1632 Series personnal comment

Hans.DeleteThis@Kill-All-Spammers.com wrote in
news:3%Qnc.65786$RI6.49845@newssvr25.news.prodigy.com:

> BS! Their running for their lives! They would not have deployed
> boats for rescue missions! For the simple fact that to do so the
> ships have to be dead in the water in order for the boats to get back
> to them. Also there is the need for ALL hands for rigging during
> maneuvers.
>
> The story falls flat on its face!
>


Most boats have marines who could be used to handle longboats and often
were, so their use would have no bearing upon the need for the ship's
crew to not work the sails.

As for a all hands evolution, it doesn't take the entire crew, except in
an emergency to wear ship. Losing the battle might have been bad but
there was still manpower available for the rescue attempt. Besides, the
Spanish Admiral had to turn his ships around as well and that would take
even more time.
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Let me tell you a little tale about my family. At the age of fifteen my mother
had never seen a "Steam Roller" and the road crews were paving the street in
front of her house... She started crossing the road and noticed the steam
roller coming toward her and froze! Her mother just pulled her to safety! This
in in 1932! People still freeze when the unexpected happens!

But when you see an aircraft that looks just like one of the demons that your
church fathers have been railing about for years... and those little hell spawn
boats going faster than HUMANLY possible... out comes the YELLOW and BROWN!
These craft, speed boats and plane, are roaring like the devil breaking loose
the bounds of HELL!

I'll give you that maybe one in a hundred will try to react... but more than
likely he'll have slipped in the mess and be rolling around on the deck. For
sure in the ensuing panic no one is going to be pointing anything like a gun at
the devil and pulling the trigger!

You are trying to impose 20th century knowledge and reactions into the 17th
century populace.


Polack wrote:

>
>
> I can't agee with you, Hans, on three points:
>
> 1) The people of the 17thC are generally considered, by modern
> society, to have been little more than superstitious peasants -- the
> "nobility" even more than the commoners.
>
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NO! I'm not ignoring the human element! The truth of the matter is easily
explained and for the most part the up-timers will understand what is needed to
insure a faster rebirth of the industries that were lost during the
Ring-Of-Fire. There are always the total idiots and morons but for the most
part people will come around to reason when presented correctly!


Michelle Steiner wrote:

> In article <FKRnc.65792$QV6.34055@newssvr25.news.prodigy.com>,
> Hans RemoveThis @Kill-All-Spammers.com wrote:
>
>
>>Boy you just don't get it!
>
>
> You don't get it. If everything you wrote is true, you are ignoring the
> human element. If Stearns tried to do what you suggest, he would have
> been kicked out of office, and maybe out of town.
>
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Fools rush in!

How many CD drives have you had to replace? How many floppy drives have you
replaced? How many hard drives have you replaced?

I am a hardware test engineer and it was my job to do everything I could to
produce long lasting hardware... The problem is there are millions of point
failure points in the modern computers. Some will just kill your CD player,
others will kill your computer.

The biggest problem here is that I will bet with certainty that there aren't
three computers in Grantville that have the same hardware (other than the odd
business where four or five were purchased at the same time). People had
choices when they bought. CPU are different and in a lot of cases not
interchangeable from motherboard to motherboard. The same for the video cards.

For example you have old AMD systems and newer AMD systems, you have litterly
hundreds of Intel compatible systems... for P-II, P-III<=600MHz, P-III>600MHz,
P-III slot one, etc!

What you'll find for the most part are unique systems that can all operate on
the same OS!

I've had to replace four CD-R/W drives in our families systems in the past four
years... and we didn't use them that much to boot! They had a basic "out the
door" warranty. They all cost over $100.00 and I'm still mad as hell about it
but that's life in the fast paced computer industry today. Hell you can't even
get support for something that is over two years old! Its a throw away
industry! I've also had to replace three 60GB HDDs in my families systems (All
IBM drives and all bought at about the same time and all went out after less
than two years)! That's a real mess trying to read a HDD that's failing in
order to save your data.

I have a HP R-80 printer and a HP PIII printer... in the 1632 universe they
would make a great models for printers to be built around 1750. But only if the
electronics are working ... the ICs would all have to backward engineered.

MTBF is a pipe dream when you can't replace an item!



Andrew Lannon wrote:

> <Hans.DeleteThis@Kill-All-Spammers.com> wrote in message
> news:FKRnc.65792$QV6.34055@newssvr25.news.prodigy.com...
>
>
>>Boy you just don't get it! You got tech that was designed as throw away
>
> devices
>
>>with very limited useful power on life! You have unwritten CD-Rs and
>
> fools who
>
>>think that saving their porno collection is the only way to go! You have
>
> non
>
>>replaceable devices and media and you're going to let some red neck use
>
> them for
>
>>target practice.
>
>
> The problem you talk about with CDs is rare, and applies mostly to burned
> CDs; few pressed CDs have that problem.
>
> A computer can, quite conceivably, last for the life of the user; case in
> point, I have a working 8088 at home; it's old enough that I literally can't
> remember it not being around, and I'm 24. The DMP even works, we just can't
> get ribbons for it.
>
> There's no reason to suppose that, with a modicum of maintenance, the
> computers in Grantville won't last longer than the life of the people who
> bought them. You're right; we tend to treat computers as disposable. But
> that's not really because of cost; computers cost a hell of a lot, when you
> think about it; it's because if you buy a computer today, it's virtually
> obsolete in 2 years; Grantville isn't going to have that problem for some
> time.
>
> If it tells you something, mom ported the house accounts from the 8088 to
> her new computer (my old Athlon Thunderbird 1.2GHz) because she's addicted
> to the MS Natural keyboard I got her a couple years ago, not because there
> was any particular problem with the computer itself. Until about 2002, it
> ran pretty much 18 hours a day, every day. If that were only 10 years,
> that's about 70,000 hours, and MTBF for most parts is 300,000 hours (more,
> for enterprise and high grade parts). Running 24/7, that's a smidge over 34
> years, and that's a generally conservative number for failure rates.
>
> A computer, despite most people's use habits, is designed to run for _years_
> on end; there are businesses out there that are running quite happily on
> computers older than most of the students at Texas A&M University this year.
>
> And thanks very much, but rednecks aren't as bad as most about rampant
> consumerism; we learn from the cradle that if something's useful, use it.
>
> Andrew L.
>
>
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Hans.TakeThisOut@Kill-All-Spammers.com wrote:

> Another lost soul!
>
> Geeezzzzzz! Aircraft had been around and in the news for YEARS by the
> time WWI broke out! Blimps were common! Your apples and oranges analog
> won't float!

Bzzzzt

"Exclamation point quota exceeded. Divert author to net-kook file."
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Hans RemoveThis @Kill-All-Spammers.com wrote:

> The town has MILLIONS of data files including encyclopedias that are
> totally wasted when the last CPU issues its BLUE SMOKE!

Nope. The hard drives are the weak point, not the CPU's.

There isn't really any need for most computers to be on, so the
semiconductors just sit. Hard drives rely on magnetic media, and that
can "go stale".
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On Tue, 11 May 2004 Hans.TakeThisOut@Kill-All-Spammers.com wrote:

 > Another lost soul!
 >
 > Geeezzzzzz! Aircraft had been around and in the news for YEARS by the time WWI
 > broke out! Blimps were common! Your apples and oranges analog won't float!

The conscripts were largely peasants. They got to the big city and saw
all sorts of astonishing things about which they had never heard. Your
idea of the percolation of news into rural places is a bit odd.

  > > As it happens, my grandfather was an officer in the Royal and Imperial
  > > Army of Austria-Hungary during the First World War, and had an actual
  > > description of what happened on the first occasion in that Army's history
  > > in what was interpreted as an aerial attack was made on several battalions
  > > in march formation. These were also people who had never seen an
  > > aircraft, and whose officers training in air warfare went to two
  > > sentences, approximately "It is possible that in this war aircraft will be
  > > used in combat. However, no one has any idea how."
  > >
  > > Furthermore these were conscripts, not volunteers whose training made them
  > > far more afraid of their officers than of the enemy.
  > >
  > > On the other hand, they did not have the authorial golden BB.
  > >
  > > They were ordered to go to massed fire.
  > >
  > > They did.
  > >
  > > They shot the aircraft down.
  > >
  > > No panic, no running in circles.
  > >
  > > Sorry, your guess does not meet with history, even against conscripts.
  > >
  > > On Mon, 10 May 2004 Hans.TakeThisOut@Kill-All-Spammers.com wrote:
  > >
  > >
   > >>Hello Eric
   > >>
   > >>Normally I don't argue with authors either...
   > >>
   > >>But in this case we have gone way too far! You have a fleet of ships that are
   > >>under attack from small power boats that are running circles around them.
   > >>(watch the PANIC in the sailors on board the ships!) You have aircraft buzzing
   > >>the ships and shooting at them... (in mass you'd have had BROWN and YELLOW decks
   > >>throughout the fleet!) I can't see a single musketeer trying to shoot one of
   > >>these boats or planes! I can see a lot of sailors diving overboard to get away
   > >>from the HELL SPAWN that is attacking them. I see the rest of the crews in mass
   > >>hysteria including their leaders!
   > >>
   > >>What I do see is that you have applied 20th century thinking to your 17th
   > >>century characters.
   > >>
   > >>
   > >>BTW I really like your "The Course of Empire", "Crown of Slaves", and of course
   > >>"1632" it had such promise.
   > >>
   > >>
   > >>
   > >>Eric Flint wrote:
   > >>
   > >>
   > >>>><Hans.TakeThisOut@Kill-All-Spammers.com> wrote:
   > >>>>
   > >>>>
   > >>>>
   > >>>>>You're right! ... Sorta! Actually everything is crap... first Big Bang
   > >>>>>crap and then super nova crap ... several super nova craps actually.
   > >>>>>
   > >>>>>However as far and the 1632 series is concerned... It has proven to be
   > >>>>>thoughtless to an unbelievable extreme!
   > >>>>>
   > >>>>>It is totally unbelievable that you have someone who SHOULD have died
   > >>>
   > >>>from
   > >>>
   > >>>
   > >>>>>hypothermia resurrected and acting as a spy. (Get this straight! There
   > >>>>>were NO boats in the area after the sea battle that could have rescued
   > >>>>>anyone as ALL ships had been scared off and headed south!
   > >>>
   > >>>
   > >>>
   > >>>I normally stay out of these discussions, because I think people have the
   > >>>right to express their dislike for something I write without me trying to
   > >>>argue with them about it. I do, however, get annoyed when a critic claims
   > >>>something is a "fact" which is nothing of the sort. With regard to the
   > >>>specific issue of whether Eddie could have been rescued, the novel
   > >>>specifically and clearly establishes that most of the Danish ships remained
   > >>>in the area for some time after the Outlaw collided with the one Danish
   > >>>warship, and some of them were engaging in rescue operations. I've copied
   > >>>below the relevant passage from chapter 47.
   > >>>
   > >>>Someone can still argue that it's highly unlikely that Eddie would survive
   > >>>the episode, and I would not argue the point -- in fact, the novel ALSO
   > >>>makes that quite clear. Simpson is astonished when he discovers that Eddie
   > >>>survived, since the odds against that happening were extremely high.
   > >>>
   > >>>So what? War is _full_ of things happening against the odds. And while
   > >>>history books normally don't concentrate on all the oddball stuff, that is
   > >>>in fact typically what _fiction_ about wars concentrates on. That's
   > >>>inherent in the nature of story-telling, for Pete's sake. People usually
   > >>>aren't interested in hearing about humdrum routine events when they want to
   > >>>be entertained.
   > >>>
   > >>>Eric
   > >>>
   > >>>PS. My critic can't even keep his points of the compass straight. Even if
   > >>>it were true that all the Danish ships had been immediately "scared off" --
   > >>>which it isn't, as the passage quoted below makes crystal clear -- they
   > >>>certainly wouldn't have "headed south." South was... Wismar, where they
   > >>>just got driven off from. They retreated where they came from, which was to
   > >>>the northwest.
   > >>>
   > >>> "Hans! Hans, damn it-talk to me!" Jesse half-shouted into the
   > >>>microphone as he pushed his own aircraft as hard as he could towards the
   > >>>clouds of smoke rising from the sea.
   > >>>
   > >>> There was no answer, and Jesse's jaw clenched tight.
   > >>>
   > >>> He didn't have a complete picture of what was happening, but the
   > >>>radioed reports from Louie Tillman had told him enough. Eddie and Larry's
   > >>>initial strike had been far more successful than Jesse had ever allowed
   > >>>himself to hope... only to disintegrate into disaster. The Outlaw was
   > >>>gone-that much Tillman knew for certain-and with it both of the boys. But
   > >>>that wasn't what frightened Jesse, because there was nothing he could do
   > >>>about it. It was too late for that. But Louie had also reported Hans'
   > >>>insane, low-level attack on the Danish ship which had destroyed the Outlaw.
   > >>>Hans hadn't reported. In fact, he had yet to transmit a single word.
   > >>>
   > >>> "Hans, I know you can fucking well hear me!" Jesse snapped. "Now answer
   > >>>me!"
   > >>>
   > >>> Silence. But he was close enough now to see the smoke and wreckage to
   > >>>which the invasion force had been reduced. Some of the Danes had already put
   > >>>about, clawing back towards Luebeck and away from the demons which had
   > >>>ravaged them. Others looked as if they were trying to continue towards
   > >>>Wismar, and a few of them were engaged in frantic rescue operations, trying
   > >>>to snatch men from the icy waters before hypothermia killed them. But most
   > >>>of them seemed to be milling around in confusion, still shocked and confused
   > >>>by what had happened. He could see the remaining speedboats hovering between
   > >>>the invaders and Wismar, and even as he watched one of the brigs which had
   > >>>been holding its course turned away rather than face them.
   > >>>
   > >>>
   > >>>
   > >>>
   > >>>
   > >>>
   > >>
  > >
 ><!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->
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 > As for cannon range tables... Geeezzzzz! It took five to twenty
 > computers, what they called the mathematicians who did the computing,
 > over a month per shot type for any given cannon. Very tedious and very
 > prone to error. So you had the computations checked and then rechecked.
 > How many up-timers are you going to toss at this?

Cannons did not *have* range tables; the manufacturing and powder were not
good enough. If you did produce something that accurate, the relevant
calculation would readily be done by downtimers using the local mechanical
calculator.

Hand calculations are not prone to error when done by people who do them
all the time, especially with checking.

(Not to mention that if you do a series of calculations the worng ones
stand out rather soon.<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->
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Actually leaving your computer on is better for it than cycling the power... IF
AND ONLY IF the computer is going to be used daily. The power on shock is the
most common cause of IC failures. The second most common cause is also related
to powering up and down the systems ... thermal shock caused by the ICs warming
and cooling. (Here the ICs are expanding and contracting which can cause them
to crack or break the weld to the wire bonds which connect the IC chip to the
ICs pins in its case. Newer IC, those developed after 2002, are getting around
the wire problem by connecting the IC chip directly to the case... for two
reasons... first it is using this connection as a heat sink and second it
removes NUMBER of connections between IC chip and case failure points by
removing the wires which are connected at BOTH ends.)

When the IC chip cracks it usually shorts out and then you get the release of
the MAGIC BLUE SMOKE. (As long as the MAGIC BLUE SMOKE resides in the IC
everything is usually fine!)

There are many other failure points in todays ICs.

One more point... todays ATX series of PCs are ALWAYS ON to some degree unless
turned off using a power strip or unplugging them.

*********
As for the HDDs failing... you betchum! Major failure point in the total system
configuration. And where are you going to buy replacements in the 1632
universe? Somehow I just don't see a truck full of 80GB HDDs being driven thru
the ROF area at the time of the ROF.

However the CD and DVD drives have a much higher failure rate in orders of
magnitude than the HDDs.



Offbreed wrote:

> Hans.TakeThisOut@Kill-All-Spammers.com wrote:
>
>> The town has MILLIONS of data files including encyclopedias that are
>> totally wasted when the last CPU issues its BLUE SMOKE!
>
>
> Nope. The hard drives are the weak point, not the CPU's.
>
> There isn't really any need for most computers to be on, so the
> semiconductors just sit. Hard drives rely on magnetic media, and that
> can "go stale".
>
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On Mon, 10 May 2004 11:43:37 -0700, Michelle Steiner wrote:

> In article <Pine.LNX.4.44.0405101354330.7438-100000.RemoveThis@ccc4.wpi.edu>,
> "George D. Phillies" <phillies.RemoveThis@WPI.EDU> wrote:
>
>> "accuracy" is not correct. Hand calculations, properly duplexed
>> checked, are entirely accurate for all 163x purposes, even if you do
>> not go to the extreme of Gauss, who in the early 19th century did his
>> linear least squares fits to 20 places.
>>
>> "speed" is also open to question, until you identify something that
>> needs a calculation that quickly, which seems unlikely in 163x. Using
>> one computer to generate a good set of 5-place trig/log tables that can
>> later be reprinted would be useful, but that one computer is available.
>
> Computers do more than crunch numbers for people. You an also store and
> retrieve data with them. Sure, in 1632, the data has to be on local
> media, unless they've built a LAN at HQ or elsewhere.
>
> But then again, what are computers needed for even today?
>
>
Computers are crucial for certain tasks, almost all of which are
irrelevant in 163x:

Biomedical research - an important step is running a search on the genome
of your target species. Going over 3 billion DNA bases manually is
impossible.

Three D modeling for complex engineering such as hypersonic planes and so
forth. Grantville won't have them, and you can use a wind tunnel for quite
some time.

Rendering movies - mostly entertainment

Remote communication via the Internet - irrelevant in Grantville. Also, it
is mostly entertainment value - you can survive with only telephones or
telegraphs.

Stuff that computers help, but you can survive fine without:

Engineering - The early space programs were done using Slide Rules (up to
Gemini, or maybe even early Apollo?)
Storing knowledge - this is something that is crucial. However, if you
manage to create printing from computers to metal plates (that you can use
to print more copies) than the information is (mostly preserved). This is
especially important for images, since you can just print text on paper
and have someone typeset it later).
Mass production - are you kidding me? Mass production that would require
computer control needs materials surplus (compared to what Grantville
has), and a higher level of technology and precision. Also, general
purpose computers would probably be bad in such specialized work, and
writing the specialized programs needed would be hard. Presentations -
Three years ago, many of my professors still used hand drawn slides.
Besides, there is a question if computer presentations help you at all
(check out the Gettysburg Address Presentation web site).


The reason I said "ignore property laws" was to try and point out that
even if you ignore property laws (which I don't think you can), there
aren't that many things (if at all), that a computer would be able to
change your life in 163x (in a way that you can't replace with work -
besides, in 163x, work is cheap, computers are precious).

Considering the fact that people in the 60s lived without computers at all
(Oh, the Horror!) and they survived perfectly well, with an improved level
of living compared to 163x GV, then I doubt that computers are so
crucial there.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

Uri David
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