| Wednesday,
January 3, 2001 I should be getting some mail up shortly.
Please stand by.
Begin with a perennial
question:
Dear Sir,
Thanks for pointing out David Stove's "Anything
Goes: Origins of the Cult of Scientific Irrationalism." As a grad
student, many of the readings in my field refer to Popper's "World
3." When reading these "interestingly" worded arguments,
I've always believed that there was something generally amiss, but didn't
have the background with which to address the questions. However,
Amazon.com should get a copy to me shortly and perhaps Stove can point me
in a better direction, or at least provide me with a different set of
tools with which to consider the questions.
More fundamentally, I find myself returning to an
interesting question: What is on Jerry Pournelle's "Recommended
Reading List?" By this, I suppose I mean, that should you be writing
the "Harvard Guide to Reading for the Future" (or similar guide)
what would you recommend?
Thanks again for keeping up Chaos Manor. I'll be
renewing my subscription shortly.
-- Cheers,
Art Russell
"if you don't understand it and the laws under
which it will be executed, then don't sign it! - no matter how much profit
may appear to be in store. Too lazy and too eager can ruin a trader."
- Grandmother from Robert A. Heinlein's
"Citizen of the Galaxy"
I have been asked this question over the years
often enough that I have long intended to do an annotated reading list,
but I never quite find the time to do it right, and done wrong it would
not me much use. My incentive has lessened since the publication of
Jacques Barzun, FROM
DAWN TO DECADENCE, 1500 to the Present, (Harper Collins 2000) which is
a far better work than I could have written; not only does it belong on
the list of works every civilized person should have read, but it contains
within it a guide a a great deal more. I can only rejoice that Barzun
could turn out such a book at his age: it gives me hope for the future.
Get that book and then ask the question.
As to David Stove, anyone in the sciences ought
to read at least one of his works: it's not necessary to understand the
philosophical stuffing to DO science, but given the modern trend on our
campuses, it sure helps to know the flaws in some of the attacks on
scientific method.
As for me, I learned philosophy of science from
Gustav Bergmann at Iowa and was influenced greatly by positivists and
operational philosophy at a formative age; it seems to have stuck. Of
course that was on a foundation of a pretty good classical education at
the hands of the Christian Brothers; alas, that sort of thing doesn't seem
to be offered anywhere in high schools now.
And for a little shameless self promotion:
Thank you for the New Year's message. I am very
satisfied with my subscription. I actually
subscribed because I felt that otherwise I was not entitled to send
messages to your web site.
Several months ago I was listening to Peter
Schickele's radio program on National Public Radio. His radio program
deals with music appreciation, as he sees it. You may know him as the
inventor of P.D.Q. Bach, or the creator of the soundtrack for the 60's sf
film "Silent Running". This particular program dealt with the
history of the "Dies Irae". Mr. Schickele claimed that it was
one of the oldest and most influential pieces of music in human
history.
He proceeded to prove that through the course of the
program, giving examples of well-known composers who have incorporated it
into their works. When he quoted a passage from it: "Day of wrath,
and doom impending, David's words with Sybil's blending ..." I was
transported to the funeral service on the Lenin, where Captain Rod
Blaine wonders how old that particular song was. What I was wondering was,
did you and Mr. Niven know how old the Dies Irae was when you wrote that
scene? Or is this fact just a happy coincidence?
Carl Zeichner
That was me: I had a very old copy of the Day of
Wrath, and the phrase "David's Words with Sybil's blending"
struck me as they must have struck Captain Rod Blaine. Few churches use
that old version now, and most don't even have those words in their
updated and modern hymnals.
And ABout TAPE
I saw the note about tape and i would say i agree
mostly, except for ONE media that i've used extensively.
DLT. aka "Digital Linear Tape". This is
*actually* a datacenter storage medium, however I've been able to find a
number of drives for $300->$600 on eBAY. The DLT4000 drive I have at
home now that i use for system backup on my NT server will put up to 20Gig
on a tape (40Gig with compression). Thats about the size I need and I've
*never* lost a backup on DLT. Compaq and DELL also sell the drives new
(for around $1K I think). All the ones I've used at home have been used
ones, all the ones I've used in datacenters have been new ones. I think
Compaq owns the company that actually builds all the mechanisms (DEC used
to and Compaq bought DEC). This stuff has been around for at least 10
years (in increasing capacities). The cartridges are also relatively small
bigger than a box of 3.5 inch disketttes but not much.
Oh, and if you *still* need a Mac serial cable, I
probably have one laying around i could send you... -jcp-
We found the cable only to discover that while
the manual for the printer Roberta uses shows an Appletalk input, the one
we have doesn't have one. We'll get that printer on the Internet, and then
get the Apples onto it as well.
Part of the problem with tape is that the
software needed to read files from tapes is among the first things lost
when there is a crash. How do you restore from that which you cannot read
until you restore?
Dear Mr. Pournelle,
My experience with Windows 2000 has been that the
settings are kept locally in the "Documents and Settings"
directory. The catch is that the name of the subdirectory depends on which
host you have logged onto. Furthermore the naming convention for this
subdirectory changed from beta to beta. I don't have access to my Windows
2000 system right now so the following is based on imperfect memory.
Typically the first host you ever logged onto would
be under a subdirectory with a name of the form "name". The next
host would be under "name.001" or "name[001]". Take a
look under your "Documents and Settings" directory and see what
is there. You can just copy from one directory to another.
I started a habit of keeping a empty folder on my
desktop with the current host name as the folder name so that I can
associate each "Documents and Settings/namexxx/desktop" with a
host.
Good Luck Ron Lewis
One of our problems was that systems upgraded
from Windows NT workstation to Windows 2000 do not HAVE a
"Documents and settings" folder. There are other anomalies,
mostly poorly documented.
Mr. Pournelle,
First off, I'm a long time reader of 'Computing at
Chaos Manor', and many of your novels as well. That said, on to the heart
of this e-mail.
Microsoft Outlook .pst files are a bad thing. The
biggest reason that they are is because the corrupt quite easily. I've had
users lose years of mail, even when they were being stored on a file
server that was backed up regularly. Many times, the corruption is so slow
and very gradual, so you are unaware that it is happening. Another reason
is the file size limit of 2GB, which for all practical purposes is really
500MB. The final big reason is that .pst files cannot be cleaned of
viruses. This is probably the absolute worst thing about them, but the
corruption issue is pretty heinous itself.
However, having said all of this, I am making the
assumption you are using Microsoft Exchange for your e-mail system. If you
are not, and you simply use the POP protocol, with Outlook configured as
an Internet Mail Client, then this is all moot. The real way to set up a
system (if Exchange is at the heart of your e-mail system) is to use the
Offline Storage Files, or .ost. If you have synchronized them while
connected to your LAN, and you are prudent about which folders you
synchronize in Outlook, then you have the ability to answer mail at your
leisure, minimal worry about loss of mail, usage of Single Instance
Storage which makes Exchange do all of the work when it comes to your
e-mail, and a plethora of functionality that is lost by using .pst
storage.
I've been working with Microsoft products since NT
3.51, and Exchange since version 4.0. I, for one, have had few problems
that I could not trace back to either hardware or user errors.
Thank you for several years of enjoyable reading,
and hopefully for several more. L. Dwayne Sudduth
I agree that the huge unparsable .pst file is one
of the worst features of Outlook. I back it up often, and all over the
place...
I enjoy reading you column. I think your motto
"we do stupid things so you don't have to" is very apt. In
general, the more you use and do with computers the more problems you will
come across. And you do so many things with the small number of computers
you have that Chaos Manor is probably a better test bed than most
companies with hundreds of computers.
Recently I've noticed that the strange things you
are learning about (and sharing with us) are less general computer
(hardware) problems and really almost 100% Microsoftisms. This should
probably be expected since hardware has gotten so much more reliable while
software has gotten so much more bloated and less documented.
If you switched to Linux from Microsoft things would
pretty much stay the same. So you'd have Linux issues instead of Microsoft
issues. Maybe you'd have a few less issues overall, but who knows. The big
difference is that your column would be much more useful to people running
or interested in trying Linux and somewhat less useful for people running
Microsoft software. So the question is: what does your readership want:
more Microsoft tips or information on how use Linux. I think the
readership of Byte 10 years ago would vote for cutting edge, free, new
software. Even if you think Microsoft might be better for Chaos Manor,
remember your motto: "we do stupid things so you don't have to".
To blaze the trail so other people avoid hazards, a scout must get ahead
of the troops.
The biggest negative of switching to Linux would be
the learning curve. For a newbie, the learning curve to switch to Linux is
almost zero since they don't have a lot to relearn. The more experience
someone has, the harder it is to switch since there is so much more to
learn just to equal the productivity you had on the old familiar platform.
The only positive: For a columnist, the whole point is learning, so the
learning curve is really an opportunity for columns.
My wife has a small law office with about 10
computers, a server and a dsl connection to the internet. For a company
such as hers, the cost of Microsoft software is significant: for w2k, and
office all around with a w2k server and backoffice plus odds and ends can
run $10k. Being able to cut that cost using Linux is a big win for her.
Many small offices are in the same state. From too many years of
experience everyone knows Microsoft software and is familiar with its
problems. Yet another column loaded with Microsoft tips is not really very
helpful. What a small office sysadmin needs is a column that shows how to
save $10k and have a reliable system.
Remember the good old days of Byte and computers
when problems were solvable? Its still that way with Linux. My advice:
stop putting your toe in the water and dive in.
Martin <mjd@digitaleveryware.com>
Well, I think you ought to write that column
since mine is merely yet another and not useful.
But for me, the thing is to continue to get all
my work done while looking at alternatives. I am glad your wife can run a
law office with Linux and Word Perfect, but I am not sure I would yet
recommend that law offices without 24/7 access to a guru try that just
yet.
I am probably slower than I would have been 20
years ago. It took me a long while to convert from CP/M, which got my work
done, to DOS and later Windows. But just at the moment I think it more
useful to pound on Microsoft to get its act together.
I'm sorry you think this is merely an amusing yet
another, but I'm glad there are a lot of readers who don't think that way.
And I'll keep plugging.
I have brought the Penguin home, and the next
thing is to see just how to integrate a big reliable Linux box into Chaos
Manor...
Hi Jerry,
As always I enjoyed your Byte column, although I can
imagine losing your PDC without a backup was somewhat less enjoyable for
you.
I agree that a good RAID setup is the best solution,
but IDE-RAID solutions have come a long way the last couple of years. RAID
of course means Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks, but SCSI no longer
is that Inexpensive.
IDE drives are generally a lot cheaper than their
SCSI counterparts and I for one am using the very nice Abit KT7-RAID
motherboard with integrated HighPoint RAID controller, which simply does
everything it should. You need the latest drivers though :)
Maybe something to look into/compare in one of the
upcoming columns? Some URL's below...
Anyway, keep up the good work, regards,
Frank Schaap.
Agreed entirely. For the moment we are using a
simple mirror scheme to back up the main server. We'll move to other stuff
later. An IDE "box of drives" as a backup system is a good idea;
Alex did that month ago at the media labs, and it has served him well. I
keep intending to do the same here.
 Jerry,
Just a note to let you know that it is possible to
switch the role of an NT 4.0 server between PDC, BDC, and Standalone.
You can't do it with NT by itself, but there is a
great 3rd party utility called UPromote that allows you to do this without
wiping out the existing installation.
Here's their link: http://www.algintech.com/UTools/UPromote.asp
Best Regards, -Don
I sure didn't know that! Thanks!!
By all means, keep up the newsletter - well worth
the read.
Oh, by the way, based on your column I decided to
try one of the Intel 815 based boards with integrated sound/video - I'm
building a system for my daughter to take back to college. You're correct,
it is definitely Good Enough. Thanks - I probably would never have tried
one without your review. It was pretty painless (like I really miss the
days of plugging in 640k of individual memory chips and endless changes to
jumpers to get it to boot!)
Thanks again, and Happy Holidays!
Joe Helminiak
Glad to be of help.
Jerry,
You wrote:
...I'd have chosen the collapse of the USSR. But now that the Seventy
Years War is over, we've dismantled many of the teams that won it -- and
doubled the numbers of bureaucratic parasites who lived off the war effort
and who will not go away.
I do at times lament leaving the defense contracting
industry. It was pretty exciting, we were doing very interesting forward
thinking stuff, and made some great advances. I'm having a lot of fun now
working for a software development company which doesn't do government
contracts, but I do miss the people I worked with in the 70's and 80's ,
and am glad I did my part to help foment the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Some of the people I worked with are still in the defense industry, or
like me, have gone into the business environment.
The cold war may be over in one sense, but the vacuum
left from it has been filled by several other groups and countries who
prefer either chaos or totalitarian control over the citizens. Many people
believe there is nothing to worry about from China or the many third world
countries who detest the freedom of the west. I don't agree with the
detractors, having been on the "inside" and having seen what
these countries and groups are capable of.
For my views, I've been told many things, not the
least of which that I wish the Soviet Union was still around so we'd have
an enemy to hate. That's just not true, I advocate being aware of what
reality is, having a world view and not sticking my head in the sand. I
don't see aggressors behind every tree, but pretending that there are none
out there is not rational.
Thought I'd get on my soapbox for a while. Thanks!
Tracy Walters
Wealthy Republics without strong defenses have
not lasted long in history. Alas, those which devote too many resources to
defense fall victim to the Allbright syndrome: What's the point of having
that splendid army if we can't use it? (Either she is more Macciavellian
than one supposes, or less than all bright; a remark like that is incomprehensible
from a normal sane person).
Yes the US has enemies. One way to work on that
is to focus on strategic defenses: they help us, develop technology, and
threaten no one who does not intend us harm. As to Asia policy, it needs
thinking about and hard. We owe Taiwan but how much and for how long? As
to Korea, we won their battles for them: the notion that a bunch of
starving North Koreans could invade a nation with the economy of South
Korea is absurd; but of course if we continue to provide for their common
defense, they don't need to. Why we should hasn't been explained to me,
now that the Seventy Years War is done.
From Ed Hume:
President Clinton received a report that there were
over 100,000 cattle guards in Colorado. Possibly because Colorado ranchers
had protested his proposed changes in grazing policies, he ordered
Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt to fire half of the guards
immediately. Before Babbitt could respond (and presumably straighten him
out), Colorado's congresswoman Pat Schroeder intervened with a request
that before any were fired, they be given six months of retraining.
(Lest anyone think different, this is a JOKE. It
seems to be listed as "urban legend" among the people who list
that sort of thing, which makes me wonder if they are all crazy; how would
anyone suppose it was anything BUT a joke? But in any event, I do not
assert this as something that happened, nor does Dr. Hume.)
Also from Ed Hume:
Dear Jerry
First of all, happy new year.
On uniformitarianism vs. catastrophism, I have
another example: Alfred Wegener. In 1915 he published the first edition of
The Origin of Continents and Oceans, in which he examined geophysical data
and concluded that continents must have drifted over time. Reading the
fourth edition, I found the reasoning fairly convincing, even if he did
not have a convincing explanation as to just why continents would drift.
But when I was educated in the 1950's, the uniform
unchanging Earth was still dogma. Not until plate tectonics provided an
explanation would his hypothesis be accepted. But now I never see his name
attached to continental drift, which is a phenomenon which he essentially
discovered. He just wasn't one of the in crowd, I guess.
Alfred Wegener died in 1930 on the Greenland glacier
in 1930, collecting more data.
Ed
Dr. Hume also sends this reference.
To view the entire article, go to
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7272-2001Jan1.html
Words fail me. Roland sends the following
with the subject "Sigh", to which I can only say,
"indeed."
http://www.latimes.com/business/20001228/t000123648.html
A big Word Problem:
Jerry:
I obtained Word 2000 as part of Works Suite 2000 and
downloaded Service Release 1 from Microsoft.
About every second time I load the program, SR-1
reinstalls. This has happened now approximately 100 times.
If any of your readers have any thoughts, I would
appreciate hearing from them.
One additional comment, a table formatted in Word
Perfect Suite 7 imports perfectly into Word '97, but is total garbage when
imported into Word 2000.
Thomas Cox
I have never had any such problems. And I fear I
do now know Works Suite 2000; is REAL Word 2000 really part of that? I use
2000 for most of my work, and it works well although 97 did also.
Jerry,
I'm afraid I can't help with Mr. Cox's problem,
because I have not loaded SR-1, nor do I know what it does, but, yes, as
far as I can tell, the Word 2000 in Works Suite 2000 is the same as in
Office 2000. This makes it a very cost-effective way of getting Word if
you don't need any of the other Office stuff. This, in turn, is probably
why Microsoft hasn't gone out of its way to publicize the fact that Works
now contains Word as its word processor.
Regards, Bill Ghrist
Thanks
This war gets very little coverage. I thought
people might find this report intereresting -
Gregory Cochran
Desperate Battle Defines Congo's Warlike Peace
Massive Government Attack Turns Into Bloody Retreat
A Congolese refugee boy at Kala camp in northern
Zambia, following the flight of Congolese civilians from Rwandan and RDC
rebel troops in early December. (Malcolm Linton - For The Washington Post)
E-Mail This Article
Printer-Friendly Version
By Karl Vick Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, January 2, 2001; Page A01
PWETO, Congo -- At the southern extreme of a ragged
front line that winds 1,400 miles across Congo lies a ferry, dirty pink
and half-submerged in the muddy Luvua River. Facing it on a gravel ramp
stand the burned-out husks of 33 military vehicles -- armored personnel
carriers, trucks, an ambulance -- waiting in a line that never moved
forward. Unopened syringes lie underfoot, amid charred tires and a
trampled note that a fleeing Congolese junior officer left behind:
"Attaque," reads the neat cursive French.
But by the time Rwandan forces approached Pweto on
Dec. 3, the Congolese government army was in no position to attack. It was
in panicked retreat, leaving a tableau of ruin on the riverbank and
opening a rare window on a war usually fought out of sight.
In two months of back-and-forth fighting here in the
southeastern corner of Congo, all the elements that make this country's
21/2-year-old war such a dangerous puzzle came into play: foreign armies,
ethnic militia groups, remote terrain and villages utterly emptied of
civilians who, from the safety of refugee camps in a neighboring country,
repeat matter-of-fact accounts of massacres. This is the "situation
on the ground" that has kept the U.N. Security Council from
dispatching 5,500 peacekeepers to monitor a cease-fire that appears to
exist only on paper.
This lightly populated, mostly forested stretch
between Lake Tanganyika and Lake Mweru had been one of the few corners of
Congo where both sides had essentially honored a peace agreement signed 18
months ago. The Lusaka Accord, named for the Zambian capital where it was
signed, was meant to arrest the cycle of advance and retreat that has
marked a sprawling conflict that pits the Congolese army and allied troops
from Angola, Zimbabwe and Namibia against an assortment of rebel forces
bolstered by Rwandan and Ugandan troops.
But Congolese President Laurent Kabila, who signed
the Lusaka pact in a moment of military disadvantage, has swept it aside
whenever he spied what looked like a military opening. Last spring, his
forces pushed back rebels sponsored by Uganda in Congo's far northwest,
only to lose the same ground months later. And on Oct. 15, Kabila's armies
launched a massive assault on Rwandan-held positions in the southeast,
striking 100 miles north of Pweto at the town of Pepa. Six weeks later,
just as happened in the northwest, Kabila's forces once again lost far
more than they gained.
Now the Rwandans have driven them out of Pweto,
clambering onto captured armor as their commander pointed out the escape
route by which the Congolese army chief of staff, Joseph Kabila, the
president's son, fled the battlefield. "We have a cease-fire,"
Col. J.B. Mulisa said with a dry chuckle, "a forced cease-fire."
In a war that has been stalemated for so long --
Congo was broken into factional spheres of influence mere weeks after the
war began, and so it remains -- such lightning gains might have finally
given the Rwandans the upper hand. But senior Rwandan officials, when
asked if they plan to push beyond Pweto farther into Congo, say they did
not want to come even as far as they have. In fact, the forces occupying
Pweto showed no sign of massing earlier this month.
Officials of Rwanda's Tutsi-led government say,
rather, that their focus is on eradicating the Interahamwe, the ethnic
Hutu militia that orchestrated the 1994 massacre of Tutsis in Rwanda and
fled into neighboring Congo. The farther into the vast Congo the Rwandan
troops go, the harder that becomes.
"We were really talking about withdrawing"
120 miles to an operational zone closer to Rwanda, said Col. Charles
Kayonga, a defense adviser to Rwandan President Paul Kagame. "Kabila
must have misread our position. He apparently thought we were weak."
Reversed Alliances
The battle began at Pepa, a town of neat stone
houses in the center of a vast cattle ranch near the southern end of Lake
Tanganyika. Rwandans had held the town since March 1999, nine months after
launching the current war by encouraging a rebellion in the Congolese
army's ranks, then pouring its own forces into Congo to topple Kabila --
the same leader Rwanda had installed barely a year earlier by backing a
rebellion that drove dictator Mobutu Sese Seko from power.
At issue, according to Rwandan officials, was
Kabila's support for the very forces Rwanda had put him in place to
eradicate: the Interahamwe -- thousands of ethnic Hutu extremists who had
fled into Congo in 1994 after leading an attempted genocide against
Rwanda's minority Tutsi tribe that left more than a half-million dead.
The Interahamwe were now allied with Kabila, and
more formidable as a result. What had been degenerating into a ragtag
guerrilla force was receiving new weapons from the Congolese government
and new training from the army of Zimbabwe, which also rushed to support
Kabila against the Rwandan invasion.
But when shells began exploding behind the Rwandans'
Pepa foxholes in the predawn hours of Oct. 15, the charge was led by yet
another force. Hutu extremists from Burundi -- another tiny country
divided by the Hutu-Tutsi chasm -- made up the brunt of the eight brigades
that pushed across the rolling rangeland, according to Rwandan commanders.
The Congolese infantry also advanced, reinforced by armored personnel
carriers and British-made Hawker combat aircraft, both from Zimbabwe.
"They were coming in big numbers, really very
big numbers," said Lt. Col. John Tibesigwa, the Rwandan commander at
Pepa.
With a much smaller force on hand, the Rwandans
slowly pulled out of Pepa, along with the Congolese rebels they sponsor, a
force known as Rally for Congolese Democracy (RCD). In fact, Rwandan
commanders maintain that they were already pulling some units back when
the attack came.
"While we were disengaging, they were massing
troops," said Tibesigwa. "To keep them from coming back, we had
to take Pweto."
The Rwandan counterattack began on Nov. 5 and raged
for four days. Tibesigwa described the fighting as the most intense he had
seen in Congo. At the Pepa hospital, Congolese nurse Justine Kaimba Puta
said fighting that started 15 miles away moved steadily closer, bringing
with it a stream of wounded that eventually covered the hospital floor.
When the Rwandans were two miles away, government soldiers brought a
warning to flee.
The town emptied promptly, but several Pepa
residents interviewed in Zambia, where thousands have gathered in a U.N.
refugee camp, said they feared more than the fighting. When Rwandan forces
first took Pepa last year, local residents were punished for allegedly
supporting the Congolese government troops, the residents said.
Two refugees described a massacre that year in
Mazembe, a village near Pepa, in which dozens of residents were ordered
into their huts, which soldiers then set afire. Both residents named
people killed in the fire, including old men and small children. One
described seeing the charred bodies.
The residents were uncertain whether the soldiers
were Rwandan regulars or the RCD rebels they sponsor. Both have been
accused by international human rights groups of similar atrocities in
territory they occupy, but the charges surface most often against the
rebels.
"With the RCD, there are some undisciplined
elements," acknowledged Nicephore Kimpinde, the assistant district
commissioner installed in Pepa by the rebels. "But you can't say the
whole RCD is undisciplined."
Kabila's forces, too, slaughtered civilians when
they occupied the area in October, he said. "We collected 10 civilian
bodies and buried them," said Patrick Murlambui, another Pepa
official. "They were accused of belonging to the RCD intelligence.
They were innocent. There was no proof. Everybody who stayed in this
region is looked at as an RCD sympathizer."
"It's a war on civilians," said Puta, the
nurse.
'The Right Tactics'
The Rwandans and the rebels took the countryside as
well, exploiting a degree of mobility that would prove decisive. The
Rwandan army is essentially an all-infantry force that by a shrewd
collusion of economy and design carries no weapon heavier than one man can
handle.
Kabila's retreating forces, by contrast, were
tethered to the road. Their armored vehicles required the Congolese
alliance to move predictably, confined to a tree-lined track that runs
across the handsome cattle estate like a country road through rural
Belgium, its owners' ancestral home.
When open range gave way to elephant grass, the
Rwandans attacked. The village of Mutoto Moija, a decrepit Interahamwe
base whose name translates as "One Child," fell after six hours.
"At midnight, we heard sounds like they were retreating," said
Mulisa. "In the morning they were no longer there. We followed."
What ensued, according to Rwandan and Congolese
soldiers alike, was a three-week running battle across the 100 miles
between Pepa and Pweto. Weeks later, the road south toward Pweto remained
speckled not only with green and white butterflies, but with corpses --
here the body of young man cut down clutching an AK-47, here a splayed
green poncho topped by a skull.
But veterans of the battle said most of the fighting
took place in the surrounding woods. The Congolese and their allies sought
the high ground above the road. The Rwandans and RCD rebels moved through
the woods behind them and caught them in crossfires.
"The Rwandans are very strong; they do flanking
actions," said a Congolese soldier, Selester Mbanza, 30, from a
hospital bed in Nchelenge, Zambia, where he was being treated for a bullet
wound in the buttocks. "They get around behind people. That's how
they fight. They used the right tactics. They came when we were resting,
and we'd be distracted."
There was a major engagement at every village, half
of which had been fortified by bunkers or other defenses that the
Congolese in each case ended up abandoning. "We would pursue them
very closely," said Mulisa, the Rwandan commander. "That's the
secret. We don't give them any time."
Panic and Destruction
By Dec. 1, the Rwandan forces had Pweto nearly in
sight, approaching the lakeside plain around the town of perhaps 50,000 on
an abandoned road along an encircling ridge. By the evening of Dec. 3,
when the Rwandans entered the town itself, the civilian population had
pushed en masse down a muddy road into Zambia, and Kabila's forces were
betraying something like panic.
The Mi-17 helicopter that had carried Joseph Kabila
to Pweto was burned on the soccer field that doubled as a landing pad,
apparently too unreliable to use but too valuable to leave to the
Rwandans. The president's son escaped by water, taking a ferry named the
Alliance with senior Zimbabwean commanders and Burundian Hutus to the far
side of the Luvua River.
When the boat returned, a 40-ton, Soviet-made T-62
tank was loaded onto the port side. Dozens of soldiers scrambled to
starboard. "It was imbalanced," said Mulisa, "and the ferry
got drowned."
With the Rwandans' gunfire audible across town, the
stranded troops splashed diesel fuel onto the line of 33 waiting vehicles
and set them afire. Then they split up, some setting off along the
riverbank deeper into Congo, others joining the throng of refugees fording
the small stream that marks the Zambian border.
On the other side, Zambian soldiers collected arms
and counted heads. At least 3,000 Congolese regulars were assembled in
primary schools about 75 miles south of the border in Nchelenge, where
last week they were still waiting for a lift back to Congo.
Zimbabwe sent a plane for several hundred of its
troops, a return load lightened considerably by the sheer tonnage of armor
left behind in Pweto. Two howitzers, two T-62 tanks and at least a
half-dozen armored personnel carriers were left intact for the Rwandans,
as well as three ammunition dumps and a weapons cache that includes 1,000
rifles.
The total does not include a tank submerged about
200 yards upstream from the ferry, its turret just visible in the middle
of the river, which its desperate driver thought was shallow enough to
ford.
© 2001 The Washington Post Company
Jerry,
Would this work?
http://www.sevilleclassics.com/products/shelving_18x48.htm
You would need to only use three shelves so your
computers would fit.
I saw them tonight at Costco for $77.
Joel Upchurch
In fact the 36" units would work well
indeed. I'll see if they exist anywhere near me. I like the big castors.
Jerry,
Your comments on the impact of the end of the cold
war reminded me of a conversation I had shortly after the collapse of the
Soviet Union with a senior engineer from a U.S. defense firm.
I told him that it was great that we had won... but
sad that the price seemed to be a heavily mortgaged country that had
surrendered its economic standing to a rising Japan.
He paused, sipped his drink, and said, "For 40
years the Japanese and the rest of the world have been playing against the
B team. Let's see how they like playing against the A team."
While I know that many other factors played a role
in what happened to the U.S. economy in the 90s... I can't help but wonder
if he hadn't hit on a key one.
Cheers!
- Mark mark@arcabama.com
There is a lot to that. We sucked off the best and the brightest to the
national labs and weapons research, and war industry. But we have also
consolidated to the point of imbecility, added regulations to the point of
absurdity and broken up the teams. Can the A team compete against not only
the overseas copetitors but the US regulators?
Subject: Re: Invasion of the intelligent but naive
futurologists!
What bothers me about the tendency to automatize is
that it is almost entirely low IQ jobs that are being replaced.
Libertarians (and I am one - or rather I am a neoliberealist to use Chris
Brand's term) tell me that a free market will always find some valuable
tasks for the displaced low IQ people to do. I just don't swallow that.
Any task that can be done by someone with a limited capacity for
complexity, seems susceptible to automatization. If I am right then there
will be hordes of superfluous people quite soon. What political
developments are likely? Revolution? Genocide? Something out of Brave New
World or The Gee Pees? Any thoughts?
Regards
Garth Zietsman (Johannesburg - South Africa)
I have great concern over this. Half the
population is below average, this not being Lake Woebegon. And those above
average never meet those who are below, and don't think much about what
they can do so long as they stay out of the way. We used to have honorable
blue collar jobs for people. We now export them as quickly as possible.
And then what?
Dear Dr. Pournelle,
First off, I'd like to say that I have enjoyed your
work immensely for the past 20-odd years. The first thing I ever read from
you was an anthology called "The Survival of Freedom". I have to
say that I will remember that book as long as I live, because reading it
opened my eyes in ways that few other books ever have. And yes, I mean
politically. The fact is, that book, along with other anthologies you
created later, turned me from being a whiny liberal to a rather angry
conservative. Angry because the information you helped place before me
showed just how much we have been lied to by the liberal/left government
and media elites over the past 30 years. Your work in this area was very,
very well done, in my estimation.
Also, even after all these years, I still say it was
a crime against humanity that "The Mote in God's Eye" lost out
to "The Dispossessed" for the Hugo and Nebula when it came out.
I tried to read "Dispossessed", thinking that if it beat out
"Mote", it must be really great. Bah. With all due respect to
Ms. Le Guin, that book SUCKED. I got about halfway through it and then
threw the damned thing out. And as anyone who knows me will tell you, I do
not throw out books, even mediocre ones. But I could not take it any more.
I've always assumed that it was pure politics that caused it to beat out
"Mote".
But I digress...
Some years ago you and Larry Niven co-authored a
book called "Lucifer's Hammer". Excellent book, BTW. In this
book you put little quotations at the start of every chapter. If my memory
serves (you know what they say, the memory is the first to go...or is it
the second? I can't remember...:), one of those quotes started out
something like,
"Trouble rather a Tiger in his lair, Than the
Sage among his books..."
My copy of "Hammer" wore out years ago and
I have not been able to find one since. I thought it might have been from
the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, but I could not find it there, either. If
you happen to have the full quote fro m the book and could e-mail it to
me, I would very much appreciate it.
Thank you very much.
Best regards,
Pat Myers Cypress, TX
I fear I was not as impressed by The Dispossessed as the Australian
voters who the year it won had Ms. LeGuin as their Guest of Honor at the
World SF Convention in Sydney; but they had not read MOTE. Mote's
publisher sent 100 free copies of the hardbound to the Australian World SF
Convention Committee to be given to the members so that some of them
might have been able to read Mote, it not at that time being in print in
Australia; but the shipment was REFUSED by the Australians who later said
they really wanted their Guest of Honor to win the Hugo. The crate came
back to the US unopened. Probably all for the best. I suspect that made no
difference in the voting anyway.
As to that quote about the sage at his books, I first saw it in an old
Gordon Dickson story, used as a chapter aphorism just as we used it, and I
am not sure Gordy didn't make it up, because I have myself searched for
the source for a long time. All SF fans seem to know it, but I don't know
of anyone who knows a source other than Dickson...
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