I bought two 2.5inch IBM DTCA-24090 4.09 GB date code JAN-98 lap top hard drives from a business man at a computer swapmeet who said he had upgraded a couple of Dell laptops to bigger drives and wanted to sell these two "small" ones, no warranty by him. $20 each! Of course I was nervious that they might be broken ones or stolen, but what a price! I rushed down to Frys and bought a little adapter to connect 2.5inch drives to IDE and hooked them up. One at a time of course. My system bios recognized the first one and it was just fine. Fdisk, format, and surface scan Scandisk Fat32 under win98. Now the other one was somewhat of a problem. As soon as the power came on it sounds like an electronic alarm is going off over in the corner near the connector, not a grinding sound like head rubbing, but just like my cheap travel alarm clock. After about a minute of this it shuts the sound off but you can still hear the platters running. The bios says nobodys home.

No utility I can find will recognize it so then I figure I will send it in for warranty repair to IBM or Dell. IBM’s web site rates this drive at 2yr warranty. Only they say that since they sold it to Dell, Dell has to warranty it, that IBM does not furnish "pass through" warranties unless the drive can be traced to a US Distributor. Dell says they only warranty a drive while it is in the original laptop they sold it with, and they do not repair them, only replace them. I asked what is someone to do who upgrades their drive in their laptop, just throw it away? Dell was uninterested in a dialog. IBM on the other hand was chatty and said they sold the drives to Dell with a warranty and Dell sold the drive with whatever warranty Dell was inclined to offer. Anyway - I am interested if anyone else has heard an alarm going off inside a laptop hard drive. I will be taking it apart soon to check it out. I used to be a Senior Principal Engineer at Western Digital back in the old days (1991), so this will be an adventure. I’ll get out my scope and dvm and see what's what. Bye the way, your site is great.

From: Francisco García Maceda (maceda@pobox.com)

Subject: NT and Task Manager

Dear Jerry:

I have not had your exact problem with NT and Earthlink, but a lot of times I get my system blocked by an application that can not be terminated from the Applications tab within Task Manager. By playing around I found several hidden options in Task Manager. In the Processes tab you have to find the offending application (not always easy since sometimes the executables have cryptic names) and you can try to terminate it with the End Process button; I am not certain why closing applications here is usually much more effective than from the Applications tab. If this simple trick does not work, right click on the process (in the Process tab, not in the Applications one) and you will get a dialog with four options: End Process (again), Debug, Set Priority and Set Affinity. You can usually change the priority of the offending application to Low so you can get to close it with any of the previous End Process variations (most of my problems have come from hanging applications with its priority set to High).

Truly yours

Francisco García Maceda

Jerry,

You might want to point your readers to a new article on Vernor Vinge in Salon’s online magazine. The URL is

Calvin Dodge

--

"When the toast is burned, and all the milk has turned and Captain Crunch is waving ‘farewell’

When the big one finds you, may this song remind you that they don’t serve breakfast in Hell"

Dear Jerry,

I don’t know if you’re still looking for contributions on the Yorktown thing or not, but as a person who has worked in 24x7 mission critical systems (healthcare, where if a system goes down, people can die (and have, but not on my shift as far as I am aware)), I have a particular interest in this incident.

I’m not a NT or Linux bigot; I helped write and test the Matrox Millennium driver for XFree86, and I earn a decent living as an BackOffice security &; admin dude, and I used to program Macs, so I’m not one eyed about platforms. Each has a place in the computing world’s toolkit.

However, with this incident, many of the ad hominem attacks against NT seem to repeat endlessly, in some cases pointlessly so.

Microsoft, contrary to popular belief, does license the source code to various third parties. If having the kernel and binary source trees mattered so much, this can be arranged, and probably within the budget of the armed services, particularly if they made it a requirement. Several universities in the US have NT’s source code. Various ISVs also have the source tree - such as Insignia, who produce a partial emulator for Windows 95 and NT (SoftWindows) for various Unix platforms and the Mac, and provide the x86 compatibility bits for NT itself on PowerPC, Mips and Alpha.

NT has a real time scheduling class, but I’d agree with anyone who thinks that VxWorks or QNX would do a better job at this than NT or Solaris (about the only Unix OS with RT extensions) due to higher latencies than VxWorks or QNX. Particularly in fire control systems. Fewer lines of code == less chance for things to go wrong.

The Kirch site has many technical inaccuracies. I have pointed these out to him, but he seems unwilling to correct them. I personally have a problem with inaccuracies being used as ammunition for advocacy flame fests, as they will bite back eventually. As a practising NT/Exchange/SQL 7 admin, there’s enough real ammo for him to use against Windows NT without resorting to half truths or factually incorrect items.

For those who think that Extreme Linux is very trendy, I’d direct them to DCE and its direct descendant, DCOM. DCOM does everything that Beowulf can do, and more. It’s been part of NT for some time now. We use it at my current site to replicate a database between remote servers and provide a seamless distributed data store for potentially thousands of client workstations to manage elections. Needless to say, it’s very trendy.

I agree wholeheartedly with those who wrote in saying that there’s nothing like fault tolerance and redundancy to keep critical systems operational. I worked with a real time heart monitor that had two of everything and backed up its neighbours. Now that’s redundancy!

If Linux had the same testing quality that Windows NT is subjected to (among other things: every module has a test harness, there are strict test metrics that must be met before code hits the streets, and each programmer is assigned at least one tester), it would be of even higher quality. Sure, open source has helped fix a number nasty bugs, but Linux has a long way to go in the quality stakes.

With mission critical systems, different rules are in place:

These rules have not changed in over 35 years since the mainframe boys in the sixties started working on change management. I’d say that no major general purpose OS besides Tandem’s and some HA IBM offerings pass these requirements.

From: Robert Peters (rjpeters@iol15.com)

Dr. Pournelle,

Thank you for helping me to earn a living for the last three years. I have been reading Byte magazine for many years (and your fiction for even longer!) and your columns always were the first thing I read when I found a new issue.

I became a computer technician three years ago after about seven years as a hobbyist. The most useful procedure I used during that time was the relentless application of logic which I learned from you. I hasten to add the other content of your columns also helped immeasurably.

My time as a career technician has come to an end, though. You wrote some months ago about the phenomenon of a customer talking to a helpful computer-literate salesman/technician, conceptually designing a system and then going down the street and buying the same system for one hundred dollars cheaper than the original merchant quoted. I have seen this happen more times than I care to remember. From what I can tell the trend is accelerating. You also wrote you had no ideas about how to stop this phenomenon. It is my belief there is no way to stop people from shopping in this fashion and as I am no longer part of the computer industry I will offer some observations on what I think is going on.

Primarily, most people do not see their purchases as what keep a business operating. As my former boss and I were moving out on Saturday, one of our regular Saturday customers was there complaining about us leaving the area (my boss is continuing as an on-line business at:

http://www.angelfire.com/fl2/flcomputers/index.html.

Please forgive the shameless plug but my former boss always treated me well and I'd like to return the favor. )

Our now-on-line customer remarked how convenient it was to deal with a local company instead of driving to Altamonte Springs (not far from where you plan to visit in mid-May, I think), the nearest location of the computer super-stores, but I must confess his opinion is in the minority. The majority of the computer and parts buyers were happy to spend the two or three dollars of gas, and one and one half to two hours of their lives to save (sometimes considerably especially after rebates) on parts and systems. I don't begrudge my former customers their right to do this, merely remark that it wasn't necessarily in their best interest to do so. Now, my former customers don't have the option to buy our modestly priced wares and talk face-to-face with us to gain the benefit of our advice.

I was reading yesterday in one of the major weekly news magazines about how profits at the major PC manufacturers have fallen recently because of the influx of "good enough" computers which can be cheaply manufactured at microtomically (?) thin profit margins and sold profitably in volume (or given away as a venue for continuous advertising). A similar "good enough" computer (233/300 Cyrix CPU, 32 Meg SDRAM, 2-4 Gig HDD, built-in video and sound w/ 15" monitor and Win95B) was our most popular sale to local businesses but even we could not compete directly on price with the latest entries into the market.

We made it a point to help our customers with even their (to us easily-solved) problems like those found in help desk horror stories. All of our efforts were not sufficient to compete in the one thing that matters now, price.

I do regret our former customers will have to travel the wastes of central Florida to find good service, though I seem to have found a more-distant shop I can recommend in good conscience.

Don't cry for me Argentina, my former boss will do well with his other ventures and one of our customers hired me almost on-the-spot (now we're just waiting for the drug test results to come in) when he found I was looking for work (praise God!).

In my new career, I will continue to relentlessly apply logic, though as I am joining an established manufacturing firm I expect tradition will have its say. As far a computing goes, I plan to read Byte, visit your web site (not as often as in the past) and tinker with computers.

Again, thank you Dr. Pournelle. You do greater service than you know. Please do NOT let the _un-helpful_ illegitimate people wear you down. Respectfully Submitted. Robert Peters

P. S. I plan to hand you two years of subscription checks when you visit Orlando in mid-May. Why wait? As you can probably tell, I like to do my business face-to-face, I have no credit cards and the pleasure of meeting you.

Hello Mr. Pournelle,

As always your articles are always interesting and sometimes even funny. On the zip thing with 98 I have had some success formatting a zip disk, as a matter of fact I did it yesterday on an external parallel port zip 100MB drive and I am now using the disk on an internal zip drive on a Dell running Win95B. I did notice though that it formatted it to less than 100MB.

If you would like more info on my set-up I will be happy to provide it.

Please keep up the good work on your column.

Have a great day.

Emeka Mordi [emordi@yahoo.com]

Greetings Jerry,

Glad to have you back. FYI, I can successfully format readable cartridges under Win98 but using SCSI hardware (ZIP Insider, external SCSI ZIP, ZIP 250, variety of host adapters). After nightmarish attempts at getting Iomega’s first set of IDE ZIP drives to work under anything, we gave up and standardized on their SCSI offerings. Added bonus? They’re a touch faster too.

Subject: MS and "strong competition"

Re your comments on Corel Office - "Historically, when Microsoft encounters strong competition, the company runs scared and piles resources into developing software that delivers more bang for less bucks, all to the benefit of the customers. I expect to see that happen here." I don’t know what planet the MS you are talking about is from but it ain’t Earth!

When MS face ANY competition they run scared and pile resources into Fear Uncertainty and Doubt marketing, start selling whatever product is facing the competition at greatly reduced margins (often in fact at a loss), fill it full of totally useless "features" that drive most users nuts but convince everyone (particularly the computer neophytes and MIS management) that you can’t live without them, and decide to bundle it with either Windows ("it’s part of the OS!") or Office. They do everything in their power to force the competition out of business. They often succeed. I expect to see that happen here.

Microsoft I agree improves their products but not for less bucks unless you include Explorer, but of course that is part of the operating system and therefore is included in the price of purchase. Right. I think the competition really offers the real value, that place where where you the real bang for the buck ..... like buying an AMD chip or a 350 rather than 450 cpu. Why do others pay so much more when the alternatives Lotus and Corel offer so much (sometimes more) for far less. This is a real industry secrete. I bought WordPerfect 8 for $70 and the corresponding Office 97 Suite cost me $220. And, the WordPerfect Suite is more stable and WordPerfect does things natively that one needs VBA to accomplish in Word. Excel is a wonderful spreadsheet but much to my surprise Quattro Pro is real close which I use most of the time now. I have experience with Lotus Smart Suite also. That group of programs is also real fine and will as much or more as the other at much less the cost of Microsoft. I think if people knew they had an alternative then Microsoft would have to be truly competitive. Why don't you folks in the media ever display that point of view?

Tom Wright Ph.D.

Netgear TX310 just changed to MUCH worse chipset

Hi,

It’s funny you should just now be recommending the Netgear TX310 fast ethernet cards. These used to be very fine at a very fine price.

As part of Intel’s battle with DEC, Intel ended up owning the DEC fast ethernet PCI chip previously used on the TX310. As Intel already made their own fine line of ethernet PCI chips, they stopped production of the DEC version.

What all this means is the new rev D of the TX310 uses some DEC clone chip, which has all kinds of compatibility problems with Linux and WinNT. I found this out the hard way (hours of hunting why a new system locked up).

There are new drivers for the DEC clone ethernet controller, but they are not on the normal Linux or WinNT install disks. The WinNT drivers included with my most recent TX310 were not the new ones, and caused my system to lock after a few minutes of use.

Netgear probably didn’t have much choice, as Intel stopped making the chip. It would have been nice for Netgear to use a new part number (like TX311), as the new card is absolutely not a drop in replacement for the old one.

Because of all the problems I had with the rev D board, I’ve stopped buying them. And don’t recommend them. Your readers might be interested in very latest info on this.

As a side note, I’m extremely sad that Byte was not continued as a paper publication by it’s new owners. I had subscribed to Byte for a zillion years (well maybe almost 20), and is one of the few magazines I’ve kept for my long term archives. I was rather insulted by the new owners offer to substitute PC World (or whatever it was) for Byte to finish my subscription. If I wanted a PC mumble magazine, I would subscribe to one. Byte was much more about technology, computer science, and the possibilities. My first reaction to the Byte web site was pretty luke warm. Maybe the last issue of the printed Byte should have had an article about why fine long standing magazines crash and burn. Is it the Internet, are the new owners idiot’s, does Windows gobble up all the advertising revenue?

Good luck on your latest books!

As some of you may have noticed, it has been impossible to send mail to me or read my web page for the last few weeks. This is because my internet service provider, slip.net, has apparently suffered some kind of hardware failure, and cannot provide internet service to me. Being in Europe, it has been very difficult to deal with this problem.

My good friend Stig Hackvan has graciously offered web space on his server, so you can now continue to read about Talin’s adventures in Europe. You can access this at the following URL:

Jerry

I would have written earlier but I expected someone to beat me to the punch.

Re: reserving interrupts for specific devices: in Windows 95 Control Panel select System, Device Manager, and the target device. Select Properties, you get a tabbed dialog, select Resources. You should be able to uncheck Use Automatic Settings and specify the IRQ and even Memory Registers you want to allocate to the device.

Of Course, Windows protests that Bad Things May Happen if you don't allow it to have complete autonomy over all system resources, but we expect that. I used this trick to make an old Mediavision sound card work when nothing else seemed to. If you know what settings work for a given device, say from an previous installation, it should still work.

Alternatively, You may find a group of settings in one of the unused Basic Setting's from the drop menu that's also enabled when you uncheck Use Automatic Settings.

I assume that Win 98 has the same choices, I have so far avoided it

. Hope this helps.

Wesley Moore

I’m an old Byte Magazine subscriber and am glad to find you on-line. Are there any plans to resume print?

I always valued Byte’s willingness to consider options outside Windows, such as Linux or the Mac. I felt that such journalistic independence lent the magazine some credibility. It wasn’t simply a publicity organ for Windows.

Thank you for the info about Corel WordPerfect Suite for Linux. Would you happen to know whether Corel plans to offer WP Pro Suite, that is, WP Suite with Paradox? Do they plan to offer Paradox for Linux at all?

"Regarding your comments about how connecting an ATA hard drive and an ATAPI CD-ROM drive on the same cable cripples hard drive performance, this was true years ago but is no longer the case. Early chipsets did not support independent device timing on ATA channels, which meant that both devices were restricted to running at the speed of the slower device.

I believe it was the original Intel Triton chipset that eliminated this restriction by supporting independent device timing on both ATA channels, which allows each device to operate at its fastest rate without regard to the speed of the other device on the channel. All modern chipsets, ATA/ATAPI devices, and ATA interfaces support independent device timing, so mixing and matching devices on a cable is no longer a concern, at least as regards data rates.

But a remaining limitation of the ATA interface is that only one device at a time can use the channel. This means, for example, that if you configure a system to burn CDs from an ATAPI CD-ROM drive to an ATAPI CD-R/RW drive, you'd be well advised to put those two drives on different ATA channels to allow simultaneous read and write operations. The large buffers on recent CD-R/RW drives help minimize buffer underrun problems, but this is countered somewhat by ever increasing CD-R/RW write speeds.

There was a great deal of discussion on my site some weeks back about CD-R/RW drives. One contingent insisted that SCSI was the only way to go, but another argued just as strongly that ATA CD-R/RW drives work just as well as SCSI if the system is configured properly. All agreed that doing a CD-to-CD copy was much more likely to succeed if the two drives were on different ATA channels.

Bob

Robert Bruce Thompson

under menu options "Freeware | Startup Manager"

from the release notes:

"A small utility to help manage the applications that are run at Windows startup.

Not everyone realizes just how many places there are to hide for programs that run at startup in Windows 9x and NT 4 . The Startup folder in your Start Menu is only the most obvious of these places; for the others, you have to roll up your sleeves and go spelunking into the registry and WIN.INI system file.

Startup Manager takes care of all this for you, even allowing you to disable these programs so that they can later be restored."

Nice little tool, works well, might be just what you need.

Jerry -

The functionality you are looking for is actually built into 98, although I confess that I don’t know if the same program is part of NT.

In 98, open the Windows "System Information" program (found in System Tools in the Accessories folder of the Start Menu). From there open the tools menu and start the System Configuration Utility. Clicking on the "Startup" tab brings a list of all active tasks started along with Windows, and gives you the option to disable them. It leaves disabled programs in the list so that you can later go back and reactivate them should you discover that you need them.

Do you remember Lotus ? I have been using it since 1986 or thereabouts but its popularity has waned over the years. As you know, it is now a division of IBM.

At CompUSA Reno, I noted the "Millenium" version of Lotus and saw that I needed to part with $99 for a Y2K upgrade or start converting my 1-2-3 R5 files to MS Excel.

While preparing for this ordeal at home, I tried the company website and found a Y2K fix was being offered for free!

On the premise that you might want to forward this to your readers:

*NAVIGATION*

Because I did not read the instructions; I downloaded the file to the desktop. In Explorer, dragged it to that directory (which created a shortcut, not a copy) and installed the file from within the recommended directory. The file is a temporary orphan on the desktop, as a result.

Regards.

McDonells

1303 KINGSLANE

Subject Smart Ship 11f (see Yorktown discussion)

From: Jim Dodd [jimdodd@tcubed.net]

Dear Jerry,

As a retired Naval Officer who served in submarines (enlisted) and destroyers (commissioned) I would like to comment on the Smart Ship theory. If the Navy is really going to use computers and other automation to counter the effect of poor recruiting and retention results (ie too few crew members), then two other problems also must be solved. These are routine cleaning and maintenance, and damage control party manning.

Ships are like boats, holes in the water into which one pours money. Ships just need more money poured than do boats, a lot more money. A lot of this takes the form of labor. I am sure your son can tell you about the amount of plain old cleaning, chipping and painting it takes to keep a war ship going just sitting alongside the pier. I haven’t heard of any miracles in maintenance since I retired in 1983.

Dublin, Tara, Newgrange, Glendalough and more!

If any of you want to stop receiving these notifications, please drop

me a note and I'll remove you from the list. Conversely, if there's

someone you think that ought to be on the list, send me their email

address and I'll add it.

--

I find myself in a bit of a bind, and the topic is one that’s been on your beat over the years; I figure if you don’t know, a staffer or reader may remember.

And that’s all I need.

Anyone have any ideas?

Jerry,

I have been using these wonderful items on the Newton for several years. As an airline pilot, I find it very helpful to have a spare book or four along on a trip, without loading down my very limited baggage space. The majority of my collection is older classics the copyrights have expired on. It is a wonderful collection, all the Oz books are available, for example. I only have The Wizard in hardback, but I have the full set on my Newton.
It is surprisingly easy to read on the Newton, I hold newt in my left hand, with the page arrows sitting right under my left thumb. A slight tap on the screen with the corner of the thumbnail is all it takes to turn the page.

Highly recommended.

Making Newton books is very simple, at one time the programs to convert text were free. There are several programs that work well for this, and a number of sites have a large collection of works available. The AMUG cd series has a number of works on each cd.

For a few examples of what is available.

I hope this sheds some light on the subject for you.

There was considerable press about these three companies about 2 months ago. After looking carefully at their offerings and their own ideas of future plans, it became clear that there was nothing there of interest to me.

At the overall price of ebooks only technical books would interest me. None of the ebook publishers had this market in mind. Not everyone is as thrifty as I am. Even with that in mind, only one of the publishers seemed to be a practical way to enjoy light reading. And to state that much is stretching the concept of enjoy considerably.

It is fairly easy to design a light duty, hand held machine with about 32 Mbytes of memory that would hold about 10 books and use a reflective display a paperback page with scrolling back and forth. A few simple functions such as bookmarking would keep the power requirements down to the point that a battery life of 24 hours is reasonable

While not popular with authors, it seems likely that authors would find that as with the scientific enterprise good work attracts money even when the ideas are offered for free.

I have been rereading a lot of classics on my PalmPilot (you can find most of the Gutenburg project out there) for over a year now.

I’ll grant you that it isn’t the easiest format to read compared with print, on the other hand, I almost always have my Pilot with me. It definitely lightens the load when travelling, and that is usually important to me, at least when on business.

I do see interesting times in the copyright arena, as how do you possibly police this? One site that I browse had a couple of Niven's "Gil the ARM" shorts on it. I see that they have disappeared, as I’m pretty sure they’re still covered by copyright, but how many copies are already floating around is anyone’s guess.

I do hope that some progress is made on protecting the copyright and ensuring that authors are compensated for their work, as I think that this market is only going to grow. How it can be done is beyond me at this point.

Good luck with the cleanup. If your space is anything like mine, a small dump truck is usually the best approach.

Good luck, and don’t take too much time away from the writing, as I hate the wait!