THE VIEW FROM CHAOS MANOR View 221 September 2 - 8, 2002 |
||
FOR BOOKS OF THE MONTH 1994-Present Click HERE Last Week's View Next Week's View Highlights this week:
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 page is about, please go to the VIEW PAGE. If you have never read the explanatory material on that page, please do so. If you are not paying for this place, click here... For Previous Weeks of the View, SEE VIEW HOME PAGE Search: type in string and press return. |
||
If you have no idea what you are doing here, see the What is this place?, which tries to make order of chaos. If you intend to send MAIL to me, see the INSTRUCTIONS.
If you subscribed: If you didn't and haven't, why not? For the BYTE story, click here.
The freefind search remains:
|
This week: | Monday
September 2, 2002 The World SF Convention will be winding down but I'm still here working. Oh well. There's still a lot of mail worth looking at. |
This week: | Tuesday, September
3, 2002
Still working on my books, and still far behind. But over in mail there is an issue about access to politically incorrect data that sparked a rather long comment by me, if that is interesting. And there's a lot of interesting mail. And this from Dan: Subject: Look at what the cat dragged in this morning Importance: High Why it is none other then Windows XP Service Pack 1! http://premierdownload.microsoft.com/download/whistler/ Install with extreme caution! Have fire trucks ready on site in case of system fire! I have yet to install this as I am still downloading it so if you put this on a system make sure its one you don't mind loosing to a SP1 related mess. This is provided of course the SP does do wonky things to your system, which I am not aware of yet. But this is XP which is patently different from everything else OS-wise MS has done so I expect this SP to act strangely somehow I just don't know how yet. -Dan S.
|
This week: |
Wednesday, September
5, 2002
Worked all day.
|
This week: |
Thursday,
September 5, 2002 Spent the day at the Windows Media Summit at the new building at Hollywood and Highland. I didn't do much for pictures. There are interesting things happening in the digital media world, but most of that will go in the column. There will be mail later tonight. I'm trying to write this up, and I am pretty tired. I used the Tablet PC for the conference, and when it's working it's wonderful. The one I have isn't quite what we need, but it's close.
OSITIS WINPROXY has done it to me again. Of course they have not responded to the trouble message I sent over the weekend (I gave my registration number; I paid for this thing). And once again Ositis WinProxy thinks it ought to intercept any attempt to get to my web site either through the Internet or through ws_ftp. Mercury, the machine that connects directly to the DirecPC satellite, has none of these problems. The problem is with the miserable WinProxy which worked for a long time, and now just won't connect to my web site for anything. Does anyone have a good candidate for a program that will let me have that silly satellite connection and distribute the results to some of the other computers here? I no longer trust Ositis WinProxy and I am tired of the emotional storms that happen when things that have always worked just stop working. The satellite needs a Windows box to connect. For a year Ositis WinProxy ran on that machine and I could connect to the satellite through it. Now it has decided that I can connect to anything except my own web site. I don't feel like fighting it any longer. They don't answer attempts to get to their technical support people (and they make it very difficult even to try to get to them). They must have some kind of competition. There is yet another critical security flaw, but the report is that no one has used it and they'll fix it real soon now. http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-956729.html http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q328691 Jerry, Any truth in the rumour that Norton has colluded with the FBI to permit their unauthorized penetration of Norton's virus security to infect "terrorist's" computers with FBI keystroke monitoring software? I have not heard this rumor so I have no notion of its truth. When Commander Eubanks was in charge at Symantec I could have said I would bet against it. I don't know the current management, but I doubt it is true. Too much downside and hardly any upside.
|
This week: |
Friday,
September 6, 2002 Column time. A newsletter I subscribe to spoke of civility on the Internet and mentioned "the hate filled web site" http://www.freerepublic.com/ I went over and had a quick look, and I didn't see any hate, although it's certainly not a Democratic Party booster site. Is there something I don't know about that site? In fact this chap said today that two web sites are "hate filled" http://www.lucianne.com/main.asp is the other. Here is what he said: "As I've remarked before the Internet contributes greatly to this. It's much easier for us to become online "dittoheads" when the drug of hate speech can be consumed privately, without sound, without company and without interruption. This has been reflected since the beginning of the Web in such hate-filled sites as Lucianne and Free Republic . Recently liberals have begun fighting back (sort of) at sites like Buzzflash and MediaWhores ."
I went looking and I saw no hate. I didn't have a chance to look very deep, and I presume that the people who post there are not Democrats or liberals, but I didn't see any "hate". Perhaps I missed it? Or have we got to the point where anything that is not explicitly liberal can be dismissed as barbaric and hate filled? I haven't time to do any in depth investigation. I have a column to do. But I wonder where we are when a commercial newsletter mostly about web technology says things like this. And for what it's worth: Jerry, I did some poking around on the site [http://www.freerepublic.com/ ]and certainly, as with any forum that allows people to post messages, there are undoubtedly a few that can be seen as ill-considered or hateful. But, like you, what I saw hardly qualifies it as a "hate-filled" site. William Harris It is always a problem. I get some mail I will not even consider posting because it is intemperate and adds nothing to the discussion, and of course I get far more than I can post anyway. But sometimes some mail I very much disagree with says things that should be heard if only because they should be refuted (and if the refutation doesn't come forth, that's very disturbing). Anyway, thank you.
|
This week: | Saturday,
For eye candy: Dr. Pournelle, Here's a weird looking galaxy, courtesy of the Hubble Telescope. Kit Case http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/PR/2002/21/pr-photos.html Gorgeous! And Joe Zeff offers a curious fact: An article at CNN, http://abcnews.go.com/wire/World/reuters20020903_175.html , tells how tarantulas have gone from something you eat only because you're starving to a national delicacy in Cambodia. First eaten by desperate refugees during the Khymer Rouge days, it turned out to be delicious. Yeeps!
There is a lot in mail today. Continued discussions of anti-gravity, and infantry. And I continue to grind out the column. I remind newcomers that there is much to read in the Reports. And I got this nifty thing from Christopher Mazuk. Thanks!! A caffeine molecule
|
This week: | Sunday,
September 8, 2002
COLUMN TIME
Entire Site Copyright 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002 by Jerry E. Pournelle. All rights reserved. |