THE VIEW FROM CHAOS MANOR View 233 November 25 - December 1, 2002 |
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This week: | Monday
November 25, 2002
BYTE seems to have gone subscription only. At a dollar a month it's not a lot: I do at least 8,000 words a month, so it's 1/8000 per word in dollars or 1/80 cent per word just for my stuff; which is hardly exorbitant, and you get David Em and Moshe Bar and Andy Patrizio and others, plus features. When people complain about the price I find that a bit odd. Anyway, I have put in my own subscription (paying for it although obviously I could get one free). If it doesn't sell enough, I suppose CMP will close things down. Nikkei BYTE doesn't want any 8 - 10,000 words a month; they're happy with half that. So is BYTE Turkey and so are the other overseas magazines; meaning that if CMP Byte folds, I'll be doing 5,000 words a month at most, and that only if enough people pay for this place. It's a good bit cheaper to subscribe to BYTE. Of course I won't at all mind if you do both... I owe everyone a COMDEX report. COMDEX was grim this year, and I haven't had the heart to write it: we had an "End of COMDEX as We Knew It" party and I fear that was well named. I have heard nothing further about the rumors the COMDEX founder Sheldon Adelson would buy COMDEX back (for $15 million plus $10 million worth of debts, having sold it for a reported $800 million) and try to revive it. It may be wishful thinking. If Sheldon does buy COMDEX back, we may return to having BYTE do the annual COMDEX awards. Those were highly thought 0f; I am tempted to say "the coveted BYTE Best of COMDEX Awards".... But so far it's all only rumor. The war preparations continue. It looks like war, and it looks as if the US taxpayers will pay for it. Whether we can then exploit anything to get some of that revenue back isn't known. Certainly we have the military means to do it. It will not be cheap in treasure, nor cheap in Iraqi blood; it will be relatively cheap in American blood, and so far as I can tell, the armed forces are eager to go in; and the notion of a war is supported by at least a majority of the American people. It's not the kind of war this country is used to, but it ought to be ended soon -- as a war. The aftermath may take a good bit longer, and my fears are for the consequences to the republic after we have won. The counter argument is that it will cost us more not to go in and get this over with: had we stopped Hitler in 1936 we might have spared the world the blood baths of World War II. It probably wasn't politically possible to have stopped Germany at the Rhineland: neither France nor Britain nor the US had the nerve. It is certainly politically possible to go in and remove Iraq as a power, and end Saddam's abilities to cause mass destruction or even mischief. Given how far things have gone, it looks to me as if the war is inevitable. If so, we will want to be quick and decisive, and establish bases that we and only we control, so that we are not beholden to anyone else in the Middle East or the Gulf for support or security. And that, I think, the administration well understands. I believe that if we do go in, we will do it right. And that's important... See mail for comments. More puppy pictures later today or tomorrow. And the COMDEX report should be done today. At the Wagner Society meeting/party yesterday afternoon, we were told the story of the only person ever thrown out of the Wagner Society: years ago the speaker was Father Owen Lee of the Metropolitan Opera Broadcast quiz show. The host of the Society meeting was startled by a horrible cry for help: rushing upstairs he found Father Lee fleeing down the stairs, his clothing in disarray, his clerical collar ripped open and his shirt ripped. "I am being attack by Grundik!" he cried. A female guest had become intoxicated and thought it would be fun to attack Father Lee. She was notified of the cancellation of her membership by registered mail... I will have to uninstall Mozilla. It is now trying to tell me my own web site is a virus, it will not let me use Internet Explorer to look at my web site, and I keep getting warnings about viruses. Mozilla is clearly working to keep me from using Internet Explorer. IE doesn't do that to Mozilla. This was cleared up by using Mozilla to go to my web site. Once I did that it would let me go there with Internet Explorer. Until then, Mozilla insisted that any web site Internet Explorer wanted me to go to was in fact a virus. This is insanity. But see below I have been thinking. If BYTE vanishes, I wonder if I'll continue doing silly things so you don't have to. It won't be anything like as easy to get equipment and software if I am just me.
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This week: | Tuesday, November
26, 2002
There is a lengthy essay on the current state of foreign affairs over in mail, with comments. I have more mail regarding the BYTE decision to go subscription. Apparently enough are subscribing, and my thanks. (Which doesn't mean stop: I mean the rate is satisfactory not that there are enough subscribers...)
We are all sympathetic to the argument that web information ought to be available without charge. The problem is that people like Moshe Bar, and David Em, and for that matter me, have to be paid or the work of finding and creating and interpreting that information won't be done, or won't be done consistently and on time; and the advertising revenue model in these dot bust days doesn't seem to work. Worse: advertisers now want some proof that people actually read the thing and care. In the past, paid circulation magazines didn't make a lot out of the subscription price, but the fact that people paid it was proof of their interest. So, I think, it is with web magazines. I liked BYTE as a free web magazine. But then I liked BYTE as a paper magazine with 32 editors in Peterborough; I loved having some of the best people in the world at the end of a phone line. Not that I don't have a great staff now; my associates know their stuff, which is why I am not often egregiously wrong. But of course I would prefer the days when I could call Peterborough and talk with a BYTE editor who knew as much about any given computer subject as anyone in the world. The universe doesn't seem to care about my preferences, alas. I really don't think a dollar a month is too much to charge for what BYTE provides. And its existence sure makes my life easier. The solution to Mozilla existing on the same system with Internet Explorer is to keep one instance of Mozilla open. If you don't, it gets unhappy and tries to usurp Explorer's tasks. Not an unbearable price. And many don't have Explorer at all, finding Mozilla preferable. One thing about Mozilla, if you assume things are logical, you'll have better luck finding out how to do something than with Explorer where controls and tools and options and preferences are sort of stuck on in various places... And see mail
I sent a mailing to subscribers today. The list of returns is shorter, but there were still some. See Badmail for details. MANY of you are "over quota" and there is not much I can do about that... I don't list "over quota" returns, but I don't delete the names from the list. Mozilla again: I can't manage to open .xfd files. IE used to open them but Mozilla now intercepts them and refuses to open them and doesn't know the name of a program to open them with. I need to find out more about .xfd files since there is some tax information in that format and Mozilla won't let me look at the files, or even download them. This is not a wonderful program so far. What program would normally let you read a document in .xfd format? The City of LA tax department has a couple of them I really ought to read. LATER: OK, I knew that xfd files were an xml format; they used to open in Explorer before I installed Mozilla. Now they don't open in either. Or perhaps I am wrong, and I never encountered one before. All I know is that the city of LA maintains something in xfc format that I need to look at and I can't find the program to open it with. This turns out to generate an interesting story that will probably go to the column. The problem is solved, and thanks to all who sent me stuff about it.
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This week: |
Wednesday, November
27, 2002
Sent another Chaos Manor Warning, this time about a scam that works to try to steal your Earthlink account and password; details in mail. Got more returns, and I have revised badmail. This should get the list pretty well up to date. Several were returned this time with the message "no thanks" which means I presume that some filter or another intercepted them. The .xfd file situation may or may not have been Mozilla's fault: it may be that Internet Explorer never did open those, and it was a coincidence that I got that "can't open this, it may be a virus" message when I tried to get a .xfd file from the City of LA. On the other hand, earlier yesterday Mozilla tried to keep Internet Explorer from opening www.jerrypournelle.com on the grounds that this might be a virus and would I like to download it? The only remedy to that was to let Mozilla have an open instance before it would permit Internet Explorer to do its thing. I suspect that is a bug; and I can be excused for thinking that the message, which Mozilla sent me about my own web site, was another Mozilla error when it sent it about a .xfd file. I don't know if IE will open a .xfd natively. There are places to get a .xfd browser. I'm working on finding out enough that I can put a section in the column. I'll also post the URL's to where you can get a .xfd browser over in mail. And I am working on a COMDEX report which will be over at the BYTE site. Some parts of COMDEX were very interesting. The best parts were very good, and being smaller I saw I think everything interesting, which hasn't always been the case.
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Thursday,
Thanksgiving
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December 1, 2002 Holidays, LASCON (the LASFS Convention) and a lot more pretty well took over the week. For light reading try http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/execmail/ which is in fact fairly interesting. I'll be back tomorrow. Thanks to all who subscribed or renewed.
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