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View 747 Monday, October 22, 2012

I am beginning to catch up, and we’re preparing a reopening of Chaos Manor Reviews with bits on the new iPad, Kindle Fire, and Windows 7 vs Windows 8. I have new machines (elegant ones) for 7 and for 8 so the comparisons are fair.

Bottom line is that for most users you’ll find 7 good enough, and if you’re upgrading from XP or Vista 7 is probably where you want to go; but if you’re planning new hardware there are reasons you might consider 8. More on that when it’s done. I’ll also have book reviews, some like the new Home Lab books by Robert Bruce Thompson LONG overdue. If you’re home schooling and you are not familiar with Thompson’s home lab books from O’Reilly, you should go inform yourself. Full reviews coming up.

Tonight is the foreign policy debate between President Obama and Candidate Romney. You will not forget which is the candidate and which is President; the President will make certain of that.

The Democrat strategy will be that this is a sensitive matter of national security, there are Things You Do Not Know, there are Things We Can’t Tell You, and there are Delicate Issues at Stake. And Mr. Obama will try to show that Mr. Romney is being disrespectful to the President, and that is a dangerous thing to do, and lessens the prestige of these United States, and How Dare You accuse me of making politics out of foreign policy matters? Politics used to stop at the water’s edge. What’s wrong with you people?

Mr. Romney’s strategy should be to avoid looking unpresidential and to avoid looking disrespectful. That will mean that he will not go hard after Mr. Obama, but Mr. Obama is correct: he is the President of these United States, and dissing him will not be good for the country. Since it is obvious to everyone in this country that the Administration’s policy in Libya was not optimum, it will not really be necessary for Mr. Romney to make that point. The voters will see that one for themselves. Mr. Romney can emphasize what he plans to do that is widely different from what we are doing now, but again he needs to be careful not to commit the nation to more adventures.

This will be a tightrope across Niagara for Romney. He is more than up to doing it well. Those who want to see him show up the President as an incompetent will be disappointed; or at least I hope for that outcome.

Regarding Benghazi, it is now clear that the President should have seen the attack coming, and ought to have had some Marines ready to go in to defend the Consulate – or else he ought to have closed that diplomatic post. The Brits had already pulled out of there.

Once the attack happened it was obvious to everyone but the White House that it was a terrorist attack. There may or may not have been good reason to pretend that we were prepared to accept the “disgusting movie” explanation, and for the President to send out spokespeople to say that we would accept that explanation. We really don’t want relations with what passes for government in Libya to get any worse than they are now. And of course the President can’t say anything like that.

This is why Mr. Romney should be careful.

It appears that the Administration was clueless. It’s pretty certain that they didn’t pay enough attention to the warning signs. It should have been preventable – a helicopter sent in to evacuate all the American citizens should have been possible without diplomatic consequences, and I expect we have enough Marines in Tripoli who could have been sent to Benghazi in time for that matter – but we didn’t do that. It may even be that the White House didn’t understand the situation by dawn of 12 September although that seems less likely. I think it more likely that someone, possibly at State and possibly in the White House, understood as soon as the reports on the severity and organization of the attack came in that this was an organized act of war in the continuing War on Civilization; but a policy decision was made to pretend otherwise for reasons of state. It has since become clear that no one can possibly believe that.

My thanks to all those who have responded to the Pledge Drive and sent in new subscriptions or renewals. This place operates on the public radio model: it’s free, but it stays open because of its subscribers. You can find out more on that at http://www.jerrypournelle.com/paying.html

This would be a great time to subscribe.

A minor inquiry:

We use Windows Security Essentials and have done so since it came into existence, and it has been Good Enough. Today I had a problem with a main system (this one in fact) seeming to run slowly. I reset it and it came up slowly. But that, it turned 0ut, was because somehow some update I allowed installed The Weather Channel, which can really slow things down. I got rid of that and as I sometimes do decided it would be no bad thing to do an outside scan. Made use of the ESET on line scanner. And that wouldn’t work. It began to download the updated scanning package and stopped. That was a bit of a concern – some attacks do try to disable protective packages – so I tried it on another machine that hasn’t been subject to any problems and the same thing happened. I then ran the McAfee online scan, which found nothing wrong with either system. And checked Windows Security Essentials, which doesn’t believe anything is wrong. And consulted Rick Hellewell my expert security advisor.

We all agree there’s nothing to be concerned about but I wondered if anyone out there had noticed a problem with the ESET on-line scanner. (I sometimes use ESET mostly because they are a long time sponsor of Leo Laporte. As it happens I did a TWIT show with Leo and John Dvorak and Dwight Silverman yesterday.) Has anyone heard of some kind of problem with their on-line scan system? Overloaded perhaps although since the download stalled out at the same percentage on each machine at different times of day, that seems highly unlikely. More likely a glitch in their profile file.

AHA!

I just got a notice to upgrade Java. Since the ESET scanner uses a Java script, it’s pretty clear. Once I get Java updated I’ll try this again.

Of course that opens up another topic.

The debate is done, and it is possible to award it on points to Mr. Obama, or perhaps it was a tie. However, all Mr. Romney had to do was to continue to be presidential, and he did that. Mr. Obama had to make the case that Mr. Romney is not fit to be President, and Mr. Obama did not do that. Mr. Romney remained Presidential, he presented his case, and he showed that he is familiar with foreign policy and the foreign policy issues; he showed that he could be President.

This is a big win for Mr. Romney, particularly since the President tried his best to goad Mr. Romney into some kind of explosion, or a statement that could be construed as disrespectful for the office or the nation; and that didn’t happen. Thus no matter how one scores the debate on technical points, the big winner was Mr. Romney – and indeed for most of the debate, if you had not known who was President and who aspired to the job, you might have thought that Mr. Obama was the candidate running up from behind in hopes of catching the leader.

We will of course see huge spins tomorrow.

Subject: A possible tie

Jerry, I’ve been hearing speculation on the radio about the possibility that the votes in the Electoral College could end up as a tie. This would throw the election into the House of Representatives. And, as it would be decided by the current, Republican controlled House, that would give the presidency to Romney. (I’m not sure how correct that is, as each state has only one vote instead of the members voting separately, but that’s what I heard.)

Now this is just plain Bad News for Mr. Obama. Not the probability that the House would, in effect, reject him, but the fact that the possibility is even being discussed. Just the fact that people are publicly considering a tie shows that the very best he can hope for is just barely squeaking by, and for him, that’s not good.

The Republicans hold a majority in the House, but if the House decides the presidency, each state has one vote, decided by its delegation. I don’t know the actual makeup of the House state by state. Probably there are a majority of Republicans but I am not sure.

But at the moment it appears that the election will be decided by the ground game. Who can get the most votes out. Those who feel strongly about the outcome should take heed.

View 746 Saturday, October 20, 2012

I’ve been recovering from stuff including having my nose chopped on. The good news is that the cancer on the tip of my nose wasn’t the kind that metastasizes, and after two MOHS job operations they have apparently got it all. They also got all the other little stuff, so once again I am cancer free.

This leaves me free to start Chaos Manor Reviews up again. There’s a lot going on in the high tech world – Newsweek folds, Apple iPhone 5 and a new iPad, Windows 8, silicon drives that you can afford as your boot drive making new systems screaming fast, Sprint is being bought by Japanese capital that looks to me as if it’s a capital export from Japan to the US, which is an interesting prediction about the relative economies (and possibly of the election). And more.

The bad news, such as it is, is that this is the week of the KUSC pledge drive, which means that it’s pledge drive week here at Chaos Manor. I confess that I ignored the Spring pledge drive because I wasn’t too sure just how much work I’d be able to do, but we’re back.

For those who don’t know, this place and Chaos Manor Reviews operate together on the ‘public radio’ model, which is to say they are broadcast free, but I won’t keep them up unless I get enough subscriptions to make it worth while. As I get older what I consider ‘enough’ changes a bit as does how much I am able to do, but I am the first to say I haven’t done as much in the past few months as I think I should do. That changes now. I’m catching up on fiction – I’ve done a few hundred words a day for the past week – and that takes time, but I also have more energy. It’s the energy factor that’s the true limiter (although I will say that I have not been enjoying the election; but then I never wanted this place to be a political commentary site to begin with. Yes, the election is important, particularly to the future of high tech, and yes I’m supposed to know something about politics having managed several winning campaigns and having been science/tech advisor to a number of officials including a Speaker of the House; but I find the interaction of high tech and politics more interesting than politics itself.

All of which brings us to pledge week, and Paying for This Place. I don’t bug you about that very often, but I will during pledge week. I time my pledge drives to correspond with KUSC’s since I got the idea of running this like public radio from listening to them. So there you have it. And my hearty thanks to all those who continued to subscribe and to renew their subscriptions – we have a pretty high renewal rate – even through this year when there has been no pledge drive.

We have a new and very fast Windows 8 machine here, and I’ll have a preliminary review presently in Chaos Manor Reviews. I have some complaints, but they may be due to my ignorance: as usual the Microsoft HELP system is ghastly and unhelpful, and since Windows 8 does things much differently from Windows 7 (which works very well but very differently) knowing Windows 7 won’t help you with 8.

Windows 8 has drivers for a lot of stuff, and for the most part they work: but when it comes time to disconnect something, like an external USB drive, when you go to the “Safely remove hardware” icon (which still hides in the hidden icons thingy at the lower right of what used to be the task bar) and click on that, often as not it will tell you that the device is in use, and you have to close the app that’s using it before you can remove it. The problem is that there is no way I know of to get a list of running applications. Task Manager doesn’t work the way it used to, and there’s really no way to know what is and isn’t running. I think I have closed down ALL applications, but I still get the same error message when trying to remove an external drive. Removing it anyway can cause Windows 8 to go into what amounts to paralysis, requiring a hardware reset to recover from it.

As I have said, there are a lot of things to like about Windows 8, but that isn’t one of them, and so far I have no source of information on what to do about it. Perhaps one of you knows? Otherwise I’ll keep looking. And yes, I have a bunch of top flight advisors who usually know this sort of stuff, but none of us are experts on Windows 8, and I’m putting it to them at the same time I’m asking you…)

I understand that the UN wants to monitor the US elections to be sure they are fair. This should be interesting.

The debates worked as planned. The Republican strategy is to make the Democrats run on their record. “You know what President Obama will do for the next four years because you see what he has done in the last four.”

The Democratic strategy is to change the subject and show that Romney is unfit to be President. “He doesn’t have a five point plan, he has a one point plan” to tax the middle class and let the rich get richer. And the ads show grandma going over a cliff in her wheelchair, and feature the man whose wife died of cancer because her health care benefits weren’t good enough, and so forth. Romney, they say, doesn’t care about you, and in fact he’s a bit of a monster.

The Republican counter to that is to show Romney as Presidential with plenty of dignitas and gravitas.

The debates are of course the epitome of those strategies, and they have worked that way. And absent videos of Romney pulling the wings off flies or torturing puppies, we’ll hear complaints about putting women in binders – whatever that means, sound like something from a John Norman novel – and other stories about Romney’s evil intentions, countered by Romney keeping his temper and looking Presidential as he chides – gently – the President of the United States. A tough job, of course. So far Romney has done it well.

That may change with the foreign policy debate, since it is now clear that the CIA station chief reported that the attack on the Benghazi consulate was not a demonstration but a planned attack, and did so well before the US ambassador to the UN told everyone that it was something else. Why did the President not know this? But I do not think Mr. Romney will press this hard, nor should he. He is the President of the United States, and as Mr. Clinton reminded us, he’s the only president we’ve got. And debating foreign policy is a tricky matter. I would guess that Romney will come out of this debate unharmed and possibly a little ahead. The President will try to make any criticism of his policies a criticism of the United States; Romney must be careful about all that.

It promises to be an interesting evening. And we are closer and closer to the election.

This would be a good time to renew your subscription!

View 746 Wednesday, October 17, 2012

The Strategy of Technology

A123 Systems filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. This is the company that has received $250 million or more in Federal grants; it was hoped that it would become the beginning focal point for an electric car industry in America, and was part of the administration’s support of Green Energy and the quest for the currently rare high paying Green Energy jobs mentioned in many of the President’s speeches.

This follows the collapse of solar panel manufacturer Solyndra LLC, which couldn’t compete with Chinese made solar panels. While A123 will sell most of its assets and may continue to operate.

The intentions of the Administration were good: although the high paying permanent Green Energy jobs haven’t materialized, the search for sustainable energy technology is no bad thing; and development of high efficiency batteries for electric cars can be important.

The government should not be investing in companies. It should not be picking winners and losers. We do, however, as a people have a high interest in developing key technologies..

As Possony, Kane, and I showed in The Strategy of Technology, technologies can be created on demand through proper strategies. That is vital to military capabilities.

"A gigantic technological race is in progress between interception and penetration and each time capacity for interception makes progress it is answered by a new advance in capacity for penetration. Thus a new form of strategy is developing in peacetime, a strategy of which the phrase ‘arms race’ used prior to the old great conflicts is hardly more than a faint reflection.

There are no battles in this strategy; each side is merely trying to outdo in performance the equipment of the other. It has been termed ‘logistic strategy’. Its tactics are industrial, technical, and financial. It is a form of indirect attrition; instead of destroying enemy resources, its object is to make them obsolete, thereby forcing on him an enormous expenditure….

A silent and apparently peaceful war is therefore in progress, but it could well be a war which of itself could be decisive."
–General d’Armee Andre Beaufre

https://www.google.com/#hl=en&sclient=psy-ab&q=strategy+of+technology&oq=strategy+of+technology&gs_l=hp.3..0j0i30l2j0i5i30.146.4190.0.4786.22.18.0.1.1.2.847.3601.5j7j3j2j6-1.18.0.les%3B..0.0…1c.1.Fcs2rKtfiZ8&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.&fp=113d4d484dcc5d02&bpcl=35440803&biw=1120&bih=472

This can be true in the development of critical national capabilities as well.

One such capability is access to space. Yes, the aeronautical business was developed by private enterprise – but much of its technology was done in partnership between industry and government. The same can be true for space. I wrote most of this in “How to Get to Space” http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/gettospace.html. Sometimes government action is needed. The problem is that government isn’t very good at picking and choosing winners: funding companies is not a good way to build an industry.

Fortunately there are ways of developing technology without betting on winners and losers. This is all describe in my Getting to Space presentation. We used X Projects to develop the aerospace industry, and we can do that for Green Energy and other national resources. The best developers of new technology are not always the best at commercial exploitation – as was proved in the growth of the aviation industry. It is true in many other cases.

Government can develop technologies without investing in companies.

I have explained X Projects many times. The basic idea is simple: the government puts out a contract for competitive bids. The contract will be to build, with the best technology available as of now (or in the very near future) working models of something that illustrates the best we have in the technology we are developing. One example was flying higher and faster. No one expected the X projects to come up with prototypes of commercial – or even military – aircraft. Instead you build the best thing you can and learn from it. An example was the Douglas X-3 Stiletto. It was the first airplane to take off from a runway and go faster than sound. That’s what it did – and while the Stiletto wasn’t a useful prototype of anything, we learned from it, and from that came the F-104 which dominated military airspace for more than a decade. What the X Project did was develop technologies. After that the aerospace industry could develop actual fighters.

The same principle can apply in other areas of technology. About twenty years ago Dr. Rolfe Sinclair of the National Science Foundation and I co-chaired a panel at an annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on the applicability of the X Project concept to development of non-military technologies. It’s hardly a new idea; but it would work.

If much of the TARP money had been given out as funding for high technology X Projects, not in subsidies to technology companies, we would have learned a lot from that; and the “stimulus” effect would have been pretty well the same. The money would have been spent.

More on this another time; but I do invite you to think of technology demonstration/development projects that would make sense for public funding in your areas of expertise. Note that an X Project is not a prototype for a commercial project: it’s a step in technology development, and the company that does the X-project is not necessarily the winner of any production contracts.

For the kinds of money we already spend on “stimulus” projects we could have taken giant steps in a number of vital technologies. It’s still not too late.

The consensus appears to be that the debate was a tie, as we observed last night. The more important question is which candidate helped his election prospects most? Opinion is divided on that, but given the strategies of the two parties, I’d say that Gov. Romney clearly came out ahead. The President can’t run on his record, and has to paint a picture of Romney as less able than he is; and he didn’t do that. President Obama did show that he can be more dynamic than he was at the first debate, but we always knew that. What he didn’t show was that he can be the heroic savior who was elected President in 2008. He didn’t even come close to that.

Mr. Romney has to show that he is capable of being President and can be trusted with the office. He has done that. The President then says that Romney hasn’t presented a believable plan and can’t prove he can bring the country out of its slump; he hasn’t done that, and it’s self-evident that President Obama hasn’t any way out. A President who cannot ask “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” has a problem impossible to solve, and can only hope that the people will reject his opponent as incompetent or dishonest or just plain unlikable.

The Romney strategy is to continue to demonstrate that he is competent, likable, and honest; claims which so far as I can see have the great merit of being true. And he continues to demonstrate that.

Farewell to George McGovern.

View 746 Tuesday, October 16, 2012

The debate went about as I expected. Mr. Obama was more engaged, and thus made his supporters happier, but he cannot run on his record, and when he was asked by a man who had voted for him last time why he deserved to be reelected, he had no real answer other than personal. He can’t say hope and change.

Mr. Romney tried to stay on the script, he’s a nice guy and plays by the rules.

If it were a prize fight I’d give four rounds to Obama, four to Romney, and seven even on points. Not an outstanding performance by either. No knockdowns. Romney had an opportunity: he might have asked why, if Obama knew that the attack on the consulate was a planned act of terror and said so in his Rose Garden speech before he took a trip to Las Vegas for a fundraiser, did the US UN Ambassador bring up the movie and demonstrations two days later? It would almost certainly have left the President nonplussed. Not a knockdown, perhaps, but — Anyway that didn’t happen.

We’ll see what happens next time. Romney hasn’t lost anything and has every reason to feel confident. There’s no big incentive to change tactics.

There is breaking news about an earth-sized planet around Alpha Centauri B. http://newyork.newsday.com/news/world/earth-sized-planet-discovered-circling-alpha-centauri-b-1.4122901 It is apparently closer to its sun than Mercury is to ours, but its existence does not bar a planet of similar size at biospheric distances. More when we know more. Now if there is a Terran sized planet discovered at the proper distance, is it inhabited by Fithp?

See also http://www.businessinsider.com/earth-sized-planet-circling-alpha-centauri-2012-10 

to sum up: Obama cannot run on his record, and had no reply to the man who had voted for him in 2008 and asked why he should vote for him again. Romney’s message was: “You know what you’ll get if you vote for Obama. Four more years. Of this.” Obama’s answer is that Romney will ruin the middle class in favor of his rich friends and bring back disaster.

Romney’s answer to that is to remain presidential and demonstrate that he has the dignitas and gravitas to succeed in the toughest job in the world. He made his point. So while Obama can ‘win’ a debate on technical points, the overall effect is the same: How’s that Hope and Change working out for you? Well, but, Romney’s going to ruin you and bring back the cronies, and …

And so it goes.