View 510 March 17 - 23, 2008 (original) (raw)

Sunday, March 23, 2008

Easter Sunday

Anniversary of the Star Wars Speech

Star Wars

Easter is more important and by a lot, but today is the anniversary of Reagan's 1983 speech that began the Strategic Defense Initiative known as SDI. Senator Ted Kennedy immediately named it "Star Wars" and the press picked that up.

The policy behind that speech, and some of the wording, was done by the Citizen's Advisory Council on National Space Policy, Dr. Jerry Pournelle, Chairman. The council first met in Larry Niven's home in Tarzana in 1980 after the election of 1980 to draft the transition team papers on space and military space policy for the incoming Reagan Administration. We reported to General Bernard Schriever USAF Ret., who was the officer formally charged with supplying the papers. Colonel Francis X. Kane, USAF Ret. had been Schriever's Director of Plans, and was charged with preparing the papers.

Kane was a co-author of Strategy of Technology (formal authors Stefan T. Possony and Jerry Pournelle), and had been director of Project Forecast in 1964. Forecast was the Air Systems Division study of warfare and USAF requirements for the year 1975. Project 75, also done in 1964 at Aerospace Corporation San Bernardino Operations, was the Ballistic Systems Division study of 1975 force and technology requirements. The Director was William Dorrance; the editor was Dr. Jerry Pournelle.

While the first report was in preparation, Possony's old student and colleague Dr. Richard Allen, formerly of the Hoover Institution, was appointed National Security Advisor, and agreed to give the Council Reports directly to the President, who read them all.

General Daniel Graham's High Frontier organization was allied with the Council and supplied much of the political muscle required to chip through some of the bureaucracy that opposed SDI.

The president adopted, and High Frontier gathered political support, for the Strategic Defense Initiative, which was first announced in the "Star Wars" speech. The Council supplied intellectual arguments, technical support (we included among others Max Hunter, Dr. Charles Gould, and many other rocket scientists and engineers; we were technically spot on), and sometimes speech phrases: Reagan was a better speech writer than any of his staff or the Council, but at least one phrase dreamed up by publisher (and long time friend) Jim Baen went directly into the speech. Jim was inordinately proud, as he should have been.

At Reykjavik Gorbachev begged Reagan to back down from Star Wars. The President would not do so.

It is my belief that SDI was the final blow that ended the USSR.

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A good night last night. I got almost 6 hours of sleep, after Vista nearly drove me nuts.

I need help. Roxanne, a Vista machine, is one of my main machine, and particularly has most of my games. It also has utilities.

I need to scrub to bare metal and install the newest Vista Ultimate in hopes that it will make the machine usable again. At the moment it refuses to believe there is any such thing as a CDROM; all drives are DVD only, and half the time it won't even see those. There are networking problems. Roxanne is all messed up, and she needs to be started over.

If that doesn't work I scrub again and install XP.

But I do not really want to have to reinstall all the applications; indeed I may not even have some of the original disks. Is there any way I can backup and save apps in a way that they can be reinstalled on a new Vista Ultimate? Or must I simply battle my way through application at a time and hope?

Advice appreciated, but PLEASE do not speculate. If you know how to accomplish something I very much appreciate the advice, but I do not need an exploration path. I can come up with that myself and in fact that's sort of what I do. Thanks.

What I want is the most painless way to blow away Vista, reinstall Vista, and get this machine back where it is now, but working.

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Subject: Exile - and Glory by Jerry Pournelle available for pre-order on Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1416555633/jerrypournellcha

--- Roland Dobbins

If you like, go order a copy. Meet Dan Alderson, among others. Find out about Nerva engines. (Yes, it's an old story, but it's not out dated; it's about starting an asteroid civilization.) Needless to say you will see this announcement again.

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Product keys: if your system believes that an installation program will be on a DVD, but it is in fact on a CD, then apparently Windows installer simply rejects the product code. It does not tell you that your disk is the wrong format. This cost me a lot of time last night. It turns out that Office 2007 Ultimate will fit on a CDROM, but in fact wants to be on a DVD; and attempts to install from a CDROM will fail with rejection of product key and no other notice.

Be warned.

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It took all afternoon, but I have eliminated 5 Gigabit Ethernet switches to be replaced by two larger ones, and got rid of a snake's nest of cables and power cords.

It turns out that the smallest tasks -- this was pretty trivial after all -- take a lot longer than expected, are more daunting, and when things go wrong like dropping a screw produce completely out of proportion emotional storms. It's possible to go very slowly, remember that it's no real disaster to lose a screw, do one thing at a time, and systematically get the job done; as witness that you are seeing this, which means I have the Ethernet network back up and running. And it's sure a lot easier to see what's happening now.

But it's also a lesson on just what the effects of a brain growth plus radiation therapy can do to one's emotions.

It has been a good day. Richard drove down for Mass and brunch at Sportsman's Lodge. Alex and Dana came to brunch. Herrin, being 8 months along, didn't want the long drive with Richard from Tehachapi where they live, and one can hardly blame her. Jenny is in China so we didn't hear from her, but we heard from the other kids and grandchild. And while I have little energy, my right ear is deaf and ringing, I taste brass, still: I can swallow. My eyes don't focus well but I can see. I can walk and I can write, and apparently I can be interesting enough to get you to subscribe.

A week more of Zaps, and then a period of rest and recuperation and then a reassessment. We detected this problem six months ago. I had two friend who were dead in six months from detection of a tumor in their heads. Me, I'm getting better.

Count your blessings.

===================

You cannot imagine how much I detest Vista. It is the slowest OD for accessing the Internet of any I have ever seen, and that's independent of the browser. It can't see my internal network sometimes, then later it sees the machines it ignored. It can see machines it can't connect to. It ignores CD's entirely.

A big download on Satine, an XP single processor system, took 20 minutes. The same download on the Vista Core 2 Duo system is expected to take more than two hours. Same file from the same (MSDN) server on a Sunday afternoon. Vista is a resource hog and gives very little for what it consumes.

Of course I was using it early. It may be a mess. I am going to scrub to bare metal and reinstall and see if that helps. If not then we do it again and install XP, and I forget Vista.

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Does anyone happen to know if Eve On Line can be played on a Mac, or must that be done (if on a Mac) through a Windows installation? World of Warcraft plays very well on a Mac. Don't know about Eve, and I'd like to know.

Hah. I have email saying there is a Mac client for Eve. Good enough! I'll download it.

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