| Friday,
November 19, 1999
The last all odd numbers day in
your lifetime.
This is 11/19/1999 and you will not live to see another date with all
odd numbers. This message brought by the Department of Trivia.
(but: Shouldn't that be the last all odd
"digits" day? Seems to me that 11/21/1999 will be the next all
odd "numbers" day, followed by 11/23/1999, 11/25/1999
........... 1/1/2001, and so on. ;> balferow@basex.com)
and of course he's right...
In a bizarre footnote to COMDEX 98, Michelle Em called this morning to
ask if we knew where Alex Pournelle and David Em, last heard from about to
enter the Hilton Star Trek Experience, had gotten to. They were to have
called after the Star Trek Experience then driven to Los
Angeles.
Of course all is well, and they had in fact stayed with friends in
Mojave rather than try to drive when sleepy; a wise thing to do. It had
got late so they didn't want to call. Let me tell all my male
readers: call home at any hour. Waking your wife is preferable to having
her worry. In fact, she won't sleep very well anyway, if at all.
Call home.
Memturbo, which is a pretty nifty utility for
Windows 98 and earlier, doing garbage collection on memory leaks and
making 98 last longer between reboots ( www.memturbo.com
)has sent an announcement about a new beta they want registered users to
try. The rigmarole they put you through to be sure you are a registered
user, followed by NOTHING when it's done, and the lack of clarity in the
instructions they give you on what to do, make the whole thing a great
example of how not to operate a web site if you want to make money. It's a
good product, but they need to be told to keep things simpler on telling
people what to do.
In fact, the answer is to have patience and all will be revealed; they
will eventually send precise instructions including activation passwords
and URL for downloading. What they don't do is tell you they are about to
do that, so you sit there wondering what the heck happens next? It
will eventually happen.
If you want to see me at COMDEX go to
http://www.bricklin.com/albums/comdex99/gateskeynote.htm
and here is my picture of Dan Bricklin (as usual click on the picture to
get a larger one).
I took this in the mad herd line waiting to get in to hear Bill Gates give
his keynote.
A reader says that NT 4 Service Pack 6 breaks
Lotus Notes. I don't have SP 6 and probably won't bother with it anyway. I
am fairly certain that Windows 2000 has no problems with Notes. My
Microsoft contacts don't know yet but will ask the NT 4 people -- most of
my contacts are in Windows 2000. We'll find out, but meanwhile, does
anyone have concrete experience with this? What does it mean
"breaks'? What happens?
OK. Here's the skinny. It is rumored that on
1/1/2000 Microsoft is going to stop selling copies of the Windows CD with
OEM machines. You get the machine and an OS that's locked to the BIOS of
the system. What happens if the files are corrupted? No one seems to know.
Now it's possible Microsoft and some vendors are mad enough to do this,
but it seems to me an exercise in futility. It will almost certainly
increase service costs, and unlike pirated software which is theoretically
lost income -- in many cases the loss isn't real because the pirate
wouldn't have bought it and only has it because it's free -- increased
support costs are quite real.
If you bought a computer with Windows 98 and it didn't come with
a Windows CD, you should raise holy hell with the vendor. Try to get a
copy. You paid for it, and you deserve it. If raising hell doesn't do it,
remember who the vendor was. Tell your friends. Tell me.
In any event, it's probably a good idea to get a CD of the operating
system you use; if you see Windows 98 Second Edition on sale at a good
price, it's probably worth buying it. If you then buy a machine with an
incomplete copy of the OS CD, you have a chance of restoring it. Also, I
am told that some vendors are selling Windows CD's with incomplete CAB
files, or even password protected CAB files. I have never seen any such
thing. All my machines have a folder, /Windows/Options/Cabs/ in which all
the important files of the original CD have been installed. You then edit
the registry to tell it to look there for the Windows "CD" when
it wants to install something new.
You can also edit the registry to change the serial number of the OS to
the number you have. This isn't trivial. At worst, though, you can simply
reinstall Windows from the CD you have bought -- assuming you have a copy
of the OS on a CD.
It has been my experience in the computer community that anti-piracy
measures that make life difficult for legitimate users have a very
negative side effect: they make the honest user into an enemy, who now
believes the publisher is fair game. People who would not normally give
away copies of their software buy big packs of CD-R blanks and burn copies
to drop from airplanes, with the serial number written with magic marker
on the disk itself. Anything to annoy those bums who have made me pay them
money so they can harass me. It may not be a good ethical argument, but
it's one that many in this community use.
I would not advise Microsoft to play funny games like that. They make
plenty money; do not bind the mouths of the kine that tread the grain.
People capable of building new machines and swapping operating systems
around aren't costing Microsoft a lot of money, and big corporate buyers
don't take that kind of chance anyway: just what good is BIOS locking an
OS going to do? But we'll see.
I hasten to add, this is all just stories. So far I know of no BIOS
locked versions of Windows. On the other hand, the Windows 2000 I have
explicitly states that it's a sometimes thing that will go away one day.
Perhaps it will be replaced by something that doesn't want to be in more
than once system at once, but that sounds to me like a formula for
disaster with very little upside for Microsoft. Microsoft isn't usually
that stupid.
We'll see...
And there's a bit of mail on
this.
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