CHAOS MANOR MAIL

A SELECTION

Here’s a random epic of computing.

My girlfriend knows nothing about computers. So I set her family up like 2 years ago with a Compaq, figuring it would be nice and trouble free. The system has had two hardware failures so far. The windows 95 installation that it was shipped with was extremely difficult to deal with. It installs all kinds of extra things with no way to remove or disable them. For example, in order to use the built-in modem, she had to run a program to disable the telephone device. Every time. Eventually, it got messed up, so I had to wipe it and put a new OSR2 install of Win95.

My brother knows quite a bit about computers. He decided to save money and build the computer himself. He got an Intel motherboard and recycled parts from older computers. It was DOA. So we spent many hours swapping parts out from his computer to mine. In the end, it turned out that the memory that he bought works fine on my DFI motherboard but does not work on his Intel motherboard. Took quite a few hours to figure that out.

Me? Well, I took the easy route. I went around, decided what I wanted for a system. Then I figured out what a reasonable price was, took it to a local PC retailer ( Castle Computers - http://www.castlec.com/ ) and they built it for me. I’ve upgraded it from a P200MMX (which now belongs to my dad’s computer) to a PII/266 (which now belongs to my girlfriend’s new computer) and finally to a PII/300. I get the parts I want with somebody there to make everything work right. And because it’s a smaller place that’s 15 minutes away, there is the expectation of personal service. You just need to find the right place.

Of course, the problem is my friends who want to get a computer at Best Buy or another such store. I’m staying away from Packard Bell computers (had one, total trash, though I hear they’ve gotten better). I’m staying away from Compaq consumer computers. Do any of the major brand manufacturers actually manufacture with the ATX form factor and a reasonable Windows installation anymore?

Also, to ensure that terms are not used improperly, I would like to correct a message in Mail #11. MOD format files are not, in fact, a compressed file at all. It is much more complicated than that. A MOD file is a cross between a MIDI file and a WAV file. It includes the instrument values (like MIDI) and also what instrument is associated with those values (unlike MIDI).

I miss Byte quite a bit. I got a big boost when Internet World went under and we started getting Byte again. And then the downer when Byte got canceled. All of the really good (in my mind) publications are gone. Somebody needs to start a magazine called "Longword" (there’s nibble, byte, so maybe longword would be the next good title.. :) ) I’m debating about the whole BugNet thing, because BugNet’s not the same as Byte. And the new Byte isn’t the same as Byte.

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\ \ \ \ \ / | Ken "Wirehead" Wronkiewicz - mailto:wh@wirewd.com \ \ \ \ \/ | [insert list of about 200 hobbies &; interests here]

From reading _Grumbles From The Grave_ I realize that this kind of thing comes under the heading of "timewaster," so I’ll be brief.

In _Footfall_ you (and Niven) give a detailed description of the destructive effect of a large asteroid hit. I need to do something similar, so I need to ask, where did you get that, or who did you get to figure it out for you? I’ve found a couple of nuclear blast effects calculation programs on the web, but they top out at 100 MT—this is of course a lot bigger (did you know that if the British Interplanetary Society’s Daedalus probe were to impact at 0.12c, the blast would be 75 gigatons?

Thanks in advance for any help you can give.

Dear Jerry,

This may help with your NT Server fonts problem.

3.51

SYMPTOMS

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WORKAROUND

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Dear Jerry: I have shared your frustration with devices that screw up

your computer, but there is one thing you can try before reformatting, which in my mind is a lot shooting yourself to get rid of a migraine, a failproof solution, of course, but a bit drastic. On the Win95 CD is something called ERu, emergency recovery utility. Install it on your computer and get your system up and going. Then before you do anthing fancy, click on the eru utility and make an eru floppy. When you run into trouble, put the floopy in the a: drive and reboot and your system may well be back to normal and you can try things again. I can’t tell you how many times one of these tech support morons has suggested that I reformat and the eru disk has saved me from another computer migraine. I guess you’re finding out what a pain it is when you’re not getting paid to get into trouble. I hope this helps. For years your column has helped, and I wish you were writing it again.

Hello again,

Password for paying folks is GREAT idea.

Next step, make password expire 1 year from donation/subscription, then send notices that "your password will expire at the end of xxMONTHxx, xxYEARxx.

Hopefully there is some type of scheduler that can do this automatically (send notices and cancel passwords).

Then

At some point in the future, start cutting back on your many posts to the web page day book and start sending them out to the paid list instead. 1 to 5 e-mails a day (more or less) from you would be a real perk for the paying folks and non-payers would need to be satisfied with the "backissue" numbered pages that you have now. Also, you can put PAID ADVERTISEMENTS (gotta go wash my mouth out with soap!) on the "free" web pages. Membership on mail list will expire at end of year as well.

Lastly (at this time), put another web page for "BENEFITS OF BEING A PAYING MEMBER". Not many now but list will grow.

Best wishes to ALL,

Jon Dowell [jdowell@pdq.net]

I just (re-) read your section on games, and thought I’d offer up one of my favorites for your consideration: Warlords 3. It’s a true strategic game, and it’s turn based (no need to chase my units around!). A demo of the current version can be had at www.warlords3.com . Fair warning: it’s addictive.

Joseph Felcman [jfelcman@ozemail.com.au]

Jerry,

As before, president Milosevic seems to listen to the only language he understands - power. NATO had to deliver a credible threat. Should the resolve of NATO and the international community weaken - Milosevic’s behavior will resume its almost boringly predictable pattern.

This could appear to be stating the obvious but your expressionistic diatribe demonstrates that it is not. While I am not qualified to comment on most of it, there is one part I am more familiar with and you happen to be quite mistaken there. I suppose you do better in the rest of it.

Regards

Rez [rividh@earthlink.net]

Since you make various remarks about the legibility of your site, I am pleased to tell you that it is all quite legible at 640x480x256 on a 15" monitor (wanna trade? :) except for the Win98 page which makes me scroll back &; forth a huge distance for each line, but you did warn us up front that this page was all messed up :)

Peter L. Briggs, Principal, Briggs' Associates [pbriggs@hdinet.com]

Jerry:

Microsoft has posted a solution to the problem of mapping flat files to Outlook 98 Named Fields on import. The solution is at:

On page http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/view19.html, just above the divider between the header boilerplate and the day journal text are a row of links:

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, ...

Chuck Wingo [cwingo@atlcom.net]

Dear Jerry,

A quick thanks for the link to the James Hogan site, and his essay on the Velikovsky affair. As often happens, once there I followed the links and read the rest of his essays. I found two common threads running through them quite disturbing. First, of course, is the perversion of the scientific method. My wife and I home school our 11 year old son, and the two themes I drum into him during all his science instruction are the scientific method and the need to constantly question assumptions. That "distinguished researchers" in so many branches of science have forgotten this and fallen prey to dogma is depressing beyond my ability to express.

The second thing that disturbed me was the constant mention of loss of funding, and the underlying assumption that you can’t do research without it. Who funded Einstein, Maxwell, or Mendelev? I’m not ignorant of how expensive it can be to experiment in some fields, physics especially. But experimentation is only one part of science. How much basic, essential science has been done with a chalkboard? I’m writing this letter with a machine that has more computing power than anything available to Bohr or Saulk or Hubble, and it seems that they did respectable work. The notion that a line of inquiry must be validated by approval from funding committees before it begins is as antithetical to real science as is the blind acceptance of any currently popular theory.

Again, thanks for the link, and for the chance to vent.

Roger Shorney [Roger_Shorney@mailsvr.hsc.missouri.edu]

Jerry;

Just finished reading the journals you have on your site. Great reading!! It took me a while to get caught up on all the news. I kinda like the format better than just the one monthly column. I enjoy finding that an expert in the field sometimes has as much trouble with computer stuff as I do (I am a pc support technician for a 110+ computers, switched ethernet TCP/IP network including Windows NT, Novell NetWare, and AIX/Unibol). We’ve had the AIX box (IBM’s version of UNIX) running for about 5 years now, and except for one or two hardware upgrades, have had VERY little down time/trouble with it. Once you get it up and running and stable, it works fine, lasts long time. The only problems we have with the Win95 users are the ones who think that they are super users, and know "all about" computers because they use one. (After all, "user" is a four-letter-word.) We are running Win95 b on all of our desktops. We are also using Lotus cc:Mail (I don’t like) and in the process of starting to switch to Outlook98. I think the trick there is getting all the server, etc. names correct the very first time you install OL98, as I haven’t found a way to go back and correct a mistake yet. (What can be used to edit a USER.DAT file???)

In reference to your problems with the ZIP drive, I have one at home that I love and have not had problem one with. My home pc started as a Compaq Presario 4160 with a 133 MHz Intel chip, 24 MB of RAM, a 2.1 GB hard drive, a 16 x CD ROM drive, and a 33.6 internal modem. I have since upgraded to a 150 MHz Intel chip, 72 MB of RAM, and a 56k external modem (lightning fried the internal and rather than take the machine to a repair depot and wait a week for a warranty repair, I got and overnight UPS shipment of an external Practical Peripherals). I also added a 4.1 GB as the primary drive, shifting the 2.1 GB to a secondary status. That’s gives C and D for hard drives, and E for the CD ROM drive, and F for the ZIP drive. Which works just fine for me (no home network - that’s next). I use the Zip for Quicken backups, as well as all my other data files, genealogy file backups, and downloaded files backups. I found that it doesn’t matter if the disk is in the drive when I boot or not. Maybe I don’t have any problems because it is my highest drive letter.

Lastly, how do I subscribe to your column??? Is it as simple as sending you $10?? Is that for 1 year or forever??

Detjen, Mike [mike.detjen@intel.com]Jerry,

I have one problem with your writing (of fiction):

Now that you are past that grabber line, here it is: You cannot write books as fast as I can read them. I have to reread the old ones to get my "fix". I was very pleased to see that "Burning City" has been sold and that we’ll get to see it.

Regarding the Linux adventure:

At my company we used to use Unix based servers. We now use all MS NT 4.0 servers because...it took 2 weeks to bring up a unix server and needed lots of experts on tap. It takes 2 hours to do the same thing with an NT server and needs one "familiar" person - no experts needed. If one of those unix servers were to crash (they did - don’t anyone kid themselves about how bulletproof they are) then it was a major thrash to get it going again.

We use XWindows for operating some of our process tools ONLY. This is because that’s the way they came to us from the vendor. We absolutely do NOT install it by choice. Reason: We need to get things DONE and don’t have time to fool around with hobby systems - in that you might have hit the nail right on the head. We also don’t have the money to throw around on an army of witch doctors who can deal with unix.

From a purely selfish point of view I guess the time you spend fooling with Linux might be time not feeding my addiction to your fiction! You gotta do what you gotta do, though.

Dear Jerry

As a long time reader of Byte and of your columns I would be happy to subscribe towards the cost of running a Chaos Manor website, _if_ some straight forward way of paying the subscription can be organised. I expect that a cheque for UKP 6 would cost nearly $10 to clear; in the interim I have found six dollar bills lying around and will send them as an earnest of good intentions.

With respect to your Linux problems:

In summary, having spent much of last week trying to pull together a document in Word 7 on from various sources, I find it a relief to revert from Windows NT to Linux. With all its peculiarities I have not had the problem of a word processor crashing repeatedly while editing a document and locking the system, sometimes requiring a hardware reset.

Regards

VAX-based e-mail system. If not, my apologies. I could not figure out how to

get the new Lotus Notes based system to even admit there is a world out there

My impression is that BYTE lost its direction about three or four years ago and was floundering downhill quite dramatically for the past two. The only sure reason to renew a sub was your column and the occasional happy surprise from one of the other good guys. Common sense about computers is so hard to come by these days when flacks are evrywhere ascendant. I go back to the days of the yellow cover IBM Fortran manuals, PUNCH TAPE instructions, and the early days of miniaturization when one on-off switch was shrunk to the size of a pack of Pall Mall 100s. Even with that perspective I sometimes despair at the idiocies that pass for computer savvy. You and your cohorts remain one of the centers of sanity on computers and computer use on the face of the planet. Good luck for the future.

Erich Schwarz [schwarz@cubsps.bio.columbia.edu]

Dr. Pournelle,

It sounds like you’re already getting good advice about the Applixware stuff. If Corel Wordperfect is designed to run with the newer glibc library, then presumably you should be spared the Applixware problems when you try that.

Some thoughts about what to do:

If you’re truly, absolutely, mortally fed up, forget this and wait for Mac OS X. It’s my understanding that OS X is an professional attempt to *actually* put the Mac OS user interface on top of a derivative of BSD Unix, which actually should allow users to really have a lot of the best of both worlds. Recently, I deliberately refrained from buying a now-cheap 68040 PPC chip system, instead buying a more pricey G3 system, precisely to allow myself to upgrade to OS X when it’s available.

If you’re willing to give things another try, here are some suggestions:

Linux is indeed frustrating to learn. It seems to me, though, that in addition to your valid complaints, there’s a bit of intemperate criticism you’re making.

The valid complaint is that Linux has absolutely nothing resembling the easy desktop interface that Mac OS has had for a decade and that Windows acquired in ‘95. And this is a point that Linus Torvalds, the founder of Linux, recently alluded to [1] -- if Linux doesn’t face the challenge of the individual user desktop, it’s going to have a brief vogue and then subside as past Unixes did. In that perception, you are in the best possible company.

But I think you’re off in some of your other complaints— specifically, the complaint that the language is UNIX is *deliberately* obtuse, perhaps for nefarious self-seeking motives.

I once took a course in physical biochemistry at an Ivy League college taught by one of the leading X-ray crystallographers in the world. This scientist had gone out of his way to be kind to me as a freshman and help me get a first job in biology (back when I needed experience to get a job, but couldn’t get a job because I had no experience) -- so I know personally that he was both brilliant and kind, a rare mix. And it was obvious, taking his course, that he was really passionate about physical biochemistry, and wanted to teach it to everybody.

Nevertheless, he was fantastically opaque. I couldn’t follow him. And I already understood part of the field!

I mulled this over, and decided that it wasn’t deliberate. It was just that he was very, very good, and had been that way for many years. He’d been that way so long that he’d totally forgotten the idiot’s-eye view of physical biochemistry. That is to say, he’d forgotten the undergraduate’s-eye view.

And, thus, this professor simply couldn’t scrunch his mind down into an elementary enough perspective to *teach* newcomers effectively. It was very frustrating, and it was a real teaching problem—but no fraud or malice was involved.

Now, about the hint in some of your writings that UNIX is made deliberately obtuse for, perhaps, unmerited job security. I’ve already addressed the merits of UNIX in an earlier e-mail. Strong objective evidence exists that UNIX is in fact a far more robust system, far more capable of doing serious *industrial* jobs in the private or research sectors, than any other OS going. I’m still waiting to hear Microsoft explain why they’re not using NT to run their own Hotmail server, for instance.

The idea that UNIX is simply a bogus OS doesn’t stand up.

UNIX’s a genuinely powerful OS that Microsoft has yet to match. Obviously all those obtuse UNIX wizards have managed to achieve something.

More generally, it’s not at all obvious that other tools made in the UNIX tradition have serious non-UNIX rivals, either. Imagine the Internet without Apache, Perl, Majordomo, sendmail, BIND, and INN. It’d implode. And all six of those software packages, on which most of the Net runs, are free software written by UNIX-style wizards.

Enough with the rhetoric about evil UNIX wizards being deliberately obtuse and liking confusion. The fact is that there is no villain here, and no one right side. You’re completely right to complain that the Linux user interface isn’t at all ready for common use by sane humans who have normal work to get done. And if the Linux community has any sense, it’ll try to come up with an appropriate interface to spare you the crud you’ve been enduring. Specifically, Oracle, which may be about to announce its support for one or more Linux distributions [2], might be well-poised to address the issues you’ve raised.

On the other hand, it is simply not true that UNIX programmers can be obtuse for no other reasons than stupidity or malice. It really is possible to be so advanced that you lose the ability to make things clear to beginners. I’ve seen it, and, if you think about, probably you have too. Rutherford’s dictum that one should be able to explain one’s work to a barmaid is a fine ideal, but it’s also something of a counsel of perfection. There are *many* very good biologists who never try to explain their work to laymen. This isn’t something to be happy about, but it doesn’t automatically make them frauds, either. There is a place in any serious technical discipline for people who practice that discipline because they *like* being in an elite mental environment, and to pretend otherwise is to overlook the complexity of human nature.

Andrew Grosland [agrosland@yahoo.com]

Sorry Mr. Pournelle, I was a bit rushed.

Here’s the text of the original message, as it came to me:::

An AT&;T friend of mine verified the above scam to be true!!!

b=0#doc

"When the French writer Honore de Balzac died of caffeine poisoning in 1850 at the age of 51 -- he was said to have consumed on the order of four dozen cups of coffee a day—he had produced more than 100 major works, predominantly novels, all in 21 years. ..."

Scott Kitterman [kitterma@erols.com]