| Tuesday, October
2, 2001
3 AM. I should go to bed. I have my doubts about VIA and
Athlon. Of course the problem is probably Windows 2000 as well. What great
fun. 9 AM: the problem was Windows 2000: the repair
installation doesn't work. Or didn't in this case. I seem to be making
progress with the full installation: before I went to bed I reformatted
the hard disk and started over for real, and that seems to be working. And
John Strohm sends this:
http://noosphere.princeton.edu/terror.html
They have prepositioned "random event
generators" (???) around the planet. They are looking at the outputs,
doing statistical correlations, essentially trying to decide whether there
is some kind of "collective unconsciousness" that affects real
physics.
They apparently see one hell of a
statistically-significant spike in their data on September 11, 2001.
I have not read this in detail, just glanced over
it. It doesn't look like a hoax, but you never know.
Now that would be real news. Jung postulated a collective
unconscious; and that plays a fairly large part in Dianetics which is
Hubbard's synthesis of Jung and Korzybski, and became the base of
Scientology. Odd indeed. I haven't time to look at the data this
morning.
I am now willing to believe that
Microsoft and Earthlink and the Hughes satellite people all worked
together to create the most frustrating system possible, guaranteed to
drive everyone insane. There is no other explanation of why
this imbecility works the way it does. Clearly no one really tried to make
this work and did any testing. Why should they? The MSN
home page, for instance, is designed for maximum problems with high
latency systems: it wants about 50 requests for little files, and since
there is a delay for each one, it takes literally about 4 minutes to
download the MSN home page. Updates are just as bad. I suppose there is
going to be some magical fix for all this when things are adequately
cached, but I wouldn't count on it. I have no choice but to
sit there and wait for Microsoft to deliver its stupid home page with all
the stupid little files, but once I get my updates I can be certain I will
not go THERE again. Ye gods! All right. Once it works
it works fine. But ye flipping gods , the contortions I have to go through
to get it going. I don't know if the problems are hardware
or software so I am going to get an Intel D815 system to install this on
and try again.
It's a Race! Galacticus the system that has
XP Home Edition has informed me that it is going to shut down forever in
one hour because my XP has expired. I have a new XP. I am installing. It
says the installation will take 51 minutes. Ain't it fun? Meanwhile, if
you have Windows 2000 running I think you would have to be insane or a
computer columnist to "upgrade" to XP. Perhaps I am wrong but
this latest trick has not given me a warm feeling. If they
do that to the press what will they do to mere customers? Irked. Irked I
am. Well I lost a few minutes as the installation
locked up. I now have 39 minutes to go to install Home Edition XP.
Hurrah. Hard reset got it going again, and I suppose the old one is gone
so I won't expire. But we will see.
I seem to have XP Home installed in time and it seems to
work. I have bought the ingredients for an Intel D815
system to be the satellite server. I don't like the way the Athlon
rebooted a couple of times when the satellite connection wasn't working
properly. I am not sure what happened, and I don't know whose fault
it was, so this time, it's Intel which I understand.
8:30 PM I have an Antec case (they don't sell PC Power and
Cooling cases at Fry's or I'd be using one of those), a D815EEAL2
motherboard, an 866 Pentium III with fan, 512 mb of memory, a 16x DVD ROM
drive, a floppy, and a Seagate 80 GB hard drive. We will see how
long it takes to turn this into a working Windows 2000 system connected
with the Hughes satellite. 9:35 PM System assembled,
booting Windows 2000 Setup. Note that I put ten minutes into mail during
that hour. 9:40 Begins formatting 80 MB with NTFS About
midnight I had the system set up, running, and connected by satellite.
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