Jan Swijsen [qjsw@oce.nl]

Subject Collecting Payments for Chaos Manor Column

Jerry,

Getting people to pay for your site is great; using Millicent is not.

The problem with Millicent is that you force people to pay. For people surfing from home that is not a problem, they don't have to come back if they don't like it, if they like it they’ll pay. When you are not surfing from home but rather from a public library of from the office (after-hours) problems crop up. I like your site so I come back regularly and I would be willing to pay but I don’t have a connection at home so I surf from the office, between 17h00 and 19h00 mostly. My manager has no problem with that but I know sites that require payments will be blocked.

Another advantage of subscription like payment is that, as user you must make a conscious effort, providing a more involved feeling. It also gives an incentive to come back even if the site does have ups and downs. With automatci payments you may loose interest in the site if its quality drops temporally.

But every coin has two sides.

The main advantage of Millicent is that the author gets a more immediate feedback on the success of his/her site. This is great for keeping the author more on his/her toes for keeping the site attractive. For you that is clearly not necessary because you are already going so fast. You keep your visitors on their toes.

An other advantage, and probably the reason why it will eventually be used, is that it makes sure everybody pays his due so that the burden of keeping sites alive does fall on ‘honest’ users only.

Maybe a combination of Millicent for some pages and subscription for others is the way to go if it can be organised. And probably advertisement funding for some other pages. And … There are probably more ways to collect money but they all take effort and time to organise.

I sure hope my payment arrived.

Stay well and keep up.

Svenson.

Well I am happy to report that my USB Zip Drive (on Win98) has given me none of the problems you had with your USB mouse (although I realize you are now thinking that was not the problem anyway). I’ve had the drive for a good week now and I have tried to do as many goofy things with the drive as I could. I’ve copied a pile of files to it in the background while playing games in the foreground and other such nonsense but no weirdness yet. The drive is very fast. I have not run any benchmarks but the drive seems even faster than my SCSI Zip. So far I’d recommend it highly.

The documentation that comes with the drive makes a big deal about it being USB 1.1 compatible. They also suggest that if you are attaching "low power" devices, such as USB mice, that you actually power down the system, attach them, and then power up. Sort of defeats one of the advantages of USB but maybe helpful for troubleshooting?

Jerry,

Bob

I have been wondering for some time now whether you have read Donald A. Norman’s "The Invisible Computer." Norman makes a case for the fact that the personal computer has become too complicated and that it will continue to do so because it is part of the marketing plan of the computer industry.

You have expressed your frustration over the complexities of computers on occasion, so I wonder if agree at all with Norman and do you see any impact this will have for computing in the future?

Jerry,

I know exactly what your going through with your CC verification software problems. We had similar troubles with my wife’s setup through Nova (which is part of Costco I believe). They sent her a DOS program to handle verification and billing. Luckily it didn’t cost $750 though. we spent a couple of days trying to get it to work ourselves, and finally got a good tech support guy to explain it.

It ended up that you couldn’t specify the IRQ for the comport (her modem is an internal one) without entering a secret code to get to the modem setup screen! I understand that most of their users know nothing, but for those up us who are technically literate it would be nice to mention in the back of the manual or something.

But the symptoms we were seeing were similar to yours, sometimes it would work and sometimes it wouldn’t. After we adjusted the IRQ it all worked fine. You didn’t mention whether the program Roberta is using is Windos or DOS based so I thought I’d pass this along.

It sure is frustrating when the ‘little guy’ runs into situations like this. I am helping a friend through another problem of big vs. little - he’s a small town doctor who charges reasonable rates ($22 per visit!) because he’s a nice guy and the local population isn’t rich. He had to install a $25,000 computer system to handle Medicare/Medicade billing (Built by Unisys, and appears to be a 386 + SCSI drive) several years ago (1991 or ‘92). They have been charging him $5000 a year for maintenance and backup tape fees, and now they tell him that it isn’t Y2K compliant and needs to be replaced, at a cost of $17,000!!

We use this software in our business (I work in the MIS Dept. of a wholesale tool and supply house. If you ever need Power Tools, let me know.), it runs on our Windows NT 4.0 Server with half a dozen workstations submitting card information for verification.

When I set it up I used an old external Multitech "ZDX" 19.2 modem left over from a decomissioned UNIX system. The software correctly identified the modem and set it up without a hitch. The catch is that the clearing house we work with does not support connections faster that 9600 baud! The amount of data that is exchanged for each transaction is very small, so that is more than fast enough.

My suggestion is to dig through one of those boxes of old equipment for an external Hayes/USR/Zoom modem that tops out at 14.4 or 9600. Slow and steady wins every time.

Detjen, Mike [mike.detjen@intel.com]

Hi, Jerry,

For some good information on overclocking of the Celeron® 300A processor you might want to visit this website:

Cantek is a mail order seller of computer hardware which I have used with good success in the past. This webpage details a step-by-step method for overclocking the Celeron® to 450MHz using specific hardware (the Abit BH6 motherboard). Seems to work well. Particularly note the mention of fan cooling: you’d better!

As they said in the web page: Intel does not recommend nor guarantee the success of overclocking of the Celeron® processor and, since I’m an Intel guy, I need to say the same thing. I’ve overclocked it personally but can’t say it’s officially sanctioned.

Jerry,

A lot of the arguments, pro and con, that people have about Linux today sound very similar to those bantered around with Mac Vs. DOS/Windows only a few years back. If "good enough" is going to be the software standard then perhaps the MS hegemony is closer to an end than most people think.

JL

Dr. Pournelle;

Remember when we all got our Timex-Sinclairs? The open code people are all about that. If you wanted programs; they had that. If you wanted to program; they allowed that. If you wanted to investigate machine code; you could do that! Same with the CBM machines; a different language, but the same idea.

The idea; as I have been able to grasp it, these people yearn for the simpler times of yore (?). Microsoft’s fouled up. The company has marketing types in charge of the Web Site, Products, etc. BUT...

Microsoft is the best thing going for those of us who; for whatever reason, cannot learn another coding system. It is not the best (compared to personalized code).

It doesn’t even support certain functions I used to count on. However I wish I could modify code on Windows; I can’t.

But; it works; sometimes. More than I can do now. And my C-128 just bit the dust.

Dear Jerry:

If you subscribe to Aviation Week, you may wish to check out their editorial on the U.S. airstrikes on Iraq (4 Jan 99, p. 70).

AW&;ST described the airstrikes as "expensive pinpricks" that did "no lasting military damage".

This was immediatly obvious to any of us with prior military experience and it’s interesting to see the leading Aviation/Defense trade magazine saying so.

Ben Baylis [b.baylis@cm-net.co.uk]

I had an old Gateway that was one of the first to use Dimms. You have

three choices

Do you think I am a megalomaniac ?

You complained in View 29 about having to make long-distance phone calls to update a modem.

This reminded me of the whole mess with respect to long distance. Recently, I started paying attention to long distance, and I was very surprised—perhaps "shocked" isn’t too strong a word—at what I found.

The last time I looked into long distance, years ago, I got MCI instead of AT&;T and I was doing about as well as anyone could. Now, there are many choices.

It turns out that the worst thing you can do is simply sign up for long distance and make long distance calls. The very worst rates are reserved for the so-called "casual" customers (like me, until recently) who are not paying attention.

Have you heard of 10-10-321? This is an improvement over the convenience rate. A substantial improvement. As an MCI customer, I could save big money by using 10-10-321. Who runs 10-10-321? Well, it turns out that MCI runs it. Thus MCI treats any person who dials 10-10-321 to a better rate than they give me, a customer for over 10 years.

Can you do better than 10-10-321? Sure. MCI, for example, has a calling plan where state-to-state phone calls are about 10 cents per minute. However, there is a $5 minimum, and since I don’t use long distance that much, I don’t want a $5 minimum. And some of my calls are to friends in other countries; and to get the *international* cheap rates, you have to sign up for another plan, with a $3 minimum.

You can do even better. With 10-10-345, you pay 10 cents per call plus 10

Knowing that I can use 10-10-345 to pay 10 cents per minute, any time of day, to call anywhere in the USA, has changed the way I view long-distance phone calls!

There is another cheap one: 10-10-220. Calls up to 20 minutes are 99 cents, and then 10 cents per minute. I haven’t used that one yet.

Rule of thumb: any phone service that promises you will "save 50%", instead of quoting a rate such as "10 cents per minute" is probably too expensive. Any service that promises that they will cut your fee in half if you talk over 10 minutes is probably too expensive.

I have been well served by 10-10-345; given my low volume of calls, I’ll probably stick with it. I’ll be interested to see if your readers have any other services they recommend.

--

Now that you’ve discovered trackballs and Logitech, I’m surprised you have not considered the TrackMan series. The old Vista model is still at Fry’s for $40 and the new MarbleFX is often on sale. Choice between them is a matter of taste, but both put the hand in what hand surgeons call the position of function, maximizing comfort while minimizing potential injury. I’ll never use a mouse if I can avoid it.

The Logitech software has some very useful features, BTW, which allow handy reprogramming of the multiple buttons.

Surely there are alternate ISP connections that can be available for Oil Change and other tests? I would be more concerned about having Oil Change store the password locally in another format than about Oil Change sharing it with someone (thing) on its own server. Cracking password protected data usually means cracking the password storage not decrypting anything else. AOL and some other services will allow the use of their password to charge merchandise to the service account so there can be real concern about security in general. Physical security on my personal hard drive is pretty good.

My experience is that Oil Change is precisely like Windows 98 automatic update. A great idea, a good implementation and nothing to use on critical hardware because it will make changes without regression testing based on a database that is subject to human errors and Murphy.

Hewlett Packard has been offering a free limited version of Oil Change off the Hewlett Packard driver site for a long time. This is the only straightforward way to get drivers (other than shipped with product) for some HP products. I presume without having any inside information that Hewlett Packard does this because it allows less sophisticated or less precise record keepers to have current drivers and so reduce support expenses while offering better support, that is it makes the whole process of keeping drivers current much easier (more automatic). There may also be financial considerations involved, if so I have no idea who pays and how much. Obviously this is a large pool of satisfied users, and there must be many more out there. I know at least one industry professional who found Oil Change a personal disaster, perhaps because of non-standard configurations and general playing around. My own experience has been positive but I was very very careful to be able to revert. I watch closely and track versions and once I start doing this the Oil Change convenience is mostly their data base, which is one among many (as is Windows 98 automatic update noted above and others).

If it were mine I would use some of your library as premiums with The Literacy Connection, especially when used for ESL or juvenile/adult delinquents. I have always thought TLC did a lot to justify one dedication in Friday.

Jerry,

I’m hoping your readers might be able to help me out. Based on the past discussions we’ve had online, I’m confident they’ll have some ideas.

My church’s sister congregation here in St. Louis has just been given three old Compaq Proliants. They’re 486DX2-66s, each with 32 megs of RAM. One has a single 1-gig SCSI drive, another has two, and the third has four. Aside from differing drive configurations, the three PCs look identical. There are also a couple of external CD-ROM drives in the bunch, which will be nice for installation purposes.

The pastor at the church wants to set up a lab as an outreach project so that area kids who don’t have computers at home will be able to come in and type their homework there. As this is an inner-city church, we’re dealing with limited resources. So I’m thinking this project is a natural for Linux. We pick up three network cards, link them together, string the printer off one of them, load up WordPerfect 8 for Linux, and let it go. I know it’ll run far better than any flavor of Windows we can muster up (and frankly, even if the church could come up with the $600 it would take to get copies of Windows 95 or 98 and Word, I’d prefer to spend that on hardware and get one more station up and running).

Herein lies the problem. I’ve played around with Linux on my own PC, but haven’t tried to network it. I’ve seen some networking HOWTOs, and they seem pretty clear. But I have to wonder if a straight networking job is the wisest approach. Would it make more sense to load up one of the PCs with all the memory we can and run the other PCs as X terminals off the single PC? Or should they just all be standalone PCs with a single network share for data? Or is there some better strategy that I’m missing in my inexperience?

Since your Linux experience is about equivalent to mine (a couple of months’ fooling around, basically), I don’t expect you’d have the answer, but I’m hoping some of the other readers out there might. (I’m out of my zone on this one—I know 95 and NT and OS/2, but that’s because I’ve had years to fool around with them.)

Thanks in advance.

Dave Farquhar

Jerry:

1) Your recent posting about modem manuals are right on. Some now ship with manuals in PDF format so you can print them yourself to save a few bucks. DOS, Amiga and LINUX users may not be big fans of that...

Obviously different modem strings are needed for different firmware and flashable modems that let you update firmware often gain support for new strings. It costs more but USR/3Com Courier line allows you to send a command to modem and it will return in plain text to your terminal program every command it supports.

And vendors seem to like fancy looking flash utilities to automate everything—as long as you have Win95/98--instead of the simple and cross-platform solution: a simple text file of new code and instructions on how to upload to your modem using any communications program and z-modem. Its especially annoying if a vendor provides such files during a public beta and then only posts the pretty version when testing is done and it doesn’t support your OS.

The various vendors have improvised from original Hayes standard (insert moment of silence for demise of Hayes...) almost as much as Java has evolved in certain hands.

2) Once you get a server set up to provide dialup Internet access to your internal network, check to see how many phone lines you have running to computer locations. If you have multiple numbers so multiple computers can connect, you may wish to run those lines to server and use one of the schemes where two modems connect to provide a double-speed link if your ISP allows. Even better, maybe you can cancel some of those lines and use the same money for one DSL link or perhaps cable modem, depending on what’s available in your location.

3) I don’t really like those upgrade systems where each computer has to connect and the upgrade is automated. Providing you don’t drop connection in the middle. I much prefer downloading an updater once and putting on server where everybody can grab it locally. Or you can put on a floppy or Zip or similar and update machines that aren’t on network.

4) Concern about subscribing: You have mentioned both e-mailing items to subscribers and allowing subscribers access to some areas before everybody else. If you do, you will want a solution that supports folks who use different accounts or change accounts. An ID/Password system would be better than a system which puts a cookie on user’s computer or looks at address they are using and automatically allows them to go to exclusive areas.

And manually maintaining that mailing list if it grows too big will get time consuming as users change ISPs. Setting up a web page where a subscriber can login with password and change their e-mail address themself would save you lots of work once it was up. Some mailing lists provide that now.

Reflections on Byte

Jerry P:

I have been reading quite a few new things on the net recently. After reading of your conversation with the new person at Byte, I realize that I wouldn't imagine that they could have provided the forum that you now have. One thing that strikes me is that probably their legal staff would stop any reference to a person who was modifying a pair of Celerons to run them faster Intel intended them to run. Well, maybe it would have been all right if it was a letter to the editor but certainly not to be referenced by one of their paid columnists. In addition, there is a lot of stuff getting into your mail that would cause equal heartburn. The thing is that with the Internet, it is assumed that we all understand that what someone says in a letter or something that is hyperlinked, does not represent the columnist or page manager, etc. While these things are linked, you don't print them in the body of your column. No endorsement is implied or expected by people reading your musings. I assume that you agree with this observation.

I have found that the freedom enjoyed by denizens of the Web is probably closer to what was intended by the founding fathers although they would have been shocked by what they loosed upon the world.

A further observation is that your error checking of hardware/software is most interesting but makes QA people like me cringe at the lack of standards in the industry. Or maybe it is the lack of completeness of the standards. There is no equivalent that I can think of in any other industry, with hardware that has MTBF in thousands of years for individual components, nanoseconds for some combinations of hardware, and milliseconds for these other combinations of hardware/software that you find. Yet for the most simple configurations like word processors, there are probably few interruptions for the average user. What we have inherited is a system with the potential for disasters, but capable of great stability and ease of operation. There is nothing like it that I can imagine.

Greetings Dr. Pournelle,

I read you August column in which you told of the good things Norton Utilities 3.0 for Win95 could do for you. I agree, basically with what you said. But there is a problem with the Registry optimization wizard. When I ran it on my machine it apparently corrupted my registry, and I had to restore the registry files using a DOS based program I own ( I won’t do free advertising) to get Windows 95 running again. For a hectic hour or so I thought I had effectively destroyed my Windows 95 and was getting ready to wipe and reinstall it. It wouldn’t boot into Win 95 and I could get scarcely anything to work right if I tried safe mode. Luckily I found the backup of the USER.DAT and SYSTEM.DAT files and was able to restore them properly (deleting the new, then copying the old with the proper file names into the proper "folders" aka directories). I’ve been playing with computers for nine years now and have a lot of experience and (thanks to your column in BYTE) a lot of knowledge about how Windows of any flavor works. Still, this scared the heck out of me. I still like Norton Utilities for what it can do for you, but novices should watch out for the little tricks it does that are less than pleasant...

Dear Mr. Farquhar

I just read your posting on jerrypournelle.com and being a Unix / Linux expert I would like to give you my advice , for what it’s worth.

The Proliant machines were built to be servers and not workstations. This means that they have quite a capable I/O subsystem but are weak in usability and graphics. With their present configuration, they are better off sharing responsability as servers to the children than as workstation.

Make the one with the bigger disks the central file and print (maybe also email) server. Attach a modem to it and make it also be the router to the internet.

The other two could be the font / application server and the backup / application server.

For the children to work you can buy / donate several 386 machines (they cost about 25$ in the US) and load linux on them. Those machine will be the terminals where the children can write/play/make graphics or whatever.

The networking issues are trivial and I can help you with them, just write to me or post again jerrypournelle.com.

With the above described set-up you should be able to server about 30-40 workstations with WordPerfect 8.0, email, GIMP graphcs programm etc. If you want to let them use the inernet, you can share one internet account one one modem among all workstations.

I have a network step-by-step manual that I sent to Dr. Pournelle a while ago and if you want I can send it to you, too or Dr. Pournelle can let you have it ( I am not quite sure where I put it).

Best regards

It’s pretty simple and fast; the report it generates is not pretty but it is fairly complete. Using it is easy; you indicate what reports you want, point it at a URL, and away you go. Xenu then proceeds to display all the URLs it finds on the initial page, and all the pages linked to it; it stops at the first external link, but you can tell it to ignore those completely, if you want. Ignoring external links makes the process take *much* less time. At the bottom of the screen, Xenu displays a running tally of the number of links it has processed, and the percentage that have been checked. The total number of links is invariably higher than you expect.

At the end, you can generate an HTML report (which it puts in your \TEMP directory and displays with your default browser). You can also save the list of broken links in a proprietary format; this allows you to retry them at another time, which is usually necessary to ensure that broken links are accurately reported. You can increase the accuracy (but increase the running time) by decreasing the number of sites it tries to check at a time. All in all, very simple to use.

I took the liberty of checking your site with it; you can see

the (edited) report at

It took about 5-10 minutes over a T1 connection. The report can be larger, but if you select all the options, a report can be HUGE (this one’s 220K as it is).

or

among other places. The explanations provided there should help make sense of why a link is broken.

On the actual report for your site, the first section (Broken links, ordered by link) lists each broken link followed by the pages it appears on. The second section (Broken links, ordered by page) lists all pages that have broken links in them, and then lists the links beneath. The last section lists all the ftp and gopher URLs which Xenu apparently has trouble checking itself; these have to be checked manually.

Although I checked the broken links several times, there are

undoubtedly some that will work for you but didn’t for me. Some

of these are of the type that begin with

These are links to local files on your PC; they will work for you, but not for anyone else. It’s the kind of error that you have to check for either (1) on a PC other than the one you use to develop the pages, or (2) on the production website, as opposed to the local copy you use for development purposes. You’ll have to figure out where these files are on the web server, and put in the appropriate URL. I stopped using FrontPage some time ago, partially because it kept on insisting on putting these sorts of links in my documents instead of the correct relative URLs (mostly for images).

Characters like ! and ) surface in several places. These are

simple to fix. There are also a few that are missing the "l"

at the end of the URL, e.g.,

should really be

You’ve also got a few URLs like

http://

that obviously lead nowhere. This kind of URL is far too easy to create with FrontPage.

The errors that result from typos are a pain to track down, but at least easy to fix. I think FrontPage has a global search and replace function, so at least you won’t have to hunt for the error on each individual page.

Other errors result from pages that require password access; unfortunately, Xenu doesn’t put these in a separate category, so it makes them a bit harder to identify. You can tell Xenu to prompt you for the password when it comes up to a site that requires one, though.

The remaining errors may be a more subtle error in the URL; the link may have changed, or the URL is somehow incorrect, even though it looks OK.

Besides the broken link and ftp/gopher reports, Xenu will also generate (if you ask it to) a list of redirected URLs, all valid text URLs, and a site map (essentially a hierarchical list of pages that have titles). Asking for all of these can generate a pretty massive report, and one that can be difficult to edit.

I hope this has been of some help to you. I use Xenu mostly because it’s free and fast; the results aren’t pretty, but it works for me. There are loads of other programs that do similar things, but most of them cost a lot more than I can afford, and they don’t provide simple and easy to understand reports (for me, at least; your mileage may vary). FrontPage has a link-checking feature, but I’ve had trouble making it work; colleagues of mine who have been more successful with FrontPage tell me they find Xenu easier and faster to use. It only does one thing, but it does it well. Again, your mileage may vary.

DISCLAIMER: I have no connection with the product or its developer; I’m just a satisfied customer.

If I can be of any more help, let me know; it’s the least I can do in exchange for all the pleasure your work has given me.

--

Data Librarian (416) 736-2100 ext. 77551

USB mice (plural is important)

Oops, the automated response I got back said that I sent this to your "Important" email address. My apologies. Here's another try.

I thought you might be interested in my USB mouse experience.

Ever since I heard about USB I've been looking forward to having multiple pointing devices on the same computer. I had used a trackball in the past and really liked it for general pointing tasks in Windows. But I play a lot of games, and the mouse is a much better device for most of the action games. So I thought USB would be the perfect way to let me choose the appropriate device for the current task.

I've just purchased a new computer. I had read on your site that a USB mouse doesn't work in Safe Mode. So I decided to run one of the devices through a PS/2 port and the other through USB. I like the size and shape of the Logitech Trackman Marble+, and since they don't have that in USB, that was my PS/2 choice. I like the wheel height of the Microsoft Intellimouse better than the Logitech offering, so that was my USB choice.

The PS/2 trackball installed just as expected.

Similarly, the USB installation went flawlessly. I plugged it in, it asked for the drivers, rebooted, (I was disappointed to see that) and just worked. Great.

Then I noticed that I had only one Mouse applet in the control panel. When I adjusted the mouse speed so that the trackball felt comfortable, the mouse was painfully slow. (I like the speed cranked up pretty high.) And the converse was true. With the mouse speed cranked up, the trackball was too touchy even for me.

I tried reinstalling the Logitech drivers. It overwrote the Control Panel applet. I installed the Intellimouse drivers. Now that is the current applet. Always, only a single speed control for both devices.

I think this is a classic example of the half-finished work that makes Microsoft products so infuriating. Sure, the mouse installed easily, one small piece of Plug&;Pray that actually works. But I'm not going to enjoy the full benefit of multiple pointing devices because they didn't think through the implications. It's frustrating and disappointing.

Jerry,

It looks like that Neo-Thoth briefings page is back up on the DARPA site.

Regardless of whether the link works, I already sent you a hard copy of the briefing via snail mail.

Dear Mr. Pournelle,

Being a long time fan of your writing ("Inferno" is one of my all time favorite books) who has followed your work through many books and the pages of "Byte" magazine, I read with interest your comments about setting up your ICVERIFY software. I completely sympathize with your travails using the product, because I am the guy they recently assigned to alleviate the modem setup problems, after my stint as the project leader for Version 2 software. (Oh, by the way, we couldn’t get the Modem Blaster to work either.) Connecting to the credit card banking industry is not as simple as it sounds, as you found out, and here is the whole story why:

1.) While YOU may be ready to move into the 21^st century, the banking industry is still in the 1970’s. For credit card approval and settlement, they communicate at 1200-baud, pretty much as a 1200-baud dumb Bell modem.

Re-read the previous sentence to make sure this dumbfounding fact registers.

Even so, "So what?" you may ask. Well, for one thing, that means when you connect to them, you already have to be configured to "talk" to them like a 1200-baud dumb Bell modem because unlike today’s smart modems, there is no communication negotiation at all. And modern modems do not default to communicating at 1200 baud. And, if you do not connect properly in under a second, the bank-processor hangs up, end of communication. 2.) This means before you even dial, you have to have a modem initialization string ready to go that turns your fancy new 56k modem into a 1200-baud dumb modem. 3.) This is a problem because some newer modems do not support a dumb 1200-baud mode. Some modems require a flash BIOS upgrade to be able to drop down to these antiquated speeds. 4) This is also a problem because this forces those of us who depend on working modems for the success of our products to have a tested modem string ready for all of the thousands of old and new modems that are out there. Naturally, this is not possible, although we try to cover as many modems as we can get our hands on. Even so, there are yet other problems. Unfortunately, the modem manufacturing industry is woefully non-standardized, so the same brand and model of modem at a given time may have one chip set, and a different chip set at another given time. This means our carefully constructed strings may not work on all modems of the same make and model! Add the fact that though there are many similar modem string commands from manufacturer to manufacturer (or model to model), some modem commands do different things from modem to modem. And some modems have their own unique commands. Scary, huh? 5.) If we do not have a pre-fabricated modem string, we have to be able to talk to the modem (if the user has actually installed the modem correctly and it is functioning, but that is another issue) and test possible commands to create a working modem string for the user. This means we have to have a pretty good generic idea of what modems can do and, and how to get them to behave the way we want them to. But due to the non-standardized chaos of the modem industry, we are not sure that the most basic of commands do the same thing from modem to modem.

Basically (particularly in the newest software), we go through several steps in our modem Auto-Detect process. First, we determine which port the modem resides and test it to make sure it is installed properly and functional. Then we ask the modem what it is, and try to match its name to an entry in our modem file, which has the modem strings. On failing to make a match, we try to determine which commands the modem is capable of supporting, and then test a series of commands that make up a modem string. Once we have constructed a modem string, we ask the modem if the string is acceptable. If that passes, you may then have a string that will dial out properly. Did I mention that some approval transactions have to be done at 300 baud? Anyway, if this string fails, another session of Auto-Detecting will produce yet another string. There is also a drop-down list of many modems to choose from the user can select and try.

Unfortunately, there will never be a good solution to these modem issues until the banking industry installs modern intelligent high-speed modems. It would help if the modem industry standardized the modem instruction set, or does other things for uniformity. There are more issues of standardization within the banking industry that would make your head spin, but that is beyond the scope of this discussion. As it stands, everybody without exception has these problems dealing with the credit card banking industry, which is why some products only deal with a few banks and bank-processors, as well as selected modems. We try to support all of the credit card banking industry, and it is no small task. The best plan of action is to buy the best name-brand modem you can afford (they have the best track record) and hang on the sales slip, because a few of the best modems can NOT do the 1200 baud dumb modem tango.

Good luck in the future, and feel free to contact me for any information you may need.

And finally, all thoughts, ideas, and other content expressed here are solely mine alone, as a private citizen, and in no way represent the views, policies or actions of CyberCash or ICVERIFY, Inc. Thanks for listening.

In the vein of your dioxin discussion in today’s view, one of my favorite politically incorrect books is "Trashing the Planet" by Dixie Lee Ray. She was a former Governor of Washington State and PHD in Nuclear Energy (I believe that’s what it was in, something related to Nuclear energy anyway). She dispels many of the myths related to Dioxin, PCBs, Asbestos, the supposed Ozone Hole, etc. If you haven’t read it its worth picking up.

Re: CEO and the UFO 11f

Dear Jerry,

I can’t believe you didn’t comment!.

I suppose that having money and brains still doesn’t exclude stupidity. I have heard (who hasn’t?) many theories about Roswell and backward engineered technology, and I have only the following to say…

Computers work too badly to be of alien intelligence (apologies for poor sentence structure). Do you think the Moties had to reboot now and then. How about Daneel Olivaw, where was his reset button?

Never weaken!

Jerry,

Agree with most of your comments about shockrave, whizz-bangery and all. I suspect a lot of these shockrave applets belong on client web sites as a distraction, ie. coca-cola or movie games, and that by grouping them all together they appear less than amusing.

However, they do have an online chess game that although lacking the functionality of the larger sites, yahoo for example, has the benefit of being available for use through a firewall without having to open any tcp-ip ports!!

Hello Mr. Pournelle,

I’m one of your readers (and some months translator) from Turkey.

After your advise :))) I bought your novel, Starswarm, from Amazon.com.

In spite of being a foreign-speaker, I could read it without looking up at a dictionary. It was very smooth for me...

Is that your intentional way? Are all your novels in the same grade? It’s very good for us; but doesn’t this a negativeness for your native-readers?

Can you say that a foreign-speaker who can read Starswarm without a dictionary can read all books which you advise in your articles easly?

Sincerely yours,

Cuneyd Er (male) (You can pronounce my name as June-eight)

Cuneyd Er [cuneyd.er@byte.com.tr]

BYTE Turkiye (Freelance editor)

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

It’s sort of scary, but interesting... Food for thought anyway...