Comments by "Keit Hammleter" (@keithammleter3824) on "Asianometry"
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@VPWedding : You make a very good point comparing radios to computers.
But I think the rot set in with Stalin. Stalin was pretty smart albeit totally ruthless. But Stalin's mindset was that anything American was the best. He had not a lot of faith in his own people. When he needed a limousine, he directed that they copy a Packard. When they needed a strategic bomber, he directed that they reverse engineer and copy the Boeing B-29 - at a cost that almost certainly was greater than the cost to develop their own bomber. (The B-29 was engineered in American customary units. Russia was then 100% metric, so they had to reconfigure an enormous range of parts & materials making.). When they perceived they needed an atomic bomb, they had their own boffins up to the task - but they copied an American design. Their aircraft engine engineers were working on an axial-flow jet engine. But rather than wait until the engineers had got the bugs out of it, they copied an obsolete Rolls Royce radial flow jet engine, with inferior fuel consumption.
Then came Khrushchev. Somehow, he thought that the Soviet Union could in a few years, maybe a couple of 5-year plans, they could surpass the USA by copying them. You cannot become a leader by copying - you can only be a follower.
The USA developed a reusable space vehicle - the X-20 Dynasoar. So the Soviets copied it. Meanwhile Americans decided it was not up to the task, so they scrapped it and developed the Space Shuttle. So the Soviets scrapped their Dynasoar and copied the Shuttle.
You can see what has happened - Stalin set a precedent, and like government beaurocrats everywhere, they covered their butts by making it established and continuing practice, not taking a risk on R&D like private industry does.
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@МирославаБерзина : Interesting - I hadn't heard quite that rationale before. So Stalin was concerned that the USSR would be something like Britain only worse, with Britain's rotten cars, dud post-war aeroplanes, and a semiconductor industry stuck in the germanium era while the USA was surging ahead with silicon planar?
As a rationale of Stalin, it makes sense, sort of. But it looks like it didn't work. It's ultimate result was the 8-bit Agat personal computer, software compatible with the obsolete Apple 2 and sold for 2 years average USSR salary, while 16-bit PC's in the West sold for about one month's average Western salary. The shame of the Agat was likely one of the factors causing a collapse in public morale and the collapse of the USSR, as Putin has explained.
In Svetlana Loknova's book, she explained that Stalin arranged for bright USSR young men to attend American universities and establish contacts with American industry, to spy. If instead these people could have returned to the USSR after getting their Ph.D's and use their creativity in Soviet industry, the result could have been better. That's how China did it.
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Most authorities state that the minimum adult daily need is around 3,000 calories for males. However, depending on what you eat, your body does not necessarily absorb those calories. In healthy people, if they eat more than they need, the calorific value of their poo rises.
I once worked out how many calories I eat per day - it was about 5,000 calories. I tried cutting back to 4000, but all I could think of all the time was food. I'm older now, mid 70's but I still eat about 4,000 per day. And, no, I'm not large, I weigh about 130 Lb.
If you don't eat meat, you need to eat more. If you do physical work, you need to eat more. If your environment is cold, you need to eat more - and the USSR was a very cold place. 3000 calories per day is the minimum for a sedentary worker in a warm environment.
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At 1:43, Asianomentry said that India lost the India-Sino War. Huh? What? It was China who lost that one. They suddenly withdrew their troops from territory they had invaded and went home, and agreed the border should stay where it was,. They did that when the US, Britain AND the USSR came in on the side of India, supplying military hardware, and this meant that China a) could not win, and b) they would have been on the nose with virtually the whole world.
This is a major error, unusual for Asianometry, and more or less makes the remainder of this video invalid, as he claimed that the impetus to create a domestic computer industry stemmed from loosing the war.
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So, Britain, essentially bankrupt after World War 2 and needing to export something, by government meddling came up with a nuclear power station design that nobody would want. Yep, that sounds like Britain all right. They did the same with their lame aircraft industry created by a forced merger of various companies, some ok, some terrible, resulting in such things as the Bristol Brabazon, an airliner for which no market existed, and the BAC TSR-2, which was incapable of performing a mission. They did the same with their telecommunications industry - the government owned BT forcing manufacturers to make a telephone exchange (Highgate Wood type) nobody wanted even if it worked ok, which it didn't. And when their electronics semiconductor industry had trouble competing with the US, their government decided to subsidize - not Mullard, who were the most technology capable, well run, and very nearly could make it on their own, because they were foreign owned (by Philips). They subsidised the ones that had no hope, so money down the drain.
The common problem in all this is the British Govt tradition of appointing committees to answer difficult questions. Expert committees are in principle good, because elected politicians cannot be knowledgeable of all things. But what they do in Britain is appoint old university professors and judges to chair and sit on their committees - these are the worst types to get a grip on commercial issues.
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@timdunn2257 It is certainly correct that these days equipment is obsolete before it wears out. But Chinese made gear is very good, if purchased from regular dealers. Here in Australia, almost all consumer electronics, apart from TV's and desktop computers, comes from China, and it's all good. But things like portable generators can be rip-offs. For example, 10 years ago I bought a Kipor brand Chinese 2 kW generator from a major hardware chain. When I got it, I put a 2.2 kW load on and it handled it perfectly - exceeded specifications. It has never developed any fault, and still runs perfectly, having done ~6000 hours. But a certain east coast (Queensland) importer buys Loncin brand Chinese 3.5 kW generators and rebrands them as 4 kW. A rip-off, but not by the Chinese maker, by the local importer.
Chinese made machine tools usually need some work/adjustment before putting to use. If you buy from Chinese suppliers at a low price, you won't get the same quality product you will if you pay a fair price.
I've bought lots of books from Amazon. I find it depends who the actual supplier is. Some books come properly packed and in perfect condition. Some come inadequately packed and damaged. Some, usually from UK suppliers, come smelling of mould.
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An Australian here. When this video started, with the words '"the millenium drought.... fundamentally changed Australian society'' I thought I was watching an old soviet TV news programme - remember Soviet TV broadcast internationally via satellite in the 1970's? Nice music but their news used to gleefully report things like '"Australian workers are striking again, as they have had enough of the harsh conditions'' and show footage of some protest somewhere that involved a single firm in a single industry, amounting something 0.1% of Australia's workers at most. But without actually telling lies, they would make it sound like the whole country riven with industrial strife.
The millenium drought certainly had NO effect on me, and no noticeable effect on our society generally. Farmers were certainly affected, but very few Australians are farmers. it should be noted that poor farming practices contributed to unnecessary dependence on high rainfall. most wheat farmers have recently adopted a different ploughing regime which better retains soil moisture.
However, this video went on to be generally good.
Asianometry did miss something important - our State governments needed to address water shortage in recent years not because of climate change, and not because of a drought - marked lack of rain periodically has long been understood as a normal part of Australia's climate - but because of considerable population growth. Since the early 1960's the population has exponentially grown from 9 million to 27 million. States ran out of convenient rivers to dam up, and had to turn to desalinating sea water. That's a 3 times increase and naturally the government has had to provide roughly three times as much water. we all drink about the same amount, flush the toilet about the same number of times, water gardens and lawn, etc.
Governments don't like to spend money or accept blame, and like governments worldwide, our State governments have blamed the climate - anything other than themselves - when in fact they should have planned for the population growth and built desalination plants and other measures sooner.
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@AnthemUnanthemed : You write nonsense. What come out of the exhaust of vehicles contains practically no hydrocarbons, unless the engine is faulty. What comes out is the products of combustion, that is carbon dioxide & water vapour, and the nitrogen from the air. But if you sniff gasoline, you get what's in it straight. In pre-emission controlled days, engine were run slightly rich as that gave better performance with simple carburettors, giving trace amounts of carbon monoxide, which was rapidly oxidised to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. You also get small amount of nitrogen oxides, which are nasty but can't make you high.
Not all hydrocarbons are the same. Gasoline is long chain molecules - carbon atoms linked to carbon atoms in a chain with 2 hydrogen atoms per carbon atom hanging off the sides, known as alkanes, octane being the archetype, Toluene has carbon rings instead of chains, and a higher fraction of carbon vs hydrogen as a result. The carbon rings give it very different chemical properties.
I did not say aborigines sniffed leaded gasoline now. I said they used to when it was available, but not very much. I said their sniffing ballooned when toluene doped gasoline became available as a substitute for leaded gasoline, so the Australian government arranged for it not to be sold in rural areas where sniffing was common. Rural gasoline suppliers sell '"Opal"" gasoline that does not contain toluene and has mostly fixed the sniffing problem, because they can't get high on it - only sick. Look it up.
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@AstralS7orm You've got some of that right, eg US semiconductor advancement due to government funding. I said that myself in my earlier post: "In the 1960's and 1970's this was all pervasive, vast, and had many hidden and not so hidden forms: Direct grants, budgeting for industrial advancement, etc..."
But on some things, you must have been using some good weed.
Bell Labs pioneered the purification of germanium and silicon to make diodes for war-time radar. So, yes their boffins had some pretty good understanding of semiconductors. That was kept secret until the war ended.
There was two things that made airborne (and to some extent shipborne) radar practical: The cavity magnetron perfected in England - a compact efficient way to generate very short wavelength radio energy at high power, and the germanium and silicon diodes key to detecting the tiny return echoes.
Incidentally, the key purification method was zone refining - where the impurities end up swept to one end of the bar, which is usually discarded. During the War, Western Electric (the manufacturing arm of the Bell system) sold the sawn off rubbish end to British firms, who made their own inferior diodes by probe testing for fortuitous good spots. They never did tweak to what WE was doing.
After the war, the Bell Labs boffins knew that junction transistors or perhaps JFETS were the way to go, theoretically, but hadn't mastered the art. They then invented the point contact transistor (physically a double diode that could amplify). They publicly announced a working device intentionally just so that the US military could not impose a secrecy order. THEN, they persevered until they mastered making the superior junction transistor. Recognising that the device - as it then was - would be useless in the telephone industry, and probably not attractive to the US military (they were wrong there), they immediately set about licencing the junction transistor to other manufacturers around the world. For a fee, any company could send production engineers to a Western Electric short training course and learn how to make transistors. It apparently was a pretty intensive course - some went away bewildered. One that was not was an engineer from Sony Japan. That wasn't the smartest move for the US, letting him in. The very competive Japanese transistor and IC industry started with him.
Meanwhile, some manufacturers, principally in Britain, got sidetracked and tried to master making point contact transistors, which commercially were a dead loss.
There's no way Germany could have led the semiconductor revolution instead of the US. As we both have stated, it was that immense amount of US Govt money via the US military (and really, NASA is part of that, money wise, even though NAS was/is a civilian agency) that paid for advanced semiconductor development.
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@AstralS7orm That's the problem - Congress holds the purse strings, but they are just a very large bunch of inexpert politicians with their own agendas. That's why the president needs to be persuasive - to have charisma to win Congress over. And the president does need to smart, in order to realise what Congress needs to be won over on. Kennedy has left us with a good example: He determined that a space race with the Soviet Union was a good thing to do (security, economic progress, etc) and he famously announced to the assembled politicians words something like "We will, before this decade is out, land a man on the moon and bring him safely back to Earth". That setting of a challenge (and it was a real challenge) and a clear target timeframe won Congress and virtually the whole country over, and they then proceeded to give NASA a vast sum of money to do just that. Obama figured out what had gone wrong with US education, and what needed to change. So he had the brains. But that isn't enough - and nothing got done.
Countries with a more modern constitution, such as Australia work on a different system. Instead of a president, they have a prime minister who acts more like a company chairman, conducting meetings in Cabinet. The Cabinet is a small group of senior elected ministers, each having a specialist role (eg finance, defence, health, etc) and decisions are by majority vote. The elected specialists may appoint subcommittees of themselves to resolve complex issues. This means the demands on the prime minister are a lot less than the demands on a US president. Really, all he has to know is how to conduct meetings.
The voting systems in western countries are generally more robust and transparent than the US systems, which helps. In Australia, we are bemused by the doubts sown over the last US election by Trump. This sort of thing would never get air in Australia, as our voting system is simpler, and run such that trust in it is easy. That helps get the right things decided on and done, because there is not much doubt that the will of the people has been expressed, and the party in power has a mandate.
It's not perfect of course, and we love to criticise our politicians. But it is a better system than the US system, which only works well when you get a president who has plenty of both attributes - brains and persuasiveness.
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Nat Semi's analogue chips were great because they were designed by Bob Dobkin, Bob Widlar, and Bob Pease - all clear thinking brilliant men.
When Nat Semi turned to things like calculators and microprocessors, these guys were not involved, and the resulting products were junk.
For example their calculators were Reverse Polish stack entry, same as the earlier brilliant and very successful Hewlett-Packard calculators. But HP had done a study which showed that a stack level of 4 covered just about any calculation you would want to do. But Nat Semi calculators had only a three-level stack, which made them useless.
Another example: Nat Semi brought out a microprocessor, the NSC800, that was in hardware a CMOS Intel 8085 but with a Zilog Z80 instruction set. Brilliant idea - low power, cheaper printed circuit board needed, and the Z80 instruction set was far more powerful than Intel's. But Nat Semi omitted the 8085's serial data ports. Dumb. It meant no-one wanted it. And the main advantage of the 8085 came with using the combined memory/port chips, which Nat Semi couldn't supply. And there was no second source, so nobody risked the NSC800.
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It's a typical British story, repeated in the car industry, the aircraft industry, TV manufacturing, and the semiconductor industry. First a number of lame duck firms are having trouble competing with the Americans and the Japanese. Left alone, one of them would rise to the top and either go broke or figure out how to succeed, probably in a more specialised market that IBM doesn't bother too much with, as did America's Hewlett Packard, DEC, and Sun Microsystems. But before they have a chance to do that, the government steps in, and meddles. They ignore the one firm who has the sense to get access to American know-how. That guarantees the end of the industry, while wasting a great deal of taxpayer's money as well.
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Nice story, Moja. There is just one problem that ruins your whole concept about any first PC, and destroys your credibility on the rest of your post: The IBM PC was NOT the first PC, in any sensible sense of the word. In 1969 I commenced work (as a technician) in an R&D lab (in Australia). Part of my duties involved doing calculations on a personal computer (that is, a computer designed for personal use by one person). It was the famous DEC PDP-8. It was about 500 mm wide, 800 mm deep, and about 400 mm high, and you operated it via a teleprinter and not a VDU. Too expensive for home use, but common in research labs throughout the West. But a PC it definitely was, and fairly old hat even in 1969. In 1978 I purchased a PC built by US company Exidy. It was microprocessor and DRAM based, had a VDU, and twin disk drives. Fully a modern PC, just not an IBM PC. Good machine too, and I still have it, still working fine. And it had back then in 1978 a multitude of competitors manufacturing in the USA, in Britain, Japan, and here in Australia.
IBM was very late entering the PC market, as its top management thought and hoped the home and small business micro computer market was a fad that would go away, like desktop robot arms did.
By the way, the lead engineer on the HP-35 was Paul Stoft. France Rode designed the arithmetic and logic sub-circuit and a couple of minor chips, a somewhat minor role under the direction of Paul Stoft, who had 14 other engineers assigned to the project. Ref Hewlett-Packard Journal June 1972.
Google Street View's origins lie with a Stanford Uni project sponsored by Google.
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@Ajopeli : Hewlett Packard called their 9815, 9825, and 9830 personal computers "calculators" for almost the exact same reason. Their rationale was that if they called them a computer, company IT departments would get to approve or deny the purchase, and probably not approve them because (a) the product could reduce the influence of the IT department, and (b) they would think of it in terms of a mainframe and find it wanting. I used a 9815 to do engineering calculations in 1975. An excellent machine. It was then a new model that was part of the 98xx series of PC's that dates back to 1972.
I still had to fight for it though, as company management mindset was that only accountants need calculators, and engineers do not. Yep - like many large companies, senior management came from accounting or legal backgrounds, and didn't understand what engineers did, they just thought we got paid too much and wanted expensive toys.
It is utterly ridiculous to claim that because someone bought out a PC (if in fact they did) before IBM did in 1981, that that represents some kind of notable achievement. For years IBM was like those company IT departments in that they didn't want people to have a low cost computer for their own personal use, and only entered the market when other more nimble firms had long created a lasting PC market.
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@indyrock8148 : That's ok, I get comments on posts I made a year ago. I myself have a policy to not comment on threads more than 6 months old unless the thread has only one or 2 posts and those posts could seriously mislead someone.
Re your first para, it's not quite right. Churchill could have sent things, but he actually denied that the Japanese were a serious threat. Given Churchill was pretty smart and usually well informed, it is unlikely he genuinely believed that - it was just an excuse for sending nothing and retaining Australian troops for his own use in North Africa and Europe. It put Britain on the nose in Australia. It was the last straw destroying government and general loyalty to Britain.
Your second paragraph is spot on.
Your third para begins with a major error. Immediately post war, the British government implemented measures to create export volume, as they desparately needed the cash. For example, they tightly rationed steel to manufacturers supplying their own internal market, but there was no rationing of steel for manufacturers exporting. This was why Rover, who had minimal export volume, changed to using aluminum bodies. The govt policy led to the infamous "home quality / export quality" phenomenon (in old British trade/industry jourmals you often see reference to models for export supposedly better) - not withstanding that their exports were never-the-less of lower quality than that from the USA and others. This was because they built to pre-war quality, which was no longer good enough. Austin/Morris, who had considerable export volume, were able to use all-steel construction.
Your last sentence is spot on - As the post war years rolled on, British exports had to complete with indigenous, US, and Japanese products, all of which were much better quality.
My background is electronics engineering. Form this I can give examples of how poor British products, built in a cost-cutting environment, led to some surprising results. For example, when television started in Australia, most local factories had acquired ties with US manufacturers, and put into local production adapted American TV set designs - which were good. However EMI Australia was 100% owned by EMI Britain and had no tie with any US firm. EMI Britain sent out drawings and a few sample British-made TV sets, with the expectation that the Australian factory would just copy it exactly. But the local factory engineers immediately saw that the British design was so bad it would ruin their reputation, so they set about designing their own set from scratch, with help from Philips. The result was the best set on the Australian market.
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You are correct. Asianometry has misunderstood a well known review article published by AT&T. Typically, your call would be routed in to what was called a "carrier system". The terminals of the carrier systems used about 25-30 tubes to combine 12 phone calls into one composite signal called a "group" - a carrier terminal at each end that's about 4 tubes per conversation, but 50 - 60 tubes in the system. The method was similar to how various programmes are modulated on to separate "carrier" signals so that you can tune your radio into the one you want. In cross-country call routing, several groups were combined into a "supergroup", needing more tubes, but they were shared for 60 conversations. Supergroups were also combined with other supergroups into a mastergroup - again more tubes, a fair number, but shared between a great number of conversations. Repeaters (ie amplifiers) were needed every 30 miles or so to overcome cable losses. More tubes, but shared between a great number of conversations. When you look at all this infrastructure, its thousands of tubes, but they are handling thousands of calls. If you followed an individual signal from tube to tube end to end, its only dozens of tubes as the other tubes are handling other calls.
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