with Photoshop. The fact that he doesn't have the foggiest idea how to code it doesn't make him any less a whiz. He couldn't build a graphics tablet either, or a colour-calibrated display, but he know how to use them.
Not having access to the guts of a computer (be it hardware or software) doesn't mean you're unable to use it for creative purposes.
Which book is that from? I don't remember reading it, so it's clearly time to reread…
I think the problem here is one of terminology. As a computer science concept, segmenting control of hardware (including the CPU) into different levels, i.e. protection rings, is absolutely alive and well. The wiki page on the subject describes this in terms of the overall concept, and both ARM and x86 have three-level hardware support for this, as I described above.
However, the x86 also has a feature implementing a 4-level form of protection ring built into the architecture, which whitroth's description above was clearly referring to. This scheme is not used (except in the degenerate form of user/kernel) in modern systems, and the virtualization extensions were tacked onto the side more recently. In particular, this scheme is not (and with the possible exception of OS/2, essentially was never) used to do kernel/driver/application level separation. Thinking that it is used that way is a common misconception.
Note that as with most things, the CPU support for this is largely about performance. If you'll remember, VMWare was available for x86 long before the VT-x extension was added: the third (hypervisor) protection level was implemented using a nutty combination of memory protection and what amounts to emulation (real time disassembly and code rewriting) to implement the necessary environment for the guest.
If you step back a little and squint, it should be clear that as ideas, virtualization, emulation, and indeed the process runtime environment itself are all different takes on a certain idea: that of running software in an abstract machine protected from the ugliness of the real hardware.
For example, say you want to read a file: your application issues a system call, which traps and transfers control to a kernel function. The kernel then decides what really happens here: perhaps a disk read, perhaps a cache hit, perhaps an error of some sort. Similarly, in a VM, the guest's issues a "system call" by writing a go-flag to what it thinks is a hardware device register. This traps and transfers control to a hypervisor function, which decides what really happens: perhaps a file read, perhaps...
The problem with thinking of these things as nice, neat protection rings is that the real complexity isn't really in this trap/control interface, it's all about the hardware isolation and performance. In other words, the interesting stuff is all in things like GPU and NIC hardware support for isolated user domains.
Humbug!
I'm resisting the urge to correct all the subtle wrongness in many of these computer history posts, but this one bugged me enough to log in.
The original Apple II had very elegant expansion slots and had absolutely no limitation on slot usage except slot 7 had a few extra video features.
By convention slot 3 was for the 80 column card, and slot 6 was the disk drive and slot 1 was the printer... but it didn't have to be. (At least not until the Apple IIc came along).
I currently have an Apple IIe with an ethernet card in slot 3, my Disk II card in slot 5, and a USB Disk card in slot6 and it works fine.
In fact it is a lot more elegant than the PC ones, as it was set up to allow cards to autoconfigure based on what slot they were in. Maybe you've luckily forgot the horror of trying to get non-conflicting DMA/IRQ/IO jumper settings on ISA cards.
Only stepping in as I am a bit of an Apple II enthusiast. Still writing games in BASIC/6502 assembler. Plus recently wrote a webserver in Applesoft BASIC that does a decent job of serving up webpages.
Think it's from Jingo.
blink
Separate topic, for your amusement:
Uber teaming up with NASA to create unpiloted electric helicopter taxis (the video shows something like a tilt rotor) that would carry four people up to 60 miles and recharge in four minutes.
Just for comparison, the 2016 Sikorsky Firefly, a prototype electric helicopter, could carry one person for 15-20 minutes at up to 92 mph. So Uber's banking on a 8-fold increase in improvement (4 people X twice the range) in two years. With reliable software piloting the thing somehow. Through Los Angeles airspace, of course.
So who wants to take the first ride? Would an electric rotodyne have been more efficient?
It was a long time ago but as I remember it there were 4 significant factors that made it difficult to share files between PC and Mac:
1) In text files, PC used 0D 0A for a line terminator, Mac used just 0D. 2) PC used the extension to indicate file type, and it was mainly for the benefit of the user, being mostly ignored by the OS; Mac used a 32-bit number which was interpreted as four ASCII characters but didn't form part of the filename, and the OS used it to assign default icons, decide what application should open a file, etc. 3) Mac file names were longer than PC ones. 4) PC files were all in one piece, while Mac files came in two bits called a "resource fork" and a "data fork". I forget exactly how the two forks were used; I think it was one of those things that looks appealing from some particular conceptual viewpoint but is pointless in practice. I do remember that the resource fork could be empty.
We had Macs and PCs networked for file-sharing purposes, using something called TOPS that was nothing to do with railway operations, which worked over Appletalk (with an interface card in the case of PCs) with a TSR (or INIT as the Mac called it) containing the drivers. IIRC this handled the filename length problem in much the same way as Windows did it - long Mac filenames would appear on the PC as their first few actual characters plus weird crap on the end to make it unique. Going the other way, of course, there was no problem.
I think it did something along similar lines to deal with resource forks on the PC - the data fork would be what showed up as the file you were expecting to find, and the resource fork would I think be in a subdirectory and named with a modified version of the filename (although I also seem to remember it being harder to find than that). Going the other way, it would simply make up an empty resource fork for the Mac to make sense of PC files.
I can't remember what it did with file types. It may have tried to use the PC extension to make up an appropriate 32-bit number for the Mac, but I'm more inclined to think it just ignored it and presented the file as some generic type. Similarly the Mac number would be ignored on the PC, and the extension used instead for making abbreviated long filenames unique.
Line terminators of course it didn't touch, and it was just down to luck whether or not the application reading the file would throw a wobbly over having the wrong ones, though surprisingly few did.
It also, coincidentally, emphasised a particular bit of shitness in the Mac operating system, which was that displaying the contents of a folder was some higher order operation than O(n). If a folder contained only a smallish number of files such as you might put there by hand, it would open straight away, but if there were 600 files in there (because they had been generated by a program), opening it would take forever. Well over half an hour. I used to name such folders things like "DO NOT OPEN" because if you forgot and tried you were screwed until it finished.
But if the folder was shared over TOPS, you could go to a PC, CD to the folder, and type DIR. Whereupon it would display the directory listing as promptly, subjectively, as it would that of a local directory. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, GUI.
(Then there was what happened when you tried to launch Word for Mac on a standard Mac, ie. one that had only a single floppy drive...)
I'm going to return to the original topic here.
What is the climate of Timeline 3. The reason I'm asking is because a Brazil that's at carrying capacity is a Brazil that's cut down the Amazon Rainforest. Otherwise it would have been similar to the Proclamation of 1763, which convinced the Western states to join the slaveholders in rebellion against the UK. The same is true for Africa's and Eurasia's rainforests. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Proclamation_of_1763
Ha, yes, I remember my "DOS bible" (not Norton's, his was shit) had a section at the end giving tips on how to write your programs so they would be easy to port to the new up-and-coming graphical interface operating system, including an introduction to the API. All about OS/2 and PM, not a mention of Windows...
"So who wants to take the first ride?"
FTFAGOS...
"Would an electric rotodyne have been more efficient?"
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by an "electric rotodyne"; a rotodyne is a rotary-wing aircraft that spins the rotor using a combination of autorotation while in flight and tip-jets for takeoff and landing. The tip-jets burn fuel; they aren't just a means of using power generated elsewhere (though their air supply is), they generate it themselves. So an electric rotodyne presumably must use electrical heating rather than combustion to add heat to the working fluid, which reminds me of US Patent 1608802 :)
Mac files traditionally had Creator and Type; each of those were 16 bit numbers (not necessarily ascii), stored in the FinderInfo structure. HFS had two sets of extents for the file -- data fork, and resource fork. The resource fork was to be used to contain various, uh, resources for the file -- essentially metadata. (Formatting information for text files, as an example, and icons and code information for application files.) HFS+ attempted to generalize it, and had meta-support for up to 256 forks (data fork being 0x00 and the resource fork being 0xff), but the catalog record did not support that, which limited that. I don't know the details for APFS, so I don't know how they handled that.
For file exchange, Apple invented a few formats -- AppleSingle, AppleDouble, and AppleTriple. I don't think anyone ever actually used the latter, but AppleDouble was the origin of the "._" convention -- the AD file initially described the FinderInfo and ResourceFork, but was eventually hacked to include the extended attributes as well.
Back in 2004, HFS+ added support for extended attributes, which were intended to be a POSIXy method of replacing the resource fork -- small chunks of data, associated with a file at the filesystem layer, set atomically. Around the same time, other people started doing streams -- additional names added to files, which could be large, seeked in, and operated on using normal read and write operations. Both Solaris and Windows went this approach, which caused, and will continue to cause, no end of fun.
HFS+ is efficient with large numbers of files -- I've generated directories with a couple hundred thousand entries -- but Finder (and the APIs in Cocoa) have ... some issues, mainly because they get too much information. Apple added a bunch of system calls to do specific things for that, such as a single system call to get all the attributes for a bunch of files at once.
It's even RFC2324 compliant. You can see a video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmIC1rImhU4
Though I guess I was exagerating a bit saying it does a good job serving of webpages, as it's a bit slow. Also, another cheat, the ethernet card has the TCP/IP stack in hardware and is doing a lot of the heavy lifting (I've been meaning to see how much of TCP/IP I could do in BASIC but haven't had time recently)
Actually, come to think of it, a rotadyne with peroxide running through the main rotor and electric fans providing thrust might have a longer ranger than a purely electric helicopter/tilt-rotor beastie. I always wondered why helicopters with peroxide tip-jets didn't become more popular. It's not like high test peroxide is dangerous or anything...*
Actually, the idea of mixing a big tank of high test peroxide with a lot of highly energetic batteries in a drone that carries people sounds wonderfully safe, don't you think?
*Fortunately, the scars from my work with boiling 30% hydrogen peroxide faded years ago. I am being sarcastic here.
You forgot the "Bah!" bit, there I think - slipping, are we? Careful, or you'll end up like Scrooge at the end of "Christmas Carol" .... cough
Don't confuse running essentially separate tasks with actually parallelising a single problem. A scheduler like Slurm can help with the former, but makes essentially no difference to the latter. And it's the latter for which C++ is so unsuitable.
Ah yes a passenger-carrying helicopter lookalike powered by the same method as the Me163. What could possibly go wrong?
PC files were all in one piece, while Mac files came in two bits called a "resource fork" and a "data fork".
In NTFS (I think since Windows NT 3.1) you can have alternate data streams in files. This is kind of like the Mac resource forks. These streams can be used to store any data. They don't show up in the Windows Explorer, so it's kind of hard to even realize they exist, and to see what's in them.
They have been used to hide malware. I don't really know what legitimate uses they have had except being more compatible with Macs. They aren't copied in all cases when the files are copied, sometimes without warning.
Cheers, that makes sense, even if it's an over-simplification in some respects.
Not just secretaries; pretty much anyone I knew who regularly worked with writing numbered paragraph documents using word processing.
In one job I was tasked with being editor of a document that would have 5 actual authors and had to have full legal paragraphing. The organisation used WordPerfect 5.2, so I asked the authors to supply me with 1 file per section applying the corporate standard, and to "not worry that their section header would always be '1 $title' because that would make it easy for them to sort out their subsection numbering and for me to sort out the overall number schema."
Which left me with some copypasta and then creating tables of contents etc.
Which is mostly true, even if it ignores the opposite endianism of Intel and Motorola processors from back in the day. (As an aside I've written code that took DEC 16 bit files with LSB in bit 7 and MSB in bit 8, and produced 32 bit outputs for a Sun SPARC.)
It has nothing to do with my point that program source files should be plain text and editable with any preferred text editor (or if exists the compiler IDE), and the compiler should then just get on with it if told "this file is your source, compile it".
And Unix/Linux/BSD/macOS uses 0x0A. Since macOS has been a version of Unix since 2001 it has been using the Unix line ending since then. And the old Mac line ending for backwards compatibility. Many modern text editors work with any line ending and work out which one from the file.
There's an ongoing tension between the attractive Unix notion of a file as a simple stream of bytes and the requirement to store large amounts of metadata about files as well. This can either be stored as extra 'invisible' files with a naming convention or the file system can be extended to accommodate them.
In text files, PC used 0D 0A for a line terminator, Mac used just 0D.
To complete the trifecta, UNIX used (and still uses) OA.
So Mac text files on UNIX contained lines that when edited in vi or emacs ran on endlessly but were punctuated by periodic downshifts, and DOS text files on UNIX were full of ^M characters at the end of every line.
PC files were all in one piece, while Mac files came in two bits called a "resource fork" and a "data fork". I forget exactly how the two forks were used; I think it was one of those things that looks appealing from some particular conceptual viewpoint but is pointless in practice.
Nope, absolutely wrong. The Resource fork was a B+ tree if I remember correctly, containing a hierarchy of objects of various types identified by a 32-bit "creator" code and a 32-bit "type" code — think MIME content-types. In an application, these would include compiled code segments, icons and other bitmaps, GUI elements, initialisation data, and so on. In a user-created file ... some applications would stash their data in the Resource fork, but mostly they used the flat, linear Data fork for storage. Think of the Data fork as an uncompressed zip-like archive structured to contain all the components of a program and you'll be on target.
(Modern post-2000 macOS is an utterly different OS that follows UNIX traditions in most respects.)
shitness in the Mac operating system, which was that displaying the contents of a folder was some higher order operation than O(n). If a folder contained only a smallish number of files such as you might put there by hand, it would open straight away, but if there were 600 files in there (because they had been generated by a program), opening it would take forever.
Yeah, MS-DOS also.
I remember circa 1990 being asked (as tech author) to clean up the receptionist's PC at the company I was working at, because it was running slow. This machine was mostly used to run Word Perfect 4.2. Turns out they'd been hiring temps on a weekly/monthly basis for a year, none of whom understood subdirectories, so every file had ended up in C:\, which now contained about 3000 files. Type "dir ." (hey, they had no idea about filenames and suffixes either), go and make a cup of tea, drink it, come back, check the listing ... yup, still running.
Let's face it, in the 1980s everything sucked. (But especially Margaret Thatcher.)
I remember once teaching a friend about subdirectories when he asked for help because he couldn't install something on his hard disk. Of course, mostly everything in C:.
The fun thing is that when working on that, I realized that they had a Hardcard 20 drive. It's the only one I have seen one - it was a hard disk mounted on an ISA card.
Which is why when techie reviewers complain about iOS on the iPhone/iPad completely hiding the file system from users they are wrong. Users do not understand the file system. You can either try and force them to use it and fail, or hide it.
Yes. In both computer software and UK politics, the 1980s are when the older, defective systems were replaced by ones that fixed many of those defects, but introduced vastly more serious ones. We STILL can't write the high-RAS applications and run-time systems, which also diagnosed the cause of external failures, that we could (with difficulty) do then.
What is the climate of Timeline 3.
That's not just a climate, but implicitly a climate and demographics question.
I haven't inked in the background in great detail here. However: loosely, TL3 was technologically retarded by about one century compared to the ~USA's TL (TL2), b/c the industrial revolution in England stalled out. Instead, industrialization based on steam/coal power started between 1880 and 1920 in the Appalachians, with electrification kicking in from the 1970s.
Agriculture is also backward by our standards, leading to a lower carrying capacity than our own world.
So, yes: massive deforestation, but also less-productive crop strains to grow on the resulting land (which AIUI isn't suitable for high yield grains).
Everyone was burning coal or wood, often on indoor unventilated fires, for heating and cooking, until comparatively recently. Think sky-high tuberculosis and COPD rates. (Historically in the 19th century TB killed up to 30% of the English adult population.) Unfortunately they've discovered and cultivated tobacco as a drug (along with cannabis, but cannabis is less lucrative because you need to consume a whole lot less of it to become intoxicated and the stuff grows just about anywhere), so they've got epic-level lung cancer as well, although the Commonwealth is working on that as a matter of urgency (by 2020 the benefits of e-cigs will be so glaringly obvious that they're probably handing them out for free to smokers just to cut their carcinogen load).
Pandemic plagues (mumps, smallpox, dysentery) would have been common until they got the germ theory of disease. HOWEVER, the GToD and public health measures in cities aren't necessarily dependent on industrial technology; microscopy goes back to the 18th century, as do the anatomists and the roots of modern medicine. So I'm going to call it for the GoTD, basic public health measures like urban sewer systems, and possibly vaccination, at roughly the same time they emerged in TL2 (give or take a couple of decades). But every time you eliminate one cause of death another emerges, and famines in the 20th century would have been particularly brutal.
By the time Miriam shows up in 2002, TL3 is already showing signs of climate instability and warming. The Commonwealth can't produce PV cells or large turbine blades easily, but it can spew out hundreds of standardized BWR and PWR reactors, almost from the get-go (remember, the New British Empire had a Manhattan Project of their own underway even before the revolution). By 2020, the Commonwealth is still burning gas for aviation and shipping, but the mass automobile culture hasn't taken off (think dense, Eastern-European style cities built around apartment blocks and streetcars) and they're producing 60-80% of their electricity from nuclear.
Yes, they've probably had a melt-down or two. But they know about TMI and Chernobyl, so they at least built their reactors inside proper containment vessels, avoided positive void coefficient designs, and so on. I'm not sure whether to inflict a Fukushima Daiichi grade incident on them ... but even if I do, this is a world that hasn't seen nuclear weapons actually used in warfare: their attitude to the Atom is much more gung-ho-1970s meets 1980s Soviet Politburo.
This line of discussion reminds me of a dinner conversation a few years back, a gentleman was claiming Apple couldn't do "True multitasking", when I told him contemporary Macs used a UNIX based O/S, it went right over his head, likely thought they also used 30 pin SIMMs and SCSI drives... People tend to form into tribes on preference questions, and will happily compare theirs now, with yours, years ago.
Hey, they could revive the Focke-Wulf Triebflügel design as a passenger-carrying taxi! Now with added HTP powered rockets instead of tip ramjets to spin the passenger-mincers! What ELSE could possibly go wrong?
(Note the highly optimistic "never exceed" speed in the wikipedia specifications section ...)
There's an ongoing tension between the attractive Unix notion of a file as a simple stream of bytes and the requirement to store large amounts of metadata about files as well.
I think I can safely say that Sean is aware of that.
(For many years he was Apple's HFS+ maintenance guy.)
This thread has gone long enough for me to complain that to a long-time Traveller fan, 'TL' means 'Tech Level' instead of 'timeline'. This just makes some posts a bit more difficult to read.
No need to do anything about it, though if somebody would start classifying the technology levels of different timelines, they would probably use a different name for it. (Also, the Traveller tech levels are hard to interpret and don't really work that well.)
The fun thing is that when working on that, I realized that they had a Hardcard 20 drive. It's the only one I have seen one - it was a hard disk mounted on an ISA card.
Yeah, I remember drooling after one back in the day.
It seemed like a good idea at the time for low-profile PC clones that had an expansion cage but didn't have a spare drive bay for a hard disk, but I later learned that vibrations from the hard drive tended to fuck over the motherboards they were plugged into, leading to a higher than normal failure rate.
There were a lot more factors than that! I wrote a utility to convert MVS files to MS-DOS, MacOS or Unix ones - me being me, I investigated fairly thoroughly, and the number of undocumented lunacies was legion. Fixing that up and diagnosing what couldn't be fixed up was, er, 'interesting'. Inter alia, which characters could occur in a valid file name (or even file!) was different.
God alone knows where MacOS got the 0D (CR) line-termination insanity from, but both the MS-DOS and Unix conventions were allowed by ASCII. What was NOT allowed were some of the other Unix lunacies, like treating 09 (HT) as a data character or the abuses of 00 (NUL) (which have only got worse since) - and there are many more. MS-DOS and MacOS had lunacies, too, including some equally 'interesting' aberrations to do with 04 (EOT), but I suspect they were more of the nature of bugs that had gone feral, rather than a deliberately perverse design.
For extra marks, consider the basic markup in a text stream "page throw and return to start of line", how to represent that, and which representations should be accepted - in ASCII, it's just 0D-OC (CR-FF), of course. Or what on earth a free-standing FF should mean in a text file.
man unix2dos (and man dos2unix).
Para 9
And, of course, this was before A Mess DOS 6 "discovered" the move command, yes?
Oh yes!! :-) Does anyone happen to know what the Focke-Wulf design department were on back then?
Supplementary - Is it still legal? ;-)
They were probably boxed out of their skull on amphetamines, like everybody else in the Reich, so nope :-)
Thanks Charlie. I don't remember if I mentioned it before on this thread, but in our timeline, Latin America didn't reach its pre-Columbian population until the 20th century. There is little evidence that I've seen which states that the Americas were at their Malthusian carrying capacity at that time.
Yeh, a corpuscular bunker buster would be very effective against both dams and probably make a right mess of a canal system, but they're future tech from NAC's point of view. I don't think they appeared in our timeline until the late nineties (willing to be proven wrong again of course). I don't think the NAC or the French have corpuscular petards that are rugged enough to slam into concrete or solid rock at high supersonic speed, burrow through and then (the tricky bit) detonate reliably. On the other hand, as I said, conventional explosives and 1940's tech is ample to knock down dams and do a bit of bunker busting on the side. However either requires getting your aircraft to fly above the target somewhere above 20 000 ft where you're an absolute sitting duck for corpuscular SAMs.
The explosive charge within is a separate issue from the design of the earth penetrating bomb itself. It's the absolute weight of the bomb itself, along with the hardness of the casing that makes it effective as a penetrating weapon. I remember reading a biography of Barnes Wallis that gave some details of the manufacturing process whereby the steel casing underwent the same hardening process used for battleship main guns to make it hard enough to penetrate 20 feet of concrete.
Also from that Barnes Wallis biography, I remember that the British learned that a near miss sometimes produced better results than a direct hit. With a canal lock or dam if the bomb landed within a couple hundred feet and penetrated a hundred plus feet before exploding the resulting earthquake would do as much or more damage than a direct hit with conventional bombs.
The Grand Slam bomb had 9,136 lb of Torpex. The "Little Boy" bomb used on Hiroshima weighed 9,700 lb. I don't think it would be much of a design challenge to fit a "Little Boy" bomb design within the casing of a Grand Slam bomb to provide a much enhanced explosive effect. Newer, smaller, more efficient designs for nuclear weapons would actually require additional ballast to make the weapon heavy enough to penetrate.
Not quite, IIRC. The problem was that in order for a bomb to work, you needed it to land at the base of the dam, with the water behind it to act as a very effective way of tamping the explosion in the direction required. Getting a bomb to slide down the wet wall of the dam is virtually impossible if you drop it vertically; however, if you spun it, and skipped it over the anti-torpedo nets (because the Germans had thought about defending the dams against attack), it would hit the wall and "unwind" downwards until the point where a pressure switch could trigger it.
Almost ... Wallis proposed the design for his Grand Slam penetrating bomb in 1940. The RAF rejected it at first because they didn't have an aircraft that could deliver it. He didn't start experimenting with bouncing marbles across a pond until early 1942. It took a little over a year to develop the weapon & delivery systems and employ them in the Chastise operation.
The success of Operation Chastise caused the RAF to take another look at Wallis's other proposals. The Tallboy & Grand Slam bombs didn't need to skip over anti-torpedo nets to get up against the dam walls. They only needed to land close enough for the dam structure to be within the earthquake radius.
Re: '... think dense, Eastern-European style cities built around apartment blocks and streetcars'
If agriculture has stalled and cheap transport across long distances is non-existent, how do you support a large city? Until both are reliable, it's easier to survive on a patch of farm or in clusters of small communities. Example: Russia's current urban population is only 72%, up from 49% in 1955.
http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/russia-population/
The paper below examines Russian life expectancy changes in the 1990s. Never knew that it's possible for a population's life expectancy to drop so much in just one year:
https://www.ucis.pitt.edu/nceeer/2000_815-16g_Twigg.pdf
'Most dramatic were the life expectancy patterns for males in the early part of the 1990s, which plunged from 64.2 years in 1989 to 57.6 in 1994, including an astonishing one-year drop (from 1992 to 1993) of more than three years, from 62.0 to 58.9. 9
While this figure has since rebounded to 61.0 in 1997, regaining almost 50 percent of its recent loss, considerable uncertainty clouds the future direction of this vital indicator. Only 54 percent of today's sixteen-year old males will survive to age sixty; in the United States, the comparable figure is 83 percent.10'
BTW, the above paper mentions some links with disease, soil contamination, pollution, poor healthcare policy, unemployment, industry, alcoholism, etc.
You could I guess open both the front and rear doors, make everyone run and change over all the passengers in well under 10 seconds plus the door opening and closing times.
If you were going to do it that way, it might be more efficient to seat the passengers in some kind of passenger/cargo module. Backing the new module in from the front would push the old module out the back onto a waiting flatbed. Run the module up to a gate where the passengers could unload & the module would be ready for the service crew to tidy it up for the next load of passengers.
Make the modules a standard size like shipping containers.
The B61-11 has busterish qualities, as did the designed-but-never-deployed W86. So things have gone a bit in that direction. (I have a suspicion that the B61-11 benefited quite a bit from work done on the W86.)
Neither of them has the real earth penetrating capability of the WWII Barnes Wallis designs, although I expect the actual physics packages would fit inside one of them.
The B61-11 is designed to "penetrate several metres into the ground before detonating, damaging fortified structures further underground." The Tallboy and Grand Slam bombs were designed to penetrate 100+ meters and destroy structures above the point of detonation.
OT(ish) - Why does this speel-chucker think that 'awk' should be 'awl'?
Ships with a smallish dictionary. You have to add the words it doesn't know the first time it doesn't recognize them and from then on it won't do that.
So I looked at the Treibflugel piece, clicked on a link and found https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focke_Rochen ! Are we sure amphetamines are strong and mind-altering enough!!?
Just a few thoughts about climate in an alternative Earth.
--One question to think about is the cause of the Little Ice Age (especially in the 16th Century, as there were worldwide political ruptures from all the crop failures and such). If you posit solar cycles and volcanoes, then potentially alternate timelines suffered the same way (assuming that this level of chaos happens equally on all timelines). If you follow the 1491 theory that a partial cause was the depopulation of the Americas followed by regrowing forest sucking down a lot of CO2, then there was a global disaster about a century after the Europeans hit the Americas, caused primarily by disease, and a lot of farmland being replaced by forests. Your choice.
--As for burning wood and coal: if they instituted European style coppicing and woodland management, then they'd have had enough wood to burn in Medieval-density villages. If they got wood American style, then there was wholesale deforestation to feed the first steamboats (along the Mississippi, Sacramento, etc.) followed about a decade latter by a switch to coal when there weren't any trees available for fuel. Charcoal for normal fuel use seems to work where there's either forest management or more rapidly growing forests than you'd have in the northeastern US. One critical tidbit is that I don't know how the Chinese or ancient Rome supplied charcoal to their cities, so there might be workarounds.
--As for petroleum, anecdote time. After the Civil War, an ancestor of mine, former cavalry colonel, worked off his PTSD by tending the oil rigs in Pennsylvania right after the Civil War. When the oil's oozing out of the ground and drilling gives you a gusher, petroleum's a nice fuel to use, and Pennsylvania was oozing oil in the 19th Century, enough to make the Rockefeller family very, very wealthy. Other big oil strikes were in west Texas and Los Angeles, so who owns those bits of land might be important in your scenario building.
--Don't forget the importance of the Mormons to western US development, and the importance of western development to WWII. The causality chain (per Cadillac Desert) is that the Mormons brought irrigated agriculture to the western US (yes, I know that the O'odham and other tribes did it first, but their systems crashed centuries earlier). This enabled people to colonize all over the western US, sometimes by ousting Mormons from their irrigated fields. This spurred the construction of dams. Dams, and especially hydroelectric plants, turned out to be critical both for developing western cities, and especially for powering the aluminum manufacturing in the Pacific northwest that led to the US being able to produce all those big, shiny planes for WWII and after. It's no accident that Boeing's manufacturing is outside Seattle--electricity from the dammed Columbia River was helping build planes.
Oh, and most American uranium comes from the western US.
So anyway, the sketched in backstory of how the West was won (and by whom) is fairly critical for talking about the industrial might of a country based in eastern North America. If it wasn't the Mormons settling and the California gold rush equivalent that lit the fuse, then who was it? Syrian refugees from the Ottoman Empire-equivalent? They brought a bunch of irrigated agriculture to the West too.
Also, don't forget that California gold helped pay for the Union win over the Confederacy, and that the Confederacy got its boost in slave agriculture in some part because the presettlement South was too pestilential for white people to work plantations--they died in too-large numbers, and people from Africa had more of the antibodies to the local diseases (or so goes the story), and the Africans could be forced into slavery. So if tobacco and cotton developed in plantations in the southeast US, unfortunately there's likely a slave trade in the timeline's past, with all the ugly bigotry that implies. If not, then things get weirdly interesting, with the most populous colonies shifting to the northeast who industrialize around something other than cotton mills...That's the story anyway. If you don't want to include the slave trade, then perhaps something like the Australian penal colony system might have populated the US, with the attendant social issues. But don't forget about things like gold strikes that always caused major social disruption.
I suppose, if you wanted to get really weird, you might posit for some bizarre reason (perhaps the Chinese explored the west coast during the Tang Dynasty and left a lot of diseases but no colonies, thereby giving the Indian populations time to recover and reservoirs of disease that made them immune to European disease introductions), that there wasn't a massive population crash in the Americas when the Europeans arrived, and that, rather than colonizing a land emptied by disease, they conquered a bunch of neolithic protostates and installed themselves at the top, with North American colonization paralleling the history of Mexico and the Andes than our history.
Anyway, that's my few scattered thoughts. The critical thing is to recognize that there was, initially, a lot of oil in Pennsylvania, so there's little point in assuming that people who were taking coal out of the Appalachia weren't taking oil out of Petrolia too.
Re: Apple II, you say
it was set up to allow cards to autoconfigure based on what slot they were in.
That's why I said the Apple II's slots weren't "universal", they had encodings that specified what slot was what. The IBM PC's bus slots had no such encodings which made things simpler.
I prototyped cards for the apple II and also for the IBM PC back in the day. It was a lot easier to build cards for the PC although some of that was probably that the Intel support chips were better developed, like the 8259 interrupt controller which didn't exist when the Apple II was first thought of.
Whichever version of the history of Personal Computers you examine one thing is very clear - IBM screwed up massively. The most successful machine was the IBM PC and so ubiquitous that the name got shortened to just PC. Yet most of the money in the PC business ended up in other pockets and IBM eventually gave up on PCs completely and sold its remaining PC business to Lenovo. The largest beneficiary was Microsoft.
When you get right down to it, many of the bad business decisions IBM made were haunted by the spectre of the 1956 consent decree. A lot of things the company could have done were not done because of fear of the DoJ and the Southern District of New York's judge Edelstein.
When IBM beat Windows 95 to market with OS/2 Warp (v.3) they knew they couldn't overcome Micro$ofts DOS/Windows advantage even with a superior product. The OS/2 development team wanted IBM to give Warp away; anyone who wanted a copy could have one for free. But management decided IBM was trying to get out from under that consent decree and it would likely cause the DoJ to react adversely if they did so.
So the chance to establish OS/2 as a viable alternative to Windoze was lost.
What makes me crazy on the subject of filesystems is that every new operating system, phone, or tablet wants to organize me. The problem is that I've been organizing my own files since DOS 3.3, and I've already got naming conventions and a giant school of subdirectories, none of which are addressed by modern attempts to "organize" my file system.
I hate software which attempts to be helpful!
For extra spiffiness, the piloting system would be "fly by wire" and it would run on Windows CE!
There was a healthy CP/M market with many machine makers and software vendors before the IBM PC. DR's strange decision to not talk to IBM about licensing CP/M for the IBM PC led to IBM going to Microsoft for an OS.
It's not as strange as some think. When IBM was developing the PC the project was carried out in strict secrecy; more from fear that IBM's management would find out about it than anything else.
IBM's reps showed up at Digital Research unannounced on a day Kildall was out of the office & unreachable. If he'd known IBM was going to come calling, he'd have been there, but he didn't and he wasn't.
The first thing IBM's reps did was slam IBM's draconian, extremely one-sided Non-Disclosure Agreement on Dorothy Kildall's desk and she freaked out. She told them Gary was out of the office, and despite her best efforts she was unable to contact him. She asked IBM to come back the next day, but they were already scheduled to meet Bill Gates in Seattle the next day because they wanted his BASIC interpreter for the new IBM-PC. The IBM folks were supposed to be back at Digital Research the day after that.
When Gates found out that IBM hadn't managed to seal the deal with Digital Research, he told them he had an operating system he could show them "tomorrow". He got on the phone that night & bought 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products. And the rest is history.
Oh, sure, those were just the ones I found significant enough so that I can still remember them :)
Concerning 0D as a line terminator, I recall that being a fairly common convention in the 8-bit world. The BBC Micro certainly used it; I'm pretty sure the Commodore PET did too, and the TRS-80; I don't remember using anything where CHR$(13) didn't do what you expected it to.
It always seemed the most sensible convention to me because it meant "carriage return" the character did the same thing as "carriage return" the key on an electric typewriter, or the "carriage return" lever on a manual one, and those were what I had been used to before I met computers.
"And the rest is history." Not quite. What isn't known, as far as I know, is why the Nazgul let Gates write the contract and fail to review it; for IBM to sign a contract that was very one-sided AGAINST them was not something that had happened before or since. But they did ....
"Yeah, MS-DOS also."
That's weird, because (per my post) I vividly remember the contrast of DOS not having that problem. The reason I had directories of 600 files on the Mac in the first place was that the next stage was to transfer them to the PC, where we would Do Stuff with them and then write them to half-inch magnetic tape. The PC software that Did Stuff and then wrote the tape used to take all day to run, but it only took 20 minutes after I'd rewritten it, and the main limit on that was I/O.
Though I do remember there was something strange with MS-DOS and the root directory that didn't apply to subdirectories, that made it a bad idea to put lots of files in the root. That strange thing may have been the slowness you're talking about.
"Let's face it, in the 1980s everything sucked."
And things began to suck that had not sucked before, such as music, or railway passenger accommodation.
In terms of technology, though, I'd be quite happy to still be in the 80s. Apart from the computers (their capabilities, rather than their existence) I really do not have any stuff that uses post-80s technology. And the capabilities of 80s computers were certainly enough to keep me happy. Maybe this makes me a curpigeon.
"...the steel casing underwent the same hardening process used for battleship main guns to make it hard enough to penetrate 20 feet of concrete. ... The Grand Slam bomb had 9,136 lb of Torpex. The "Little Boy" bomb used on Hiroshima weighed 9,700 lb. I don't think it would be much of a design challenge to fit a "Little Boy" bomb design within the casing of a Grand Slam bomb to provide a much enhanced explosive effect"
The "Little Boy" style of nuke is not just called "gun assembly" as a metaphor - it uses actual artillery technology, and the main non-nuclear component is a gun barrel just like a real one: long, strong and heavy. It all but is a penetrator as it stands, and being incredibly simple it is better able to resist the shock of penetration than the much more complex and finicky implosion-assembly type.
On the other hand it is also very inefficient in its use of fissile material, and it has been suggested that an enemy could use its underground burst cavity as a 235U mine which would supply them with enough unreacted 235U for several implosion devices with a lot less effort than they would have to put into making the same amount by enrichment.
Point of order: the Tallboy/Grand Slam design was not designed to go through 20 feet of concrete. Barnes Wallis thought they might bounce off instead, and recommended sticking to the method for which they had been designed, ie. destabilising the structure with a near miss. But naturally some of them did hit the submarine pens directly, and it turned out that they were better at penetrating concrete than had been expected.
Yes. And one of my naming conventions is never to use capital letters in filenames, so I can type them without using the shift key. Pretty much everything violates this, even things that do manage to avoid putting bloody spaces in filenames.
Carriage return and line feed are two different operations on a typewriter. They are coupled by a ratchet and pawl mechanism but can be decoupled on some better-quality typewriters to give a better bold/overstrike capability since the operator doesn't have to rewind the paper and carbons back on the platen for the next line of overwriting keystrokes. They are totally separate mechanisms on electric typewriters and coupled by switches and wires (I nearly said electronics but that's not quite true).
The IBM PC had lots of RAM and, with floppies, lots of data storage and so its OS could afford to use both CR and LF codes for EOL to allow more flexibility compared to its resource-limited 8-bit predecessors like the Apple II.
Yes, "move constructors" aren't bedded in to everyone's habits yet
Do you mean the compiler writers, or the poor schmucks trying to use them? I spent some quality time trying to make move constructors work with thread classes, then with PODs and eventually gave up.
Part of the problem is that in classic C++ style they decided that "move" should be syntactically indistinguishable from "copy". More importantly, there's no alternate explicit move syntax, nor any compile-time notification that a copy operation will be performed instead. Even better, some calls won't compile with move semantics if there's no copy constructor for the object being moved. You have to code for a copy even if you're using move... or you can just pass raw pointers and know exactly what will happen (SIGSEVF! :)
The irritating thing for me is that I'm used to pushing fixes back up the chain, but with C++ I don't have enough skill to do that, or generally even to find the bug in the first place. I end up making plaintive posts to forums and mailing lists saying "the standard seems to say that this code should work, but it doesn't" and eventually someone says "yes, that should work but doesn't".
C++11 gave us "duck typing"
Note that that is in the sense of "C++ brought duck typing into the language", rather than it was first seen in C++ then later copied elsewhere. "auto" is a significant convenience, as is "using", but they do rather exist because of the laborious "std::move_iterator>>>" habits of the language.
"for(auto thing:collectionofthings)" is a complete joy by comparison. Lisp had that in 1970, Delphi in 1995, C++ in what, 2015? See the awesome power of modern C++!
MSDOS used CR+LF because CP/M (an 8-bit OS) did. Not because it had more memory or larger storage capacity.
"In terms of technology, though, I'd be quite happy to still be in the 80s."
Not if you're a motorcyclist... Tyres look more or less the same from the outside, but have gone through a revolution. Back in the 80's I rode on Pirelli Phantoms. They had hardly any traction until they were warmed up. (remembering that I'm in Australia, god knows what they were like in the UK). They were the stickiest tyres you could buy at the time. Once warmed, you could go around a corner reasonably well, but not actually get your knee down. Even the racers didn't manage it. In the wet! OMG. Just try to keep it straight up and down and coast to a stop. They were the very best wet weather tyres available. In fact they were considered so good that I saw a few race teams run them instead of wets in races that allowed non-road tyres. Yet I could ride around in top gear blipping the throttle and the engine would just go Brooom Brooom as though I had pulled the clutch in. And after 2000 km they'd be down to the cords.
Now it's not unusual to buy a street tyre that lasts 16000 km that lets you drag your knee should you so desire...in the wet. http://i154.photobucket.com/albums/s241/Johnistephen/PR3sinthewet.jpg
This was because of an unfortunate API design choice: the OS did not maintain any directory enumeration state. It only offered a single function for getting name and info for the ith entry of a specified directory that ran in O(i) time. Ouch!
They are decoupled, as standard, on every typewriter I've ever used. You can push on the end of the carriage to return it to the start of the line, and you can turn the knob to advance the paper, independently. True of both manual and electric typewriters.
You can also, on a manual typewriter, push the paddle-like lever on the end of the carriage to perform both functions in one movement. (Although sometimes it doesn't do it very well.)
On an electric typewriter, similarly, when you press the carriage return key on the keyboard, it triggers both operations together.
On a computer, when you press the carriage return key on the keyboard, it both puts you back to the start of the line and scrolls up one line, which is the same as what an electric typewriter does, and also the same as what a manual one does with the paddle-lever.
Since pressing the key named "carriage return" means "go back to the start and up one", it always seemed most logical to me that the character code named "carriage return" should mean the same thing.
Interesting discussion ... this is not what Smalltalk/Python/JavaScript/Lisp dynamic programmers calls duck typing. For the non--programmers reading this, either roll eyes and move on or think of this as another example how large and complicated the world of programming has become :-)
We dynamic programmers call this feature of C++ "type inference", in the most obvious case saving me from the repetition in:
my.package.hiearchy.SomeType foo = new my.package.hierarchy.SomeType()
by letting me only write the type once.
But what we call "duck typing" is that if I write
foo.quack()
then I know nothing at all about the type of foo. The compiler/interpreter cannot assume it knows the type of foo either. All that is required is that at runtime the object foo knows how to respond to a quack message. No abstract class, Java interface, or other notation required.
Something I don't remember being mentioned in the book, is there any contact between Timelines 1 and 3 outside North America?
Knowledge of world walking had spread to the rest of the world at the end of the Merchant Princes. I would guess that by 2020 actual world walking has also reached outside the USA, either world walkers themselves or the cultured tissue gadgets that the USA developed.
Again, I would guess that by 2020 in timeline 3 there is some knowledge of world walking on the other side of the Atlantic. Maybe an unhappy / greedy world walker defects from timeline 3 North America and sells his/her services to the highest bidder?
So what happens when British/European world walkers from timeline 1 meet the French Empire? Do they start a tech exchange program of their own?
I must admit I didn't get into motorbikes myself until the 90s, but I'm sure the tyres we got in the 80s weren't as bad as that even so; for one thing, I'd inevitably have heard people talking about how crap they were, and later talking about what an amazing difference there was now, but I haven't. Also, if you could blip the throttle in top on a bike and have it react like the clutch was slipping, you'd have been able to do the same in a car, only you couldn't; and you'd not have been able to pull wheelies on a bike, only you could. Nor, for that matter, would you have been able to control anything like, for instance, the Yamaha 350 two-strokes that were very popular at the time and were quite mad.
Tyres like that certainly existed, but normal people couldn't get them. Only commercial people could. You'd find them on Transit vans and things because they'd last 50,000 miles and still have plenty of tread left, and the sliding all over the road could be blamed on not having a load in the back.
The bike tyres to watch out for were ones made in Iron Curtain countries or in China. They would lack grip, but they weren't anywhere near as bad as you describe. Occasionally people would also be found to complain about the tyres on second-hand bikes imported direct from Japan with Japan tyres still on them; apparently the problem here was that the roads in Japan were surfaced with volcanic ejecta that gave a much grippier but also much more tyre-eating surface than European tarmac, so rock-hard tyres were a sensible choice for Japan.
I'm wondering if what you observed was the result of tyre manufacturers suddenly twigging on that their assumptions about Australian road-surfacing materials had been wrong all the time...
It may also be significant that Pirelli tyres on bikes seem to generate differences of opinion which are difficult to reconcile with the tyres they apply to not being different, and which you don't seem to encounter in respect of other makes. Some people say they suck dangerous arse while others say they don't have a problem. It appears that Pirelli tyres are unusually sensitive to minor variations in conditions of use or something of the kind.
what we call "duck typing" is that if I write foo.quack()
One of the tricks with C++ is that they use words in ways that are not typical for coding in general, and their implementation of common concepts can be peculiar. Which I imagine can be hell if you're cross-training experienced C++ developers.
One of the more curious corners is that there are no root objects. One consequence is that there's no reflection built in, what there is has been bolted on after the fact and has to be explicitly supported (which kind of defeats the point, but that is also usual in C++).
A C++ object is a type rather than being part of a hierarchy (or it's in a hierarchy of one, if you're that sort of person), and types are generally disjunct - an object is not an integer is not a pointer but you can of course C-style cast between them with abandon (viz, it compiles). Boxed types seem to be rare in C++.
Exceptions are likewise non-special, the statement "throw 0;" is just as valid as any other. What that means is you can't "catch exception e" and know anything about what you've done other than that if someone said "throw exception(...)" you may well catch it with that statement. If they have their own exception hierarchy it doesn't have to descend from the C++ exception class and indeed may not be an object at all. It's quite legal to throw an int and catch it to use as the return code of a command line program.
From a Commonwealth point of view the problem is that so much core software for our world is written in C or C++. You can't just not use C++ and keep microprocessors.
Maybe they weren't as bad as I remember. Anyway, here's a lap of Bathurst (which though it's a 'public road' had a racetrack surface with much more grip than a public road). Note the complete absence of knee sliders and the rather pedestrian lean angles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJSlro-47Ns
That would a brisk but not outrageous road ride these days. Guys who 'press hard' would be waiting at the coffee shop!
Compare that with the elbow dragging antics in modern 600 supersport (also on road tyres). Hell, you don't even need to go to a racetrack to see elbow dragging. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5_Zc2mpBX0
"Nor, for that matter, would you have been able to control anything like, for instance, the Yamaha 350 two-strokes that were very popular at the time and were quite mad."
Heheheheee. I couldn't! I had one and crashed it literally too many times to count. I'd buy indicators 8 at a time to save trips to the shops.
Oh, I guess the throttle blipping thing... I was riding a Suzuki Waterbottle that was more TR750 than GT750. It made more power than most cars of the day. So perhaps that's got something to do with it. Still, it should have stood up on one wheel, but it just spun. Don't forget I'm talking about the Wet here. It stood up fine (well terrifyingly actually) in the dry. It went past GSX1100's like they'd stopped. https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzuki_TR_750&prev=search
"Agriculture is also backward by our standards, leading to a lower carrying capacity than our own world. "
At risk of stating the obvious....
The biggest effect there is probably not "how big can your population be", but rather "how much surplus labour" is available for better things than agriculture.
USA 1870: Half the workforce is doing agriculture USA 2008: 2% of the workforce is doing agriculture
And by 1870 we'd already escaped the Malthusian trap.
You can do a hell of a lot of work if you free up half your workforce to do it.
"And by 1870 we'd already escaped the Malthusian trap."
'Escaped'... Delayed would be more like it.
The principle that you had to get more energy out of the food you grow than you put into growing it (or catching it or whatever) still holds, but we're using stored energy of coal and oil to provide a temporary surplus. Like having billions of unpaid workers who don't need feeding. That upsets his ideas that didn't take into account such a possibility. His advice at the time was to have later marriages and fewer children. We no longer marry at 12 and have 15 children, but that's also a temporary fix. Take away oil and coal tomorrow and we'll have a massive famine within a week. The vast majority of farming and harvesting work is done by machines replacing 100's of billions of workers. That could be replaced by solar, but it hasn't been yet.
Here are my thoughts
Mormons: You place too much emphasis on them. They were instrumental in our timeline, but that was more of a coincidence. Here's an alternative:
The alt-Louis and Clark discover that the Pacific Northwest (PNW) has enough fish to sustain agrarian densities. Unlike our timeline, that area is settled first. Eventually, there is either a transcontinental railway connecting the Great Lakes to the PNW or way stations develop similar to the Silk Road. One of these stations discovers the Ogallalla Aquifer.
A deepwater port is still needed for trade with China/Japan. The first port is Seacouver, but it eventually moves south to LA when oil is discovered there. LA becomes the Pacific Naval Port for that reason, encouraging settlers there. The larger population (no Chinese exclusion act) makes constructing large public works cheap. This is how the alt-water system develops. It might even be more extensive than the one in our world?
The Gold Rush still happens around the same time
Hawaii is probably colonized earlier (as the only island chain in the middle of the Pacific between 15 and 60 degrees North, it is too strategic to ignore). Most likely, it will end up with the French Empire after the revolution (for the same reason Bermuda was not part of the ARW in our timeline).
Crop packages: In our world, the Columbian exchange was incomplete in a lot of ways. Quinoa only spread out of the Andes recently. Don't forget that this is the staple crop for peasants in the Andes.
Fish farming: Is industrialization necessary for its emergence?
How many of the gains in agriculture in our world could have been achieved without industrialization? How many of them could have been achieved by an agrarian society with just oil and hydropower? I have no familiarity with agriculture, so I can't answer this
Put it another way. US agriculture used about 1.7 quads in 2002. A very fit and strong man could probably output about 1 kWh worth of work in a day (a Tour de France rider puts out about 1.6 kWh per day). 1.7 quads is 498,220,841,666.67 kWh. Rounding out to something reasonable, that's about half a trillion man days worth of work. That's just US agriculture, not the whole world. Like having 5 fit, unfed slaves working 7 days a week to feed each person. If instead of having those 5 unfed slaves, you had to feed them... well that doesn't work. There's food for 1 and 6 working. That's not even counting that the 'fit strong' part of each life is only a few years. There's a lot of growing at the start and a bit of dying at the end. Also not counting the fact that a person outputting 1 kWh a day will eat about twice what a normal person does, which really means needing food for 11 while only growing food for 1.
Oops, I meant the California alt-water system
"3. Fish farming: Is industrialization necessary for its emergence? "
I've spoken to a fishfarmer from Lombok and visited fish farms in Malaysia. It seems like nylon netting is pretty essential. Their fish lived in nylon cages. It's hard to imagine an organic material that wouldn't rot. So ocean fish farming seems hard/impossible without industrialisation.
Freshwater, inland. I can't see why it would need industrialisation. You'd have to grow the fish food. Why not just eat it directly if calories are scarce?
Let me move around to analyzing TL2. That TL looks deceptively like ours. However, that is only because the future "is not evenly distributed". I don't know how the TLS are structured in Charlie's book, but I'm surprised they never ran across a TL where humans never evolved. Such a TL would be "terra nullis". TL2 has the ability to send drones across timelines. We already have evidence of the commercial use of this technology.
This wouldn't make much difference to Northern America and Europe, other than the uses Charlie already specified. That is because these countries are old, have a low TFR, and are heavily urbanized. There wouldn't be many takers for a new homestead act.
With the possible exception of Haiti, Western Brazil, and probably parts of Central America, the same holds true for Latin America. While Latin America isn't as old, it's lagging by a few decades.
Now we get to China and India, where this would really change things. I'll focus on China in the rest of this post and India in the next post.
In our TL, China has maintained a policy of being self-sufficient in "basic foodstuff". In TL2, this policy will change to mean being self-sufficient in all food, fuel, and metals. This means that they'll colonize alt-Australia, California, and Saudi Arabia, at a minimum. If they can't send people, they'll really focus on automating these industries.
In our TL, China strictly limits urbanization to prevent the emergence of the slums which plagued Europe during the 19th century and currently plague India. http://www.citymetric.com/politics/china-strictly-controls-urbanisation-and-limits-migrant-workers-rights-all-could-be
I don't have a source for this, but I also heard rumors that China strictly controls agricultural mechanization to prevent urbanization. In other words, they're controlling both push and pull factors
In TL2, China will probably permit more mechanization and permit urbanization to the newly built cities in their new colonies. They know where the best land is. At the same time, I doubt that they would permit many immigrants from becoming rural again.
At first glance, TL2's Australia and Brazil will end up with different economies.
Is worldwalking cheaper than containerized shipping? If so, that could provide a new incentive to build new cities "close" to the destination markets.
"3. Fish farming: Is industrialization necessary for its emergence? "
I've spoken to a fishfarmer from Lombok and visited fish farms in Malaysia. It seems like nylon netting is pretty essential. Their fish lived in nylon cages. It's hard to imagine an organic material that wouldn't rot. So ocean fish farming seems hard/impossible without industrialisation.
Freshwater, inland. I can't see why it would need industrialisation. You'd have to grow the fish food. Why not just eat it directly if calories are scarce?
The Hawaiians (among others) pulled off fish pens built out of lava rock just fine. The trick is to keep the boulders close enough that small fish can freely enter and leave, while bigger fish get stuck inside. Normally they stocked these ponds with milk fish, and if you look up milk fish, I think you'll find it was widely farmed in pools near the ocean.
That said, when you've got salmon runs the size of what they used to have in the PNW, farming salmon seems like an amazingly stupid thing to do. Trouble is, if you log the watersheds, dam the rivers, and overfish the population left in the ocean, after a surprisingly short time, you run out of salmon in the dammed, logged, overfished river. Weird how that happens...
For the same reason we kept domesticated animals before industrialization. However, fish farming also includes algae farming. Also, don't forget filter feeders such as crawfish
In our world, India's population growth is slowing. In addition, inefficiencies in public infrastructure and plain old corruption are limiting agricultural mechanization. That said, the rural population is growing faster than cities can expand to absorb them. This can be seen by India's relatively low urbanization rate of 32.7 percent in 2015. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_by_country
In TL2, depending on how cheap worldwalking is, I could see the Indian government subsidizing some sort of transport to new colonies in other timelines. These colonists would probably be more rural than their Chinese counterparts?
I don't know enough about Southeast Asia and Africa to make comments about how either would react. Would Israel want to create colonies in other TLs?
I'm not going to argue that alt-China couldn't exist, because it's amazing what might have happened had the "Mandate of Heaven" story never taken root in their political system.
Anyway, one little point: yes, someone could sail a junk around Japan, the Aleutians, down the coast and find North America. The thing to remember is that the China trade, which China desperately needed during the Ming and Ching dynasties (this would be Latin American silver going to China in return for silks and such for the Spanish Court) ran from Acapulco to Manila, not from LA to Shanghai. I believe there are reasons relating to winds and oceanic currents why the Spanish didn't sail straight to China, but instead swung south. Chinese trying to colonize California would have the "fun" of the north Pacific, followed by a long swing home. That part's maybe a little bit trickier than it looks at first.
If you want that story to happen, it needs to start with the Chinese conquering Korea and Japan, working their way north due to the trade in sea otter furs (which there was in the 19th Century--it's what almost wiped the cute buggers out), followed by exploiting Klondike gold and working their way down the cost (as the Russians did, but without the gold) to exploit other things (like all those huge trees which would make really excellent junks), and so forth until the got to the Sacramento River and found (eventually) more gold! And even a climate to grow rice in!
The fun part of this is adapting Chinese agriculture to keeping their colonies fed. IIRC crops like rice generally work in the Sacramento Valley. There's a big stretch north of there which would be trouble, and then they'd have to switch to wheat, barley, and sheep for southern California. It would be an awkward transition for them. They might even haul in indentured Mongolians to care for their transplanted flocks as they push inland and give those tribes horses (along with black death and smallpox, but what the heck).
Where did I say anything about a China not in TL2 or 3 colonizing the Americas?
My understanding is that TL3's history is the same as ours up until the Seven Years War? However, the invention of railroads and the increasing population of TL3's North America would necessitate a new port to complement Acapulco. You're right that Acapulco would be a bigger port than in our world or TL2, especially as Mexico City grows in population. However, it's a very inconvenient location for a transcontinental railroad to the East Coast of N. America. Plus, LA has the oil.
TL2's China is not dependent upon China's traditional crop package. They still have a People's Republic which reformed under Deng Xiaoping. THAT is the government that will be setting up colonies. It's fully industrialized, so it doesn't need to worry about trade winds.
Re: Canals (This may have been covered up thread, but...)
North America (and presumably it's analogue, the NAC) has an extensive network of er, "Inland Waterways"
The Mississippi Drainage.
The Battle of New Orleans, already an (the) important export point for "western" (Ohio Valley) products, The young Abraham Lincoln made a keelboat trip to NO in his youth. And Vicksburg, the whole point of Grant's campaign.
Small River Boats continued to serve Northern Arkansas/Southern Missouri through the 1940's; The White River Drainage. Not sure where it joins, but runs down the eastern part of the state to join the Arkansas River?
Not sure what the status is of the plan to extend Navigation to Oklahoma City; I know river traffic at Fort Smith (The Western Edge of the state of Arkansas, adjacent to "Indian Territory", aka Oklahoma) is still important, you get little stories in the news when there is low water or (river) traffic problems.
The Mississippi is a huge drainage, and one of the important Geographic influences on the USA and it's dominance. New Orleans (and control therof) was the original goal of Thomas Jefferson's mission to France, (1803), but Napoleon offered the Rest of his claims on the drainage, which was snapped up, the "Louisiana Purchase". Sort of extra legal action on the part of the Chief Executive, or his agents.
With cheap labor, I could also see large waterworks that take advantage of the Great Lakes. I doubt NAWAPA is doable without industrialization, but a less ambitious project is probably doable?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Water_and_Power_Alliance
The problem with a wider rail "gauge" (and the real limitation, loading gauge) is everything has to be wider; More fill/blasting, longer sleepers, bigger tunnels and bridges which use more material.
Why (3') "narrow" gauge was popular in the American Mountain West (look up Durango & Silverton and Cumbres & Toltec tourist roads), C&T was an operating fright railway to some small oil fields and the Uranium mining boom through the 1950's.
Same for Meter (or is that Metre?) gauge popularity in Colonial Africa.
Oh, yeah, narrow gauge is certainly useful. In the same way that small boats are useful. For local stuff it's just what you want. The Hong Kong ferry would be absurd with Harmony of the Seas plying the route. We have lots of 2 foot gauge cane trains in Australia (but they're dying due to road transport). But if you're going to build a transportation network for 3-4 hundred million people instead of a national highway system, then I still think that something like the Darjeeling toy train is not the model you need to be looking at.
Have a look at this video and get some idea of how much mucking about is needed and how miserably slow narrow gauge really is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ElKHT3yUX4
Though I do remember there was something strange with MS-DOS and the root directory that didn't apply to subdirectories, that made it a bad idea to put lots of files in the root. That strange thing may have been the slowness you're talking about.
ISTR that the root directory of a FAT disk (the usual kind of MS-DOS disk, and yes, there are variants) has a limit on how many files in can contain. I have the vague notion that this is because the system allocates a certain number of blocks for the root directory data and expects to find them in a known place. Subdirectories can have a varying number of sectors allocated to the file information, sot hey don't have this problem.
A quick google didn't find anything about this, and my knowledge of FAT is over 20 years old, so I might be remembering wrong.
And yeah, from the Wikipedia Design of the FAT file system: "This is a Directory Table that stores information about the files and directories located in the root directory. It is only used with FAT12 and FAT16, and imposes on the root directory a fixed maximum size which is pre-allocated at creation of this volume."
So, on older FAT systems the root directory size was limited.
Fish Farming Widespread in our EUrope form about 100 onwards. Look for places on the map called "fishponds" or "Fishpools" - all large monasteries had such. Freshwater fish, admittedly, but by the standards of the time, quite large-scale fish-farming. Nets can be made of string or hemp, after all, or a small sub-pond draine, most of the fish scooped up, then refill. A Medieval technology
Actually, C++ exceptions ARE special. C++11 made a complete balls-up, by allowing both cross-thread exceptions and the programmer to (effectively) access the context of a thread. One of the many things I failed to get fixed.
And, wrt move constructors, it isn't explicitly stated when the compiler will use a move constructor, a copy constructor or assignment - and it is ambiguous to undefined when the STL will - both typical C++ failings. It's one of the many reasons that almost all serious parallel programmers don't use the STL.
"African Standard Gauge" was 3'6" ... In India, the brits realised this problem & learnt from theor baked-in mistakes of being the first developer of railways & went for 3 gauges, according to terrain: "Broad" = 5'6", Metre ( NOT 3'6" ! ) & "Narrow" = 2' Quite a lot of the metre is being regraded & curve-realigned to take, broad, or closing
Something I don't remember being mentioned in the book, is there any contact between Timelines 1 and 3 outside North America?
Nope.
TL2. the ~USA, and TL3, the Commonwealth's world, are not directly connected — you have to go to TL1 (home of the former Gruinmarkt) and make another transition.
TL1 was, at best, mediaeval-ish, and has been sandbagged by a nuclear winter (the USA basically set fire to about 60,000 square miles, much of it forested, by carpet-bombing with airburst nukes close enough together to ignite waterlogged biomass at surface level. Going by typical forest biomass of 5kg/m^2, I get on the order of a gigaton of biomass incinerated directly in a firestorm that's going to dump most of this into the stratosphere (along with assorted fallout). Not enough to cause a true apocalyptic nuclear winter, but comparable to a big volcanic eruption and likely to trigger a "year without a summer" event.
The ~USA is, ahem, sensitive about world-walking technology, the way they're sensitive about high-purity 239Pu. They don't share it—not with anyone.
The Commonwealth's paratime spy agency only a little less paranoid—reliant on human world-walkers for now, they keep track of them very carefully—and does indeed use points of entry outside the USA, as we get to see in "Dark State", but world walkers are a scarce resource and, again, they ain't sharing.
but I'm surprised they never ran across a TL where humans never evolved. Such a TL would be "terra nullis".
You missed the big screaming infodump that 70% of so-far-discovered TLs have no hominids whatsoever, and the rest host scattered paleolithic hunter-gatherer tribes at best?
I put a lot of work into the world-building and writing of these books and you've ignored them! (Sniff.)
Japan ran on narrow gauge before the Shinkansen build-out, and still has a lot of narrow gauge tracks. It's quite interesting to ride the Romancecar train from Tokyo to Hakone: it's a narrow gauge express, hitting peak speeds of around 125mph!
On the other hand, I really cannot recommend the overnight sleeper from Kuala Lumpur to Singapore. Narrow gauge passenger trains tend to be a little unstable laterally, and the ride was, shall we say, pretty bad (although not as bad as the Sydney-to-Melbourne sleeper the second — and definitely last — time I rode it: mudslides took out the line and we did the last 300 miles by bus).
And .. How long can you keep a secret? Once the possibility is known _ & it openly is ... then other people WILL develop the technology, even without spies inside the US system. I would have said that within 20 years, which is about your time-scale isn't it? Um.
E.G. Atom Bombs The soviets had spies, but still developed their own. The Brits had a lot fo info, before the US fucked-up & screwed us up, but stll didn't take long. The French were next, weren't they? So, you shouold, realistically, exoect world-walking of some sort from some other tech-advanced nation within the timescale of this second series, shouldn't you?
Once the possibility is known _ & it openly is ... then other people WILL develop the technology, even without spies inside the US system.
Nope. It's not possible to independently develop it with anything remotely close to our technology level. It's just about possible to replicate it using tissue cultures harvested from the brains of captured world-walkers, but world-walkers are understandably reluctant to donate their living brains to Mad Science (especially as the process is fatal to the donor), and the US government treats the resulting tissue cultures much like weaponized smallpox, and the gadgets containing them like nuclear weapons.
(There is wriggle room for future novels in this setting, should there be any, to go that way: but at that point we're shifting into medium- to far-future SF.)
Ah ... A Most Convenient McGuffin, then .....
I'm curious regarding the rest of "the West" in Timeline 2. Have they gone down the same Stasi-police state path as the US, or do they see it as an American madness to be avoided?
Bear in mind, modern big-ag converts fossil calories into food, by starting with gas and oil, Mining minerals and ores, making tractors, fertilizers, biocides, irrigating, harvesting, processing, etc etc.
Some reckon we use about 8 calories of fossil energy per calorie of food consumed.
I recall one comic strip had lads with a time machine hunting dinosoars for food.[1]
We are metaphorically eating dinosoars, or rather the keragonated remains of a carboniferous ocean biosphere.
Speaking of which - which 'terra nullis' TL has the velociraptors, Dodos, giant moas, or mammoths ?! 8)
[1] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/ComicBook/Flesh
Two things Eat dark choclate! Drink Vino! " I'll drink to that.
New L M Bujold out in the Penric sreies ( just bought my Kindle version): https://www.amazon.com/Prisoner-Limnos-Penric-Desdemona-Book-ebook/product-reviews/B076X2TNRM?pageNumber=2
Yes. That described what IS done. But I believe the question was whether it NEED be done.
Almost all of the improved crop varieties not merely could but were developed without using any techniques beyond those used by the neolithic farmers. The only effect of industrialisation was to produce enough surplus effort to enable scientists to work out what was going on and do it systematically. Fertilisation and irrigation is similar, but is more demanding on manpower without industrialisation. Biocides are trickier, but there is evidence that non-industrial methods can be effective.
So the only fundamental aspect is the way that the use of machinery and fossil fuels allows a very small number of farm workers to produce a very large amount of food. It is perfectly possible to posit intermediate approaches, using 'modern' plant science and late mediaeval industry that still allowed a relatively small number of farm workers to feed the population.
I'm curious regarding the rest of "the West" in Timeline 2. Have they gone down the same Stasi-police state path as the US, or do they see it as an American madness to be avoided?
This gets explored (a bit) in "Dark State" and "Invisible Sun".
Speaking of which - which 'terra nullis' TL has the velociraptors, Dodos, giant moas, or mammoths ?! 8)
Obscure detail: look for the description of a "pigeon" in the Commonwealth (I think it's in "Empire Games" but might be in "Dark State"). Hint ... the passenger pigeon hasn't been driven into extinction there, and has become an urban pest!
Empire Games. I noticed it with amusement.
You took one of America's premier agricultural pests and turned it into a city bird? Why bother? It was so much more impressive as the American Red-billed Quelea, that, along with the now-vanished American locust, really made a mess of early attempts to farm the great plains. However, unlike the Red-Billed Quelea, market hunting really did a number on the passenger pigeon (probably because they're larger and by all accounts tastier).
We'll avoid the little discussion of why passenger pigeon bones don't turn up in the archaeological record of the Midwest. Some people deduce from that absence that the massive flocks of passenger pigeons are a relic of the disappearance of the Mound-Builders in the 15th and 16th Centuries. The theory is that as their very extensive ag-lands reverted to oak woods and savannas, the pigeons (which loved them some acorns) exploded in number. If this is the case, you can predict similar things will happen in a dystopian future with a rapidly falling human population, as resources re-wild. Billions and billions of starlings, pigeons, and mallards in the air over the British Isles, perhaps, with a raccoon in every trash dump.
...
Me, I'm wondering if worldwalking technology is based on an Atlantean split (came from a world where Thera didn't erupt, and...), an Eemian split, or what. Given that Miriam's not obviously of Chinese or recent Neanderthal ancestry, we can presume that whoever it was that used the technology at least looked European.
Er, all of large numbers of the three types of wild pigeon, starlings and house sparrows were/are commensual in the UK, so that would not happen. Also, many American oaks have low-tannin acorns, but European ones do not (which is why few birds eat them). Mallards would become more common, with the recovery of the marshlands, but no more than they were in mediaeval times. And there are no feral raccoons here, either.
The big issue is whether we would reintroduce any predators to control the deer - if not, they would become even more overpopulated than they are at present.
Billions and billions of starlings, pigeons, and mallards in the air over the British Isles, perhaps, with a raccoon in every trash dump.
We don't have raccoons — outside of zoos — and starlings are on the endangered list in the UK, dammit. I used to see huge swarms of them swirling in the sky at dusk in the autumn when I was a kid; changes to agricultural and conservancy policy has starved them of nesting grounds. (Luckily they're plentiful enough elsewhere.)
Say what about those acorns? Since I'm living in the acorn-eating capital of Indian Country (California) I'm giggling at the idea that many of our oaks are low-tannin. They're not, with a few rare (and I mean that literally) exceptions, one of which I've eaten raw (single acorn). It's surprising how much processing even an acorn woodpecker (adapted to eating the things) does before an acorn is ready for them to eat.
No, the point is that we in our billions are massively warping nutrient flows all over the planet. Certainly climate change will further disrupt them, but even then, if human populations fall faster than biomass does under climate change, there are going to be outbreaks of species that take advantage of all the food that's suddenly freed up, with the species determined in part by what food suddenly becomes surplus.
That, and it's likely that anything that can burrow has an increased likelihood of surviving, based on the patterns of survivorship under previous mass extinctions. So badgers and bunnies and rats and starlings, oh my. Too bad there might not be enough wheat to make pies of all of them.
"And the rest is history." Not quite. What isn't known, as far as I know, is why the Nazgul let Gates write the contract and fail to review it; for IBM to sign a contract that was very one-sided AGAINST them was not something that had happened before or since. But they did ....
I don't think IBM realized they were giving up any rights to Gates and Micro$oft. They didn't anticipate anyone reverse engineering the IBM BIOS, so didn't anticipate there would be an IBM Clone market for Gates to sell DOS to. Secondly, when it came to Windoze vs. OS/2, Gates abrogated the contract and IBM felt it was "powerless" against Micro$oft because of their perception of the bind the 1956 antitrust consent decree had left them in.
Gates got better legal advice.
IBM's lawyers constrained and restrained them from going after Micro$oft the way they could have, should have and otherwise would have.
Speaking as a professional economic historian, can you tell me the source of this claim?
"Also, don't forget that California gold helped pay for the Union win over the Confederacy."
It's wrong but it's not a wrong idea that I knew had entered the world view of educated people. Thus I'm curious as to where you got the idea from!
(For those interested: At its peak in 1852, CA gold output came to a hair under 2% of U.S. GDP and served mostly to pull labor to the west faster than otherwise. Labor that didn't waste time mining came out, as best as we can tell, better than they would have otherwise. Those that wasted time mining, not so much. There's no discernable impact on national-level government revenues, capital formation, or economic growth. https://eh.net/encyclopedia/california-gold-rush/)
As for UK raccoons, you might want to read this article. And watch the Chunnel.
The "Little Boy" style of nuke is not just called "gun assembly" as a metaphor - it uses actual artillery technology, and the main non-nuclear component is a gun barrel just like a real one: long, strong and heavy. It all but is a penetrator as it stands, and being incredibly simple it is better able to resist the shock of penetration than the much more complex and finicky implosion-assembly type.
I suggested a "Little Boy" style nuke because the dimensions of the weapon itself (and the weight) would conveniently fit the dimensions of the explosive payload in the Grand Slam. An implosion weapon would certainly be more efficient, but the first generation "Fat Man" bomb wouldn't fit within the Grand Slam bomb casing.
I'm thinking in terms of an earth penetrating, bunker busting weapon that is producible with the technology as it stood at the end of WWII, which I think is well within the reach of Miriam Beckstein Burgeson's North American Commonwealth's Ministry for Intertemporal Technology's forced march through the Industrial Revolution.
Point of order: the Tallboy/Grand Slam design was not designed to go through 20 feet of concrete.
Tallboy was not; Grand Slam did receive extra hardening to enable it to penetrate concrete. It was not always able to achieve the desirable "near miss" and they wanted it to be able to still damage the target when it landed right on top of it (or so sez the Barnes Wallis biography I read ... or it might have been a book about Guy Gibson or 617 Squadron ... it was many years ago).
A good rule of thumb is to assume that anything published in the Dail Wail is pure invention, until it has been confirmed in at least one semi-respectable media outlet.
"I don't think IBM realized they were giving up any rights to Gates and Micro$oft."
While they certainly didn't REALISE, in advance, I worked in a related area of IBM after the relationship had gone sour and a lot of their development was distorted because of some wording in that contract. Basically, there was a stage when Gates got full rights to everything IBM developed but not conversely, and it delayed the release of at least one major OS/2 upgrade. However, I never saw the contract myself.
I'd like to read that, but it looks like it's going to be a real PITA to get it in a "real" book version.
Wikipedia agrees: they no longer consider links to Daily Mail articles to support citations
... and starlings are on the endangered list in the UK, dammit. I used to see huge swarms of them swirling in the sky at dusk in the autumn when I was a kid; changes to agricultural and conservancy policy has starved them of nesting grounds. (Luckily they're plentiful enough elsewhere.)
I know a couple of towns in Eastern North Carolina that would be happy to let you trap all you want to take back to the UK.
Low tannin does not mean almost no tannin. From my reading, I believe that the only native European oak that is as low in tannins as some (most? all?) of the white oaks is the cork oak, which is very local, and the two main species are similar to the unpalatable USA red oaks. Anyway, the only European bird species that I know of that eats acorns is the jay.
The raccoon thing is semi-true; they've gone native/invasive in Germany and are heading towards the channel. They're also a rabies vector. But this is old news — I first saw it about a decade ago. The Daily Heil is definitely not worth the paper it's printed on.
Since they were trying to keep the PC from IBM's upper management, I have to wonder who they had review the contract? Was it in fact the Nazgul, or did they hire an outside law firm?
Fair enough. Guess you're stuck with rats in the compost piles then.
we're shifting into medium- to far-future SF
Which reminds me of a thing I've wondered about: what distinguishes the far future from nearer futures? Years or generations might do it in some cases, or social and technological change. Or an amalgam of those. All in all, I suspect it's a "you'll know it when you see it" thing, but any thoughts on the matter?
A related exercise using OTL history: given where we are now, when in the past did 2017 become the far future? I think that 1900 would be a reasonable candidate in many ways, but what about 1880 or 1920?
While they certainly didn't REALISE, in advance, I worked in a related area of IBM after the relationship had gone sour and a lot of their development was distorted because of some wording in that contract. Basically, there was a stage when Gates got full rights to everything IBM developed but not conversely, and it delayed the release of at least one major OS/2 upgrade. However, I never saw the contract myself.
The story I was told at IBM was that when IBM & Microsoft agreed to jointly develop OS/2, Microsoft was completely overwhelmed by the project. OS/2 v.1 was written by Microsoft & it was a P.O.S. In the meantime, in order to have a GUI to offer its customers, IBM took over Microsoft's "Windows" and wrote version 3.0.
And this is where Microsoft's lawyers got the better of IBM's lawyers - at least for a while. IBM owned the rights to Microsoft's worthless OS/2 v.1 code & Microsoft had non-exclusive rights to IBM's golden Windows 3.0 code when Microsoft pulled out of the OS/2 deal.
IBM wrote OS/2 v.2 to be backwards compatible with Windows 3.0 - Windows 3.0 programs would run in OS/2 v.2; the only difference being that if the Windows program crashed it didn't take the OS down with it. Microsoft wrote Windows 3.1 to break the compatibility with OS/2, but IBM had the right to add new code to OS/2 to restore that compatibility, hence OS/2 2.1.
There was no Windows 4 because Microsoft figured that by changing the name to Windows 95 they could deny IBM the right to have OS/2 run Windows programs. IBM had already produced OS/2 v.3, aka OS/2 Warp.
And because Microsoft was no longer "using" Windows 3.x, the rights reverted to IBM. Before I left IBM in 2000, we were working with a 32 bit graphical PC DOS that booted directly into Program Manager. I worked for the Integrated Subsystems Lab where we developed the pre-loads to be installed on IBM PCs. The 32 bit DOS was intended for use on manufacturing's assembly line.
My job was twofold in logistics - fix the hardware in the lab whenever the programmers broke it & get the completed pre-load packages out to the manufacturing sites in a timely manner.
Anyway, that's IBM's side of the story as it was conveyed to me.
The story I heard was that the PC was marketed internally within IBM as a smart terminal, more capable and flexible than a dumb VDU. It could run programs on data downloaded from the mainframe via its built-in RS232 port, offloading some of the computation as well as having flexibility in displays, keyboards etc. Changing keyboard layouts for different countries was usually a SKU issue for VDUs, not a question of plugging a different keyboard into a port at the back. Floppy storage (an option on the most basic models, there was a cassette port for really low-cost local storage) allowed for sneakernet transfer of data between users etc.
The idea that this high-end VDU-replacement could pose a marketing threat to the mainframe and minicomputer markets was laughable in a world of million-dollar hardware running batch jobs in airconditioned suites. Who's laughing now, monkey-boy?
As for OS/2, it was fatally associated with IBM's Big Mistake, the PS/2 PC concept where, bodyswerving the open architecture of the original PC, they made everything proprietary, locked down and expensive. They even included Golden Screwdriver tricks buried in the hardware like an accelerated DMA process across the proprietary MCA expansion bus that they only enabled for users a couple of years after the hardware hit the streets. ISA and later EISA and PCI did for MCA eventually.
Since they were trying to keep the PC from IBM's upper management, I have to wonder who they had review the contract? Was it in fact the Nazgul, or did they hire an outside law firm?
I don't know how much the PC project was hidden and how much was misdirection. The PC was a project of IBM's Entry Systems Division in Boca Raton. What would "Entry Systems" have been in the days before personal computers?
I don't know what management thought they were doing down there, so I don't have any idea who was in on the deal. Legend says Mary Gates, Bill's mom, was on the board of United Way with IBM's Chairman of the Board & suggested IBM could do business with Microsoft and that's what eventually led the PC developers to come calling in Seattle.
I joined the PC Company after they moved up to Research Triangle Park in North Carolina, so this was already history by the time I was hired. My background is "field service tech" from the days when if your computer broke down they'd actually send someone out to your business to fix it.
What little I know comes from my indoctrination when I was hired at IBM and from after work "team building" sessions at local restaurants (bars) where I listened while the old hands talked about the good old days.
One thing I was told quite forcefully at IBM when I first got there is there IS NO and NEVER WAS any "MCA" architecture. "MCA" is the registered trademark of Music Corporation of America.
The IBM PS/2 was based on "Micro Channel Architecture". My managers were pretty anal about that.
"A smart terminal" It wasn't just internal, and it wasn't just marketing. It wasn't until the late 1980s that IBM Galactic Headquarters (and the marketdroids) abandoned the delusion that its main use would be as a way of accessing mainframes. Interestingly, Microsoft repeated that with Windows NT 4, where the first workstation version of that couldn't even install any software without being connected to a Windows NT 4 server system! I had such a system, with no compilers, networking, external media device drivers, useful applications or games worth playing - and no way of getting out of that hole - at which point, I converted to solely Linux.
''What would "Entry Systems" have been in the days before personal computers?''
3270s etc. The officially intended purpose of the IBM PC was as a replacement for them that would run a GUI. Presentation Manager started as a 3270-style full-screen interface, and then added its GUI design for precisely that purpose.
Re: Tannins
Apart from use in wine and beer, don't understand why the comment (emphasis?) on tannins. Also, chocolate is about 6% tannins per weight which means if tannins are an important trade commodity, Mexico and lands south are key markets to exploit. As a reminder - potatoes, yams, tomatoes, coffee, chocolate, vanilla, and corn (maize) are major ag products worldwide now and all originated in the Americas. Whichever old-world country lands, conquers or makes the best trade deal with the Americas will have a considerable advantage re: food supply/trade.
Interestingly, Microsoft repeated that with Windows NT 4, where the first workstation version of that couldn't even install any software without being connected to a Windows NT 4 server system!
They must have fixed that in a hurry. The dual-Pentium Pro box I commissioned for a graphics studio ran NT4 Workstation without any networking at all and would install software off floppy or its CD-ROM drive without a problem. I've probably still got the original NT4 WS installation media somewhere... rummage rummage yep, 0796 Part No. 000-43148, the code wil lrun on 486, Pentium, MIPS, r4x00, Alpha, Power PC and Pentium Pro, 1-2 processors.
Re: Caloric requirements
One of the advantages of urbanizing (technologizing) the populace is that their daily caloric requirements drop substantially. Desk jockeys need far fewer calories than lumber jacks. (Wild guess: Most desk jockeys don't work out at gyms, play hockey/soccer, or cycle to/from work or errands long distances every day.)
http://www.dummies.com/health/nutrition/how-to-determine-your-calorie-needs/
And here's a calculator with definitions of 'work':
http://www.exrx.net/Calculators/CalRequire.html
Of course if you're a zombie, your daily caloric requirements may vary.
"They must have fixed that in a hurry."
They did. I said the first version, and it was precisely that. My guess is that they got a LOT of negative feedback, plus people who just went elsewhere.
Tannins are a class of chemical, generally some mess of a long-chain hydrocarbon, and there's generally a bunch of them in a particular batch of tannins.
The reason they're called "tannins" is because they were originally used to tan leather, aka denaturing the proteins in the skin. Some of them also stain, but that feeling you get on your tongue is when you drink old, cold tea is the tannins in the tea trying to tan your tongue. This is also why tea can be a bit of an antibacterial solution, although it's not great.
In any case, oak tannins were used in tanning hides (typically oak and other barks were used. One oak relative in California is called tanbark oak for a very good reason). Acorns use tannins as an antiherbivory defense chemical, which is why you can't eat raw acorns of most (not all!) species. Even the low-tanning acorns taste very much like eating green tea leaves, and if you eat too many, the incipient tanning of your digestive tract is fairly uncomfortable.
Fortunately, leaching gets rid of tannins, and leached acorn meal has been a food around the northern hemisphere since prehistoric times. Indeed, some believe (without much evidence) that Middle Eastern acorn-eating cultures (in what is now Kurdistan) preceded the grain-growing Sumerians.
The thing about America being the land of low-tannin oaks is questionable. The California Indians valued the high-tannin acorn species above the low tannin ones, for the simple reason that the more poisonous acorns tended to have more oil and fewer carbohydrates, and were thus far more nutritious.
Tannins fix proteins, which is why plants produce them - i.e. to kill insects by stopping their digestion. Mammals shed their gut lining, so are relatively immune, but high levels of tannins are not good. They are the main reason that we cannot eat the leaves of most boreal plants.
Two things Eat dark choclate! Drink Vino! " I'll drink to that.
add in some lo-dose aspirin, fish oil caps and as much oat as you can tolerate comfortably, and you'll attain cardiac immortality. Start seeing any dark spots on the underside of your big toes and it means your bloods getting a little too thinned out, time to cut back on the fish oil. One cap every three days fixed it for me.
Yes. It was appreciated :)
"the three types of wild pigeon ... in the UK"
Uh? There are five...
Columba livia (Normal pigeon) Columba palumbus (Woodie) Columba oenas (Stock dove) Streptopelia decaocto (Collared dove) Streptopelia turtur (Turtle dove)
C. palumbus eats acorns, btw.
I wonder if the low-tannin oak thing is something like the American left wing still being right wing from a British point of view? - ie. the difference between the distributions on either side of the Atlantic leads to a similar difference in the colloquial terminology.
We don't have raccoons — outside of zoos
And, apparently, family pets.
http://metro.co.uk/2016/02/04/family-buys-raccoon-after-receiving-26000-benefits-lump-sum-in-social-experiment-5662917/
Assuming this is true, I'd be surprised if a few haven't escaped (or been released).
"""And by 1870 we'd already escaped the Malthusian trap."
'Escaped'... Delayed would be more like it."
Nope. Escaped.
From 80BC to 1700AD standard of living for most people living in Europe changed only slightly. Similarly true in Asia, give or take a few periods (though the glories of the early Ming dynasty did affect a whopping large number of people).
Economic Growth equalled Population Growth. So economic growth per person was extremely close to 0%/year.
Between the period of around 1760 to the 1830s humanity broke out of this trap. Surplus exceeded population growth by so much that educational/technical capital per person could build up and - boom!
We are out of the trap. We have achieved it.
"4. How many of the gains in agriculture in our world could have been achieved without industrialization? How many of them could have been achieved by an agrarian society with just oil and hydropower? I have no familiarity with agriculture, so I can't answer this"
A lot of biological wealth comes from improved plant and animal breeds. A lot comes from better techniques. A lot comes from more clever types of machines (eg Jethro Tull's seed drill) A lot comes from better chemicals: fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, antibiotics. A lot comes from better irrigation. And finally, a lot comes from replacing human effort with machine effort.
Which of these rely on "industrialization"? Well, depends what you mean.
But I think people talking about an "energy budget" and focussing on how we use machines to "turn fuel calories into food calories" are missing a huge part of what happened.
Oh, and transport!
Agriculture gets much more efficient because of transport. Grow crops that suit the climate, ship'em out, ship in what you want in return.
Which reminds me of a thing I've wondered about: what distinguishes the far future from nearer futures?
That's easy!
Near future SF: barring accidents/shit happening, you can hope to live to see it.
Medium-term SF: you won't live to see it, but somebody now living might (e.g. 2017 as viewed from 1907).
Far-future SF: nobody now living will ever see it.
There is a sliding threshold between MT-SF and FF-SF depending on whether your version of MT-SF admits the possibility of life extension medicine, but being frozen/revived in the future is almost always a hallmark of FF-SF (notable exception: Transmetropolitan, by Warren Ellis, in which plenty of 20th/21st century corpsicles are defrosted and revived in the 22nd century, with unfunny consequences — massive future shock, for one thing).
I made a mistake (I should have said four, though one is mainly feral, not wild), though you also misunderstood. "all of large numbers of the three types of wild pigeon, ..." C. turtur does not and never has occurred in large numbers.
I had forgotten that C. palumbus does eat acorns, but I doubt that it does so from choice, based on my observations of it and the contents of its crops I have seen.
Nope. Look at the recent history of food production relative to population, and the forecasts. We evaded it for a while, but didn't take steps to stop population growth so that it wouldn't overtake food production again.
I think that I disagree, slightly. There is a big difference between SF that describes a world that is derived from current trends, developments etc. and one that describes one that has evolved into something urecognisable. I would classify the former as medium-term, and the latter as far-future. But you are right that the boundaries are murky.
I am not sure what I would call the 'far-future' SF that describes the USA (or other countries, in some cases) of the recent past, with space-ships and near-magical technology, except as implausible.
It could be. It could also be that I had muddied the issues by saying 'tannins' where the actual situation is more complex. I did a Web search, and it doesn't seem to be clear why acorns were rarely eaten in Europe (and then usually only in desperation). There was one researcher who claimed that it was not so, but he seemed to be grasping at straws. The research that classified the toxins seemed to be mainly on American oaks, though I found one on Polish oaks that also included Q. ruber.
No look at the developed world, or even parts of the third world, where the fucking "priests" have been stamped on. Look at the birth-rates. IF we can continue to get the birth-rates down to below 2.1 per couple, then the escape from Malthus is permanent.
Look a bit deeper. Even if your predicate were true, that's not the only factor. Too much of agriculture is based on unsustainable practices, and the continuing degradation and loss of farmland due to those and climate change is a major problem. That is partially hidden by using previously uncultivated land, but we are running out of that, too. Unfortunately, we are heading straight into another Malthusian event.
On the future, far and not so far, I was reviewing the matter and was reminded that OGH and guest blogger Cat Valentine had some pertinent and interesting things to say back in 201201 and 201202.
E.g.,
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/01/world-building-301-some-projec.html
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/01/world-building-302-psychology.html
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/01/world-building-404-the-unknown.html
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/02/how-do-we-get-there.html
"Agriculture is also backward by our standards, leading to a lower carrying capacity than our own world." If Miriam's gang caries over some key seeds & breeds the NAC could probably see a noticeable increase in the ratio of people fed per person working on a farm quite quickly.
Priest-stamping is optional; look at the total fertility rate in Iran over the past 30 years. (They've dropped from an average of about 5-6 babies per woman circa 1980 to less than 1.5 this decade, below replacement rate, despite still being a theocracy.)
Well, it's a bit late this year, but I should be able to provide an answer to the "choice" aspect when the one on my shoulder is old enough to try them. (Ears, noses and fingers, along with skin wrinkles of all sizes, seem to be more appealing at the moment.)
What's worth realizing in all this is that even in a theocracy the priests don't have nearly the influence they'd like. If they started rounding up everyone who uses birth control they'd be overthrown in a heartbeat!
Also note the Saudis clamping down on their religious police.
The world average fertility rate in 1950 was 5 live births per woman. It has been falling continuously since then and is now around 2.5 or so. The UN projects (medium variant) that it will be around 2.0 in 2100.
https://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Graphs/DemographicProfiles/
We might indeed be heading for a crash for the reasons you suggest. But it's a stretch to call it a "Malthusian event" or a new "Malthusian trap". The Malthusian trap is an equilibrium with high birth and death rates, low average income, and where economic growth leads to a higher population at the same low average income. Fertility is an essential component of the Malthusian model. The mechanism behind the crash I think you have in mind is simpler and more general - it could also happen in a non-Malthusian world of infertile immortals.
(Infertile "immortals" who can starve to death, that is.)
Nope. Delayed. Escape is impossible, because we are on a finite planet.
It is most unfortunate, really, that in our timeline the step increase in agricultural output came after, not before, Malthus's ideas. That has encouraged far too many people to make the invalid leap from "it didn't happen like he said it would" to "...therefore he was wrong and it isn't going to happen at all". A rather more correct interpretation would be "...because an unexpected factor altered the timescale but not the overall conclusion".
Because of this aid to wishful thinking, we haven't even used the reprieve to make sure that the "unexpected factor" will continue to operate, let alone taken any effective steps to control the population. We need to do both of those at the minimum in order to prolong the delay until other factors occur to make it irrelevant by terminating the experiment (asteroid strike, red giant Sun, that kind of thing).
We can't escape, but we could make the Malthusian constraint less constraining than other, less malleable constraints. There are all sorts of reasons why we may or may not achieve that, but one thing that's certain is that we definitely won't achieve it as long as we pretend the problem doesn't exist.
"The Malthusian trap is an equilibrium with high birth and death rates, low average income, and where economic growth leads to a higher population at the same low average income."
1) Drop the money talk. That is pure obfuscation and tends to lead to faith in magic as a solution. "Income" and "economic growth" are irrelevant, it's food supply and population growth that matter. The same concepts apply to all the species that don't use money as well as the one that does.
2) Absolute levels are irrelevant, it's relative levels that matter. "A higher population existing off the same low food supply" is the same as "the same population existing off a lower food supply".
I freely admit that I have not read Malthus's actual works and only know about him because he was mentioned in history lessons at school. I also can't remember exactly what was said about his ideas, although I do remember it was expressed in terms of food and not money. But I do remember that my reaction was along the lines of "well, duh, state the bleeding obvious" because I was already thoroughly familiar with the concepts from biology, from my own reading as well as from school lessons. You can reach the same conclusions from reading RM Lockley's "The Private Life of the Rabbit". There is no fundamental difference between a breeding group of rabbits in a finite pen and a breeding group of humans on a finite planet. When the rabbits are eating the grass faster than new grass can grow, what you get is a bunch of starving rabbits fighting each other over bare earth. Humans have the intellectual ability to foresee this and take avoiding action, but they still prefer not to use this ability and act like rabbits.
If Malthus did frame his arguments in terms of money rather than food, then that was a mistake. To insist on a narrow and pedantic definition of "Malthusian" that considers money rather than food is to compound the mistake. I use the term simply to refer to situations where the population becomes too large for the resources available to sustain it (whether by population increasing, resource availability falling, or both). This may be a poor match to the writings that gave rise to the term, but it is a good match to the actual situation of concern.
Agreed, but contra look at all the other muslim & several christian countries wehere this is not the case .......
They seem to be doing quite well in the USSA & Nicuragua at the moment ....
"1) Drop the money talk. That is pure obfuscation and tends to lead to faith in magic as a solution. "Income" and "economic growth" are irrelevant, it's food supply and population growth that matter. The same concepts apply to all the species that don't use money as well as the one that does."
No, no, no!
And 'no' some more!
The whole point is that when you get out of the Malthusian trap it stops being about food supply. Because Malthus was wrong.
Malthus talked about a primarily agrarian economy. In which economic success meant more food, and this meant more population that ate up all the surplus food.
So economic growth could occur, but population growth would occur to match it. So "income per person" or "wealth per person" or "GDP per person" can never improve. Life just doesn't get better for most people.
Historically, for the time period before he was born, he was pretty much right. Human global economic growth and human global population growth really were pretty much the same.
But Malthus stopped being right. For the last 200 years global economic growth per person has vastly, vastly exceeded global population growth.
This matters. It means that in most of the world, calories per person is no longer a good measure of the economy.
It means we have a vast amount of surplus labour that we spend on things other than acquiring food: things like education for all, and like science, and like building immense infrastructure, which lead to even more economic growth.
We've decoupled economic growth from population growth. Contraception and common sense means that wealthier countries have less kids that poor ones, not the more kids that Malthus predicts.
Rabbits don't do that. They don't decouple increase in resources-per-rabbit from population increase. But humans have done that.
And that is what it means to be out of the Malthusian trap.
"I use the term simply to refer to situations where the population becomes too large for the resources available to sustain it (whether by population increasing, resource availability falling, or both)."
If your point is simply that humanity has some hard resource contraints - well, yes, that's certainly true.
But that is not what Malthus was talking about. For Malthus it's about "exponential population growth" inevitably outstripping growth in food supply.
"Drop the money talk."
Oops, sorry, you are right in this respect. (I'm an economist, we teach this stuff in economics courses, and we sometimes use "income" as shorthand even when it doesn't imply a monetary economy. Nostra culpa.) What I should have said was:
"The Malthusian trap is an equilibrium with high birth and death rates, low average material living standards, and where economic growth leads to a higher population at the same low average material living standards."
But as for the rest of it - what icehawk said.
"For Malthus it's about "exponential population growth" inevitably outstripping growth in food supply."
And the exponential growth happened. Just because it's now s-curving (a bit) doesn’t mean that history hasn't happened. We had the exponential growth. The brakes that he envisioned were removed, by a seemingly endless supply of food.
For an ecologist rather than an economist, it's an old old story. A story that always has the same ending.
Humans have extended into a new niche, filled it beyond its capacity. In economic terms, you can create value out of nothing. Food isn't like that. It comes from an application of energy to resources. In Malthus's time that energy had to go via humans or horses, so it all had to come from food. You needed food to make food. Then 200 years ago, coal. 100 years ago, oil. That's let us apply huge amounts of energy to resources. The old story will play out again, unless we find a new supply of resources. That doesn't seem likely...
That's let us apply huge amounts of energy to resources. The old story will play out again, unless we find a new supply of resources. That doesn't seem likely...
Solar power? /snark.
Ecept Population is levelling-off & will probably start td decease, slowly. What then?
Sigh. As I said above, exactly the same. We have been 'borrowing from the future' in our agricultural expansion, and we are going to see a reduction in productivity. So the Malthus trap is catching us up from behind - everything is relative.
http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/95153/icode/ https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/12/third-of-earths-soil-acutely-degraded-due-to-agriculture-study
Just because it's now s-curving (a bit) doesn’t mean that history hasn't happened.
Hang on a mo: it's not s-curving a bit: if you look at those places furthest along the s-curve, it's going steeply negative. Japan is looking at its population halving by the end of the century if they don't start importing migrants. Much of western Europe would go the same way except that they are historically more open to immigration.
But it turns out that immigrants from high-birth-rate societies converge on host society birth rates within two generations. And once you normalize having 2 babies per family instead of 6, upping the birth rate to three kids is as hard as going from 6 to 9 would be — the resource spend per child is much higher in a post-demographic-transition society, and when deciding on a family size parents look at their peers to decide what's "normal" — three kids is 150% of normal, four is just weird (rather than underperforming), as it would be by pre-industrial, high birth rate/high death rate norms when 50% die before adulthood and there's a 10% risk of maternal death in each childbirth).
The curve is bending down just about everywhere. The implications are a future dominated by old people, a high ratio of dependents to workers, and deflation in the labour market — possibly mitigated by robotics. If we're lucky we end up with the s-curve being replaced by a sinusoidal oscillation with considerable damping, converging on a sustainable mean population (over a period of centuries to millennia). If we're unlucky? Crash, here we come!
Yes, to clarify for the economists in the room, you haven't been doing real economics.
Now that you're hyperventilating, here's what I mean by real economics: it has nothing to do with money and everything to do with the 20-odd biogeochemical cycles that make Earth work (the 17 elements necessary for all life, plus a few oddballs like vanadium that might matter for some, plus solar energy and geothermal energy).
If you do your accounting on these flows, which are fairly close to closed loops on a global level, you'll realize we're actually in serious trouble, because we're taking elements, in the form of things like fresh groundwater, out of pools faster than they replenish, and putting those elements in pools (like sewage and seawater) that are high entropy and take a lot of energy to make useful again.
In pseudo-money terms, we're burning through all our "savings" by noting this exhaustion of useful pools of elements as income to our economy, deliberately externalizing (e.g. ignoring) the costs of recycling these elements or finding new pools as something some Invisible Hand will take care of.
A classic example is the idea that food production will keep track with population. It isn't right now, as the number of people who are food insecure is rising, but the real kicker is that it depends far too much on things like groundwater mining in California, Australia, the Great Plains, China, and Russia. When the groundwater becomes unattainable, food shortages suddenly become a huge problem. We no longer have large stockpiles of food, and we're coming close to running food on a just-in-time supply chain. This is great, so long as global supply chains keep working all the time. Unfortunately, as we saw in 2010, when the Arab Spring that was triggered by crop failures in Russia and Pakistan, we're in a situation where small shortages snowball into political chaos. This is not a system functioning under the statistically normal assumptions that conventional economics runs under. Rather, it's a system that has all sorts of non-linearities that can cause serious damage if improperly modeled.
Finally, as most economists undoubtedly forgot after high school, Malthus is one of the underpinnings for the basic theory of Darwinian evolution (it's the part about "more organisms are born than can survive"). If you're going to say Malthus is wrong, you're going to also have to demonstrate why that can be the case while evolution is demonstrably true, more so than relativity and quantum mechanics.
Dietary change to prolong viability of food supply would be one of the last options considered, but under extreme duress it could happen more readily than some imagine. Eating maize and soy directly instead of feeding it to livestock would increase caloric efficiency by a factor of eight. Considering how little maize and soy is eaten by humans now as a percent of world output, that's got to be a few centuries worth of wiggle room already built in to cushion the shock of finding new technical or political solutions for mass starvation. Plant protein faux-burger quality has improved; heme as a flavor ingredient is now synthesized from genetically modified yeast cultures, with results good enough to fetch twelve bucks per serving. Still an order of magnitude costlier than beef, but that's come down a hundredfold from early trial production. So maybe it's a three way intersection of population, food supply and technology growth curves as opposed to the two dimensional people / food ratio Malthus discussed.
It's interesting to consider how this affects the average age of people's relatives.
We go from a world where most people have tons of siblings, first cousins, aunts, uncles, nephews and nieces, often at least one parent, and maybe a surviving grandparent or two, to one where most people have both parents, four grandparents, and even a few surviving great-grand parents, and maybe a sibling or cousin or two.
If you're a seventeen-year-old male at loose ends, this makes it a lot harder to put together a raiding party or a street gang, and a lot easier to find someone who'll pay your tuition for a degree in accounting.
Since we're over 300, did anyone else read David Brin's prediction of war with Iran? Most interestingly, note the second word in the main text.
I think we're going to need a bigger model.
I'm curious how all this relates to the Empire Games multiverse. Compared with the High Frontier Redux, travel to other versions of this habitable planet in other timelines is very low cost. So does that mean that the various Malthusian traps and Limits to Growth constraints can be avoided by exploiting and growing into alternate earths?
Well, I don't really want to get into a longwinded defence of economics and economists here, esp when I did it already in the comments of a different blog entry here - environmental economics, externalities, pollution, resource constraints etc are now all part of standard u/g econ education - but you and EC are missing the point about Malthus.
Malthus is also standard fare in u/g econ teaching (heck, I teach it) so I don't know what the high school remark was about. And Malthus deserves huge credit in the history of science: arguably the first modern theorist of economic growth, arguably the founder of population ecology, and both Darwin and Wallace cited him explicitly in their autobiographies as inspiration for their thinking about natural selection.
But fertility is crucial in the Malthusian approach. It's not just resource constraints - they are also an essential part of his story, but hardly an original contribution of his. The interaction of fertility, mortality, population growth and resource constraints is the Malthusian approach.
As Charlie (and I) pointed out, declines in human fertility have been huge and look set to continue. The Demographic Revolution is what put an end to the Malthusian Era. In the Malthusian model, i.e., the basic chapter one population ecology model, an increase in carrying capacity leads to a higher population. In the post-Malthusian world, economic growth translates into higher living standards rather than a larger population at the same living standards. Fundamentally different.
Of course, we don't know how things are going to play out over the next few centuries. Maybe a crash and a big population decline driven by resource constraints ... maybe not. Maybe big declines in average living standards ... maybe not. Maybe even a return to a Malthusian world, where economic growth (up or down) translates into population changes (up or down) rather than into changes in living stands. But today's world and the near/medium future ... post-Malthusian.
Solar power is energy. It might let us exploit lower quality resources (like more marginal land, with better fertilizers), but it's not going to make resources like land, soil and sunlight appear from nowhere.
Ummm, yes? Plant growth is driven by solar energy absorption by chlorophyll and analogues after all. I WAS being snarky...
Of course once all the oil and coal and gas has been extracted and burned and agrichemical energy input is constrained by the need to avoid plating the planet with solar panels to allow plants to grow we'll have to build out lots of nuclear power plants to make fertiliser or even provide the energy to carry out direct conversion of raw chemical feedstocks into NuFood (tm Grimbledown Down).
Sudden thought: is alt.pave.the.earth still a going concern?
What I'm saying is that standing in 1750, with a world population of 700 million, and a UK population of 6 million, you'd be thinking that a world population 10 times higher, and a uk population 10 times higher, would mean that the population bomb had already gone off. The fact that the world population is now only rising at a rate of 700 million per decade might look like negative growth to us, used to much higher growth rates, but to Malthus, it's still an enormous growth rate. But what I'm saying is that at this point, growth rate doesn't matter. The enormous unsustainable growth has happened already. We now have not a future that contains a possible huge population, we have a present that contains a huge population.
Sure we might be able to feed the world population for the next couple of decades. It will take flattening the entire Amazon rainforest and turning Brazil into the world's breadbasket, but what about after that? Farmers have known for thousands of years that farming rainforest works for a few years, but then the thin soils are gone, the nutrients washed into the rivers and you can't grow anything in that spot for decades.
It's not even just ecologists who are thinking this way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzA6jRYjVQs&t
"Sudden thought: is alt.pave.the.earth still a going concern?"
Posting has split into the People's Paving Front of Judea on Redit and the Judean People's Paving Front on Google Groups, with about 3 posts a year on each.
See also the TPratcheet/Baxter "Long Earth" series?
If you're a seventeen-year-old male at loose ends, this makes it a lot harder to put together a raiding party or a street gang, and a lot easier to find someone who'll pay your tuition for a degree in accounting.
Yes, but there are social down-sides.
Consider that child-raising is an acquired social ability, traditionally learned by kids looking after their younger siblings. In a one-child family, where do the youngsters go to learn how to raise their own child(ren)?
Again: most of our traditional social structures implicitly assume that people have a family safety net; youngsters to work the farm when da is in his dotage, elders to provide advice and training and support to young ones. This, however, is breaking down. I know/have known people with no living first-degree relatives —second-generation single children whose parents and grandparents died. If they're adults this is usually fine ... until something goes wrong, like a bout of depression or chronic illness. At which point there's nobody there to spontaneously check on their wellbeing.
There may be some good things associated with smaller families, mind you. Sexual abuse of children seems to be a learned behavior that often runs in family lines. If the family structures that facilitate such abuse die out, I can't see that being a bad thing in the long run. But we don't have much idea of the long term effects of much smaller families on our broader societies yet (although China and Japan are a generation or two ahead of us on this track).
It's inked-in in the background, but: resource extraction from parallel earths is a great excuse for not mitigating environmental degradation back home, isn't it? The ~USA is experimenting with large-scale carbon capture using cold traps (condense out a shitload of dry ice and dump it into an uninhabited parallel time-line).
The ~USA also has [this is a minor spoiier for DARK STATE] a bunch of supermax prisons in another uninhabited TL — not for revenue-generating private prisons, but as an oubliette for the political prisoners they really want to keep a lid on (those who today are stashed in Guantanemo or "undisclosed" black sites around the world). In time they may sprout prison plantations because, hell, that's the American Way and if the prisoners want to eat they gotta work, right?
And then there are the technologies too dangerous to use unless you have them safely firewalled in another universe. (Imagine the implications for biowarfare research, for example.)
But 17 years from the USA's discovery of paratime to full exploitation isn't enough — for that, I'd need to write another novel set 50-100 years later. And I'm not ready to go there yet.
"As Charlie (and I) pointed out, declines in human fertility have been huge and look set to continue."
Perhaps. But it is NOT declining globally as fast as our loss of potential agricultural capacity, so it is still increasing in relative terms, which was my main point. I don't believe in technological magic wands (e.g. vat-grown food), because they almost invariably introduce as severe problems as they remove, only somewhere else. Modern fish farming is an example.
There are also some reasons to believe that the path followed by Japan and the West may not be followed by all of the world, because of the number of countries where poverty (in absolute terms) is increasing. And there are some very disturbing, stable subgroups in the West that are having large families, despite NOT being newcomers.
It would be easier for the US to simply cross-connect our planetary atmosphere with another uninhabited low-CO2 world somewhere rather than spend time, effort and energy creating gigatonnes of dry ice each year here (any less is spitting in the wind, we release about 15 Gtonnes of fossil-fuel CO2 into the atmosphere each year as it is) and transporting it to somewhere else to dump it. That would reduce our CO2 levels and maybe help terraform a snowball-Earth world elsewhere by raising its greenhouse gas levels.
Building wind turbines at the portal(s) would be eco, too.
That's assuming they can make portals, which may turn out to be significantly more of an engineering challenge than culturing some self replicating interdimensional-teleporting-organelles.
A medium term policy would be to transfer the most polluting industries off world. For example; rebuild the busiest shipping ports on an adjacent world and (somehow) transport large cargo ships over.
"Building wind turbines at the portal(s) would be eco, too."
If you could find a link between a world with a sea level 60 metres lower than ours, and one 60m higher, that would make for an awesome hydro-electric plant.
Reminds me of an old E.E Smith story with a hero who, when stranded on one of Jupiters moons* uses heavy engineering magitech to build a thermocouple power station between the equator and the poles.
*habitable of course.
Now that you've pointed us to it, I've read it. I'm not sure about it. A few weeks ago a US-North Korea war seemed inevitable; where is it now? Now Brin predicts a US-Iran war; where will it be in a few weeks? Will we then foresee a US-China war? And what's going to come after that?
I'm also not too sanguine about his portrayal of the US as the best of all possible empires. To paraphrase: in the Pax Americana most people on earth have profited while only some are murdered by the empire. Whereas in a Pax Russiana all of us would be murdered by the empire. Really? Isn't it more likely that under a Pax Russiana most people on earth would be roughly as much affected as under the Pax Americana while only some people would be murdered by the empire, only that—unlike under the Pax Americana—these "some people" would include parts of the current American elites? Which to them might look like "all of us are going to be murdered"? To me this reads very much like "I praise the empire that has me as a profiteer and has only other people as victims, but I fear and demonize the empire that would have me and my friends as victims".
I'm not sure which word you're referring to. Is it "Today we’ll update" in the first paragraph or "Is it disturbing" in the first paragraph after the first bold sub-headline? Neither the "we" nor the "it" seem particularly interesting to me, so I assume that I'm misunderstanding your reference.
Consider that child-raising is an acquired social ability, traditionally learned by kids looking after their younger siblings. In a one-child family, where do the youngsters go to learn how to raise their own child(ren)?
My sister-in-law has five children, born over twelve years or so; and the oldest two did indeed take on a chunk of the childcare. However, consider that most 2.4-kids families have the children spaced about two years apart (i.e. a bit of a breathing space, followed by "that's it, two is enough"). Having done just that, it doesn't really permit the "children caring for younger siblings" thing.
Given that my wife and I both came from two-children-in-about-two-years families, and that we were the first of our local cohort of acquaintances to start breeding, our child-raising was basically self-taught from first principles. My wife had some limited exposure to her nieces while helping out on a holiday, whereas I was limited to having been handed a baby at dinner once so that my friend could pick up both knife and fork...
Can we assume that the UK has been facing this for a few decades now?
To me this reads very much like "I praise the empire that has me as a profiteer and has only other people as victims, but I fear and demonize the empire that would have me and my friends as victims".
True; but you could differentiate by saying "both have corruption, but one has a track record in exposing and reducing it without murdering those involved". In other words, Pax Americana is orders of magnitude less corrupt than Tsar Putin.
In a century or two, once the USA has in turn lost its empire, perhaps it will be filled with people arguing that the colonies benefited from the American Empire, and that they shouldn't complain or ask for apologies. You know, the usual Nationalist loonies who insist on Exceptionalism and hark back to glory days when the world map was red-white-and-blue; that the reduced US should "get back its sovereignty from foreign lawmakers"; and we'll have a nice repeat of the British Empire.
I wonder what the equivalent of the Suez Crisis will be?
Oh, I have to disagree! We (myself, wife, and kids of then 13/15/17) did the sleeper from Butterworth down to KL: same train, different section, and we really enjoyed it. I slept much more than I though I would. Terribly impressive was the blind gentleman across from me in the carriage : negotiating a very busy sleeper, bunks and platforms while blind must have been a challenge, and he seemed blissfully calm.
The journey up, the other way from KL to Butterworth was a 7-8h day's ride, in first class. The carriage had about 10 -15 people in it, on massive revolving seats - all quite luxurious, but definately early 80's rolling stock, in style and condition. $dearwife and $deardaughter were not impressed that the ladies was a hole in the floor.
Best holiday I've ever been on.
Fair enough, though strictly speaking I think you should be comparing agricultural capacity (a stock) to population (also a stock) rather than to fertility (a flow). The declines in fertility are huge - according to the UN, from around 6 births per female in the "less developed" world in 1950 to a projected 2 by 2100 (a factor of 3!), and they're already almost there (about 2.7 now). Pretty clear pattern across countries, and reversing it in aggregate seems pretty unlikely. But of course this is misleadingly optimistic (when were you last accused of that? :) ) because population levels change slowly.
Anyway, my little grumble was mostly about what is "Malthusian" and not about the (your) analysis. And to be honest, I googled around afterwards, and I think I was being too dogmatic about it - the term is commonly used more flexibly than I implied. Humpty-Dumpty-ism ... mea culpa.
I'm also not sure I buy the prediction, but I found it interesting enough to amplify for multiple reasons. First, there was the comparison of the Commonwealth to Iran in a couple posts by OGH above. Are we going to see a realtime exploration of that issue?
Second, I noted the use of the words "Today we'll..." at the very beginning of his first paragraph. Who is the "we" Brin is speaking for? He notes in the text that he has addressed TLAs in the past, so I'm curious about whether he's speaking for himself or speaking for some faction within the government, and I'm very curious about everyone's thoughts on that issue.
Third, stuff like this is worth amplifying because sometimes when a "clever plan" on the part of a difficult government becomes public knowledge, that plan is abandoned or modified to make it more publicly acceptable.
With regard to your objection re: Korea, I think a war on Iran can easily be an extension of the conflict with N. Korea. If the U.S. attacks Iran's nuclear infrastructure as viciously and publicly as possible, that attack can send a very strong message to N. Korea without worries about a nuclear exchange or an attack on Seoul.
Something that I am pretty sure hasn't been mentioned because I can't believe I'd have missed something that must either be big itself or have a big reason why it isn't: pathogens.
Since the points of divergence (that we know about) of other timelines are fairly recent in terms of human history, we can assume that the diseases of those timelines were also the same up to that point (otherwise the divergence would have been earlier). But there does seem to have been plenty of time since then for microbial evolution to diverge also, and therefore for novel diseases to emerge. (Similarly, what was the deal with polio in the other timelines?) I also don't see any reason why pathogens from other timelines couldn't have undergone some minor mutation that doesn't affect their virulence, but does alter the factors by which the immune system recognises them, so immunity to the measles (say) in one timeline doesn't necessarily mean immunity to the measles of other timelines.
Ooops! I should have addressed this issue in my post above. I don't completely disagree with Brin on this issue, but I do find him absurdly enthusiastic about it.
I'm simplifying outrageously in writing this, but empires do get it right sometimes. I'm reminded of the story about the British administrator in need of supplies in back-country India, who used a page from his journal to write out a check for 50 pounds. His word was trusted enough that that the check was essentially used as money until it made its way back to him months later - at which point he paid the 50 pounds to the bearer. That sounds a lot like getting it right to me.
Or consider the heartbreaking labor the British Empire put into ending slavery in and around Africa - there wasn't a bit of profit in that one, but expensive ships of the line were routinely sent out on anti-slavery patrols. Britain's influence on ending slavery is undeniable.
Or consider the U.S. Marshall Plan after WWII, or the fact that former enemies like Japan are now economic powerhouses, or the U.S. pushing S. Africa to abandon apartheid, or the fact that we routinely send carrier groups to disaster areas to provide humanitarian support.
Empires do get it right from time to time.
That being said, does Brin have a good point? Yeah, kinda, if you're willing to forget The Phillipines, Vietnam, Iraq, Nicaragua, Chile, Guatemala, etc., there's some evidence that we're a decent and fair people in our foreign policy... As long as you're not some kind of Liberal Commie Poofdah we're great neighbors.
I was comparing the rates of change in both stocks. I.e. fertility relative to the loss of potential agricultural capacity. THAT is the disturbing aspect.
His analysis of the war against Iran is far too much Faux News; he should read a few more of the reporters who actually visit the areas concerned, and speak at least Arabic. What is happening is that Saudi Arabia is running an anti-Shia pogrom (which is turning into genocide in Yemen), backed by Israel, the USA and Al Quaeda (yes, they are allies again), and wants the USA to attack Iran (as does Israel). The current crown prince is sane enough not to do it directly. Yes, of course, Iran is leading the resistance to that - it didn't do so for a long time after that pogrom started, but clearly has realised what will happen if it doesn't.
And the viciousness and corruptness of the modern USA and Russia differ more in kind than degree. Look at Bhopal, Falluja (and Iraq generally), Syria, the way that military and diplomatic force is used to impose disadvantageous contracts and lock out competitors (India, Iraq and more).
I wouldn't say "Faux News" so much as suggest that you consider the conspiracy theories of the U.S. Left.
But what I wrote above is unsatisfactory. The most significant part of the text is the first sentence, where he says "Today we'll update you... My guess is that his CIA or Defense Dept. contacts dropped a hint and asked him to put this before the public. Since the request was made off the record and Brin was told why/how the war is expected to unfold off the record, he can't use that material. So he's used publicly available material to rebuild the case and explain what his contacts expect to happen. This leads to an explanation that's much murkier than I'd expect if there was a whistleblower involved who could lay out the straight facts.
At least that's what I'm getting out of it all.
It would be easier for the US to simply cross-connect our planetary atmosphere with another uninhabited low-CO2 world somewhere rather than spend time, effort and energy creating gigatonnes of dry ice each year here
They don't have portal technology: just a black box they can bolt to an airframe (or, with very careful civil engineering, an insulated rolling platform). So bulk transport it is.
My experience of the KL-Singapore train was not improved by the sleeper carriage we were in having faulty plumbing, and the train crew trying to fix it by hitting things with spanners more or less continuously from 1am to 3am.
Until about the exact time that Jets replaced the Sydney-Melbourne sleeper, the rail gauge was different in Victoria and NSW. The result was that around 1 in the morning all the passengers were turfed out of one train, made to stand around on an unheated platform in the middle of the night for a while, before getting into the next train. The state governments cleverly delayed the extension of SG rail until almost the very year that it didn't matter. Maybe they thought that they'd better get their act into gear and do it or the airlines would eat their lunch?
"Albury, All Change" is burned into the Oz culture.
High-test peroxide.... My late ex, the rocket engineer, used to talk about that. Hey, I know how I can shoot your peroxide-fueled rotodyne down, easily: I'll stare at it hard, and cross my eyes.
Jeez, so much to catch up with, after a long weekend in Chicago, visiting friends, attending Windycon... and running the bid party for DC in 21 (when the Trumpster fire will be long gone....)
Never had to use WP before 5, and everyone who had, including my late wife, told me how much improved 5.0 was.
And I take incredibly serious exception to "everything in the 80's sucked", given, at least, meeting my late wife.
About Maggie sucking, though... I've read Nancy Ray-gun could suck the chrome off a bumper, and that was how she got where she was.....
Which I'd blame on the effect of the disaster of the collapse of the USSR on the 99%.
As I've said before, I want artificial stupids. As it is, on my Netbook, when I was in Chicago, it takes seconds to type in a URL 'cause it's SURE IT CAN FIND IT FIRST!!!
Crap.
Something that I am pretty sure hasn't been mentioned because I can't believe I'd have missed something that must either be big itself or have a big reason why it isn't: pathogens.
You get a chunk of that in passing in "Dark State".
That was Lewis and Clark.
Gain in agriculture... the twenties, I think, and definitely in the '30s, the US Dept of Agriculture was heavily pushing the three or four field crop rotation, with one field/year being clover (or whatever) to fix nitrogen, so you didn't wear out the soil, or need fertilizer.
But, going on to population growth, etc.... I see a dropping population as a very good thing. Back in my twenties, based on then-ideas of the size of protohuman bands, and assuming half the land surface of the earth was habitable, (not hardly!), that the max human population of the earth should be 1Bn, which we hit around 1820.
I'm not talking carrying capacity, I'm talking human capacity. Love suburban sprawl? Love nowhere to go to be alone? Psychologically speaking, I think we'd all be more comfortable with more space (the final frontier, of course). Hell, I think we oldsters have seen it shrink....
Picked up Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen from Sally at Windy.
Um, the first chapter, were it a short story, would fit perfectly into The Last Dangerous Visions....
What is happening is that Saudi Arabia is running an anti-Shia pogrom (which is turning into genocide in Yemen), backed by Israel
While it's an obvious point that the strategic interests of Saudi Arabia and Israel are fairly well aligned (less Palestine), I'm curious as to why you think that bin Salman wants or needs Israeli backing for any pogrom?
Certainly, Al-Jazeera and others have reported on leaked cables, but it's a bit of a leap from "both see Hezbollah as a threat" to "Israel supports a pogrom".
the USA and Al Quaeda (yes, they are allies again), and wants the USA to attack Iran (as does Israel)
Again, the bold comment seems unlikely, given that in the past few months, the USA has been assisting the Lebanese and the Iraqis against Sunni militants. How does the USA supporting the killing of Al-Qaeda affiliates, count as "yes, they are allies"?
Since we're talking about improvements to agriculture, I'll just leave this article here
https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/11/giving-agriculture-a-global-do-over-could-feed-nearly-a-billion-more-people/
So if we change everyone's diet, we have some sort of central authority that dictates what you're allowed to grow, so not for maximum profit, but for maximum calories, and we increase international shipping, we can feed 825 million more people than we do at present, but we are adding 700 million per decade. Still that cuts water consumption per person by 13%. Of course population is growing at 10% per decade.
So glad that Malthus was wrong. Otherwise things could get sticky...
What's the current projection for maximum (world) population [ both numbers & date ] before the "only 2 children" meme really cuts in & the population starts to decline? Estimates?
I suggest that you train yourself to extend your attention span, and read the WHOLE of a sentence before quoting part of it out of context.
"What is happening is that Saudi Arabia is running an anti-Shia pogrom (which is turning into genocide in Yemen), backed by Israel, the USA and Al Quaeda (yes, they are allies again), and wants the USA to attack Iran (as does Israel)."
It's irrelevant whether bin Salman wants or needs Israeli backing - the simple fact is that they are working together to the same end. Shias worldwide are very, very concerned, for very, very good reasons.
And the answer to your last question is al Nusra, under its various names, and by a nod and a wink to intermediaries. For example:
http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/715977/al-nusra-us-arming-jihadists-syria http://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Report-Israel-treating-al-Qaida-fighters-wounded-in-Syria-civil-war-393862
The gold standard for global population projections is the UN population group. These are the figures everyone uses from Rosling to Roser and the worldindata group to the MSM. There's an easily accessible display of the UN medium fertility model here. http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ The medium fertility model is a conservative approach and seems to be holding up fairly well. They issue a revision every couple of years with the latest being July this year.
Follow all that and you'll find they're predicting no peak this century, 10b in 2056 and 11.2b in 2100. By which time the population will still be growing by 10m/yr.
Beware though the models are focused on births, deaths and fertility rates. So they assume business as usual continues and don't really include the kinds of pollution, food, resource constraints, technological improvements (wars and black swans!) likely to produce non-linearity in this timeframe. So for instance, even though the immediate past is really bumpy, the projections show nice straight lines for the fall in population growth.
Answers to that question here in an easily digestible form. http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
867 868 So - slowing, levelling off, but not fast enough ... seems to be the correct answer? And thanks.
I suggest that you train yourself to extend your attention span, and read the WHOLE of a sentence before quoting part of it out of context.
There's no need for that. It was a perfectly polite post that raised a couple of questions (that I was attempting to make clear by separating and bolding the parts of the sentence that I was discussing).
"What is happening is that Saudi Arabia is running an anti-Shia pogrom (which is turning into genocide in Yemen), backed by Israel, the USA and Al Quaeda (yes, they are allies again), and wants the USA to attack Iran (as does Israel)."
OK, I'll try again. Your comment above can be reasonably interpreted to make two assertions:
Firstly, pogrom is a fairly heavy word to use - please can you give an example where Israel has "worked together" with Saudi Arabia toward this end? I may disagree with Israel's tactics and foreign policy, but I don't see them rounding up and deporting Shia. Is your statement hyperbole, or do you really mean it?
Secondly, the "USA and Al-Qaeda are allies" claim - supplying weapons to an affiliate in a strictly limited situation, does not "strategic allies" make. If the USA wants to support the Free Syrians, they have to accept that their local aims are entangled with the local Sunni nutjobs in al-Nusra, and may end up in supplies and SF/air support to them at a tactical level. If the USA wants to attack ISIS, they have to accept that their local aims align with those of the Quds Force, and may involve a certain degree of arms-length coordination with them. I would suggest that such tactical alignments do not make either Al-Qaeda or Iran "allies" from an operational or strategic perspective.
As I said, I can see where you're coming from, I'm politely challenging how you have chosen to interpret it.
You don't think that supporting al Quaeda and even Da'esh counts as supporting a pogrom? Do you know what happens to Shiites who fall into their hands? You should remember that Da'esh (like al Quaeda) was initially bankrolled from Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and was protected several times by Israel bombing the legal Syrian's regime's allies who were attaching it. Their common end is the overthrow of the Syrian government, and the suppression of anyone who opposes them, whether politically or religiously.
And you will make any excuses to justify your beloved USA's actions. Allies are allies, whether strategic or local, and it must be SO much comfort to the victims of al Nusra that the USA isn't backing them globally.
And now, with exquisite timing, here comes Brad DeLong (Berkeley economic historian) with a lovely blog entry on whether, in an alternative history, Rome could have experienced an industrial revolution and made the transition from Malthusian to modern growth:
http://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/11/notes-on-mark-koyama-on-rome-on-medium.html
Directly relevant to the original blog topic (alternative history), plus a nice explanation of what "Malthusian" means, plus Brad is a fan of Charlie's (I discovered Saturn's Children via one of his blog entries). Triple bonus score!
Inconveniently for your claim that it's all down to a pogrom of the Shia by the USA, do you deny that the USA and UK have been cheerfully bombing the murderous Sunni nutjobs of Da'esh, in support of the Shia-aligned government of Iraq?
Here's a suggestion that while there are sectarian lines, it's really a struggle between Saudi Arabia and Iran for regional dominance (link)...
You don't think that supporting al Quaeda and even Da'esh counts as supporting a pogrom? Do you know what happens to Shiites who fall into their hands?
Power politics in the Middle East is brutal, vicious, and unrestrained. The Mukhabarat are every bit as happy to detain, torture, and murder as SAVAK or similar. Hafez al-Assad's response to rebellion was to surround Hama and kill anyone who opposed him (Robert Fisk reckoned on 20,000 dead). Bashar al-Assad's response to rebellion was to use nerve agents on his own civilian population. While Da'esh are murderous in the extreme (and need wiping out), it's not saying much in comparison to a government that is willing to shell its own cities and gas its own children.
You should remember that Da'esh (like al Quaeda) was initially bankrolled from Saudi Arabia and the UAE, ...
Agreed.
...and was protected several times by Israel bombing the legal Syrian's regime's allies who were attacking it.
And here we differ. Israel attacking Hezbollah? Hardly a surprise, given that they've been shooting at each other across the Lebanese border for several decades. But Israel is on the other side of Syria from Da'esh. Meanwhile, there's plenty of footage of the USA bombing Da'esh positions in both Iraq and Syria.
The difference is that the anti-Assad forces have been smart enough not to shoot at the Israelis (it suits Assad to claim all his opponents are terrorists / Da'esh / al-Qaeda rather than rebels). If the FSA or al-Nusra start shooting at Israel, the IDF will respond exactly as they do towards Hezbollah.
Their common end is the overthrow of the Syrian government, and the suppression of anyone who opposes them, whether politically or religiously.
As opposed to the Syrian Government, who have a track record of tyranny, the suppression of anyone who opposes them, and a death toll of hundreds of thousands as a result...
Going back to my original point: the Israeli choice to not attack the opponents of Assad (who don't shoot at them) and to attack the supporters of Assad (who do shoot at them) seems pragmatic. A depressing but pragmatic tactical decision is not proof - so other than guilt by your association of Israel with Da'esh, what justification do you have for claiming that Israel desires a pogrom against the Shia?
And you will make any excuses to justify your beloved USA's actions. Allies are allies, whether strategic or local, and it must be SO much comfort to the victims of al Nusra that the USA isn't backing them globally.
By your reasoning, Russia's association with Assad means that they support the use of nerve agents and cluster bombs against civilians. You can't have it both ways.
Immediately after the Iraq war Iranian clerics issued fatwas that Islam favoured only two children, the government offered free vasectomies and tubal ligations, and birth control class attendance was made a requirement for marriage. Not all theocracies?
"Inconveniently for your claim that it's all down to a pogrom of the Shia by the USA,"
Typical of you, that is a lie. I did not say that, as you know perfectly well.
Your post 850: What is happening is that Saudi Arabia is running an anti-Shia pogrom (which is turning into genocide in Yemen), backed by Israel, the USA and Al Quaeda (yes, they are allies again), and wants the USA to attack Iran (as does Israel)
Your post 871: You don't think that supporting al Quaeda and even Da'esh counts as supporting a pogrom?
If you don't mean it, don't say it.
Tempers appear to be flaring, and responses are starting to get heated.
Please cool it for a while.
A totally off-topic thought, but I think Frank (and others) might like The Genius Plague by David Walton. Recommended by David Brin. I'm only a few pages into it, but it seems good so far.
The protagonist is a mycologist, and a fungus is the major plot element. Also Margulis' theory of cooperation/symbiosis as a driver of evolution.
Re. 877 & earlier Apparently Christopher Steele ( ex- MI 6 ) has now released more information on the Trump-Putin tie-up 7, according to the Beeb this morning, probably a lot about how Trump acted as a Laundromat for Russian oligarch's money .... Nothing much on the web - yet - I expect more publicity soon.
Something I've been wondering about for a while: What the schnozzle is wrong with Agent Gomez? I'm not talking about her being an a-hole, but about her repeatedly making idiotic suggestions and not realising what's wrong with them until someone points it out - like her brainwave of threatening to deport Rita's grandfather to that notorious hellhole...modern Germany.
So finally got to read it last weekend, overall rather enjoyed it though it did stop abruptly just as things were getting going. One fridge thought though that has been bugging me - when Rita first gets escorted into TL4, she gets transported across via a "freight elevator" from deep in a basement.
So the USA transported men and materials over the border at ground level in order to dig a hole to put a transfer device in. That seems awfully elaborate - why does TL4 need a disguised passage exit anyway? Who would be there to hide it from ... in the middle of a large military compound?
A Secret Base must include at least one underground feature. Especially if you're the baddies.
A Secret Base must include at least one underground feature.
Indeed so. It's pretty much a must for reasons both practical and psychological.
http://www.thespacereview.com/archive/2037a.jpg
The trouble with"underground" is that you can be trapped in there, by your opposition dumping tons of shit on top. So you have to build-in a backdoor emergency exit, which, of course brings its own vulnerabilities ... [ Scissors / Paper / Stone ]
Of course, it helps if your back exit can be in another universe...
it helps if your back exit can be in another universe... which, of course brings its own vulnerabilities, ahem.
You know, quite a lot of Americans today really do think Germany is some kind of communist hell-hole. (They mostly get their opinions from Fox News, which explains it.)
Gomez has several chips on her shoulder, including but not limited to: prejudice against anyone who isn't a Scientologist (she is one), prejudice against muslims (or anyone who remotely looks like one), prejudice against LGBTQ folks (see Scientology, above) ... she's not exactly cosmopolitan and well-travelled. We may posit that she's been planted on the Colonel's team by internal factional rivals who want to keep an eye on him.
Breitbart, rather than fox, surely?
Gomez: is also a known "type" of cop, unfortunately relatively common. Suspicion almost always equals proof - this tends to happen with half-educated cops who have dealt with small-time crooks for a long time & extend that metric to EVERYBODY. They would always have benefitted from a better, more structured education, as well - they are inside a semi-self-built trap that they can't see. For a real, actual non-fictional classic Brit example of this & how it can utterly crash-&-burn, look at the murder of Jo Yates a couple or so years back & how Avon & Somerset Plod completely fucked up. [ I still want to know why some plod were not dismissed for breaking every rule in the book on prejudicing the press & public & all the confidentiality rules. ] Large damages were paid out, eventually.
Digression: I would have thought that being a scientologist made one unfit for police work, but then we have NornIron cops & politicians, who seem to be well down the same avenues of bigoted ignorance. It would appear to be, amazing as it may seem, that "The South" is going to finally break free well before the North - I mean, they are more than half-way there already, it just needs the final breaking of a couple of still-on-statute bonds.
No, I would agree with Charlie: this is the sort of thing that Fox viewers appear to believe. Breitbart is more for actual neo-Nazis (though I'm sure the overlap is large).
Picked on this thread because it's the most recent over 300, but what the actual fire truck?
The Tories have voted that animals can't feel pain as part of the EU bill, marking the beginning of our anti-science Brexit
Yes, I saw that too ... has NOT appeared in several papers - very selective reporting there ....
Yeah, I just don't see it. Ken MacLeod's scenario with Spartacus's creating early capitalism, then somehow leading to WAY early industrialization doesn't work. Kewl but sadly implausible.
IMO you need the old world, or new world areas with "easy" industrialization potential to have had access to both hemisphere's crop/animal packages for industrialization to work. Access for how long? Gut instinct says AT MINIMUM 100-150 years, probably a bit longer.
Assuming the americas get discovered on OTL's schedule this suggests around 1700 as the earliest realistic period for industrial takeoff. Going by that Delong article suggesting we 'merely' managed to get it 100-150 years early it suggests OTL's around the middle of the range if not exactly there. Call it say 1700-1950 as the range of industrialization dates with 1825 as the median date.
Why does the old world need the new world's crop package for industrialization to occur?
An example: check out food imports from Ireland to Great Britain during the Industrial Revolution, then remember the cottier class who paid their rent in farm labour to raise that food subsisted entirely on potatoes and buttermilk.
Yes, but was that necessary for industrialization? Another way of asking this would be: would industrialization have happened even without that potato. It's like the discussion we had above about Mormon farmers. They were crucial to settling the West in our timeline, but I already demonstrated that there were alternatives other timelines could have pursued. I don't know enough about the history you mention to propose alternatives, but they probably exist?
Increasing the food surplus enough to at least give a halfway decent shot at industrializing.
China OTL after 1500 shows that new world crops were helpful but not a guarantee.
Not just things like the potato. Lumber was extremely important for things like masts — so much so that the British worked hard at organizing commercial lumbering to create an industry that could provide them masts and spars. (Especially important after Napoleon blockaded the Baltic and the American Rebellion limited access/control to former colonies like New England.)