Charlie Stross

Recent Actions

• Commented on Where we went wrong
  Sure: but a quote and link to an essay by Professor Lawrence Lessig is not exactly in a class with a random effusion and a link to a clean-your-credit-record/herbal v**gr*/network marketing site....
• Commented on Upcoming maintenance
  You're probably thinking in terms of a large, well-capitalized national-scale ISP. I'm thinking in terms of a small, poorly-capitalized local ISP ... with a senior sysadmin I drink with and who is willing to hold my hand when I run...
• Commented on Where we went wrong
  I know The Raven of old, from elsewhere on the net. Doesn't look spammy to me....
• Commented on Interview
  No idea: does "The Wind in the Willows" (age 4) count?...
• Commented on Interview
  What does 'tweaked your geek' mean?...
• Commented on Interview
  Not until next July. (Then go hit on Transreal Books in Edinburgh, or come to a convention I'll be at.)...
• Commented on Interview
  Can't say; I'm not directly involved....
• Commented on Interview
  Alas, no fixed date (it may not go anywhere: or it may catch fire at short notice and demand lots of my time)....
• Commented on Upcoming maintenance
  The servers aren't $2-3K each -- more like $0.5-1K each. They're bespoke Atom boxes assembled to order by the ISP themselves, fractional-width 1U so they can put lots of them in the datacentre and lease them cheap. Think in terms...
• Commented on Interview
  ADMINISTRATIVE NOTE It is morning. I am in a hotel in Sydney. Tomorrow morning I am checking into a hotel in Melbourne. Between now and then, I am checking out of this hotel and catching a sleeper train. So you...
• Commented on Interview
  That's easy: the lifespan of a work of fiction is around 5 years -- anything over that is a bonus. That's the span "Halting State" was written for; by 2017, when it's set, it'll look laughably obsolete. Does that make...
• Commented on Interview
  Stephen King's "On Writing" is the only writing book I've ever seen that was worth a damn. As for the "where do you get your ideas from" embedded in your question: get a broad-based education. In particular, get a science...
• Commented on Interview
  A simple "thank you" in email suffices. (It may not get a reply, however -- depends how overworked I am at the time -- unless it asks a question that expects one.)...
• Commented on Interview
  No. (Am not a TV viewer and have no idea who the current luvvies/actors are.)...
• Commented on Interview
  I have a chapter to write for a non-fiction book in September once I get home; other than that, no....
• Commented on Interview
  nanofactories already exist: they're called ribosomes. And we are learning how to hack them to produce polymers not found in nature....
• Commented on Upcoming maintenance
  Want hotswap drives? That'll be an extra £50 a month, thank you very much. I'll take 15 minutes' downtime once every year or two, thanks....
• Commented on Upcoming maintenance
  What makes you think I'm going to replace a hard drive (on the other side of the planet) tomorrow? I've already outsourced the hardware. As for Typepad, (a) it's Six Apart (bad history -- ask anyone with a Livejournal lifetime...
• Commented on Interview
  Life extension. Purely selfishly (I'm 46; if we get viable life extension meds within 50 years I stand a fighting chance of still being alive to benefit from them. And while I expect to die sooner or later, I'd prefer...
• Commented on Upcoming maintenance
  (Incidentally, performance-wise, we've just weathered 242 spams on the blog in around 24 hours, up from 125 in the previous 24 hour period and a long-term average of around 10 per day. Weird and annoying, but it's mostly not getting...
• Commented on Upcoming maintenance
  Why don't you just hand your business to someone else and hope like hell that they don't go bust or decide to jack up their prices 500% on impulse once they've got you trapped in their cloud?...
• Commented on Interview
  Ain't gonna happen, if you're thinking in terms of procedural AI; it's a dead field. Emulation of chunks of human neuroanatomy is likely, but there will be unforseen gotchas -- for one thing, we don't know for sure (yet) how...
• Posted Upcoming maintenance to Charlie's Diary
  One of the hard drives on this 'ere server has died and needs to be replaced, so there may be some downtime on my blog on Tuesday or Wednesday. (It's a bank holiday back in Blighty this Monday and a...
• Commented on Interview
  In "The Apocalypse Codex" Bob has a different boss. Next?...
• Commented on Interview
  Provisionally ... I have plans for a Laundry novella featuring HPL in flashback (much as Sir Edward Younghusband features in "The Concrete Jungle"). Yes, I've run across "Lovecraft is Missing". Didn't get far into it, though. Bob is not a...
• Commented on Interview
  Regular webcomic reading list includes: XKCD, Questionable Content, Girl Genius, and Plan B. The first three are top google hits; the latter can be found at www.goonpatrol.com....
• Commented on Interview
  Google on "James Jesus Angleton"....
• Commented on Interview
  With some books, the title comes first and adheres to the story with a death-grip. With others, trying to figure out a title to pin on the lump of text is a job for the marketing department. Seriously, I can...
• Commented on Interview
  Yes, plenty of things. (No, I'm not going to go into any more detail.)...
• Commented on Interview
  See "Rule 34", coming next year. (Yes, /b/ is a possible revolutionary development for the future of society.)...