Re: Is your operating system EOTW-Proof?

[cockpitbob]

Again, I am not saying computers wouldn't be needed eventually. They would. But not for a long time, during which lugging one and the means to power it would be a liability. Hence my suggestion to bury it for later retrieval.

Gil.

If TEOTWAWKI does happen, it is my deepest hope that when we emerge from the inevitable dark ages to re-build society that we place Bill Gates in the same ranking as the Devil, that a respectable operating system becomes the standard platform and that writing virus code and sending spam becomes a capital offense.

[gil]

LOL Bob, I couldn't agree more :o

Gil.

[BlinkyBill]

Wow Freax, you've put a fair bit of thought into this.  I'd like to offer an alternative view on the need to store information.  I may ramble a bit, so be it. 

Because this is all a moot point if only one part of the world is effected (look how fast Europe rebuilt after WW1/2), let's assume the entire planet is hit by massive solar flares that wipe out all transistor based electronics (even those deep underground by some strange unknown natural occurrence).  This event also causes an outbreak of fish-moths, which go on to eat all the books in the world  :'( .

Let me start by stating my position with regards to technology and quality of life.  With the exception of medicine and some engineering, I reckon that technology has made life more convenient, but not actually made our lives better/happier/more content.  With that in mind, I don't see the need to get back to our current technological level in a hurry to lead happy lives for me and my fellow man.  Rather focus efforts on rebuilding medical capacity etc.

Now with regards to replicating Wikipedia etc. what we need to remember is that it's just data or information.  It certainly isn't knowledge.  So where then does knowledge lie?  In the heads of people that currently use it.  While engineers/doctors/surgeons/law enforcement etc. use references frequently (digital or hard copy), I would imagine that they could function well with what knowledge they have in their brains.  Perhaps slower to start with, but they, like everyone else will start documenting and making notes (on slate or cloth probably, 'cos the fish-moths ate all the paper remember  ;) ) almost immediately so will improve their efficiency fairly quickly.  Certainly not to current levels, but hey, that's ok.

These people would in turn take on apprentices and pass on the knowledge, just like in the past that served humanity so well for so long.  Sure we'd loose democratizing of opportunity.  If you're an unpleasant person, in the wrong village, or someone else is smarter you'll miss out on the opportunity to train under a "master", but hey, at this stage the collective good is more important than your dreams and aspirations so we'll just suck it up.

And so life will go. Less convenient, but no worse off.

Then again, perhaps I'm just an optimist :)

[NavySEAL]

There were no calculators when I started college......slipsticks for all us engineer hopefuls (slide rule)........still have two on my desk.....batteries never run down.:)

[ciphercomms]

I gradually upgraded slide rules through high school and college and ended up with four of them, two plastic and two laminated bamboo. Late in the 1990s, when my wife was collecting stuff for our first (and last) garage sale, I put the three cheapest ones up for sale. I probably had $1 stickers on the plastic ones and probably $5 on the smaller bamboo one. I spent a significant part of the garage sale explaining to people what 'those things that slide' were...and a couple of times showing interested people how they worked. At noon I put new stickers on them for 50 cents and $1. At 2:00 I changed them all to 25 cents.

I still have all four of them.

[cockpitbob]

Well, since the topic has shifted to slide rules...I've got a collection.  I'm in my 50s and probably the last generation to have learned them in grade school.  My dad is 92 and an engineer.  He's already given me his ivory covered Picket.  I'm a (inactive) private pilot, so I've got an E6b circular flight computer. 

I've got a collection of various other special purpose circular and linear calculators for everything from construction to celestial navigation, but my special one is the one my dad picked up while he worked for IBM inside the Pentagon during the early 1960s.  It's a nuclear bomb blast damage calculator.  Yeah, really.  A guy my age who grew up in uber-liberal Berkeley, CA thought it was a joke item, but there was a time in this country when many war planners and scientists had one in their desk and used it often.




Once dad gave me this there was only one thing to do; find its mate  Online I found and bought the same model radiation decay calculator Dr. Strangelove used in the movie to determine how long we needed to stay in the mine shafts.  It's in a box somewhere so no picture, but here's something about it. 

[KK0G]

I have a couple of slide rules also. As the other pilots here are aware, the E6B "Whizz Wheel" is still relatively common in aviation although even it has been replaced by electronic E6B's by many pilots including myself. It's still common in aviation because of the fact that it's a sometimes critical piece of flight equipment that has no batteries to go dead or circuits to fail at the worst possible time which is why I carry one in my flight bag even though I seldom use it.

[cockpitbob]

I can do ground speed and cross wind calculations faster on the back of the wizz wheel than I can with the Sporty's electronic E6B.  I like the visulation of the wind triangle it gives me.  I'm guaranteed to not get a wacky number because I pushed a wrong button in turbulance.

[NavySEAL]

Well, since the topic has shifted to slide rules...I've got a collection.  I'm in my 50s and probably the last generation to have learned them in grade school.  My dad is 92 and an engineer.  He's already given me his ivory covered Picket.  I'm a (inactive) private pilot, so I've got an E6b circular flight computer. 

I've got a collection of various other special purpose circular and linear calculators for everything from construction to celestial navigation, but my special one is the one my dad picked up while he worked for IBM inside the Pentagon during the early 1960s.  It's a nuclear bomb blast damage calculator.  Yeah, really.  A guy my age who grew up in uber-liberal Berkeley, CA thought it was a joke item, but there was a time in this country when many war planners and scientists had one in their desk and used it often.




Once dad gave me this there was only one thing to do; find its mate  Online I found and bought the same model radiation decay calculator Dr. Strangelove used in the movie to determine how long we needed to stay in the mine shafts.  It's in a box somewhere so no picture, but here's something about it.

I have one of those from way back.....

[gil]

Thats a nice 'computer' :) http://preview.tinyurl.com/pxn6ppe

That page is a bunch of BS.

Linux was complicated and convoluted fifteen years ago. Today it is the best operating system out there, and yes, it is free. MS Windows is a bloated dinosaur; unreliable and vulnerable to viruses. Viruses! It's like swiss cheese, only holes are security ones. I use Mac OS and Linux Mint 13. My productivity has increased greatly, since I don't spend so much time rebooting and scanning for viruses anymore, not to mention having to rebuild my system every so often. Linux simply works, better, and keeps on working.

Gil.

[Lamewolf]

Actually, no.

A computer would be the least of my concern in a TEOTWAWKI scenario. A solar powered pocket calculator would be the only computational tool I just might keep handy. Survival takes a whole lot of time, none for messing around with computers. Sure, I might store one for use years later, maybe... If I live that long. In all practicality, I think it would be outerly useless, and just one other item to lug around and need to produce power for.

What about when you're old and grey and suffer from memory loss? My family has short term memory loss as a treat for me when I get older. Also my hands will stop working (I won't be able to grip that well) so for me doomsday is about saving as much of modern day technology as I can so that I can use it for when I'm wheelchair bound and are unable to remember anything. I intend to shrug off doomsday as something which caused great pain but I managed to survive. Isn't that the whole point of surviving? I am dependent upon technology, infact just right now I'm reliant on a car for any form of movement from one place to another because I've bruised the ball of my foot by wrongly stepping on a pebble. It hurts like hell and I assure you that I'm not going anywhere walking or riding. It would have to be a car or motorbike bare minimum. Imagine what it would be like for me post-collapse + 30 years...

All it took to put me out of comission was a single pebble.

Humans are very fragile, I feel that unless we have at least a partial continuation of society well into doomsday that we will all die, There are simply far too many people in the world and even just in the USA nevermind the fact that we could end up seeing millions of boat refugees going towards the promised land once doomsday hit. ANYWAY, There are simply far too many people to make it practical to fight for resources in a 1800s or even early 1900s technique. Put it simply we cannot just ride up in the Model T Ford and chop down some firewood for the log cabin and Ethanol still despite that being a very romantic and very attractive proposition for myself because I love Fords. People WILL find you no matter what part of the country you are in and take what you've got. For me this means certian death and for people in the USA this means so many bullets that you would run out by the time you got everyone. Imagine massive crowds, swaths of people, all coming after your tiny little stockpile of food. That is what scares the shit out of me the most about doomsday.

So my preps center on the notion that if we got to that point that any prepping would be pointless and so therefore I am prepping for the more practical doomsday alternative that will be a VERY ROUGH worse-than-the-great-depression doomsday which we will all (mostly) survive but that society will never be the same (never be as dependent upon making money/useless crap and consuming natural resources.)

Basically my doomsday prepping centers around the following disasters:
#1 Doomsday clock reaches midnight. Nuclear war breaks out.
#2 Famine begins partially due to trade sanctions, people have oil but there is fighting in the middle east so it is incredibly expensive.
#3 People start to loot and return to their basic instincts, families and friends turn into mortal enemies.
#4 Religious people start up the dogma and turn into vicious animals just like the rest of us.
#5 People get over themselves and realize that a great proportion of the world is starving, people start to die in the hundreds of millions.
#6 Seeds soil water and fertilizer are the most valuable commodity in the entire world besting even gold or diamonds. Rabbits are used for generating fertilizer and meat because they procreate the quickest.
#7 Coal power plants are built and energy production begins at low cost to enable people to grow crops without the aid of the sun.
#8 Once the second dark ages is over and we have stabilized the food industry once more people begin to socialize again. But we can no longer sustain the current population levels due to severe radiation damage to the farmlands. Worldwide dust storms are a threat to solar power plants worldwide big and small and can even damage crops due to the sky being blacked out (Read the bible sometime)
#9 People still socialize and still grow food but they are mostly bored shitless out of their minds all of the time. They begin to create new content to keep up spirits and moral.
#10 The new golden age begins as a result of people working together, people shun the whole notion of using fossil fuels and it gradually begins to fade out of existence in everyday life and is forevermore used as an alternative emergency source of energy instead of what it was before, a primary source of energy.
#11 As a means of this never happening again calorie restrictions are set on everyone so as to discourage having children. And a one child policy is most definatley federal law.
#12 Guns are no longer a practical method of hunting as there are simply no more animals to hunt after, during the great famine people would eat these animals with their bare hands while still alive.
#13 People begin to repopulate nature and respect it for what it truly is, It is a part of us not a seperate entity. We go on forward through the years respecting our planet and hopefully never again take it to the extremes of overpopulation and deforestation and grossly wasting its natural resources ever again.
#14 Children are told of the day that the Zombies-in-Suits almost killed us all. How humanity was blindly led by greed into almost complete and total annihilation. We realize how stupid we've been.

If you would like to visualize this scenario I recommend the tv show Dark Angel (With the hotnsexy Jessica Alba in it) https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=dark+angel+full+episode

And now back to our regular programming...

The new range of x86 intel cpu's consume approx 7.5 watts, you cannot muster that much? At most it would be 13-15 watts for a small eeepc, my large 17" Laptop with one of the newer 7.5w tdp cpu's consumes approx 15-20 watts from the wall once the battery is fully charged. I could do that easily with a 40 amp hour battery and a 40 watt solar panel no problems. For a car mobile station that kind of laptop is invaluable.

Computers are a new invention, and personal computers have existed only for about thirty years. Everyone was doing just fine without them before that, including businesses and large organizations. I'm not saying they haven't changed the world, but when one has to worry about food, shelter and safety, no way anyone would even care about maintaining, using and transporting them. Their level of complexity makes them a liability. There would be no way to fix them or produce new components for decades. What if the only one or two computers used to run any kind of organization broke down? No way to retrieve the vital data or get a replacement. Computers are fragile, not adapted to such a new situation.

I don't see computers being fragile not at all infact I would say that they are one of the most rugged items available as long as you know how to replace or remove ram cards cpus or graphics cards, replace power supplies etc. Think about it. After a collapse every single abandoned home is going to have spare parts ready for you to be able to use. This is why I've settled on the ATX Rackmount formfactor, that way I can use any ATX LGA1155 motherboard out there or any short-length PCI-E graphics card out there, or any ATX power supply, or any sata cdrom or any sata hdd or any DVI/VGA/HDMI monitor for spares.

Just stay away from cheap component manufacturers like Seagate, Only ever buy Western Digital drives. I have a few which are still working fine from 1997 and all of my more modern drives except for one 1TB one which had a controller failure (which I'm going to swap out from a known-good 1TB drive to recover the data). So 20 hard drives over the last 15 years and only 2 have failed. Pretty good odds.

As for power supplies I recommend Seasonic, basically anything with high quality capacitors in them. Some power supply review websites actually take photos of the innards so you can make sure what they look like inside before you buy one. Just google search the brand and model of PSU and "review" and you might find one. Anything made by Delta is golden.

As for graphics cards go for Gigabyte or ASUS brand, Asus is a bit less dependable than Gigabyte.

As for ram, stick to Corsair or Kingston.

If you don't know how to install an operating system then I highly recommend that you do learn, it is very rewarding when you know that you are no longer tied to a computer geek. I say that in the nicest and most helpful way possible too.

Remember too that there will be other survivors who do not exactly believe as you do, that computers are a thing of the past and are no longer necessary just because the world ended. Infact I would bet that they will be clamouring for anyone with additional data to consume and raiding houses looking for DVDs or Blurays of tv shows or movies that they haven't seen yet. Probably even stacking multi-terabyte hard drives in their new super-cluster basements. That is how a large proportion of Geeks will probably behave once they have mastered the art of stockpiling rice and growing their own food in their backyards, or basements, out of sight from anyone.

To state that "everyone was doing just fine without them before" is going to be true afterwoods is flat out wrong, have you ever seen a teenager after they've broken their phones? Have you ever seen a geek without internet access? No sir. We will rise again and we will create our new anarchist-internet, and I hope that HAMs like yourself will be there to kindly steer them in the right direction of using 2.4 or 5GHz and not have them TX on your bands while trying to setup a Warez BBS.

I would rather store paper, blank books and ink, pens and pencils. They don't need power and they don't break down. A good medical book would be worth it's weight in gold... And I am not referring to a pdf file.

But they do run out, Rather quickly actually. I would recommend the purchase of a Handspring Visor PDA which takes two Alkaline or Eneloop AAA batteries and can store a vast mountain of information without the aid of a warehouse of office supplies too. EDITED: It doesn't have effective GPS though. The Navibe GPS that I bought separate with the unit won't even receive GPS signals. I assume due to age and damage done to the internal shielding among other things like it being very old (14 year old GPS module), so I tossed the gps module out and am keeping the PDA. With this I can not only take notes but also plan out a trip. Assuming nothing takes out GPS satellites. It also has an aluminium case for it made by rhino skin which is kind of rare but you can get them which makes the device EMP proof. However in another thread I made you can simply put it into a tin box and make it EMP proof along with some additional padding which I would not be getting in the rhino case and extra AAA batteries, maybe even a solar panel on the outside of the case to keep it fully charged at all times = never need to replace batteries ever again. Just brainstorming here, thanks for the idea actually! You made it happen!

And I hate books, honestly, I'm not going to fill my car up with books, with the aid of technolgy I have a first aid app on my handspring visor and various mountains of pdf files on my laptop. In the event of a doomsday scenario a book will look like tinder to burn not something to read. Especially if there are digital copies available.

Aswell as a mirror of Wikipedia and a mirror of the Gutenberg project.

Stockpiling various books means that I have to stay put, and unless you have those books in your car at all times then you will have to waste precious minutes getting them from out of your house and into your vehicle. Its truly a sad state of affairs if you do not have any reading material for your children in pdf format either. I thankfully have thousands of nursery rhymes available.

No offense, but I don't think anyone is going to flash new firmware to FLIR cameras when finding clean water would be of utmost importance.

I believe that survivial requires a minimalistic approach to succeed. Radio itself, while important, is low on the list of priorities in a post apocalyptic situation. The only technology I would have is handhelds, a couple HF radios, a soldering iron and a pocket calculator. Stuff I can carry if needed, repair if necessary, and that doesn't require me to lug around a 100lbs battery. Anyone having to walk a few miles with a laptop in their backpack will throw it out on the side of the road on the first day and carry a bottle of water instead.

Is this the forums first argument thread? :) No I don't think so. We're all being quite nice here. I agree that minimalism is essential in surviving however you also need to think about the other people around you. I will have the option of providing people a means of not-freaking-out and focusing on things that they are familiar with. As for a laptop you can get lightweight eeepcs and who says that anyone will be walking around anyway? It might just go the other way where we have an abundance of fuel but no food and therefore people will be driving everywhere. Especially if they can burn ethanol or vegetable oil. Ontop of that how are you going to cook your food once all of the natural rainforests have been cut down for firewood? By the 300 million people out there who think they're preppers but are actually just locusts waiting for the chance to swath through a forest like sheep with a head full of ignorance. I would have the option of using a portable microwave in my car if I ever decided to buy one that is, they are pretty damn clunky and take up room.

Think about what happened in Africa when they told everyone to burn wood to make sterile water for drinking, they then had the problem of millions of people cutting down the trees everywhere. http://web.mit.edu/africantech/www/articles/Deforestation.htm

My plan is to get a trailer and put a battery on that and solar panels, I can then leave it near a mountain or in a rainforest and setup a new home which can be moved at a moments notice..

The only hard drive one needs to fill with useful data is one's own head. If it breaks down you have nothing to worry about.

I'm sure that there will still be Psychiatrists after the end you cannot get rid of them no matter how hard you try. They would probably be so heavily medicated however that their eyes glow red. They are like psychopaths with a licence to wreck peoples lives they will do fine in a post-collapse scenario and might even think its all just a hallucination or wonderful dream that relates to how their parents treated them.

Gil.

Its been nice talking to you :) and to quote Jessica Alba.... Life Goes On.

Freax,

Buddy, your computer is not going to work after TEOTWAWKI, its going to be worn out from all these painfully long posts you've been making ! 8)

[gil]

Buddy, your computer is not going to work after TEOTWAWKI, its going to be worn out from all these painfully long posts you've been making !

LOL!

[NCGunDude]

Freax has been busy. He's the only contributor to the site in the last 30 days, that I could tell.

I've got plenty of sources for EOTW stuff, and I like radio stuff, but still learning. The key to providing valuable information is having more than one source for the information.

I know I don't have all the answers, but I know who does!