THE VIEW FROM CHAOS MANOR

October 25 - 31, 1999

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This is a day book. It's not all that well edited. I try to keep this up daily, but sometimes I can't. I'll keep trying. See also the monthly COMPUTING AT CHAOS MANOR column, 4,000 - 7,000 words, depending.  (Older columns here.) For more on what this place is about, please go to the VIEW PAGE.

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If you want to PAY FOR THIS there are problems, but I keep the latest HERE. I'm trying. MY THANKS to all of you who sent money.  Some of you went to a lot of trouble to send money from overseas. Thank you! There are also some new payment methods. I am preparing a special (electronic) mailing to all those who paid: there will be a couple of these. I am also toying with the notion of a subscriber section of the page. LET ME KNOW your thoughts.
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The LINUX pages are organized as the log, my queries, and your responses and advice parts one, two,  three, and four. There's four pages because I try to keep download times well under a minute. There are new updates to four.

Current View

Highlights this week:

• Microsoft Decision coming
• For sale: Human eggs or human babies?
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I've only had one lockup of Parsifal since the reinstall, but that is one too many.

The Microsoft Decision Part One Findings of Facts will be given this Friday. See www.byte.com for details; Techweb will be doing live broadcasts for four hours with participation by me. I'm rearranging the place to make it convenient for me to follow stuff on line as well as by broadcast.

One minor annoyance of FrontPage is that when you paste in a message with URL's in it, they don't become "active" until you manually put a space at the end of the URL. I didn't in last week's mail links to sits where you can get the editor vi. I've fixed that.

Fiction this afternoon. I'm feeling good about Mamelukes, the next book in the Janissaries series...

Got at least 4 pages done. That feels better. 

I don't watch much television, and almost never except when it's a program my wife likes. We got used to Law and Order: despite it's somewhat politically correct bias the acting is good, and I rather enjoy the character of the openly liberal but practical DA. Lately, though, we seem not to see the original program, but this new "Special Victims Unit" edition, which is so PC as to be ludicrous in parts; almost everyone overacts; there is dripping sincerity in every scene; and it has become a colossal bore. Pity, because the premise could have been pretty good. Oh. Well.

So about the only TV I see now is on Tuesday nights on Warner, when I watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and now Angel afterwards. Don't know how long that will last.

And Sixty Minutes on Sunday nights, in part because it has taken the place of the lesson. That is, it used to be that there was always the same lesson read in churches on the same day. On 7th Trinity you got the Loaves and the Fishes, the Prodigal Son on 9th Trinity, and the leper and the Centurion on 5th Epiphany. Now it's all changed around and nobody goes to church anyway, so there's nothing everyone will have heard this week. Except Sixty Minutes, which furnishes at least something most of us will be aware of. I suppose I'm being facetious. 

On 5th Epiphany you certainly got a good definition of military authority. 'I say to this man, Go, and he goeth; and to another Come, and he cometh; and to my servant Do this, and he doeth it...' The Army hasn't changed much.

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The findings of fact in the Microsoft case will be announced Friday. Techweb will cover this live. For details see www.byte.com .

This morning's LA Times has a front page article (below the fold) on an email auction of eggs from attractive models. At least one authentic bid of $42,000 has come in for and egg. The girls give their pictures and resumes.

Ethicists - whatever those are, it sounds like a wonderful job, sort of like a clergyman only you don't have to be or do good, just tell people what they ought to do - seem disagreed, with one at USC proclaiming that this is 'merely a tissue sale' while others are decrying the auction of babies.

Leaving out the bizarre ethical controversies, is this likely to be a good trend? The old poem speaks of "Then there are cows who love to boast of affairs they had by Parcel Post" but that was cows getting impregnated by mail; now we have egg and sperm from different places. You too can have the perfect baby although it won't be yours: does that matter? The article didn't say who was doing the bidding: whether this was a wealthy man either unmarried, married to a barren woman, or merely unhappy with his wife's genetic possibilities (which of course could include some proclivities to genetic defects). Given the price of the eggs it's not likely to be tried by the poor - unless it becomes a fresh new right discovered somehow in the Constitution. One can't neglect that possibility.

Will we then have Federal price setting for eggs, and a guarantee that poor people will have access to eggs from attractive college students? How about charging an egg as tuition for a scholarship? The higher the SAT score, the more eggs you are required to donate...

Unfortunately, while all that sounds absurd, I watch some of the other bizarre legal trends in this land of the free, and wonder.

Long article in the LA Times this morning about the Mississippi county just south of Memphis. (The state line ran through our farm at that border, so I know that area, or knew it 20 years ago.) Gambling has created two jobs for every inhabitant, but only one applicant in 7 from within the county is hired because they lack "the basic skills of getting to work on time, looking a person in the eye, etc."  Now when I lived in rural Tennessee/Mississippi most of the sharecroppers never got beyond 6th grade, but they could all read; and every one of them understood the notion of working a full day and being to work on time. Apparently that has vanished?

The article says that most of the jobs are filled by commuters from Memphis. It also quotes one woman who "has just moved from a dirt floor sharecropper cabin to a subsidized apartment" as saying "none of that money ever got down to us, and it don't do us any good." Or words to that effect. The reporter made no comment on this.

I haven't been back to that area since 1950 except twice, once to make a speech and once to be a guest at a SF convention; but how did people get from being poor hard working farmhands to the point of being unable to get jobs as janitors in a casino? Or did the article leave a lot out?

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Once again I have the mail list problem. Outlook 2000 and Earthlink hate each other, with the result that I cannot send to a mail list of a thousand or so. I need a way to DO that. Pair.com, the host of this site, doesn't seem to have that as part of its "service" or if they do I haven't been able to figure out how to do it. They seem to have some kind of anti-spam thing that prevents me from sending more than a dozen... Wait. There seems to be a bulletin on that. Perhaps it will work. Stand by...

Nope. "Too many recipients."

I need a mail service that will let me send to 1,000 or more people, by simply sending mail.  I will pay for that. Pair.com won't do that. Earthlink.net won't do that. SOMEONE will do it. I do not mind authenticating who I am, or anything like that. I just want to be able to DO IT without having to go through Hell to make it happen.  Surely someone can manage that? And I want to be able to do it from Outlook since importing and exporting address lists isn't easy. I just want to be able to DO it. 

I hate little computers this morning. I have other things to think about than this.

Later: I've got a number of suggested solutions, and I'll go with one of them. More when it happens. Mostly I need QUICK and CONVENIENT since I'd mail more to the subscriber list if it were easier to do. 

We will be doing THE BYTE.COM AWARDS at COMDEX this year. We have a pretty good team, too. Wednesday afternoon, in the main LVCC foyer, at the Computer Reseller booth, after 4 PM.  Plan on being there!

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More fiction today. Mamelukes is definitely moving along now. That always makes me feel better.

New goody box from Intel, a Pentium 550 and a SR440 BX motherboard. I have one of those set up with Windows 2000. This one gets 98 SE. Now I can compare them with different peripherals. One of them probably takes the place of Princess, this dual Compaq Professional Workstation Pentium 200 I have been using for communications for so long. Princess can be honorably retired, although in fact she's a fine machine still, and there's no real reason to change. I'll probably shuffle things around, putting Princess at Niven's station (where Squirrel was to go, only the MSI motherboard was defective).

Incidentally, the ghost in the machine went away: it only took time. When we went to the beach house I shut down the work stations but not the servers. When we came back, Seattle was still there, but Squirrel was gone: clearly the "lease ran out" on the assigned TCP/IP address for Squirrel, and the server forgot about him. It was an interesting episode, though.

Now to build the new machine. Also to take Parsifal apart and see what is locking him up.

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Standing by for the Microsoft Decision. We'll have comments live. See www.byte.com for details today.

Discussion in mail on tariff for revenue.

And the judge calls it off. Next week, he says. Sigh. 

I have managed to mail to my mailing lists after a bunch of wheel spinning. If you are a subscriber and did not get a mailing today, please send me mail to jerryp@jerrypournelle.com?subject=subscriber and tell me when you subscribed, how, and under what email address.  Before you do that, wait a day or so, and then look at the badmail page. I will revise that this evening or tomorrow morning after the returns come in. I have a number already.

What I did was break the list into two parts, and mail to each. Actually I broke it into 4 first, and when those all went out, I decided to live dangerously. I also found out that while Outlook mails only to "Contacts" it does NOT have to mail only to the ROOT CONTACT FOLDER. You can select among other contact folders. I did that. And as to why I didn't know to do that, it was because I did not

READ THE FLIPPING MANUAL, STUPID!!

Of course the manuals are awful for Office 2000, but by diligent battering of the little help paper clip I got him beaten into submission enough to tell me how to do this. And it worked. So I should be doing more frequent mailings now including forwarding stuff I think might be interesting to subscribers. Filtered, of course. I don't send out a LOT of stuff.  It's just difficult enough that I have to think about doing it...

We saw Double Jeopardy tonight. Pretty good. And there's some interesting stuff over in mail today.

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I got the following spam (which actually goes on for a page or more):

What a little candlelight can do! There's nothing like candlelight to create a tranquil atmosphere [etc.]

and for some reason came the mental picture of the house burning down. Oh. Well. Which generated a comment...

The Toshiba settlement is horrifying. See mail.

For some reason FrontPage 2000 has slowed down, so that the letters 'drag' when I type. It's worse over in mail. I can't think why.

Went to Niven's Halloween Party. Nice party. Now it's column time. 

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ALL HALLOW'S EVE

Disturbing new: the visit stats for this place are falling off. Not horribly, but enough that if the trend continues it will make me wonder if the work put into this is worth it. Tell your friends to come have a look. They might like it.

If you subscribe and haven't renewed in a year, this is a good time... If you don't subscribe you might think about it.

I can also do more special reports now that things are settling in again. What else ought I be doing?

I have been putting BYTE Column mail in with regular mail. Should I, or should that have a separate page? I prefer the way I have been doing it.

I seem to be coming down with something. We had our flu shots a month ago, so perhaps it won't be too severe. Sure does drain energy, though.

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