Ross Smith

Ross Smith

  • Commented on Crib Sheet: Season of Skulls
    I think wolves are just as cool as everyone else does, but I've found it impossible to take werewolves seriously ever since I read Ursula Vernon's Summer in Orcus....
  • Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
    A few years ago I was slightly mindboggled to realise that the new computer I'd just bought had exactly a million times as much storage as the first computer I ever owned (Amiga with 5 MB -> Mac Pro with...
  • Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
    Craig Murray believes Y2K was a hoax. That's all the proof I need that he's a crank....
  • Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
    A measly 190Gb of logfiles going back to 2010? Luxury! At my last job we had to process 100GB of logs every day....
  • Commented on Decision Fatigue
    If Apple hadn’t bought Next, I think the odds are pretty good that it would have been Apple, not Next, that suffered Be's fate....
  • Commented on Yokai Land Q&A
    See also the tapestries in PC Hodgell's Kencyrath books....
  • Commented on Quantum of Nightmares: spoiler time!
    I have this feeling that "Skaro" was something Charlie put in the first book as a throwaway joke and then found himself stuck with when the plot decided to go there....
  • Commented on Empire Games (and Merchant Princes): the inevitable spoiler thread!
    I was amused to find that a large part of the book takes place in the parts of Berlin I'm familiar with from living there a few years ago. (Saturn megastore ftw!) My inner aviation fanboy amused himself by trying...
  • Commented on Invisible Sun: signed copies and author events
    ...Aaaaand finished :) No spoilers here, but I liked it a lot....
  • Commented on Invisible Sun: signed copies and author events
    Just got my copy, hot off the Innertubes. Will dive in ASAP....
  • Commented on Invisible Sun: Themes and Nightmares
    Yes, the ebook....
  • Commented on Invisible Sun: Themes and Nightmares
    Malcolm@46 and Moz@69: I'm in Sydney, using a credit card from an Australian bank, and I had no trouble pre-ordering it (and Charlie's other upcoming books) from amazon.com (delivery Sep 28 for IS)....
  • Commented on Infomercial Interlude
    "What might happen if Derek reunited them for one last roll of the D20?" For that scenario, you should read Kieron Gillen's brilliant comic Die....
  • Commented on CASE NIGHTMARE BLONDE
    "The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly. The rich have always objected to being governed at all." - GK Chesterton...
  • Commented on CMAP #16: Book Title Blues
    Some sort of Confusing Variant Title Award has to go to the Keith Laumer novel that was published as both Night of Delusions and Knight of Delusions....
  • Commented on Dread of Heinleinism
    I too have had the sad experience of re-reading some Heinlein "classics" only to discover the Suck Fairy had got there first. On the other hand, though, let's not forget that Heinlein wasn't solely a novelist. Whatever the merits or...
  • Commented on Unsustainable Interstellar Civilization, Hotspot Colonies, and Dwarf Culture
    "The planet stays habitable because all the water on the planet flows to either the front side (so there's a huge ocean under the sun, due to a massive day/year long tidal bump)" Dubious. The tidal effects are stationary with...
  • Commented on The End of the British nuclear deterrent?
    Agreed the "secret duplicate missile programme" thing is pretty unlikely. What's much more likely, I think, is that the UK long ago put some of their clever backroom boffins to work on reverse engineering all that American technology the UK...
  • Commented on Empire Games
    So despite Kobo posting a release date of Jan 31, I checked this morning and found I was able to purchase and download the epub. Will read ASAP (I'm currently halfway through re-reading Mark Lawrence's Broken Empire trilogy and want...
  • Commented on The dog ate my homework
    Kobo are quoting a release date of Jan 31 for Empire Games ... so, given how accurate Kobo's release dates have been in the past, it's anybody's guess when I'll get hold of it. In preparation I just finished re-reading...
  • Commented on Empire Games sneak peek
    I just discovered that the Tor.com site has a much longer excerpt than the one Charlie originally linked to. The time travel pedant in me feels called upon to wonder, if the timeline diverged from ours in 1987, how come...
  • Commented on Busy busy busy
    Re 2 - If I've followed the recent revelations correctly, I understand she was already an auditor before Bob first met her; the whole "contract employee" bit was just a cover for her off-the-record activities on behalf of the Laundry,...
  • Commented on Busy busy busy
    There's a saying I heard somewhere: the difference between Europeans and Americans is that a European thinks a hundred miles is a long way, while an American thinks a hundred years is a long time....
  • Commented on A reminder
    "Fascism offers certainty - you know your place in things, even if it's not at the top." I am reminded of Lord Vetinari's argument that the key to politics is to understand that what most people really want is for...
  • Commented on Follow the money: Apple vs. the FBI
    Just a heads up, Charlie: John Gruber just posted this to Daring Fireball, so there may be a sudden influx of new commenters on the way....
  • Commented on Clickbait spasm: 14 gizmos I used in 2015
    A few months ago I replaced my iPhone 5s with a 6s (like Charlie, I tend to upgrade every second year), and noticed an unexpected side effect: suddenly I almost entirely stopped using my iPad. Apparently the increase in screen...
  • Commented on That "Annihilation Score" spoiler thread you're all asking for
    A small nitpick that I can't help bringing up because it kept bothering the Banks fan in me: the phrase from the Culture is "outside context problem", not "out of context problem"....
  • Commented on On the Great Filter, existential threats, and griefers
    On a more optimistic note: As our host points out, a past GF would be good news. There are really two distinct kinds of past GF, which you might call extrinsic and intrinsic. An extrinsic PGF is the kind of...
  • Commented on On the Great Filter, existential threats, and griefers
    You're talking about interstellar civil war, but I don't think we need to get anywhere near that far before internal conflict becomes an existential threat, even assuming we get over the threat of nuclear war. Technology keeps advancing, and people...
  • Commented on Cheap ebook!
    Possibly someone has already brought this to your attention, Charlie, but you have at least one very famous reader. Donald Knuth recently released a preprint of Volume 4B of The Art of Computer Programming, and the Preface begins with the...
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