| Sunday,
March 26, 2000
Hi Jerry,
Regarding spam and congressional inaction: I imagine
spammers are probably smart enough to refrain from sending their annoying
drivel directly to members of the senate and house of representatives, so
that congress may not fully appreciate the extent of the problem. Suppose
some columnist(s) suggested to his/their readership to FORWARD all the
spam they received to their Senator and Congressperson’s e-mail address.
It wouldn’t take that many people to do it to get their attention. Has
this idea been floated about / explored??
DIV
O, subtle one. O Serpent. What a dastardly thing
to suggest...
There really isn't any polite way to show this one,
so:
>I was falling on the floor laughing for 15 minutes when i saw it,
courtesy
>of an article in Wired.
>
> http://www.blowthedotoutyourass.com/
>
>(no kidding, thats *really* the URL). Its a real guy (actually
several of
>them) who a couple weeks ago started putting
"anti-dot-com" posters up in
>San Francisco. (the guy apparently actually works for a tech.
company).
>
>He thought up about 30 of the most unlikely names for "dot.com"
companies,
>and started plastering stickers on billboards with the names on
them.
One does wonder how many of those domains will be
registered, and how long they will last...
I have my views on this but it's time to get yours:
Dr. Pournelle,
I'm a long time fan of your sf as well as your
computer column. I have a question that others might also be interested in
reading. I am thinking of upgrading my office computer with a new
motherboard, but I am finding that chipsets have become quite confusing
since I built my P5-100 several years ago. Any views of whether one should
get a VIA or Intel chip set? Also, any motherboard manufacturers that you
recommend? I know that you have had experiences with Iwill and Tyan
recently, but how would you compare them to Intel boards? I realize that
you are busy, so take your time. Thanks.
Michael Dennis Michael Aaron Dennis Assistant
Professor Science and Technology Studies Cornell University 632 Clark Hall
Ithaca, NY 14853-2501 607 255 6044 (fax)
I understand your annoyance
with Outlook, since I'm stuck using it at work. ( Microsoft's documentation
DOES suck dead bunnies :P )
For a _free_ solution to the spam problem that
DOESNT require you to change mail clients, take a look at EzPop http://www.glabouni.com/EzPop/
If that doesnt suit, there are a pile of 'Email
Checkers' that can do similar jobs at http://im1.tucows.com/win2k/checkers2k.html
http://cws.internet.com/mail-notify.html
That MAY make life a little easier on you.
BTW, there is one dodge that may cut down on your
spam. Spammers ROUTINELY 'harvest' email addresses set up as 'mailto:'
links on web pages (your blimp...) When I yanked the 'mailto:' link on my
page, it cut down my spam by 75%.
To see how I display my email address on my pages,
take a look at http://home.netcom.com/~jfurlong/contact.html
yes, it's a nuisance for people who want to email me, but spam is a
nuisance for _ME_. <grin>
Alas, I don't want to make it difficult for
people to send me mail. I get a great deal of information that way. Worse,
much of it is addressed to mailing lists (being press releases and such
like) so I can't kill it that way either. I presume I will figure out
something. Thanks.
The Burning City on Amazon
Jerry,
Just wanted to let you know that I enjoyed The
Burning City and wrote a favorable review on Amazon, which is now posted
to the public. I find it amazing how many people are willing to grind
personal axes in public. Reading a couple of the Amazon reviews, you'd
think a copy of the book leaped off the shelf and maliciously beat their
children into pulp.
Best as always to everyone at Chaos Manor,
Jessica Mulligan
Thanks! That's a great image. I wish
I'd said that and within a couple of months I probably will have...
For a less happy thought:
http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2000/01/31/kincaid/index.html
>Is this child pornography? >American photo
labs are arresting parents as child pornographers for taking pictures of
their kids in the bath. >By James R. Kincaid
JULES SIEGEL http://bookarts.webjump.com
As Kincaid says in the article, we are being
encouraged to fantasize sexual motives and techniques from pictures of
children at play.
Let me pose a scenario: take two children, take
digital photographs of them. All photographs of the actual subjects are
legally clothed, say bathing suits, two piece for the girl. The children
do nothing that children on the beach under adult supervision don't do in
public. The digital images are now turned into 3-d digital objects.
The clothing is removed digitally. The original models are never shown
these pictures and are unaware that they exist. Go further: the faces of
the digital images are altered sufficiently to make the originals
unrecognizable: eye and hair color for a start. The digital images are now
made to do increasingly risqué acts. At precisely what point does
this become illegal? At precisely what point is it a crime to possess a
copy?
I don't know if anyone has done this, but it is
possible with today's technology. I doubt I have quite enough horsepower
to render such images here at Chaos Manor, but it won't be long before I
and everyone else will have it, and there must be a thousand places within
a mile of here that can do it now.
The presumed intent of the law is to protect
actual children from actual harm. In the scenario I have proposed, what
harm has been done? Agreed, this isn't the behavior I would want from
anyone around small children, but that's a matter of social acceptance,
not criminal law. Or so I would suppose.
I checked out the Website and
if you want to run Mac OS8, you'd better look elsewhere. This emulates a
Mac running OS 6.7. It won't do some of the calls in 7.0 which was a major
update. Thanks for the info though. Love the columns and the Chaos Manor
website. Thanks for all the problems you've gone through and we don't have
to.
Mahalo Ron Maurer
Alas. Thanks.
Jerry,
Thursday you wondered what "bogon flux"
was. Here's a short intro:
http://www.heisler.net/hal/jargon-4.1.0/html/Q/quantum-bogodynamics.html
Les Halfhill
Thanks. Actually, I fear I don't care enough to
go find out. I have known about jargons and their uses since reading
Sutherland's The Professional Thief as an undergraduate. Jargons
can protect semi-closed groups from infiltration by amateurs, but they
aren't much security against anyone both intelligent and determined. And I
can't learn them all...
Another I post without comment:
From: Jim Warren <jwarren@well.com> Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2000
20:55:34 -0800 Subj: the ant and the grasshopper _
ORIGINAL VERSION: The ant works to exhaustion in the
withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up food and
supplies for the winter.
The grasshopper thinks he's a fool. He laughs and
dances and plays the summer away.
Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed. The
grasshopper has no food or shelter so he dies out in the cold.
MODERN VERSION: The ant works hard in the withering
heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the
winter. The grasshopper thinks he's a fool and laughs and dances and plays
the summer away.
Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press
conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm
and well fed while others are cold and starving.
CBS, NBC and ABC show up to provide pictures of the
shivering grasshopper next to video of the ant in his warm, comfortable
home with table filled with food. America is stunned by the sharp
contrast.
How can it be that, in a country of such wealth,
this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?
Then a representative of the NAAGB (National
Association of Green Bugs)shows up on Nightline and charges the ant with
"green bias", and makes the case that the grasshopper is the
victim of 30 million years of greenism.
Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the
grasshopper, and everybody cries when he sings "It's Not Easy Being
Green."
Bill and Hillary Clinton make a special guest
appearance on the CBS Evening News. They tell a concerned Dan Rather that
they will do everything they can for the grasshopper who has been denied
the prosperity he deserves by those who benefited unfairly during the
Reagan summers, or as Bill refers to it, the "Temperatures of the
80's."
Richard Gephardt exclaims in an interview with Peter
Jennings that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper, and
calls for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his "fair
share."
Finally, the EEOC drafts the "Economic Equity
and Anti- greenism Act", retroactive to the beginning of the summer.
The ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate number of green bugs
and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, his home is
confiscated by the government.
Hillary gets her old law firm to represent the
grasshopper in a defamation suit against the ant, and the case is tried
before a panel of federal judges who Bill appointed from a list of single
parent welfare moms who can only hear cases on Thursdays between 1:30 PM
and 3:00 PM when there are no talk shows scheduled.
The ant loses the case. The story ends as we see the
grasshopper finishing up the last bits of the ant's food, while the
government house he's in, which just happens to be the ant's old house,
crumbles around him since he doesn't know how to maintain it.
The ant has disappeared in the snow. And on the TV,
which the grasshopper bought by selling most of the ant's food, they are
showing Bill Clinton standing before a wildly applauding group of
Democrats announcing that a new era of "fairness" has dawned in
America.
My machine at home is a Win98
box. Everything works fine...except...
After a while, shortcuts on the desktop slow down
and eventually quit working. I had this problem with PC Anywhere and AOL.
I thought my phone line was bad. However, I could start the apps fine from
the Start menu.
This has occurred at work where we have a ton of
machines running Windows NT 4.0 Workstation. Folks will double click to
start an app. In some cases the app won't start. In others, it starts, but
is flaky. By coincidence I found that deleting the shortcut and creating a
new one "fixed" the problem.
Is there some sort of baggage attached to shortcuts
such that, after a while, the baggage becomes so great that the machine
just can't handle it?
Thanks.
Mike Corum Knoxville, TN
I have noticed that myself. I find that running
MemTurbo seems to fix the problem. MemTurbo works with Windows 2000 but
seems to have no effect; with W 98 it seems to do considerable good.
I know you think NASA has
become a wasteful bureaucracy, but don't you think you're being a little
over zealous in this instance? GRO is well beyond its designed life, which
means the likelihood of an unrecoverable failure in the near future is
very high. Unlike SOHO (the European satellite you referred to,) GRO is in
low earth orbit. From this layman's point of view, bringing it down in
under control seems prudent.
Drake Christensen
I have this from one of my technical advisors in
whom I have great confidence:
NASA will deorbit a multi-hundred million
dollar unique astronomical research instrument rather than spend less than
a million dollars working on modified control software to point the
instrument with only two reaction wheels. Interesting priorities,
particularly because this technique has been demonstrated on SOHO and IUE
spacecraft.
Beyond that I leave you to your own conclusions.
My problem is that I no longer believe much of what NASA says. JPL, for
instance, will not tell you that they didn't think to test the ignition of
the mars lander systems under the extreme cold conditions; they tested
them at room temperature and thought that sufficient. I wish I were making
that up. Now OF COURSE there are people at JPL smarter than that just as
there are people smart enough to see that the numbers don't make sense
when you use English rather than metric system to calculate burn times.
The problem is there is no longer any adult supervision.
I have my own answer to this, but I invite
comments.
Hi Jerry - I'm just finishing the Burning City and
quite liking it.
I have a question that (if it fits the general
scheme of things) I would love to ask your other readers.
I have an office with a half dozen PCs, networked
with Win98 and a 10/100 hub. I also have a handful of Macs of various
vintages running System 7.6. Currently the Macs are networked with
AppleTalk, and also have ethernet cards to get to the University system
for Internet access.
Can someone point to a specific resource that will
will tell what I have to do to integrate the Macs into our PC network? (I
want to plug an ethernet cable from each Mac into the hub and have it all
work.) Since we will be phasing out the Macs I have little interest in
adding hardware.
Thanks!
Barry Rueger Bagatelle Communications &;
Management
(613) 274-4441 22 Ashburn Drive Fax (613) 274-4442
Ottawa, Ontario K2E 6N3 http://www.synapse.net/~rueger/
And the Solution
Hi Jerry,
The Mac-Windows solution is quite simple. One needs
a Windows NT 4 Server or a Win2K Server. (It is the only Win OS that has
Apple Share as a Service) In either flavor of server, just turn on the
Apple Share Service under Networking. Then either server can share files
and or printers across the entire network. If the Win 98 boxes are running
Office 2000 and the Macs are running Office 98 for Macintosh, they can
share documents.
Apple has done it even better. If you have an
"old" Power PC network running OS 7.6.1 and try to connect to a
new G4 network with iMac clients running OS 9... you are out of luck. The
two networks will not talk to each other. Apple has stated no plans to
work something out.
I have taken Apple's advice and have "Thought
Differently". I am experimenting with a Win2K Server sitting between
the two non-talking networks and acting like a bridge, sharing files
stored on the Win2K box via the Apple Share Service.
I'll let you know how it goes...
Regards,
Will Bierman wbierman@flash.net
(Discussion
continued next week)
Mr. Dobbins reports:
There is a huge hole in NT Remote Data Services,
which is installed with the following Microsoft add-ons:
Microsoft Internet Information Server 4.0 (and 5.0?)
Remote Data Service for ADO versions 1.1, 2.0 Microsoft Data Access
Components version 2.5
MDAC 2.5 is included with Win2K, and is available as
a download from Microsoft for NT 4.0.
I have a played with a perl script which will allow
me to make any machine running RDS into executing a trojan of my choice,
such as netbus, Back Orifice, etc. This is a very serious problem; it's
not the OS itself that allows the exploit, but various services running
underneath it which are intended to make it easy to, say, pull data from a
SQL Server database and have it rendered on a Web page without a lot of
hassle.
Here's how to fix it:
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q184/3/75.ASP
Roland Dobbins <mordant@gothik.org>
Mr. Dennis,
I have always preferred to use Intel boards. I just
like the security of knowing that the foundation of the system is as
compatible as possible. ( I define the foundation of a system as the CPU,
chipset and motherboard) I have used Gigabyte Technology motherboards in
the past with very good results. However, when it came time to upgrade
that machine from win98 to W2K, the bios was incompatible, and Gigabyte
hadn't updated it in two years. I don't think this will be a problem with
the Intel boards. ( to be fair, I could have obtained an updated BIOS for
my Gigabyte Tech board, but it would have cost me more than upgrading it
to an Intel motherboard did. Also, the updated BIOS was not from Gigabyte
Tech, but from the BIOS vendor itself, leaving another big question mark I
didn't want to mess with finding the answer to.)
The latest chipsets from Intel are the 440 BX-2 and
the 820 ( the 820 is the latest and greatest). I have heard nothing but
good things about the VIA Apollo Pro chipset, but have not used them
myself. My final advice is: you can't go wrong with an Intel board with
either the BX or 820 chipsets.
Jim Snover
And finally, some comments about Women
and Water. This should be enough: we have now said about all that
needs to be said.
Hello, Jerry
(1) I looked over the Women &; Water conference
site, and if some of your readers are hopping mad about it, then they must
lead very sheltered lives. The conference looks soft-headed, soppy, and
stupid, but who has the time to carry petitions against stupidity? And if
they have that time, maybe they should read the Trancendentalists, and
then work back to Coleridge and Wordsworth. Take a read through
"Frost at Midnight" and "The Prelude" -- more
satisfying.
(2) Re mother-boards, I didn't catch your
correspondent's e-mail address, but I like, and trust, ASUS boards.
(3) Saw "Mission to Mars" the day after it
opened here. Perfectly good movie, and then, clunk, it has to raise the
Big Issues -- the reverential business about Martians who seeded Earth.
Similar to that excruciating movie with Jodie Foster, and to the weakest,
worst part of 2001.
I've been away for the last two weeks: did you
discuss M2M? Any thoughts about what works as movie scifi, and what ends
as pompous drivel?
Regards,
John Welch
While I too think that the title and description of
this conference is a little on the weird side, I have problems with the
way people are complaining about it's use of public moneys.
For one thing, the actual conference itself may not
actually be as silly as it sounds, and may in fact have legitimate points
to be made. We won't know unless we actually go to the conference.
The other thing that bothers me is the question
"Who decides what conference or event shouldn't be heard, for
<insert your own reason here>?" This is the kind of thinking
that can come back and bite one, when next one supports an idea that
others think are hokey!
I seem to remember (though I'm not going to take the
time to research it, now) that there are several ideas that were once
thought to be silly, but that are now accepted as facts. There are
probably many ideas that really are silly, and not worth spending time and
money on, but where does one draw the line?
I can't help but think of the way some people are
trying to have hate sites on the internet shut down. Yet not too long ago,
some of these people would have been on the other end of the question,
with folks wanting to stop them from speaking out. Once we stop someone
from being heard, we've set up a procedure that may stop US from being
heard, one day.
-- David Bierbaum
P.S. Keep up the good work! Even though I don't
always agree with your views, your discussions are always interesting, and
I always look forward to the next one.
It's an excuse to have a conference. I've seen
worse, especially if business people or politicians were involved. Edward
O. Wilson points out that our (human) preferences for where we like to
live are sorta strange for mammals: On a height With a large view
(savannah grassland with scattered trees) Near a body of water.
Find those in a package, and you have some expensive
real estate. Note the water. So water and women do go together.
Wilson also has taken a look at a number of human
customs and taboos. Look at incest. We have a lot of things to say about
incest, ranging from myths to legal codes. But our rules for incest were
actually identified by Westermarck and are shared with other primates: if
two individuals live together closely during the period that either one is
under 2.5 years of age (other ages for other primates), they will not have
a (long-term) sexual relationship. (Some exceptions occur for
father/daughter relationships involving force.)
You may have to listen to him to realize this, but
Wilson is a first class natural scientist. He is not like some people I
know who politicize their science. Very much the reverse.
--- Harry Erwin, PhD, <http://mason.gmu.edu/~herwin>,
Computational Neuroscientist (modeling bat behavior), Senior SW Analyst
and Security Engineer, and Adjunct Professor of Computer Science, GMU.
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