CHAOS MANOR MAIL

A SELECTION

Through September 20, 1998

Peter Golden [pgolden1@nycap.rr.com]

Dear Jerry: I saw your musings on Bookshelf and thought you might like to try something I've been doing for a while. Uninstall your old copy of Bookshelf and then copy the Bookshelf CD files to its own directory on your hard drive and reinstall it from there. Now you'll have Bookshelf whenever you need it on your hard drive and it will run quickly. I have found this particularly helpful on notebooks without CD ROM Drives. I'm enjoying your daybook as much as I've enjoyed your columns. Glad you can find the time.

Best,

Earl Gibbs [egibbs@sprintmail.com]

Jerry

I just got Red Hat Linux up on my Cyrix 166, FIC 2007 Motherboard (It has a Via chip set not Intel) with 1M cache. I use EIDE drives and a external US Robotics V.Everything modem. Wouldnt worry about going pure Intel.

The Red Hat CD I bought at Fry’s said Red Hat in big letters but the fine print in the lower corner said "Macmillan". This means that I dont have access to the free support offered by Red Hat. I would recommend that if you use the Red Hat CD - get it directly from Red Hat.

The BIOS on the FIC motherboard allowed a CD "boot" but the Red Hat documentation did not cover all the selections you need for an installation.

For instance you are asked how big to make several partitions with no on screen recommendations. I went back to Win95 and used the Adobe Acrobat viewer to look at the Red Hat CD where the reference books are located and printed the reference information I needed to get started.

The sources of information I used include a list of "HOWTO" documents on the internet, "Linux for Dummies" and an old "Unix for Dummies". Each of these contributed only a small part of the required information. Some of the simple things you do in DOS took a long time to figure out and were poorly documented everywhere for a beginner.

My Example: How do you find what's on the CD? In dos you put in the volume letter F:, then use a DIR. In Linux you must "mount" the volume first with a "mnt" command (and figure out where to mount it) then CD to the "cdrom" that is mounted—then figure out how to use the "ls" command to find a file name that looks nothing like a DOS/WIN name. I finally got access to the Cd only by using a command string example I found for a different subject!

Netscape Navigator comes with the Red Hat package and it worked but didnt receive some web pages. I found that Netscape had a $19.95 CD with Communicator 4.05 that includes versions for Windows 95, NT4.0 and Linux 2.0 so I ordered it. I installed it on NT first then on my Linux disk and it seems to run ok. Have not got Real Audio up yet. Nor can I get the Corel word processor to install.

I enjoy your site, even the non PC stuff, and hope you keep at it. To that end I still think you should caarge for an iregular e-mail newsletter to bring the $ up to the point where you feel better about the work involved.

Would be happy to answer questions on my Linux installation if it would help your Linux project.

Talin [Talin@ACM.org]

Jerry,

While I haven’t had a huge amount of experience setting up Linux boxes, I have set up three or four of them. So here’s my bits of advice.

Choosing the hardware:

It’s unlikely you’ll have a problem here, but you never know. I just bought an Intel BX motherboard with a 100 Mhz bus, and a 233 MHz Pentium II, and had no problems with it whatsoever. There are some driver chips out there that are not yet supported, especially in the newer laptops. However, I’ve yet to find anything that wasn’t compatible with the most recent version of Red Hat.

If you do have a problem with a particular board, there are a couple of options. First, see if the board is supported by checking the various FAQs on the net. All Linux FAQs and HOWTOs can be found at the _Linux Documentation Project_ located at http://sunsite.unc.edu/LDP. Look in particular at the "Getting Started" guide at http://sunsite.unc.edu/LDP/LDP/gs/gs.html, it has a section on planning the hardware for your system. There are also specific HOWTOs for networking, video cards, etc, all of which can be found at http://sunsite.unc.edu/LDP/HOWTO/HOW-TO-INDEX-3.html.

For networking, I recommend going with a PCI NE2000 clone; If you want something fancier than that, I suggest looking at the Networking HOWTO at http://sunsite.unc.edu/LDP/HOWTO/Networking-Overview-HOWTO.html first.

For graphics, most of the accelerated windows cards are supported. The XFree86-HOWTO document at http://sunsite.unc.edu/LDP/HOWTO/XFree86-HOWTO.html lists which chipsets are supported (look under the section "Hardware Requirements". For myself, I have a Matrox Mystique; Apparently, that and the Millenium series are the fastest cards supported in XFree86. I recommend going with 4MB of video ram;

You can get by with 2 MB, but if you want to run a 24-bit display in a high resolution you’ll need more than that. (I only have 2MB on mine, which limits me to 1160x870 or so in 16-bit color.)

Hard drive: IDE support is built-in, whereas SCSI usually has to be configured. I’d recommend goind with IDE initally, both for hard drive and CD-ROM, as it’s simpler to set up.

Mouse and keyboard should auto-configure; I’m using a plain old Microsoft PS/2 mouse.

Sound cards: There’s support for a lot of different cards; I have a Sound Blaster AWE-32, which works fine.

Zip drives and such: Look at the HOWTOs.

Installing the software:

Pretty much just do what the Red Hat manual tells you to do. Don’t bother going into MS-DOS to run fdisk or anything like that. Just stick in the boot disk and go from there.

Running office apps:

As far as running Microsoft apps, I can’t be of much help. The WINE emulator works, and can run Word, apparently, but I’ve never tried it. I have been considering plunking down the $99 for the ApplixWare suite of office programs offered by Red Hat. I’ve also got the demo version of WordPerfect for Linux, but I haven’t tried it yet either. (Generally, when I want to write text, It’s more convenient for me to just lay down on the couch with my Mac Powerbook.)

Oh, another thing: On partitioning the disk.

You need at least two partitions: A main partition and a swap partition. You can create more if you like.

The swap partition is nameless. I generally make it equal to twice the amount of RAM that the system has.

Talin (Talin@ACM.org) -- Systems Engineer, PostLinear Entertainment.

Stackpole,Mark [stackpom@oclc.org]

Dear Dr Pournelle:

Ah ha. At last a topic in View I can comment on.

I lived in Redlands during the early Nineties and could only work up the effort once to go down the 10 to attend a concert at the Bowl. My family ended up far away in the back on the picnic knolls with John Mauceri conducting some film score excerpts in the distance.

Pedantic correction: English Horns (which is a mistranslation from the French for Angled Horn [Cor Anglais vs. Cor Anglaise get it?]) are oboe like instruments, with a double reed, a bend near the mouthpiece (the angle ‘natch), and a rounded bell. French Horns—or just plain Horns -- would be the brass you saw at the Bowl.

For early orchestral music—outside of operas and oratorios—two horns would be the standard number. But Beethoven wrote the Eroica with THREE horn parts. How did they get away with only two? The decreased number of woodwinds means that the Hungarians were making a gesture towards period performance practice. A noble effort, but not, in my opinion a good idea at a venue like the Bowl, where more is more.

Yes, they were definitely going back to the original instrumentation, excising the expanded horn and brass sections that were tacked onto Beethoven by well meaning conductors and editors later in the 19^th century. In the Third Symphony the brass should consist of just 3 horns and 2 trumpets. And you should never, ever, under any circumstances hear a tuba in an orchestral work of Beethoven.

That’s right. Leonora/Fidelio was revised over and over before Beethoven called it quits. Overture #1 is a standard curtain raiser with no thematic links to the opera Overture #2 synopsizes the entire plot of the opera in a linear fashion anticipating Lizst’s tone poems Overture #3 also follows the plot, but is recast into Sonata form Since Beethoven felt numbers 2 &; 3 gave away too much of the story, when Leonora was revised and recast into Fidelio he wrote Overture #4 - a standard curtain raiser with no thematic links to the opera Thus is illustrated the progression of the Artist.

Mozart was already playing around with the cutting edge in musical technology up to his death. The clarinet and glass harmonica where two of the odd soundmaking devices that Mozart was composing for in his thirties. Heck, what would W.A.M. would have done if he has access to a Horn capable of playing the entire chromatic scale?

Kurt Roithinger [gren@teleport.com]

About 18 months or so ago i stumbled across a note saying that the folks at origin games were looking for fans/players to submit names of planets and/or systems for ‘fill out’ the wing commander universe.

i made a few suggestions (immortalizing one of my own fictional creations, naturally). one of them was that a planet named ‘piper’ or ‘piper’s world’ be placed near pournelle (which popped in WC I or II, if i remember correctly).

well, i never heard back from origin and thought nothing of it since.

however, while surfing around today (and in anticipation of WC: Secret Ops), i can across a site that has a truly amazing map of the WC universe (http://www.dragonfire.net/~alfong/wcumo/)

on a lark, i entered some of the names i usggested in it’s search interface and lo and behold, it seems that all of my suggestions were implemented (makes me proud :)

i’ve attached an image of the sector with pournelle, piper and kalvan (they must be fans :) and thought you might get a kick out of it.

Jim Dodd [jimdodd@tcubed.net]

Jerry,

To comment on what happened in Afghanistan, my $.02.

In another life I was a Navy Electronic Warfare Officer, later an Operations Officer with a resume which includes the Middle East, doing SIGINT. I retired 15 years ago, but I don’t think the vocabulary has mutated yet.

SIGINT is the overall term, standing for Signals Intelligence. ELINT is electronic intelligence, and is applied to the signals from devices such as radars, etc. COMINT is communictions intelligence, and is applied to listening to the other guys radio transmissions, etc.

What I hear (not from DOD sources or any Large Unnamed Gov’t Agency -LUGA) is bin Laden’s guys ran an operation which assumed that their cellular telephones were being intercepted and the US was listening. (This is pretty easy to do, by the way. You can also do it very expensively from space). So they suckered our "intel weenies" with calls indicating a fake meeting. I also heard that they were expecting a special forces attempt and not a missile attack. The same organization is reported to have pulled this off in Somalia, leading to the ambush of the Army’s Rangers.

Anyway, the Commander of the Camp was quoted saying he thought the initial missile hits were the normal explosives training the camp conducts. This while others were trying to claim it was a study center for Islam and the Koran.

Scott Kitterman [kitterma@erols.com]

The OS monopoly is not the only one Microsoft has. Because of the proprietary file formats used in MS Office, the barriers to market success for any competitor are very high.

In my case, my company’s customer uses MS Office and so we have to use it at work because we send a lot of files back and forth. Because I do some of my work at home, I have to use MS Office. While other suites allow import and export to/from MS Office formats, the translation is not generally perfect and they lag the latest MS Office releases. Who wants to take the risk?

Scott Kitterman [kitterma@erols.com]

OK, I’ll plead ignorance. I didn’t know that Microsoft publishes the file formats on MSDN. I’m also not surprised I didn’t know. I guess a have to plead ignorance again when it comes to an ability to successfully navigate a Microsoft developed web site. I just looked and couldn’t find it. My fault probably.

I would just prefer it if there were an open, stable standard for standard productivity suite software data files. The constant evolution of file formats also ensures a steady supply of upgrade customers. I successfully wrote my undergraduate thesis with Word 1.0 and with a very few, minor exceptions I don’t think I use features in Word ‘97 that 1.0 didn’t have. Yet, every time an upgrade comes out, I’m right on top of it so I can effeciently deal with the data files that are a large part of my professional life.

I guess it comes down to the same reason I’ve got Intel inside all my PCs. AMD, and others, may be compatible with Intel, but who in business wants to take the risk. I’d rather pay a little more, but be guaranteed compatibility with the dominant player who defines the standards.

With that, I’ll go back to lurking now.

Bruce Denman [bdenman@FTC-I.NET]

I thought the following was appropriate:

Regards

Robert Bruce Thompson

Well, that Stanford story was nice and sentimental, totally untrue, but very sentimental. How do I know it’s untrue?

Well, go here

and you can see certain facts..

Like Leland Stanford Jr dying of typhoid fever, at the age of 15, which of course means he didn’t die in an accident, and makes his attending Harvard for any length of time exceedingly unlikely. Not impossible, but unlikely.

September 6, 1998

In your mini-review of "The Trap," you mentioned that when you advocated rational trade policy, people quoted Ricardo against you. I recently came across this. The passage below is from John Kenneth Galbraith’s "Money" (Houghton Mifflin, 1975). According to Galbraith’s footnote, the stuff in quotation marks is from John Giuseppi, "The Bank of England" (London: Evans Brothers, 1966), .

Eric Pobirs [nbrazil@ix.netcom.com]

Someone in the Netly group was lamenting the dearth of new weird websites of the kind flourished in those heady days of yore AKA 1996. This resulted in a flurry of suggestions, some of which I present here.

The MES Text Filter:

Calculator in the URL:

&; radical majoritarians can vote on the value of pi:

Who answers a phone booth in the desert:

wherein a foreign expatriate waxes about California driving habits (his rant about Volvo drivers is hilarious), and shows off his photographs of Emeryville, California (I think I remember some of West Oakland too). He’s an excellent photographer, and if you like urban-industrial-wasteland-scapes, as I do, you’ll love his stuff.

Here’s another funny one with even more time-wasting potential.

Consumer Reports guide to girlfriends

Digital Unix

Digital OPEN VMS

HP UX/Unix

Sun Unix

Linix

BSD Unix

BeOS

Mac OS

SCO Unix

IBM AIX

Novell

OS/2

NextStep

Dave

Jerry,

I’d try a couple of things. First, if your ISA SCSI card has a built-in floppy connection, it’s probably conflicting with the one on the motherboard. Disable one or the other and see what happens.

The possibility of the combo floppy working connected to the ISA SCSI card is probably a bit higher, since you know it worked before (provided you disable the motherboard’s built-in controller). Some BIOSes don’t like the combo floppy drives. That’s why my friends and I quit using them.

Asus SP97V motherboard with built-in 2D video: $70

180 MHz IDT WinChip $35

Quantum Fireball Eclipse 2.5 GB hard drive $125

Generic AT case/power supply $30

Generic 3.5" floppy $15

Generic AT keyboard $9

Generic serial or PS/2 mouse $9

Generic CD-ROM $20

Creative Sound Blaster 16 OEM version $35

For $400, before shipping and a couple of hours for assembly, you’re in business. Jack Tramiel (founder of Commodore and ex-Atari prez) would be proud. I don’t know why someone doesn’t mass-produce these boxes and sell them. They’d make a fortune. (Oops, I just gave away my best money-making scheme. Not that the idea had any originality anyway.) It’s a terrible game machine (slow on-board video and the WinChip’s floating point unit is slow -- but it’ll run old DOS games like a champ), but it’s everything most people need for word processing and Web surfing.

Low-cost system caveats: Avoid Amptron, Houston, and PC Chips motherboards (the ones with "TXPro" or "VXPro" chipsets). They boast of built-in video and sound. Their features also include high rates of failure, terrible documentation, nonexistent customer support, and poor compatibility. The Asus SP97V is almost as inexpensive and comes from a solid vendor. Acer also makes a board using the same chipset, but it’s difficult to find. And take your time while assembling in an el cheapo case. The light gauge aluminum makes for plenty of cuts on your hands.

Your $150 7-gig hard drive is a much better deal and worth every penny of the $25 difference, but we don’t find deals like that in Missouri. The Eclipse is a very fast drive, however. Maxtor’s DiamondMax line gives similar price and performance.

And, on a third unrelated subject, since you’re into games that make you think really hard... Have you checked out the Railroad Tycoon II demo yet? It looks incredibly promising.

Keep up the great work. I find your site more useful than ZDNet’s, and you have a much smaller staff.

Dave Farquhar

G. Timm [gcjtimm@earthlink.net]

MEI/Micro Center (http://www.mei-microcenter.com/) of several locations, including Tustin, CA and Santa Clara, as well as the wrong (East) side of Cleveland OH, has a minimum price box.

$399 or with 14" Monitor $499. PowerSpec 1810, 180 MHZ Cyrix MediaGX processor, 24MB RAM (22 MB Available), 1.6GB Hard Drive, 1.44MB floppy drive, 24XCD-ROM 33.6 Internal Data/Faxmodem, Windows 98 and selected software titles preloaded. Toss in Corel Office for $39 (www.surplusdirect.com) or the Microsoft Home Pack for $78 - $99 depending on sales, and you’d have a reasonable writer/browser.

MEI has been in business so long we used to run down to Columbus, Ohio and pick up bulk 5.25" disks for our Osborne Users Group. Last year (before prices fell) I picked up a bare bones PowerSpec w/P133, 16MB and a 1.2 Gig Western Digital drive and Win 95 late release. I tossed in a Creative sound and CD package and a USR Winmodem. I also added a 3.2 Gig WD as a second drive and upped the memory to 48 MB with Chips that came free with the WD drive. I bought my Red Hat 5.1 (Factory) Linux package there at a considerible discount.

Only problem was a 3.5 drive fixed under warrantee. Never been a problem since. I admit replacing the l’il clicky board with my old massive Key-tronics KB-101.

Jeff Timm

Hi Jerry,

I don’t know if this discussion is dead yet, but I just thought I’d put my two cents in. I really don’t like FrontPage for one reason. It does not create valid HTML. As a web author, having valid HTML is priceless, as you don’t have to worry if the pages will look proper in every browser.

Just as an example go to:

This is the result of running your view page through a validator. It’s pretty ugly. And then to clean this up, you have to wade through the horrendous mess of HTML that FrontPage creates.

IMHO, Notepad is better!

David Cefai [davcefai@keyworld.net]

So What!

The only valid criterion here is "good enough". Any automatic code generator is going to produe some pretty weird stuff most of the time. As long as the RESULT is more or less what you want then Bob’s your uncle. The way I see it you can concentrate on content or you can concentrate on coding.

If you’re coding software then you need one set of standards. If you’re generating a Web Page then it is the output that counts, not the underlying HTML.

I’d better go outside and cool off, this is a favourite hobby horse and a guaranteed argument between myself and my daughter whenever the subject comes up.

Robert Rudzki [bunkie666@hotmail.com]

jerry:

let’s see, multi-story house in encino/studio city, a beach house in san diego, low six figure dollar advances for your latest book [by low do you mean $200,000 and below?] residuals and royalties from all your previous books and speeches, twenty years worth of byte income for your column, all the overseas byte columns, and whatever other things you write for and you want US to send YOU money???

let us not forget the 20 years worth of very fancy computer equipment and software you have been given over the years to review, and i am willing to bet you got to keep most of it! god knows you have told us often enough how much of it you have had to shovel into the dempsey dumpmaster, un-reviewed...

your recent surprise at the high price of microsoft mice struck a nerve, kind of like president bush being astonished at the sight of an embedded laser scanner at the checkout lane/register in a supermarket he was visiting in the 1992 campaign, they had been in common use for at least the previous 10 years, it shows you how long it has been since he bought his own groceries, if ever!

jerry, i hate to tell you this, but my wife and i recently got our social security earnings worksheet from the administration and you probably have made more from a single book deal and advance than my wife and i have earned in our entire working lives, i am 48 and she is 47 and we started working at the ages of 17 and 16!

don’t get me wrong, i do not begrudge you your lifestyle and material goods, i am sure you have worked hard to get your degrees and professional qualifications, my wife likes some of your books, and i have read your column in byte since 1982 on a regular basis.

BUT, AND THIS IS A BIG BUT!, i think it is unseemly of you to constantly badger us for payment to view your web site considering the cash flow you have enjoyed these last 20+ years.

imo, individual web pages and sites are of two types:

a vanity page on your local isp which is included in your $20 per month service charge.

or

a bigger site hosted by an isp and ad banners all over the place ala

i don’t expect to pay to visit either site, capice?

and i sure as hell will not pay to look at your site!

He is correct; he does not have to pay. 30.

I buy your books (and I admit Niven’s also) because I enjoy them, i.e. value received. I paid my (to my mind minimalist) contribution to your effort for the same reason: I enjoy it and I receive something from it. To wit: I read your daily musings to add another opinion to the input in my life. I take note of the technical dialogs as they tend to parallel my own issues either at work or at home (Office 97 SR2 on NT40: so far so good). I tolerate your funks because you are entitled to them in that you have chosen to put forth whatever you wish for public consumption. For these reasons, I have chosen to invest money and time in your enterprise. If a consumer chooses not to consume, that is their privilege; you have no gun to my head nor a monopoly on any of the pleasures I’ve listed.

The concept of community comes to mind. People of similar interests and perhaps like minds (better: dissimilar mindsets) congregate to share information, opinions and expertise. From this we hopefully progress to a better understanding of ourselves and our environment (be it social, work, or family). I enjoy science fiction, computers and life. As such, you fit into my plan to enlarge my worldview by feeding my want for information. I enjoy the diversity of opinions and information published on your website. I bemoan your having to perform as an editor (what a step down), and I decry your need to spend real money to accumulate goodies. But life goes on and I’d like to think my contribution at least led to the creation of something more diverse than a Byte column (where the money would have gone).

My opinion is to continue as you have: put what you wish on your website (and solicit as appropriate). I, in turn: will visit, pay homage (as I wish), gather information, return opinion, rail at you (as I wish), learn, avoid, be amused, and generally have a good time in good company.