THE VIEW FROM CHAOS MANOR

View October 18 - 24, 1999

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This is a day book. It's not all that well edited. I try to keep this up daily, but sometimes I can't. I'll keep trying. See also the monthly COMPUTING AT CHAOS MANOR column, 4,000 - 7,000 words, depending.  (Older columns here.) For more on what this place is about, please go to the VIEW PAGE.

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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.
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Current View

Highlights this week:

• Return from Beach
• Global Warming?
• VOPT -- Use 4.1 not 4.0: WARNING
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At Beach House

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Still at beach house.

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Back from the beach house. Getting Mail and View set up again. FrontPage 98 has some features that FrontPage 2000 lacks, lack some that it needs. I wish they'd combine them. Anyway, I'm here, and I've been reading s a couple of interesting books, as well as getting some writing done. More later 

It was nice at the beach in San Diego, unseasonably warm, but that's good, not bad. Very pleasant. It's hotter than blazes up here in Los Angeles. Makes me believe in global warming, but not of the politically correct kind. We KNOW the Earth has warmed since the times of Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates, because brackish water in Holland seldom freezes hard enough to skate on now; but that has been the case since about the turn of the Century, and hardly could be due to human activities. In fact, it is probably due to solar warming trends, and the real question is, will that continue, or will the Sun start getting cooler again?  Between this and an Ice Age I'll take warmer. Every time. So will anyone sane. Only the Great Penguin Conspiracy wants Antarctic conditions right up to the Tropic of Capricorn...

And all the indications we have are that things have been getting warmer, but most of the warming was in the last century, and the warming trend is slowing down. Not that that changes things for today, when it remains hotter than blazes...

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A query: Charles Murray, the sociologist, has been wondering about Netscape settings: much of the mail in our discussion group comes in badly formatted with lines too long, etc. I don't use Netscape to deal with mail much, but I recall that at least the older versions I used had a way to set line wrap.

Does anyone know the precise way to set that in Netscape? And is Netscape a satisfactory way to deal with mail in discussion groups? I use Outlook which invokes Word as the reply editor, and once I got used to that decided I liked it.

Letter on Global Warming and the mean sea level, with pointers to a site which tells a very great deal on this.

We have reports the Golden Bow VOPT 4.0 can cause serious problems. DO NOT USE VOPT 4.0 but get VOPT 4.1 instead. This is serious. It's also a surprise since I know of no previous released version of VOPT that has really bad problems. 

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Spent the morning getting my Eddie Bauer Explorer serviced. Routine maintenance and two minor recall items, neither of which I bothered with until the maintenance was needed.

I've been having some real problems with Parsifal, the Pentium II system that I use as a "main". It locks up now and again, to hardware reset. I can't tell if it is the ATI  Rage Fury 32 Megabyte video board, the Creative Live sound board (which doesn't do legacy worth beans; can't get it to play Interplay's Conquest of the New World Deluxe with sound although every other Windows 98 and Windows 2000 system I have will do that) or the DVD drive (an old one) or just what. It's a very complicated system with a MagnetoOptical drive, an external SCSI Zip, three different CD drives (DVD, CD-R/W, and a 36X IDE CD-ROM ) and other stuff.

I do know I have about had it with the problem: when the system works it works fine, and when it is in use it seldom hangs (once in the middle of a game of Free Cell but otherwise if I am using it it doesn't DO that; only when it is sitting idle does this happen). Anyway, I have had enough, and I'm going to replace it as the Windows 98 "main" with a new Pentium III 550 that seems extraordinarily stable. I'll take Parsifal to the test bench and start replacing parts. First thing, I think, is the ATI Rage Fury: I have a new Number Nine 32 meg that I like.

I have to say that the latest round of Intel Pentium III chips are working well, better than the II with multi-media, but that may just be my own experience.

I am also about to get a G4 and an IMAC and get Chaos Manor back in the Mac business, while reviving the Linux project and getting a Linux server going to let all these machines talk to each other.  This will all take a month or so, of course. First thing is to figure out what in the world is the problem with the Pentium II system.

Actually the first thing is to clean up some of the mess here so I can FIND the work bench.

And I am sure tired of Earthlink dropping me every time I am about to upload.

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This is probably one of those bills introduced to make points without expectation of passage, but we get a lot of laws by having such stuff pasted into some other bill and passed by voice vote without anyone being aware that it's in there. Then "it's the law."

Leave out one's theories regarding safety and gun ownership, why is the Internet to be treated differently from any other advertising medium, and if it can be, why stop at guns? I can think of lots of legal products that are not in favor with some groups. Vitamins, for that matter.

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d106:h.r.01702 

HR 1702 IH

106th CONGRESS

1st Session

H. R. 1702

To amend title 18, United States Code, to ban using the Internet to obtain or dispose of a firearm.

IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

May 5, 1999

Mrs. MINK of Hawaii (for herself, Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California, Mr. ANDREWS, Ms. WOOLSEY, and Mr. PAYNE) introduced the following bill; which was referred to the Committee on the Judiciary

A BILL

To amend title 18, United States Code, to ban using the Internet to obtain or dispose of a firearm.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. BAN ON USING THE INTERNET TO OBTAIN OR DISPOSE OF A FIREARM.

(a) PROHIBITIONS- Section 922 of title 18, United States Code, is amended by inserting after subsection (y) the following:

`(z) It shall be unlawful for any person to use the Internet to obtain or dispose of, or offer to obtain or dispose of a firearm.'.

(b) PENALTIES- Section 924(a) of title 18, United States Code, is amended by adding at the end the following:

`(7) Whoever willfully violates section 922(z) shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 1 year, or both.'.

And here's another to worry about:

Source: Insight Magazine Published: 10/22/99 Author: Timothy W. Maier

Clinton Orders Human Experiments

By Timothy W. Maier

Executive Order 13139 is requiring military personnel to receive experimental vaccines not approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Courts-martial are pending.

I don't know how much worry one ought to put into it, but it does seem a bit odd: I hadn't thought our troops were volunteering to be guinea pigs. Walter Reed used soldiers to test his Yellow Fever theories, but they were all volunteers for the experiment. 

More in mail...

Attempting to reinstall Windows 98 SE on Parsifal. First thing is the scandisk problem: if you have removable drives, scandisk reports that it can't scan all your disks, so you have to go to a DOS prompt and do SETUP /IS to make it happen. In my case the files are on C:\WINDOWS\OPTIONS\CABS\WIN98 and of course Windows responds by saying that there's a running DOS program and you must close it. Fortunately you can and SETUP will continue to run. KEYWORD here for future search SETUP WINDOW98 SE upgrade install.

It's now copying files like crazy. I hope this all works, and it stops this machine from locking up; had advice to that effect earlier and since if this doesn't do it I will take it apart, this seemed worth a try.

Must say that Seattle, the Intel Pentium III 550 is much faster and crisper with everything it does, and I'm tempted to move to that no matter what...

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Reinstalled Windows 98 SE on Parsifal last night; so far it has not locked up. It's a bit hard to be sure, but I think this cured the lockup problem. Thanks to those who suggested this remedy, and stay tuned. Of course I can't guaranteed the problem is gone: if was heat and the video chip, then I may not find out until next spring, since the weather seems to have broken, and it's only 80 or so outside. But we'll see.

More on climate over in mail. Start with the Isle of the Dead and go on from there.

Spent the day cleaning up. Five garbage cans of STUFF gone, and more to the LASFS as donations. Maybe I can make some room here.

If you like vi as an editor, you can find out where to get it in mail.

Reinstallation did NOT clear up Parsifal's lockup problem. It's locked up to hardware reset. I'll clear it of files and take it apart tomorrow.

I am informed that there are now more Serb and Gypsy refugees from Kossovo since the pacification and occupation by NATO than there were Albanian refugees before the bombing began; and that more Serbs have been murdered since the pacification than Albanians had been before the bombing began. There are almost no Serbs in Kossovo now, and there are about 350,000 refugees.

I have no confirmation of those figures, but my source is usually reliable. I note that the situation over there is not much in the news.

It is my understanding that in the early part of this century Serbs were the majority in Kossovo, and the balance tipped after Mussolini used Albanian volunteers to occupy the province after the Axis conquest.

I am also informed that the US has second thoughts on accepting a treaty giving the International Court of Justice compulsory jurisdiction in crimes against humanity because there seems to be no way to word things such that Milosovec is subject to trial, but Clinton and Albright are not; and the State department is also worried about US military commanders who for instance fired missiles at civilian targets when no war was declared being later hauled up for trial by an international court.

In these days of computer dossiers, memories are very long. One need not be Ivan the Terrible to find oneself remembered in old age for crimes committed in youth.

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