Subject: InstallShield

What is it? Where did I get it? I’m having problems with it. (It says there is an error ... ). Did it come with W95? I did not put it in.

How many more apps are like this?

Love your web page as is. Keep on dancing. I’ll try to keep up.

In Lucifer's Hammer, you had one of your characters carefully wrapping and burying books in anticipation of needing them later to rebuild civilization. In The Mote in God's Eye, you and Niven had the Moties using their museums/libraries/armories as a repository from which each successive Cycle of Moties could gain technology after a collapse, once they'd reached a certain level of astronomical knowledge on their own.

Our situation may not be quite so dire at the moment, but we're doing our best (or worst, depending upon how one looks at things) to make it so. I will tell you that, given the current state of the educational system, the libraries may well be the only places one can go to obtain any sort of useful education. The library educated me, and I've done alright.

The atmosphere is different than in a book store; even in a Borders or a Barnes &; Noble, one can't really just slouch on a chair and read all day without buying something, because the book store is in business to sell books. If you're trying to get an education, you can't just go buying everything in sight, you need to be able to browse and then browse some more. And of course there are those who can't afford to buy lots of books, so the library is doubly important for them. I don't mind paying reasonable taxes in order to provide this service.

And the Web is no subtitute for a good library, and won't be for quite some time. Project Gutenberg notwithstanding, there is simply too much garbage on the Web, too little useful content, and a plethora of copyright and billing-model issues to be worked out before it will even begin to approach the sheer utility of even a modestly-sized library. The Web is primarily targeted towards extreme individualization, whereas the library is by nature designed to offer the broadest possible scope of content.

So, yes, the library is cheap, compared to the benefits. As for libertarians arguing that libraries are no longer necessary, they'd probably be just happy arguing that oxygen is no longer necessary, either. Most libertarians I've known (including myself, when I was one) seem to be a rather odd admixture of Thomas Paine, Harry Flashman, and King Canute; fever-eyed, conniving, and utterly ineffective when it's time to actually accomplish something, rather than just talking about it.

but isn't. The reader can get there by copying the URL onto the clipboard

and pasting it into the "Open" dialog, but he will first be frustrated

trying to get there by clicking on the reference.

Incidentally, that cited page does not discuss the Outlook glitch. The

Carrington Dixon

972-604-5799

I spent the weekend getting a poster ready for a local conference, so I just came up for air. You have some interesting comments...

1. Why I don’t like Microsoft—I was putting together a handout for the conference. The text was developed using Word, and the figures were in a Powerpoint presentation. I was using Excel to generate charts of the real and robot bat trajectories, and was then using cut and paste to import the charts into the presentation. I would copy a chart, switch to Powerpoint, and Excel would crash. After this happened a few times, I figured that the two programs were incompatible. So instead I now copied the chart into a Word document and then moved it into the presentation. I’d then go back to Word, delete the chart, and finally I’d go back to Excel for the next chart. That worked, except that Word was making backups and was telling me that the disk was full (1.2 GB available!), and after six or so charts had spent some time in Word, Word would die, apparently because its internal memory was so fragmented that it couldn’t allocate space for the next chart. I’d then restart Word and continue. After I printed out the presentation, I did a save, and PowerPoint died during the write to disk. I _think_ I was able to salvage a backup.

This is pretty standard for my experience with MS Office 98. The way I use it tests the design skills of its programmers, and that means it’s often pretty flakey. Nothing else is as well integrated, though. For my dissertation, I intend to convert the various figures to epsf files and then import them into a LaTeX file, but that takes too much effort for a poster handout.

I guess this is OK for commodity software, but MS is trying to compete in markets where the users (who are not the buyers!) expect and need better quality and reliability. How do you feel about having an aircraft flight control or air traffic control system running on a Windows PC? Also, some of the business tactics I’ve seen are not to the user’s benefit. MS is not the only offender—

Symantec built its Mac utilities market share by buying out and sinking competing software packages. Then it got complacent, decided to defer the System 8.0 version of Norton Utilities, and a couple of competitors have emerged. However, those new products aren’t that mature, and we would have been better off if competition had been continuous.

2. Yes, public libraries (and public schools) are necessary. A society were people cannot pull themselves out of poverty by their own efforts is a society where people are deliberately made poor. Wealth breeds wealth exponentially, so a society that shortchanges itself that way falls behind and could collapse. Or even worse, it could be the end of society. Suppose we discover a comet on a collision course, but we haven’t invested into producing the trained people and technical infrastructure to deal with it. End of movie. Replace comet with a number of interesting disasters causally linked to our current ways of using the earth. >90% of the urban cultures that have existed on the earth have disappeared, often—if not usually—due to short-sighted mismanagement of the environment. Have you seen the archaeological data on human impact on island ecosystems? It’s rather ugly, and the Earth is a large island.

3. Was Marx right? Hard to say. His economics were the classical economics of the day, but he was also a journalist, anthropologist, and whig, a believer in progress, and so interested in discussing the morality of it all. Most Marxist economists found the Soviet Union (and its children) very hard to understand, since 1918 Russia was not a developed industrial nation and hence not a place where the Marxist model supposedly applied; the collapse now makes things much easier for them theoretically, since it confirms their original doubts. Marx’s model of social evolution, adapted to modern economics, may still turn out correct, but I suspect (based on some ‘80s work in chaos theory) it’s far too deterministic.

Subject: Baldur's Gate and Random Monster Encounters

You may not have noticed, but the game autosaves every time you leave an area (even within an area, i.e., going into a building), so if you have an encounter you didn’t like you can go back and reload the Auto-Save.

Another thing you will find useful: hitting Q does a Quick-Save which is even intelligently put into its own slot (i.e. it does not overwrite the Auto-Save). I use the Q key a lot when I am exploring a new map or during a major set-piece (although you cannot quick-save when the game thinks there are monsters nearby—I guess it is kind of a "detect nearby monster" spell too ;->).

Unfortunately the load game dialog does not have an intelligent thumb—it is like the old thumb from Windows 3.1. The Auto-SAve and Quick-Save are the first two save game slots, so you will probably have to scroll up to find them. When you open the load game dialog it is not obvious that there are other saves above the four you see other than that the thumb is at the bottom of the slider bar.

Hope this helps!

John Jacobson [Jack_Jacobson@compuserve.com]

Subject: Little things

Hi Jerry,

I just subscribed to your page, but it took a little effort. <G> You probably are already aware of these issues, but I’ll list them anyway, since "listing" is one of my hobbies.

First, it is quite difficult to even find on your site that you are encouraging people to subscribe. I found your site for credit card subscriptions several nights ago, but it must have taken me five minutes to find it again, even when I was specifically looking for it. Maybe a little disclaimer or speck of advertising to that effect somewhere on the top of the home page would be appropriate here?

The layout of the credit card application might be improved. Just a couple of small issues here. e.g. the credit card expiration date boxes for month and year should be on the same line, they weren’t on my browser. (IE4) The space to enter the credit card type lacks Master Card as a choice, and if one chooses the wrong card by mistake, you can’t "unchoose" it. i.e., I clicked on Visa, then decided to click on Discover since my main card is a MasterCard not a Visa, and I wasn’t sure you would take MC. But when I reclicked on the Visa box, it wouldn’t unselect. So one has to clear the form and start over. No big deal, but a small time waster.

I have enjoyed reading your material for years as a loyal Byte subscriber. I wrote you a note and told you I had actually subscribed to BugNet because I thought you were going to be a regular columnist for them, but guess that was a one time deal for you.

I enjoy your current site, and appreciate the efforts you’re making to redesign it to make it easier and more intuitive to use. I think you have the opportunity to create a community of individuals online whose influence may be more significant than you realize. You are held in high respect in the computer community, as well in SF circles and I’m sure other circles of which I know nothing. <G> Thank you for your efforts to improve the site.

One other small suggestion. Have you considered a "lifetime" membership? Some of us might be more interested in that approach, and it might improve cash flow for you early on, also giving you a guaranteed source of income from the site.

In any event, thank you for your insight and wisdom down through the years. I look forward to more!

Best Wishes.

Dear Jerry:

I know what you mean, but the fact is it has never been easier to be published... getting read is another matter. A thousand years ago the only way you could get published was if you were God (Bibles, in Latin, by scribes and priests); today any idiot with a Commodore 64 and a modem can be "published" on the Internet. As I said, being read is another story, and I think this is the point you are making, that the marketing and distribution power to get eyes on the words is becoming more and more concentrated, and I can't disagree. Still, with desktop publishing software, a laser printer, and an attractive ad in a few inexpensive specialty journals something really worthwhile at least has a chance of reaching a wide audience without being filtered through the egos and editors of Publisher's Row. And good Internet sites, like Tom's Hardware and your own, get a lot of very good stuff out to a whole lot of people very very cheaply. So I just don't see the need to worry about anti-trust where publishing is concerned... I frankly think the concentration going on in the industry is a direct reaction to all the new ways of getting information and art in front of people: the only publishers who will be able to survive the new paradigm will be a few of the largest and best run.

All the best--

C Jervey [userchj@conterra.com]

Recovering from Win95 corruption problems.

I read about the Windows 95 registry corruption problems you had with Roberta’s Joizy. ERU, and Norton Zip Rescue are two utilities I have found useful in such situations.

ERU (Emergency Recovery Utility) is one of the utilities the comes with

Win95 that isn’t installed by default. Like Power Toys or Kernel Toys,

it was created by the Widows development team, but isn’t really pushed

by Microsoft.

It’s a small utility program (\Other\Misc\Eru on the Win95 install CD) that grabs copies of Autoexec.Bat, Config.Sys, Command.Com, the hidden boot executables in root directory, the windows .Ini files, the Win95 registry, and any other files you designate as essential to the system and moves them to the drive/directory you specify along with a utility program called ERD.Exe. When run (safe mode command prompt only), Erd overlays the current Win95 system files with the backup copies, saving the overlaid files so that the restore can be undone if necessary.

Norton Zip Rescue is another small, single purpose utility program. Originally bundled with the Norton Utilities, it’s recently been made available as a free download from the Iomega web site. When run it:

1) Creates a boot floppy, complete with the drivers needed to access the system’s zip drive, and an Autoexec.Bat configured to load the Win95 GUI environment from a zip disk.

2) Loads an (initially empty) zip disk with all the pieces that make up the Win95 GUI environment.

3) Copies any Win95 programs you designate to the zip drive and configures them to run from the zip drive files rather than from the hard disk.

The result is a boot floppy/zip disk combination that allows you to boot up to the Win95 GUI environment, complete with your favorite disaster recovery tools, without having a functional hard drive in your computer, much less a working Win95 system on the hard drive.

Subject: laser powered space launch

Sir,

Several years ago, I remember reading a story about a space launch system using ground based pulsed lasers firing into a parabolic reflector on the bottom of a launcher. in the lower atmosphere, thrust was generated by heating the ambient air in the mirror, and at higher altitudes, water was injected into the "combustion" chamber.

Recently, beginning about two years ago, I have read several articles about a scientist, Leif Myrabo, who is faculty at RPI, working with DARPA on a project to develop this basic concept, and in fact they have managed to get a tiny device about 70 feet off the ground.

I have been searching my SF archives trying to find the story, which certainly predates the project, but have been unsuccessful. It is likely that the possible authors are you, Niven, Heinlein, Asimov or Clarke, since you five comprise the majority of my SF reading.

The basic premise of the story is a business tycoon ( for some reason i think it was a woman ) who develops this launch system and rakes in the bucks. I believe the launch site was in arizona or new mexico to take advantage of the clear dry air.

I am trying to find this story for two reasons. First I would like to read it again, and second, I want to spank the scientist for not giving credit to the author who came up with the idea in the first place. I understand that the scientist has done the hard work to make the idea feasible, but SF has been responsible for giving so many ideas to scientists, and is so rarely given credit, that I find it especially annoying when an idea put forth by a SF author puts out an idea that is spot on and is not even given so much as a kudo by the scientist hwo turns the idea into reality.

If you recall this story, or could refer me to someone who might, could you please send me any information that might help.

Subject: The Pentium III ID Number Idiocy

The privacy freaks have thrown another conniption fit and once again made a mountain from a molehill. An Arizona politician has even gone as far as pushing legislation to outlaw the sale or manufacture of the Pentium III within that state. The Commerce Department might have some issues with that idea...

On your view page, there was a picture referenced:

can’t. So error, but the specific one? I don’t know.

Subject: Win98 breaks Office97

Dear Mr. Pournelle:

I thought you might find this interesting (if you haven’t already heard of it).

It seems that installing the SR-1 fix for MSOffice 97 installed on a Windows 98 machine will break Office due to a "feature" of Windows 98. I found out about this while helping out a friend with a new IBM Aptiva P333 with the AMD 3D CPU. They purchased the system over Christmas from a local Staples and the system came with SmartSuite. Since no one in the family was acquainted with Word Pro, etc. but did know Word and Excel from work and school they asked me to help them get Office Pro 97 installed. (I am a consultant dealing with small offices (dentists, doctors) and Nursing Homes doing installs of PC’s and peer-to-peer networking.)

We got Office Pro 97 (which they recently purchased at Staples, also) installed off the CD and confirmed that all the various programs worked. Then, because of the "gotcha’s" in the origional program(s) I attempted to install the SR-1 update. It seemingly installed without problem but Word then failed to run giving an error message that "wwintl32.dll was the wrong version." Powerpoint also failed—not even giving that much of a message. Excel, Binder and Access would run and the About menu item did confirm they were version SR-1.

Replacing the wwintl32.dll (dated 1997) with the wwintl32.dll (dated 1996) from the origional CD would get Word to run but the About menu item did not show SR-1 version for Word and Powerpoint still crashed. Wonderful!!

So, off to the Microsoft Support Web site and check the Knowledge Base. Yes—sure enough—there it is. Thanks to the "walign.exe" program which alligns all MICROSOFT applications on 4K bounderies AUTOMATICALLY it screws up the Office programs so the SR-1 update zaps them not fixes them. Of course, Microsoft says the fix is easy: (1) just spend 2hrs. downloading this 8meg. replacement for SR-1 (and, by the way we aren’t putting it on CD anymore so you can’t get it that way—lots of luck!), (2) remove Office completely from the system (3) reinstall Office and make sure the task manager has time to walign.exe and align the programs and (4) then run the "new" SR-1 update.

Guess what—I do all this and get exactly the same result. So, then, I figure that maybe Office didn’t get alligned by walign after all. I scrub Office and reinstall, run all the Office program (maybe they have to run and be logged by Windows???), then run walign by telling the task manager to run it immediately, then shut Windows down and cold start (who knows maybe its like waving the magic wand and saying "presto"!). Then after the reboot install the "new" SR-1 update. Guess again—yes, the same stupid message!

At this point I go slightly crazy (it’s 3am) and I scrub the disk totally:

fdisk, format, reinstally Win98 from scratch, install only minimal drivers (sound and video). And do it all again and get the same dumb message!

I have check this out now on 4 different system: 2 with Cyrix and 2 with AMD chips with the same results. I don’t know if a Intel CPU might make a difference as I didn’t have access to a system with one that I wanted to mess with. In fact on two of the system MSOffice 95 wouldn’t install properly either. And, in looking for a zip/unzip program with these systems on 3 of them neither Winzip (version 7) nor ZipMagic98 (evaluation) would work properly. ZipMagic wouldn’t even finish the install but would crash as it tried to run the executable at the end of the install. WinZip would consistly claim that zip files were damaged. In fact, even the downloaded "new" SR-1 update kept reporting that its cab files were corrupt when I attempted to run it 3 out of 5 times. On the same systems, after I deleted Win98 and installed Win95c (I won’t leave friends or clients with what is a ticking bomb) everything work perfect even the "new" SR-1 upgrade (which Microsoft indicated would work with all versions of their OS’s). Amazing what a feature Microsoft things I need and apparently can’t be avoided can do! I guess Microsoft has really found the perfect way to sell Office 2000!

The final insult is trying to find from Microsoft how to notify them of this behavior. God knows where the email address is I couldn’t find it and using the phone—they want me to PAY for their ADMITTED screw up!

So—interesting story, huh! If you or any of those patronizing your site have any other ideas or workarrounds I’d love to know.

David Yerka

Subject: The Pentium III ID Number Idiocy

I don’t know that I’d call it idiocy. In effect, Intel announced that they were going to begin serializing their CPUs, which minicomputer vendors like DEC have been doing for years. And if you’ve installed much software on a VAX, you’ve probably run into programs that "marry" themselves to the CPU ID, after which they can no longer be installed on a different CPU. To extend the VAX analogy, most VAX software is priced according to the power of the CPU you run it on. Do you really want your processor telling your software how fast it is, so that you can be charged more to run Windows NT or Office on a faster machine?

Microsoft is already altering their license agreements to say that the software is licensed only for the original CPU it is installed on, and that you must buy another license rather than moving an existing copy to another machine. With the new tendency toward forced registrations, I think the ultimate goal of this may be to control customers license usage more than anything else. Given the reality of dwindling upgrade revenues, reduced bundling revenues resulting from low-cost PCs, and the perceived need to maintain historic growth levels, I think Microsoft’s ultimate goal is to rent software to you rather than licensing it. I think they’d love to automate the whole process of debiting your account each month or quarter, and varying the amount you pay according to how fast your computer is and how long you use each application each month.

Idiocy is perhaps too strong a word.

Dr. Pournelle,

I think you might have saved yourself some trouble by not giving up on the floppy so soon.

As you investigate further into Linux, I hope that you’ll find it makes a very good "rescue" disk even for non-Linux systems. I wouldn’t expect you to know this yet, but you might consider it worth investigating. You don’t need a full-blown installation to get good mileage out of Linux.

Linux (other systems can too, but I’m not familiar with them) can format a standard 2MB floppy for 1.7MB of storage. So you could have superformat’ted a floppy and copied the file to it. Then taken it to Joizy, copied the file, and been on your way.

If you had a LAN available, a Linux boot disk could also make good use of it, to copy easier/faster than with a floppy.

You might find these pages useful/interesting:

MILITARY CULTURE DOES MATTER

by Williamson Murray

Volume 7, Number 2

January 1999

Williamson Murray is the Harold K. Johnson Visiting Professor of Military History at the United States Army War College in Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. The views expressed here do not represent those of the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

This essay is an abridged version of an article that appears in the Winter 1999 issue of Orbis, a special issue focusing on "Culture Wars in the Military." Other articles include:

Does military culture matter? Students of either military

history or current military institutions have devoted little

attention to it, yet it may be the most important factor not

only in military effectiveness on the battlefield, but in

the processes of innovation during times of peace. Stated

simply, military culture comprises the ethos and

professional attributes, derived from both experience and

intellectual study, that contribute to military

organizations’ core, common understanding of the nature of

war. Less easily studied than defined, its influence on

military institutions is almost always the result of long-

term factors rarely measurable and often obscure both to

Military culture is shaped by national cultures as well as factors such as geography and historical experience that build a national military "style." The American military, for example, has always had to project its power over great distances. Even in the Civil War, which has exercised such great influence over the general military culture of the U.S. services, Union forces waged a war on a continental scale equivalent to the distance from Paris to Moscow. Germany, by comparison, was for centuries at the center of European wars, and consequently tended to neglect logistical problems.

The history of the interwar period from 1920 to 1930

underscores the importance of military culture in preparing

the services for war. The German victory over France in May

1940 resulted largely from changes in the cultural patterns

of the German army that were made in the early 1920s by the

chief of staff, General Hans von Seeckt. The hallmarks of

the new German army were its emphasis on systematic,

thorough analysis, willingness to grapple with what was

really happening on the battlefield, and a rigorous

relevant intellectual attainments of officers as well as

their performance in leadership positions. The Reichswehr’s willingness to study the operational and tactical lessons of the last war stands in sharp contrast with the British army’s reluctance during the same period to draw lessons from the experiences of the Western Front.

Historians have often suggested that military organizations study the last war and that is why they do badly in the next. In fact, few military organizations study the past with any degree of rigor, although the success of those that do so has demonstrated its vital importance. Some military cultures reject the past as having no relevance to the future of war. Air forces have been particularly attracted to the belief that the study of even recent military experience is of limited use in preparing for the glorious, technology-driven future. Such cultures have great difficulty in innovating in useful ways during peacetime and a particularly hard time in adapting to the real conditions of war. The Eighth Air Force’s failure to push for the development of long-range escort fighters, despite heavy losses to its bombers on deep penetration raids during the summer and fall of 1943, indicates the potentially baneful influence of military culture.

By comparison, the current American military cultures

Perhaps even more significantly, the American military

appears to be going through a major change as the Vietnam

War generation is succeeded by officers who did not share

that experience. With the exception of the Marine Corps,

the new generation has proven far more attracted to the sort

of technological and mechanistic "solutions" that

contributed so much to failure in Vietnam.

As in the past, the air force continues to emphasize number- crunching systems analysis. According to one air force study (New World Vistas: Air and Space Power for the 21^st Century, 1995): "The power of the new information systems will lie in their ability to correlate data automatically and rapidly from many sources to form a complete picture of the operational area, whether it be a battlefield or the site of a mobility operation." Many senior leaders in the other services are now moving in the same direction.

A recent naval war game suggests that some officers believe

that fog, friction, uncertainties, and chance -- all the

factors that have influenced history over the past 2,500

years -- will simply disappear under the searching eye of

superior technologies. The army is clearly divided between

those who look expectantly upon technology and those who

continue to be influenced by historical evidence. And it is

the battles within the army that will decide where American

military culture will go—at least until the next Vietnam.

Only the marines appear to be solidly resisting the allure

of technology as the answer to all the problems of war in

the next century. Their recently rewritten doctrinal

emphasizing uncertainty and "fog." Moreover, their culture remains firmly tied to a sense of history both as a learning tool and as a warning to those who would put too much reliance on technology. The army’s major doctrinal manual is presently being rewritten; its initial draft appears quite similar in philosophy to that of the Marine Corps. But the other services continue to push technologically oriented, top-down doctrines. This trend has been reinforced by what is coming out of the joint forces community. The joint doctrinal publications are unreadable, which is perhaps just as well, because the mechanistic, technologically driven doctrine they advocate claims much, but in fact contains little of substance.

Particularly worrisome at present in the U.S. military culture has been the propensity to shut down debate. The current draft of Army Regulation 600-20 suggests that the senior leadership in the army wants to "proscribe an officer from even holding certain views which contravene official policy, much less from espousing them." On the other hand, the navy and the marines do appear to be encouraging debate within their officer corps: the navy because of its three very different subcultures (aviation, submarine, and surface), the marines simply because their culture appears to thrive on argument.

You may forward this email as you like provided that you send it in its entirety and attribute it to the Foreign Policy Research Institute. If you post it on a mailing list, please contact FPRI with the name, location, purpose, and number of recipients of the mailing list.

----------------------------------------------------------

Foreign Policy Research Institute, 1528 Walnut Street, Suite

610, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19102-3684 For membership information, contact Alan Luxenberg (215)

In reply to Bob Thompson, I honestly don’t think idiocy was too strong a word. The story was widely reported and extreme reactions voiced but most of those speakers had no knowledge or little understanding of what Intel was actually doing. I certainly would not include Bob in that category but perhaps he wasn’t exposed to as much of the media deluge as I happened to digest. Intel is partially at fault for not doing a better job of making the press aware of the full details as given in the EETimes story I referenced earlier. This is annoyingly reminiscent of the cookie paranoia that pops up every few months.

To me, one of the hallmarks of idiocy is knee-jerk responses. In this case it was people responding to the Intel name. Without fail any story that has Intel or Microsoft in the headline gets vastly more attention than it deserves. If Motorola/IBM announced a similar scheme in the new G4 chips it would have been ignored most places except by the semiconductor trades and Macworld.

Getting everyone to pay for the commercial software they use is fine with me. The Intel ID system would only offer a fairly limited means to enforce this, and in light of the most recent reports from the trial, if Microsoft could eliminate the great majority of piracy they would then be under considerable legal pressure to sharply reduce prices. Even so, considering the huge number of unlicensed users, they would still show fabulous profits. I don’t think they’d even consider billing by CPU power. In the minicomputer days when cost were high and major advances years apart it made a certain sense to factor system speed into software sale but that would never fly today. Intel would go berserk if MS used the ID code in a manner that could make people reluctant to own the latest and greatest in Intel processors.

Bo Leuf [bleuf@algonet.se]

Subject: OEM, fraud and ID-tracking

Jerry,

This is a short comment with regards to Wednesday View where you note

"I also know plenty of places where multiple machines are all running copies of a single license of Windows 98 upgrade, and I expect most of you do as well. This is technically theft, although I doubt that Microsoft would send in the FBI or Secret Service or whoever has enforcement responsibility in the case of a home user with machines for himself, his wife, and his kids."

<<<

This reminds me of the two issues I recently took up on my own daynotes (these journals moved from my org to my com domain):

--

Nice to see these popular lyrics reposted. They’re quite ancient—early 70s at least, as I recall them being printed out on the Olivetti tty’s when I studied at University.

--

I read your mention of the Palmpilot. You didn’t say, however, if you’re using the stock stylus. If you haven’t tried one yet, I recommend you pick up the Cross DigitalWriter. It’s a regular Cross pen with a stylus refill. (You can get the refills separately from Cross.)

Cross has patented a type of plastic that makes writing a whole lot better than any other stylus I’ve tried. It feels almost like writing on paper, and the fact that it’s a normal pen makes writing easier.

Dr. Pournelle,

I revisited your site, just for grins... I see that you haven’t lowered yourself to the ad hominem attack lately (even when you vented about APM and Ralph Nader.) The negative observations that you do make about various things are backed by anecdotal evidence - again, that is good to see.

I am glad to see that you are sticking it out with Linux even if your motives aren’t pure (rooting for Linux to keep Microsoft in line).

Jerry P.:

So far this works with Norton Rescue disk, the Zip &; floppy combination, as I have already screwed things up otherwise and had to have Norton come to my rescue one more time.

Jerry,

As a longtime Byte reader, I’m glad to see your web site is alive:

between this and Steve Ciarcia’s site, its a taste of the old days.

I have an entry into the "did everything right" category to discuss with you ..... Citrix.

As you are probably aware, Citrix got a fat licensing payment from MS and many claim they should be happy campers for it. I see it another way: they invented a solid (non-Unix) multi-user Win32 system and had it stolen from them by MS.

Citrix was ready with WinFrame 2.0 (based on NT 4.0 technology) back in fall 1996. However, they could not get their licensing worked out with MS, who refused to extend their prior agreement (which only covered 3.51 technology). At that time, MS was working on their OWN multi-user windows technology, and clearly wanted to delay Citrix’s product while MS development tried to catch up.

Ultimately, MS decided to blackmai^H^H^H^H^H^H purchase the WinFrame technology from Citrix instead of developing their own. Despite this R&;D turbo-boost, MS managed to take a market ready product (WinFrame 2.0 had been beta testing for some time) and delay it for 2 MORE years, even AFTER bringing the Citrix engineers on board.

windows, the market lives on, MS is still there to profit.

Oh, Citrix kept the ICA protocol. Big deal! How long before MS adds the 3 or 4 MetaFrame-only features to their own stuff and Citrix goes away completely? Look at theWinTerm market...hardware vendors are now using Windows CE so their box can be considered "Windows based" and can connect with RDP instead of ICA. What a slick legal maneuver on MS part to duck their Citrix license agreement on non-Windows hardware! To the end-user, that means buying (2) TWO licenses for MS operating systems: the CE license (bundled into the WinTerm) and the NTWorkstation license (required to connect via Terminal Server). Result: MS will sell you a "time-shared" session of NT for the cost of (2) whole OS’s. Care to buy into that?

Please help me understand how Citrix goofed in this deal!

I’m interested to see that you’ve started to use Linux on your family network. My house is wired up similarly but more modestly; I have two Windows’98 machines [Riddler and Joker] linked up on a home network to my Linux server [Two-Face] which acts as intranet, file, mail, news, proxy and everything else server. Other machines will be joining the network soon - a laptop [Penguin] and another PC [MrFreeze]. On all machines I’ve reserved space on the drives so I can dual boot into Linux.

I read your comment in your November column about Linux not being an environment for computer games, and that simply is not true. DOOM and QUAKE were written on UNIX machines before they were moved over to a Windows environment, and therefore are available for Linux.

If you are into Windows type games like Minesweeper, Tetris and Patience there are plenty of examples which run under X Windows.

I do grant that there is not the sheer volume of Linux games, and some versions running under Linux frankly lack the quality that may be expected of a similar Windows application. However, the number of applications [including games] coming available seems to have started rising almost as steeply as the learning curve required to know how to operate a Linux system. I am beginning to feel that Linux will "go critical" and become a serious contender to MS over the next 12-18 months.

The other thing I see about Linux, which may be bad for Microsoft in the long run, is that now I know what Linux can do, I see very little reason to part with vast amounts of money for the privilege of running NT, the operating system for grown ups. Why pay $800 for NT Server, and even more for BackOffice, when I can do it for almost free with Linux? Support certainly isn’t an issue - I never want to spend vast amounts of money sitting on hold on a support line, when I can post an article on Usenet and get at least 2-3 accurate and helpful replies within 24 hours. Not only that, but I don’t have to wait two years till Microsoft admits there may be a bug in one of their applications and graciously provides us with a service pack.

I’m occasionally contributing towards development of KDE, one of the many GUI "front-ends" that aim to make using a Linux system as user friendly as Windows. KDE includes KOffice, which [you guessed it] aims to provide equivalent functionality to Office. There are various similar projects out there too, providing alternative look and feels; GNOME, Enlightenment &; CDE to name but a few.

Subject: Windows NT Stability

Jerry – I read in today’s view your comments about the stability of Windows NT. I’d just like to offer some advice in that regard, for which I think I am qualified. I’ve installed and support Windows NT for the last 5 years, since the days of NT 3.1, as well as doing stints supporting MacOS, SunOS, Solaris, AIX, OS/2 and some others I’d rather not mention (VMS, anyone?)

If you are having to reboot Windows NT twice daily, or even once for that matter, you are most likely encountering one of the following:

1. You have a serious hardware problem. NT is very picky about the hardware it runs on. You can’t have IRQ/DMA/address conflicts, you can’t have weird memory problems (in particular, NEVER mix and match different memory brands in the same machine), and this leads me to…
2. You are running NT on a system or a system component that is not in the HCL (Hardware Compatibility List). This is one of the most frequent occurences I come across. I have worked at places where they have cobbled together a bunch of parts and called it an NT server, where some of the components were not even identifiable (no-name memory, old ISA cards with no identifiers, motherboards from God knows where), and they honestly expected these systems to be stable and bullet-proof. It just doesn’t work that way. Buy brand names and you won’t have this problem.
3. You’ve installed NT on top of some other operating system. Whether it be NT 3.51, Win95, Win 3.1 or DOS, it doesn’t matter. The very first thing you should do (and I maintain this applies to ALL operating systems, Windows or not, Intel-based or NOT, excepting some flavors of Unix) is make a complete backup of your previous OS install, delete the partition scheme, format the hard disk and THEN install the new OS. You are just asking for trouble if you don’t.
4. You’re trying to do things that the system will not handle. A good example might be your mentioning of opening so many windows and programs that the system slows to a crawl. People seem to think in this day of 400+MHz processors, huge hard disks and lots of RAM that there is nothing they cannot do on their system. WRONG! Try this for an experiment: Open all four Office applications, with a sizable document in each. Open Internet Explorer. Go to a web page with lots of stuff on it. Open some other applications, whatever you want. I guarantee after the 5^th or 6^th application is open, that you will start to experience serious system slowdowns. I have responded to user’s complaints about having to reboot NT constantly by watching their application usage habits. They frequently have 10 or more large programs open. Many of these programs don’t have open documents. Invariably, when asked why the program is open, they say something like "Oh, I hate to wait for it to reopen so I never close it." This is behaviour that will crash any mainstram graphical OS – NT, 95/98, MacOS too.
5. Lastly, I’d like to relate how stable I think Windows NT is. At my current employer I am responsible for a branch office of about 40 people, supported by a single Windows NT server and a single Solaris x86 server, both running on Dell hardware. The NT server takes care of file services, network printing, tape backups, DNS services, WINS services, DHCP services, WWW/FTP services and other assorted things. The last time I had to reboot the machine was when I installed a new version of the virus protection software on it. That was last month. Prior to that, the last reboot was in July of 1998 when I initially installed and configured the machine. The Solaris machine handles a similar load and has also not been rebooted since July.

As with ANY operating system, Windows NT requires a good amount of planning, knowledge and good sense to install and support. If you do things right, it is a exceedingly stable operating system.

An aside: I’m also acting as a beta tester for Windows 2000 (NT5) as well as Office 2000. These both are running flawlessly on my Dell notebook and I am very happy with both of them. Outlook 2000 especially is very nice, they have made some very nice improvements to it. Now if they would just roll in the news reading from Outlook Express, I would consider it very well done.

Cheers

I bopped over to slashdot.org to see what the fuss was about and found that you were a Microsoft bootlicker. In all the years I’ve read your stuff enlightenment never came. Further, I’m told that you’ve published huge numbers of inaccurate statements and that it is likely that you do so deliberately! My gosh, if you only had an EULA, I’d ask to have my subscription refunded.

Further, I found that my intelligence is suspect because I enjoy and appreciate your efforts and because I sent you money. Never dawned on me that a suspect intelligence was the root of so many of my problems.

On a more serious note, do you or any of your readers have suggestions for a keyboard/video/mouse switch? I’ve a mechanical switch which is distressed that I’ve asked it to work with linux and NT boxes. There are gazillions of them available and I’m not able to find a review. I’d prefer an electronic box, not another mechanical.

Hitachi sells machines with BeOS pre-installed on them in Japan. Apparently, Japanese law puts different requirements on Microsoft’s OEM deals there for the Japanese language versions of both OSes.

There are three "screwdriver shops" in the US that will sell you machines with BeOS preinstalled on them...some on Quad Xeon machines selling for more than your new truck will cost.

Hitachi cannot or will not sell their dual boot BeOS machines with the boot loader enabled—in order to get at the second partition, the customer must do a 30 second configuration procedure, which can be done from the BeOS boot floppy, or from a loader within Windows.

Of the screwdriver shops, at least two of them do not have OEM arrangements with Microsoft. If you want a Microsoft OS on the machine, you pay wholesaler prices (about $80 for Win98, about $170 for NTWS 4.)

I should note that the Hitachi Flora Prius BeOS bundle outsells the new iMacs in the Japanese market by about 2:1. Not that either of them make a dent in the sales of Windows 98 machines.

And right now, you can buy Compaq machines with Red Hat preinstalled, making their Digital Unix side truly unhappy. Dell is rumoured to be considering selling pre-loads of BeOS and Linux, depending on who you ask about it.

I agree with you about the EULA. Getting my $25 bucks back isn’t worth the three hours it’d take me. I also feel that those who think that Microsoft is the Evil Empire using every trick including kidnapping, murder, extortion and threats of directing asteroids at your home to lock OEMs into selling Windows is a laughable exercise in paranoia. Perhaps we should call Mulder and Scully in....

Linux, in the server market, is OS competition for Microsoft. BeOS in the multimedia authoring market is competition for Microsoft and Apple. (BeOS tries to peacefully coexist, rather than charge head on against Windows as OS/2 did.) The Macintosh, because of the hardware differences it has, is "token" competition for Microsoft. It might make up 10% of the computer market in the future, about where it was at its peak, but it won’t expand beyond that. (20% if they do USB peripherals universally)

Right now, with Windows 2K slipping into the further distance, this is the best opportunity since DOS v. OS/2 for someone to make the leap and become an actual desktop competitor.

BeOS has the better technology, Linux has the popularity and mindshare. As Apple and Microsoft demonstrated, bet on popularity and mindshare over technological innovation. I hope both succeed.

John DeWitt Jr. dies; bounced radar off moon

NASHVILLE, Tennessee (Reuters) -- John DeWitt Jr., who expanded the frontiers of science by bouncing a radar signal off the moon and back to Earth, has died, his family said on Tuesday.

DeWitt died on Monday at age 92 at his Nashville home.

A pioneer in the broadcast industry, DeWitt conceived the idea of bouncing radar waves off the moon in 1940 as an amateur astronomer. In a diary written at that time, he wrote:

"It occurred to me that it might be possible to reflect ultrashort waves from the moon. If this could be done, it would open up wide possibilities for the study of the upper atmosphere ... In addition, this may open up a new method of world communication."

His first attempt to obtain moon reflections came in an unsuccessful try using a 138-megahertz transmitter and receiver that he had developed for WGN-Radio in Chicago while working as an engineer.

During the Second World War, as a lieutenant colonel in the Signal Corps, DeWitt was assigned to the Evans Signal Laboratory at Belmar, New Jersey, and distinguished himself developing radar for locating mortars and directing counter-fire.

"Project Diana," named for the Roman moon goddess, began when DeWitt and his men, awaiting discharge after the end of the war, received a directive from the Defense Department to pursue the possibility of bouncing radar waves off the moon.

On January 25, 1946, after several evenings fiddling with their equipment, they heard the first reflections of radar waves back from the moon, proving that electromagnetic waves could penetrate the Earth’s atmosphere.

After the findings were confirmed by independent experts at the request of the Defense Department, news reports put the feat in the same class as the development of the atomic bomb.

Time magazine declared, "Man has finally reached beyond his own planet."

After "Project Diana," DeWitt returned to Nashville, where at age 16 he began his career by founding the city’s first broadcasting station.

He helped install transmitters for new stations including WSM-Radio, whose output took the Grand Ole Opry into thousands of rural homes during radio’s heyday. DeWitt remained at WSM, where he eventually became president.

From Phillip Pournelle:

Dad,

Here is something for your column:

Recently I received as a gift from my family a Palm III made by 3Com. Its a great little PDA that enables me to keep a phone/address list, Calendar, Memo pad as well as the all important ToDo list. There are other features such as an expense recorder, artwork program, calculator, scientific calculator, etc. While there are plenty of other applications out there, I haven’t had an opportunity to explore them (pesky thesis is breathing down my neck…) . Meanwhile, My thesis advisor has been telling me about how great the operating system on these things are and has several grants to explore placing thin client programs on these things for military applications.

My experience with these things was far more mundane. Along with the Palm III, my family purchased for me a copy of Ascend 97’s Franklin Planner Software , an organizational program that says that it works with the Palm III. Ascend 97 has many functions that enable you to get organized. You can make a detailed list of tasks with priorities and attached notes. You can build a goals paradigm, record phone numbers, addresses, etc. In all it appears to be an excellent system to get organized and I am told by my brother that he uses it all the time.