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This in from Frank Love:
Interesting site. Found you from a mention at Bob Thompson's site.
Your SF section intrigues
me. You primarily list authors I rank among my favorites. What's intrigueing
is the lack of others I consider as good or better. Of course I have no way
of knowing what's readily available in Sweden, but the lack of Heinlein,
Clarke and Asimov seems puzzling.
Among recent authors, my current favorites are David Weber, Elizabeth
Moon and David Drake. The recent collaboration of David Drake and Eric Flint
(An Oblique Approach and In The Heart of Darkness) was memorable. The first
book is the best combination of Historical, Action, Hard SF and memorable
characters I've run across in several years. It actually got me interested
in the historical period it's set in! A rare occurence indeed!
I've been collecting SF and fantasy since about 1962 (back when SF
was disdained by teachers and parents alike) and have been reading it since
1955. My current collection probably numbers close to 4000 books (I never
count them, that's to much like work!) with about 90% being paperbacks.
Currently I'm heavily into Military/Action/Adventure books, (as you
might guess from the previous paragraph) but am always willing to try something
different.
I've been involved with microcomputers since 1979 when I paid $2212
for an Apple II with 48K of RAM and a 5 1/4" floppy drive that sounded like
a cement mixer and held 117K in it's capacious grasp. It came with an RF
Modulator to hook up to a tv set. I bought it to catalog my SF
collection.
I currently have a system with a Cyrix 686 PR200+ processor, 96MB of
RAM, 13.5GB of disk storage and a cable "modem" hookup to the Internet. Not
to mention a 5-disc 10x CD-ROM changer, a 1GB Sparq drive, a 5 1/4" floppy
drive and the ubiquitous 3 1/2" floppy.
I figure that over the last twenty years I've spent a total of $20,000
on hardware and software and countless hours reading about, thinking about,
dreaming about and scheming about computers at work and at home.
I still haven't cataloged my SF collection.
That's too much like work!!!
Thanks for the feedback.
The selection of authors included is rather arbitrary, apart from
being ones I recommend, and obviously incomplete by any standard. It takes
time to do a proper list with title links etc. For this reason I passed by
a number of "classic" names to begin with, since my intent was to highlight
names that may be unknown to many. Heinlein, Clarke and Asimov titles are
in any case often easily found, even at public libraries here, and to list
their complete works is a project unto itself. I may get there in due time
-- it's not as if I lack the info, having been an avid SF fan myself for
as long as I have been a reader of books.
Follow-up on yesterday's exchange with Scott Kitterman:
If the power generation is destroyed it is quite literally the work
of years to replace it. While it may take a few weeks (or longer given the
war and the overall shape of the Serb economy) to fix what this strike did,
it is still much quicker.
Most of the life critical civilian infrastructure such as lights, cooking,
and water purification and distribution is relatively insensitive to sudden
power loss. The permanent damage is generally going to be reserved for more
sensisitve electronics. Things that are important to both military operations
and a modern economy, but not basic human services.
I replied to this, but had a subsequent freeze of the system on a later dial-up,
and since the mail program was still open, I lost the copy-to-self before
I could post it here.
In summary, then, I noted in my reply that it was not so much the sudden
power loss I had been referring to, as the HT transients downstream and the
short-overloading effects upstream. Both could be quite destructive to consumer
equipment and generating components respectively. Even relatively simple
items. In addition, the capability for repair/replacement of damaged components
is being degraded daily with the continued bombings of the transport
infrastructure and factory facilities.
Obviously, Serbia is/was not a particularly high-tech region of Europe,
and our own societies would be much more vulnerable to this sort of thing.
But note that NATO staff have on several occasions remarked the the goal
of the campaign is to bomb Serbia back to the 1800s. Given the state of the
country to begin with (and Kosovo was even more un-tech), this may have less
impact than we imagine on the greater population compared to the government
and military. But there are a number of reports in recent weeks that suggest
increasing problems supplying (in cities and towns) the basic utilities (power,
water, sewage), not to mention transportation and fuel.
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