| Sunday,
July 15, 2001
Hi Jerry -
>From this morning's sports stories (7-15-2001)
comes the story of Chicago Bears' football player Paul Edinger. He was
arrested for DUI after he hit several mailboxes, flattening two tires in
the process. Sounds a little like, though less spectacular than, the story
you told 30 years ago of the guy who you saw get busted for DUI after he
pulled into a gas station driving on the front rims of his Cadillac, and
then as the story unfolded it turned out he hit several mailboxes at the
top of Laurel Canyon, flattening his two front tires, and then hit
something like 7 other cars on his way down to where he pulled into the
gas station! "Want some air in your tires?" I recall you quoting
the service station attendant asking him when he asked to buy gas!
- Tom Locke tlocke@delphicorp.com
Good grief, was that 30 years ago? I guess it
was! I told that story at LASFS, and it was all true, I didn't have to
make up a thing. Did I print it anywhere too?
This entire exchange is probably worth posting:
Here is Microsoft's response to GRC: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/TechNet/itsolutions/security/news/raw_sockets.asp
and The Register's comments on both: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/19502.html
You're right in that the sky isn't falling - but I
still think that this is not a good thing for Microsoft to implement - I
can't see how the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.
Many thanks for taking the time to comment.
Best regards, Marc Erickson
----- Original Message ----- From:
"Jerry Pournelle" <jerryp@jerrypournelle.com> To:
"Marc Erickson" <marcerickson@home.com> Sent: Saturday,
July 14, 2001 2:36 PM Subject: RE: Windows XP and DoS attacks
: Then I guess the sky is falling : :
-----Original Message----- : From: Marc Erickson [mailto:marcerickson@home.com]
: Sent: Friday, July 13, 2001 9:24 PM : To: Jerry Pournelle : Subject: Re:
Windows XP and DoS attacks : : : I am just a newbie at the computer trade
- I have a MCP in NT4 Workstation : and Server (which unfortunately
doesn't mean much these days) and am : currently doing cable internet
setups on customers' computers. I have to : rely on what others are saying
about this. I'm willing to entertain the : possibility that he's not
accurate, but given Microsoft's history of : security holes (e.g. the Word
97 RTF macro vulnerability), I'm inclined to : believe him... : : Best
regards, : Marc Erickson : : -
Chris Brand is, to say the least, controversial.
His book on IQ is now available as shareware on the web, having originally
been published by Wiley then withdrawn from publication (thus 'Depublisher:
Wiley'); it is very much worth your reading since it states the IQ
hypothesis in strong terms and gives his evidence and reasoning for his
position.
Dr. Brand has other strong views as well.
I feel sure Professor Schwartz is right to link
PeeCee especially to feminazism. When I was being witch-hunted out of
Edinburgh University, I had no trouble from ethnic minorities, nor from
victims of elitism or paedophilia; rather, it was the feminists who queued
up to testify against me -- giving the University solemn evidence of jokes
told by me at private parties ten years previously. Likewise at a public
level, fat, frumpy and power-crazed wymmin have been by far the major
beneficiaries of PeeCee: Prime Minister Blair obliged the Labour Party to
give him 100 female MPs (called 'Blair's Babes' in the press and notorious
at Westminster for their deference to him and for their lack of
contribution to debates or anything else visible).
I suggest twentieth-century feminism can be usefully
compared to Christianity of the first three centuries AD -- i.e.
disorganized, self-contradictory, achieving very little, and best known
for its martyrs and endless whingeing. But Constantine took Christianity
by the scruff of the neck and put it to work in just ten years. Likewise,
Blair and the Clintons have been turning the lights green for feminism
throughout a wide range of institutions. The latest institution to feel
the pinch is the Law Society which has managed to lose more than a million
pounds fighting allegations of racism and sexism by its own top organizer
(a curmudgeonly Pakistani woman whom it had sacked for bullying staff). If
even the Law Society cannot resist PeeCee, imagine how many institutions
won't even try! Once feminists were modest, believing they should wait for
the abilities of women to become appreciated and to force change
gradually. Today they shamelessly demand quotas and have even won the
agreement of at least two of the main contenders for the leadership of the
(doomed) Tory Party.
Certainly a mighty show of PeeCee is the only way to
*resist* feminism. The universities notoriously over-represent males
because of the shortage of high-IQ females. But the universities get away
with this by having virtually no staff at all who are known for
conservative or non-peecee views.
-- Chris Brand <crispian@chris-brand.co.uk>
Edinburgh. Psychorealist and author of THE 'g' FACTOR. (Wiley DePublisher,
1996. 2001 edition available free at http://www.douance.org/qi/brandtgf.htm
.) --
g
Jerry, Saw that you were reading Cryptonomicon. Yes,
it is one of those books that breaks all the rules, and yet still works
not despite but _because_ it does. (Something like _Atlas Shrugged_ in
that regard, I suppose). Stephenson is the master of the Amusing
Digression, and Cryptonomicon is a veritable orgy of amusing digression.
(I particularly enjoyed the two-page digression on the radial band saw
merely as a an analogy for the Maxim water-cooled machine-gun.) At a
Turkey City Writer's Workshop not so long ago, Bruce Sterling observed
that two of SF's hottest young writers (Stephenson and Greg Egan) were
both ex- or current computer hackers (in the old, non-criminal meaning of
the word), and that this infused their work with a certain perspective
(though by no means an identical one) that gave it great appeal. I think
he's on to something...
Lawrence Person, Editor Nova Express
lawrenceperson@jump.net http://www.sflit.com/novaexpress Coming Soon:
www.novaexpress.org
One man's Amusing Digression is another's padding
with irrelevance. I will agree that some of the digressions are in fact
amusing, and some are interesting. I will probably finish the book, but in
fact it gets less interesting as I get toward the end: some of the threads
that were interesting got tied off so I know what happened to the
characters, while the modern characters are not terribly interesting to
me: possibly through dilution with other people's stories. It may be my
inability to think of 20 things at once while caring about 10 of them.
Dr. Pournelle, this is just some personal opinion, not meant to be
published on your site. Not that I'm saying anything offensive, or
anything; just rambling, now that I've hit forty, it happens a lot .......
Dear Dr. Pournelle,
I read in View that you are reading Stephenson's
"Cryptonomicon." I echo your sentiments completely, in regard to
Stephenson's pacing being downright bizarre in some places, but overall, I
loved the story.
"Snow Crash," one of Stephenson's previous
novels, (and a very good one, I thought) had another very captivating
idea-driven plot. And much less tendency to wander off and discuss some
tangential subject for two or three pages at a time.
"Diamond Age," was the only novel of
Stephenson's I've read so far that I just don't understand at all. He has
his protagonist raised by a very intelligent A.I. book, so that she can
make all sorts of logical determinations with regard to life-choices. Yet
when she goes out into the world on her own, she decides to live and work
in a politically unstable region that guarantees her no end of extreme
personal hardship when the balloon eventually goes up. And here I thought
she had been taught to be smarter than that. Its almost as if Stephenson
was running down some checklist of what hardships a female character must
endure on her road to destiny.
If this has been oblique, I apologize. I'm trying
not to give too much away if you haven't read the books and wish to do so.
Sincerely, Jim Snover
Clearly Stephenson has his supporters, and many
of them.
Now about the Newton:
Orjan Larsson wrote:
> Might have talked a bit about us who
use, or did use, Newton Messagepad > 2000/2100. > > After using
it, and getting back to Mac or Windows, one really ask, why do we >
have files? I never used "files" to find or put things in order
on my Newton, > yet I can find things faster, and be more organised
while using the Newton. > > Its been tried in real life, and the
only drawback is that messer Steve Jobs > killed Newton, instead of
letting it be an free Newton Inc. (The managment of > Newton Inc even
had as goal to be profitable in six month, and they had an > plan that
looked OK:ish for me)
I still use a Newton, a MessagePad 2000 upgraded to
2100 status. I have a Palm Pilot and an early Windows CE Palm-sized PC
(which I reviewed at http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/peter_g/Peter1.html)
and a Psion, too, but the Newton has unique advantages. No other PDA can
replace it-- not yet, anyway.
Apple killed Newton, Inc. because it needed the
people to work on Mac OS-related projects. Those people have contributed
more to Apple's bottom line than they ever would have contributed to
Newton's bottom line, so I can't fault the business decision. I wish Apple
had licensed the Newton technology to other companies, but it's hard to
say if there really were any legitimate offers. (There were certainly
offers, but it's not clear to me that they were entirely sincere.)
The larger display is the key to the Newton's
superiority. It gives me three or four paragraphs of easily readable text,
not just one or two, plus room for the necessary user-interface icons and
text. A larger screen also makes room for comfortable writing-- it's the
difference between jotting a phrase on a Post-It note and writing a note
on a 3x5 card. The larger screen impairs portability, but that's a price
I'm happy to pay. PDAs with smaller screens are simply useless to me.
If I had the resources, I'd design a Pocket PC
around a color VGA display about the same size as the Newton's. By using
the best available LCD technology, you'd get an enclosure clearly larger
than those of current Pocket PCs, but smaller than the Newton by a
significant margin. It ought to be possible to come in at about half the
Newton's thickness, in particular, which would greatly reduce overall
volume and weight.
I don't much like the Pocket PC operating system;
Windows CE has always been kinda crude and overcomplicated. I'd use it
only because Microsoft has simply outstripped the competition in
application and multimedia support.
First, however, I need to revolutionize the computer
monitor industry. Maybe then I'll deal with the PDA market. :-)
. png
If one has intelligent assistants and can confine
one's projects to a few interesting ones, files are needless.
Unfortunately I find them indispensable. If I had graduate students and
other assistants I would let THEM worry about the files.
I eagerly await the Microsoft sponsored Clipboard
PC which may turn out to take care of many of the problems of the PDA.
Meanwhile I find the COmpaq iPAQ the best of a not very promising breed --
at least I can see it in daylight. But the screen is, as you observe, too
small.
And Greg Cochran on the
Social Contract:
I saw some of this more than twenty years ago. There was a similar
role-playing game on the Plato system at the University of Illinois. It
was very popular for a few years - to the extent that the sysops announced
the game gold- US dollar ratio three times a day. I may be the first
person in the world ever to have offered a sword + 1 pro-undead for sale
for actual greenbacks. Also, the first to offer to trade a character for
candid photos of someone's sister. The game designers tried to make it
impossible for players to kill each other, but ways were found. People
would offer to guide a party and then abandon them deep in a dungeon, way
over their heads - then come back and loot the corpses. Others would throw
super-powerful area-effect weapons at orcs in close proximity to newbies
and fry them as they stepped into the dungeon. On the other hand, most of
the powerful players, for musterious reasons, felt that they should help
the newbies and spend a certain amount of time shepherding weak parties
around. I used to do this a lot. I also liked to throw money at them,
since by heavy playing and sound investments I had two-thirds of all the
gold in the game ( 60 out of 100 million with about 300 people playing).
We found ways of punishing the troublemakers. I'll bet the forces of order
would prevail in Everquest, given half a chance. Also, from your comments,
it sounds as if there may be a way of systematically stomping the jerks
even with current rules - I'm not sure, since If I look too closely I
might start playing and that would be bad. The earlier game almost flunked
me out of grad school.
Gregory Cochran
I'll have more on this shortly. Dinner time.
Dr. Pournelle:
"It would be an interesting experiment
for Sony: to have a server in which literally there is a war of all
against all, anyone may attack anyone, levels are unimportant, and see
what kind of social order emerges. Will there be royalty and aristocracy?
Will the strong protect the weak and the weak be deferential? It would be
a highly interesting social experiment to allow complete anarchy with the
only rules those adopted by the players. To do that would require little
in the way of programming. As a refinement, some way for the city
sovereigns to change the faction of certain players so that the guards
would kill those people on sight and thus prevent them from entering the
cities, and perhaps a sort of tax on the merchants that could be disposed
of through a vote of the citizens of the city (those who were born there;
half elves would have dual citizenship as would humans, most races would
have only one). It would be a fascinating experiment: does anyone have the
ear of the game designers? I would certainly pay to be part of that kind
of server, one in which there might actually evolve law and order as
opposed to endless anarchy."
* * *
I agree wholeheartedly. Properly set up, this could
be an excellent experiment to see if the libertarian ideal can actually
work. The great difficulty would be setting up the program to allow
maximum freedom of action and user organization, but keeping a solid set
of rules in place to keep the MUD from drifting completely away from
reality (like people programming super powers into their characters).
Certainly there is a novel or two in this although the concept has been
dealt with already in many books. "Lord of the Flies" comes to
mind.
I remember back in the '70s when Control Data had
the "PLATO" system running, a central system that communicated
over phone lines to dumb graphic terminals. Intended for education, I
first used it playing "Empire," the first multiplayer online
game I had ever seen (Gary Hudson managed to finangle a demo unit out of
the company). Despite primitive connections and graphics, players managed
to form all kinds of alliances and developed interesting tactics. Since
the system created "movement" by continuous refreshing of a
still screen, many players were able to time attacks between refresh
cycles to suddenly "appear" on an opponent's screen.
See under "1972" here:
http://www.fourbelowzero.com/TheGamer/Timeline.htm
and here:
http://www.platopeople.com/
Despite suggestions from many, including myself,
that Control Data could make a great deal of money commercializing these
games, our ideas fell on deaf ears. Control Data was plugging PLATO as a
Wonderful Educational System, and commercializing PLATO, much less
multiplayer games, was just too lowbrow to consider. It is interesting to
think about how the Internet concept might have evolved had someone with
vision at CDC latched onto this idea and run with it.
Tom Brosz
And some good news:
Subj: Ballistic Missile Defense: Return to
X-program-based strategy?
From: monty@sprintmail.com
Don't know whether you caught the briefing on C-SPAN
by LTG Kadish -- there's a transcript at
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Jul2001/t07142001_t0713mda.html
-- and it contains an exchange, near the end, that I
found really interesting.
A reporter asked Kadish why the current schedule
does not include an immediate start on construction of X-band radar at
Shemya. Kadish said, basically, that that radar was on the critical path
for the system Clinton decided not to deploy, using the acquisition
approach that had been planned for that production system, but that the
new _development_strategy_ was not yet ready to commit to putting X-band
radar in any particular place -- maybe, for example, it might turn out to
be better to have the X-band _mobile_, on a ship or something.
And then came the exchange I really thought was
interesting:
Q: But General, I thought the X-band radar
was the schedule driver, it was going to take about four years to build
it, and so if we wanted to be able to deploy 2004-2005, that had to get
started right away. What's changed there? It sounds -- you guys are
suggesting that you're going to have a system that can be deployed on an
interim basis, if need be. But without that radar belt, how will it work?
Kadish: It'll work as good as we can make it
work. But -- see, that -- one of the main features of this program -- and
this gets little arcane, so you've got to stick with me on it -- the way
we normally do major defense procurement programs is that we set a very
rigid requirement from a military standpoint. We want to do X, Y, and Z,
and if you can't do that, we don't want it. That's called threshold or key
performance parameters.
And then we set a plan to accomplish that.
All right. Usually those things are set at a very bar in terms of
performance. So what that does to us in a development program -- it works
very well when you got mature technologies. We've been working on an
airplane for a hundred years now, and we're pushing the envelope, but we
know a hundred years' worth of stuff about how to handle airplanes. So
you're able to take schedule and planning milestones to meet that
requirement. And that's what we were trying to do with the old national
missile defense construct. It's not that that's an unproven method; it's
just what we were trying to do.
This approach takes a different tack. It says
that technology is so difficult and so uncertain that we think we can
accomplish this, we know we have a good shot at it, from an engineering
perspective, but we're going to take the approach that we're going to do
this incrementally. We're going to have this idea of the military
requirement out there, but we're going to provide the military
decision-makers and users what we can produce and ask them a very simple
question -- "We can do this technically; is this good enough for you
to use?" -- all right? -- instead of working very hard, very high
risk, trying to meet a requirement that they can say they need.
And that's a very important difference for us
developers. And that's what we're trying to do with this idea of interim
test assets on the way towards a very incremental, very progressive way of
developing these systems. So you don't birth them full-born. We're not
trying to go for a layered system with a specific architecture and spend
any amount of money and time to do it.
Quite frankly, my record of predicting when
we've been doing things is not very good. (Laughter.) And I would match
that not very good record with everybody else in history on this program,
because nobody's been right on when we're going to do this. So we're going
to take an approach where we're going to have internal plans and we're
going to try to work to them, but we're going to be flexible and realistic
to know whether or not we can do something. And we want to do that through
realistic testing.
Q: Well, it sounds like a massive lowering of
expectations and standards.
Kadish: Not to me it doesn't.
[end of quoted exchange]
Now, maybe I'm hallucinating, but that sounds an
awful lot to me like the new development strategy is to proceed through a
sequence of technology demonstrators.
Technology demonstrators that worry about showing
what we can do with what we have, rather than prototypes that try to glue
together stuff previously studied only on paper, or in simulation, to
attain some arbitrarily pre-specified level of performance according to
some arbitrarily-chosen figures of merit.
In other words, the new development strategy sounds
a lot like it's based on X-programs.
Sounds good to me, too.
g
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