picture of me. You haven't missed anything.

CHAOS MANOR MAIL

Mail 168 August 27 - September 2, 2001

read book now

HOME

VIEW

MAIL

Columns

BOOK Reviews

emailblimp.gif (23130 bytes)mailto:jerryp@jerrypournelle.com

CLICK ON THE BLIMP TO SEND MAIL TO ME

 

LAST WEEK                            Current Mail                           NEXT WEEK

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

FOR THE CURRENT VIEW PAGE CLICK HERE

If you are not paying for this place, click here...

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.

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. 

Day-by-day...
Monday -- Tuesday -- Wednesday -- Thursday -- Friday -- Saturday -- Sunday
 
atomz search

Search: type in string and press return.

 

or the freefind search

 
   Search this site or the web        powered by FreeFind
 
  Site search Web search


Boiler Plate:

If you want to PAY FOR THIS there are problems, but I keep the latest HERE. I'm trying. MY THANKS to all of you who sent money.  Some of you went to a lot of trouble to send money from overseas. Thank you! There are also some new payment methods. I am preparing a special (electronic) mailing to all those who paid: there will be a couple of these. I am also toying with the notion of a subscriber section of the page. LET ME KNOW your thoughts.
.

If you subscribed:

atom.gif (1053 bytes) CLICK HERE for a Special Request.

If you didn't and haven't, why not?

If this seems a lot about paying think of it as the Subscription Drive Nag. You'll see more.

Highlights this week:

  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  

Search: type in string and press return.

 

line6.gif (917 bytes)

 
This week:

Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday

TOP

Monday August 27, 2001 

Roland reports with glee that a spammer has been fined:

http://www.businesstoday.com/business/business/spam08252001.htm 

Hurrah!

Hi Jerry, I am having a great senior moment. I think I remember one of your columns mentioning a great contact cleaner. Actually it created a contact between two low voltage points but did it in a way that a multi-contact board wouldn't short out adjacent pins, but would make better contact. Does this ring any bells with you?

If not, either I am making it up, or maybe it was Steve Ciarcia.

Thanks,

David Porter 

Stabilant 22

On Dylslexia:

Speaking of the advantages of being diagnosed with dyslexia today. My son told me yesterday that children diagnosed with dyslexia in Austin Independent School District get free use of a laptop for the duration of their high school experience. As to how much learning is done as opposed to how much game playing I couldn't say.

Fred Brown

Indeed. Just as poverty can sometimes be a highly desirable state to be in, depending on how much they will pay you to be poor for the government. Indeed.

Hi Jerry,

What do you make of this? http://www.msnbc.com/news/619488.asp 

I am beginning to believe that I am more "free" living in China, than I ever could in the US.

(ok, ok. I live in Hong Kong and for now, the system still works)

- Paul

I make of it about what you think. Through its own incompetence the FBI is reduced to harassing reporters and writers who have done the work the FBI ought to have done for itself; and it is always easier to jail normal law abiding citizens than to catch real criminals.

Why is anyone surprised?

I have made a Report of mail regarding the Kursk and the future of naval warfare. It is long, specialized, and frightening.

And Robert Racansky who is computer literate on the state of the media's numerical literacy:

At the UN Conference on the Illicit Trade in Small Arms [1], a representative of the Million Mom March claimed that:

"The gun lobby has been talking for 40 minutes. During that time, 40 people have died from the use of small arms and light weapons in this country" [2].

40 people killed in 40 minutes = 1 person killed per minute. There are 525,600 minutes in a year [60 minutes/hour x 24 hours/day x 365 days/year].

However, there are "only" about 32,000 firearms related deaths in the United States per year. Over half of the victims died by their own choice [3].

This means that the Million Mom March is exaggerating the number of firearms related deaths by over 1600% [525,000/32,000 = 16.4 x, or 1,640%].

For comparison purposes:

140,415 Americans were killed in battle during the Civil War (1861 - 1865) 53,513 Americans were killed in battle during World War I (1917 - 1918) 292,131 Americans were killed in battle during World War II (1941 - 1945) 33,667 Americans were killed in battle during the Korean War (1950 - 1953) 47,393 Americans were killed in battle during the Vietnam war (1964 - 1973) 148 Americans were killed in battle during the Persian Gulf War (1991) [4]

In 1989, the American Academy of Pediatrics claimed that "Firearms are responsible for the deaths of 45,000 infants, children and adolescents per year," which exceeded the _total_ number of firearms related deaths for _all_ ages by about 10,000, or about 30% [5].

1. http://www.un.org/Depts/dda/CAB/smallarms/ 

2. Statement of Mary Leigh Blek. Million Mom March. United Nations Press Release DC/2792. "Civil Society Groups Highlight Impact of Firearms Injuries, Gun Ownership Rights in Small Arms Conference Debate." 16 July 2001. http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2001/DC2792.doc.htm

May Leigh Blek's MMM page:

http://www.millionmommarch.com/chapters/national/victim_resources/vic_4/ 

3. There were 32,166 firearms related deaths in 1997, the last year I have data available for. WORLD ALMANAC AND BOOK OF FACTS 2001. "Deaths in the U.S. Involving Firearms, by Age, 1997." p. 879. "Unintentional" = 981 "Suicides" = 17,566 "Homicides" = 13,252 "Undetermined" = 367 The World Almanac also breaks those numbers down by age group, if you're interested in more detail.

4. "Casualties in Principal Wars of the U.S." WORLD ALAMANAC AND BOOK OF FACTS 2001, p. 209. Figures do no include other deaths during those wars.

5. quoted in, David Kopel "Children and Guns" (p. 309). David Kopel (ed.) GUNS: WHO SHOULD HAVE THEM? (Prometheus Books, 1995).

The _total_ number of firearms related deaths for _all_ ages in 1989 was 34,776. Centers for Disease Control. "National Vital Statistics Reports." 24 July 2000. p. 71 http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/pdf/nvs48_11t18.pdf 

An earlier version of Kopel's "Children and Guns" (without notes) is available at http://rkba.org/research/kopel/kids-gun.html  The source cited in the book for the AAP statement is: "Doctors Worry About Gun Deaths" (Associated Press). AURORA BEACON NEWS. 23 October 1989.

And thank you. I am tempted to put that off into a report where it will be found by many; perhaps when there's discussion. Thank you again.

More on double file extensions:

Hi-

I want to first say that I read your column as often as possible and love it. I know everyone says that.<grin> I just read your column on Dmitry Sklyarov, Adobe, and the FBI and thought it had a lot of good information. I just had a problem with one idea and that was that a file shouldn't have more then one extension. I know people have probably written to you about it, but I think you have overlooked .tar.gz files. These are compressed tar files and very common for people running a version of Unix or Linux. I do send these through outlook quite often due to the fact it is all my boss allows us to use at work, even though we deal with UNIX quite a bit.

Thanks again for all the great articles. 

Kevin Johnson

I still wish I could reference those in Outlook Rules, though

g

TOP

 

This week:

Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday

TOP

Tuesday,  

This was a working day.

 

 

 

TOP

 

This week:

Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday

TOP

Wednesday,

 

And another

 

TOP

 

 

 

This week:

Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday

read book now

TOP

Thursday, August 30, 2001

And yet one more day of writing.

 

 

 

TOP

 

 

 

This week:

Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday

TOP

Friday, August 31, 2001

Begin with a matter of interest...

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

One of the contributors to Slashdot pointed out that the Adobe encryption program that was broken was ROT13. This is even sillier than you thought. If true, you can write the decryption key yourself. Just put the first thirteen letters of the alphabet in one line, then the second thirteen letters in a matching row in the second line. If the encrypted letter is "A", the plaintext letter is "N". If the encrypted letter is "T", then the plaintext must be "G". If you have an old copy of Internet Explorer laying around, it includes an encryption/decryption program for ROT13 in the toolbar.

Your friends and mine that comment on Slashdot have pointed out that their sigs are encrypted with double ROT13, and anyone decrypting to read them is risking jail time. They are obviously angling for civil service jobs.

regards,

William L. Jones wljones@dallas.net

Hilarious. That's the Picket Fence encryption, used in the Civil War (and br0ken then, too). But I think that may have been chosen by one of the Adobe customer publishers rather than Adobe itself? Surely there were other options?  But the entire matter is absurd and I would have thought that any adult in the Department of Justice would end it.  Apparently not.


Roland recommends on Linux (including the comments):

http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=01/08/28/2058247&mode=thread 

He also reports on his latest project:

Have you installed a P4 from scratch?! The boxed 1.4GHz processor kit from Intel (w/fan) comes with a -hypo- with 10ccs of some sort of 'thermal protection material' which one smears atop the processor (deliberately designed to make it possible for one to insert incorrectly and thus bend the pins when lowering the lock-lever, it seems) prior to clamping the huge CPU fan into place.

I got a DFI P4/i850 motherboard for $139; 1.4 GHz P4 boxed kit for $189; P4-ready case (yes, you need a P4-ready case to accomodate the pretty much standardized P4 motherboard form-factor) w/300W power supply for $99; 2 256MB sticks of the hated RDRAM for $99 each ($198 total for 512MB RAM); and a 30GB Seagate UDMA-100 hard drive for $94. As events developed, I needed longer UDMA cables, which cost $5 each. I re-used my current DVD drive, SoundBlaster Live!, 3Com 3C95x card, and GeForce 2 video adaptor.

The DFI motherboard has on-board sound, which I promptly disabled. The Intel board, for $50 more, has a built-in EtherExpress Pro 100 Ethernet adaptor. The DFI board comes with a good, well-illustrated manual, and a handy sticker with all jumper locations to put on the inside of your case. The BIOS setup utility (Award) is outstanding, with almost everything being set 'correctly' (i.e., the way I like things tweaked) by default.

These are all Fry's prices; I'm sure I could've done better if I'd shopped around, but this was an instant-gratification sort of exercise.

The P4 is faster than my previous 800MHz PIII w/384MB of RAM. Is it $650 faster? On balance, I'd say so. If I'd had to purchase a new GeForce card and sound card, though, I probably would've waited a bit.

I'm happy; it works. Kernel compilations are a -great deal- faster. I guess I'll get around to putting some flavor of Windows on a second drive so that I can play some games (sad that I have to say that), and test it in the time-honored tradition.

------- Roland Dobbins 

I blush to say my Pentium IV came to me from Intel already built; I haven't assembled one yet. I should do so shortly.

Years ago a DFI dual processor system was the fastest machine in the house. It was also the quietest. They have done some good work.


Now this:

Subject: Here's a link that I was reminded of by reading the Sklyarov case...

It reminded me of this link, since both are about what happens when you give beurocrats too much power.

http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2001/08/29/zero_tolerance/index.html  

I read the referenced article expecting to agree with it, and I sort of did, but then I got to thinking: the reason we have zero tolerance, and three-strikes, and the rest of it is that we no longer trust anyone with discretionary authority. We don't trust grown up magistrates to act like magistrates and we don't trust teachers with the authority to be teachers. Worse, if any of them try to make things work, God help them if they make any kind of error in judgment: the legal system will destroy the teacher or administrator.

Under those circumstances, they all hide behind rules, and sad to say, I wonder if I would not be tempted to do so were I in their shoes. Yes, it gets overly silly, with a girl thrown out of school for having a kitchen knife in her car, and a mother arrested for letting her daughter sit in her lap. When you see the silly consequences you forget the alternatives.

The alternatives are what we used to have, with classrooms a blackboard jungle indeed. The opposite of zero tolerance is some tolerance, and the problem here is who tolerates what and from whom? Allowing one student to disrupt the class is a tax imposed on all those who want to learn. The teacher spends more time with the disruptive student, and thus has less for everyone else. 

In the old days the teacher would just throw the disruptive one out. "I don't care where he goes. It won't be in my classroom." And generally the authorities would make it stick if there were evidence that teaching was impossible with the little monster in the room. Now suppose the little monster is a minority, or handicapped, or has any other possible claim to victim status: now what? You can't "blame the victim". The result is that no one learns anything. Thus zero tolerance: it leads to absurdities, it leads to heaving kids out that no one wants to see thrown out, but it may also lead to some peace and quiet and order.

Not I don't defend the practice of stupidity: but if we live in an insanely litigious society, it may be we have no choice but to try silly measures as the only way to adapt. Would that it were otherwise...

Hi Jerry,

re: "Do you think this may be a good time to travel abroad now that we have asserted that activities not criminal the one's own country can be prosecuted as heavy duty felonies if the US can lure you to within its borders? I can't think of a sillier precedent to get on the books."

<wink> Maybe like using tax evasion to catch hardened criminals like Al Capone et al, we could get copies of this "illegal" software into the hands of, say, drug runners, gun runners; heck even Mexicans crossing the borders... and finally Nail 'em?? Or maybe just wait till their XP or Office licenses expire and... </wink>

best regards, tob

And

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

Someone had better hope that the Soviets........sorry, the Russians don't decided to pull a page out of the Cold War book. Simply arrest an American student, accuse him of hacking, have a quick "fair trial and pack him off to the Gulag. I'd be willing to bet Sklaryov would be released pretty quickly. Of course, it would help if the student was the son or daughter of someone important.

BTW, I just read one of your books here in Batam.

Best Regards,

Corey Putra Batam Komputer Pulau Batam, Indonesia

Yeah. It's come to this... Thanks, and glad you could find my books there.


And Robert Racansky recommends:

An interesting, article on -- as the title says -- the failure of tech journalism:

http://www.netslaves.com/cgi-bin/yabb/

YaBB.pl?board=005&action=display&num=998801687 

(It's about 1/3 of the web page long, with the other 7+ pages being reader comments).

Fair warning: this uses "modern" language, meaning that scatological and Anglo-Saxon reproductive activity terms are sprinkled throughout (why I don't know; having been a soldier I know something of barracks language, but I don't see any need to use it to make my points here).

WARNING: I find that visiting this site seems to subscribe you to hundreds of sex sites, and while it didn't pop up anything to me, it did to others.

HERE IS A READER COMMENT

Jerry, I followed this link http://www.netslaves.com/cgi-bin/yabb/

YaBB.pl?board=005&action=display&num=998801687 i

n mail for Friday August 31. when I closed the explorer window up popped a page inviting me to visit a page with cumshots. Closing that page led to another, then another ...

Perhaps your internet security settings are different than mine and this didn't happen to you, but you should warn readers about this.

Greg French

And indeed my settings are different from yours: but on arriving in San Diego I find that my mailbox is full of garbage. Apparently that site, purporting to be a criticism of network journalism, is in fact a leadin to sex sites. My apologies.

 

Second, in one of the comments there is the statement that I am clueless, which didn't entirely endear the piece to me, and also the implication that BYTE is gone, which simply isn't true.

But he does have some points. Regarding my own activities: yes, I get most (not all) of the equipment I use free; if I didn't I could hardly afford to have things to write about, because unlike most "reviews" I don't review things at all: I use them, and I don't in general report on things I don't or won't use, and I don't in general recommend something I have used long enough to have some confidence in it. Most of the systems I build here are built on PC Power and Cooling cases, and use Crucial or Kingston memory. I get most of those free although when I am in a hurry I buy them. But I recommend them not because I get them free but because I am willing to use them for my own work. After all, I can get almost ANYTHING free. And since I can't sell it (I'd have to declare the stuff as income if I did) and since I have more computers than I need, and indeed approach having as many as I can endure (I have long passed how many my wife will endure) I have no choice but to take free equipment. On the other hand, since I can get almost anything I want, it's hardly a bribe.

As to writing negative reviews, in general I don't do that, because there's enough stuff out there that I can recommend, and I have found over the years that readers -- my readers at least -- don't WANT negative reviews. They want to learn about neat stuff they can use.

But you can infer a lot from what I don't write about...

As to recommending that Windows 2000 is Good Enough, I think I said that quite a long time ago. And still do. I had ME on a couple of systems; it's on one last one now but I took it off everything else, and it would go off that one if I needed the machine for anything important. If you get ME factory installed it is probably OK, but if you're setting up a new system use Windows 2000, the only exception being some older DOS games like Conquest of the New World that just plain will not work with W 2000. 

And so forth. I'm writing more about that piece than I intended to because it is disturbing. But I think that, clueless or not, I escape many of the criticisms he levels at most of the hi tech journalists...

===

Jerry, I followed this link http://www.netslaves.com/cgi-bin/yabb/

YaBB.pl?board=005&action=display&num=998801687 i

n mail for Friday August 31. when I closed the explorer window up popped a page inviting me to visit a page with cumshots. Closing that page led to another, then another ...

Perhaps your internet security settings are different than mine and this didn't happen to you, but you should warn readers about this.

Greg French

And indeed my settings are different from yours: but on arriving in San Diego I find that my mailbox is full of garbage. Apparently that site, purporting to be a criticism of network journalism, is in fact a leadin to sex sites. My apologies. It subscribed me to several, I find now that I am back on line.

Dear Dr Pournelle, Further to Roland's link on the demise of VA Linux's hardware services, ZDnet has on-line a comment on the dumping of one of the Samba project heads, perhaps showing the software side is also not in best of health, at ( http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/newsbursts/0,7407,5096404,00.html?chkpt=p1bn  )

"Aug 30, 2001 9:08 AM PT Open-source luminary out of a job Jeremy Allison, leader of the Samba project that lets Linux servers share files like a Windows server, is among those left jobless by cuts at VA Linux Systems, Allison said Wednesday. The company shucked its hardware business in July. VA also hired Samba's Andrew Tridgell.

Allison said he's considering working at SGI, a former employer that's embarked on a variety of Linux and open-source projects. In particular, Allison said he's interested in SGI's XFS file system, which Allison said is faster than several alternatives. --Stephen Shankland, Special to ZDNet News "

We looked at a pre-built VA Linux machine for one of our servers a year and a half ago. The build quality was nice but the price was four times that of a tweaked generic Intel box we eventually built for ourselves.

This is a major point about open source which is often missed. The distributions are mature enough now that it is possible for someone not completely clueless to roll his own, and the traditional overheads or cost overruns render a corporate minder unaffordable.

The paradoxical result is that outfits like VA Linux are experiencing a sales squeeze while open-source based installations are rising, so 'market share' becomes meaningless, or at least bent way out of shape. Anybody out there care to coin a new phrase? How about 'non-market share'?

Regards, TC

-- Terry Cole BA/BSc/BE/BA(hons) (tcole@maths.otago.ac.nz) System Administrator, Dept. of Maths. & Stats., Otago Uni. PO Box 56, Dunedin, NZ.

And on a previous subject:

There are always at least as many sides to a story as there are people involved. For some interesting background on Vanessa Leggett see

http://www.houstonpress.com/issues/2001-08-23/insider.html 

Regards,

Paul Adams

I confess to knowing no more than the MSNBC report told; but I was impressed by the various journalistic organizations that have filed briefs in her behalf. And the horror is that we can believe things may routinely happen that a decade ago would have been literally incredible. Even in the paranoid periods we thought the government played by rules. Now we are no longer sure. That's frightening.

Re: Magellan

I love Magellan, I still use it on my computer, I run win 95. Will it run on win 98 or winme ? I would be lost without it. I wish someone would make a new version. Years ago, I heard the original writer wanted to get it from IBM and they refused. I don't know what I would do without it. If MS had spent the time and money fixing what it had instead of just adding to it, I would not need to use it. File management with MS is for the pits. I use 8 different programs to do what the operating system should be able to so. 

ps. love your writings. Kenneth M. Potraker

I loved Magellan too. I haven't even tried it for years; perhaps I ought to try to get my old copy out and see if it will run. Or I will try to work with the Franklin people to get their OnePlace working properly (it sure don't work for me)... Because I really need an indexer. And I have several reader suggestions. We'll get there!

Dr. Pournelle,

Your brand of "I do these things so you don't have to" Tech Journalism is the best thing going these days. I'm a manager at small (err tiny) FORTRAN compiler company and the majority of our customers are scientists and engineers who just want to get their jobs done. Your trials and tribulations help to keep me focused on that fact.

I do miss the print version of Byte though. If only because I could read it on my deck instead of in front of a computer screen.

A question: do you ever get the desire to do "bug fixes" on a book that you have released?

Best regards and stay up in the "Monk's Cell". We want the next book,

Tony Goelz

Bug Fixes for books are mostly sequels. But I wouldn't mind being able to do rewrites when events have passed me by...

Corporations are starting to realize just how much money they are spending on M$ products and upgrades, and just how little they are getting for it.

<http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.html?i=1527 >

Pete Flugstad

Indeed. I have to say that I find Windows 2000 Good Enough for all but games. I would not take XP off a new system and replace it; I might do that with Me; but I certainly know of no reason to leave Windows 2000, and so far I find Office 2000 good enough for everything I do. Perhaps I will see reasons for upgrades in future; so far I have not.

 

 

TOP

 

 

This week:

Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday

TOP

Saturday,

 

Call it a holiday.

 

TOP

 

 

This week:

Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday

read book now

TOP

Sunday, September 2, 2001

And another.

 

 

  TOP

 

 

birdline.gif (1428 bytes)