HOME

Current View
VIEW Home
MAIL Home
BOOK Reviews
 
©
This week:
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
 


 
Top

CHAOS MANOR MAIL

A SELECTION

July 5 - 11, 1999

CLICK ON THE BLIMP TO SEND MAIL TO ME

  The current page will always have the name currentmail.html and may be bookmarked. For previous weeks, go to the MAIL HOME PAGE.

Fair warning: some of those previous weeks can take a minute plus to download. After Mail 10, though, they're tamed down a bit.

IF YOU SEND MAIL it may be published; if you want it private SAY SO AT THE TOP of the mail. I try to respect confidences, but there is only me, and this is Chaos Manor. If you want a mail address other than the one from which you sent the mail to appear, PUT THAT AT THE END OF THE LETTER as a signature.

PLEASE DO NOT USE DEEP INDENTATION INCLUDING LAYERS OF BLOCK QUOTES IN MAIL. TABS in mail will also do deep indentations. Use with care or not at all.

I try to answer mail, but mostly I can't get to all of it. I read it all, although not always the instant it comes in. I do have books to write too...  I am reminded of H. P. Lovecraft who slowly starved to death while answering fan mail. 

If you want to send mail that will be published, you don't have to use the formatting instructions you will find when you click here but it will make my life simpler, and your chances of being published better..

This week:
Monday -- Tuesday -- Wednesday -- Thursday -- Friday -- Saturday -- Sunday

Current Mail

HIGHLIGHTS:

•  Silicon is cheaper than iron, and nospam?
• Tim Loeb on Littleton and other matters
• Page design question
• Kick-starting Linux
• Use the shift key to select, stupid!
• Microsoft ships software before its time: Clark Myers
• The LINK SECRET revealed!
• Can you upgrade with standard Windows 2000?
• Dealing with spam
• What happened to auto reply?
• The Allaire Home Site editor.
• Escheated funds
• WinG in Windows 98?
• US Military adventures: Republic or Empire? Two letters
•  

©
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
 
Top

Monday July 5, 1999

PLEASE DON’T INCLUDE MY REAL EMAIL ADDRESS - USE

fmora@*NOSPAMPLEASE*.us.ibm.com

Dr. Pournelle,

You wrote recently that you were wrong in predicting the ultimate demise of mechanical hard drives against silicium.

Well, maybe you were right 20 years too early. Here is a link about

Nanochip Inc, a new company that seriously intends to revolutionize the

storage market:

http://www.nanochip.com/

In a nutshell, they propose a new chip, the NC900SX, that uses an atomic probe device to read and write bits as molecular dots. The chip has a 900-MByte capacity, and they plan to sell multi-chip boards. Lantency time is about 500 microseconds (20-30 times faster than a fast HDD), transfer rate: 3.1 MByte/s. They hope to beat the per-megabyte cost of hard drives.

This looks very serious, and they talked about their technology at the Alternative Storage Technologies Symposium on June 22 in Monterey.

There is also another company, American Computer Company, that makes

similar claims, but they don’t reveal much about their devices:

http://www.accpc.com/tcapstore.htm

So you were right. But then, any wild prediction about technology becomes true if one waits long enough... :-)

--Fred Mora

Precisely. Incidentally, I don't know how many spammers get addresses from this site. Since I am careful to report all spam to earthlink.net and to any other ISP that has a spam reporting service (many don't have one, which I think is a major mistake) this may not be the right place to look. Dunno. I get a lot of junk lately, but the Outlook Rules Wizard is pretty good at weeding the stuff out.

I do know that if I can't reply with the reply button, I generally don't reply at all.

I always knew that "Silicon is cheaper than iron" was a good prediction, but I didn't know how long it would take.

===

There's a lot here from Tim Loeb, and I don't have time to comment, but it's not fair to let it sit in the queue for ever while I wait for time to do a proper response. That happens far too often...

Dear Jerry:

Your comments about wanting to write about Littleton have prompted me to stick my oar in as well, but before I do that I wanted to do a bit of "comparison shopping" regarding building versus buying a new computer, knowing you are in the throes of such construction right now.  Two days ago I ordered a new box from Dell, a 500 Mhz Pentium 3 system with 128MB of 100ns RAM, a 13.6 gigabyte hard drive, Diamond's new Viper 770 32 MB video board, sound-enabled Winmodem, Turtle Beach Montego 2 sound card, basic speakers, mouse, and their mechanical (real key-click!) keyboard, etc. (no monitor) for a grand total of $1615 plus shipping.  Before placing the order I gave building an equivalent system a lot of thought, but considering the price and especially the software bundle decided I could not only not do better myself, but couldn't do as well.

The software bundled with the Dell includes Windows 98 2nd edition, MS Office 2000, and Bookshelf, all of which I would have had to purchase retail if I had built the system.  The latest edition of the PC Connection catalog lists a new install of W98 2e at $178.95, and Office 2000 SBE would set me back $439.95, for a total of $618.90 for the software alone.  Add to this the value of the three year warranty from Dell - and their support is terrific - and I didn't see how I could do better "rolling my own."

I'm not stumping for Dell or anybody else, but I just wonder how the price I'm paying compares with your current project, under the assumption that if you were John Doe you would have had to pay retail for all the components and software... in this market of mini-margins, are there really any significant savings to be wrung out by the home brewed machine?

As for the disaster at Littleton, a lot of blather HAS been written and said about root causes, as you suggest.  I doubt there is any one root cause, but a contributing cause which I believe hasn't been recognized is an unintended consequence of capitalism, and is something we need very much to address in this country.  Please bear with me, I feel the idea is valid but my exposition of it may leave a lot to be desired.

You're familiar, I'm sure, with the theory of a Hierarchy of Needs which basically states that as an individual's basic needs are met (food, shelter, sex) the human animal focuses on higher and higher levels of wants and desires, ending (theoretically at least) with a quest for spirit or God.

Capitalism coupled with freedom has been an incredible engine for satisfying the lower levels of physical needs in this country, and the "unintended consequence" of which I speak is that this material well-being has given birth to a Culture of Youth never seen before in human history.  The reason is simple, I think, if not entirely obvious.  As American prosperity waxed greatly in the 1950s and into the 60s, more and more discretionary spending became available to people at a younger and younger age.  While the young still do not command anywhere near the resources of mature (middle aged and older) people, their influence in our society has been vastly magnified by their willingness to SPEND what they have (and more - witness credit-card debt among the "20-somethings").

It's my contention that as the middle class as a whole has moved through the hierarchy of needs, the youngest have been the most willing to spend, while their elders have perhaps been somewhat more willing to save and invest their surplus funds, and even explore that spiritual path.  This, in turn, has over the years not gone unnoticed by the marketers, salesmen, and good old Yankee Traders of America, to the point that today a minute of advertising on TV that reaches the "right" demographic sells for more than a minute that will actually be seen by a much larger audience!  And that "right" demographic is the free-spending young.

What this has meant over time is a complete reversal of the societal norms of every previous culture I'm familiar with: in America today we celebrate Youth over everything; over wisdom, over experience, and especially over age.  It's totally pervasive, and at the same time totally corrosive.  Where in the America of 100 or even 50 years ago the Town Fathers would be the respected leaders of the community today it's rock musicians, TV &; film stars, and super models almost all under the age of 30 or 40 who command our notice.

This isn't news, and I doubt anyone would really dispute the point.  But what it means for the society I don't think has been fully comprehended, and Littleton is one result.  Wisdom, for example, is not only no longer sought by the young, it's no longer considered a virtue.  As financial power and authority have devolved upon the young through the overwhelming success of capitalism the NEED for age, wisdom, education and experience to achieve material well-being and security has almost disappeared.

Oh, not in all cases and certainly not at all levels.  But generally today the easiest to get marginal dollar increase in revenue is to be found among a younger and younger demographic, and with that shift in economics has come a commanding shift in the power of Youth in our culture.

The trouble with Youth, of course, is that it lacks wisdom and maturity.  In other cultures, especially tribal cultures even today, and going back thousands of years, Age has been the keystone.  Power - political, social, economic, spiritual - has rested with the most experienced members of the society.  There Youth strives to share in that power by emulating the Aged, by listening and learning from what experience can teach.

In microcosm, Ricky Nelson in Ozzie &; Harriet wanted to be as much like Dad as he could; in today's sitcoms the hip Dad tries to be as much like the kid as he can.  And America has literally BOUGHT right into this role reversal, with disastrous results like Littleton.  Because fundamentally kids don't bring a lot to the table beside lots of energy, an open wallet, and raging hormones.  They haven't been around long enough to become wise, to control impulses, to learn how to handle rejection and alienation, to make good decisions and healthy choices.  What's different about Youth today is they no longer seek to emulate the mature behavior of the Aged as they have in other times and other cultures; virtue today is doing exactly what you feel like when you feel like doing it.

People who blame the Littleton mess and others like it on guns, for example, are almost literally insane.  Guns have ALWAYS been pervasive and easy to obtain in America.  When I was growing up in rural Michigan in the 60s my father kept three handguns and at least a half-dozen long arms in unlocked drawers and closets: I knew where each one was, and had daily access.  He gave me a 20 gauge shotgun for my 14th birthday, a gun I was proud to own and shoot.  But I never took it to school, and the thought of murdering classmates with it wouldn't have even entered my mind, noy for a nanosecond.  Back then I was a somewhat "troubled" youth, and even had a few scrapes with the law.  But what would have kept me from acting out any momentary violent impulse was the sure and certain knowledge of the complete and absolute condemnation I would have faced in the community; nobody, not even my best friends would have thought anything about such an act was "cool" or "awesome."  The Culture as a whole, not just the police or the politicans or even the clergy, prohibited such behavior.

Which is the difference today.  In a society which rewards maturity over youth things are very different.  A mature human being knows the value of life, knows how irreplaceable it is, knows how much easier it is to destroy than create, but knows that creation is the best measure of what being fully human is.  The unintended consequence of capitalism has been that its very success has shifted economic power from Age to Youth, and Youth is impulsive, ignorant, heedless, and without a base of wisdom and experience upon which to make decent decisions that are to the long-term interest of society.

Pick your own examples of how Youth-based our culture has become.  One of my favorites is the current school bussing environment.  Anytime a school bus stops to pick up or drop off even a single kid ALL traffic in both directions comes to a screeching halt.  I'm sure this has done wonders for safety, but at the same time it's telling every kid, twice a day, 200 + days a year, for 12 years, that the world has to stop and look out for you, you don't have to look out for the world.  And they don't.  They don't look out for the world when they have babies at 15, they don't look out for the world when they abuse alcohol and drugs, they certainly don't look out for the world when they pick up a gun and slaughter their classmates at school or in a drive-by shooting.

Please don't misunderstand, I'm not saying Youth itself is a problem, but I certainly think the Culture of Youth that this society has created is.  We need to start a debate about how to move cultural power back to those people and institutions mature enough to have the wisdom and judgment necessary to respect it and handle it responsibly.

All the best--

  Tim Loeb

All worth reading, and my apologies for both the delay and being rushed...

===

Dr P:

Just a quick thought re your page layout.  Would you consider putting the "buttons" for the various sections (mail, view, current mail, current view, etc) on a top of the page panel that stays static wherever you happen to be to allow quick navigation/jumping to other sections?

That makes it a bit more complex, but it's easy enough to do. Is it worth the effort? Comments invited.

===

Subject: Linux Kick-start

Dear Jerry,

I’ve been playing with Linux a bit, mainly for the purposes of writing about it for a local newspaper, and a friend asked me for some help, having no experience with the Unix command-line but a fair profiency in DOS. I’ve posted it on my HTTP server http://users.hol.gr/~ctipper/UnixKick-Start.htm and it’s the distilled essence of what you need to know if you’ve never used any flavour of Unix before. It’s only about a page and a half, but may be useful to those others of us who have used DOS for years, and want to try Linux. A disclaimer: because of its extreme brevity, it will not get you up and running with X Windows, will not help you configure your environment: this information is freely available elsewhere.

Regards,

Christopher Tipper

PS This page has a link to Moshe Bar’s testimonial on your website, an ideal application for Linux. Anybody who expects Linux to replace their Windows Desktop will be sorely disappointed at this stage in Linux’ evolution..

 Thanks. I have been neglecting Linux lately largely due to time pressure. I'll get back to it...

===

I recently had a wow, I could have had a V8 whack your head experience: I had not known, in all these years, that shift navigate selected stuff in word and in most other Windows programs. I have been using the stupid mouse to do most of that, and I miss often. This is wonderful news. Hold the shift key and use the arrows or other stuff to select; it works here in Front Page 2000 and that means I don't have to be so accurate around table edges... And of course the chap who told me has to rub it in just a bit...

Just don’t forget Home, End, Page Up &; Page Down. I use this method of selection a lot in form/dialog box fields before doing a Ctrl-C &; subsequent Ctrl-V to paste repetitive information. Also, Shift-Arrow beats trying to mouse select a lower case i any day.

I find it a little difficult to believe you missed this one, but hey, as a professional trainer I still get a little embarassed when a newbie finds something "obvious". I won’t tell if you don’t <grin>.

Cheers

Jonathan Sturm (jonathan@uprun.com)

But I don't care. This makes my life so much easier it's hard to see why I never found it. I guess the f8 lock on select in WORD was enough that I never looked into other ways. Or whatever. Anyway, thanks!

====

Quoting: 

OUTLOOK 2000 has a terrible "feature". This is akin to saying Microsoft ships software before its time (quoting Jerry Holcombe about Kzin programmers "Scream and ship").  Hand optimized machine coding helped Lotus kill VisiCalc but made Lotus so slow to upgrade that Lotus was vulnerable. I lament more the absence of choice in this winner take all market than the choices made by the winner. I do think the winner is more often lucky than smart but the winner is almost always good enough.

This feature only matters when Outlook is used outside the networked enterprise, even then the user may have a quasi-permanent high(er) speed access so the afflicted are just the poor souls with a dial up connection and the dial up installation of Office. I don't think Microsoft can serve the home market and the enterprise market with the same level of satisfaction simultaneously. Seems to me Microsoft had started to converge the operating systems and then said this convergence will not work yet (and maybe never?).  Yet no one will settle for Microsoft Works when Microsoft Office is just a little more money. Word Perfect once tried with Letter Perfect for the non-secretarial market and that flopped too.

Soon enough you will have shared ISDN for your working machine and the problem will go away. Software ahead of the hardware makes sense in the Microsoft world of get it out the door. Or would you have the software wait for the hardware to catch up? Consider how much of the operating power goes into the user interface and automation compared to say batch processing something like the Club of Rome models of the dismal science.

It is the absence of published work-arounds and durable how to information from the help desks (remember that Word Perfect had great free and tool free telephone help and useful books from the help desk people) that is the greater lack. Perhaps too the Tower of Babble effect has set in as programming structures reach higher and higher the teams can no longer talk to each other.

The great appeal of Linux is that it allows hot rodding. NT no longer does. Once upon a time the software was hard but the hardware was fun. R-base for Dos almost needed or perhaps pre-supposed a resident guru but the PC or PC-XT plugged directly to a LaserJet 1 did not. Today the hardware needs a resident expert, read administrator, but the software does what it does and we accommodate to the software rather than customizing it.

Clark E. Myers
e-mail at:
ClarkEMyers@msn.com
I wouldn't Spam filter you!

Good points all. This is another of those letters I wish I had time to do a long response to. I am catching up. And FP 2000 probably will get fixed (a manual and real help files will help) eventually. At least I can use it now… But when it is "publishing" you can’t do anything else with it. I used to (in FP 98) be able to save off pages in the editor, start publishing in the explorer, and go back to editing open pages in the editor. No longer. I suppose this is a feature, combining the editor and the publisher, but if so I don’t like it.

Oh well.

=   =    =     =

Jerry

>If it is, say, mail/currentmail that’s fine, but if it’s reports/jerryp/y2k.html >then it needs to be ../../ and that takes judgment and work. Better would >be if I could just point to the "top level" on which index.html resides; but if >there’s a way to DO that I do not know it.

I ‘think’ what you are looking for is ‘/’.  If you insert a tag looking at "/images/jep.jpg" for example, anywhere in the web, it ‘should’ look for the image at: www.jerrypournelle.com/images/jep.jpg . Or, in other words, a folder called images at the top level of your web. You should be able to put all common images there and reference them with ‘/images/image.jpg’ from any page.

On most of my webs, I keep a separate folder for just those common images and use other folders for things like photographs.

I notice, looking at source html for alot of your pages, that tags pointing to things like ‘background images and icons (birdline.gif for example) point all over the place and are duplicted alot. For example, a number of pages point to /linux/bg.jpg for the parchment background of a table cell, while others poing to images/bg.jpg and other variations.

HTH

John

--

coredump@NOSPAM.enteract.com

http://www.enteract.com/~coredump

I’ve found a home on the Information Superhighway

Wow. That’s what I needed to know. The odd thing is there is NOTHING in any of the 8 books I have on HTML that tells me this. I didn’t expect to find it in the non-existent Front Page manual or the execrable Front Page help files, but I would have hoped to find it in a dictionary sized book on HTML. Nope.

But that will do the job. All I really have to do is global replacement of C://etc/etc stuff with the / and that should take care of many of the remaining broken links.

===

Hi,

 I hope these kinds of questions don’t offend those in attendance at Chaos Manor but they seem like exactly the kind that would, categorically, fit into the realm "...so you don’t have to"...

(1)  Can the "full version" of Win98 2^nd edition (that is, *not* an ‘upgrade’ CD), be used as an "upgrade" from Win 95? Or am I in for a

re-install of a ton o’ applications?

 and perhaps even more subtle...

(2)  Can that same "full version" CD be used to ‘upgrade’ a machine with the original Win 98 on it....without, again, re-installing the applications?

I’m guessing that for #2 above, I might be able to use that new utility which allows me to check and/or re-install system’s files but will that be like ‘upgrading’?

With all of the Win98 content I’ve read on your site, you seem more likely to re-format a disk and add the OS...I guess I’m wondering if that’s my only/best option for pre-existing Win 95 machines (which would of course ensure nice clean registries, etc...). I’m trying to avoid having to *buy* an ‘Upgrade Win 98 CD’ when I already have a "full version" !

Thanks,

Tob tony obrien [tobrien@sensar.com]

The full version can be used to upgrade from Windows 95, although it may not be the smartest way to go: the best way to upgrade a system is to scrub her down and start over. Having said that, Eric managed to install all the successive betas and then the final release of Windows 98 2^nd without doing that, and so have I. In any event, yes, you can upgrade from 95 with the full edition of 98 2^nd.

The registry wasn’t the smartest idea Microsoft ever had, in my judgment; it’s major aracana, and one edits it with trepidation; junk accumulates in there, and you then take your chances with Norton or Mijenix for cleaning it out. You are better off scrubbing down and starting from bare wood, but if you are like me, you have lost a lot of the original installation disks and don’t know how to install some of your programs. Norton UNINSTALL is supposed to be able to do migrations, although I have to say I haven’t had all that much success with doing that.

===

What seems to be going on is that when a bug is reported, the programmers don’t get the bug notification—the mail department routes the bug notice to the Suprise Party department, which routes things to programmers to alter (not necessarily FIX!) if and ONLY IF the Marketing Department can’t come up with a way to make the bug look fancy by calling it a Feature.

There seems to be some kind of software fallacy in operation:

1.      Programmers are expensive.

2.   Press releases are cheap.

3.   Therefore, it’s cheaper to explain the bug than to fix it.

Or do I simply fail to understand management?

Mark Thompson [jomath@mctcnet.net]

I fear you understand all too well...

===

If Kzin were programmers: No comments. No QA. No discussion. You scream and ship it!
"I don't care what you say about me as long as you spell my name right."

Well, I knew about the movements, but I never knew you could use shift to make them select. Apparently from the mail I am not the only one who didn't know. It's wonderful!

©
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
 
Top

Tuesday, July 6, 1999

The Sun preempts Y2K ?

After reading HSL 602 (Is that 17 a year if you've been at it 35 years, and are y'all getting enough rest (it was emailedon on a Saturday)?) reference to the 25% embedded system failure rate (for Y2K, at a major chemical plant in the US), I looked up "Bruce Beach" on www.deja.com. The following mentions a "Mark Frautschi", and asks whether there's any distinction between what the two are talking about: file://www.deja.com/getdoc.xp?AN=494407721

Thanks for the reference. I don't have enough time myself to keep up. Our engineering consulting firm is way too busy fixing bad software, and resolving obsolete parts issues (even on brand new weapon's systems!).

There has been mention of solar activity preempting Y2K, say in November. I saw the mention in Nexus magazine, Jun/Jul1999 (www.icom.net/~nexus/), which was reporting on an Art Bell interview of Gordon-Michael Scallion, 17Feb1999. For the relevant transcript, see: http://www.matrixinstitute.com/trnscpt3b.htm

GMS could be a real prophet. Who knows (short of God). Even if his material turns out to be mostly fanciful, there is hard data included amongst the predictions. The Earth Changes Report online (fractions) are at: www.matrixinstitute.com/. Report 83 is the one that supposedly mentions increased solar activity. There is only *mention* of that report online: www.matrixinstitute.com/link1.htm See, however, a link to current solar data, near the bottom. It also appears they do intend to provide online access to past reports (eg 83), for paid subscribers.

sdmaley@tasc.com

Jerry,

It has been a long time, but allow me to remind you of a program which appears to have slipped through the cracks for you.  Trellix.  This is a web SITE manager not just a wysiwyg PAGE editor.  Of course at this point, porting the site to it would be horrendous, but I’ll betcha you could get it done.  Anyway, just a jiggle.

Rick Boatright

I wish I had started with Trellix, which has got to be more logical than this place has become. I didn't, and the conversion is likely to take time I don't have. Make no mistake, if you go to Front Page you will probably stay there. This has its advantages, but there are problems as well. I'm learning how to solve at least some of them with the CUE USING FRONT PAGE 2000 book; there is no information in the Front Page manuals.

Trellix has a number of mapping features that look intriguing. What I may do is build a dummy web site in Trellix and if that works out, ftp it out here. We'll see. It's busy here just now.

===

Hi Jerry, I've been reading about your trials and tribulations with Front Page and can at least offer advice that might help somewhat with global replaces. We have been using Front Page 98 with pretty fair success but have found that having Allaire's Home Site 4.0(http://www.allaire.com/products/homesite/index.cfm <http://www.allaire.com/products/homesite/index.cfm> ) as an additional HTML editor a necessity. It will, for instance, do global replaces. It's probably the best raw HTML editor on the market and actually now ships with Macromedia's Dreamweaver. Macromedia have recognized that while Dreamweaver is a terrific program(and one we'll probably migrate to rather then FP2000) it doesn't allow you as much access to the code or contain the site management features that Home Site does. I strongly recommend trying out the 30 day shareware version of Home Site which I believe is available at the URL listed above.
Another note, as I said before we're really high on Dreamweaver, and you mentioned in one of your columns that you are planning to evaluate it. Do so. Be prepared for it to take a little longer to get used to. It's interface is quite different, not bad necessarily, but different.
Regards,
Steve_Jelliman@Dell.com

Every now and then go away, even briefly, have a little relaxation, for when you come back to your work your judgment will be surer; since to remain constantly at work will cause you to lose power.
-- Leonardo da Vinci

I'd love to try that, but my efforts to find a way to get it have failed; their store gives me a failed to find error as do some of the aliases they give. Their page is remarkable: full of praise for their product and absolutely no simple way to GET IT, no "click here to download the evaluation copy", or if there is, it was invisible to me. I'll keep trying because it sounds enough like what I need that I was willing to buy a copy if I could, but if they have a way to sell it to me, I didn't find it.

===

Subject:  Spam and Email Address Harvesting

Dear Doctor Jerry,

In reply to a recent mail posted in currentmail, you said:

"Incidentally, I don't know how many spammers get addresses from this site."

As best I understand it, an email address appearing on any web site is fair game for spam bots.  What I have heard, and this would seem to make sense, is that the bots search web pages for addresses to add to spammers databases in the same way that search engines' spiders troll the web building indexes.

On John Walker's web site (the guy who founded Autodesk), http://www.fourmilab.to/, he says:

"I was forced to remove my E-mail address from pages on this site...any E-mail address on a Web page is quickly "harvested" by spam (unsolicited commercial E-mail) robots and becomes unusable due to the volume of junk mail which arrives."

Keith Dawson, who runs the 'Tasty Bits from the Technology Front' mailing list (a wonderful weekly list on things science and net related that I would heartily recommend to fellow subsribers to Chaos Manor: http://tbtf.com/) uses a simple and elegant solution on his site: your address would appear as:

jpournelle at jerrypournelle dot com

However, perhaps this would eat too much of your time to be practical here.

Matthew Blair

Santiago, Chile

matthew at blairnet dot com

It’s probably too late for me anyway. I get enough spam to feed Albania, which is where I wish it would go. I am not one for vigilante activities, but in the case of spammers, I would be willing to make an exception. There is no excuse for what those people do, and they make me think of the old (and I am told discarded now) Scientology designation of certain people and groups as ‘fair game’ meaning that legally you might have restraints, but ethically they deserve anything that can be done to them. I suppose I don’t mean that, but I confess that taking something as wonderful as the Internet and turning it into a nightmare of junk mail merits one of the lower bolgias of the Inferno. It’s not even the porno stuff, which I can filter; it’s the imbeciles who offer me the ‘service’ of doing what they do, if I will just pay them, who deserve athlete’s foot over their entire bodies. I have some poison oak patches locally that are hungry..

If people want to sign their mail with their address stated as you did, PUT THAT IN THE BODY OF THE LETTER so I don't have to copy it, and I'll set things so that the real return address never appears.

====

I commend to your attention http://www.spamcop.net

 These guys seem to have a handle on dealing with these....persons.

 Regards.....Ward Gerlach

I will have a look, and thanks. There has to be a way for the net to take care of itself without hiring a bunch of bureaucrats to get in the gears and ruin it all for us. Congress would LOVE to have some laws, and the FCC would LOVE to have some new powers and employees, but there has to be a better way than THAT. I hope.

===

Did the auto reply get clobbered with Office 2000?

I have not had an acknowledgment for about 3 days now.

Clark E. Myers
e-mail at:
ClarkEMyers@msn.com
I wouldn't Spam filter you!

 Yes, those rules got clobbered, and I have not set them up again. It is a matter of time, and thanks for the reminder. Outlook 2000 is in fact an improvement over Outlook 98, and probably would have imported the rules just fine if we hadn't done things so drastically here. I will get them set up again after the column is done.

That's assuming I can figure out how to create replies again. I recall it was tricky, and apparently I never logged exactly how I did it; and I sure can't figure it out now. I'm stuck...

GOT it. Thanks. See view.

====

Hi Jerry, I’ve been reading about your trials and tribulations with Front Page and can at least offer advice that might help somewhat with global replaces.  We have been using Front Page 98 with pretty fair success but have found that having Allaire’s Home Site 4.0(http://www.allaire.com/products/homesite/index.cfm <http://www.allaire.com/products/homesite/index.cfm> ) as an additional HTML editor a necessity.  It will, for instance, do global replaces.  It’s probably the best raw HTML editor on the market and actually now ships with Macromedia’s Dreamweaver. Macromedia have recognized that while Dreamweaver is a terrific program(and one we’ll probably migrate to rather then FP2000) it doesn’t allow you as much access to the code or contain the site management features that Home Site does.  I strongly recommend trying out the 30 day shareware version of Home Site which I believe is available at the URL listed above. 

Another note, as I said before we’re really high on Dreamweaver, and you mentioned in one of your columns that you are planning to evaluate it.  Do so. Be prepared for it to take a little longer to get used to.  It’s interface is quite different, not bad necessarily, but different.

Regards,

Every now and then go away, even briefly, have a little relaxation, for when you come back to your work your judgment will be surer; since to remain constantly at work will cause you to lose power.

-- Leonardo da Vinci

I had a heck of a job getting that editor: the Allaire site isn't intuitive for me, and there was stormy weather on the net: it took a u]bunch of download attempts, trying to register was very tough, and in general things just didn't work well. Eventually I got it, though, and I'll try it tomorrow after the column is done. It got here just to late to go into the column.

I'm still sticking with Front Page 2000 but I certainly understand the temptation to chuck it and go to Dreamweaver. My problem with Dreamweaver is that I haven't been able to learn how it does site management. FP 2000 works in its fashion although the lack of a manual or useful help files hurts it a lot. We will see. Thanks.

©
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
 
Top

Wednesday July 7, 1999

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

 In case you have not gotten email on this from other readers—the August, 1999 Windows Magazine will be the last print issue.  John Woram has some of the details, and a sad postscript at:

http://www.woram.com/CMP.HTM

Regards

T. Patrick Henebry

Sad. I hope it is understandable that I mourn BYTE a great deal more. Fortunately, BYTE is alive and well as www.byte.com and we have great plans for the future. BYTE is growing, and we're getting back some of the old gang. I never wrote for Windows so I don't know what happened there.

===

Every now and then I like to run a letter like this.

Dear Jerry,

It is such a great feeling writing to you. I am a great fan of your style of writing. Let me tell you how I came into contact with your columns. The place where I was working before used to have a subscription of BYTE magazine. I used to read it after a month’s time. ( By the way let me tell you I am writing from India ). After leaving my job from that company, I came across your article today on the BYTE website. I had a faint idea about the existence of BYTE web site, but frankly enough I did not visit that site till today. I also came to know about the existence of your own personal Web site, and there I am writing to you.

I liked your Death valley article and also went through each and every view of the Chaos Manor. I am just feeling happy that without subscribing to the BYTE magazine which is slightly heavier on the pockets according to Indian scenario, I can browse through all your articles and important columns of the BYTE magazine.

Hope to keep in touch with you always.

 Yours sincerely,

 Vinod Inamdar

e-mail:vinodi@niit.com

Thanks for all the kind words. I confess it's harder to read the BYTE.com than the old BYTE which I used to sit at coffee and leaf through, but that's the modern world. Thanks again.

====

 Hi -

 Just saw the note about the BeOS. I just installed it myself, and I'm quite  impressed, even with the slightly older "R4" version, not the newer 4.5  that's out now. The software situation is the only thing holding me back from  switching completely. While some of it, email software for example, is   better and more stable than many programs under Linux, or even Windows for  that matter, other areas, like the browser, are lacking. Not to put down the  developers - they're well aware of the shortcomings, and have done an amazing  job with an almost non-existant staff, compared to the "big boys". This will  hopefully be addressed soon with ports of Opera and Mozilla, as well as  updates to NetPositive, but is still awkward. 

 As long as you've got supported hardware (getting broader all the time), it  "plug-and-plays" much better than Windows (95OSR2, anyway). I've heard of  people upgrading their video card, and not having to do anything at all,  except the physical card change. No funky driver installations, no  interminable restarts every time you install an app. I can even change all my  network and TCP/IP settings without rebooting - just click the "restart  networking" button. Cool!

 It's still not "there" for the average "buy a copy in your local Wal-Mart"  user, but it's definately getting there for the adventurous, and pretty good  for those seeking to bundle up a cheap internet-access box.

 On another note, one of the best tools I've found for managing a large site,  complete with keeping track of links, etc. is Frontier, from Userland  Software (http://www.userland.com). It does, however, represent a substantial  up-front investment in (somebody, does not need to be the person maintaining  the content once things are set up) learning the ins and outs, particularly  for a large site that's already in place (like yours). It may be worth  looking at for the long term, though.

 regards, Monty Hayter http://www.abreast2000.net - Please support cancer research

 PS - This is being sent from BeatWare "Mail-It" under BeOS R4 - hopefully

 Came through fine, but there were carriage returns at each line end that had to be stripped out with a macro. Eric is quite excited about BeOS, and we'll be installing it here on Praetorius in a week or so. Thanks.

===

I read your article on Byte as to how your funds have been escheated. I have

helped relatives to recover funds from New York to the tune of around

$20,000. They will take anything such as idle bank accounts, stock that paid

no dividends and the owner did not respond to voting for the annual meeting,

insurance,security deposits, etc. Best site is to go to is NAUPA at

" www.unclaimed.org ". Expect long waits for your money to be returned. In New York it is about 1 year.

Pat

THANKS!

===

    >Date: Tue, 06 Jul 1999 15:28:10 -0700

 >To:           mike@morris.com >

Subject:     a Word 97 registry hack that you’ll love... > 

>If you use Microsoft Word 97, you may have noticed that when >you peruse a document using the scroll bar, the visible page >doesn’t "change" until you let go of the scroll bar button. >Well, if you apply this registry tweak, you can click &; hold >the scroll bar button and get "live updating" in the document >window!

 >Here’s the hack: Shut down Word, then start Regedit, navigate >to HKEY_CURRENT_USER, then to Software, Microsoft, Office, 8.0, >Word, Options.

Cool.

===

Jerry,

Just a quick note on the "/" thing. Although this is a valid way to refer to the "root of the web", the main problem with this "solution" is that while it assuredly works on the domain URL (i.e. on the server), it does not on your local Fp web copy—UNLESS you can access the local copy via a local webserver under a dummy domain-alias. It’s a bit like when you put the full URL in a link:

"http://www.jerrypournelle.com/folder/file"—which works only on the server that the domain resolves to. This is fine if you are editing and maintaining the pages directly on the site servcer.

In other words, to (I hope) clarify:

On the web server, "/folder/file" is equivalent to the full URL above, except that it does not require DNS resolve. It points to the "htdocs" node defined in the server configuration as your web root.  Again, works fine if you view and edit only on the server.

On you local copy, "/folder/file" will refer to the current drive’s root, which would be fine if only your local copy of the web started with the partition root as its own root. However, this is not the case.

In either case, ".." always refers to the parent of the "current"

directory, (usually) allowing a relative addressing like "../folder"—a

sibling folder to the one containing the document where this relative

reference is used. This assumes that the software does in fact make

"current" point to document.

To use absolute "/folder" style referencing, *both* on the domain site and on your local web copy, you would need to serve your own local copy via a local webserver configured for a dummy domain pointing to whatever root the local web has.

(In the Apache for NT setup that I use locally, httpd.conf has the default virtual domain set as:

DocumentRoot I:/www/LEUF_net

which means that accesses to http://winifer get locally translated to the above root and served exactly as they do on the actual web server when accessed as http://www.leuf.net )

However, the simplest solution to having working references in both domain and local copy is to always use the relative "../folder" style references, despite the complications when you have varying document depths and start getting "../../../" style folder walks.

/ Bo

--

"Bo Leuf" <bo@leuf.net>

Leuf Network, www.leuf.net

===

Sir:

In Canada we’ve been getting news reports that only 12 Serbian tanks plus some other armoured vehicles were destroyed by the boming in Kosovo. At a rough guess it makes the cost of an inflateable Yugoslav dummy equal to that of a new M1 Abrams. Do you think there is a world-wide market for inflateable M1’s to counter act this new stealth weapon?

Just joking,

Deception and Denial: this has been known since before the Desert War. Alas.

From the old Goon Show:

The Time is World War II, the Battle of Britain

"This is the BBC. Neddy Seagoon tries to work his ticket."

Neddy: "Sir, I have an idea. Let's put cardboard tanks out at Charing Cross and decoy the Germans into wasting their bombs!"

Later.

"We interrupt this broadcast for a special bulletin. The German Air Force has dropped hundreds of cardboard bombs on Charing Cross Road..."

====

Hi Jerry,

I had previously read about your troubles with "This Means War" and Windows 98, and thought nothing of it until I ran Civ2 the other day.  I played it directly from the CD (by just running the executable) after installing  winG (from the civ2 CD) onto my Windows 98 machine.  I have no idea if this was a "full" version of winG but I just wanted to let you know...

Regards

Steve Barlow

barlow@forwiss.uni-passau.de

 Great news. I will have to try that. Thanks! Anyone else have similar experiences? Know how to make WinG run on Windows 98 systems?

©
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
 
Top

Thursday July 8, 1999

 BTW: http://www.jerrypournelle.com/default.htm stopped working on this permutation. I thought you were down again until I pulled the /default.htm on a hunch.

d_c_walker@csi.com

There is no longer a "default.htm" page. Is there a point to having one? It would simply be a pointer to the real Home page which is index.html. I could put one in. Should I?

===

Hi Jerry,

 I just got an Asus P2B-F motherboard for my computer at work.  Running with a Celeron 433 MHz slot 1.  Big weirdness, works fine with an AGP video card installed (ATI Rage Pro AGP), but crashes with any PCI video card (I tried several).  Also complains with ISA bus video card and won’t allow better than VGA resolution.  Flashed the latest BIOS from Asus but no different.  So, I will have to buy a new AGP card to suite the motherboard.  (Our lab, TRIUMF, is stingy, but I’ll hide it somewhere).  So, generalization, if you buy a motherboard with AGP, you should probably get an AGP video card for it right away.

By the way, how the heck does the bios know to send the video to the ISA, PCI or AGP bus anyways????

So long, Bill

p.s. I finally got the DVD software from ATI for my Rage Fury 128 card (my PC at home), but it was version 3.0 and I had already pirated ver. 3.1.  ATI said “tough”.

p.p.s. OK, I know your a big army guy, but my friends are Serbs and I cannot understand why NATO is helping the Albanian invaders.  I lived through Vietnam, and here we are again.

Tell me where to find version 3.1 because my version 3.0 locks up once in a while. Thanks.

I am hardly a "big army guy". I think we ought to bring our army home; interfering in everyone else's affairs is called Imperialism (the Roman motto was "To protect the weak and make humble the proud." Trying to cure the world of wickedness is one of the better ways to build yourself an Empire and an Empire is never a Republic. We are on a cusp as Rome was after the Gauls were finally defeated and Egypt was willed to the Roman people; and we appear to be headed for Empire. 

I have always been for a strong military but there is no reason why that cannot consist of Strategic Defenses, a powerful Navy, and a small Army with plenty of reservists and National Guard. We have some overseas interests to protect and we have some obligations within our own hemisphere, but I believe with John Adams that the policy of the US should be "We are the friends of liberty everywhere but we are the guardians only of our own." The Seventy Years War with the USSR was real, and dangerous, and required that we protect allies (containment worked but it was expensive); but we won that Protracted Conflict, and we can stand down from that posture.

I have no brief for Milosovec, but then I have none for the KLA. Many of the Albanians got into Kossovo as part of Mussolini's occupation forces; in the early part of this century the province was a majority Serb. This doesn't excuse being beastly to the Albanians any more than encroachment excused the Kiowa from butchering Sioux villages; but while that latter may have been our business, straightening out tribal wars that began in the time of Alexander the Great and bred resentments lasting 2500 years in the Balkans is very little our business.

Asus boards have a very good reputation.

===

Sir,

I haven’t written recently, but you made a comment in response to a letter that I felt needed a response.  You said, “I have always been for a strong military but there is no reason why that cannot consist of Strategic Defenses, a powerful Navy, and a small Army with plenty of reservists and National Guard.”

I beg to differ.  One thing we have learned over and over is that the single most important component of the military is the land force component.  To paraphrase, you need an eighteen year-old with a rifle to accomplish most military objectives. 

I understand the sentiment that our “legitimate” military defense needs can be covered by Air and Sea assets, primarily, but the need for a strong, capable land force is paramount.  I suspect you agree, and simply think a standing reserve force would suffice.  Having dealt extensively with the National Guard and Reserves, I can assure you it would not work.  The National Guard and the Reserves are fine assets, but they are not professional soldiers, and professional soldiers are what we need.  One cannot simply plug the reserves into a job calling for a trained soldier.  That training and readiness is a full-time job, not something you can do on the weekends. You simply can’t substitute a part-time soldier for a professional.  Of course, being in the Army myself, maybe I am just being defensive, but I don’t think so.

Major Bryan Broyles

Across the pale parabola of joy...Ralston McTodd

Oh I thoroughly understand your view, and I agree that were our mission to be the World Police and impose the New World Order on everyone; to do as Clinton suggests and fight racism worldwide; you would be correct.

The problem is that if we have an army that can do that, then we WILL do that. Our Secretary of State has as much as said so. And that is fatal to a Republic. The danger of a big army to a Republic is not that the soldiers will revolt or impose an emperor on the state; not at first, not for a long while. Eventually the army will have bureaucrats as generals and colonels, with the company grade officers being thorough professionals who follow orders, and then the Army becomes a threat to the Republic; but that takes a while, and a corrupt civilian leadership which imposes on the Army the worst kind of top level leadership. It takes time to corrupt a Republican army. It can be done: look at Cromwell’s New Model, which eventually wrote into the Commonwealth constitution a tax to pay the army as a first charge before anything else was paid.

But the real danger to a Republic of a large and powerful army capable of imposing the President’s will on all and sundry is that it will be used for that. The notion of a Declaration of War and Congressional control of the Army is a farce, as we have seen in the past years. The only way to keep out of foreign adventures is to be unable to indulge in them. This has the secondary merit of making us less of a threat to others, and thus less a target.

The ideal solution is to have a powerful Navy and Marine corps, and just enough heavy armor divisions that no one really wants to see them coming. The rest as reserve and National Guard; and since we don’t have the transport to send an army anywhere without a lot of buildup, we also have time to mobilize.

The United States persists in a war mobilized state when there aren’t any enemies to challenge us. We aren’t going to get in a land war in Asia again; for THAT we can use the Air Force and Navy. The Navy and Marines can protect our overseas interests; and if anyone begins to develop a real threat to the US, we can mobilize as fast as they can, particularly if we have paid attention to the reserves.

========

Having been a low-level Navy type from 1969 to 1973,  I agree thoroughly with Dr. Pournelle.  A large standing Army invites this attitude: "Here we have all these expensive soldiers and armored divisions sitting around and eating their heads off.  Let's send 'em off to crunch something/someone!"

 A large and capable Navy and Air Force? You bet! If we can clobber the Bad Guys before they get here,  they will know it.  A large and capable Marine Corps to provide protection to our interests on a short-term basis? That's a good thing. 

 A relatively small Army that is very well trained, and equipped? You bet - if the Bad Guys do get here, they get clobbered some more.

A large Army to use as "the extension of foreign policy by other means"?  I think I vote against that. Been there,  did that,  and trust me,  No Fun At All.

 (After re-reading the above, my prejudices are showing.  Viet Nam was not a nice place when I was there.)

Regards....Ward Gerlach

Viet Nam, on the other hand, was part of the Seventy Years War, and may have been the critical campaign. It was a highly successful campaign of attrition, decisively won by the United States. I know that is not the usual view, but the effort to build not one but three major armored armies for North Vietnam, two of which were destroyed (one during the 60’s over time, the other in 1972 when the North sent down more armor than the Wehrmacht ever had in WW II, only to lose every last bit) and the third finally won when the Congress refused to help South Viet Nam in 1975 – the effort to build those armored armies, and in general to support North Viet Nam in that war was a major factor in the bankruptcy of the USSR. Without that campaign, the Cold War would probably still be going.

The cream of the jest was that the USSR decided they had won, and now knew how to project power, and thus could go into Afghanistan…

I would argue that we had to be in Viet Nam as part of the Seventy Years War. The difference now is that we have no national enemy capable of the kinds of threat that the Soviet Union was. Yes, China could be a dangerous adversary; but their ambitions are not the same as the USSR’s were, and their capabilities are largely confined to Asia.

To that end:

Dr. Pournelle,

Here’s a quote—maybe a paraphrase—on large and powerful military forces from Senator Robert Taft, almost half a century ago: “If we have a military which is big enough to go anywhere and do anything, we will always be going somewhere and doing something.”

Good point, no?

Rod McFadden

Precisely.

©
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
 
Top

Friday July 9, 1999

Wonderful site and writing, as always, Dr. Pournelle.  I've read your stuff since the days you were in Byte telling us how to soup up our DEC Rainbows, which I sold while I was employed at a college bookstore circa 1983-4. 

 On the phrase "Bob's your uncle":

 From Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 14th Edition, Harper-Collins, Great Britain, 1989.

 "That will be all right; you needn't bother anymore, just leave it to me!  The phrase was occasioned by A. J. Balfour's promotion by his uncle Robert (Lord Salisbury) the TORY Prime Minister, to the post of Chief Secretary for Ireland.  Balfour had previously been made President of the Local Government Board in 1886, then Secretary for Scotland with a seat in the Cabinet. The suggestion of nepotism was difficult to ignore."  p. 134

 I clearly have way too much time on my hands, even with a life as a systems administrator/DBA with state gummint and a family, but I thoroughly enjoy your site, Byte, and have taken up amateur astronomy, archaeology, and certification as an NRA (Life Member) Firearms Instructor. 

 Allow me to introduce two web sites that may be of interest:

 http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org  (for a view of American conservatism as it ought to be thought about and practiced)

 http://www.hackworth.com  (for a perspective on how things are going in today's American military by the most decorated soldier in American history)

 Dave Hardy

 Sgt. USAF 1971-77

 RVN, TLC (Air Police, Security Police, Spec Ops)

 Spec4 USAR 1978-80

 344 MP Co., 182 Inf. Brigade

 I am a Chronicles subscriber, and I find myself sometimes in agreement with their paleo-conservative views, particularly Samuel Francis. Other times I wonder what planet they believe they inhabit. Overall I am fond of Chronicles, and if there were a genuine federalism in this country it would be worthwhile trying some of their experiments. But try as hard as I might, I find no label that fits me. I am not neo-conservative, nor am I really rationalist enough to be a good libertarian. I guess you would have to call me a Strict Construction Constitutionalist, which puts me outside nearly all camps…

Jerry,

Excellent articles. I truly look forward to reading them. Glad Byte and you are both back.

I too use a Palm II (Palm Pilot Professional). Two days ago, I upgraded it to a Palm III with a Synapse Pager Card, http://www.pagemart.com/productsnservices/pagercardforpalmpilot/index.html.  The card works great. PageMart Wireless, provides the paging service. Local access with roaming ability. And yes, there are other features they offer.

My upgraded Palm now has 2 Megs of memory, OS 3.02, and the paging service works very well. Also, all of my incoming email is now forwarded to the pager card in my Palm Pilot (limited to 300 characters). Very slick. Happy customer. Like you, I’ll still drag my laptop to the hotel room, but I’m not dragging it to the clients office. It stays in the hotel room!

I’ve since “dumped” my old “dumb” pager.

Thanks again for doing what you do best.

Sincerely,

- William Pollard, Jr.

IT Manager

http://www.scm-ae.com

http://www.ttinw.com

Dear Dr. Pournelle:

I concur totally with your position on the right military balance - large Navy, medium-sized Air force, and a small Army.

However, my assessment is based less on what a large army might encourage media-happy politicians to do than on the needs of the future.

Our military today is a smaller version of what we had in the Cold War - a force optimized to fight a major land war in Europe.  The Soviet Union is no more, and the Warsaw Pact nations are now part of NATO.  We no longer need to keep a large force in Europe.  A small force as token of our leadership, yes, but not two armored divisions backed up with many more active-duty units at home.

What IS needed are units with strategic mobility - particularly warships, which do not need to beg permission from allies to operate.  With the threats emerging in the Middle and Far East, and the large distances involved, mobility will be at a premium.  And a large, heavy army is a money-hungry, immobile leviathan.

It’s time to revert to the pre-World War II peacetime balance - strong Navy, small Army.  Budgets are too tight to do things the old ways.

V/R:

Michael L. McDaniel

Under the old dispensation, for about 200 years, the President owned the Navy, but the Congress owned the Army. The President could do pretty well as he pleased with the Navy and Marines, but if he wanted an actual conquest he had to get a Declaration of War.

©
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
 
Top

Saturday July 10, 1999

Hi again Jerry

I like the Science Daily site for science press releases. It is at www.sciencedaily.com 

I just had to laugh, however, at the July 9, 1999 called "Marshall Center's New Rocket Team Looks Beyond the Moon" basically touting what a great job they are doing progressing into the future. As I have written to you before, I think the efforts of NASA, that is to say, the efforts of Organized Space, are hideously slow. Other than this silly piece of fluff, which was a press release from Marshall after all, the Science Daily site is pretty cool, covering lots of areas of science. Thought you or some of your readers might like to check it out, if you haven't heard about it already. Bye, George.

georgebrown@worldnet.att.net

The purpose of a government agency is to maintain itself and if possible grow. This is unrelated to what the agency is supposed to do; that is the secondary task, and if accomplishing the task the agency is set up to do will result in the agency diminishing or vanishing, that won’t be done.

NASA is precisely that. The purpose of NASA is to keep a monopoly on space, and to see to it that only those NASA in general and George Abbey in particular get to space. You can’t make an empire built on astronaut selection if any old person can go to space. Second, NASA exists to see to it that only BIG projects like Shuttle are allowed to actually do anything, particularly with manned space.

NASA has had the equivalent of the Apollo days budget for a very long time. We ought to be halfway to Alpha Centauri on what NASA has spent. Instead, we can’t even get back to the Moon.

The best thing that could happen to the space program would be the entire and utter abolition of NASA. Zero it out of the budget. The armed services would set up ways to continue their space assets, and the commercial sector would take care itself. Of course that won’t happen, and NASA will continue to absorb things, eat the dream, and pay its bureaucracy.

===

Apollo and its passage into history

The Twentieth Century will be remembered as among other things a time of unprecedented ingenuity and brutality.  Once in a great while Great Projects come about where our skills are applied towards things that benefit and inspire the world. Apollo was such a marshaling of the best of our minds and industry.

It was something most who worked on believed in deeply.  Apollo was not just another canal or weapons system, indeed it was a nationalistic demonstration of the prowess of the United States over the USSR, but it was also a glorious crusade to bring the heavens within our grasp.

Apollo will always be a beacon across the gulf of time, a benchmark, a peak, and a point of transformation in what was possible.

We know that as long as history is taught the time which brought about our first steps on another world will attract attention. If the bulk of our future advanced civilization ever lives outside the Earth Apollo will stand as an early sign post to those circumstances. If humanity never makes it to the Moon again then the fact we could once do it will mark our era as a latter day Athenian age when the accomplishments of civilization briefly outpaced its pitfalls.

Now the Moon is ‘old history’. The mighty Saturn V rockets lie in pieces displayed like the funeral barges of vanished Pharaohs and the Moon rocks are  in museums alongside other artifacts of vanished times.

The best quality copies of photos taken on the Lunar surface are now in private hands, with no equivalent material publicly available. The Moon is receding from us and becoming another Pompeii whose paintings we marvel at under glass cases.

We have turned our back on the future as a nation and as a people, at least for the time being.  The ‘New Frontier’ of the Kennedy era has been quietly redrawn to our immediate surroundings.  There are no plans to ever leave Low Earth Orbit again. In recalling our lost skills, it is almost like an ageing athlete looking at fading photos of their moment of glory.

It is increasingly likely that none of those who visited the Moon be alive when and if it happens again. After they are all gone, those who remember Apollo will steadily dwindle in number, until some time around 2050 when Apollo passes into the mists of history such as the Civil War has done. When I was a child there were still veterans of the Civil War alive.  Hopefully some of us who remember will still be lucid enough to appreciate the second generation HDTV views some future space travelers will beam back to Earth.

While waiting for that day I will always carry in my heart the transcendent feeling of looking up at the Moon and knowing there were people up there at that moment!

The moon walks are mere ghosts on videotape, and all of us may well be ghosts before such a thing happens again. In time such things as we remember may seem miraculous, but such are the hazards of events passing from living memory.

May the Moon never pass from living memory.

Don Davis July, 1999

Well, I can agree with that. NASA took the mightiest machines mankind ever made, the Saturn rockets, and made lawn ornaments of them. It took a fully operational Skylab, a perfectly good space station, and put it in the Smithsonian. All this to preserve its monopoly on space. ONLY NASA can do it right; so says NASA. And you and I will never get to space.

I once asked Bill Gates if he wanted to go to the Moon. It would cost about $4 billion (bit more now I think) to build actual spaceships, that fly to space and come back and are refueled and fly again. Leave one in orbit and refuel it with others, and it can go to the Moon and back again. Many times. Building the first ones is expensive because one need to learn how. They wouldn’t be large. They wouldn’t be up to the DC-3 even. But they’d work.

Bill said he didn’t want to put that much money in an enterprise he didn’t control, and he didn’t have time to be involved in this: his job was to make Microsoft work. A perfectly reasonably answer, but it’s still the case: I could get a fleet of reusable LEO  rockets and the capability to refuel one in orbit built and operating for under $10 billion. NASA can’t do it for any price, and for that matter doesn’t want to. NASA wants supershuttle. Oh Well.

===

Tony O’Brien asks, effectively, i f you can use a ‘non-upgrade’ Windows 9x distribution CD to upgrade an earlier installation.

The answer, in the strictest sense, is ‘No, you can’t’.  But that’s not always the answer people are looking for; let’s look a little closer...

First, upgrading any version of Windows—that is, using the _Microsoft_ upgrade procedure, has proven to be a non-starter.  At least in my professional experience with about 100 machines over the past 4 years or so, any fresh installation is about as stable as you’d expect from an operating system designed in Washington.

Upgrades, OTOH, whether from 3.1 to 95 or 95 to 98, have proven to be, well, almost insupportable.  So, if you have _any choice_ whatever in the matter, install the new OS, and then re-install your applications and data files.

If you didn’t _keep_ your apps, you pretty much deserve what you get, I’m afraid.

The non-upgrade installations will notice any other versions of Windows that reside on your disk, and die in mid-install.  Sometimes, you don’t want that, because you’re doing a fresh install, and want to keep the old version around as a fall back.

In this case, you need to rename the \windows directory (unless you were naming the new install something else), and _also_ rename WIN.COM, _because Windows will find it anyway, regardless of what you name the directory it lives in.

(ATTRIB +h on the directory will also fix the problem, but the rename seems simpler.)

After you’ve done this, and assuming you have enough space, you can then do your install.  The other thing I recommend doing, regardless of how far down this idea makes Microsoft chew it’s nails, is to copy the entire WIN9x directory onto the hard drive, and run SETUP from _there_.  This effectively makes you independent of the fact that Windows seems to feel the need to copy in files it already has every time you make _any_ change to your setup, however slight.  It’s pretty painless nowadays, given current drive sizes.

Hope this proves helpful to Tony, and the rest of your readers.

On an unrelated topic, I’ve just bought a Pilot Pro (Office Depot Closeout sale, $120), and I’m wondering if any of your readers have the Synapse alpha pager card—and specifically if it can be ‘re-crystalled’ to Pagenet’s 929.1375 channel; I’m quite happy with my current service and pricing.

Cheers,

-- jra

Jay R. Ashworth

jra@baylink.com

I agree that in general you are far better off  to scrub down and start over, no matter how much work that may be. Sometimes you can’t, but you are certainly taking a risk by doing the “upgrade” option.

===

I hate to ask this after you’ve just gotten _done_ getting everything fixed, but...  :-)

The dragon you’re fighting is named “content management”... and there are other, better, swords with which to slay that beast.  When things settle down even a little more, you might have one of the squires investigate Zope, and Frontier, two different approaches to the same problem, neither of which comes from MicroSoft.  Zope, in fact, is open source.  They both play well together, now that Dave Winer has stopped screaming in pain when he hears the word ‘Linux’ (:-), and they may be a place to look into going for a future iteration of the site.

Which, btw, continues at it’s usual standard—that is, crazy, but informative.

I just finished my fifth (or maybe sixth; I’ve lost count) re-read of _Lucifer’s Hammer_ -- twice in the trade edition recently re-published, and the rest in the original rack.

I still cry at the end.  I always wonder if there’s anywhere to _take_ the characters from there that wouldn’t seem like _just_ a sequel; I like them, a lot.

RIP Dan Forrester (er, um, I mean ‘Alderson’).

Cheers,

-- jra (Jay Ashworth)

Interesting. Thanks!

===

Jerry:

Don’t change a thing. “Pretty” websites take forever to load and most often don’t contain anything worthwhile. Believe those who compliment you (“I was born moodest, but it wore off.” Mark Twain, quoted by Hal Holbrook, who is still going round impersonating the old reprobate after thirty years). More power to you and the resurrected BYTE. I gave up on its replacement.

Best wishes.

Roy King

Thanks for the kind words. That's certainly my impression. Still, I am going to have to redo this place if only for practice. Maybe I can snazz it up without changing what makes it better...

===

Jerry,

The collection of opinions on the issue of a large, standing American army has been interesting, but I wonder if perhaps it may be more useful to use more pragmatic arguments for limiting their use.  As it is now, our ground forces are spread across the globe on a myriad of missions.  While we note that having an army based upon the “Seventy Year War” might be conducive to continuing the these missions (and their high number), our Army today is nowhere near the size it was during those years and the signs of strain are visible.  The catch phrase these days is “a higher OPTEMPO”—operational tempo—meaning that as our army shrinks, troops are deployed much more often because the numbers of missions are appearing to increase.  Higher OPTEMPO, long deployments overseas, greater strain, soldiers opting for civilian opportunities at earlier dates.  The volunteer soldier can only do so much, deploy so often, before the exertion becomes no longer desirable.  As possible recruits flock not to their recruiters but to the opportunities of a strong economy, the numbers become not a congressional decision, but a logistical reality with which the Army must simply learn to live with.  Without getting into the relative merits of Empire versus Republic, it may be that practical strains on our army will be the most convincing reasons to limit our activities.

Sincerely,

2LT Patrick Bryant

Lack of citizen recruits has not stopped previous empires. The simple solution is to recruit foreigners, who are given citizenship after 20 years service. Citizenship and land; and of course some rise through the ranks. Diocletian, at one time recruit Diocles, probably a Serb, is a good example. “Till the Legions elected him Caesar, and he rose to be master of all…”

I agree that working volunteer soldiers to the bone is no answer, and that is what is happening; but there are many other remedies. While the high tech parts of combat demand a better grade of soldier, quite a good trooper can be made of a lad facing sentence in state or federal court. It used to be done all the time. Or, of course, if you can’t recruit enough troops domestically or even foreign enlistees in your army, you can accept as Allies and Auxiliaries whole units of Gauls and Heruls and Huns; there’s plenty of precedent.

Do not underestimate the ability of an empire. They work pretty well. They just aren’t the friends of liberty.

==

From: James Siddall jr

siddall@tin.it

Dear Jerry,

after having “upgraded” or “updated” to Internet Explorer 5, I can appreciate a number of your problems with MS products, and ask myself how much they actually think about the end user when they decided what “features” to change with their new products. I send you this list in the hopes that maybe one of your readers may know a solution or work-around for some of the “features” that I consider problems, and that aren’t (as far as I’ve been able to dig and find) switchable in terms of the default action. Maybe with some registry hacks they may be modifiable, but I haven’t been able to find a source in Internet in the first 10 or 11 search engine result pages. Not very “user friendly” IMHO, but I’m only a user, so what do I count? You seem to have a LOT more clout, thankfully. Some of the main problems I consider are:

1.     saving the “complete page” (images and all) is sometimes nice, but is it possible to change the default to the (past method) only HTML Source?

2.     the filename for the default save is the HTML Title, not the source filename. This means saving one of your pages makes it “Current Chaos Manor Mail July 5 - 11, 1999.htm” and not “currentmail.html”.

3.     the file extension/type doesn’t default to the source file, but to Explorer’s preference (this goes back to IE4 too). Example: “currentmail.html” is defaulted to “currentmail.htm”, unless the extension is specified as “.html”. This is the same for images, which in the case of JPEG’s, default to image.JPEG, even though image.jpg is MUCH more common in normal usage.

4.     the status bar (which monitors progress in loading the page, listing links’ destination addresses, etc.) seems to disappear at irregular intervals. The first web browser loaded tends to have it, but other instances may or may not, it seems. May this be a setting controlled by the remote site being browsed? It doesn’t seem to be specific to any site. It doesn’t seem to be something which simply remembers the last chosen state either.

I’ve found tweaks, toys, etc, but none that seem to give me more control over the settings that I want to configure the “usable environment” if I can call it that.

Best wishes for your continued success,

James Siddall jr

Thanks. We’ll let the readers have a go…

©
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
 
Top

Sunday

©
Chaos Manor home

Entire contents copyright 1999 by Jerry E. Pournelle. All rights reserved.
Comments and discussion welcome.