| Monday
March 5, 2001
The march 1 alt mail page does not appear to use the
brick-red colour for your replies that I have come to enjoy.
A uniform interface is convenient for someone who
does not read in detail every post. I enjoy the obvious distinction
between you ("the editor") and your correspondents in these
extended conversations.
Since alt mail has one page for several weeks
(months? Years?) of conversation, I would appreciate a date on each entry.
We get this with the day boundaries in the regular mail pages.
All very reasonable requests, but
there's only me to do it. One of these days...
Bruce Sterling had a good article on three competing
high tech chairs (Herman Miller Aeron, Steelcase Leap, and the Humanscale
Freedom) in Wired magazine some time back. Here's the link:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.07/chairs.html
Thanks,
Jim Riticher
It's a decent article I suppose but
a bit long, and I have never quite cared for that "just among us
boys" style. A bit like the kid who tells his mother about the
wonderful Boy Scout trick that comes with pulling your finger. But that's
me. In any event I am happy enough with this chair. I sure spend enough
time in it.
Jerry,
I saw the letter from Jim Potter with his favorite
saying "if ISPs ran airlines, planes would be falling from the sky
every hour."
He went on to complain that ISPs: chronically
oversell beyond capacity, deliver as advertised about 10% of the time, and
always have a handy excuse to blame someone else for the problems. I
laughed reading that, because if you changed "deliver as advertised
about 10% of the time" to "arrive on-time about 60% of the
time" you'd have a pretty good description of the airlines. (I hope
Mr. Potter doesn't work for one).
That said, my last trip via air went off without a
hitch, and we were on time both directions. Also, when I signed up for DSL
service, I too got the modem/hub months before the service was hooked up
(actually, when I called to complain that they were a month late hooking
me up, Verizon apologized and sent me another DSL modem/hub! Sigh).
Anyway, hang in there; it is well worth the trouble.
I've had DSL at home now for a little over six months, and it's a pure joy
to use. I have had very few outages, fewer actually than with my previous
dial-up ISP. Given the ludicrous rates charged for a second phone line,
it's even close to a financial wash. I no longer hesitate to download
demos, patches, etc.
Best Regards,
John Hawkins
I keeps trying...
Hi Jerry I'm a South African looking for a good
Windows 2000 web hosting service. I came across HostPro, which calls
itself a Micron Company, and wondered if you or your readers had ever
heard of them. The service they offer sounds good.
Cheers Allan Jackson - 27 31 2060542 // 083-777-6862
Allan's Article Archive: www.mediagroup.co.za
I know nothing about them but then I
know nothing about any web hosts: Bob Thompson did a good bit of research
before he found a place for his web site, and he recommended www.pair.com
to me; I have used it ever since and despite my short temper which has
caused me to explode at them a couple of times, they have been as near
perfect a host as any I ever heard of. I recommend www.pair.com
highly. Others I simply don't know about because I have no reason to look
around.
One day when I get more bandwidth
and a fixed IP Address I will host one of my alternate web sites here on
the Penguin, just to get the experience; but I am not mad enough to move
this site from Pair.
Hi Jerry,
You might not be aware of this site:
http://corporate.windowsupdate.microsoft.com/en/default.asp
It contains downloadable/distributable
updates/upgrades/drivers/etc MS files. You should be able to find W95 (and
other) update/upgrade type files that you can download, save and
re-install from local copies.
John
-
rice@vx5.com webmaster, network admin, janitor
I think that is the one I was
looking for and couldn't find. Thanks.
Mr. Pournelle,
I regularly install Windows 95 systems for companies
which refuse to upgrade, or on my older sub-P233MMX systems.
I don't seem to have the problems you encountered,
though I don't doubt that you did indeed have them.
I have a pre-made Windows 95 boot disk with a
generic IDE CD-ROM driver and FDISK and can easily load it that way.
I have a ZIP Cartridge loaded with Windows 95b and a
DOS boot disk with the Guest Driver.
I also have a disk made for an Adaptec/Trantor SCSI
Cable (Parallel Port SCSI) and can load from my external SCSI drive if all
else fails.
As to having IE without having to download it for
many systems, any MSN Signup disk, (which you can get at any Radio Shack)
has the full version of IE on it. So do most copies of the AOL CD, or
signup CDs from many of the Major ISPs.
OR,
you can go to this Microsoft Webpage and download
all the updates as installable files:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows95/downloads/
It's all there and can be downloaded and burnt onto
a CD.
Copy the webpage down to your HDD and put that on
the CD also as a handy directory to the files.
I do wish Microsoft would have a quarterly
subscription which was affordable to end users which would have all the
possible updates and free stuff on an easy to install CD.
I think people might pay $39 for something like
that. I know I would.
You should be able to buy it in a store with the
current CD, and then send in a card to get 3 more updated CD's mailed to
you.
Microsoft could easily advertise new products on
these CD's as well as include the MSN client and offer that service to
make this even more worth the effort to do.
Why they don't do this already with the glut of MSN
disks they distribute (fill up the empty space with the most downloaded or
important updates) as a service to their customers is beyond me.
Regards, Al Hartman (Macintosh Emulation List Host) http://www.topica.com/lists/MacEmuList
My Homepage http://www.geocities.com/alhartman
Enlightenment means taking full responsibility for
your life. - William Blake
Well I have a magic disk with all
the OS's on it, but that was as hard as anything I ever did. Now I have to
move software. They do not make any of it easy.
Dr. Pournelle,
I'm sorry, but I don't know what the term
"pre-breathing" means referring to space suits, and there's no
reference to it in the article in "Current View".
I'm afraid that NASA's first priority is
Geopolitics, and proper science has to take a back seat, as it does in
Antarctica. The US is building a station at the South Pole to mark our
territory down there, and the committee that reviewed the decision stated
that it would be valuable for geopolitical reasons alone.
Thank you,
Stephen Borchert
Prebreathing means you have to spend
time breathing pure oxygen in order to get the nitrogen out of your
system. Current suits use under 5 pounds of pure oxygen, and at that
low pressure any nitrogen in your system will boil into bubbles and cause
the bends. The remedy for bends is pressurization but that of course ends
the EVA and fast.
With 12 pounds of air or enriched
air the pressures are enough to prevent nitrogen bubble formation. Ideal
is of course 14.7 pounds of air: that experiment we have run for a very
long time. But in fact 10 pounds of oxygen-rich air along with the
nitrogen is enough (I am not up on the very latest research on all this
but it's not hard to find out if you really want to know.)
Higher pressures mean stiffer suits,
and tire old geezers out. Astronauts tend to be geezer nerds, not jocks.
For construction you want riggers, young jocks who can work hard and gut
being tired. But in fact you can make perfectly usable non-pre-breathing
suits that even the superannuated astronaut corps can manage in. No one
builds them, in part because the industry lobbies are very powerful. Why
take away a meal ticket? Suit maintenance contracts are VERY
lucrative. We pay more for one space suit than you would pay for a
small submersible good to 30 atmospheres. Feh!
The public has been ripped off on
space suits for 20 years and more.
A small correction to the email I sent you earlier.
When using Setup method 2., I recollect that it seemed necessary to copy
the files back to their original folder in its original location before
re-running the files. It was my impression that at least in the initial IE
4.x release the files seemed to have paths that were more or less
hard-wired. Method 1 for IE 5.5 always works from any location.
Keith E. Risler
-----Original Message-----
Subject: Your recent column, installing IE
locally
I noticed in your latest posted Chaos Manor column
that you wondered if there is a way to avoid having to install IE 5.x from
the web on each machine via web install.
There is a way, although it is not obvious.
Actually, there are two ways to get a complete re-usable install
downloaded. Either technique should work on Windows 95, although I can
only vouch for the Windows IE 4.x approach on Windows 95 as I no longer
use that OS.
1. IE 5.5 download: IE 5.5 Internet Setup has an
Advanced install button (or something similarly named) on its setup web
page. That option lets you download all of the files involved and store
them in a folder of your choice. However, only the components of the
install selected at the prompts are downloaded; so it's important to
choose all of the IE options (except foreign language packs unless you
need them). Then, when the advanced option is used, all of the files will
be available locally. I have complete installs for IE 5.5SP1 for Windows
2000 and Windows 98 on CD-R right now. When the stored setup is used,
Setup will not in my experience need to connect to the Internet unless a
component is selected that was not originally, such as a language pack.
2. IE 4.x or IE 5.5SP1 This approach is my earlier
technique for capturing a reusable download if IE4.x or later. IE 4 seemed
hard to get a reusable download for, but there is a trick here. Run the
customary setup from the web, again selecting all of the options except
foreign language packs unless they are needed. Let the online Setup
complete with a reboot as usual reboot. After install there is usually a
new folder on the PC (somewhere) called "\Windows Update Setup
Files". This folder contains the setup files. They can be re-used.
When the stored setup is used, Setup will not in my experience need to
connect to the Internet unless a component is selected that was not
originally, such as a language pack. This type of download seems to be a
little more prone to need to connect to the Internet during setup that
IE5, I would guess because the IE4.x Internet setup didn't download all of
the selected components reliably. Certain media features seemed to always
be re-downloaded to my recollection When IE4.x was involved.
In either cases 1 or 2, the time taken to reinstall
IE is greatly reduced. Just run IE Setup from CD-R.
Keith E. Risler 80 Adelaide Street South, London, ON
Canada N5Z 3K5 Wireless: (519) 851-1323 | FAX: (630) 214-5568 Email:
KeithRisler@alumni.uwo.ca | http://go.to/KeithRisler.com Send secure email
via: http://members.execulink.com/~kerisler/pgp.htm
And that's the point: it's not
obvious how to do it. Thanks!
Jerry, for Windows'98 you can download many of the
updates, including IE 5.01, from
http://www.microsoft.com/windows98/downloads/corporate.asp . Since Win'95
seems to have hit MS's self-decreed end of lifecycle the equivalent page
for it has disappeared, indeed any business link points you at an
explanation of what the lifecycle dates are for the various OS'es. NT
seems to be slated for "Extended" phase June 30 of next year
which means, if they follow their standard practices, NT is dead one year
later at least in terms of support. Thought this would help.
Brian J. Bartlett, PearTree Associates shadowjack@compuserve.com
Compuserve SysOp: IBM Forum, Vintage Computing Forum
Yes. That seemed to be what I ran
into. Well we will abandon 95 some day, but since many schools still
have it we have to be sure her program will run with 95.
Dear Jerry;
I just got finished reading the March 5th Byte
column and boy do I agree on the Intellimouse, and on a Macintosh no less.
Without the software it's a great optical, no hiccups, And with the
software the extra buttons are so handy for web browsing alone that they
are worth it.
Steve
Indeed. I do love those red eyed
mice.
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