Contents |
A SELECTION November 30 - December 6, 1998
|
Go to PREVIOUS MAIL WEEKS: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 Fair warning: some of those previous weeks can take a minute plus to download. After Mail 10, though, they're tamed down a bit. IF YOU SEND MAIL it may be published; if you want it private SAY SO AT THE TOP of the mail. I try to respect confidences, but there is only me, and this is Chaos Manor. PLEASE DO NOT USE DEEP INDENTATION INCLUDING LAYERS OF BLOCK QUOTES IN MAIL. TABS in mail will also do deep indentations. Use with care or not at all. I try to answer mail, but mostly I can't get to all of it. I read it all, although not always the instant it comes in. I do have books to write too... I am reminded of H. P. Lovecraft who slowly starved to death while answering fan mail. If you want to send mail that will be published, you don't have to use the formatting instructions you will find when you click here but it will make my life simpler. Begin with two letters from new Linux users. Microsoft web site breaks Netscape Ken Burnside answers Eric on Microsoft Chuck Wingo sets the record straight on cookies. Browsers and new jpeg format; why some pages seem blank. Linux Mail: Yast and other matters. Another satisfied user reports what you can do in Linux
|
|
Reading your Linux journal over the holidays gave me the push I needed to finally install the thing myself (RedHat 5.1). Ive never used Linux or Unix before although I am a bit familiar with things from NT TCP/IP stuff, as well as ftp, etc. Anyway, Im happy to say things went a lot smoother for me. I did a dual boot on my Win95 station and got Linux up and running in 90 minutes including Internet connectivity. Ive now used Netscape from Linux (XWindows) as well as Lynx and managed to get myself stuck in the AfterStep windows manager until I finally removed it from the wm_config file. Im finding XWindows a bit frustrating to use. I have a number of Linux books and they give great instructions on how to get XWindows running but not on how to USE the bloody thing. It certainly does not seem an intuitive interface by any means. I do have a few questions that perhaps your readers could answer:
Regarding the issue of getting something DONE with Linux here is what I have to say: Linux does not run Dreamweaver, Homesite, Visual InterDev, Photoshop, Illustrator, FireWorks, Quark XPress, PageMaker, or Outlook98. Obviously there are some equivalents but none come close to the features and ease of use of the above applications. In addition, I lose almost all interoperability with my colleagues and business partners as they ARE using those applications. As a result, I cannot get any real work done in Linux. Of course I knew that going in and what I want from Linux is to use it as a file server, web server, and firewall box. For those needs it looks like it will be wonderful indeed but those claiming Linux can be a replacement for Windows95/98/NT and Mac are really kidding themselves. Linux has a LONG way to go before it will compete as even a possible mainstream desktop OS for even 30% of the users out there. Book recommendations: Ill second all the OReilly recommendations although I did not find "Running Linux" any more useful than many of the other books. "No BS Linux" is a good book and "Learn Linux in 24 hours" from Sams Pub was a handy companion to the RedHat manual during installation. The "Linux for Dummies Quick Reference" is also very handy as a small guide to commands as you hack away at the console. I looked at the huge "Inside RedHat Linux" from Sams Pub. this weekend. It seemed rather useless. It covers about everything but in very shallow detail. Good luck with your progress and thank you for taking the time to put up the Linux journal.
Good to have a new user account of installation. I do everything as simple mindedly as possible: as I sometimes say, I do silly things so you won't have to. Glad to have been the inspiration. ==
Kit Case [kitcase@netutah.com] Dear Dr. Pournelle, Linux first. At Comdex I picked up a copy of TurboLinux 3.0 from Pacific HiTech < www.pht.com>. Very easy install, and it can see my Fat32 partitions. Also easy to get dial up networking (PPP) running. This message is, partially, a test of whether or not I got mail configured properly, taking advantage of your auto-reply feature.Airbags, 4X4s. Glad to hear that you survived the rollover. I have a friend that used to be a paramedic in Hurricane (pronounced "hurriken") Utah. Its about 2 hours north of Vegas and right where people going from LA to Denver or Salt Lake City, or the other way, fall asleep. He has told me that he has never had to call the coroner for anyone who had an airbag, used a seatbelt, or (if they were riding) wore a helmet. Needless to say (but Im saying it) he has airbags in his vehicles, always wears a seatbelt, and wears a helmet when riding. Southern Utah is definitely 4X4 country, especially in the winter, and people I know drive all sorts. The most common are pickup trucks (the 4 door "cowboy cadillac" type is popular) followed by Broncos and Blazers. Also, for the serious LDS families that come in Platoon size, the Suburban is well regarded. Hope this helps, Kit Case -- Remember what I said about Microsoft's new web site? Check it out! Now you can't do much of anything without IE4. Visit it in IE4 and then in Netscape. Nothing works right in Netscape! But the Netscape version does have a big icon in the upper left that says "Download Internet Explorer Today!". Lovely, huh? Herschel Adler Herschel Adler [hadler@bigplanet.com] Lovely indeed. I'll have a look. Thanks. There is a comment, click here. === Burnside Kenneth W [kw.burnside@hosp.wisc.edu] Eric: You asked us to name one competitor who went up against Microsoft and made "no mistakes". (See mail17.) Stac Electronics fits the bill pretty nicely. Back in late 80s, Stac had a hardware-assisted drive compression technology that pretty much ran the tables, for Windows 3.0 and 3.1. It was the Product of the Year for BYTE and PC Magazine and several others. Shortly after these accolades, DOS 5 started shipping with Doublespace, a drive compression utility that was eerily similar. Stac went to court, citing patent infringement and reverse engineering of their product. Calling up the DoubleSpace source code in court showed that there were still blocks of comments that said "Copyright © 1987,1990, Stac Electronics". Microsoft settled out of court, but not before dragging the case on to the point that Stac Electronics had effectively gone belly-up. Of course, a true Microsoft apologist could say that Stacs mistake was letting a copy of their source code leave the building. Personally, I think the best result of the anti-trust probe would be to require a fully documented API for Windows/NT. My wildly idealistic goal is to forcibly convert the copyright to Windows to a GPL. What I suspect will happen is that the appeals process will bog down for years, and the status quo will be changed. Anti-trust trials dont move quickly enough to keep up with high technology. The Stac deal always did seem a bit raw to me. I was involved in the Quarterdeck deal too: in that one, a Quarterdeck engineer basically told a Microsoft programmer how Quarterdeck did some memory management tricks, over the telephone, as a boast; it's hard to see how Microsoft was at fault for taking advantage of that, and I suspect Microsoft management wasn't even aware of the source of their memory management people's sudden inspiration. In the Stac case, it does look like straight plagiarism. Of course corporate plagiarism is not the same as monopoly power. But that one is a serious case. One keeps hearing stories, some of which cannot be true, such as Gates telling someone in confidence "Your big mistake was to trust us!" and cackling like a maniac. That did not happen; it is about as much in Gates's character as chastity raucous humour is to Al Gore's (and I know Gates a lot better than I do Gore so let's not get too far into that metaphor.) You do begin to wonder who is making up all the spin stories. === People seem to forget one important thing, Stac won the case. They got a big settlement and royalties that more than compensated for any legal costs and lost sales. Stac demonstrated that when the facts were clear and a real legal complaint could be heard rather than whining, Microsoft loses. People also forgot one other thing, Stac signed a lousy contract. If that doesnt fall under major screw-ups, I dont know what does. They didnt just let the source code out by accident while discussing technical issues with buddies from Redmond. They formed a business agreement that involved that source code. There is no question that somebody in Microsoft pulled a fast one. Who knew in the higher echelons is another issue. I doubt the top guys would have gone about it so clumsily after what happened with Kildalls copyright notices in PC-DOS 1.0. This is not apologia. It is a critical issue of the case. If Stac had been on their toes there would never have been a conflict. Whether or not someone actually said "You screwed up, you trusted us," is unimportant. In business you must always assume it could come to that. Gasping out an "Et tu, Brute" is cold comfort for forgoing tense negotiations. You could be entering a partnership with your oldest friend in all the world but if you dont assume he may turn on you or vice versa, you are a fool and deserve whatever evil fate comes your way. (Gary Kildalls divorce comes to mind.) Let us also not forget that drive compression was a small market at best and doomed by the rapid drop in storage prices just over the horizon when the case was pending. Also, after the idea had sunk in and others came up with their own compression schemes, numerous competitors were vying for shares of that market. Stac probably came out of the debacle with more money than if they had done a slow fade into commodified obscurity. (Not to mention that nearly everybody Ive ever known who used drive compression ended up regretting it. Compressed folders make much more sense for desktop systems.) The hardware assisted version of the product didnt enter into the case since it was for low-end systems. Once it made more economic sense to get a 386 and enjoy its benefits for everything that board was hurled into obsolescence. It does have a legacy in the ISDN stuff. Stac did not go belly up. They got smart and realized that the retail market is for people who enjoy abuse from distributors, retailers, and end users all at once. Instead they went into the business of licensing their current and future patents. They have a strong standard in the ISDN field. Collecting royalties from people who do the legwork while you get to stay in the lab doing what you do best or just enjoying the money strikes me as preferable. Remember the Bernard Baruch line about the stock market crash? "I have always thought that if in 1929 we had all continuously repeated two and two still make four, much of the evil might have been averted." This is what people always forgot when dealing with Microsoft. They dont have any special magical powers. They dont even have a legion of flying monkeys. The best example to learn from is the one Microsoft itself created. Remember when IBM was considered utterly invulnerable and was held in much the same regard Microsft is today? Remember who overcame their awe and started the revolution that forever changed the industry landscape? Microsoft did it with tough negotiation and pursuing assets IBM undervalued. Even Microsoft got complacent, though. IBM took to treating them as a vassal rather than a partner. Look what happened when the vassal lost its illusions. Eric Pobirs [nbrazil@ix.netcom.com] Good point: I was there when IBM decided to rub in Microsoft's subservient status, and I saw the result. A battleship ought perhaps not lightly take on a fleet of smaller but nimbler battlecruisers. As for the rest... Well, I have had publishers who were "honest" in that they paid promptly upon credible threat of a lawsuit; Stac did have to go to court to get its money. They were adequately compensated, but I am not convinced that's quite the same thing as playing square in the first place. But your point is well taken that the disk compression market was doomed in any event. For reply by Burnside and my wrapup of all this click here. == Cwingo@atlcom.net Dear Jerry, Ive just read the letter from Clark Myers, commenting on my recommendation of Cookie Pal. If I may, Id like to respond to a few issues he raised. (This discussion began in Mail 17.)Hes right, cookies can be quite useful. If I gave the impression I think all of them are nuisances, than I didnt express myself clearly, and I apologize. His example of Amazon was appropriate, as I have four Amazon cookies on my hard drive right now, along with those from three or four other sites I buy from. My point was that theyre there because I was alerted that they were going to be set, and then gave my permission. And as a bonus, by using a general filter, Im no longer bothered by alerts about cookies from these sites, as Ive set my system to always accept them. There are other cookies that are not on my drive because I chose not to allow them, and Im no longer bothered by those alerts, either. In short, I use a filter because I want to keep some control over whats on my drive, without having to respond to alerts on every new page. Occasionally Ill change my mind. If I do, all I have to do is navigate back to the beginning of a site and change my filter. By the way, the site that did politely ask me to allow their cookie did so right in the site, not through e-mail. I declined the cookie, and when I attempted to go the next page in the site I got a page explaining their need for the cookie, and asking me to allow it. I hit the back button, changed my filter, and was off to the races. Not having read their source I cant say for sure how they did it, but I can think of at least two ways, neither of which involves more that a few minutes of coding, and a willingness to be polite. Which is all I ask. Thanks for you time, and your site. Chuck Wingo
Right. Sensible attitude. Cookies can be useful, but they do need controlling. == " After a few adventures find that the CPU is bad. ..So I have to return the CPU. Frys does that, I fear, packaging returned stuff and reselling it. Why? Do they think it fixed itself on the shelf? Or that the people they hire would be competent to know if anything works or not?" It has to do with the returns procedure in force at all major retailers. You walk up to the counter at Frys with defective product, or material you wish to return. You tell them it is either defective or does not work in your computer. The Frys employee checks the packaging to make sure all disks, CD, warranty cards, product, etc is in the box. They give you a refund and your outta there. The box goes into the back where it is re shrinked, and has that blue "quality" sticker attached. If you tell them it is defective, they chuck it into another box and get an RMA from the vendor. I used to rep several PC peripheral lines at Frys and have seen $10,000 of returned video boards (Hercules) where less than 10% was actually defective.
Interesting. Well, the CPU I had was just plain defective. I ended up with another I haven't tested yet because I am having problems with Creative's newest sound card. Blast. ==
Firstly, I must tell you that I was a loyal reader of your monthly Chaos Manor in BYTE. I miss a lot the BYTE Magazine, mostly because of its original perspective and its strong technical articles about everything in computing, from real-time kernels to web-enabled OLAP databases... ;) Stupidly enough, BYTE Spain, which have never translated your column (as far as I remember), now its the "Spanish Edition of Windows Magazine", and thats really disgusting to me!. And worse, the American edition of the "New" BYTE (if exists, Im not sure) its not available in Spain for now. I want to comment something about your SP4 adventures because I recently read them at your web site. You said that IE 4.1 was missing after the setup. As far as I know (Im at the SP3-level yet) the SP4 comes with IE 4.01 SP1, not IE 4.1!! But, as usual, Windows isnt able of identificate the IE version correctly, so in "My PC" always appears "4.0". You should check the revision number: It should read "4.72.3110.8" or newer, since I have the Spanish IE and could be a bit older than the English one... :( Thanks for read me... as I read you for years :) ----
Mistyped. You're right, of course, it's 4.01 that I am operating with now. It's an improvement. You also get active desktop with NT Y2K upgrade, and in fact it is much worth while. BYTE Spain doesn't take my new column; why don't you tell them they can have it for something between a nominal fee and an exorbitant price Thanks
R.P. Nettelhorst [rpnettelhorst@earthlink.net] I found this comment by one of your correspondents interesting: Remember what I said about Microsoft's new web site? Check it out! Now you can't do much of anything without IE4. Visit it in IE4 and then in Netscape. Nothing works right in Netscape! But the Netscape version does have a big icon in the upper left that says "Download Internet Explorer Today!". Lovely, huh? Herschel Adler Herschel Adler [hadler@bigplanet.com] On our website ( www.theology.edu) we made a mistake on our Online Courses page: we left out </table> at the end. IE had no trouble with the page, and since both I and the guy who owns our server use IE almost exclusively, we didn't notice a problem: the page looked fine. Thankfully, one of our professors uses Netscape, because for Netscape users, the page was just a blank. Apparently IE is better at handling bad HTML programming. So perhaps the reason Microsoft's website looks bad under Netscape is just that Microsoft's webmasters are sloppy coders... :)Sincerely, R.P. Nettelhorst Academic VP, Quartz Hill School of Theology Interesting. Thanks. ==
Jerry, When I started using images on web pages, life seemed rather easy, since the defacto standard early became gif and jpeg format. Of course gif was not really that simple, there being two basic versions, and later variants such as transparent and animated. But, hey, eventually the main browsers could display any version with no problems. All we had to do was either have gif or jpeg to begin with, or use some conversion program. Any broken image icons on a webpage generally just meant an invalid path reference or wrong case in names. Early this year, I ran into something different. I manage a web version of a translated newsletter for the Rotary Doctor Bank ( http://come.to/doctorbank to use the shortcut url), and received jpeg images of the photos usedto include them in the web issue as well. With the first issue for 98, suddenly my image editor programs refused to recognize most (but not all) of the jpeg files as a valid format. Neddless to say, neither IE nor Netscape showed anything but a broken icon. Initially I thought that the files had become corrupt and wasted much time trying to figure out what had gone wrong. In the next issue, _all_ the jpegs were unloadable, and I managed to see that there was a subtle subversion difference in the file headers. I gave it up for a while, and all 98 issues remained imageless. On and off I downloaded new versions of freeware and shareware image editors, but none resolved the formats, and most were inferior in other ways to what I already had.Later, this autumn, I got the ACDSEE32 image browser (highly recommended) and found to my surprise that the "broken" images all rendered very nicely. This rather confirmed that we had new jpeg versions here, saved from Mac. When I later registered Opera, I sent in a couple of the jpegs to their support and got back a helpful reply from Karl Anders Oygard < karlo@operasoftware.com> ...The gist of the reply was that there were two new browser-unsupported jpeg formats around this yeara CMYK JPEG image and an AppleDouble encoded version. The CMYK version will be sort of supported in the new 3.51 release of Opera "being the only web browser in doing so". It was noted that as yet the CMYK to RGB conversion was a bit crude. He had however been unable to decompress the AppleDouble one. This coincides with my own observation that the number of "broken" image icons on certain websites (Mac-made pages?) were on the rise. / Bo --
Interesting. I will have to try the Opera browser. So far I am running as fast as I can to stay in one place, but I will get there. Anyone else know a lot about this? ===
I disagree with your assertion that disk compression was a doomed business. I admit that it got a rocky start due to the poor quality of the initial offerings but it was the disk drive vendors who finally made a run at catching up with Moore's law that have currently eliminated the need for disk compression. Why worry about disk compression when you can buy 18 GB hard drives for less than $300? However, the day will come again when disk drive technology runs up against physics and we will once again turn to data compression. You and I may be old and gray but I believe it will happen in my lifetime. Cheers, Tom -- Tom Myers : tvmyers@iquest.net Possibly, but it will be a long time. The worst prediction I ever made was that spinning metal would be replaced by electronics -- silicon is cheaper than iron. It hasn't happened in 20 years. It will happen, but spinning iron seems to have a bit of new life yet. And makes for BIG drives. And yours is the last mail I am going to post that is formatted with end of line characters. I realize Linux isn't very flexible, and you don't use WORD or Word Perfect, but I would have thought SOMETHING would format mail without end of line markers no matter what system you are using. ===
Dear Jerry, Yes, by all means get the SB Live board into Robertas machine. I have the value edition in mine, and wow! The setup program installs a thunderclap .wav file as the Windows startup sound,and the first time it playrd my six year old son looked up at the ceiling and then at me and asked "is that the computer?". It is the best sound I have ever heard from a computer, period. I am using Altec Lansing ACS 48 speakers, and they are wonderful as well. The only thing that bothers me about the SB Live is that I now have DOS drivers loaded in autoexec.bat, even though I use no DOS programs. Even if I rem them out, they reappear when I reboot. I guess there may be some entry in the registry I could change, but I really hate mucking around in there. It wouldnt matter except Im losing an IRQ for nothing. At any rate I am sure you will be pleased by the sound quality you will get from the SB Live, but dont forget a good mike and good speakers. By the way, I read somewhere that the Durangos ride isnt as good as the Explorer. It sure looks great though. Does it mean anything that your two alternatives, the Mercedes and the Dodge, are now products of the same company? Take care of that leg. Cheers Greg French Thanks! At the moment it ain't broke and we'll stay with the Ensonic until I have the Creative Live! Running with an AMD K6-2; Roberta isn't for experimenting on. But I'll sure keep that in mind. I forgot that Mercedes bought Dodge. Interesting. ==
Ken Burnside [burnside@itis.com]
I take objection to Eric Pobirs response with regards to Stac Electronic, and your follow-up to it. Not a disputation of the factswere all pretty much in agreement that Stac got into a legal dispute with Microsoft, Microsoft was clearly in the wrong, and Stac got paid out. What I dispute is the historical perspective on the nature of drive technology. Certainly, from our perspective 7 years down the line, its clear that hard drive sizes would suddenly start to obey Moores law. (MR heads, one of the major keys to getting hard drives over 300 MB in the PC form factor, didnt really come out of the labs until 93). At the time of the trial, it was NOT abundantly clear that this would happen. Eric has indulged in the fallacy of perfect hindsightthat what is evident now was evident then. Which leaves us with the following situation: Microsoft settled out of court. Had it gone to settlement, I strongly suspect that there wouldve been strong scrutiny on any drive compression technology they implemented, for either DOS or Windows. Had it gone to judgement, Stac wouldve starved, as a company, and been eliminated as a competitor, Microsoft couldve bought their technology, and won that way. Settling out of court is less bad PR, which is worth the extra financial burden of the settlement. As it was, Doublespace was part of DOS, and part of Windows, and theres virtually no way to sell a drive compression utility that can compete with what you get for "free" with your computer/OS. As near as I can tell, Stac took the money and got out of the business, because they didnt see a way they could compete. The market still existed at the time of the settlement, and the fact that it would vanish in two years is more or less moot. And now a question for yourself, and Mr. Pobirs: Given that any single case thats cited as an example of Microsoft using dominant market position to trample roughshod over a competitor can be picked apart, what list of tenets must be established to prove that Microsoft has driven someone out of business by means fair and foul, versus them making a collosal blunder? Ken Burnside burnside@itis.com I'm not sure of your point. Mine is that most of this is irrelevant. All big businesses do things that their competitors think of as sharp practice. The real question is, how much activism by the Federal government is justified by this? I start with the premise that "making a Federal case of it" is not good; one calls in the Feds only when there is no other remedy, and even then you do reluctantly. Once that camel has his nose in the tent, it is very difficult to keep the rest of the camel, with all his fleas, and most of his relatives, out; and you end up supporting an enormous bureaucracy whose purpose is to justify its own existence. Just as many "non-profits" actually exist to pay big salaries to its executives who then spend most of their time raising money to "meet our underfunded budget." Even the Getty seems prone to that disorder. Same with the Feds. Call them in and the one thing you can be sure of is that they will be there, paid highly, watching, for eternity. I call to evidence the AT&;T and IBM cases. It is no part of my agenda to make Microsoft into an angelic host. I have considerable admiration of their management style, which gives large autonomy to individual product managers, and I am sure that some of them are no better than they should be. I note that lately Microsoft has tended to give large technical and marketing power to its younger people, but to retain more centrally control over external relations. It was not always so. I am temperamentally opposed to very big entities to begin with. I'd feel a lot more comfortable if Microsoft were about four companies, and I'd be willing to work on legislation that simply limits the size and power of very large companies on principle. That, however, might well require tariff protections of the smaller companies we then mandate, since they might have problems competing with offshore cartels. That will require other Federal interventions, per omnia seculae seculorum. Enough. For good or ill, let us call this one settled: you wish to blackguard Microsoft, and we are all agreed that they have skated very close to the edge of deserving that. Whether they crossed some line, and where that line ought to be, is not going to be determined here or by us, nor would much be accomplished if we did. FOR CONTINUATION ON THIS CLICK [FrontPage Image Map Component]
|