Subject: Converting Internet messages to Exchange or Outlook

Jerry,

The utilities gallery has a variety of utilities for handling mail exporting

Dear Mr. Pournelle:

I’ve followed your column pretty avidly for years and this latest one just begs for a discussion. I have not yet read Alan Coopers book , but it sure sounds like he’s hit the nail on the head.

I do technical writing for a living and I can tell you from personal experience that most of the people who write these programs haven’t a clue about how they are really used. Sadly, that’s just the beginning, you might even expect propeller-heads to not "get" it, but the GUI’s themselves are nothing short of a disaster. You and I may have gotten used to the damned things, after years of frustration. Normal people, like, say, my wife, think we are insane. We’ve had long talks on the subject and I finally began to understand what she was driving at. A user interface should be intuitive, the information you need, or the way to get to it should be readily apparent. Now what we have is really little more than a shell over a directory tree, no interface indexing, no cross-references, no real aids to navigation.

Perhaps the closest thing I ever saw to a truly useful interface was dreamt up at PARC (where else). They had a 3-dimensional screen object you could manipulate and inspect from many angles. Relationships between informational objects changed as your viewpoint changed. In a very short time you could achieve an almost holistic appreciation of the information space. Another approach is something called The Brain, which encourages you to reorganize your entire information structure however you see fit. I’ve worked with it just a tiny bit and, while it takes a significant amount of time to set up, I can see there being a great improvement in how you can interact with the system.

Your complaint that you like to know what goes on in your computer doesn’t really hold up. I can clearly recall columns of yours fairly reeking with your anger, frustration and contempt for poorly designed and/or implemented software. I suspect you and I are a bit alike: we have a certain "geek" curiosity that wants to know how it all works, but what we really want to do is write, or play music or make 3D animations. In the end, the incompetence of the interface design prevents us from doing what we really want or working at our highest level.

We should demand a much, much better way to sort, manipulate, play with the plethora of information at our fingertips. It’s really not very good, certainly not good enough.

The entry for Windows logo key in Help (which by the way can be reached instead of the Help for the app you're in by pressing WinKey + F1) is rather sparse but it has another goodie: Winkey + Break pops up the System control panel.

Subject: Embassy Bombing

From: Jim Griebel (jgri@earthlink.net)

"Letting morons who can't tell the difference between a vacant lot and the Chinese Embassy play with billion dollar B2 bombers (either as pilots or as mission planners) is so incompetent as to be indistinguishable from malice. Or am I being too harsh?"

No. I get snippets of news courtesy MSNBC on the beeper, and when this came over I said to myself That’s gotta be a mistake, some dumb reporter got his ill-informed source wrong. But this seems to be the story. Old map. Sorry about that.

I mean, I know our recce assets aren’t what they used to be, but you could probably get a map from Michelin that told you where the Chinese Embassy was, for Gossakes. And if they aren’t getting any fresh imagery, how are they doing BDA? And if they are getting fresh imagery, why in hell are they relying on some old map? And where did that come from?

I used to be an enlisted assistant to a FAC, and a tactical mission planned in haste that bombed something that wasn’t supposed to have bombed at all would have gotten everybody involved stood tall if it happened in simulation. In a live situation you could have hit your own people. And the mission we’re talking about here wasn’t planned in the time it takes to fill out the form on the hood of a jeep or in a battalion TOC, based on a situation map at least partly guesswork; no, this one was planned by people with plenty of leisure to make a list and check it twice, and with, one would assume, all the latest information at their fingertips. If you can mislay a target as sensitive as the Chinese Embassy, what else are you hitting that isn’t what you think it is? Whoever was most directly responsible for planning this mission ought to be shot. I don’t think I mean that figuratively.

I don’t want to get into a long discussion of the niceties of bombing, which even with PGMs is a fairly wholesale business in which you’re going to break things and kill people you weren’t aiming at. If they said the pilot dropped short, or pitched long, or the weapon went unguided, or something like that, I wouldn’t be writing this. Those things happen. Nobody’s said that. They’ve said that whoever hit the Chinese embassy (and I can’t find out whether that was an aircrew or what) was aiming at it. Ooops. Gee, we’re sorry.

We need look no further for the reason why so many Americans take a conspiratorial view of current events or for that matter all of history. Who can believe that this was the mistake we’re hearing that it was? Well, I can; the armed forces and intelligence agencies of not one but half a dozen countries, working in concert, can foul up anything. And NATO is beginning to run out of targets, like the RAF and USAAF towards the end of the bombing campaigns against Germany and Japan in WWII. When they started bombing radio and television stations I had the feeling that target exhaustion was setting in; now I’m sure it is. By now they may not be looking that closely at targets whoever "nominates" them – if you’re going to keep the pressure on by bombing you’ve gotta bomb something -- and we may look forward to more mistakes and more Presidential apologies.

Jerry,

About user interfaces: I don’t know who really counts as an objective critic of such things; I myself tend to think of MacOS’s GUI as being wonderfully intuitive, but given vehement dissent from other people (who find the Win95 GUI pleasing, unlike me), I’m left wondering whether *any* interface is "intuitive" unless you’ve used it for a long, long time.

Incompetence in the Balkans: it is positively horrifying how utterly dependent the competence of a war seems to be on the cluefulness, or lack thereof, of the Commander-in-Chief. Clinton reminds me of a deer caught in the headlights—the differences being that the deer has the sense to at least be scared, and that it won’t be Clinton but the country that ends up being roadmeat.

Subject: Windows 98 scanreg, Legacy client woes.

Hi, I learned this trick from a Microsoft Support Technician: Under Win98 use scanreg /fix from the command line mode to clean out the registry. Run it five times(!). It will run progressively faster with each pass. I have used this utility to help ISP customers with system stability problems including frequent Illegal operations, Shut Down failures, and missing file notices at boot time. It has nearly always worked. One time it ran progressively slower, resulting in a system that would not boot until Win98 was reinstalled from scratch.

The nearest equivalent in Win95 was setup /f, which, I am told (again by a Microsoft support tech,) forces a rebuilt of the registry. This is less reliable than scanreg in Win98, but often works.

Another new utility in Win98 is FSC (File System Check). When setup is run, Win98 does a CRC on all critical system files and stores the information somewhere. FSC scans system files and looks for changes in these critical system components. It will offer to replace files that have changed, interactively, one file at a time, and will offer to save copies of files that have been replaced. This tool must be used with great caution because many applications, especially from Microsoft, will install updated dll, vxd, and MFC class library files with updated versions. The result may be applications that no longer function &; must be reinstalled.

One final comment regarding software that does not allow you to control system parameters. A major problem in our tech support shop is the inability to run Microsoft email clients side by side on our systems in order to "look over the shoulder" of a customer while helping them with client configuration. We can install three to five versions of Netscape, in separate subdirectories, and have them function properly so that when a customer using Netscape 2.x calls in we can open the program and walk them through the configuration screens. This is impossible with Microsoft applications. Inbox (Microsoft mail), Outlook Express, Outlook97, and Outlook 2000 will simply NOT coexist on the same system. Even if you could choose what subdirectories to install to (and in most cases you can not,) subsequent installs replace system dll files and MFC class files at will. The result is missing, incorrectly enumerated, or corrupt component warnings when you attempt to run the legacy application. One consequence of this is that people who share workstations are forced to upgrade their Microsoft mail clients to what ever the most recent installed version is—whether they want to or not.

Regards,

--

Thomas E. Kindig [tokind@zianet.com] Hypertext means

Hello, Dr. Pournelle.

I’m a long time fan of your work, both fiction and non-fiction.

Two things:

This article shows how a dual processor NT system can be built for several hundred dollars less than the typical Pentium II numbers.

"The first time Win 95 comes up, it sees the sound card. It wants

the Sound Card Drivers. Those are on a CD-ROM. However,

Windows hasn’t installed the SCSI CD-ROM drivers yet, so it

This can easily be worked around by simply cancelling the install of these drivers the first time around and waiting until windows setup reboots the machine again. The second time around windows will prompt you again for the drivers and you will have access to your CD-ROM.

I don't think it worked that way for me, but from a hotel room I can't tell…. Thanks. This is a bit awkward. Portables are great for a lot of stuff, but the screen is small for doing big paste operations…

I have a couple of these Intel motherboards with the jumper that has to be moved to access the setup routines. I agree that it’s a pain but there is a reason for it.

We are quite concerned about security with respect to viruses. It would have to be a pretty robust virus to climb into your computer and move that jumper to access your bios, wouldn’t it? The main problem arose with the fact that nearly all motherboards today employ flash bios rather than ROM bios. This means, of course, that you can easily update your bios by simply "turning on" the write function of the flash and then loading the new bios. A virus could do this too. By having a physical switch blocking that function you prevent this from ever happening. You might wind up with a hosed hard disk but you will never wind up with a hosed motherboard. I seem to remember that the infamous "Chernobyl" virus did exactly that.

I would have preferred that the folks over in Systems provide for an external keyswitch but I suppose you could just install one yourself. But then, they probably wish that we chip geeks do some things differently too.

Does this make any sense at all?

Happy to hear the snake oil works. Did those purveyors in the latter part of the last century have something then?

On Reflection I agree. It took getting used to, but it's not that big a problem for someone who will set and forget. Of course for experimenters it can be a pain opening the box every time you want to update it, but then if you are adding internal equipment you open it anyway…

Subject: very interesting site --linux and "open source copyright" !!

Jerry,

Check out the article called "The Practical Manager’s Guide to Linux" the author Ganesh C. Prasad can write almost as lucidly as you can. I’ve read you for years in Byte.

Keep up the good words!

Brent

Thanks.

Scott Kitterman

Kitterma@erols.com

There are five separate issues related to Kosovo in this week's View. I have thoughts on all of them (I should make it clear here that these are my opinions and I am representing no one else):

1. Maps. Based on what I've heard in the news it sounds like a series of errors were made. The 1992 map of Belgrade was updated in 1997.

The new Chinese embassy building was added to the map, but no notation as to its purpose was included. In my opinion we are about 20 years into our over reliance on "National technical means". If you are looking at a picture and you've never been to Belgrade, questions about what the building is for or where the embassy went just don't occur to you. That was the first mistake.

Then, the targeteers picked the wrong building (not a parking lot) off the map.

There was apparently no one in charge of keeping track of embassies.

As usual in DoD, people were imperfect as they always are, but the real moron was the bureaucratic system.

2. Laws of Armed Conflict. First, although often referred to as laws of war, they are laws of armed conflict. That's why the POWs were POWs and not illegal immigrants.

The laws of armed conflict do not prohibit damage to non-military targets. What they say, and I'm paraphrasing because it's been a while, is that collateral damage must not be disproportionate to the military gain. When using precision guided munitions, it appears the number of stray weapons has been low. For a target of military value I think it is probably lawful to use them in a built up area. I am seriously distressed by reports of cluster munitions being used in urban areas. If those are true, I would think that would be questionable at best.

Legitimate military targets are not limited to the uniformed military. Civilians who support the military effort and the means of military production are legitimate targets. I would say that the offices where people are working on importing weapons to support the war effort pretty clearly fall into the legitimate category.

Although not an issue for the laser guided bombs apparently used in the embassy attack, there are weapon systems in use today in which the person launching the weapon doesn't know what the final destination is.

3. Are the orders from the President to execute this campaign constitutional?

Armed conflict short of war has a long and distinguished history in this country. Before the Constitution was a decade old, we were engaged an undeclared naval war with France. The anti-Federalist Thomas Jefferson did not stop the First Barbary War when he assumed the Presidency.

There is a line beyond which the President is not allowed to go. I'm not sure exactly where the line is, but some armed conflict is allowed without a Congressional declaration. I think a sensible dividing line would be engaging regular Army troops in sustained combat. That is the point that significant American casualties are likely to begin.

I agree there is an important Constitutional question here.

4. Was the attack on Serbia legitimate under international law? Not only is it legitimate, it may have actually been required. I have heard the administration's argument that this fits within some sort of loophole in the UN Charter. I'm not an expert and I and won't try and repeat it here. The other pertinent treaty is the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

The relevant quote is, "The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether commited (sic) in time of peace, or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish." When we ratified the treaty in 1988, we agreed to prevent genocide. What Serbia is doing fits the treaty definition. I found the entire text at:

http://www.oil.ca/rights/cppcg/cppcg.html

5. How screwed up is the US military?

The only Air Force EW capability that I'm familiar with being eliminated is the EF-111A airborne jammer. I'm not a fan of excessive jointness, but I think this is one decision that made sense. The EW systems in the EF-111A and the Navy EA-6Bs that are being used to support both services now are the same.

The critical issue that has led us to this position is Air Force doctrine. The doctrine essentially states that air strikes against the enemy are a decisive element on their own. A subsidiary aspect of this doctrine is that the ability to conduct close air support is not very important since ground troops aren't really necessary. The result of this is a force that can blow up fixed targets very nicely, but has neither the intelligence gathering capability, the command and control structure, nor the weapons to effectively and rapidly attack mobile forces.

There isn't, in my opinion, enough money in the defense budget today to accomplish all the missions the military has been assigned, but that's not the major problem in Kosovo. The major problem is the air power dreamers continue to oversell their capability. Bad doctrine leads to the wrong force structure.

Personally, I think we've set a very dangerous precedent in attacking a sovereign nation over internal issues. We were crazy to think a little bit of bombing would cause the Serbs to back down over Kosovo. That said, that's in the past. We've headed down the road and we need to look ahead not back. Having started it, we need to finish it. Now I need to sit and think through what I mean by finish it.

Regarding the UN conventions on genocide, they are not self-executing; a Security Council resolution is the only authority I know for sending in UN forces. There was no such, nor could there be.

The real lesson is, you are not sovereign unless you have nuclear weapons: something Indian and Pakistan clearly have learned, and other nations will learn it now. Sovereign nations have nukes. Others may be bombed with impunity. If that was not the lesson intended, it was I think the one taught. We would not bomb Russia over Chechnya.

I have not been impressed with Wm. Kristol and The Weekly Standard arguing that we probably should not have gone in there, it was probably illegal to do it, but now that we have we must, to remain credible, win, not get out. This strikes me as a very bad argument, and one designed to undermine the vesting of the power to declare war in the Congress. If we should not have been in there, we should not be there. And "win" I fear means establishing the KLA in power, meaning we must then occupy our protectorate forever, or allow the KLA to destabilize the region in the name of Albanian nationalism. Neither of those sounds attractive.

Subject: Microsoft To Support IEEE 1394 

I must not have been as clear as I should be: firewire is plenty fast, in some incarnations. I thought I was talking about USB, which is just now becoming widespread in use, and which is OK for some things, but does tend to be saturated. Thanks.

Hypersearching the Web

A very good article about IBM’s Clever project, which is a search engine that mines the links to/from web pages to determine ‘authoritative’ pages and return those first.

This engine uses a concept of ‘hubs’ (lists of links) and ‘authorities’ and assumes that authoritative pages will be listed on lots of hubs, and that hubs will tend to list lots of authoritative pages.

The article goes in to a lot of detail on the algorithm and I find it fascinating.

Barrie Slaymaker [rbs@telerama.com]

Thanks.

Subject: I had some serious problems with Fix-It Utilities in NT4

Hi, I read your excerpt on Mijenix's Fix-It Utilities tool. I'm dissapointed that Mijenix has not been forthcoming with some of the problems that users have had with their tool in Windows NT4 systems. I run a PII 450 Dell with 384 MB of ECC-RAM and Windows NT4 Svc Pk 4. I have my disk partitioned with Powerquest's Partition Magic so that I have a completely separate Windows 98 partition for my daughter to use for kid's software/games.

I purchased Fix-It shortly after it was released and installed in in both partitions. I had no problems in Windows 98 but the NT partition was a nightmare. The product introduced an instability in the operating system so that I would get constant crashes to blue screen. I talked at length with someone from the development group at Mijenix who reported that unfortunately they had not gotten as much feedback from their NT beta users as they would have liked...and most were running Svc. Pk 3. I was unable to stabilized the system even after uninstalling Fix-It. I had to wipe the partition and reinstall NT and all my apps. With over 60 apps loaded, this took over 40 hours (with all the patches on the apps and with the constant reboots that WinNT requires). Then Mijenix pressed me to reinstall FIX-IT with some changes they had quickly made. I debated this for a couple of weeks but since I really wanted the functionality that FIX-IT supplied, I went ahead and reinstalled the modified version. Well-- to make a long story short, again the system became unstable and started crashing to blue screen when closing IE5 or running other apps. I tried to contact Mijenix a number of times by sending email directly to their support group, but I suspect that they just didn't know what to do about this. None of us could tell whether the problem was introduced by running their registry fixer (which I suspect) or some other feature. Unfortunately again, backing out their application did not resolve the instability. Again I was forced to do a clean reload and reinstall my apps for a week. At that point I gave up and returned their product for a refund to my credit card. As I see it, they did not adequately test their product in enough configurations or loads under Windows NT.

I felt that I was just another beta or even alpha tester for their product. I continue to read reviews such as yours and the others in PC Magazine and else that praise their suite. But I'm surprised to see no mention of the problems under NT. Considering that I am a senior computer scientist with 15 years of experience and even did 2 clean installs to test their product and still got a terrible instability in Windows NT--- I think they should have pulled the product or warned users about installing it in NT until the bugs are removed.

Thanks

. Lore Levitt

Jerry,

Sorry this isn't in the approved format but. Two weeks ago I got the IE5 CD from MS. Installed it (on Win98). System died. In order to fix it I had to fdisk(!!) and re-format my C drive. Fortunately, before I install ANYTHING I back up to CD-R. To test my theory that it was IE5, I did the following:

1. Install Win98 OEM, install IE5, install everything else I could.

2. Install Win98 OEM, install everything else, install IE5.

3. Install everything except IE5.

Both 1 and 2 above resulted in crash, fdisk, reformat. 3 was OK. Still haven't re-installed word. It was a long day, but at least I learned something. Not sure what.

Of course, my system is a bit more complex than most. I have two hard drives, which, as I recall, you found out Win98 sometimes (randomly?) doesn't like. A Creative Live card (4.1 channel surround sound) a creative 6X DxR3 DVD-ROM player. The Live plus DxR3 is highly recommended, by the way. An hp 7200i CD-R drive. Thus, all 4 IDE channels are in use, and I am running some devices that are less than a year old. Given the experiences of others with IE5 (no problems) I think it is the complxity of my system that is causing the problem with IE5.

Earlier I sent a message that ScanReg is not included with Win95. This Win98 program appears, to me, to operate properly on Wn95. I’ve used it on several computers with all versions of Win95; your experience may vary. I suppose MicroSoft would have a problem with moving files between OS versions, though.

John

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Dear Jerry,

After reading some of your thoughts about the state of schools in the past versus the present, I thought you might be interested in a couple of web pages I stumbled across today.

Have you ever heard of the Follow Through program? It was a near-billion dollar experimental study that evaluated the success of several different teaching methods. The clear winner was "Direct Instruction," which is probably similar to the way you were taught as a youngster. As the results became apparent, advocates of the unsuccessful methods argued that the quantitative research used in the study was inappropriate for assessing teaching methods. Rather, they said that their methods should be assessed through ethnographic and other "soft" techniques. The results of the study have subsequently been largely ignored by the educational establishment.

Details are at

http://www.athenet.net/~jlindsay/EducData.shtml

http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~adiep/ft/151toc.htm


Regards

Thomas J Crook, tjcrook@email.com