alanfleming

renay posting in

ladybusiness

We're halfway through 2026! ( Read more... )

tamaranth

2026/095: The Gate, the Girl and the Dragon — Grace Lin

“Jin was carved face upward, looking at the sky. Watching people is not in his nature.”
“Watching people is in the nature of all Gongshi,” Ba protested. “Protecting and caring for people is the purpose bestowed on us by the goddess!”
Jin winced… People! There were so many of them, rushing around and squeezed together in their gray, grubby world... Watching people was the most boring thing ever. [loc. 500]

Jin is a Gongshi, a stone spirit dwelling in a statue: he's also a young lion cub who's passionate about zuqiu, a soccer-like game, and is forever being told by his parents that he's irresponsible. One day, in a fit of pique after a match is stopped just as he was about to score the winning goal, he accidentally kicks the Sacred Sphere, a relic of the Goddess, through the magical City Gate and into the human world. Rushing after it, he finds himself trapped in mundanity -- and nobody can come to his rescue, because the Gate is closed.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: calm

tamaranth

2026/094: Pandemonium — Daryl Gregory

Jungians saw evidence that archetypes had been seizing human minds since prehistory. In America demon sightings had been recorded since the Pilgrims, but most scholars pegged the start of the modern possession epidemic at the first publicized appearance of the Captain on July 12, 1944. [p. 205]

Del Pierce has grown up in a world where demonic possession -- or, to put it in medical terms, the 'possession disorder' -- has changed the course of history. Eisenhower was killed in 1955 by a man possessed by -- sorry, suffering from the Kamikaze strain of the disorder -- and O J Simpson was shot down in the courtroom by a janitor temporarily hosting the strain known as the Truth. Possession can happen to anybody, anywhere, at any point in their life.

It happened to Del when he was five years old: ( Read more... )

Current Mood: okay

tamaranth

2026/093: When There are Wolves Again — E J Swift

You want to believe the tide is turning. You want to believe you will die in a better world than you were born in. [loc. 2070]

A hopeful novel about the future of the UK, the ecology, and the climate crisis (yes, really!), beginning in 2020 and ending in 2070. It follows the lives of two women: Lucy Gillard, whose ecological awakening comes when she's sent to stay with her grandparents during Covid, and Hester Moore, whose story starts in Chornobyl, where she's making a documentary about a team of vets who care for the abandoned dogs.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: hopeful

forestofglory posting in

ladybusiness

I have been on a reading journey that has taken me to the land of superhero comics. It started during a stressful time when I ended up reading a ton of fic about the Batfam (Batman and his various allies/sidekicks/semi-adopted semi-feral children), and accidentally got really into the fandom. (Reading a lot of stories that focused on found family but didn’t have romance was extremely soothing.) It was my original intent to just read fic and not bother with any of the source material. But I have slowly gotten sucked in.

( Read more... )

tamaranth

2026/092: The Last Hawk — Elizabeth Wein

Emil had told me to get out. But like a pilot in a damaged plane, I had to keep flying blindly before I was able to land. [loc. 784]

Ingrid Hartman has been deemed 'a disgrace to Germany' because of her stammer, and her failure to greet an SS officer with 'Heil Hitler'. Her widowed father urges her to get a job at the gliding school where she helps out: Ingrid, at seventeen, is already one of the best glider pilots there. The plan keeps her out of the way, and her friend Emil, a Luftwaffe pilot, recommends her as assistant to test pilot Hanna Reitsch.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: thoughtful

helloladies posting in

ladybusiness

Sidetracks is a collaborative project featuring various essays, videos, reviews, or other Internet content that we want to share. All past and current links for the Sidetracks project can be found in our Sidetracks tag. You can also support Sidetracks and our other work on Patreon.

( Read more... )

tamaranth

2026/091: Baba Yaga Laid an Egg — Dubravka Ugrešić

As we grow older, we weep less and less. It takes energy to weep. In old age neither the lungs, nor the heart, nor the tear ducts, nor the muscles have the strength for great misery. Age is a kind of natural sedative, perhaps because age itself is a misfortune. [loc. 2704]

A book of three halves.( Read more... )

Current Mood: disappointed

liam_on_linux

[Nicked from a later comment to the previous one.]

Other OSes I've used with no CLI -- Psion EPOC 16 (x86, Series 3); EPOC 32 (Arm, Series 5); Symbian; PalmOS; NewtonOS; and on the desktop, Atari TOS/GEM.

PalmOS is not so much from MacOS as indirectly from another Apple product: the Newton, which was architecturally totally different (a native Arm OS with no CLI and no filesystem either).

Newton OS 1.x could only read cursive: joined-up long hand written script, and it had to learn yours first before it worked well. This led to a tonne of jokes and NewtonOS 2.x which could also read hand-printed letters and block caps.

Palm started out offering its Graffiti text-input system as an add-on 3rd party app for Newton OS 1.x.

The look and feel of the Newton has a tiny bit of influence from MacOS: it's greyscale only, with elegant hand-drawn mono icons. Palm naturally picked up some of that.

NewtonOS version 2 made that much less relevant or necessary, so Palm pivoted: it took the core functionality of the Newton as a PDA, licensed in a kernel, wrote a GUI layer and some applets, and made the tiniest device that could run it. It junked the clever UI, the handwriting and hand-drawing recognition, the smart assistant mode that understood written commands, interpreted what you meant and try to do them.

Instead, the PalmPilot selling point was that you didn't enter data on the device at all: it was largely an output device, and it synched the data from your Mac or PC.

I wonder why we don't see this more? Are operating systems generally built by CLI-likers?

Because the industry has gone backwards.

Almost all the ambitious bold technologically-innovative projects from the 1980s and early 1990s went broke: Newton, General Magic and the MagicCap, GEM, GEOS/Geoworks Ensemble, the Atari ST, the Amiga, Acorn and RISC OS, Be and BeOS.

Gradually the industry converged on two cheap safe bets: Windows NT, and some form of Unix. Especially when a free Unix came along.

We junked all the new OSes from the 1980s and just one from the 1990s survives. (NT, and it's very very close to Unix: it's a modernised version of native OS of the hardware that Unix evolved on, written in Unix's language and using Unix's tools and concepts. From the distance of a classic Mac or a Raspberry Pi running RISC OS, Windows NT and Linux are almost indistinguishable, they are so alike.)

Now everyone else uses an end-1960s OS. It's big and slow and a poor fit for modern computers, but it's free. Its successor, Plan 9, what the geniuses who wrote Unix did next, flopped too. Its concepts are too hard for not-very-clueful techies. (There's no real view of the real filesystem tree? What? There's no way to see the real thing? You can't move files because you don't know and can't find out if source and target are on the same volume? What? Windows are directories? What? There's no console?! WHAT?!)

Then they followed it up with the productised version, Inferno. It deprecates C and native binaries! WTAF? Nobody wants that!

(TAOS had the same problem. And it wasn't true: yeah they did. They bought Java instead. It was easier to understand.)

So we went backwards. Out went the modern safe languages. Out went platform-independent binaries. Out went multiple different purpose-built OSes for different purposes and platforms. Out went using the best language for the job and the best platform and OS for the job.

And out went GUI-only OSes.

Instead, in came the lowest-common-denominator, stupidest, simplest, but !!FREE!! OS that could with a tonne of work do everything.

Unix is hopelessly obsolete. It was when Linus was a student. (I am slightly older than Linus.) Andy Tanenbaum was right all along, and so was Richard Stallman.

Unix is obsolete because it's a minicomputer OS and we don't have minicomputers any more. They no longer exist.

The central UI device in Unix is a terminal. We don't have terminals. Nobody has terminals. Everyone has their own computer, in fact, multiple ones.

Unix does not have built in networking: it's bolted on, clumsily. (What file is your IP address in?)

Unix does not have a GUI or the concept of a GUI. It is text-only. An app layered on top can draw a GUI.

(What file is the current colour of the cursor in?)

Unix does not have sound support.

But it is obligately multiuser: multiple people on terminals share 1 computer, which never ever happens in the 21st century.

I've been working with computers since 1988.

1980s computers were all amazing and very cool.

1990s ones turned into boring beige boxes, as dull as staplers, but there were occasional flashes of brilliance -- most of which you couldn't afford.

Then by the 2000s nothing was left but staplers. It's all just office equipment now.

Devices like modern phones and the ReMarkable make me want to cry, they are so stupid and so clunky.

But I am 58. In a decade or so I can retire, and I will be dead in another decade.

I watched my chosen field go from bold and innovative to a sad bunch of efforts to polish turds. It is heartbreaking.

liam_on_linux

[Nicked from a Lobsters comment...]

Classic MacOS was for many of us the real MacOS. OS X is NeXTstep given a facelift to look a bit like a Mac, but it's Unix, and you can tell. It's a pretty Unix but it's an order of magnitude more complicated than classic MacOS and it is littered with ugly little "tells" like config in text files, file extensions, and weird stuff that doesn't "stick" when you set it, or things that the computer puts where it wants and not where you want.

It is my favourite daily driver OS today. I am typing on an Intel iMac. But it's not really a Mac.

Classic MacOS was not very reliable, not very stable, but it was beautiful. No shell, at all, anywhere. No config files. Nothing kept in text. Beautiful and clever and thoughtful GUI idioms for things that needed physical buttons to be pressed on other computers. To eject a disk, drag its icon to the wastebin and the motorised drive spit it out. Other computers needed you to do the work: press a button and you felt little mechanical levers move, strings twang, and the drive creaked and the disk was popped out on a spring. It felt so crude.

To make a folder bootable, remove the System file and put it back in. To install a font, or a driver, or an extension, or a new control panel, drag it onto the System Folder. Whatever it was, it didn't matter. The OS knew, but you didn't have to. The computer sorted this nerd stuff for you and put it in the right place. To uninstall, go find it and move it out, or just bin it.

A file is an icon and an icon is the file. You can only see a real physical thing in one place at once. So, you can only see an icon in one place at once. Open a new window onto Folder X when Folder X's contents are already visible elsewhere? You can't see the contents twice. So, the original closes.

Place a file in a particular location in a folder, including the desktop, and it 100% will be there next time. Change view, sort it, change back, it always will still be there, guaranteed. So you can navigate your filesystem by muscle and spatial memory: you know where on which screen it was and it will stay there unless you move it.

System 7 added "aliases" -- in Windows parlance, "shortcuts", in Unix ones "symbolic links". Aliases included the path and the machine name. Peer to peer networking was integrated. So, copy an alias onto a floppy, put it in a cupboard for 6 months, get it out, insert it into a different Mac, and if you have the network permissions and the original Mac is on the same network, the alias works on a different machine. The new Mac finds the old Mac on the network, connects to its drive, locates the file, and opens it for you. Apple didn't expect this: it was emergent behaviour of the filesystem and networking system.

Drag an icon to another window and what happened depended on the location and type of source and destination, but intelligently. Same volume on same drive? Move. Different volume? Copy. To the bin? Move to the wastebin if a file or alias, eject if a volume or network share. It did the right thing and you didn't need to think -- you could trust it.

I realise all this isn't about development. I am not a developer.

Porting to/from Classic MacOS was hard. There are no true file paths: there is no shell, no CLI, no command line, no idioms from command lines like Unix pathnames or DOS/Windows "drive letters". The MacOS was in part a much cut-down LisaOS. The Lisa had multitasking, hard disks, a hierarchical filesystem... the Mac had none of that so it was all removed.

Later some was re-added. So path names were

volume name:folder name:folder name:filename

No extensions ever -- internal filesystem metadata handled that. Files are not DOS/Unix style flat sequences of bytes: they have internal structure, with a data fork and a resource fork. The stuff that dumber OSes like DOS and Windows keep inside the file are in the data fork. The metadata about what app created it, when, and what apps can open it, and when it was last changed, and when it was last viewed without changes, and who owns it, and who can change it, and its big icon and a small icon for list views, and mono and colour icons, and all that stuff, is inside the resource fork.

DOS tried to get all that into 1 time/date and 3 alphabetic letters after a dot. It was profoundly brain-damanged by comparison. Unix kinda sorta encodes some of this but it doesn't know what "graphics" are, so not much of it.

There is no text mode. It's not even possible: the machine is always in full graphics mode from the moment it starts booting. There is no stdio and can't be, because there is no console. The computer doesn't have one. (PCs do but Windows tries hard to hide it, but it's always there. Not on Classic MacOS.)

So you went into Mac development very differently and it was very hard to port stuff. Most MacOS apps were original and native. A few, a very few, were later ported to Windows. You may have heard of one or two: Excel is one, PowerPoint another IIRC.

The Lisa was informed by Smalltalk, but partly programmed in Pascal. It did not start out as a GUI machine. Apple worked with Niklaus Wirth himself to add OOPS to Pascal for the Lisa and Mac. The result became Object Pascal which became Borland Delphi and was hugely important in the early Windows era, from 3.x to 95/98 and NT.

So at first development was in Pascal on a Lisa. Then it went self-hosting. Then Macintosh Programmer's Workshop came along. That enabled multiple languages, including C++.

There was also a rich GUI BASIC very early on, but Microsoft intentionally sabotaged that project.

It was a whole alien world and almost nothing of it survives into OS X, which is why those of us in the Apple world at the time say that Apple did not acquire NeXT: NeXT took over Apple.

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

Folks may have noticed that the site has been slow for logged-out users over the last while. This is partly because we separate traffic by logged-in, "logged out but have visited the site before", and "logged out, never visited the site before" and assign the fewest resources to the last category (because we're pretty confident the overwhelming majority of it is bot and scraper traffic, even if it's often impossible to say for sure). The flood of garbage traffic is a plague and a scourge the entire internet is dealing with, and it's hitting small sites the hardest as operators get better and better at cloaking their requests to look like real, authentic use. We long ago hit the point where adding more resources is a possible solution (because they just eat them up as soon as we do), and splitting traffic lets us keep the site usable for our actual users without wasting too much server power on garbage.

We've now, lucky us, reached the point where the "logged out, have never visited the site before" path is just flooded all the time, and the "logged out but have visited the site before" path is suffering some of the overflow. We've made some changes to the routing to try to improve things for logged out users who have visited the site before and keep it at "it may be a little bit slow, but at least it works" instead of "it keeps timing out", and we've seen some improvements, but if you're accustomed to browsing the site while logged out, I'm really sorry but it may continue to be a little miserable.

You will get the fastest page loads and the best performance by browsing the site logged in. If you are having trouble loading the front page to log in, bookmark the direct login page. We can't route the front page to the "more power" server pool, because it's a common target for garbage traffic, but we've switched /login over to "more power" and we'll try to keep it there as long as we can unless it starts getting slammed, too.

tamaranth

2026/090: The End of Everything — M John Harrison

Several [fallen trees] could be found in a single glade, many with younger trees growing from the earth caked in their ripped-up root balls, so that it looked as though a different species was springing out of the carcass of the original. Birch from beech, Marnie thought. Holly from ash. A sense of horror overcame her. [50%]

The setting is the Kent coast, some years after what may be an alien invasion by the iGhetti. Humans are waging an ineffectual war against the invaders, who are rumoured to originate from the astral plane; who manifest as 'tall writhing bursts of light'; who may not have noticed that humans even exist. There are three protagonists. Richard Tennent is a mudlark who, at the beginning of the novel, has just found an iGhetti artefact in the surf. Marnie, his aunt, lives near the beach, in the shadow of the wing of a crashed aeroplane, and may be suffering dementia. Hampson, to whom Tennent tries to sell the artefact, is a collector who obsessively chronicles his experiments with similar artefacts. ( Read more... )

Current Mood: jubilant

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Reading

Let's Get Literate! Mid-Year Reading Check In

2026/095: The Gate, the Girl and the Dragon — Grace Lin

2026/094: Pandemonium — Daryl Gregory

2026/093: When There are Wolves Again — E J Swift

Superhero Comics I’d Actually Recommend

2026/092: The Last Hawk — Elizabeth Wein

Sidetracks - June 29, 2026

2026/091: Baba Yaga Laid an Egg — Dubravka Ugrešić

OSes with no CLI and thoughts on the staleness of modern computing

What was Classic MacOS like?

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2026/090: The End of Everything — M John Harrison

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July 2026

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