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CHAOS MANOR MAILA SELECTIONAugust 16 - 22, 1999
CLICK ON THE Bottle TO SEND MAIL TO ME The current page will always have the name currentmail.html and may be bookmarked. For previous weeks, go to the MAIL HOME PAGE.
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. If you want a mail address other than the one from which you sent the mail to appear, PUT THAT AT THE END OF THE LETTER as a signature. 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, and your chances of being published better.. This week: HIGHLIGHTS:
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Monday August 16, 1999I think you reacted too quickly.
There are some subtle and very useful features in Word 2000. The multiple clipboards paste is
worth the price of admission. I have always wanted a stack of clipboards
so I can go along cut out several things and then paste them in different
places. Check it out. When
my eval version ran out I bought the released version. I was definitely
missing something. Limitations are the way menus
are readjusted based on use. Problem is, the items you rarely use are
exactly the ones you want listed because they are the ones you are most
likely to forget. So glad Byte is back and you are
back and more often Thanks, Ivan isindell [isindell@gcsr.com] Multiple clipboards are available from several third parties and work better than the ones built into Word 2000. I tend to agree, Word 2000 is the most polished of the Office 2000 group, and parts of it are improvements; but they aren't improved enough that I prefer it to Office 97/Word 97 warts and all, and my advice is still to wait for a Service Pack. I am also having real problems with Outlook 2000, which seems to lock up far more often, and use far more resources, than Outlook 98 did. I have a dual processor Pentium Pro with 300 megabytes of memory. If that ain't enough machine, then 'blimey, what is? See also below. === Space, SDI, Norman Spinrad Dr. Pournelle; I recently re-connected with
your web site after several months away from your observations (couldn’t
find BYTE on the newsstands, now I know why) and read the discussion on
the above topics. Here’s a thought which is, I
confess, somewhat partially inspired by Robert Heinlein’s views on
government - let’s disassemble every bureaucracy we have every 40 years
or so. Completely do away
with it, and see if it was needed. If
it was, replace the essential parts.
After 40 years, it’s likely that the new entity will be as fat
and bloated as we want it to get - kill that fatted calf and see if a new
one will grow in it’s place. Some
(such as the military) we wouldn’t dispose of - just shake up - like the
Pentagon. Others, such as
NASA... NASA - The old brains, once
innovative, are now too afraid to rock the boat and do strange, wonderful,
and daring things. My
children LOVE to watch the Apollo documentaries, and Apollo 13 the movie,
and don’t really believe that we went to the moon - if we did, why
aren’t we still going? Same with Skylab, and all the rest. Remove the boils from the space program (NASA) and let’s
get on with some important work, rather than farting around keeping
bureaucratic bunglers happy... What would happen today if
something horrible (not Challenger, but Apollo-13-like)
happened to the Shuttle? Perhaps
a loss of 2/3rds of the re-entry tiles?
How would the agency handle it?
Would they wring their hands, say “I
don’t know,” wet themselves, and retire to prepare a proposal for
Congress calling for increased funding?
Or would they roll up the sleeves, get out the books, and refit one
of the other Shuttles in record time, launch it and rescue the Astronauts?
I, for one, don’t expect that they’d do it. End of sermon. On a personal note : I’d like
to thank you for those years you wrote in BYTE.
I first encountered your column while I was looking for something
to read in the college library while killing time for between classes (as
a day-student, I couldn’t really nap out like the rest of the drunks).
I hold you PERSONALLY responsible for destroying the potential
businessman I was trying to become (and perhaps capping my income at
$30,000 annually whilst I shuffled papers), and remaking me into an
unrepentant alpha-geek computer nerd, who will pull down (with bonuses,
etc.) nearly $70,000 this year alone, but would joyfully work with this
technology stuff for free (well, that and food) if need be.
I started with a VIC-20 when they were new, moved to an original
green-screen IBM PC (with cassette interface!), then headed down the dark
path with Amiga before returning to the PC platform.
Of course, now I’m supporting 150 Macintosh users in a mixed
network with 20 PCs (Thanks, Microsoft- if I ever need to add to my
department headcount, I’ll beg for Microsoft to produce an Apple
operating system. That alone
should add 5-8 people to our support ranks to deal with their BS). Thanks; thanks for the sci-fi
stuff that keeps me loopy (I still regularly Hope the new on-line gig works out
- and you have time for fiction. If
it Take care, and thank you
again... - - - - - - - - - - - Information Technologies Project
Manager Thanks. That's the kind of letter writers like to get, of course. As to NASA, I fear your assessment is correct. Subject:
XCOPY for backup Hi Jerry, I have been reading your column
for many years, and remember a long time ago you looking for a easy way to
backup files. I figure you
must have been suggested this, but just in case... Almost nothing is easier than
making a batch file using the old dos ‘xcopy’ command.
If you are backing up to a cd just use directcd and access the
cdrom as a drive letter. With
the batch file you can easily create directories, copy networked folders,
select extensions, modified files, subdirectories. It is even easier to
restore files because they are just files on a burned cdrom, or on a
networked drive. No need to go open a program, have it do all its stuff to
restore one file. Hope this is short enough to
make sense, and not waste your time.
If you have any other questions or comments reply to: Gordon Bower Ach!
They call this a soccer riot?
Come on, boys, let’s take ‘em to school! Groundskeeper Willie at the Mexico v. Portugal soccer game. The Simpsons. That is the method I tend to use for backups, but of course it does no compression (not that this is much needed in this era of enormous drives) and it has no real way to handle sharing violations. But yes, large xcopy batch files is a good way to go. Thanks for the reminder.
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Tuesday, August 17, 1999Very Busy today: I fear most of the mail gets Short Shrift...
Hi, I want to know, W2K is supported peer to peer network, how i can do that, maybe you have suggestion step by step (or maybe you have reference with the PDF file). thanks and regards Tyas Tyas [Tyaspx@centrin.net.id] To the best of my knowledge, the peer to peer networking is pretty automatic once you choose a WORKGROUP NAME and give each computer a unique name and put it in the workgroup. It uses Microsoft Network Client and NET/BUEI and it just sort of works. For TCP/IP and a server it's a bit more complicated, but pure peer to peer is easy. I fear I haven't time to go into more details. Muck about and ye shall know... Hi. I just read your webpage on
the Dean Drive. I’m an undergrad in college,
so I don’t have much background in the physics and the math. But I”m looking to read up on
anything about drives, any kind of drive, theoretical or otherwise. I have
no idea where to look, however. I’m sure there are websites and books
and papers out there from which I can educate myself, but I have no clue
what and where :) Would you mind telling me some
sources? Any general source will do, though I would like to make this
somewhat systematic. And would you have any
information on such sources for other technologies proposed/involved in
science fiction? Some directions on where to get at papers on current
cybernetics and wetware research, genetics and human DNA research, newest
physics and math, and such and such and such... I realize this is a lot to ask.
I’ve already put in considerable time in a project, and I want to fill
my ideas with ideas for more than just ideas. This project of mine is also
going to take some time, as I’m in school and still can’t see when
I’ll be out :) So mostly where to look will be more than enough. Thank you. Yuan Wang [yuwst9+@pitt.edu] Can't help. There must be thousands of web sites out there, some with reference librarians. Not me. Sorry. Bob
Thompson likes WinGate too, and I intend to get it going on my system as soon as I am
sure it works properly with Windows 2000. And thanks. And other comments re wingate
above the one quoted here... I have used wingate.
It works. It does cost
money. I don’t know about
running under W2K. I do know
that unless things have changed in the last few months, every machine
accessing through the wingate server (software running on the machine that
has a live [continuous or dialup] internet connection] must be running a
wingate client. This may
limit you (in that if you run a Win box as a wingate server, and have a
linux box on your network, I currently do not know if there is a wingate
client for linux). I do know that I have got linux
up and running for my home working machine (Gateway 2K, 200Mhz PII).
It provides IP forwarding and IP Masquerade (IP sharing) for my
better half’s W98 box. I
have been running fairly continuously for a few months now, and my
downtime is related to the DSL connection, not the Linux box (although, to
be honest, I have done a couple of silly things which damaged the setup,
requiring some repair). Regarding Linux...
My first setup was with Redhat 5.2.
It went fairly smoothly, but I was glad to be a bit geekier than
the average joe, because some things didn’t work following the setup,
and I had to enable them manually. I
have since upgraded to RH 6.0. I
did this by backing up files I cared about, wiping the disk and doing a
clean install. Everything
worked following the install. I
had to complete the entry of data for internal and external networking
(about equivalent to setting tcp/ip properties in the networking dialog of
WinNT). That was it.
Linux Functionality (for me). I have Wordperfect 8.0 for
Linux. This reads MS Word 97
documents - haven’t tested writing yet, but I know that the RTF format
support is good. I have Acrobat Reader 4.0. (used constantly) I have GOOD compilers.
EGCS C++ is far closer to C++ Standard compliant than Visual C++
6.0 (I also own the latter) I have an ICQ client.
(used sparingly) I have Netscape Communicator (my
main tool for mail and browsing in both Linux and Win environments).
I have a tool called the GIMP
(Gnu Image Manipulation Program). This
is lots of Photoshop, and very little Illustrator, with lots of third
party plugins, all rolled into one free program.
I really* like this tool. I have a desktop environment
called KDE (not perfect, but more than good enough, some bells and
whistles, Drag-n-Drop functionality mostly implemented) that has Icons, a
status bar, etc. I have 4
virtual desktops to choose from currently, so I can have Netscape open on
one desktop, be reading a programming text in pdf format, editing
exercises and running test compiles on another desktop, etc. KDE Tools include a couple of
text editors, an organizer, etc. Also
available are applications written for the Gnome environment, one of them
being Gnumeric, a spreadsheet that will import (lacking some
functionality) Excel 97 data files. I run SetiatHome client
(sidelight, virtually identical configuration at home and at work,
difference being the home box is Linux, the work box is WinNT WS4.0 - yet
a SaH work unit which takes 14+ hours at home in the background, takes 60+
hours on the NT box - dunno why)
All that aside, it can be (and
often is) more work to run in the Linux environment.
Not lots more, anymore, but at first A LOT MORE.
Enough to have paid for a copy of Windows NT. Maybe even enough to have paid for NT and Office 2K.
But I couldn’t have bought Photoshop.
(besides, I couldn’t afford all those things right now - a little
time I have, extra cash, no) I couldn’t have made as many mistakes, nor learned as much
as I have. And in the last
few days (perhaps related to the same behavior ruling SetiatHome), I
learned that Illustrator by itself in 128 Meg of ram is enough to bring
NT4.0 to it’s knees. I sent
the document home and did in 1 hour using the GIMP what I could not do ALL
DAY using Illustrator on NT. I
know, they have different functionality.
But Illustrator would NOT do what I needed under NT. Certainly a run-on email, since
this started as a minor validation of what you have already heard about
Wingate. But don’t give up
on Linux (I know, you haven’t, you are just time challenged).
Ask. I’ll help. -- regards, Brian Bilbrey Thanks. I intend to get back to Linux as soon as I get back from NASFIC and then Japan.
The North American Science Fiction Convention is held when the World Convention is out of the country. In 1999 the NASFIC will be in Anaheim California 26-29 August, 1999. I am guest of honor. If you have never been to a science fiction convention and wonder what those things are like, this is as good a one to come to as you will find... Go visit the site, and tell them I sent you... Jerry- Initially I wasn’t going to
comment on this subject, but see the responses you posted I feel that I
need to comment. I read the article in Byte about
using a Linux box for ICS. I
built a 486-33 installed Linux and after several weeks of frustration my
tenacity paid off and I got it working. But the box was under powered and
useless for anything else. So I upgraded to a PII-233 - Much better! But
this left me with a nice ICS system but still the box was rather useless
to me otherwise. Then I found WinProxy. I
installed Win98 on the box (Linny) and WinProxy, Bam! It was working in
just an evening’s tweaking. Great. Then I saw the price - ouch! Well, I
had 30 days to evaluate so I continued to use it. After about a week of WinProxy I
discovered that Win98SE had ICS built in. It was only a few dollars more
than the WinProxy registration so I ordered it. It arrived just a few days
before WinProxy’s trial would have terminated. I tried to install it but
all the proxy settings left over from WinProxy were getting in the way. I
called MS and they were amazed that I had a retail copy two days before it
was suppose to be available. OOPS! If course no one there knew anything
about ICS, but one of their techs was will to work with me so we had at
it. About 6 hours later we had wrestled the beast into a working
condition. Sweeet. And MS support had some very nice info for their
support DB. It works great. No hard coded IP
numbers or proxies. In fact all that stuff just gets in the way. Linny is
happily supporting four PCs and itself. No problems. Linny also boots
Win2000 with it’s ICS and that works just fine too.
Super sweet!!! The only secret is don’t get
fancy. Install clean, turn it on, set everything to a plain LAN connection
and voila! IE, Netscape, Eudora, Outlook, Outlook Express - all are having
NO problems. I ain’t no expert on it, but
it had been working here and I have set it up for a few friends. And there
is peace in the house. No more fighting for the phone line and the
internet connection. Very often all four PCs are surfing at the same time
with little apparent slowdown. ‘Nuff said. Recommended (to
borrow a phrase from a friend). -Brooks Clark Thanks! < For what it's worth, I've had some experience with both Sygate and Microsoft's internet sharing. Briefly, for an existing system, Sygate worked better for me. Especially when installed on an NT system (in my case, NT Workstation). I tried Microsoft's program with Windows 2000 beta 3, and it required I change all my IP addresses to the 169.254.X.X range (though, in an environment of Windows 98/2000, it DOES make it easier to install new lan cards by dynamically assigning IP addresses). Also, it didn't seem as clean as Sygate. It would through up a message box for each PPP connection, and sometimes tended to stop working after awhile, with many boxes on the screen. Sygate on Windows 98 seems to work, but unlike on NT4, doesn't seem to really work as a service. I have to be logged into the Win98 box before it will work, and sometimes it will not dial on demand if a message box is displayed on the screen. Also, Sygate doesn't support the Windows 2000 betas yet. My plans for the future are either to move Sygate back to my Windows NT system, or to try yet again to get this stuff working on my Linux computer. == Subject: Internet
Connection Sharing From: Jim Griebel (jgri@earthlink.net) A little bit of
misinformation seems to be leaking through on this – no, you don’t
have to set up the other machines on the network to point to a proxy and
in fact you don’t want to. (You do want to set them up to use the LAN
connection rather than Dial-Up networking.) I just did this on a new
client running NT 4.0 Workstation and IE 4, and all you have to do is
plug through the Internet Connection Wizard picking “LAN connection”
at every opportunity, and saying “No” when it asks you if you use a
proxy. Bingo. As Eric said, everything you need to know to set this up
is in the W98SE help, and if I wanted to use ICS I’d go get the W98SE
upgrade to make sure I got that. A couple of other
points, having actually used this myself: ICS insists on a fixed subnet
of 192.168.0.x, so if you already have a TCP/IP network you’re going
to have to readdress it unless you picked that subnet. Since ICS
provides some limited DHCP functionality – it will assign IP addresses
to the client machines for you – this isn’t as bad as it sounds. The
ICS wizard, if I remember right, will even make a diskette that you can
use to configure the client machines, although I didn’t do that
myself. To configure a client, all you need to do is add the TCP/IP
protocol and make sure “obtain an IP address automatically” is
checked for your network adapter. Machines configured
to use DNS or WINS are going to cause the server machine to dial the
Internet at odd intervals looking for name servers. Hence if you bring
the laptop home from work, you may have to change the network
configuration on that machine to keep it from kicking off Internet
dialups when you don’t want them. And (looking over
both shoulders and lowering voice) you can even make ICS work as the
gateway to the Internet for your Linux box. It takes some doing, but so
far it seems to be easier than getting Linux to do the same thing in
reverse. Wingate is probably
better; OTOH if you already have W98SE, ICS is free.
Thanks I just got back to the DC area
after three weeks on the west coast visiting family, national parks, and
universities (investigating job leads).
The air on the east coast has been very bad this summer—mostly
due to the excessive ozone levels—and the difference was noticeable
going both ways. Perhaps some
of our elected representatives will wake up and do something intelligent
about the problem; perhaps not. It was interesting to spend some
time in Oregon and Washington. Most
of the National Parks, Monuments, and Forests in the area are
participating in something called the “Recreation Demonstration Fee
Program”, and there’s a good deal of grass-roots opposition.
This program doubled the fees for entry into the National Parks,
and imposed fees in other areas that used to be free, with the intention
that 80% of the money collected be used for local improvements.
The problem is that most of the money seems to be going for
‘roadside disneylands’ to build tourism rather than improvements that
the people being nickled and dimed see.
A particularly bad example are the half dozen expensive visitors
centers that have been built by the Government in conjunction with the
logging industry on the road up to Saint Helens.
Another is the zoo-like tour the Forest Service has built on the
south side of Lake Quinault. It covers the same material that a Forest Ranger named Lucia
presented up at Hoh Rain Forest, but much less effectively and with much
more impact on the old-growth forest.
(After listening to Lucia, I was able to explore the forest on my
own, with some understanding of what I was seeing. A
blessing on her name for opening my eyes.) I guess it’s “We’re from the Government, and we’re here to help you.” Harry Erwin [herwin@gmu.edu] Windows 2000 Professional Beta 3 11f From:
Richard Carleton [rcarlet@ibm.net] Hi
Jerry, I couldn’t
agree more with your evaluation of Windows 2000 Professional. As I work
with it, I am more and more impressed. The latest wonder was that it
automatically recognized my Iomega Zip 100 USB drive as a removable drive.
Before connecting it I had checked Iomega’s web site and no mention was
made of compatible drivers for Windows NT. With some trepidation I
connected it anyway and it automatically recognized the drive. Wow, USB
that works! No questions, no dialogs, no warnings; it just works. I have been
reading your column for years in Byte and am happy to see that you have
continued in that fine tradition with your web site. Best of all there is
more content and it’s updated regularly. Glad to hear
Starswarm is out in paperback since I missed it in hardcover. I find your
books are the ones I keep coming back to over the years to re-read,
especially the Mote. Thanks, Richard
Carleton Y2K,
IntellectualCapital 11f Dear Dr.
Pournelle, The funniest
y2k compliance statement I have seen is at www.hartscientific.com/y2k.htm
. A real side-splitter. A comment on
your Intellectual Capital column. Given
the increasing improvements in imaging technology, soon, I think, it will
be possible to fake a videotape, on home equipment, that a professional
will not be able to differentiate from the real thing.
Think of the fun a dishonest attorney could have with that! Kit
Case Dear Mr. Pournelle, In one of your last articles I
was happy to read something you said about having trouble with Netscape,
and not being able to boot up your computer right because of one of
Netscape’s components. Well, I was having exactly the same problem and
followed your advice. I got that software that lets you see which programs
run at boot time (can’t remember the name now), disabled AOL Instant
Messenger that Netscape installed without asking me so, and haven’t had
a boot problem since then. I like Netscape, specially its
e-mail program, and although some friends told me that IE5 is much faster,
I think I’ll wait a little more to see the next versions. Thanks. Mauro.
Mauro Nacif Rocha, M.Sc. - Cięncia
da Computaçăo Universidade Federal de Viçosa - MG
- Brasil e-mail: nacif@dcc.ufmg.br tel.: +55 (031) 467-2013 Mauro Nacif Rocha, M.Sc. - Computer
Science Federal University of Vicosa -
BRAZIL e-mail: nacif@dcc.ufmg.br phone: +55 (031) 467-2013 “Em verdade, em verdade, eu vos digo, aquele que ouve a minha palavra ecrę nAquele que me enviou tem a vida eterna; ele năo vem a juízo, mas passou da morte para a vida.” Joăo 5:24 Thanks. I will ask in future that you don't put long lines in your text. It is harder to remove those borders than you think with this execrable Office 2000 stuff. It was much easier with Office 97 and FrontPage 98 which didn't pay so much attention to borders and shadings. Thanks again.
I’ve just been reading your
netscape install woes. I
certainly don’t have any answers; both Netscape and Internet Explorer
are big and bloated, but my last Internet Explorer experience was more
stable than my last Netscape experience, for what that’s worth. But I’m not using either at
the moment. I’m using Opera
3.6, a much more light-weight browser (and, in my experience, seemingly
more stable) than Netscape or IE. No,
it doesn’t come with plugins to every wannabe multimedia provider on
Earth. Yes, there are some
pages that display differently (but many times that is due to problems in
the HTML of the page). In
this era of free browsers, for me to actually pay Opera Software the $35
registration fee says something. The
total footprint of Opera on my disk is about 2 megabytes (not including
the cache, which is more customizable than either Netscape or Internet
Explorer.) I have no connection to Opera
other than having downloaded it and tried it.
I know you’re a busy person, but if the next Netscape or Internet
Explorer install annoys you enough, you might want to check out Opera,
from http://www.operasoft.com. William Harris williamharri@earthlink.net This is not the first time I have heard good things about Opera. I haven't QUITE got angry enough with Outlook and Internet Explorer to throw them out, although sometimes it's close. I may get there, though. Thanks for the recommendation. For MORE ON OPERA Every time I put up a virus alert, it turns out to be a hoax, but better safe than sorry: Sir, This message just appeared on my
confuser screen at work. FYI. Rod McFadden Centreville, Va The Network Operations Center
has received notification that a new virus, called VBS/Monopoly, is
spreading that could potentially infect your system. VBS/Monopoly
is sent as an email attachment. Much
like the Melissa virus, it sends a copy of itself to all recipients in the
infected user’s MS Outlook Address Books (global, personal, and
contacts). To recognize the virus, look for
the subject line “Bill Gates Joke.” and blank TO: and CC: fields.
The message will have an attachment named MONOPOLY.VBS.
If you receive the virus, do not
open the attachment. Instead,
delete the message from your Inbox and your Deleted Items folders.
If the attachment is opened, you will also need to delete the
following files: c:\temp\Monopoly.vbs (the complete
virus) c:\temp\Monopoly.vbe c:\temp\Monopoly.wsh c:\temp\Monopoly.jpg
In response to a mail about the
SETI project you said: A lot of people
have got in on this. It can’t hurt. Well, actually, it did. Apparently the people organizing the project failed to estimate high enough for the number of people wanting to get involved and their servers got overwhelmed. They seem to have fixed that by now though I have heard reports that they’re keeping the, um, efficiency of the client down as they’re afraid they’ll run out of data far too soon. Ah. thanks. Jerry Pournelle
Writes: >“Clearly
requiring some valid return address would have a dramatic effect, but the
question becomes, do people have the right to anonymity? >Certainly King
George III would have been happy to have all the pamphlets and papers of
the Committees of Correspondence have valid return addresses...” Dear Dr. Pournelle: You raise some worthwhile
points, albeit points which don’t, I believe, negate my argument in
favor of requiring either a “UCE” or “SPAM” tag, or the use of a
valid email address. First, Payne, Adams, and co.
were not operating a Ponzi scheme or selling porn.
Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem at all with porn involving
consenting adults. On the
other hand, I don’t want my email box filled with it, with no recourse
for stopping it. At the same time, I never
enjoy attempted fraud. There
is a fundamental difference between publishing
controversial documents, under an alias, which are available
to all, and putting on a disguise and tackling someone and reading that
material to the unwilling listener, whilst holding him in a headlock. Second, requiring UCE to
identify itself as such is well within existing legal precedent.
Commercial speech is somewhat more circumscribed than political and
artistic speech. There are laws against misuse of fax machines for
instance. There are others.
You have the right to pitch legal products to me, even on city
streets. However, you cannot
follow me home and attempt to force your way into my dwelling in the name
of making a sale, especially by pretending to be the meterman or the
police. Allowing spammers to
hide behind aliases, or merely to camouflage their spam is the equivalent
of allowing encyclopedia salesmen to call you at work and falsely tell you
that your wife’s in the emergency room of the local hostpital in the
hope of pitching you in the ER when you get there. Even requiring spammers to use a
consistent FAKE email address would address the problem, as the killfile
function of my email reader (Forte Agent) doesn’t require that the
address being filtered even EXIST, only that it adhere to the relevant RFC
for email headers. They would maintain their anonymity and I’d never see their
messages. Try as I may, I can’t think of
an important societal benefit which is achieved by allowing people selling
things, especially those On the contrary, requiring spam
and or spammers to be identified would allow spammers to spam, and you and
me to ignore them. Chris Morton Rocky River, OH Jerry, I know you've said that you don't want to fill your pages with banners, but I don't know if you've heard about a nonprofit web site named http://www.thehungersite.com Every time someone visits their web site and clicks on the "Donate Free Food" button, a corporate sponsor donates a certain amount of money to the United Nations World Food Program. You can only click that button once a day, as that is the deal they have with their sponsors. Since your web site gets a lot of visitors, I thought you could give them a nice boost by adding their banner to your web site. The smallest one only adds 1.5kb to a web page, and is the one I use on my web site. You can locate their banners here: http://www.thehungersite.com/banners.html Regards. Ignacio Alvarez support@binarytools.com Dear Jerry
Monopoly is a genuine virus; seen http://vil.nai.com/vil/vbs10234.asp
for details. Tim Cunningham Thanks.
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Wednesday August 18, 1999I have two reports of problems with Netscape: Sir, I use Netscape Navigator pretty
much exclusively, and have found that your Current Mail page is causing a
consistent crash. This is
only recently, in fact it just started today.
The only thing I see that is new is the “bobbing bottle” email
icon. I had to resort to IE to see the
page, which is why, of course, I keep both browsers on my machine.
What a sad state of affairs. Hi Jerry, I have been a regular
visitor to your site and have appreciated, and been amused by, your
struggles with computer hardware and software. I write to notify you of a
problem I have not had before with your (or anyone else’s) site.
I am unable to open your currentmail page (dated Tuesday, August 17
1999 with time 02:53 pm) using Netscape Navigator version 4.08. My computer is a P-133 (no MMX) running WIN95, with Microsoft
Plus and the Win95 Y2K fix installed.
Attempts to do so generate an “application has performed an
illegal...” with details showing a problem in KERNEL32.DLL.
I was able to open the page using Internet Explorer 4.0. I understand you check the site
using Navigator from time to time. You
may want to test your page. It
is possible the problem is my computer (install of WIN95 Y2K fix has
caused roughly the same error with another application), but I thought I
should mention this in case others are also having a problem. Please keep on with “ I do
these things so you don’t have to...” and do continue with all your
other writing endevours, I am a fan. Regards, Tom Vaivada. My problem is that I cannot duplicate this. Netscape 4.6 sees currentmail and my silly bottle just fine. Can anyone help with what's wrong? I will remove the bottle to another page. Now: does that make it easier to read THIS page, and do YOU HAVE PROBLEMS WITH THE SPECIAL PAGE with Netscape? Here is some of the mail on Office 2000: Hi Jerry, I think your review of Office
2000 was a little heavy-handed. I am no Microsoft supporter (on the other
hand, I don’t fall into the MS-basher camp either - call me nonpartisan)
but I have been using O2K for some time now and have found some definite
improvements, especially in Word. I agree that the documentation
leaves a bit to be desired. The help system is way too slow - it was
barely useable on my old P166 but works great on my new PIII-450 w/256MB
RAM. Actually, I think that says quite a bit about bloatware, but I
won’t get started down that thread. I have found that while the
multiple instances of Word on the taskbar can be annoying, they can also
be useful, esp. when working on multiple documents simultaneously and
switching back and forth quickly. Alt+tab will allow you to switch from on
to another easily enough. I could never wrap my brain too tightly around
the old shift-F6 (is that it?) combination that could take you from one
window to the next. Word 2000’s table handling is
infinitely improved over Word 97’s, although I don’t think it still
matches good old WordPerfect 6.1 for that. But tables are MUCH easier to
use. The most useful improvement
I’ve come accross is the “save as Web page” feature. In W97 it was
almost a joke, but in W2K it works like a charm. As a consultant, I often
find myself producing reports for my customers and struggling to find a
way to present them electronically. For some clients, creating Adobe
Acrobat files works fine, but for others simply posting the document to
their intranet works best. That’s where the save as Web feature comes in
very handy. You can save a richly formatted document (tables, graphics,
etc.) as HTML and it will appear on any old IE 4.x or Netscape 4.x browser
almost as a verbatim copy of the native Word file, without any special
plug-ins or anything else. The beauty of this is that it requires no
effort on the part of the author (unless clicking one button can be
considered “effort”). I can’t speak for FrontPage
(don’t use it). Excel is good, but not (from my perspective anyhow)
noticeably improved, save for the HTML rendering of spreadsheets (try
saving a multi-sheet workbook as a Web page - you’ll be amazed!). And
yes, Access is annoying in that the file format has changed, but I have
found, through using it in
the field on many occasions, that most conversions are reversible. I have
has no big problems with it. That’s it! By the way, I love your column,
especially since it has now been running once a week on Byte.com. I have
been following Chaos Manor since before you were doing PC’s (in the
IBM-compatible way) and were always mucking around with S-80 (is that it?)
systems, CP/M and other wonderful technologies that have all but been
forgotten. Keep up the good work. Best regards, Eric == Upgrade Hell, Office 2000 Style
It started out innocent enough
when one of my clients decided to upgrade all office computers to
Microsoft Office 2000. A day later they’re on the phone complaining that
the computers are running as slow as molasses, Internet connections no
longer work and two mission critical software packages that were otherwise
fine until the upgrade have ceased to function in whole or in part. After
a full day of struggling , lost productivity and frustration, fear of
never regaining normal computer operations had set in as deadlines were
pushed further and further back. At this point my job is
threefold. Secure the data and reassure them that normal operations can
and will be restored in a timely manner, then do it. The simplest way to
do that is to restore their systems back to pre-upgrade condition which
can be difficult as Office 2000 and Internet Explorer 5 dig into the
operating system like a tick. Upon arrival they had upgraded
two of four computers, one desktop and one laptop. The laptop, a Pentium
133, was so slow as to be unusable. The
desktop, a Pentium 166 was faring a little better and was the more mission
critical so I turned my attention to that one. Uninstalling Office 2000 did not
restore the previous Office 97 or performance levels nor did the software
package in question return to functionality. Uninstalling IE5 did result
in the return of pre-upgrade performance levels. Reloaded Office 97 and
IE4 noting that the dialer was upgraded in the process and not uninstalled
with the rest and had to be reconfigured as well as mail. It is typical for uninstall’s
to leave behind significant remnants which can and often do continue to
cause problems as has been shown in this instance and it is noteworthy to
ponder what else lay in the bowels of the machine to rise up and bite me.
The plot thickens. Reloading the software, a
moderately complex, application specific and expensive databased program
which the office relies on heavily, did not restore proper operation of
the program. In fact the program, which would run and function partially,
was not accepting the backup data set properly or printing database data
at all. A clue. The short answer is that Office
2000 loaded and left an updated OpenDataBaseConnectivity driver in the
windows system directory, with the application in question mapped through
it. In this instance ODBC if available would be utilized but was not
necessary. Unmapping the data set from ODBC did not restore proper
operation. ODBC had to be manually removed from the system. Once that was
accomplished normal operation was restored. Post analysis revealed that
Microsoft has depreciated (their term not mine) unspecified functions in
the API of the upgraded ODBC driver. No doubt the program in question was
attempting to make function calls that were no longer supported or
supported fully, rendering the (Win9x) application program useless. It should be
noted that between the cost of Microsoft Office 2000 Small Business
Edition and my tech time the impact to the customer will be nearly a
thousand dollars not counting two
days of lost productivity only to wind up exactly where they started. They
will need to upgrade every computer in the office to run Office 2000
efficiently in addition to resolving now known issues and perhaps other
issues unknown with their respective program venders and I doubt they have
the fiscal or emotional stomach for it at the moment. Down the road it
will be inevitable. Also noteworthy is that both the
program vendor and Microsoft need to secure credit card information before
even reporting let alone discussing this matter. I doubt either would have
actually charged the account in this instance but it has gone officially
unreported because of it. As it was, the problem was identified and
resolved, at least for the time being, in less time than one would find
themselves on hold with either vendor, the likely result of which being
little more than third party finger pointing as has been historically the
case. I continue to correct nit picky
issues that remains of the Office 2000 uninstall such as missing fonts
etc. and the laptop awaits my attention.
There is much less on that computer discounting preinstalled
garbage which can and should go. As a result I may take that one to bare
metal. The laptop gets two
programs, a new one which requires ODBC and the other that doesn’t like
it. Hopefully, the older ODBC driver in Office 97 will allow the two to
coexist. Many of my customers are small
businesses such as doctors, lawyers, accountants, trucking companies,
recycling centers, junk yards, you name it. The one thing they have in
common is that almost all of them use custom crafted databased software
that is essential to the operation of the business. I would suspect that
many of those programs also rely on ODBC. As MS Office 2000 propagates
through these offices, some systems may be going down faster than the
titanic. Due to the nature of their
computing requirements, Win98SE and Office 2000 was going to be my
recommended Y2K baseline configuration as both are reported by Microsoft
to be fully compliant. That plan may be going out the window. Win9x and
Office 97 can be made compliant or reasonably so and that may be the new
recommendation or perhaps a hybrid of SE and 97. I try to lookout for my
customers as best I can. It’s not easy. Bob === I thought I had more mail in defense of O 2000. I'll look around. This has to go up now. Read your Intellectual Capital
column on digital zombies and thought you’d find the following relevant.
A big problem in image databases is, suppose one has many images
(still and moving) with no pre-existing corresponding text-based catalogue
or index, how does one search for what one wants (e.g., images of the
stinky plant). The article
describes some approaches being taken. From
Financial Times Wednesday 8/18/99 (http://www.ft.com): (alas, that's all the URL that was sent...) Thanks. === Jerry, Thought
you might find this article in WIRED magazine interesting... http://www.wired.com/news/news/news/technology/story/21310.html Here
are the first few paragraphs to give you a taste... --Preston
DuBose Plasma-Powered
Trip to the Stars Hi Jerry, You wrote: AOL is returning
most of my mail addressat unbekannt (well they say no such person) and
this includes to Larry Niven, my Simon and Schuster editor, my
literary agent, and nearly anyone else who sent me mail and has an AOL.com
address. You would do well to
consider alternate ways of getting mail if
email is important to you. Unfortunately this seems to be a
regular occurance with AOL.COM, and may be part of their defence against
the spammers? I run a couple of mailing lists
(one with 450 subscribers, and the other only 50), but AOL addresses are
usually the ones that have problems first, or they just have smaller
mailboxes than other ISPs. Have you checked out any of the
automatic mailing list tools out there to manage your subscriber lists? I
recommend LSoft at http://www.lsoft.com
and their LISTSERV product, but it can get expensive for large lists. This
way the mailing list manager would handle all the error reports and you
could just send to one address. Thanks for continuing an
excellent site, regards, James It's fixed again, but for a while all email from me to them was being sent back. That wasn't to lists. It was to my agent, my partner, and others unfortunate enough to have AOL mail accounts. This is not the first time I
have heard good things about Opera. I haven't QUITE got angry enough with
Outlook and Internet Explorer to throw them out, although sometimes it's
close. I may get there, though. Thanks for the recommendation. Hi
Jerry, I
have been using Opera as my main browser for over a year now. It was worth
the price of admission to get it. What
I like about it is -
small footprint -
fast speed -
how customizable it is -
stability Aside
from that, what I like most
is the ability to Shift Control Click on any link and have it open in the
background without disturbing my current train of though with what I am
reading at the time. It
allows me to completely read a web page without jumping off somewhere else
and then coming back. When I
have finished, I can close the window and then pick up on one of the other
pages that I have loaded. If
you have to do a lot of research on the web, or read a lot of information,
this feature is a precious time saver. While
you can do with the other 2 big browsers, they jump in the foreground and
steal your attention away because you have to minimize the beasts. It
is worth a try, even if the other browsers work fine for you. A 30 day evaluation copy can be obtained from http://www.opera.com/download.html
There
is also a support page with information on how to configure the various
Netscape style plugins that are compatible with opera at http://www.opera.com/plug_in.html -
Paul Thanks. And see above. Jerry, Here is a link to a neat (free) little renaming program written by the people at PC Magazine. I use it quite often, it's simple to use and powerful. http://hotfiles.zdnet.com/cgi-bin/texis/swlib/hotfiles/info.html?fcode=000QJL Tom Scheck Thanks!! It looks good. The changing of file extensions
is trivial. copy Jonathan Sturm (jonathan@uprun.com) “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him to use the Net and he won’t bother you for weeks.” Aargh. I knew that. Thanks. Jerry, I use a nifty shareware
program called “Picture Information Extractor” to rename my camera
pictures. See: What makes this app standout is
it’s ability to extract info that’s embedded by Olympus (and other
manufactures) in the actual JPG file. This info can then be used to build
a mask for renaming the file. It can even change the file’s date and
time to match the actual date and time that the picture was taken. Mike Goff Sounds great. I'll go look for it. THANKS! (GOt it, have not tried it yet. Looks good.) And then: Long long ago there was a program called DOS and it had an obcsure command called copy ;) AndyC:\temp\test>copy 0* 0*.jpg 001 002 003 3 file(s) copied C:\temp\test>dir Volume in drive C is DISK1PART01 Volume Serial Number is 12AB-35A7 Directory of C:\temp\test . <DIR> 08-18-99 6:37p . .. <DIR> 08-18-99 6:37p .. 001 JPG 4 08-18-99 6:37p 001.jpg 002 JPG 4 08-18-99 6:37p 002.jpg 003 JPG 4 08-18-99 6:37p 003.jpg 001 4 08-18-99 6:37p 001 002 4 08-18-99 6:37p 002 003 4 08-18-99 6:37p 003 6 file(s) 24 bytes 2 dir(s) 5,453.64 MB free C:\temp\test> Andy Bushnell And of course I knew that and forgot it. Thanks. Re the problem with your web page using Netscape - I had this problem a few weeks back before you had the bottle and sent you a note (which you answered, thanks) about it. I could read your page OK if I switched off Netscape’s Javascript (under advanced preferences) The problem occurs when your page grows beyond a certain size; early in the week I can read your page with Netscape(4.07) running on NT4-SP4 but later in the week I have to turn off Javascript in Netscape to be able to load your page. The javascript used by Netscape has some differences from the javascript used by MSoft in IE. Anyway, it is not the OS as I have the same problem using either W95 or NT4-SP4 If you one of your readers finds the cause I would be curious to know the details. Keep up the good work Regards Sam Bass BUT SEE THIS: Subject: Solving two problems for you: ·
How to rename files 001, 002, etc. to .jpg? C> ren *. *.jpg
To rename them to
“picXXX.jpg” you can use the FOR statement: C> for %i in (*) do ren %i pic%i.jpg
·
Why does Netscape crash on your mail page? I cannot be certain, but it is
very likely that this problem can be fixed by going to the Users directory
for Netscape (e.g. C:\Program Files\Netscape\Users\Steve in my case) and
deleting the file NETSCAPE.HST. This file keeps the information
of which links you have clicked on. When
it grows over a megabyte, Netscape can begin to be very unreliable; also
very slow. I recommend your
readers empty the Netscape disk cache, shut Netscape down completely,
delete the NETSCAPE.HST file, and then run Netscape again.
I predict that Robert will be your parent’s sibling. I nuke NETSCAPE.HST about every
month or so, and I haven’t had any trouble with Netscape recently, but
before I figured this out I often had mysterious crashes on certain web
pages. -- Steve R. Hastings
“Vita est” steve@hastings.org http://www.blarg.net/~steveha
Doing well by doing good... Dr. Pournelle: Regarding the virus warnings: I
appreciate any and all. Better safe than sorry. Unfortunately, eternal
vigilance is the price of e-mail. Sigh. A computer science professor
told me about a mainframe type of virus that infected a particular IBM OS.
The virus was like Melissa, except that it would only operate when the CPU
was idle. It would then transmit copies of itself to other machines with a
sufficiently compatible OS. In due course, a bean-counter
would complain about all the un-accounted-for CPU time, and IBM would
dispatch an expert to fix the OS. The expert usually sent was the author
of the virus. If the infected machine was in
say, Nome, Alaska, the fix would take a day or so. If the machine was in
Aruba or Acapulco . . . well, two weeks, maybe three. The guy only got caught when he
forgot to inoculate a machine against a repeat infection. I’m sure this story is an
urban legend, but it sounds like a great job for a born tourist. Regarding Front Page 2000: I am
now a webmaster, Front Page 2K and all. I hope your experiences will
help. Starswarm is marvelous. It has a
flavor quite similar to the best of Mr. Heinlein’s work. I am going to use the paperback for Christmas presents. I suspect the story is legend, but it would be nice work if you could get it...Thanks for the kind words.
Jerry: Just in case the message
sent by Opera didn’t reach you... (actually, it did. JEP) I normally use Netscape 4.06
(not Netscape 4.6) to browse, and last night, currentmail caused the
browser to crash. I fired up
IE4, no problem. I fired up
Opera 3.6, no problem. Today,
I ran 4 different computers from 2 different locations, and Netscape 4.06
crashed on each one. Netscape
3.1 had no problems. The bottle isn’t the problem. I haven’t looked at the html yet, but I’ll bet there’s
something in there that Netscape 4.06 (and maybe others of the 4.0x ilk)
can’t handle. --Jerry (jwright@iaml.net) Well, perhaps someone will find it. I have no notion of what is crashing Netscape, and with 4.6 which I use it is no problem at all.
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Thursday August 19, 1999It ain't the bottle, so what blows this up? Can't be sheer size, either. Isn't this fun? Apparently some readers just can't make this page work in some versions of Netscape. Dear Jerry, Here is my info regarding
Netscape crashing when trying to access your “Current Mail” page. Both yesterday (Aug. 18) and
today, my Netscape (Navigator v4.08) crashes when trying to open www.jerrypournelle.com/mail/currentmail.html.
It has no problem with www.jerrypournelle.com/mail/special.html.
And on the ‘special’ page I can see the animated bottle without a
problem. FWIW, Dr. Watson reports
“Exception: access violation (0xc0000005), Address: 0x00000000”. I am
running Win NT4 SP3 with 64MB RAM. (N.B., I have had this same
problem with the Current Mail page once in the past, about a month or two
back.) Perhaps I will download and try
Opera - I resist IE because of how it ingrains itself into your system
whether you want it to or not. Hope this info is useful -
I miss reading the mail. Regards, Alan Donders P.S. I like the bottle better
than the blimp. Also, the compass is very well done, especially if you pay
attention to the shadowing. Since I can't duplicate the problem I don't know what to do next. I will keep working. OK: We have fixed the problem. There were a bunch of div /div pairs in the html, many needless. There were also a couple of peculiar formats pasted in. I cleaned that stuff out, and that appears to have done it. Mr. Rice's hint about the div statements is what clued me in. Anyway that works now. The great Mail Flap: see view for details. Here is mail on the subject. I have had this problem
frequently. Unfortunately,
the MS Knowledge Base indicates that it is a
problem in your own computer due to one of many causes (see http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q180/4/84.asp and http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q192/5/25.asp Unfortunately, I checked and
applied their fixes (including ‘registering’ the supposedly
unregistered file) and none of them stopped that message.
What does seem to help is never to occupy CPU cycles with anything
but mail transfer when Outlook is sending.
It’s a pain to stop everything you are doing while Outlook checks
the mail, but I haven’t seen that error in many weeks, now. I never hear anything but raves
from the people who use Lotus Notes for email.
Can any of your readers compare it to Outlook?
I sure would like something less problematic than Outlook. --Chuck Waggoner [waggoner at gis dot net] I plead ignoramus on Lotus Notes. The two sites you show are informative although neither seems to address the particular problem I had, which leads me to believe that my conclusions on the matter are true. == Dr. Pournelle, I have the solution for your
email problem. Please go to http://www.group-mail.com.
If Outlook 2000 can export
it’s address list to a text file then group-mail can import the address
list. It is very flexible. Sincerely, Lynn McGuire It will be interesting to see what Outlook exports are possible. I tried exporting a contact list to a csv and the result was unreadable, but perhaps I did it wrong. I'll try again another time. Thanks. I understand Eudora, which is on its way here, has import tools that will probably work. On the other hand, I may not need Eudora now that I understand what is happening. Jerry, Whenever my Byte subscription arrived, the first thing I would turn to was your column. I have always enjoyed it. About mail... Have you considered becoming a "List " owner? There are free services like www.listbot.com that let you become a list owner. You can have multiple lists. The beauty here is that you don't have to manage the list yourself. Your subscribers do all the work. It is a "opt-on" list. If your subscribers want on, they sign up, if they want off, they remove themselves. What could be easier? You can send invitations but the subscriber makes the final decision. All you have to do is compose your message and post it. All you need is your Web browser to do all the work. Everything is Web based. Listbot even supplies an archive of your previous posts. Your subscribers can check this at any time. You can send messages up to 100K. You can even put a link on your Web site to give possible subscribers easy access to your list. Check it out. Regards, Will Bierman wbierman@flash.netNever thought of that one; not sure I know enough about how to go about it or the advantages and disadvantages. I seem to recall it was explained to me once but I fear the explanation went out the same door it came in... Hi All:
Today’s LA Times ran an article that told how to join in with the
million people who have already volunteered to allow SETI to download a
screensaver that will harness their computer in to the SETI computation
pool. Go To: http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu -and read all about it. It’s another way of
using the internet that could never have been imagined !! Bill Haynes Colonel Haynes (USAF Ret'd) used to run the Manned Space Office, and is a long time member of the Citizens Advisory Council on National Space Policy. I concur: I would never as an SF writer have dreamed of a distributed net of people looking for alien signals... And Now This: setiathome-1.3.i386-winnt-cmdline.exe This
program is much faster than the Seti@home
screensaver. Will B- Thanks, I will
give it a try and let you know. Following my latest Linux rant
that you so graciously published, Will wrote to me to let me know about a
command line client for Seti@Home on
Windows NT - by gum, should be cranking out an additional couple of
datasets a day now (at work, on my NT box), since the point wasn’t to be
pretty, it was/is to go to Stockholm and/or find ET for real.
:) -- regards, Brian Bilbrey
I would like to remain anonymous
please. Jerry, I am normally content to lurk on
the Web and Usenet, but I wanted to comment upon the “O2k Problem”.
Our relatively large company has a nearly uniform environment of
133 MHz Pentiums, all of which have 32 Mbytes of RAM, 1 or 1.5 Gbyte hard
drives, and Windows95. Prior
to the upgrade most had Office95, though some had been upgraded to
Office97. While not
state-of-the-art, these computers worked fairly fast and amazingly
dependable. This was good
since the powers-that-be had decreed that the computers would not be
upgraded for a long time (possibly 5 years!)
Being a techie who can’t live without at least 5 applications
open at once (all the better to cut and paste between), I wished regularly
for more RAM and a larger monitor, but I have to admit things were working
well. Unfortunately, the pace of
“innovation” never stops. It
was decided to upgrade everyone to Office2000 unless it could be proven
that you had a critical reason not to.
The “upgrade” happened about three weeks ago.
My complaints thus far: 1)
Installing O2k required us to do some radical file compression to
open up enough disk space for the installation itself.
After the installation it became apparent that even more disk space
is needed for virtual memory (probably due to just having 32 Mbytes of
RAM). After complaining about
how crash-prone O2k was, I was given a much larger hard disk.
Application crashes and system lock-ups went down, but did not
disappear (see item 6). Ironically,
only 3 months before a coworker was denied a larger hard disk for his
critically needed data because “everyone would want one”.
2)
My computer now pauses quite distinctly for virtual memory every
time I tab between applications. This
used to be a relatively infrequent occurrence.
3)
The applications are individually much slower, even with the
Paperclip turned off! I am
often reminded of the many small agonies required for using Word 6 and
Excel 5 on a PowerMac 6100. The
applications are powerful, but S L O W. 4)
The user interfaces have changed tremendously from Office95.
It is now so wonderfully “helpful.”
After two-weeks of living with the mess, I turned off toolbar
squishing and menu item hiding. Things
are better, but there are still many things I have not figured out how to
do yet that were once simple! I
have begun to fear that some things may not even be POSSIBLE anymore.
I am of course getting ZERO re-training to use O2k. 5)
What happened to Help? Why
is it now so strangely deficient? Why
is it so slow? Why does it
have to resize my window when it starts up?
Why are so many questions not answered?
I am getting ZERO re-training to use O2k.
Help should be bridging the gap.
(I suppose they planned on the Paperclip doing the job, but it
slows things down so much I turned it off.)
Why have I gotten so disgusted with Help that I hardly ever refer
to it anymore? 6)
Word2k crashes between 1 to 3 times a day!!!
It seldom brings down the system, but all edits are gone and the
system must be rebooted to unlock the document.
(My log shows that every one of these Word2k crashes were
associated with copy, cut, or paste, but a co-worker is getting regular
crashes—even when he is not there—from other features.)
This is the single worst new “feature” of O2k.
I have become acquainted with WordPad, but miss all too many of the
features of Word95. There are some interesting new
features in O2k: pasting
between Word and Excel is much better, Word no longer objects to two
spaces after a period, and files are compatible with Office97.
However, I LOVED Word95. It
was wonderfully customizable. I
generally enjoyed the rest of the applications.
They had some bugs (or perhaps I should say “features”), but I
knew every one that I came in contact with.
More importantly, I knew how to avoid or work around them all.
The most ironic part of the
whole “O2k Problem” is that our IS people had to hustle to get O2k
installed before a moratorium on new software began on August 1.
Thanks to potential Y2K problems our company is not installing any
new software, including O2k patches, until January 2000!
Thanks for all the help Bill! Having a very dry sense of
humor, I find that the more I use O2k, the more philosophical I get about
it. Perhaps, this “upgrade” is just someone’s way of
breaking through the company’s moratorium on buying new computers. Certainly, it helped me get a bigger hard drive (although I
hadn’t previously needed it). It
may even be getting me more RAM (I do need that).
I wonder how I can use it to get a bigger monitor and a faster
computer. . . Hmm. On an
other note I must say that WordPerfect doesn’t look as dead anymore, or,
perhaps, I should say that Microsoft is looking more suicidal than it used
to. Thanks for the soapbox. ·
An Office95-Bereaved Engineer P.S.
I hope that you and the rest of the computing press keep in touch
with us “mere mortals” who are limited by budget and/or company policy
to much-less-than-state-of-the-art computers. Well, I can't say I have had THAT much trouble. But I do find that much of O 2000 is not ready for prime time. Or so I have concluded. Some don't agree. There is a link on http://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosreports/Recommended.html relating to Avant keyboards. The link is http://cvtinc.com/avant.htm when you click on it you get the following error: Not Found The requested URL %s was not found on this server. Instead of the above link, you may want to point to: http://cvtinc.com/kybdfeatures.htm The new link lists the features of the Avant Prime and Stellar keyboards with a link on how to order each. Now if I could only afford a keyboard that costs more than many multi-gigabyte drives... Aloha, Dan Thanks. I've put your letter on the relevant page.
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Friday August 20, 1999I fear today is short shrift again, but the letters are good.
Lotus Notes - Stable and Solid I've been a Notes user at work for the last two years. I've found it to be a powerful, stable messaging and groupware system. Unfortunately for me, we got bought out last year and Exchange/Outlook is the standard of our new parent. As of today, I'm an Outlook user. I managed to be the last person in the company to switch. I haven't used Outlook much yet, but have had to become familiar with it to keep my employees up and running From the perspective of pure messaging, both systems have similar capabilities. The only major capability difference is that the version of Notes I was using (4.6a) couldn't render HTML. I think the current version does, but I'm not sure. I may change my mind with more experience, but the user interface with Outlook seems much more complicated and less intuitive. It seems to generally take more steps to get the same thing done. The biggest advantage Notes had in my book was stability. In two years I never lost a message due to data corruption. Notes crashed ocassionally, but much less than the Office applications I've been using at the same time. I have a rule that I NEVER use beta software. I made an expection for Notes. Their beta loads were consistently more stable than most production software I use. The real power of Notes is in it's groupware functionality. In groupware there is no comparison. I'm still working through getting groupware stuff ported over. I'm waiting for someone who is expert in Visual Basic (VB) to build applications to accomplish functions that come as either standard Notes templates or ones that I (not much of a programmer of any kind) set up in less than 10 minutes. The Microsoft definition of groupware is shared folders. Since more than one user can access them, it's groupware. By that definition, Netware and NT Server are groupware. I'll live, but I'm not thrilled to have switched. Scott Kitterman kitterma@erols.com Thanks for the clear exposition. Subject:
Swap File Bloat Dr.
Pournelle, Early this
year, we replaced our Pentium 200mhz computers with Pentium II 400mhz
mini-towers having 128MB of RAM and running Windows NT4. Those in the
office regularly running Autocad 14 were excited to know it would be
running much faster. It was
somewhat odd to find engineers complaining of slowness with their new
computers. I thought that people were running too many programs or opening
too many documents. Not always true. Some computers were slow regardless
of what was running. Occasionally when Autocad was started, it was not
unusual to have many of the toolbar icons replaced with a “smiley
face” version even though the commands attached to the icon worked just
fine. The fallback position was to have them shutdown their computers
during the day and nightly to flush the memory. In June, we
failed to load an architectural site plan drawing from a client. The
Autocad program recommended increasing the virtual memory size in order to
load the file. This seemed to be the last straw. Then, I remembered an
article in a CAD magazine earlier this year discussing the “smiley
face” icon problem and how it had something to do with the size of
virtual memory on the hard drive. It recommended making the size of swap
file four times the amount of RAM installed on the computer with either
Win95/98 or WinNT. This is necessary to accommodate Autocad’s use of the
swap file independent of the RAM installed on a machine. I raised the
virtual memory size from 139Mb to 512Mb on the user’s computer and the
site plan drawing loaded just fine. Slow reaction and drive light activity
confirmed that Autocad does indeed use the swap file quite frequently.
After cleaning out unnecessary portions of the drawing, the file size
dropped to 9Mb from 23Mb. I changed
the virtual memory on my machine as well as a few machines where the icon
problem occurred. There is a noticeable difference with fewer episodes of
slow down. We’re switching the other CADstations over to 512Mb of
virtual memory. The same magazine article further recommended that 1Gb
might be needed for “large, complex files”. I’m
glad I don’t have those yet—20Mb+ is enough. We’re evaluating
Autocad 2000 and I’m suspicious of it, too. Software bloat is one thing
but swap file bloat? Autocad is but one case. I wonder how many other
programs resort to extreme activity with virtual memory. After this
experience, I want to setup a test machine with a separate hard drive for
use by virtual memory only to see if there is a significant advantage. We
may need to use a dual drive setup on our next cycle of computer
replacement simply to reduce time lag taken by use of the virtual memory. Lastly, one
of my coworkers asked when we would switch to Windows 2000. I replied,
“Late November 2001 when the existing computers are swapped out at the
end of our lease. There’s too much brain damage in switching over 50+
computers to a new operating system when a few months later the lease runs
out and you can simply get new machines.” Stan Fuhrhop smf@absconsultants.com Greetings, Jerry: Your column was the first thing I turned to in "Byte", and I now browse your site regularly. It is both entertaining and educational. I have no inherent dislike of Microsoft, but I find many of their programs needlessly complex. It seems they lack the incentive to make things SIMPLE and RIGHT the first time. I have often wondered if this is due to a "boy genius" syndrome. "Let's see how much we can stuff into this! Aren't we smart!" -- is the impression I get from some of the OS &; program "features". Having wasted a lot of time rebuilding from crashes of Win 95, I have adopted utilities such as Go Back, Norton, and Startup Manager. For most program software, I turn to companies other than MS, as they "try harder" and are less expensive. For email, I use the Pegasus program. It has many useful features, including filters, a spell-check, and the ability to make distribution lists. If you haven't tried it, let me recommend it. As a "graphically inept" person, I find Pegasus easy to use. It has drop-down text menus, and icons which sprout explanatory text when the cursor touches them. It also supports multiple identities, addresses, and users. While the 16-bit versions of Pegasus would crash just as the user finished editing a lengthy message, the 32-bit versions are as stable as any WIn 95program I have found. If the system crashes while Pegasus is open, damage to data is usually minor. (I set 'autosave' for 2 minute intervals!) Did the proponents of icons as a kind of universal language ever consider that some people are text-oriented, and may find icons meaningless and hard to remember? Eudora works well, but contrary to my cognitive processes. I once sat in front of a Mac for ten minutes, and could do nothing with it. (This was before I had used Windows ) I have been using computers since '83, and studied a half-dozen programming languages. Is there a term for being "graphically or symbolically illiterate" (iconically inept?) ? (I can remember enough Latin to doubt the logic of such a phrase!) My computer wish for the year 2000 would be to have reliable PC systems. It might be instructive to set up one Win 95 or Win 98 machine completely with non-MS (apart from the OS) software for a week's work, and then assess one's productivity and time wasted compared to an exclusively MS system. The fans of Linux already have their answer to the question. As to mailing lists, have you never subscribed to any? They exist all over the net, as a means to discuss all sorts of topics. The list "owner" sets the rules and manages the list. Much of the management can be automated. Most lists are free of charge, and all subscribers can participate in discussion. Some lists are moderated, which means the list owner has to approve any post before it is sent out. If you want a list sent only to paying customers, and to which only you send messages, it might be possible to set that up. I look forward to reading more of your adventures in computing. Best wishes, --MP P.S.: See U-Haul's old slogan, "Adventures in Moving" --- there are some areas of life where one might prefer NOT to have "adventures". ************************************** Margaret Pollex Dept. of Languages, Brandon University Iconically inept is a good concept but if the icons are not easily distinguished and recognizable, then the value of icons over a menu is minimal to negative. And there are many times I wish I didn't have adventures. "I do all these silly things so you won't have to..."
Jerry, I
just read your e-mail travails, and that you may consider using Pegasus
Mail. Please don’t. We use it here on our Novell
server, and P-mail works OK with Novell (besides, it’s free; that’s a
major advantage for a university). However,
I don’t recommend it for dial-up connections. Others may have had more
success than I, but I’ve found P-mail to be difficult to configure for
dial-up. I’m hoping to move from P-mail to IMAP support later this year. HTH JA -- John Alexander Manager, Area Computing Services The Capstone College of Nursing Thanks for the tip. I may yet have to try it, though. But for now I am struggling along with Outlook. If I could easily get rid of Office 2000 and go back to 97/98 I would. And I may yet. But marching back isn't simple. On the other hand, they will get out a fix pack. It's a question of when. Right now what I really hate is Outlook's inconsistencies. It is driving me nutso. === Jerry
I write the Dr Keyboard
readers’ computer help page for The Times (of London, although as we
were just about the first newspaper let alone the first Times we think the
others should distinguish themselves by appending their city names) and
run a mailing list for readers - I send out details of the weekly column,
updates on the website, much the sort of thing you do.
Anyway, once the column topped a couple of hundred I got fed up
struggling with Outlook barfing for no reason and the amount of my life it
took up, and so I started up with Listbot (http://www.listbot.com).
I think I found out about it from Fred Langa who used to use it for his
LangaList too, although now he pays for his service so he can sell his own
ads in the mail. The paid-for, ad-free Listbot is only about $50 a year.
Anyway, it’s proven immensely simple to use; just write the
mailing in Word or whatever, cut and paste it into a form on the site in
your browser and away you go. There’s useful statistics to use too, you
can have people subscribe automatically or have an approvals process and,
best of all, it’s saved me half a day a week wrestling with Outlook.
Recommended, as you say. On
the problems you have with FrontPage, I’ve given up trying to use FP2000
because it’s just too different to 98 and I don’t have the time to
learn it. The one thing
that’s kept me able to use
98 is splitting up the web site into lots of smaller sub-webs, which
proved simple in the end. I have the main root web, www.drkeyboard.co.uk,
and then there used to be folders off it called /answers, /diary/, /chat,
what have you. To cut it up, just create a new site called www.drkeyboard.co.uk/diary
and then import into it the contents of the old /diary folder, and that
was it. Good luck, and thanks
for everything you do. Regards Chris Ward-Johnson Dr Keyboard - Computing Answers You
Can Understand As I said above, if I could go back to 97/98 easily I would. And Outlook 2000 with it's settings and different views and surprise! Surprise! when I open mail makes me crazy. The Times. An institution of some importance. I wonder if the old press lords ever imagined there would be a computer correspondent for The Times? "I shall write a letter to the Times," say the characters in many books. Now I have a letter from the Times... Thanks for the information. Are you using the FP Extensions with 98 and your chopped up subwebs? And if I convert the first 50 pages of VIEW to a subweb, would it be hard to reference them from the main web? Thanks!
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Saturday August 21, 1999Column time meaning we are still in Short Shrift mode.. I never quite know what to make of missives like this. Things that being "Did you know?" usually end by telling me something I don't want to know, or that is true only in a technical sense but in fact isn't true in any useful way, or both. But perhaps this time for sure? FYI: from http://www.macosrumors.com/
Revenge of the “Swiss
cheese” Microsoft code [12:58 8/19] contributor: <Brad
Dormanen> Did you know that
FrontPage is banned from SIPRNET, (Secure Internet Protocol Router
Network) the government’s separate, secure network? The reason for the
ban is that there may be huge security holes created by FrontPage code in
HTML that makes it easier for hackers to break into and edit the existing
HTML. In fact, this is such
an issue that one of the “features” of FrontPage 2000 (which is not
expected to be released for the Mac, cutting out more than 60% of all
Webmasters) is that you can use it to create pages free from any FrontPage
extensions: “HTML pure.” If you currently use FrontPage 98 or earlier
and you don’t manually go through it line by line and strip out the
FrontPage specific code, you run the risk of getting hacked through the
huge security holes caused by FrontPage extensions. BBEdit and Dreamweaver,
anyone? Bart
Biamonte LDS Engineering
- Strategic Projects Now what does this mean? That pages created by Front Page aren't allowed? That people on a particular net can't access pages created by FrontPage? Or that a secure service doesn't allow the FrontPage extensions to run on that server? If the latter, nor yet do I, but not for security fears (that would be Pair.com's problem, not mine) but because with large web sites the FP Extensions don't work well if at all. As I say, I am often suspicious of "Did you know?" warnings. From: Stephen M. St. Onge <saintonge@hotmail.com> Subject: NASA and SDI Dear Dr. Pournelle: I just read the Spinrad article, and your reply. It reminded me of an English assignment back in '86. I was told to find and summarize a technical journal article, and I found one in an engineering magazine on space stations. There was a paragraph or so on Mir. There was two or three paragraphs on Skylab. And then there was the meat of the article -- a discussion of all the proposed space stations that NASA had thought about but never built. One sentence, burned into my memory, says it all "An office was established to study the concept." RIGHT. They studied concepts, but never built anything. And that's the way they'll explore the Solar System, too. I wish I had something to add to that. A few years ago I was asked what it would take to build a Lunar colony. My answer was: "Two billion if you give me the money and get out of the way. If you advertise a prize for the first Lunar Colony to last two years, that should probably be about ten billion dollars. Alternatively, if you go to the Air Force or Navy with specs you won't change and let them do it black (ie without having to comply with the Armed Service Procurement Regulations, which was 25 linear feet of loose-leaf notebooks when I was in the business, and is now much larger, and includes handicapped access and much else) you would probably get bids at $10 billion; if you make them do the paperwork and follow the ASPRs then probably $25 billion. NASA has already said it will take $85 billion and 20 years if everything goes as planned. With NASA nothing has EVER been cheaper or taken less time than the estimate." I have no real reason to change that now. I read your effusive review of
W2k with great interest, then tried to install a copy of RC1 on two of my
machines. One is a dual PII-400 with 196MB of memory; the other is an AMD
K6-233 with 128MB. The dual Pentium machine
installed OK from the bootable CD, rummaged around for several minutes,
then crashed, saying it couldn’t load “NTKRNLMP” which I’d bet is
the kernel for multiple processors. The other box wouldn’t boot
from CD, so I used a 1GB partition with W95 as a jumping-off point, then
asked W2K to do an upgrade. It searched the HDD’s on the box (but not
the network drives or the drive containing Linux) and said it couldn’t
install due to the presence of V.Communications’ System Commander. The
complete non-install report is attached if you are interested. I’m very UNimpressed with the
fact they have made W2K incompatible with the entire Corel 2000 Office
Suite, and other items found on the box. Seems to me they are
none-too-subtly requiring me to use their office suite, thereby
‘proving’ they neither have nor seek a monopoly. Regards, Tom Well it is beta, but thanks. If my remarks came out as effusive, then apologies: I find Windows 2000 a distinct improvement what with a device manager and plug and play, and for what I am doing with it, it works. Win 2K Professional uses both CPU Unites in my Compaq Pentium Pro without problems, and boots fine. However, I have NEVER recommended that you 'upgrade' to install a new operating system. The best I can say for that practice is "good luck" but the results are likely to be unpredictable. For months. When we did Win 2K here we scrubbed down and reformatted the hard disk, repartitioned it, etc. There wasn't a trace of the old stuff left. Jerry: Bob (tek1@inwave.com)
tells the sordid story of a customer who made the ill-considered move to
O2K, including the following statement: “It should be noted that
between the cost of Microsoft Office 2000 Small Business Edition and my
tech time the impact to the customer will be nearly a thousand dollars not
counting two days of lost
productivity only to wind up exactly where they started. They will need to
upgrade every computer in the office to run Office 2000 efficiently in
addition to resolving now known issues and perhaps other issues unknown
with their respective program venders and I doubt they have the fiscal or
emotional stomach for it at the moment. Down the road it will be
inevitable.” What gets me here is that
Microsoft takes the heat for the customer’s stupidity, and Bob is
perpetuating this hateful reality. What caused the customer to
blithely move forward with a major system upgrade on a system that had
imminent deadlines? Ignorance
and rose-colored glasses. Yes,
I concede that, in a perfect world, all upgrades would go smoothly, and we
should address all
software vendors to do better at making the upgrade path easier to
navigate. But we all have to
deal with reality, and tossing a new OS on a mission-critical system two
days before a deadline is nothing but raw, unmitigated idiocy.
I can only presume they did this without Bob’s input, because if
they did it with Bob’s blessing, well... Anyway: my point is that stupid
users tricks still persist. Software
can only be as smart as the user driving it.
They got bit, but I fear they’re not learning the right kind of
lesson. ...cheers...KCL...
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Sunday August 22, 1999Still in short shrift mode. Dear Jerry: The past week as part of my own experiment to create a Linux box I've spent hours and hours researching the "build versus buy" state of play in the low end market of today. If you're interested in what I found out read on, otherwise have a good one! My nose has been buried in COMPUTER SHOPPER and the Internet for the past week looking for the best deal on a "good enough" Windows machine that would be pressed into double duty as a Linux test bed. The basic idea was "how low can you go" in terms of price, and is it economically more viable to build a box or buy one? I started by bargain hunting for about the cheapest useful box you could build: by "useful" I mean known brands from known vendors, not RAM made in Nepal or power supplies from Columbia imported by ex-CIA spooks selling the goods through clandestine Web sites. What I found is that for just under $500 you can buy the components needed to build a reasonable box, sans monitor: AMD 300Mhz K6-2 CPU, 32MB SDRAM, 4.3 gigabyte HDD, floppy, on-board video and sound, 32X CD-ROM drive, no-name motherboard, case, modem, speakers, mouse, and keyboard. At this price no software would be included, including no O/S, but as the intent was to stuff Linux on it that wasn't a big issue; obviously the only warrantees would be from the individual component manufacturers or the retailers themselves. Late Thursday I was ready to start placing my orders when a notice came across my screen courtesy of C/NET: it reported that the upstarts at eMachine had just refreshed their line with some added features but had nonetheless kept prices at from $399 to $599, after rebate (once again sans monitor). Needless to say, this I had to see... Turns out to be very very true, and I think the new eMachines have just about put any economic reason for building your own low-end computer to rest. Long story short, there's a brand new eMachine eTower 400ix (the middle of the line) on my desk, and I'm completely impressed. This box hosts a (370 socketed) Intel Celeron 400 with 128KB L2 cache, 64 MB of SDRAM, a 6.4 gigabyte Seagate HDD, generic floppy, Samsung 40X CD-ROM, 2X AGP ATI Rage Turbo 3D graphics chip with 4MB of SGRAM, Crystal Soundfusion PCI wavetable sound chip, a PCI card V.90 "Windows modem", 2 USB ports (one in front next to the MIDI port under a nifty smoked-plastic hatch, one in the back), a Logitech 2-button mouse, tiny non-powered speakers, and a fine little keyboard. It also comes with Windows 98 and MS Works installed, and a one-year warranty, all for just $549.98 minus a $50 rebate for a net price of $499.98 plus tax. Jerry, I just don't think you can build an equivalent box, apples to apples, for less than $700, and you still wouldn't have a warranty on the end result. The closest equivalent box on Dell's Web site came in at $916! I've used the eMachine hard the past couple of days: coupled to a Sony 17 inch monitor it displays 16-bit 1024 by 768 color rock solid at 75hz refresh, it plays Unreal at 800 by 600 in 3D mode (the textures are a little "gritty" but the colors are fabulous and the speed flawless) the sound is exceptional, and I just can't see what the average office, SOHO, home or student user would need with a more expensive or capable machine. Granted this box is no Arnold Schwartzenegger of computers, but if what I was going to build was a Pee Wee Herman by comparison this guy is definitely at least a Bruce Willis. The power supply is only 120 watts, the two RAM sockets are populated by a pair of 32MB SIMMs instead of one 64MB DIMM, and there is only one free drive bay with one free power lead and one open IDE channel lead, meaning the user's choice is a second hard drive OR something like an Iomega ZIP, not both, but those quibbles aside there's just no way I can see building an equivalent system for anywhere near the same money. Inside everything is tie-wrapped and neatly folded, as orderly an installation as I've ever seen, and shows real pride in manufacture. The case is all-steel, and listening to the metallic-reverb floppy and hard drive access takes me back to those "good old" IBM-PC and AT days. How low can and will prices go? I don't know, but with this eMachine the cost of a truly capable mini-tower is lower than I ever thought I'd see. Anybody contemplating building or buying a plenty "good enough" system really ought to check one of these systems out at Staples, Frys, Best Buy, Sears, Circuit City, etc. All the best-- Tim Loeb PS: I have nothing to do with eMachine, Inc., have no personal interests in the company, know nobody there, and as far as I know have no ax to grind here at all: I was looking for the best inexpensive plenty "good enough" box, and I think I found it. For now, anyway. PPS: And what about the Linux install, the motive for this madness in the first place? As they used to say, "tune in next week..."Fascinating. Thanks!
Dear Jerry, What the WashingtonPost did not
mention is that the proposed legislation that would permit surreptious
entry would also do by a so-called sealed warrant. A sealed warrant is
such that it cannot legally be divulged until it is unsealed, if ever. A
commentator on the article I read raised the interesting point that since
the existence of a “sealed” warrant cannot be proven - then the
converse is highly likely - that its NON-existence cannot be proven. This
leaves an already shaky barn door wide open. The gestapo types (sadly,
most “law enforcement”) would have open season, merely by conveniently
forgetting that there is no warrant. And who can prove tthat there is,
under the circumstances? I thought the idea of mandatory back-doors was
scary, but sealed-warrant legitimization of breaking &; entering and
vandalism is seriously scary. Regards, JHR -- [J.H. Ricketson in San Pablo] Saw this and thought this was revolutionary.
Thought you needed to know. As you have said, you can never have enough
storage. A reader since the beginning, Robin Whitson rwhitson@fastlane.net ‘KEELE’ ULTRA HIGH DENSITY
MEMORY SYSTEM A Quantum Jump in Memory Storage
and Access Professor Ted Williams at Keele
University, Staffordshire, England has developed a patented solid state
memory system with the capacity of 86 Giga Bytes per square centimetre of
surface area. The system uses a magneto-optical system not dissimilar to
that of CD-ROM, except that the system is fixed, solid state, and has a
different operating approach. http://www.cmruk.com/cmrkeele.html Beyond the dreams of avarice! Thanks for telling me about it. "Silicon is cheaper than iron..." Hi Jerry
Just tried the link to the Keele web site (re: A
Quantum Jump in Memory...) and got a 404 error. Managed to find some info
at the bottom of this page: http://www.cmruk.com/cmrinventions.html Cheers, Paul
-- Paul Kennett
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