CHAOS MANOR MAIL
A SELECTION
Through August 2, 1998
03:05 AM
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Fair warning: some of those previous weeks can take a minute plus to download.
WARNING: DO NOT FORMAT MAIL YOU SEND ME. Use normal Word documents, and do not BLOCK QUOTE. One way BLOCK QUOTES appear is if you use TAB to move signitures over to the right side. Don't do that. Leave them on the left, please. Block Quotes mess up things enough that it takes me a long time to fix it for some readers.
We start with Commander and intellectual property. Then we go to mail about my wizards essay.
Then the WinChip bit. Then general mail and something on Active Desktop, then more on WinChip. It's a busy world.
Begin with this (brought over from view, but now there's more.)
From: J.H. Ricketson [warlock@pacbell.net]
Sent: Friday, July 24, 1998 11:49 AM
To: jerryp@jerrypournelle.com
Subject: Norton Commander for Windows 9x - Found It
Jerry -
Found it at:
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/EFSoftware/
Downloadable. US$59.
Took WebFerret 45 seconds to find it. WF _highly_ recommended.
Regards,
JHR
[J.H. Ricketson in San Pablo]
which raises interesting questions. The version shown here is not Symantec's Update Commanders, but a Swiss shareware program. The program works. It has some features Commander may not have. I haven't used the shareware program a lot, but those who do swear by it.
For me the problem is intellectual property. Symantec's Commander was a unique design, integrated with a command structure and an interface view and the navy hat as icon. I would presume all this is copyrighted. If ever there was an original look and feel it was Commander. Now it is copied as shareware. Normally that would be open and shut: a ripoff. However, Symantec has as good as abandoned Commander for Windows (although I gather there the German version still sells in Europe so it's not quite abandoned). I have myself been tempted to put up disk images of Commander Upgrade on the web as a public service, although of course I haven't done it. I understand the motives of the Swiss programmer who designed this and has done a lot of work making it useful and keeping it current. I have great sympathy for him.
My compromise has been that I don't much talk about the program; but of course I was able to bully Symantec into selling me a copy of the upgrade…
Now really little of this discussion belongs in VIEW, and if I had time I'd move it over to MAIL, and you see the problem. I have a lot more mail that raises interesting questions.
Then:
From: J.H. Ricketson [warlock@pacbell.net]
Sent: Sunday, July 26, 1998 8:49 AM
To: jerryp@jerrypournelle.com
Subject: Commander Clone - Another Point of View [LONG]
Dear Jerry,
With absolute respect (awe is more like it), I would like to expound on my view of the situation:
1. As you admit - Symantec _has_ abandoned Commander - as they did Central Point Software and Q&;A. If they had paid even cursory attention to these, you would still be happily turning out even more books (&;columns) on Q&;A Write, and having Q&;A do an excellent job of handling your mailing lists. Instead, you (and I) are stuck with the likes of Word, Access, Look Out!, etc. About the only thing that can be said of them is that, like democracy, the alternatives are even less desirable. What _really_ galls me is that I KNOW that there are better alternatives to these programs possible.
2. I can appreciate and empathize with your feelings that the Commander clone author has been at least discourteous. I submit that we will probably never know the truth of the matter. The author makes no attempt to conceal that it _is_ a clone. This leads me to believe that it has at least the tacit blessing of Symantec. Gods only know why. Once again - they simply abandoned the ball and left the field - while they were ahead, with a winner!
3. Again - I appreciate your point of view as a professional author - but: If someone were to "clone" John Christian Falkenburg and write more "Falkenburg’s Legion" books of the same quality, I would quite happily buy them and not feel too badly. You are only one man, and even with your incredible endurance - there are only 24 hours in the day. Could you really have a valid objection if someone else picked up the torch and reincarnated Christian Johnnie? He seems to have gone / been sent to his reward so far as you are concerned. OTOH, I am _really_ pleased and eagerly awaiting "Mamelukes", if it is a follow-on to "Janissaries." It is, IMO, what you do best. "Starswarm" was, IMO, not Pournelle at his best, enjoyable as it was. POINT: Please keep up the good work, doing what you do best.
4. Finally, and last-but-not-least, the Commander clone is now the only game in town. None of the rest of us are Jerry Pournelle, who can cause Symantec somehow to produce a copy of a now non-existent program for him. I’m grateful to the author. I do wish I could still buy the original, however, and would do so if it were available to me. Please publicize the source of the original if one is located by any of your gang out here.
Despite the critical tone of this, you always have my respect and sincere (selfishly so) best wishes for a long, contented and productive life - so that you may continue to delight me and all the rest of Pournelle’s Legion.
Regards,
JHR
--
[J.H. Ricketson in San Pablo]
Which raises some points worth thinking on. First, there are those who think Starswarm is the best thing I have ever done. For an author his best work is the one he's doing now, so I don't have to get into that. Starwarm was intended for a more general readership than the Falkenberg novels, which were never quite what they seemed to be: more like my history and moral philosophy lessons.
Regarding Commander, if I thought there as a tacit agreement with Symantec on Commodore I wouldn't have any mixed emotions at all; I'd simply compare it with the genuine Symantec upgrade, which I understand is being sold in Europe but not here.
The most interesting point is the general nature of intellectual property. Now there is a sense in which I am not harmed if someone else plants in my field. On the other hand it is very rare for authors to give permission for that, in part because they don't want the job of editing for consistency: I did that with War World, which I created partly in the hopes of providing something that John Carr could take over as his own, he having worked so hard and so long for me. I never could quite cut loose: there was always something I noticed that was just not quite part of the vision I had. Those books were a lot of work for not very much money.
I would be even less pleased to have someone else do Falkenberg, because I really do have a philosophical view expressed in those stories. A long time ago a German Communist translated one of the Falkenberg books and took out every single line with meaning, leaving only violence and blood. He thought he was showing the "real" work; he even boasted of "showing him for the Fascist he is." When I met him one year at a World Con he was quite pleased with himself. He also had no idea of what a Fascist is or believes, but that's pretty standard: few now know the difference between Mussolini's Fascism and Hitler's National Socialism, and almost none can contrast either with Marx/Lenin theories of class warfare. So while the world might be deprived of some action/adventure by my ownership of the copyright, I am spared the pain of seeing someone use my own work to make it appear I have views I don't have.
Of course it's not quite the same with software.
Now on the subject of my essay:
From: Tim of Angle [tadhg@bigfoot.com]
Sent: Sunday, July 26, 1998 5:34 AM
To: Jerry Pournelle
Subject: Response to "Reflections"
Of course, if the fact that the article was reprinted from "Salon" (which I will not dignify with the name "magazine") wasn’t a sufficient clue, the fact that it involved Ellen Ullman, current Court Magician to the Chattering Classes, would have been enough.
She has a book out, "Close to the Machine : Technophilia and Its Discontents", concerning which the chief attractions seem to be (judging by the reviews) her sexual preference (or lack of it) and her "former" communism; that ought to tell you quite a bit about its value right there. I suspect that those same qualities were what endeared her to "Salon"; they have published other articles and interviews with her, all laudatory—you’d think she was the new Esther Dyson. She certainly seems to be the left-wing equivalent.
It is an unfortunate fact that anyone who gets paid to do something is entitled to call himself a "professional" these days, regardless of the quality of the work thus produced or of the presence (or absence) of those attitudes and habits that you and I think of as constituting the core of professionalism. I suspect that Ms. Ullman is a "computer professional" only in the sense that she can turn one on without it blowing up and she employs people who actually *are* computer professionals to service her clients. Her ideological biases color everything she says, and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it colors everything she does, as well. Only the fact that businesses are desperate for the sort of boost that the proper application of information technology can give them allows her sort the scope to dirty this field.
Her dislike for ‘wizards’ is characteristic, and proves that she isn’t a *professional* programmer at all; merely the employer and coordinator of professional programmers. I *am* a professional programmer, which means that I have X amount of time to get a product finished, and working, and in the hands of our customers—and I’ll use any aide, product, trick, or shortcut I can lay my hands on to get that product built, working properly, and out the door. A proper respect for the value of one’s own time is the first thing *I* think of when I think "professional". (Your reaction to your first use of Electric Pencil is a good case in point. You are a professional writer, and when the opportunity came to ease the non-creative aspects of the job, you jumped on it like a duck on a junebug.)
Ms. Ullman may write and speak entertainingly, but that makes her a writer and a speaker, not a programmer. Much as with the distinction you commonly make between "author" and "writer", I suspect that Ms. Ullman is one of those who much prefer "being a programmer" to actually writing code. I regard her as evidence that the pseudo-intellectual dilettante elite, having ruined the arts, literature, economics, and politics in the modern world, is invading technical fields as well. A pity.
Don’t waste your time reading "Salon", or anything reprinted from "Salon", or anything written by anyone published in "Salon". Write for us instead. We’ll all be much happier.
{The Signature had undeletable lines in it: that is a long line of equal signs, that could be deleted only by getting rid of the whole block, so I did: in future I will simply not try to include any letter with stuff like that in it. PLEASE DO NOT DECORATE MAIL TO ME!!!!!}
I'm not sure I need to respond to this. My view of Ullman's capabilities as programmer should be plain from the essay.
From: Erich Schwarz [schwarz@cubsps.bio.columbia.edu]
Sent: Sunday, July 26, 1998 1:34 PM
To: Jerry Pournelle
Subject: Somewhat less fatuous reasons to loathe NT versus Linux.
Dear Dr. Pournelle,
I can understand your dislike of the Ullman article in Harper’s, but less flakey reasons than hers exist to distrust NT versus Linux.
In a (long) sentence:
It is very far from clear that the incentive structures acting upon a proprietary OS sold for profit are actually consistent with maximum debugging and reliability of that OS, versus an OS whose source code is open to scrutiny and open to improvement by many intense users who are also programmers.
Considerable articulate and non-flakey, non-_Harper_-esque writing exists to substantiate this point:
1. Recent evidence that NT is literally putting our Navy at risk of losing battles. See:
Note the fantastic slack that MS is getting cut by the Navy. Consider the possibility that if the reverse had been true, and Linux instead of NT had caused a major ship to literally choke, we’d have seen MS trumpeting the news to the skies and braying about how NT was "the answer."
Reflect that, in warfare, stupidity is always a capital crime. Recollect that padding of military procurement contracts and shoddy provisions to the military by profit seeking civilian corporations are a fantastic Achilles’ heel in warfare, one that we have typically had to sacrifice a number of brave young men in the early phases of every war to root out.
Ask yourself whether you’d want the life of one of your sons to depend on the sort of lame excuse made for NT: "Although Unix is more reliable ... NT may become more reliable with time."
2. Substantial, wide-spread empirical observation by serious programmers—not people trying to maintain a caste guild, but simply professionals trying to get the job done—that NT is a feeble reed. For a painstakingly lengthy and documented description of this—by a Windows NT *Microsoft Certified* Professional— please read:
http://www.kirch.net/unix-nt.html
3. Intrinsic reasons exist why operating systems may simply not be easily optimised if their source code is kept secret. You’ve probably already read Eric Raymond’s already-classic essay on this, but, if not, it’s at:
Nor is Raymond some semi-competent crunchy granola programmer, as his resume should show:
Nor is Raymond anti-capitalist, as his criticisms of the Richard Stallman school of thought should show:
http://www.opensource.org [several references within site]
Nor is he trying to keep computing restricted to an elite:
http://sagan.earthspace.net/~esr/faqs/index.html
4. C is not an *intrinsically* obscure language. It is merely one with many obscure programmers writing it. Clear C programming, readable by others years after its composition, is possible, and is the standard promoted by O’Reilly Books. Read _Practical C Programming_ by Steve Oualline (3rd. ed., O’Reilly) for a splendid description of how to make the technical power of Kernighan’s language coexist with the cleanliness one expects in (e.g.) PASCAL.
Thank you for your consideration of these points,
--Erich Schwarz
One of Niven's Laws: "There is no cause so noble that it will not attract fuggheads." A corollary to that law is that the fuggheads will get more attention than the serious spokespeople for the cause.
I think I have said before that while I trust NT on small systems, it wouldn't be my choice for something with life and death mission critical requirements. But then Linux wouldn't be either. I'd go with something with a lot more organized support. I do use NT for my work, but then I back up a lot too.
As to C, I do not believe it is possible to write C code that is understandable to those who didn't work on it; or putting it another way, if there is any such, it is very rare. The common outcome is code that is maintainable, barely, by the original programming team. In any event, C is hard enough to learn that if we are to have a lot of coding applications the choices are: trust the (human) wizards and go without until you can find one; or use code generation software wizards and get code you don't understand.
It is my belief that computers won't be really mature until a change takes place. At one time the ability to write was important and rare enough to get you a job. Public stenographers who wrote letters for illiterate business people existed when I was a young man. Now the ability to write is taken for granted. Writing well takes work, but just writing a letter doesn't take a professional. Knowing what to write is important; the ability to get the words onto paper is ubiquitous or should be.
Should it not be that way with programming? And I contend that if the trend to teach Pascal as a first language, and Modula -- or, God save us, ADA -- as the production language had continued we would have a lot more readable programs today, and a lot less need for the kind of Wizards Microsoft develops. But we don't, and we will become more, not less, dependent on those wizards; or so I think today.
Tien Lowe [tlowe@herald.infi.net]
Dear Sir:
I enjoyed reading your response to the Dumbing Down article. I've read your Byte magazine column since you reviewed the Amiga 1000 and Atari ST. You don't seem to tolerate much BS.
Still, I cannot agree fully with your response. Though I realize that the computer is, above all else, a tool to get my work done, I miss the days when we worried about efficiency in programming.
I am currently deploying new database software in my district. Though the 3D buttons and drop down menus look quite pretty, the program is horribly slow and unstable. The simple fact is that I could do as well with a few Access queries and some lines of Visual Basic code (which is what the software was written in). But I am not a programmer! People who get paid to write software should code better than me, a technically proficient hobbyist.
To blame visual programming environments is, of course, to blame the tools. It does not excuse poor programmers. The fault of these environments is that they make it far too easy for anyone to declare a himself (or herself) a programmer by mixing parts together. It's fine for hobbyists like myself, but professional programmers should do better.
Sincerely,
Kwan Lowe
But then most anyone can call himself a professional writer now. Or open a web site and be a journalist. Or an editor, or a publisher. Surely that is no bad thing, to get rid of credentialism? After all, many military instructors are much better teachers than the 'certified professionals' who are 'credentialed teachers'. And yes, wizards can and do write awful programs. We all knew that. But they can also write stuff that just gets the job done. I have a bunch of primitive programs, klunky, awful interface, that still get the work done so I have never replaced them.
The real question is, what are we to conserve? There are a lot of electrons in the universe. Surely we aren't trying to save on electrons? Or computing cycles? What we want is to get on with our lives…
Professional programmers should do better, but in over 20 years in this computer revolution I have found by and large that the best thing is what works, and often that's a kludge I did myself. Then some day someone writes Quicken. I wish I had. But I still use a CBASIC accounting program I wrote in 1978, and it still works, klunks and all….
Peter Glaskowsky on my WinChip Problems.
|
From: Peter Glaskowsky
Peter N. Glaskowsky [png@ideaphile.com]
Sent: Monday, July 27, 1998 1:15 PM
To: jerryp@jerrypournelle.com
Cc: png@ideaphile.com
Subject: WinChip system problems and Ellen Ullman
Boy, I go out of town for a week and you run off and put together a machine that’s just doomed to fail from the very beginning. Okay, I know companies sell systems with 75-MHz system buses and 37.5-MHz PCI buses. I know people buy them. I know some of them work reliably. Here’s MY advice: just say no. PCI devices are designed and tested for 33.33-MHz operation. There’s just no basis for assuming any PCI device will work at any higher speed. Even if you find one that works, it might not work when the system warms up, or the power supply voltage drifts a tenth of a volt, or when you add or remove some other PCI card.
It’s probably not fair to say that the Diamond Monster sound card doesn’t work with the WinChip. It’s much more likely to be a conflict with the PCI bus speed.
A 200-MHz/66-MHz WinChip system would probably work fine. You might try cranking your system down to that speed. It’s the same 3:1 divisor ratio, just 200 MHz instead of 225, and 66 MHz instead of 75.
Ellen Ullman, who wrote that Salon piece about Linux, said in an interview on the site:
> I say in the book, I was promoted very rapidly because my employer was
> amazed at my ability to work hundreds of hours a week without cpmplaining.
I’d be amazed at that ability too. :-)
. png
TUESDAY, 28 July 1998
A number of you were kind enough to point out that Partition Magic does have a DOS mode that runs from the CD ROM. I used it to verify that Winnie's partitions were all right. They hadn't been: my guess is that the overclock episode caused more serous problems than I had suspected. See VIEW for details, but all is well, now that the WinChip is running at 66/200 instead of 75/225. Indeed, I can recommend WinChip machines. Again see VIEW.
Typical was:
There should be a "PQMAGICT.EXE" in the root of the CD-ROM; at least I have one on the 3.x CD I have here. This is the DOS version. It doesn’t have pretty graphical menus, but there are simple text menus and you can enter partition sizes and such directly as numbers.
Gary M. Berg (Gary_Berg@ibm.net)
You also pointed out that fdisk in DOS 6.3 is not the same animal as in Win 95b. Then:
Speaking of Partition Magic, there's a bug you need to be aware of. It's no problem for what we're talking about now, but (as I found out by sad experience) you need to be very careful using PM3 on an NTFS disk. Release 3.00 can render a bootable NTFS volume unbootable. They have a patch to 3.05 on their web site (at http://www.powerquest.com/downlwd/3xpm.html). Make sure to get and install it before you use PM3 to mess with your NT partitions.
Bob
Robert Bruce Thompson
There was also a lot of correspondence on Active Desktop. As for instance:
From: Keith Irwin [kirwin@iglobal.net]
Personally, I don’t use any of that stuff, but like the fact that Active Desktop gives you greater control over file windows, letting them remember what they were set to, for instance, or being able to make global changes, and even being able to customize backgrounds. (All stuff you could do with OS/2 way back in 1992, incidently.)
Anyway, might be worth installing, disabling most of it, and then re-enabling one or two things just to see if they’ll be useful.
AND, I seem to remember (before Win98, anyway) that when you ran the uninstall for IE4 from the CPanel’s Add/Remove, it asked if you wanted to uninstall ONLY the active desktop. Perhaps that’s not with every installation....
Enjoying the WinChip discussion. Might you add a link with information about the chip? I’d never heard about it before. Is WinChip a brand name or a company name?
And since you’re into reviews these days, do you watch Babylon 5? Or Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict?
Keith
U of NT
I try to watch Babylon 5, but I don't seem to be in front of a TV when it's on, so I catch up in batches. I confess I was mildly turned off at one time by the "Cardinal Mindzenty" episode last year and stopped looking for the series, but that was an unjustified fit of pique. WinChip is from Integrated Device Technology (www.idt.com), 2975 Stender Way, Santa Clara, CA 95052-8015.
Concerning Babylon 5, Eric asks:
I've missed a few recently but I'm not sure what B5 storyline that name refers to in the past. I can't help being curious where the offense was found.
Mindzenty was the Cardinal Archbishop of Hungary, and was imprisoned prior to the Uprising of 1956 when he was liberated by Hungarian Freedom Fighters. He refused to leave the country and stayed in the American Embassy from 1956 until he died a dozen or more years later. While he was imprisoned the Russians used the techniques that became known as "brainwashing" to try to get him to cooperate with the Sovietization of Hungary. Much of what we know about that technique began by studying his experiences.
It's a powerful theme, and every writer is tempted to have a shot at it. They did so in Babylon 5, and while it was a noble attempt, I don't think the result was very good, either in terms of adding to the story line, or adding to what we know about people in the brainwashing situation. That annoyed me, but as I say, it was an unwarranted fit of pique: they treated the theme with some respect, and my major complaint is that it ought not have taken a full hour. Still it is a story of courage and determination, and if the worst you can say about a TV show is that it attempts themes that are perhaps a bit too large for the series, I would have to say that is actually a form of praise.
Then there's this about mail:
From: John Rice [John_Rice@notes.teradyne.com]
Jerry,
After some experimentation, I now understand the Block Quote problem. It is an artifact of the cut/paste method you use to transfer mail from MS-Word, to MS-Frontpage.
If you use copy/paste to copy a message which has embeded TABs from Word, when it is pasted into FP, the TABS will be replaced by block quotes, to space the tabbed text out to the desired position. I guess this is done because HTML doesn’t inherently support TABs.
This becomes most evident (and causes the width problem) with mail signatures that have been TABed out to the ‘conventional’ letter type signature position. If the signature has been positioned using SPACEs, the problem does not occur (FP just deletes the leading spaces).
While all this is interesting, and leads to understanding what’s going on, I’m not sure how it helps solve the problem overall, other than you might change your comment at the top of the mail page to request that correspondants not use TABs in e-mail.
John
Interesting. It does look like you're right. Thanks.
Read last night’s View this morning, boy can I sympathize. Add a joystick &; trash Windows! You’d think with a Microsoft product there would be a least a fighting chance of it behaving properly.
I reach that stage of total frustration about once every six months or so. I find myself wanting to go back to my previous incarnation as a Tax Auditor. Just come into the office work 8 to 5 and go home. Ah, peace and nirvana!
Then I remember having to explain why someone’s kennel bill for their doberman isn’t deductible as a business expense, and they don’t/can’t/won’t understand. Yeah, at least with computers I can occasionally win an argument... sometimes.
Oxymoron: Microsoft Works.
Hang in there, you are not alone!
Mark Gosdin
Well, we're back up and running now...
J.H. Ricketson [culam@dnai.com]
1. CDs are _fragile_. "Handle only by the edges."
2. CDs are hard to store securely. I don’t dare simply drop them in a drawer or on top of the desk,uncased.
3. CD-R/W disks can be rewritten only "up to 1000 times", I believe the phrase is.
OTOH, MO cartridges are even sturdier than 3.5 floppies. A magnet doesn’t affect them, and they’re physically extremely rugged. No limit on the usage, and even ordinary substrate MOs are supposedly good for 30 years. The expensive kind, with a glass substrate, supposedly will last forever. Can’t beat that - although I don’t expect to be around to collect a refund!
]Microtimes has a nice article on you, "Chaos, the Next Generation", by Mary Eisenhart, at: http://www.microtimes.com/182/jerrypournelle.html
Regards,
JHR
Agree. I like MO a good bit. Have for some time. Still have problems finding 640 meg cartridges though.
Mary did a nice job on that Microtimes bit.
