Stephen King is a very odd duck indeed. I recommend him highly, despite that. He writes with a clarity I find intoxicating. No joke on that. Literally get a buzz on some of his works.
Ack, Steven King is so 90's, and not in any good way.
I read of number of good, scary ones, however a lot of them just seemed B-grade stupid slasher material with some sex thrown in. Dean Koontz seemed to have a lot more originality, and Lovecraft is truely horrorific.
The Shining was published in 1977. The movie, 1980, was great. Although I suspect that was more down to Stanley Kubrick and Jack Nicholson than the actual story itself.
But yeah, I would not go out of my way for a Stephen King story.
Exactly, his early stuff was new, scary as heck.
Later, just seemed to start getting 'really' into weird stuff to push the envelope or perhaps stroke his ego on how shocking he could get.
Under-rated SciFi/Fantasy- Jasper Fforde Nursery Crimes, and Shades Of Gray.
Here is a free 1-page story that is pretty clever:
That's all likely valid. I've not read much of King recently. I'll get an opinion when I give the one Mrs. has a read. And given what I know of King the person, he's probably just going weird more than go for the ego shock type of thing. But again, I'll get a sample here in a while.
Really, I am not a huge horror fan. Koontz is pretty good. I've gotten that "buzz" from his work a time or two. His ability to form characters is not what King has, but his ability to take a person somewhere is very good. A big part of the appeal of King for me is those characters. With horror, I think I really need to identify with them for the genre to work. And of course, that is what makes "IT" so darn compelling, scary. Those characters are so vivid, they present as people I *know* and the transition from little kid scary to adult in that book is genius.
Definitely take my comments in the context of early King.
Not being a horror fan, I've not actually read Lovecraft. Any recommendations?
Maybe we should start a book thread... I am a big sci-fi fan and stay fairly current, once I worked my way through most of the Grand Masters.
500 years from now, historians will look back and see whole nations were kickstarted into modernization by overcharging everyone for internet and cellular phone services.
You seem to be among one of the few nations that didn't need or want the cash cow.
+++++++++++
Operating systems that just desire to feed the economic review have become a real moral hazard to both nations and individual.
I really wonder (and worry a bit) about kids that are more interested in cellular pad phones than books. Study as a pleasure is getting harder to demonstrate to them.
OS wars? Oh goody!
Windows, Android, Apple, Linux. Pah, it's all been downhill since the days of CP/M, I say!
My 15 year old daughter asked me the other day what version of Apple iphone I had when I was a kid. I told her we had one telephone for the whole house and it sat on a table in the hallway.
CP/M was downhill without a crowd -- single user on floppy disks, no internet, just a very noisy dot-matrix printer.
We never had just one telephone. My dad was an MD and insisted he had one bedside and a few others around the house. I'd say we started with one on each floor, began install extension plug; and my sister force dad to provider her a separate line by doing the teenage girl phone addiction.
By 1970, we almost needed an operator... phone in the bathrooms, a phone in the garage, a phone in every bed room. And of course, we were sprouting multiple televisions as well. No longer did the family sit around and watch TV together.
My 15 year old daughter asked me the other day what version of Apple iphone I had when I was a kid.
We were someplace with several generations of old cars and my daughter pointed to a 1920's era pickup truck and asked if that's what cars were like when I was a kid. As I smacked her upside the head while pointing to a 1960's era muscle car, I told here they were more like that!
It is hard to imagine that we've only had iPhone and all the change it has brought on since 2007. Sadly, I could still keep that 1920 truck or 1960 car running and useful today but my first iPhone is pretty much junk.
CP/M was downhill without a crowd -- single user on floppy disks, no internet, just a very noisy dot-matrix printer.
We never had just one telephone. My dad was an MD and insisted he had one bedside and a few others around the house. I'd say we started with one on each floor, began install extension plug; and my sister force dad to provider her a separate line by doing the teenage girl phone addiction.
By 1970, we almost needed an operator... phone in the bathrooms, a phone in the garage, a phone in every bed room. And of course, we were sprouting multiple televisions as well. No longer did the family sit around and watch TV together.
Shouldn't dis CP/M. It may not have been perfect but it started us on the path that led to what we have today.
Did I hear someone bad mouthing CP/M?..rolls up sleeves...CP/M is small, simple, efficient. Now a days it's Open Source and runs on a Propeller. What is not to like? People here have been complaining about modern day software "bloat" and complexity. Even suggesting we should not have multi-users systems. CP/M is then a fine example for them.
Mind you...I'm not sure I want to praise CP/M for leading to where we are today. A direct heir of CP/M was qdos and hence MS-DOS. Totally horrible and held back progress for a decade. Still persisting in the bizarre world of Windows with it's drive letters, wrong way around path separators, non-standard text file line endings, case insensitive file names etc, etc, etc....
Well. I am a bit dismayed by where we are today.
CP/M and its single user design did lead to a rather merry chase through messy crashes and huge data looses caused by viruses.
It all would have been avoidable if each file had user and group rights with choice of read, write, and execute modes of use for each.
These things happen though when college dropouts with lots of cash rush out and buy something that is beyond their personal ability to code. It comes from having punch tape store your software code, and IBM not wanting to share the 'good stuff'.
Forty years later, every youngster wants to drop out of university and become a billionaire. This is called 'progress'. The world out there puzzles me. It is so messy, a bit unfair, and quite chaotic.
Wasn't it some CP/M producers that tried to market those 8" Formatted and bootable floppies for their particular system at $100USD each?
FREEdos is what we have today. You can take your Intel computer and use it for all and everything. You just need to locate an old version of Wordstar and Visicalc, and perhaps a modem.
He's some multi-tasking kernel, written with a macro assembler and programmed against with static jump tables. The guy who did it, went insane, killed most everybody he knows, and the whole thing is kind of amazing, but spooky with no source code left behind...
Nobody is quite sure how it works, only that it does, until it doesn't.
Our house phone was on the wall, and I wish I had taken a picture of all the handy numbers and notes written right on the wall all around it. Beautiful.
I might just have to mock that up for the grand kids to see one day.
I had a secret extension made from some old parts and a switch. To dial, I just did the pulses manually.
Regarding CP/M and MSDOS... Truth is, Microsoft could have done better after a time. They made the compatibility choice as well as the embrace and extinguish choice. Turns out, both of those combined solidified their position in the market, and was a great business move.
Much better technical choices were everywhere and it's not like the guys at Microsoft could not have implemented them. Had nothing to do with anything. It was business first and foremost.
CP/M and its single user design did lead to a rather merry chase through messy crashes and huge data looses caused by viruses.
No, it did not.
I don't recall there being any talk of any virus on CP/M. If you have a link to a story about one that would be interesting.
The first virus in the wild in the personal computer era was " Elk Cloner" on the Apple II. The first PC virus was "Brain" in 1986. pretty much after CP/M was dead and gone.
These things happen though when college dropouts with lots of cash rush out and buy something that is beyond their personal ability to code.
I wonder who you mean
On the other hand those things can happen when you have a very small machine with a max of 64K RAM and no virtual memory and you want some kind of disk operating system for it. It has to be small. No room for user and group rights with choice of read, write, and execute modes of use for each etc etc.
See this great History of Computer Viruses by Mikko Hypponen here:
with the fascinating story of finding the authors of Brain, in India.
And here they are: Amjad Farooq Alvi and Basit Farooq Alvi
I don't recall there being any talk of any virus on CP/M. If you have a link to a story about one that would be interesting.
The first virus in the wild in the personal computer era was " Elk Cloner" on the Apple II. The first PC virus was "Brain" in 1986. pretty much after CP/M was dead and gone.
So you are saying that AppleDOS wasn't based on a CP/M scheme
Well, that's what it says in the article you linked to. "The company considered using Digital Research's CP/M, but Wozniak sought an operating system that was easier to use. On 10 April 1978 Apple signed a $13,000 contract with Shepardson Microsystems to write a DOS and deliver it within 35 days"
Call it a CP/M "scheme" if you like. But given an 8 bit machine with tiny memory space and a floppy drive you are not going to come up with anything much different. You need files, files need names. You need a means to write, read, copy, rename, delete, list them. Run code from them. That is about all you can fit in. Intel had someting similar with their ISIS operating system. There were others also.
Me too. I'll put one on my next Powells Books trip list and see if it sucks me in. Sometimes a good horror book is good. Like I say, not generally a fan of the genre, but it can work.
The only thing with Lovecraft is he has a very long-winded descriptive style.
I do believe this harkens back to the pulp days when they were paid by word.
These Great Old Ones, Castro continued, were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape - for did not this star-fashioned image prove it? - but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die. They all lay in stone houses in Their great city of R'lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a glorious surrection when the stars and the earth might once more be ready for Them. But at that time some force from outside must serve to liberate Their bodies. The spells that preserved them intact likewise prevented Them from making an initial move, and They could only lie awake in the dark and think whilst uncounted millions of years rolled by. They knew all that was occurring in the universe, for Their mode of speech was transmitted thought. Even now They talked in Their tombs. When, after infinities of chaos, the first men came, the Great Old Ones spoke to the sensitive among them by moulding their dreams; for only thus could Their language reach the fleshly minds of mammals.
Heh, well it was the 20's-30's I believe.
At the time I expect it was quite uncommon for a literary person to even contemplate writing as such. I think it was an early sort of grammatical overloading, really almost forcing one to take in 'everything' without benefit of notational stops or pauses.
This may or may not have been a good example, however the horror does build quite nicely, and he goes in directions that are unexpected to say the least.
"Born in Providence, Lovecraft was a sickly child whose parents died insane. When he was 16, he wrote the astronomy column in the Providence Tribune. Between 1908 and 1923, he wrote short stories for Weird Tales magazine, among others. He died in Providence, in poverty, on March 15, 1937. His most famous novel is considered to be "At the Mountains of Madness," about an expedition to the South Pole, which discovers strange creatures beneath a mountain."
Wasn't there an OS or Linux distro about 25 years ago that was based on magi/curses? Not ncurses
On the origins of it, I am debating what I want to say. Let's just say really smart people involved with big name companies you would recognize are involved. I've been tracking incoming instances, and I have high confidence in some definitive origins.
Heard yesterday: "that is not part of the ask, but it could end up a big want"
Of course my dynamically adaptive, organic parser makes it all transparent to me. No worries, other than the curio it is here. I'll hear that and it makes great sense. I'm only aware because of this fun meta discussion we are having.
I'll simply respond in a compatabile way and get the work done.
So, User Requirements, Customer request, etc are out of fashion?
Funny, the British folks I work with at the Sales/Lawyer/Solutions level kept talking about this annex or that annex... which I guess is British legalese.
And they love to use 'bespoke' as American's prefer custom, one-off.
Comments
Ack, Steven King is so 90's, and not in any good way.
I read of number of good, scary ones, however a lot of them just seemed B-grade stupid slasher material with some sex thrown in. Dean Koontz seemed to have a lot more originality, and Lovecraft is truely horrorific.
The Shining was published in 1977. The movie, 1980, was great. Although I suspect that was more down to Stanley Kubrick and Jack Nicholson than the actual story itself.
But yeah, I would not go out of my way for a Stephen King story.
Exactly, his early stuff was new, scary as heck.
Later, just seemed to start getting 'really' into weird stuff to push the envelope or perhaps stroke his ego on how shocking he could get.
Under-rated SciFi/Fantasy- Jasper Fforde Nursery Crimes, and Shades Of Gray.
Here is a free 1-page story that is pretty clever:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/dec/24/extract.originalwriting
Yes, its a long 1-pager.
Really, I am not a huge horror fan. Koontz is pretty good. I've gotten that "buzz" from his work a time or two. His ability to form characters is not what King has, but his ability to take a person somewhere is very good. A big part of the appeal of King for me is those characters. With horror, I think I really need to identify with them for the genre to work. And of course, that is what makes "IT" so darn compelling, scary. Those characters are so vivid, they present as people I *know* and the transition from little kid scary to adult in that book is genius.
Definitely take my comments in the context of early King.
Not being a horror fan, I've not actually read Lovecraft. Any recommendations?
Maybe we should start a book thread...
After so few posts the acronym OS has already proven it's opaque symmetry. Loosely given to mean many things as languages and interpretations evolve.
OS = Open Source
OS = Operating System
OS = Off-topic Stuff
OS = Oliver Stone
unofficially and obscurely splendid
OS = Oh Sh..
I'm scratching my head wondering what kind of operating system Stephen King is
Well, that could start a whole new debate, but he's certainly got plenty of old school hard(back) data in storage.
You seem to be among one of the few nations that didn't need or want the cash cow.
+++++++++++
Operating systems that just desire to feed the economic review have become a real moral hazard to both nations and individual.
I really wonder (and worry a bit) about kids that are more interested in cellular pad phones than books. Study as a pleasure is getting harder to demonstrate to them.
Windows, Android, Apple, Linux. Pah, it's all been downhill since the days of CP/M, I say!
My 15 year old daughter asked me the other day what version of Apple iphone I had when I was a kid. I told her we had one telephone for the whole house and it sat on a table in the hallway.
We never had just one telephone. My dad was an MD and insisted he had one bedside and a few others around the house. I'd say we started with one on each floor, began install extension plug; and my sister force dad to provider her a separate line by doing the teenage girl phone addiction.
By 1970, we almost needed an operator... phone in the bathrooms, a phone in the garage, a phone in every bed room. And of course, we were sprouting multiple televisions as well. No longer did the family sit around and watch TV together.
We were someplace with several generations of old cars and my daughter pointed to a 1920's era pickup truck and asked if that's what cars were like when I was a kid. As I smacked her upside the head while pointing to a 1960's era muscle car, I told here they were more like that!
It is hard to imagine that we've only had iPhone and all the change it has brought on since 2007. Sadly, I could still keep that 1920 truck or 1960 car running and useful today but my first iPhone is pretty much junk.
Shouldn't dis CP/M. It may not have been perfect but it started us on the path that led to what we have today.
Mind you...I'm not sure I want to praise CP/M for leading to where we are today. A direct heir of CP/M was qdos and hence MS-DOS. Totally horrible and held back progress for a decade. Still persisting in the bizarre world of Windows with it's drive letters, wrong way around path separators, non-standard text file line endings, case insensitive file names etc, etc, etc....
CP/M and its single user design did lead to a rather merry chase through messy crashes and huge data looses caused by viruses.
It all would have been avoidable if each file had user and group rights with choice of read, write, and execute modes of use for each.
These things happen though when college dropouts with lots of cash rush out and buy something that is beyond their personal ability to code. It comes from having punch tape store your software code, and IBM not wanting to share the 'good stuff'.
Forty years later, every youngster wants to drop out of university and become a billionaire. This is called 'progress'. The world out there puzzles me. It is so messy, a bit unfair, and quite chaotic.
Wasn't it some CP/M producers that tried to market those 8" Formatted and bootable floppies for their particular system at $100USD each?
FREEdos is what we have today. You can take your Intel computer and use it for all and everything. You just need to locate an old version of Wordstar and Visicalc, and perhaps a modem.
He's some multi-tasking kernel, written with a macro assembler and programmed against with static jump tables. The guy who did it, went insane, killed most everybody he knows, and the whole thing is kind of amazing, but spooky with no source code left behind...
Nobody is quite sure how it works, only that it does, until it doesn't.
Also, turtles all the way down.
I might just have to mock that up for the grand kids to see one day.
I had a secret extension made from some old parts and a switch. To dial, I just did the pulses manually.
Regarding CP/M and MSDOS... Truth is, Microsoft could have done better after a time. They made the compatibility choice as well as the embrace and extinguish choice. Turns out, both of those combined solidified their position in the market, and was a great business move.
Much better technical choices were everywhere and it's not like the guys at Microsoft could not have implemented them. Had nothing to do with anything. It was business first and foremost.
I bet whatever he runs on has no ECC or parity bits!
I don't recall there being any talk of any virus on CP/M. If you have a link to a story about one that would be interesting.
The first virus in the wild in the personal computer era was " Elk Cloner" on the Apple II. The first PC virus was "Brain" in 1986. pretty much after CP/M was dead and gone. I wonder who you mean
On the other hand those things can happen when you have a very small machine with a max of 64K RAM and no virtual memory and you want some kind of disk operating system for it. It has to be small. No room for user and group rights with choice of read, write, and execute modes of use for each etc etc.
See this great History of Computer Viruses by Mikko Hypponen here:
with the fascinating story of finding the authors of Brain, in India.
And here they are: Amjad Farooq Alvi and Basit Farooq Alvi
So you are saying that AppleDOS wasn't based on a CP/M scheme.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_DOS
Call it a CP/M "scheme" if you like. But given an 8 bit machine with tiny memory space and a floppy drive you are not going to come up with anything much different. You need files, files need names. You need a means to write, read, copy, rename, delete, list them. Run code from them. That is about all you can fit in. Intel had someting similar with their ISIS operating system. There were others also.
Hmm, looks like I am far from even halfway through Lovecraft.
Quick google found this online library:
http://www.dagonbytes.com/thelibrary/lovecraft/index.html
Can't go wrong starting here, although I much prefer reading from an actual book.
http://www.dagonbytes.com/thelibrary/lovecraft/thecallofcthulhu.htm
The only thing with Lovecraft is he has a very long-winded descriptive style.
I do believe this harkens back to the pulp days when they were paid by word.
These Great Old Ones, Castro continued, were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape - for did not this star-fashioned image prove it? - but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die. They all lay in stone houses in Their great city of R'lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a glorious surrection when the stars and the earth might once more be ready for Them. But at that time some force from outside must serve to liberate Their bodies. The spells that preserved them intact likewise prevented Them from making an initial move, and They could only lie awake in the dark and think whilst uncounted millions of years rolled by. They knew all that was occurring in the universe, for Their mode of speech was transmitted thought. Even now They talked in Their tombs. When, after infinities of chaos, the first men came, the Great Old Ones spoke to the sensitive among them by moulding their dreams; for only thus could Their language reach the fleshly minds of mammals.
Wow!
Honestly, I'm not as bothered by the verbosity as I am the lack of paragraphs and connecting phrases. Could use a bit of grammar polish too.
There are ay least three great paragraphs in there.
Some authors do that however. I've seen a similar mess more than once, just as I've seen grammar, form and other abuses done for creative effect.
In fiction, I don't judge it too harshly, until after I've read enough to understand the context.
As always, the test is one of immersion. Does it take me there, and do I stay there?
If it does, that is a pass.
Sorry, I had no resist.
Heh, well it was the 20's-30's I believe.
At the time I expect it was quite uncommon for a literary person to even contemplate writing as such. I think it was an early sort of grammatical overloading, really almost forcing one to take in 'everything' without benefit of notational stops or pauses.
This may or may not have been a good example, however the horror does build quite nicely, and he goes in directions that are unexpected to say the least.
"Born in Providence, Lovecraft was a sickly child whose parents died insane. When he was 16, he wrote the astronomy column in the Providence Tribune. Between 1908 and 1923, he wrote short stories for Weird Tales magazine, among others. He died in Providence, in poverty, on March 15, 1937. His most famous novel is considered to be "At the Mountains of Madness," about an expedition to the South Pole, which discovers strange creatures beneath a mountain."
Wasn't there an OS or Linux distro about 25 years ago that was based on magi/curses? Not ncurses
On the origins of it, I am debating what I want to say. Let's just say really smart people involved with big name companies you would recognize are involved. I've been tracking incoming instances, and I have high confidence in some definitive origins.
Heard yesterday: "that is not part of the ask, but it could end up a big want"
Of course my dynamically adaptive, organic parser makes it all transparent to me. No worries, other than the curio it is here. I'll hear that and it makes great sense. I'm only aware because of this fun meta discussion we are having.
I'll simply respond in a compatabile way and get the work done.
So, User Requirements, Customer request, etc are out of fashion?
Funny, the British folks I work with at the Sales/Lawyer/Solutions level kept talking about this annex or that annex... which I guess is British legalese.
And they love to use 'bespoke' as American's prefer custom, one-off.