>>"Apparently US Robotics no longer distinguishes between "Courier" and "Sportster"

When 3Com took over USR, the Sportster name was dropped. The Courier line still exists; I just received one from 3Com for a project I’m working on.

It’s very different physically, thinner but wider and much deeper (something like 8-10 inches!), and all black. The packaging also refers to this as the Corporate modem, because of some management features, including the ability to set it to automatically redial a broken connection.

-- Russ

If you do the same thing from within Netscape, you have to press tab once again then Enter/Return.

Only an extra keystroke, but still... ‘tis the principle of the thang. COuld the fact the MS owns Hotmail have anything to do with the fact that it is nominally easier to get things done with Explorer as compared to Netscape?

Regards...

Ted

Dr. Pournelle,

On 2/22/99 you published: "I confess I am weary of the INTERNET. This morning nothing was happening at all. I logged off. I shut down the system and started over. I logged on to Earthlink.net and tried ping. Nothing."

After spending the last 17 years building, programming, networking and repairing computers as a hobby and as work, I have taken up painting with acrylics and writing fiction as hobbies. I write with a pen. I go outside more, and I take pictures using real film. I get the wind in my face. I look at stars. I check my e-mail only once a day. I don’t update my web site much. I am concerned about what the web has done to my ability to read for effect. I feel like I am trying to recover something.

Glad to hear about the possible changes, thought I would drop a line about a good enough combo to think about. I just finished a new machine (named Falkenberg) a retail 300a celeron O/C to 450 on an Abit BH6 board w/ a Mylex BT 950 running a IBM UW2 9ES 4.5 gb drive in a PC Power &; cooling case over Granite Digital cabling. The cabling is almost as expensive as the drive, I’ve got less than 800 USD all up in the beast and it runs right with any 450 mhz PII tests I’ve seen reported on Winstone 99 and Winbench 99. It came up and ran 450 with no tweaking straight out of the box! I only wish I had waited a few weeks and bought a set of the new 370 PPGA riser boards and chips and made up a dual machine, as it seems Intel forgot to make drilling the chip a requirement to bypass the dual processor block on the PPGA celerons. see cpu-central.com for info.

Anyway, good luck on the new setup.

Richard Sherburne Jr.

Zach Smith [matrxweb@hotmail.com]

TO: LouComNews@aol.com

This is in response to "Of Linux, Unix, Red Hat Applixware and the Second Computer Revolution" in the Volume3, Number 4, February 1999 Louisville Computer News. I know this was written by Jerry Pournelle, but I would still like to comment. I also sent this letter to him.

Unix has extensive documentation all over the Internet. Most (if not all) commands have a "man" page that explains all the options for that particular command, and some even include a brief history of the command. All you have to do is read.

Last time I looked, that helped with learning Win9* too. Also, XWindows makes most tasks extremely easy.

You will find tons of office applications for Unix/Linux. For example, Siag Office is a free, office package for Unix/Linux, including word processor, spreadsheet and presentation graphics. I find it pretty amusing that "Applixware" was mentioned in the title of the article, seeing as how that used to be RedHat’s Office Suite. Which, by the way, consists of a word processor, spreadsheet, e-mail client, HTML author and several other utilities. Don’t believe me? InfoWorld Magazine (August ‘96) calls Applixware for LINUX "a must-have application suite for anyone who is serious about using or considering Linux as a productivity desktop or business development OS."

About games, several are available for the Linux platform, and game development for it is rising. LinuxGames.com has a huge list of games for Linux. To list a few: doom, quake, unreal, etc...

Now, for a shameless plug:

Subject: Re earthlink and internetweather.com

the site internetweather.com uses methods to probe traffic and response times that earthlink servers block out, so the site’s 100% congestion reading is meaningless...

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

The reference is to a site hosted by the University of Virginia for one of its graduate students, Eric Weisstein. He has written the ultimate math fancier’s guide to mathematics: the "CRC Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics."

I remember CRC handbooks from my college days and I always pause at Barnes &; Noble to leaf through one or more of the current editions. But I stumbled on this one when I searched the Internet for an article that described how to construct a regular heptadecagon (17 sides) with compass and straight edge. My oldest son is studying construction of simpler polygons in his middle school and we worked on one of his assignements one night. My interest was piqued when I remembered reading years ago about Gauss discovering how to construct an absurdly-large-number-of-sides polygon. Turned out to be 17 with proof that polygons with a number of sides equal to Fermat primes can be constructed (257 &; 65537!!!!). It also turns out that I found a better explanation of its construction at a different site, but the point is that *this* site has this terrific book...with all of it on-line!

Anyway, the "CRC Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics" was put together by Mr. Weisstein in his spare time over the course of 10 years or so. It’s about to be printed in its second edition at around 1970 pages for 80 bucks with a CD version in the works. His story of the making of the book makes interesting reading, too.

Just thought you’d be interested.

Steve Erbach serbach@compuserve.com

Saw the thing in MAIL about the Louisville Computer News. I was curious and attempted to locate something on the web. Surely they have something like a web page. So far not! I’ve only found the name at various Louisville web sites.

The following link points to a description of the paper..... That’s

right, it appears to be a free print publication! If you’re interested

get to the page and "find" Louisville Computer News.

Regards,

Gene O'Brian [gco738@kiva.net]

Sir:

In reply to a mail sent by someone else, you said:

"The proper way to comment on a text is to quote it entirely, or refer to it so that the reader can find the original, and say something coherent, not chop into it tiny point by tiny point. But I suppose I expect too much."

Since you have been online nearly as long as I’ve been speaking in sentences, I would imagine that you have noticed that the usual rules for online discussion include the admonition to quote only the specific parts to which one is replying. Probably Mr. Smith (though I can’t speak for him, obviously) was doing his best to follow that rule, rather than the normal rules for printed material.

Dr. Pournelle,

You write:

"I DETEST the practice of taking snippets out of context, quoting them and writing at length about each, then stringing the whole mess together as if that were some kind of coherent article."

I think you’re going to lose this fight. Furthermore, on Usenet, I think you *should* lose this fight.

Why? Because any given medium has a "grain," a way that works particularly well versus a way that doesn’t. Your own preference:

"The proper way to comment on a text is to quote it entirely, or refer to it so that the reader can find the original, and say something coherent, not chop into it tiny point by tiny point. But I suppose I expect too much."

...is exactly what we all learned to do in high school and college. For paper text. For referenced articles. And it works wonderfully -- for referenced articles, which are written on a relatively slow time scale, and which are written with the expectation of remuneration (either cash or a good grade). It makes sense for me, the writer, to spend tons of time following the standard canons of woodpulp-net writing if I’m being paid by the word or my grade depends on doing what the teacher wants.

Usenet writing is not like that.

First of all, there’s a *lot* of stuff out there to comment on. It’s like a "free university" going 24 hours a day, with seminars of wildly varying quality. If you plod through each response the way you did in college you will respond to about one item a week.

Second, nobody’s paying you to plod through stuff. It’s your own time you’re using, so if you spend enormous amounts of time on one thing, that time is just gone and with nothing but psychic satisfaction.

Third, the *medium* SUPPORTS fast replies and re-replies— instantaneous rebuttal—while allowing *exact* quotation of the particular point being replied to. If you don’t appreciate this point, you’ve never had to argue with a cranky parent, who first makes a point and then denies later having ever made it. Usenet is the authoritarian’s nightmare because there is *nowhere* to hide: if you said something, I can prove it, and I can quote it.

Conversely, for those of us who *like* articulate fast argument, Usenet’s a dream—and styles of writing that allow efficient reply times are intrinsically desirable. I don’t want to wait a week for an essay; by that time, swifter people will have said the things worth saying on a thread anyway.

Fourth, there’s just arisen a very broad consensus among even mature and intelligent users of the medium that to "quote it entirely" is poor form. I don’t want to read 1500 words of you, or anybody, if what’s being addressed is just *one* statement you made in all that logorhhea that comprised 35 words. I want the person arguing with you to precisely excise the particular, specific point that you made and that he or she disagrees with, and quote exactly that, so I don’t find myself scrolling through pages and pages before seeing a much smaller amount of new text..

Fifth, the problem with referencing is that references on the Net are imprecise: I myself can and do cite URLs in my net writings, but if the one relevant section of the URL is much smaller than the total URL content, it makes sense, again, to excise and quote.

To try to sum up: Usenet writing is qualitatively different from woodpulp writing. It is *capable* of supporting the texts one finds in paper publications, but it *enables* new forms of communication that are like nothing so much as articulate telepathy with perfect memory of any given text placed on the Net. From those new forms of communication you get new styles of debate, which have pretty much arisen by spontaneous consensus, and in fact have existed for many years on Usenet—long before it was popular.

I suspect that the newer style of argument is fantastically annoying if you’ve grown accustomed to more sedate forms of discussion and you’ve just read yourself flamed in the new mode. But language changes, and that’s not always bad. Otherwise, we’d still be reciting, "Hwan in Aprille the springe shouers sote..."

Erich Schwarz [schwarz@cubsps.bio.columbia.edu]

Hi, Jerry

I found out (the hard way) about CDRom and UDMA.

To make a very long story much shorter....

I installed a new motherboard (Abit BH6) in my existing system. This board contains the Intel BX chipset which includes an Ultra DMA buss mastering drive controller. Remember that the entire rest of the system was older. Does this sound familiar? Incidentally, almost all of the BX chipsets are made here in Oregon at Fab 15 on process 854 (8" wafers, series 54- we’re up to 860 now on the Pentium III® ).

When I fired up Win98 (it was on the existing hard disk) it reported all kinds of new hardware found and offered to install drivers. I let it do that, foolish as I am, and it trundled away for a while. Presently I got that nasty error message "cannot find file xxxx.xxx" please insert disk. Hit browse - the CDRom has disappeared.

In the motherboard documentation - on CD, of course, - there is a note that says "if you install the Intel PCI Ultra DMA drivers your CDRom drive may not work if it isn’t UDMA capable but you probably won’t have any trouble. You will have trouble - believe it. I wound up putting the Windows 98 CD in the drive on another system in the network and copying it all over to the hard disk on the new system (after restoring everything all the way back to the beginning of the project).

Oddly enough, the CDRom still worked when the system booted in DOS mode. Under Win98 it was GONE. It turns out that the windows Ultra DMA drivers and my older CDRom drive just didn’t like each other’s company. DOS drivers were those which came with the drive and worked fine.

Solution was to run out to CompUSA and pick up a Memorex Ultra DMA CDRom drive. Slapped that baby in there and all was well again.

After all was done I ran that CeleronA up to 450MHz, added a Creative Banshee 16MB graphics board, Sound Blaster Live!, and we’re ready for games. This is the game system; critical data is NEVER kept on an overclocked system. Seems to be nice and stable, though, and the chip temperature never goes above about 47C.

Moral: you’d better heed those warnings in fine print about what MIGHT have a problem when you change things around.....

Jerry,

I think you should have just one question for the Linux users: What are they trying to accomplish? Sure, you’ve said some things about Linux in frustration that they might not want to read about their pet OS. You frequently say some things about Windows that aren’t exactly flattering either—I seem to remember one point last summer when you were having some problem with Windows 98 and you said you figured you should just chuck it all in favor of writing fiction. And, back when OS/2 was a factor, I’m sure you had some not-so-nice things to say about it as well.

All of this means just one thing: No OS is perfect. They all need work.

It’s admirable that the Linux crowd gets to its dirty work very quickly. But the Linux crowd needs to quit taking every criticism of their OS so blinking personally! Repeat after me, everyone: A criticism of Linux is not a criticism of me. Again. A criticism of Linux is not a criticism of me.

If the Linux zealots want more mainstream acceptance of their OS, they need to learn to live with people writing about it. And if the writers keep all of Linux’s weaknesses as their own dirty little secrets, there’s less chance of those problems getting fixed. There was a reason why Thomas Jefferson said that given the choice between government without newspapers and newspapers without government, he’d take the latter. This coming from a man who was repeatedly crucified by the press he held so dear.

If the goal is to get more mainstream acceptance, the time it takes to go bash any writer who dares write something negative is better spent polishing the install routines or getting KDE ready for prime time. Now, if the goal is to stop the current momentum so that Linux remains an underground, punk OS... I can’t think of a better way to do it. But before doing that, maybe they should go ask OS/2 and Amiga users to compare present times to the early 1990s, back when both were still contenders.

If this makes me a target for Linux zealots too, so be it.

Dave Farquhar

Subject: Honey vs vinegar

"BTW, to people who send me mail asking when a Linux version of Frontier is coming, if you want a respectful answer, don’t call the computers I use PeeCees. Only very immature people can dismiss hundreds of millions of users that way. Or maybe very stupid people.

And if you send me a personal comment on this I will remember your name forever! People can be so intrusive. Simple message: MYOB. This is between me and the idiots who think they can win without working with Mac and Windows people."

I believe it is the people who devote the least time to insulting others who get the most work done.

Hi,

Firstly sorry if you’ve already heard this from thousands of people, but I wonder if the problem you have with formatting zip disks could possibly be Win98 formatting them Fat32 for some reason. A friend recently reported that he had ended up with a Fat32 formatted floppy that worked fine in his machine but of course anthing that wasn’t 98 refused to touch it! I’ve reformatted zip disks with an internal IDE drive under NT several times with no problems, both NTFS (I was experimenting!) and Fat16.

Secondly, I had a very brief discussion with you a couple of months back about a type of crash in Word (many versions, but particularly 97) with lots of objects that leaves it unable to save to any disk, local or network. The only option was to copy everything to the clipboard, quit and reload word and paste it back. I tried to dig a little deeper to define the cause, but could never really tie it down - Office SR2A seems to have fixed it though. At 23 megs I wonder just what _isn’t_ in there!

Kim

 Kim Blackburn BEng

Jerry,

One common problem with windows shutdown in a networked environment has to do with disconnecting with shared drives. For example, if a windows machine is mounting (or trying to mount) a shared resource on another networked machine that no longer exists, the machine can appear to not shut down properly.

I think it may be that there is an exceptionally long timeout period if the disconnect fails and it gives the impression that the shutdown isn’t working at all.

Since you seem to be having this problem on all, or most of your windows machines, it may be that at one time in the past you had mapped a common network drive, on a server perhaps, on all of the machines. That server (or shared resource) no longer exists because it was replaced or renamed. Now when the machines try to shut down, they try to ‘disconnect’ from that shared resource before they can cleanly shutdown and because the resource is no longer there it causes a problem.

Check in ‘My Computer’ for attached network resources with a red ‘X’ thru the icon.

Dear Jerry:

Regarding your troubles shutting Windows 9x down, when was the last time you ran the Norton Utilities WinDoctor, SpeedDisk, and Optimizer on these systems? I know it takes quite a little time, and I forget to do it for weeks at a time, but in many instances little glitches and odd behaviors just vanish afterwards... at least until NEW odd behaviors and little glitches develop.

All the best, waiting on pins &; needles for the "good news:" Clinton resigns? World peace? Faster than light drive? One can only hope...

Tim

I just went through the same thing [systems not shutting down properly] with a friend’s computer. After trying everything (including formatting and reinstalling Windows 95b) I finally stumbled an a solution. In CMOS I changed the memory settings from the default (Auto Detect) settings to a slower setting. No problems since then. The way to do this differs depending on the BIOS maker and version - in this system the change was from Auto Detect to Normal (the choices being Auto Detect, Turbo, Fast and Normal).

I’ve also found that, with some newer motherboards, the CDROM is more stable if you manually change the PIO mode from Auto (which is usually Mode 4) to 2 or 3.

Claud Addicott

Dr. Pournelle,

Having been a long time reader of your column I find your insights and general method of doing things pretty much normal. Your sufferings are typical of the average user trying to get all this computer stuff to work together in some sane manner.

Anyway, I too suffered the problems that you are having with the systems not wanting to shutdown. This has happened to me on a couple of occasions, but with different scenarios. This is on a new (4 months old) Pentium II 450 Mhz from G2K, generally very good equipment.

The first scenario is that WIN98 would not shut down, kept the wallpaper on the screen and just sort of sat there. I had to use the reset button to get it to go away. This went on for about 4 days. Then I tried to print something. Nothing happened. No print dialogue box, nothing. I decided to go into the control panel and look at the printers. That would not work either. I then ran Norton Utilities System Doctor. It finished and only found one error in the registry about a shortcut being incorrect so I let Norton fix the registery. I then shut down the system (it hung as usual). But when I started the system back up everything worked normally, printers, and proper shut down. I surmise that it was the spooler process and something was damaged in the registry that NU was able to resolve, althought it did not indicate such a problem.

The next time the problem shutting down the system arrived was hardware based. The system is supposed to have automatic power down. Well it would shut down and then would just sit with a blank screen, no power off. I looked back over what I had done. I had installed a Mitsumi CD-R. I then suspected a problem with the drivers although WIN98 had not requested any drivers. I called Mitsumi tech support, spent a lot of time on hold, and then go dumped into a voice mail system. I dutifully left a message figuring that I would never get a call back. I was wrong. The next day Mitsumi called me (and even during the hours that I specified). They gave me instructions and a firmware update to the CD-R via EMAIL. I installed the firmware update and my shutdown problems dissappeared. Two things I learned from this is that sometimes hardware can cause the problem, why I don’t know. The second thing is that Mitsumi tech support is better than most. I would recommend Mitsumi purely from the their tech support and the fact that they returned my call. The tech knew what he was talking about, provided a response, a response that fixed the problem. Congratulations Mitsumi.

Dear Jerry, thanks for being online. I was going through a particular

bad bout of Chaos Manor withdrawl when I decided to do a search for "Jerry Pournelle" on the net. Et voila I found you!! BTW, in reading through your online mail messages I found the 1-800-232-2983 number for Byte Subscribers to call (CMP). I highly recommend calling as they answer the phone with "Hi this Byte Magazine, how can I help you" which is really refreshing to hear after all these months (truly, I must be going through major withdrawl if that perks me up!!). Anyway, to cut to the chase the nice young women who answered informed me that Byte Magazine would be resuming as an online publication sometime this quarter.... but she had no details. I am eagerly looking forward to it whenever and wherever it resurfaces.

Its been toooooo long.

Cheers, and many thanks again for not abandoning the Byte community.... you’ve done yourself proud!

• Mark

Dr Pournelle:

Just a suggestion but your registry might be corrupted—leaving Win9x fumbling arround and effectively perpetuating the errors in the backup copies of the registry.

One possible cure for this is to boot to "safe mode DOS prompt" and run the DOS version of REGEDIT and export the registry to a text file. Then, after saving system.dat and user.dat (and system.da0 and user.da0) somewhere safe on the hard drive, delete them. Finally re-run the DOS version of REGEDIT and import the previous text file.

For some reason this process will dump phantom settings in the registry and generally clean up entries. It also seems that ONLY the DOS version does this.

I have found it to work for me on several Win9x system with "strange" behavior. Of course there are no guarantees -- I still can’t get my personal system (WIN95c 2.5) to stop searching for the floppy drives on bootup and the first time I open anything (program, menu, etc.) that has a pointer to the floppy drive. I figure I’m lucky, though, as the system hasn’t crashed on me in 2 months and it’s up 10hrs. a day 7 days a week. (‘Course 50% of the time it’s probably sitting there like a expensive space heater)

Dear Jerry,

I had the same problem with my Win95b system. Turning off all power management solved the problem, until I installed WinFax PRO, as long as the controller is running the system hangs at shutdown. If I manually exit the controller no shutdown problems. I was able to duplicate this problem on both my sister’s and cousins machines. The system also will not shutdown if AOL is running.

If your computer uses Advanced Power Management, it’s possible that it is conflicting with memory. In the Control Panel, call up the Power icon and uncheck the Allow Windows to manage power use on this computer. Shutdown Windows and see if the problem is gone.

Anytime I have more than three programs running in the little icon tray windows won’t shut down, This is also a repeatable phenomenon. BTW programs that run in the background (can only be seen with ctrl+alt+Delete) have the same effect.

It took a long time figuring out a fix for this problem. I went back and looked at my logs (that I never would have started if not for Chaos Manor Byte column) and learned that this took three calls to HP’s tech support and a guy named Tom helped me with the solution. This computer would not shut down out of the box. That was two years ago and I’ve duplicated the problem on a Gateway and a Compaq, so I’d say the problems was in Windows. But, I’ve seen a Win95 system with 8 programs running in the system tray shut down like it’s supposed to.

Chuck Wingo

Jerry,

Logged onto your site today using the new Neoplanet browser, and out of curiosity hit their "What’s Related" button. The sites it pops up as related to yours include two about Mr. Heinlein, two about Larry Niven, one about Stanislaw Lem, and one about the new animated Tarzan movie from Disney. (???) Makes me wonder who it was that "classified" your site, and how. At least you seem to be in good company. If you’re interested, these are the links

Subject: Altavista DOES return Lisa Myers interview results.

Jerry,

I’m a big Alta Vista fan, but it does contain a few "gotchas". One of these is case sensitivity: lower case matches anything, while upper case matches only upper case (this is mentioned a ways down on their Help page, but who ever reads it?).

In the Alta Vista query you reproduced in the View page, all your search words were capitalized, including the +Interview term. I tried out your search, and got 86 results without seeing what you seemed to be looking for among the initial hits. Changing +Interview to lower case and trying out the search +Lisa +Myers +interview +Clinton returned 313 hits, with the number 1 hit being the NY Times article that broke open the floodgates and "allowed" NBC to broadcast the interview.

I DO agree with your general sense of frustration with the various search engines, though. It seems that the economic pressure to become "portal" sites may be interfering with the development of better user interfaces for actual searches. Of course, making someone try again and again to get the desired search results DOES increase the "stickyness", and thus profitability, of the site...

I don’t mean to be flippant, but what exactly do you expect from software that is only "good enough"? I have yet to have one of my personal systems shut down properly consistently, from Windows 3.11 on up through the chain, and I don’t use any beta software either, though I do use a variety of brand of hardware. John Dvorak said it first, when it quits, restart and go on like it was normal, and accept it. We can toss around our suspicions amongst ourselves, but the only resolution will come from Microsoft. We, as the computer community in general, need to demand better quality. If my trousers burst at the seams everytime I undid the zipper, I’d soon look for another vendor. But we don’t have the choice here, because Microsoft has pretty much driven the competition away. I think Windows itself was the original Push technology. WindowsNT, on the other hand, is a step in the right direction. Hopefully MS continues only a step at a time, and doesn’t leap over important steps ( I fear Win2000 may be the beginning of the leaping).

Hi Jerry,

I look forward to your comments.

Amazon and computer stocks

 From: Kit Case [kitcase@netutah.com]

Dr. Pournelle,

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

I just read your annual onions and orchids piece and it got me thinking about the tools I find most valuable on a daily basis.

I'm an independent I/T consultant working in Toronto running my own small business. As such, I have a lot of test machines in my home and office LANs so I can simulate any hard/software scenario with which I come into contact when visiting clients. One can't be an expert at absolutely everything from the top of one's head. Sometimes a little research is required.

I require machines running Win95, Win98, WinNT Workstation 4, WinNT Server 4, Novell, Linux, and at least one test box for rebuilding and debugging. (As an aside, I joined the MSDN Universal Subscription when I became an MCSE so I could have access to the appropriate Microsoft resources. This is by far the best deal in software around if you're an independent developer. It isn't cheap (approx $4000 CDN), but you won't want for any Microsoft patches, versions, SDKs or development information.)

As you can see, I'd need atleast 7 machines to create a test lab to fit my requirements. Both the cost and electricity bills resulting from running 7 separate desktops didn't seem like a very good idea.

My pick then, for most useful product, is the removable hard drive bay.

There are a few different manufacturers of removable bays, and all work very well. They cost about $30CDN a pop (probably a lot cheaper where you live), and are invaluable. They load in a front bay of the system and have a handle and a lock to make removal really fast and easy. With hard disk prices so low, it makes sense to build a different OS on each drive and swap them in and out of your machine as your needs change. It certainly saves a lot of money on building (or - gasp - buying from a manufacturer) loads of new PCs. They come both in IDE and SCSI flavours. They're especially helpful if you want to experiment with several different builds of Linux without losing your previous build when trying out the next one.

Removable hard disk bays can really help a small developer get more out of his/her small LAN at a very low cost. If you haven't experimented with these devices, I recommend you do and, if you like them, give em a plug in your next column.

Cheers.

NeoPlanet gives one a number of choices as to the look and feel of IE; they have several different schemes available which control the appearance of the browser. They’ve also built natural-language search engine support into their add-on, and support ‘channels’ for various sorts of content.

I personally turn the channels feature off, and I don’t use their supplied email client, but continue to use Outlook. Nonetheless, I’ve found NeoPlanet to be a useful add-on for IE, and I might add that it works very well with both IE 4.01 SP-1 and IE 5.0 beta.