Month: March 2003

MediaWhoresOnline Watch Watch Watch Watch

1. Cabal of oldsters who won’t listen to outside advice? Check.

2. No understanding of ethnicities of the many locals? Check.

3. Imposing country boundaries drawn in Europe, not by the locals? Check.

4. Unshakeable faith in our superior technology? Check.

5. France secretly hoping we fall on our asses? Check.

6. Russia secretly hoping we fall on our asses? Check.

7. China secretly hoping we fall on our asses? Check.

8. SecDef pushing a conflict the JCS never wanted? Check.

9. Fear we’ll look bad if we back down now? Check.

10. Corrupt Texan in the WH? Check.

11. Land war in Asia? Check.

12. Right unhappy with outcome of previous war? Check.

13. Enemy easily moves in/out of neighboring countries? Check.

14. Soldiers about to be dosed with *our own* chemicals? Check.

15. Friendly fire problem ignored instead of solved? Check.

16. Anti-Americanism up sharply in Europe? Check.

17. B-52 bombers? Check.

18. Helicopters that clog up on the local dust? Check.

19. In-fighting among the branches of the military? Check.

20. Locals that cheer us by day, hate us by night? Check.

21. Local experts ignored? Check.

22. Local politicians ignored? Check.

23. Locals used to conflicts lasting longer than the USA has been a country? Check.

24. Against advice, Prez won’t raise taxes to pay for war? Check.

25. Blue water navy ships operating in brown water? Check.

26. Use of nukes hinted at if things don’t go our way? Check.

27. Unpopular war? Check.

VIETNAM 2 YOU ARE CLEARED TO TAXI

WSJ.com – U.S. Tactics May Seem Original, But History Offers Some Lessons

HISTORY LESSONS
Key elements of the U.S. war plan in Iraq have been tried in earlier wars, to mixed results.

• Bypassing population centers in a rush: Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson did the same in his 1862 Civil War campaign in the Shenandoah Valley, leading to early successes.

• Long supply lines: They became a significant problem when Germans invaded Russia in World War II.

• Guerrilla warfare: Iraqis may be borrowing tactics that worked for fighters opposing Israel in Lebanon and the West Bank and Gaza Strip over the last 20 years.

• ‘Shock and Awe’: A much more extreme version — atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 — helped bring World War II to a successful end for American forces.

Napoleon said it best.

So we have underestimation of how hard the enemy would fight off an invasion and classic supply line management problems. The armchair generals are not looking so clever.

Finally got a chance to get out and ride a bit today. I did 13.5 miles in about an hour (along the Burke-Gilman Trail to Tracy Owen Station and back), and it felt good. I had a tailwind on the outbound leg that helped me roll along at 20 mph, and on the way back it was hard to hold a steady 15 mph.

Lots of riders today, at all level of accomplishment: nice to see.

Chad Dickerson

From a technical standpoint, the most interesting thing in the story is that the Al-Jazeera sites typically receive traffic “in the range of 50 or 60 Mbps.” If you skimmed over those numbers, you shouldn’t. Ladies and gentleman, that is some serious traffic, and I say that having watched the MRTG graphs at some pretty big media web sites. If you ever wondered if Al-Jazeera was for real or not, there’s your answer.

Having looked at the same MRTG graphs (I would love to have seen them at the start of the current war), I wonder if this isn’t a way of advertising a web site’s popularity. Everyone likes to think web access logs are the only measurement, but looking at a set of graphs that measure traffic flow in close to real time gives a sense of scale and capacity that page view counts don’t do very well.

A formula could be expressed as volume of traffic in bits divided by average page size (images and other stuff will pollute the data somewhat). Also factoring in what fraction of capacity is utilized at a given flow of bits might give an ad buyer a sense of how likely their ad will be seen when the flash crowd shows up.

Here’s mine: not in Al-Jazeera territory . . . .

The bottom line: I’d like to see more sites make a sample of their bandwidth numbers public.

Back Off, Syria and Iran!

Paul Wolfowitz, Rummy’s deputy, conceded that the war planners may have underestimated the hardiness of the heartless Iraqi fighters.

This admission is galling. You can’t pound the drums for war by saying Saddam is Hitler and then act surprised when he proves ruthless on the battlefield.

Lots of good insight here on how the war plans may be putting troops in harm’s way in even greater risk.

I noted a similar notion here.

I thought the idea of war games was to try unexpected ideas in a virtual theater, rather than finding out in reality that you’d made dangerously wrong assumptions.

The Bible – Polari Edition

found at http://languagehat.blogspot.com. To quote a comment I saw there, “separating the sparkle from the munge: that’s what it’s all about.”

Adam Osborne, Pioneer of the Portable PC, Dies at 64

Adam Osborne, a British technical writer who became one of Silicon Valley’s legends by introducing the first portable personal computer in 1981, died on March 18 in Kodiakanal, India.

I interviewed Osborne years ago, during the Paperback Software suit: he was insistent that while they did emulate the keystrokes and other user interface elements of Lotus 1-2-3, that was to help the user transition to their product, not to ape the then-market leader.

He was starting up his Indian ventures at that time, with some kind of artificial intelligence system to be called Socrates. He respected the Indian work ethic and high level of education, and had no great love for the US software industry at that time. Google doesn’t find any mention of it, sadly.

This article in the NYTimes doesn’t mention the fabulous CP/M operating system that these machines used: I have a clone/workalike from that period. Check out the prices on those things . . .

My work/knowledge log is at http://paulbeard.dyndns.org/mt. After running into the Usual Resistance on getting a static IP address, I just signed up with dyndns to handle it.

Notes and comment about work projects, the food options on campus and the Ave, and other “noted in passing” items will be featured there.