The name London Review of Books may mislead you. Ostensibly, the articles are book reviews, but barely. The books reviewed are more starting points into long-form articles on their subject matter. The articles are uniformly fantastic, though obviously not uniformly interesting to everyone. I find that every issue carries about three to five articles I find really interesting.
I‘ve just yesterday read an old LRB issue where in one article the book ostensibly reviewed was first mentioned after three whole pages!
Am I getting old or did it use to be much better 10 or 20 years ago? Half the LRB feels so politicised to me now, and the other half barely feels erudite. Was I just too young to pick it up back then?
I peeked at the front covers from the archives - 2007 has everything from global warming to the French riots, for example, although there's certainly more current affairs content. I'm not sure what you mean by the other decline in standards, though.
Parent already knows this, but for completeness to the grandparent, the LRB is part of a small genre of literary journal that does this with "reviews of books". The New York Review of Books (which begat the LRB), and the Times Literary Supplement when it's feeling risque.
If this company now owns DR DOS, why do they need to do a clean-room reimplementation?
The About page mentions some form of ownership but doesn’t address that.
> …DRI continuing to publish updates until their sale to Novell in 1991. … DR DOS would change hands from Novell to Caldera in 1996, and again from Caldera to DeviceLogics in 2002.
> In 2022, Whitehorn Ltd. Co. acquired DR DOS and began the process of clean-room re-implementing this historically significant operating system.
The front page only mentions a “legally unencumbered” reimplementation but not how their acquisition was encumbered.
What this doesn't really address to me is why DR-DOS. That documentation uses a lot of flowery language to say nothing or close to nothing.
I'm too young to have used DR-DOS in anger (so I may be missing some key feature), but it seems like the entire point of DR-DOS would have been its source code legacy and accumulated feature set.
Here, my immediate question is why not FreeDOS? I'd guess it was system requirements, but according to the documentation DR-DOS 9 requires 2 MB of RAM minimum and a 386!!
I have used a DR-DOS 7 that was set up with a nice task switcher, between terminate-and-stay-resident programs ( not true concurrent processing ).
This setup started WP5.1, a spread sheet -- I think Lotus123, and a graphics editing program. I think it switches using cntrl and the F keys, similar in feel to how a linux machine switches consoles.
I think at the time this was set up, only DR-DOS could do the task switching. I don't know if that is still true.
For example, the requirements for a CPU instruction set, in order for it to be properly virtualizable, had been known in the mainframe computing world for many, many years, when Intel and AMD came up with their unvirtualizable (except for VMware‘s heroic tricks) 32 bit instruction sets.
Those requirements and their different jargon from the mainframe world were re-discovered from the literature when virtualization in the PC world became a selling point.
(Edouard Bugnion et. al. - Hardware and Software Support for Virtualization)
I like Luhmann’s theory better. What i like about it is that Luhmann argues that the smallest denominator of a social system is a realation between two. Habermas says it can be brought down to an individual. Which in my mind defeats the “social” part.
Havin not read the underlying theory, is the society of one constructed with the belief that one has relations to one's self?
That is, I could see that the idea of a society of two could be derived from a society of one in that I could extend my desire to be kind to my past, present, and future selves, to a desire to be kind to selves that are not my own.
Kind of like a computing network being a generalisation of the network that exists inside anyone one machine in that networking is just i/o with more steps and more wire?
And there was a real cliff in recording time, not a marginal difference: a normal VHS tape could record a typical TV show, a normal Betamax tape could not. The utility function is a step function here.
(Both got more recording times through Long Play techniques a.k.a. quality degradation and through actually longer magnetic tape in the cassette, but at least in the beginning it was clear-cut).
I‘ve just yesterday read an old LRB issue where in one article the book ostensibly reviewed was first mentioned after three whole pages!
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