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CHAOS MANOR MAIL

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Mail 86 January 31 - February 6, 2000

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Monday  January 31, 2000

More on Professor Gelertner's article:

An interesting essay, as far as it goes, but I think Dr. Gelertner misses a larger cultural swing underway, that being the Internet. In the world I live in, university professors in the United States have much less sway and social input than computer hackers breaking the 'crypto' code used for DVD playback living in Norway.

My father is an engineer, my mother a science teacher, and I am very proud to have come from educated people, and to be educated myself. I am deeply skeptical that there is any sort of objective reality to religion except in as much as it is a social and psychological phenomenon, and I feel no particular need to act as if I believe in it. I do feel the need to be respectful and caring of my fellow humans, whom I actually like quite a lot. Those rascally rebels from the 60's who tore down such wonderful institutions as southern segregation and killing millions of vietnamese to no particular purpose don't seem to have damaged the country all that much so far as I can see looking around these days. Relative to a short number of years in the past, abortions are down, marriages are up, the economy is up, capitalism rules the land and the day, and the Internet is bringing more power and freedom in some very real and interestingly new ways to a goodly number of people.

When Gelertner rails against intellectualism, it seems to me that what is really complaining about is more properly termed political correctness, that being the belief and practice that people who think differently should be educated as to their misfortune. Deplorable, honestly, but perhaps this is just evidence that we are *not* all thinking the same way anymore? Surely the notion of political correctness is a moot point if everyone believes the same thing anyway. Conservatives complain loudly and strongly about the intellectual elites and about the degradation of the culture, but the only difference I detect between them trying to shape the culture according to their liking and the 'liberal elites' trying to shape the culture according to their liking is that the conservatives assume that every right thinking American believes the same way they do, in their heart of hearts, while the liberal assumes that the majority do not, and so feels a need to be more strident.

Noise and fury, Gelertner's essay no less.

 Jonathan Abbey jonabbey@arlut.utexas.edu

 Applied Research Laboratories The University of Texas at Austin Ganymede, a free NIS/DNS management system http://www.arlut.utexas.edu/gash2 

Well, I am not at all sure that modern intellectuals haven't made political correctness a criterion for inclusion; they certainly see to have done so around the academic institutions I have seen. The President of Cal Tech told a Nobel prize winner that he was damned if he was going to have any SDI mongers on his campus; which is why I never taught the seminar on technology and civilization. Perhaps it is better now, but I haven't seen a lot of evidence of it.

For more on this see below.


Dear Dr. P:

How about a "rant" on the "special build componets".

I just bought a H.P Pavilion 8650C desktop computer and was astounded to find that the "latest model" (according to the Tech support Dept at H.P." neither has MS-Dos drivers for its Master-Riptide sound card (by Conexant, formely a div of Rockwell) nor drivers for Linux. (even though H.P. website crows that they have Linux/Unix support.)

And a rant on the curious lack of documentation on the components they assembled into their "masterpiece".

Keep up the good work.

Sincerly

Richard Brown

Interesting subjects. There is SO MUCH to rave about lately...


I have a number of letters on Van Vogt.

All I can say is that vanGoth, Andre Norton, EE"Doc" Smith all had a large part of shaping this kid's future. I have always remembered Laura, the mutated cat who was Kit's best frend in "Star Man's Son". Of course I've always been a sucker for a good looking cat (female), even before that title, but it hit a soft spot for this kid in the early '60's. Or van Vogt's "The Weapons Masters of Isher". Now that was a REALLY interesting idea. It made you reach. Unless you read past all the points of the story and never understood. But you gotta love "Doc" and the "Tom Swift" stories. They got a kids atention back then, and raised an i...(What is the best term for something that is agravating, and just beyond reach-Oh Yeah, sorry I have to scrach that...) Sorry for the spelling, I have the spell check off tonite.

Regards, Jeff Pelton

THank you sir. I had not heard of his death till I read your notice. I am merely a sci fi consumer, not one of the inner sanctum, but, I can say like you that he had a profound effect on me in High School. Null A in particular; I actually read both Science and Sanity and Manhood of Humanity thanks to him.

Vogt, the Campbell stable and to a lesser (but still there) degree you and others were my companions of youth....

condolences to us all

-Bart Prine

Indeed. Van caused me to read Science and Sanity in high school and again as an undergraduate, and I still have a copy. It led me to other works, and to study with Wendell Johnson and Sam Hayakawa, and from them to Gustav Bergmann. Van had a lot of effect. He was also a decent man with good manners.


Hello Jerry,

What do you think about Wendy Goldman's article in this week's Byte? She's very harsh against Microsoft.

It's at http://www.byte.com/feature/BYT20000127S0001 

I liked her last paragraph, where she says it's the opinion of some people that MS would shine more brightly if it competed fairly. You have yourself said many times that MS is at its best when under pressure.

Regards,

-- Miguel Bazdresch

I fear that her book, in which she gave direct quotes from conversations she could not have overheard, and other direct material for which there is no conceivable unbiased source, so spoiled my expectations that I seldom read her any longer. She had Gates saying things that Gates would die rather than say if only because they were obvious and not clever. She has quotes from Gates to a young lady he is courting at intimate moments: how can she possibly know any of this? If she will make up that kind of National Observer gossip, she will make up anything; you can prove anything if you are willing to make up your sources.

So I fear I haven't read her latest, and am not likely to.

From: Stephen M. St. Onge saintonge@hotmail.com

Subject: Wendy Rohm's Microsoft Article

Dear Dr. Pournelle:

You write "I haven't read her latest, and am not likely to," and I can't say I blame you. There ain't much there, there. But it is mildly instructive as a study in propaganda.

The article runs four pages. Page 1 tells us why Gates and MS are doing what they're doing. No sources get named, and mostly, no sources even implied. There's a lot of psychologizing. The main thrust concerning the Caldera anti-trust suit is that during the trial which was not held, evidence of illegal practices, not detailed, would have been presented and proved MS guilty. No need to actually see said evidence or hear the other side before reaching a verdict.

The second page is a summary of the bad guy theory of MS, as presented in Judge Jackson's "Findings of Fact" from the recent anti-trust trial that did take place.

On the third page, we actually see something about the suit. Gates is quoted as saying that DR DOS was as good as MS DOS in 1989. So MS tried to make a deal with DR. When they couldn't, we get the allegation "Gates himself began instructing his staff to find ways to 'break' DR DOS. Programmers then began to implant fake error messages in various Microsoft products, and other fabricated bugs to make DR DOS malfunction when used with Microsoft Windows and other products." I'm not a lawyer, but I would not be surprised to find out this was illegal -- if it happened. Rohm doesn't feel the need to point us at any evidence it did.

She does cite a two memos in which Gates complains that the competition from DR DOS is costing MS money. I think it's here that we get the core of the anti-MS case: the company is too successful, therefore it must be in the wrong. I was not previously aware that it is against anti-trust law to complain in internal memos about how the competition is hurting your profit margins, but again, I'm not a lawyer.

Finally, on page 4, we get to the smoking gun. The fiends of Redmond played dirty. "By turning Windows into an 'operating system,' and combining it with DOS, Gates killed many birds with one stone. He was able to double the price of the operating system to OEMs, and eliminate completely any competition in the operating system market, forever enabling him to set prices however he wished. " Damn. I was so looking forward, back in 1993, to the opportunity of buying a computer with DOS, hopefully the old, unimproved, won't take more than 640K program kind, and then paying additional for a GUI. Let's dispense with any more trial nonsense and lynch the varmints now. That's what I say.

*SIGH* I keep reading nonsense like this, and I can only find one point of view from which it makes sense. If you assume that the only people who really matter are programmer types, that the purpose of the computer market is to provide them with toys, that they have a God given right to go into business and become rich no matter how lousy their products, and that the general public should take whatever the hackers feel like letting them have, then it all sort of makes sense.

Well, while it lasted, it was nice having a company that wanted my business.

Best, St. Onge

P. S. Thanks for recommending the Gelertner article that I read, the one about the intellectual class and it's hatred of the general culture. If I ever come across the essay Jonathan Abbey comments on, I'll read that one too. Alas, I fear it exists only in his head. There seems to be a lot of that going around ...

Heh. I happen to have been one of the first to write about the error messages that came up when you used certain Microsoft applications products with DRDOS. They were, according to Microsoft, intended to warn you in a way that would prevent lawsuits if things didn't work.  "After all, if they aren' tusing MSDOS or PCDOS, how can we be sure our applications will work with it? We didn't test our applications with their operating system."

    This was rather ingenuous, of course, but the messages in fact did nothing. Nothing was prevented from running, as I pointed out in my column. It was an irritant, but not a terrible one.

    And every time I see an article about how awful Microsoft is, it emphasizes the harm done to Microsoft competitors, not to consumers.  I truly wanted a competitive system to Windows; I wrote for OS/2 Professional as long as the magazine existed, and we tried to get IBM to do things right. Sigh.

 

 

 

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Tuesday, February 1, 2000

Mr Pournelle, You state in your column 231 (cont) of Jan 3, 2000, that your DVD_RAM will not be used for movie copying, but that because the "...The DVD code is broken and the genie is out of the bottle." you will soon be able too. This alludes to the recent fuss over DeCSS I imagine. Perhaps you may wish to review

http://opendvd.org/journalists.html 

to see that copying DVD's has always been possible, given a DVD_RAM drive. The "broken DVD code" has been leapt on by the DVD-CCA and the MPAA to try an stop unlicensed players being produced. And they have chosen the red "Pirates!!" rag to wave at the judge. The abuse of the courts by industry is a sad thing to see.

Regards Leif Eriksen

Apparently there is a lot to this story I don't know, and I'll have to dig into it; it happened at a time when I wasn't paying attention. I'll get to it. One must remember, I've always said that copy protection schemes are useful only temporarily. Even with CDROM and DVD games, where there is some legitimate need for copy protection, there's no scheme that will work for long. And with fast download like DVD and fast CDROM and DVD burners, nothing is safe for long. 

Protection of intellectual property is a real problem and we have yet to see a reasonable solution. This story isn't going away.

 

 

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Wednesday, February 2, 2000

"Protection of intellectual property is a real problem and we have yet to see a reasonable solution. This story isn't going away." This is a prescient and very true statement. What do you think of the Wired set maintaining that "Information wants to be free"?

...cheers...KCL... 

 Keith C. Langill, Principal Engineer Stellcom, an Employee-Owned Company

I think information may want to be free, but "No one but a blockhead ever wrote except for money." Love of the game won't pay the bills, nor will free information get new computer games developed. I have set my face against copy protection since CP/M days, but part of that was because of the horrible inconvenience for legitimate users. Microsoft's hideous serial numbers with Office and Windows are an inconvenience, but not an impossible one; of course they don't stop piracy, only make it easier to identify the pirate's source. I can live with that.

I have no final answers here... I just know that I like getting royalties on The Mote In God's Eye which we wrote nearly 30 years ago now... and I don't think it unfair that we be paid for the book. Nor would publishers publish it if they couldn't make some money too. 

Leif Eriksen commented yesterday:

" ... copying DVD's has always been possible, given a DVD_RAM drive. The "broken DVD code" has been leapt on by the DVD-CCA and the MPAA to try an stop unlicensed players being produced. ..."

Although I agree with the sentiment of his letter, a couple of things need to be pointed out. First, a $300 DVD-RAM drive won't do the job. Current models record only about 2.6 GB per side, versus the 5.2 GB of a standard DVD disc. The forthcoming generation of DVD-RAM drives will write 4.7 GB on one-sided media, which in fact will be large enough to contain most full-length movies. Be that as it may, what you really need to make knockoffs of a DVD disc is a DVD-R drive, which costs several thousand dollars and uses write-once blanks that cost $40 to $50 each. Obviously DVD-R drives are pretty much found only in commercial mastering companies and so on. Using a $50 write-once disc is no big deal if you're pre-mastering, but it's a pretty stupid way to copy a $25 movie.

Also, DVD-CCA probably doesn't much care whether someone writes a DVD player for Linux or whatever. In fact, they probably could have defuzed their opponents' arguments by releasing their own free Linux DVD player in executable form. What disturbs them is that DeCSS allows people to rip the unencypted digital data from a DVD disc, re-compress it more tightly, and then write that data to a $1 CD-R blank. What they end up with is a CD-Video disc, which, although its picture quality is more like VHS than DVD, can be played back on nearly any computer CD-ROM drive and many home-audio DVD players.

DVD-CCA isn't really too worried about the few $50 5.2 GB exact dupes that'll be produced. What scares the hell out of them is the millions of $1 650 MB CD-V discs they think will result from DeCSS. Or that's my understanding, anyway.

Bob

--

Robert Bruce Thompson thompson@ttgnet.com http://www.ttgnet.com

Could they be looking ahead? I recall when CD/R drives were $20,000...

AND there is more...

 


Mr. Rice does the VIEWDEX and MAILDEX indices for this site. He recently sent me a wonderful source of information about Microsoft Outlook 2000:

Hi Jerry,

I ran across a good page of tips and tricks for the MS Outlook Rules Wizard at:

http://www.slipstick.com/rules/index.htm 

also other more general Outlook Information at

http://www.slipstick.com/outlook/index.htm 

The site seems a bit slow, but my connection may just be slow today.

Hope this is useful.

John

-- John Rice coredump@enteract.com http://www.enteract.com/~coredump The Internet - Somebodys LAB experiment gone horribly wrong.


Interesting:

Read your van Vogt obituary and thought you might
 appreciate the following.
A. E. van Vogt dies.
Golden Age SF scribe meets
final Black Destroyer
Van Vogt's super Slan:
Science Fiction fans had their
tendrils on their can.
General Semantics
And Hubbard's Dianetics:
Lost mind more than once.
A great writer, but
one caught in amber; the field
Just moved beyond him.
Van Vogt: "The right to
buy weapons is the right to
be free." Then as now.
- Lawrence Person
    lawrence@bga.com
Nova Express Web Site: http://www.delphi.com/sflit/novaexpress/
Lame Excuse Books inventory now online:
http://www.abebooks.com/home/LAWRENCEPERSON/
I can't say I agree with every one of those sentiments,
but interesting. Thanks.

Periodically I get suggestions for changing this site. It may be time to consider some of them. As this:

1. Why not make make a typeface (cain't call them things fonts) change from your site's current Times New Rooman or similar to one of the Internet- friendly ones that come with Windows? Clearer reading for your readers. The Microsoft site uses these fonts, and I'm sure you find them less spidery than TNR. Even Stanley Morison didn't like TNR, and he designed it.

2. Why not use an e-mail system that does not require users to work with Outlook Express? Many people use OE; many -- including me -- don't. Plenty of websites have direct-opening crossplatform mail boxes, including NYTimes, ZDNet, Washpost and PBC Online NewsHour. Like the font change, a one-time action, probably not all that difficult. The NYTimes page isn't all that smart.

Coda: CMP bought Byte soon after I took an extremely expensive multi-year airmail subscription. Cost hundreds. Didn't get my money back. Didn't get offered any make-good. Got no reply to my letters of inquiry. Wasn't even told about the Website reincarnation (or metamorphosis: ain't no flesh in these here electronic signals). I suppose that to all my earlier quivering with rage is the possibility that these thieving bastards have made a fat profit on the money they stole from me ... aaargghhh.

Kind regards --

Paul Kunino Lynch 4/36-38 Bayswater Road Kings Cross Australia 2011 02-9368 0809 +612 9368 0809 ... phone &; fax

What fonts or typefaces would be better? I like Times Roman. Apparently many don't.

I don't use Outlook Express, I use Outlook 2000, and I like the RULES a lot; it was not easy learning how to do them properly but I managed. I have also managed to get the mailing to my subscribers work properly.

I have nothing to do with circulation and refunds, but surely, surely, you can get your money back if you work at it? I know you should not have to work at it. I fear I can't do anything at all about it...

Okay, I realize this is the second time today I've responded to a message from one of your readers, but I'm puzzled about this one. Mr. Paul Kunino Lynch wrote:

" 1. Why not make make a typeface (cain't call them things fonts) change from your site's current Times New Rooman or similar to one of the Internet- friendly ones ..."

As far as I know, you seldom specify fonts on your pages, except where you've cut and pasted reader mail in Arial or whatever. Normally, you use "default", which means the reader's browser determines which face is used to render the text. If Mr. Lynch prefers something other than Times Roman, all he need do is set the default proportional font in his browser to whatever he likes. Perhaps I'm missing something.

Or perhaps Mr. Lynch is suggesting that you implement Cascading Style Sheets and specify fonts directly. If so, I hope you won't do that. I intensely dislike reading sites that use CSS to control the fonts (and particularly the sizes) of text on my screen. For example, John Dvorak's PC Magazine column is too small to be easily readable on my screen. On a normal web site, I'd just use the Size button on my IE tool bar to increase the font size. That doesn't work with PC Magazine pages. I have to reconfigure IE to tell it to ignore the specified fonts and use my choices instead. That's a pain in the butt, because it causes other sites to display very poorly.

The whole idea of HTML in the first place was to deliver content independent of the hardware upon which it would be rendered. So-called designers hate the idea that the appearance of "their" content is controlled by the reader instead of by them, so they use features like CSS font and size to control appearance, much to the aggravation of me and many other readers. Please don't go down that road.

Mr. Lynch also writes:

" 2. Why not use an e-mail system that does not require users to work with Outlook Express? ... Plenty of websites have direct-opening crossplatform mail boxes ..."

Again, I'm puzzled, unless he's referring to those hideous HTML forms that some sites use instead of providing an email contact address as a live link. As far as I know, the only relationship of email clients to your web site is that you post email addresses frequently. But those are done using the RFC-standard "mailto:" URI. Any browser/mail client combination should be able to handle that. If it doesn't, it's broken.

-- Robert Bruce Thompson thompson@ttgnet.com http://www.ttgnet.com

One of the better perks of running this place is that I often don't have to write responses to mail...

Thanks.

 


The following is long. To skip to its end, click here. But don't do that because it is interesting...

From: Thomas Crook [tjcrook@email.com]

Subject: The DVD brouhaha

 

Jerry,

 

This is long, but bear with me; I don’t think it can be covered adequately in less than a couple of pages.

 

I’ve been following the DVD de-encryption controversy closely. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) is in vigorous legal pursuit of the authors and disseminators of the open source software module DeCSS (so called because it decrypts the CSS encryption code present in many DVD’s). It was the MPAA’s intention to limit the dissemination of decryption keys to paying CSS licensees.

 

MPAA’s position:

§       The writing and dissemination of DeCSS is piracy and theft of intellectual property.

Analogy from the MPAA’s viewpoint: it is akin to stealing the key to the back door of a movie theater and making a copy for personal use so that you can go in and watch movies at any time without the theater owner’s permission.

Such theft should be vigorously prosecuted and an example should be made of the thieves to deter further theft.

 

DeCSS supporters position:

§       When DVD’s were first marketed, commercial software providers only wrote playback/decryption software for Windows and Macintosh computers. Users of other operating systems (e.g., Linux, BSD, Solaris …) wishing to play back legitimately purchased DVD’s that they owned could not do so, presumably because commercial firms didn’t see much profit in a software player for those OS’s given their market share and the CSS licensing costs.

Analogy: The front door of the movie theater is in a shopping mall; the only way to get to it is to walk through the mall. The back door opens into a  park. The DeCSS folks like movies as much or more than mall-goers, but they despise the mall and prefer to hang around the park. They would really prefer to buy their movie tickets over the phone and then enter the theater via the back door. They don’t want to sneak in to see movies for free, they just want to come in through a different door.



§       When Xing wrote their Windows DVD player, they neglected to secure the decryption key. This allowed the DeCSS authors to easily reverse engineer the Xing player. It is not clear whether they used “clean room” reverse engineering practices. “Clean room” reverse engineering is, of course, legal. That’s what Compaq and Phoenix did to make the first IBM PC clones. It’s why Microsoft Word can import WordPerfect files.

Analogy: Xing left the key to the theater sitting on top of the doormat in plain sight. The DeCSS folks came along, saw the key sitting there and said, “We can cut a key just like that.” So they took out a pencil and sketch pad and drew a picture of the key and then went away and made a working key from the sketch they had drawn. Now they buy their tickets over the phone and go in the back door, just like they want to.



The DeCSS supporters raise some interesting arguments against the contention that DeCSS was written for the purposes of piracy:

§       Copying DVD’s using personal computers and software is uneconomical at present—say $50 to make a copy versus $30 to buy a pre-recorded DVD.

§       It is ludicrous to try share DVD’s over the Internet like MP3’s. It would take days to transfer a DVD over a typical dial-up connection.

§       It is implied that DeCSS has opened the door to widespread piracy of DVD’s--a door that was previously shut--but it is not necessary to decrypt DVD’s to copy them. Anyone who wants to pirate DVD’s on a large scale can buy a DVD burner and make exact digital duplicates. And of course, anyone can make analog copies ad infinitum to VHS tapes. In fact, it seems that these two activities would account for a much greater economic loss than a few computer hobbyists, so why is the MPAA so intent on punishing the DeCSS people?

 

A couple more points:

§       To run the Xing player, you apparently have to click a button that says (among other things) that you agree not to reverse engineer it. IF the DeCSS folks clicked the button rather than just looking at the program file, AND IF such an agreement is indeed a legally enforceable contract, AND IF the MPAA can convince a court that the DeCSS authors agreed to and then broke the contract, they may be in trouble. In any case it is not clear that the DeCSS people followed the kind of “clean room” reverse engineering that would hold up in a court.

§       Should the MPAA prevail, it might set a dangerous precedent for future technology developments, allowing contracts to abrogate the freedom to reverse engineer.

§       The MPAA hasn’t been helping its PR efforts by prevailing on the Norwegian authorities to haul a 16-year-old boy into a police station for six hours of questioning, as well as confiscating his computers and cell phone. (Maybe he was playing pirated DVD’s on the phone?)

§       The whole case raises the issue of how tightly should we allow intellectual property to be controlled? For example, I think that it is fine to give you as an author the right to be paid for your work. But should you or your publisher be able to dictate when and where I buy it and read it?

 

It’s an interesting case, worth paying some attention to.

 

Thomas Crook 

As you say, interesting. Thanks! And for a bit more click here.

 

 


This came with the subject: "The morons at Microsoft strike again."

Jerry,

I think they are their own worst enemies &; will end up driving us all to Linux. I've been using the IE5.5 beta since about 12/16/99 which is when went up on Tucows. I check the windows update page one or twice a week-who knows what nifty keen patch or latest version of directX you might find there. When I tried it yesterday I get this:

http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/R357/V31Site/x86/w98/en/thanksIE55.htm 

It's really annoying. It had worked just fine up to yesterday. If I'd known they were going to pull this crap I'd never have bothered with the beta.

Two games appearing RSN that I'm looking forward to: Reach for the Stars &; Imperium Galactica II.

Wally

On going to that site I found it has to do with updating a Beta copy of IE 5. While Microsoft does seem to be a bit slow about updating some of the Windows 2000 stuff (but then it isn't formally released yet, is it?) I find that there's quite a lot of good stuff at 

http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/ 

and I guess I am not particularly unhappy that they haven't got around to setting up support for beta copies of a free program. I can't see why this makes them morons? The simple remedy is to stay with IE 5, or upgrade to 5.1 which is supported. Or just wait...

While I am at it; here's a somewhat different letter about Microsoft:

Fantastic article! I've been a computer professional for 38 years, and the Linux zealots and the anti-Microsoft people either don't know what really happened or are out and out lying.

Microsoft is actually one of the better behaved companies. UNIX, with its brain-rotting inconsistencies and unfriendliness, nearly wrecked the mainframe/desktop-workstation world. SUN slashed and burned its way through, and now UNIX is dead, a number of good companies were taken out by SUN's trashing and lies and their own inability to believe that these people were actually going to succeed in peddling snake oil... SUN was banned from selling to the government for a year because of their falsification of benchmarks; now they are right out there pitching lies to try to get on top...

I wouldn't have a job today if it weren't for Microsoft's popularization of the PC.

WHY? Because the scientists did not want to use unix, and here was the Apple, friendly and accessible. So they went to the Apple. Then when Apple got to be too hard to interface to because it was on a proprietary kick, they went to the PCs, and there they stayed.

If I had not followed them to PC-world and provided networked servers and other services, our center would have gone down the tubes. It would have been used only by about 10% of our user base; the others were happily doing actual work on PCs while the UNIX people tried to remember whether it was a capital R with chmod or a little r like with cp.

All the time the DOJ is trying to salvage its ego by killing off Microsoft, they are ignoring really serious anti-competitive mergers in the vital communications industry. If I thought they were smart enough, I would accuse them of the old bread and circusses game to distract attention from their encroachment with encryption technology.

Well, Microsoft is 109 in the Fortune 500. Time-Warner is 108 and now merged with AOL. HP is, I believe, 6. HP something like 13. Compaq and Intel are right up there.

Globally, Microsoft is something like 284 in the Fortune Global 500. This is something we want to mess with? I don't think so.

Microsoft has only 22 billion in assets, $16 billion + in stock equity. So what is that 400 billion plus MARKET VALUE? I would guess, largely good will which could easily go bye bye. If they break up microsoft, they end up with three companies with about $7.5 million each -- too small to compete in the world.

And they accuse Microsoft of "bullying" these companies? What about the basic premise of the law that sophisticated corporations are expected to be able to solve their differences through courts without dependency on defenses such as they were picked on?

And would some lawyer please tell me how that biased job can find that Microsoft is a monopoly as a finding of FACT, when it is a legal question as to whether a company is a monopoly.

Also, would someone please tell me how this is helping CONSUMERS. Prices are going to skyrocket.

Why, because development will be more expensive for all companies.

And when it is claimed by someone that they must have charged too much for Windows, because Gates is so rich, I would remind them that if they had charged LESS for windows, they would be accused of predatory pricing!

I hope that Microsoft goes against those states and appeals this case as quickly as possible.

I feel that I have a thorough understanding of all of these issues. I would enjoy talking to you or be pointed to other people who do, and I would like to help Microsoft fight these ridiculous charges.

Virginia Metze


And here is how to find The Week In Review. These are the broadcasts, but done in MP3. They will stay around, and in future they will continue to stay around...

 

Jerry:

per your request, these are the week in review files that are available as MP3. I have attached the descriptive files for each of them as well.

http://img.cmpnet.com/byte/weekinreview/te-20000128_wir.mp3  http://img.cmpnet.com/byte/weekinreview/te-20000121_wir.mp3  http://img.cmpnet.com/byte/weekinreview/te-20000114_wir.mp3  http://img.cmpnet.com/byte/weekinreview/te-20000107_wir.mp3 

Paul Schindler

While we are at it:

http://www.technetcast.com/tnc_program.html?program_id=72 

Is a page with live and archived video from Linux World (including a speech by Linus Torvalds) done by our sister publication, Dr. Dobbs Journal. I don't know how Linux rabid the people at your site are, but if they like Linux, they'll like this.

Paul E. Schindler Jr., Editor Winmag.com, Byte.com

 

 


 

 

 

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Thursday, February 3, 2000

Subject: What is DVD mess really about?

It clearly isn't about piracy. That's been possible for the professional pirates all along (by copying encrypted images). It's been possible for the desktop crowd before DeCSS, too; a trick was out months before that for a lower-quality copy by using a modified video driver to copy the output stream, and a low-quality copy is all it's practical to transfer with desktop equipment now anyhow.

It's about *playback control*; specifically, about whether copyright holders can enforce arbitrary restrictions on access to their work. In this case, the immediate problem for the movie industry isn't piracy but region codes. DVD players sold in America, Europe, and the far East all have different decryption keys, and won't read the same DVDs. This allows the movie industry to set release times and prices differentially by market to maximize revenue. (Some have argued that this is a violation of WTO rules, but let's not go there for now.) This control, however, depends on control of the players; and *this* is what DeCSS threatens. They don't care if it's available as pirateware on the Internet, but they don't want DVD players produced that need no license from them and thus implement no restrictions on playback.

What rights copyright holders ought to have in this area is an interesting question; but I'm inclined to think that attempting to enforce them technologically will cause fearsome damage to open computing and the internet if it's possible at all.

- Mike Earl


 

I was rather concerned to see that you were experiencing sugar crashes, but forgot to write until AE Van Vogt's obit in slashdot reminded me that I had intended to do so. Given the close attention you pay to your health, you probably already know whether or not you are diabetic, but if you aren't sure, FOR GOD'S SAKE SEE THE DOC AND FIND OUT!

Sorry about the shouting. I went through two months of hell in late 1998 before being diagnosed with adult-onset diabetes. I was constantly tired in spite of sleeping poorly 12-14 hours/day, drinking massive quantities of water, and desperately inhaling orange juice by the pint several times a day. I would only wish this sort of thing on my worst enemy/ies. That having been said, I am now somewhat stable thanks to Glucotrol, (mostly) diet, and (not enough) exercise; if the stress of my present job and raising two teenagers doesn't kill me I reckon I'll live a while longer. Please, please, have yourself checked out.

On to more cheerful subjects: I have experienced great success with Corel Linux, more so than with the OpenLinux I was previously futzing around with. The "stripped" version of WordPerfect 8 for Linux that comes with it is not as capable as Word for Office 97, and the kppp daemon will not work with the Winmodem in my eTower, but that will change.

You say there's a new Gunpowder God novel coming out? Faunch, faunch! When is it scheduled for publication?

Kevin Trainor THE RIGHT TO BUY WEAPONS IS THE RIGHT TO BE FREE -"The Weapons Shop", A.E. Van Vogt

My mother had adult onset diabetes so we do watch for it here. I don't have it. I do have a tendency to eat everything chocolate in sight and we go to opera league parties where there is and endless Godiva supply; the result sometimes isn't pretty. And having a Husky ensures you will get exercise or be driven mad; I choose the 5 mile hike daily.

I too find Corel Linux useful, and I continue to look forward to the Corel Office Suite for Linux.

John Carr and Roland Green wrote a second novel in their Great Kings War series; they have the rights to both it and their first; and are looking at their options on how to publish both. John is considering a self-publication by subscription. More when I know more. Carr and Hawthorne have done another War World story and I'm working with Baen on getting it published and possible reviving the whole War World series. Again more when I know more.


This small utility, published as freeware by PC Magazine, allows you to minimize programs to the tray by right-clicking the minimize button.

This has made my desktop MUCH easier to use. I send to the tray the programs I leave open all day but which I don;t need for the current task.

Since Windows apps never quite return all the RAM and resources you had before when you close them, I'd been suffering from NT lockups because I could not stand to have all the apps open where I could see them; but, now I send them to the Tray, it's out of sight, out of mind, and work is much smoother.

Suggest you take a look at it.

http://hotfiles.zdnet.com/cgi-bin/texis/swlib/hotfiles/info.html?fcode=0014PZ 

John Bartley

Interesting. Since I switched to Windows 2000 professional I no longer worry about memory leaks: all those I had in NT days seem to have gone. I used to use MEMTURBO, and still do for Windows 98. Thanks for reminding me. I need to give that an award, and I clean forgot. MemTurbo (search this site and you'll find where to get it) is a shareware that really does work to recover lost memory in Windows 98 and NT 4; it doesn't seem needed in Windows 2000.


Just discovered your web page. Been a fan of yours since I read your "a step farther out" back in about the mid eighties. Very glad to see your still writing and active. I watched DCX become the Delta Clipper with hope, and was disappointed to see it lose out to Lockheed's X-33. I understand now its in the zone of cost overruns and asking for more money. Hope you or someone can persuade Richard Branson to bankroll the rotary rocket company. I think it or maybe Kistler aerospace is our best hope for low cost space travel in our lifetimes. Having just turned 40 last year, I follow with interest the telomere breakthroughs being made by the Geron Corp. With a little luck we could be around to enjoy that future of asteroid mining, space colonies, SPS, fusion, etc., that you have been writing about. Though they have now publicly backed away from its human longevity implications, I hope this is only a public stance. If not them then hopefully others are working on it. Just dropping you a line from an old fan---thanks for the ideas

Private capital may well be the salvation of the space program, but there is no law that says the capitalists have to speak English. There are at least two island empires with some interest and the ability...

 


Jerry,

I did read the Gerlernter essay, but for the life of me can't agree with it. Some problems I have with it:

Gerlernter claims the change of the universities began because of stome strange anti-elitism by old elites: "The old elite made the revolution itself. Nothing compelled the Harvards and Yales to change their ways. They did it on their own; they kicked things off by volunteering to make room for a new elite." To the best of my knowledge this is substantively untrue. The universities were essentially forced to accept a huge influx of new students by the GI Bill, which was *not* initially expected to be used by WWII veterans to the massive degree that it was (college education being thought to be something only of use to a small genetic group of people whose chromosomes carried an "old money" gene). Paul Fussell, whose essays on history and society you may have read, describes in his autobiography just how *un*welcome he was at Harvard as a non-upper class veteran of the Pacific war.

Another influence may have been sheer economics: beyond a certain level of technological development, which our country probably had reached by 1945, it simply makes more sense to employ people to carry out skilled intellectual labor than continue to run the economy as if it could still function with a large number of unskilled laborers. And that economic force has done nothing but get stronger: witness the increasing disparity in returns to college-educated versus high-school-dropout labor. Given that, if Harvard and Yale hadn't opened up, the land-grant colleges of the midwest and the western states (e.g., Univ. California) most certainly would have.

Onward to a worse point. Gerlernter writes: "One dramatic sign was the big influx of Jews. The intellectualizing trend went a lot farther than bringing in Jews, of course, but Jews are a dye marker that allows us to trace a new class of people as it moves into the system -- a new class distinguished by intellect and not social standing. At the prestige colleges today, the goal is to inculcate the intellectual's habits, not the lady's or gentleman's."

In other words, Ivy League colleges dropped the Jewish quota.

I don't understand why this was a bad thing to drop, nor am I impressed with Gerlernter's *not* pointing out that the numbers of Jews could only kept low in "prestige colleges" by what could fairly be termed anti-affirmative action. Reverse discrimination stinks when it's used to keep Asians out of Berkeley today; why are we supposed to mourn its passing in the Ivy League? Moreover, is it really the case that I am supposed to be critical of affirmative action when it favors subliterate non-whites but nostalgic about it when it favors intellectually mediocre (but rich) whites?

Gelertner's reason for this strange position seems to be: "... the old elite used to get on fairly well with the country it was set over. Members of the old social upper-crust elite were richer and better educated than the public at large, but approached life on basically the same terms."

But, historically, this is nonsense. It *totally* blanks out of history the extremely sharp divisions that in fact existed between the affluent elites of the American northeast and the bulk of the country. Imagine Gerlernter trying to tell a midwestern farmer, circa 1896, that the "old elite" was approaching life on "basically the same terms" as him. Now imagine Gerlernter trying to make the same case to Upton Sinclair -- while the latter was writing _The Jungle_, a fiery call to socialism that is chronically misdescribed as a call for food regulations. Moving forward a few years, recall the sharp social divisions and sometimes savage social norms described by Edgar Lee Masters in _Spoon River Anthology_ and Sinclair Lewis in _Main Street_ and _Babbitt_.

When you consider all these actual historical data, Gerlernter's argument becomes extremely difficult to take seriously. Of course the elites didn't challenge Christianity.. Why bother? They saw Christianity as a doctrine that told the worker and farmer to be patient with his lot on earth and not make trouble about seeing vast profits accrue to capitalists and Wall St. bankers. They saw Prohibition of alcohol and strict regulation of the sexual lives of working people as a way to keep the workforce clear-headed and docile -- of course they weren't about to advocate having any alternatives even discussed, let alone advocated, in the universities. Of course they didn't trouble the ideology of the common people. They *needed* that ideology to keep the common people quiet during the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties. And as for not wanting the universities to be taken over by roughnecks or Hebrews whose only attainments were scholastic, well, when you're trying to keep college slots open for your own (perhaps mediocre) offspring, *of course* you want to have a quota on sweaty outsiders who see college as a place to actually *learn* things.

This doesn't look very admirable to me.

I should point out here, since I run the risk of being easily misunderstood: I am not asserting that the creed of the common people was *nothing but* Marx's social "opium." In fact I personally believe there was significant wisdom, both practical and moral, in at least some parts of it; and it is entirely possible that, beyond what I myself can see, there is more truth to it than even just that. My hostility is not (I hope) to the creed of the people itself, but to what I see as the corruption of leaving them intellectually undisturbed in that belief, not for any charitable purpose, but for a completely and narrowly self-seeking one.

Finally, Gerlernter writes: "Today's elite loathes the nation it rules. Nothing personal, just a fundamental difference in world view, but the feeling is unmistakable."

Here he has a point that I think is harder to dismiss. It is, to my mind, clearly true that people such as the Clintons have an attitude towards the bulk of the U..S. that is both paternalistic (or perhaps I should say maternalistic) and deeply repugnant for its mendacity and (for lack of a better phrase) disrespect of culture. But I'm not sure what to do about it, though, since it is very difficult to have an academic movement based on anything *but* some form liberalism (even if it's 19th-century "liberalism", which today would probably be called "libertarianism").

The reason isn't hard to see: the fundamental premise of the academy -- not just of a politically biased academy, but of any good one -- is that of Socrates: "We must follow the truth wherever it leads." Now, that premise is unquestionably at the root of the Western Civilization that conservatives say they want to see more remembered and valued. It is also utterly subversive of conservatism, which has as a core premise the idea that the individual mind is not really fit to rationally judge society.

I can imagine an intellectual renewal being based on libertarianism (or some practical variant of it); but conservatism, per se, is as hobbled in the marketplace of ideas as Marxism is in the marketplace of material goods. If you have *as your fundamental premise* the idea that individuals really ought not to rationally criticize society, it is very hard to make headway when what you really want to do is criticize a liberal society.

I am no more fond of some of the consequences of this, e.g., the Clintons, than you probably are. What is not at all clear to me is that we are really *worse* off now than when college was the province, mostly, of affluent white male "Anglo-Saxon" Protestants. I welcome any thoughts that you may have about this.

--Erich Schwarz schwarz@cubsps.bio.columbia.edu

I think you missed the point. Dropping the Jewish Quota wasn't a bad thing, per se, but it did move us toward the concentration of intellectuals as rulers. The University of California system in 1960 was entirely a teaching establishment with some top level graduate schools; by 1968 it was modeled after the old German research university, with tenured professors in undergraduate work, contempt for teaching, and generally useless as a means for educating citizens of California to be citizen leaders of California.

The mandarin system in which your SAT score and only your SAT score at age 15 or so has produced the present situation. That the intellectual elite loathes the middle class that supports it is easily demonstrated, and the best cure for patriotism of any kind is four years at an American tax-supported university in anything but technical education, and even there you will be exposed to hatred of the nation.

If you genuinely believe that "following the truth wherever it leads" is what produces Singer, Focoult, deconstruction, political correctness, and journalists accredited to the White House 85% of whom preferred Fidel Castro to Ronald Reagan when Reagan was president, then you delude yourself. As to conservatism in the market of ideas, it seems to have done remarkably well considering how little market space it gets: which is what explains the liberal mania for campaign finance "reform". If ideas cannot be promulgated by spending money, and candidates cannot challenge by spending money then the media control more than ever, and incumbency becomes even more important than it is -- and since about 90% of incumbents are returned to office routinely, that's important already.

We have a corruption of terms, of course. "Liberalism" today doesn't mean paying attention to the truth, else we would not have so much nonsense in environmental policy. I know of no one who wants to destroy the earth in order to make or save a few bucks. But the idea of a science court, first proposed by Kantrowitz in about 1970, has never even had a hearing in the media. Why should it? Real scientific judgment isn't "liberal" nor it it "conservative." 

I had never heard it said of Edmund Burke or Thomas Aquinas that they thought individual minds incapable of criticizing society. I had heard Burke say that the "general bank of the ages" had more wisdom in it than most individuals, and listening to Peter Singer makes believe Burke. I do think that remaking society at the whim of non-elected judges along theoretical lines has been a disaster, and continues to be, and that is the essence of liberalism in this country: that ideas are so important that they must be implemented by any means necessary, and if legislatures will not do it, then judges and executives must, since the intellectuals are so very much smarter than the people they rule. But I had not heard anyone say that Thomas Sowell thinks individual minds incapable of criticizing society. Are you sure you meant what you think you said?


You probably know this already but here is a link to the article on BBC news about the corpse flower at the Huntington museum producing seeds... http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_627000/627166.stm 

Also, Do read more about the DVD hack DECSS. The events seem to support some of your misgivings about growing global corporatism.

Thanks for providing such a wonderful resource.. Ken Riley 

Thanks. 

 

 

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Friday, February 4, 2000

Column time continues. More interesting mail...

First, has this happened to you? Anyone know more on this? I will be trying it later today.

Jerry,

I thought I'd take a break from the current debates (on the intellectual elites and what to do about Microsoft) to offer you a little suggestion as you work on your "good enough computers" book.

The suggestion is: don't use a Netgear NIC (at least, not a recent model with the PNIC chipset) in a computer which also contains an Adaptec PCI SCSI host adapter. There's something about the combination which gives the Netgear the fits, and causes it to drop most incoming network packets when under a heavy load.

I discovered this last night (the effective transmit data rate (to my other computer) was the usual 3.x megabytes per second, while the receive rate averaged around 70 to 80 KILOBYTES per second. In this case I was running Linux, but the experience jogged my memory, and I recalled a similar incident with my mother's Win95 computer (which also has an Adaptec PCI card and a Netgear).

>From what I gleaned through searches at Google (http://www.google.com), this appears to be a hardware issue (rather than a problem with the Linux driver), so I suspect there's the risk of this whenever one combines the two cards in one system.

You might check this out on one of your systems if you have both cards handy.

Sincerely,

Calvin Dodge

More when I know more...


Jerry: Here is the path to the article you referenced in January. http://www.theatlantic.com/cgi-bin/o/issues/2000/02/002fallows.htm 

Thanks for the heads up!

James Post

Thanks.


And the latest on this case:

Dr Pournelle:

One piece of information on the DeCSS case. The reason that the Norwegian police confiscated Jon Johansen's cell phone is that it is one of the newer phones that is also a PDA. A copy of the DeCSS code was stored on the phone.

Regards,

Todd Johnstone

And Roland Dobbins reports:

Interview with the Norwegian lad arrested over DeCSS

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/02/04/1133241&;mode=nocomment 

 Roland Dobbins 


Jerry -

Just wanted you to know that the Week In Review files are a real hoot! What a great idea, and use for the MP3 compression system.

Regards, Bill Loard Atlanta


As a Former Naval Person (USN 1969 - 1973) who was sent to a far-off land that no one really cares about to this day, and as the son of a man who served in the Army from 1941 through 1945, I feel that I can respond to your notion that Adams was right.

Dad went to Europe as an Infantryman, and lived to not tell the tale. He went because no one told Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, and Company that "enough is enough, and if you don't stop this, we'll punch your lights out!"

We learned from that lesson, so I went to the 'Nam to take my part in the 70 Year War. And I hated every second of being scared, and tired, and sweaty, and smelly, and scared. And I lived to not tell the tale to MY son. And the little problem in South-East Asia did not become a Big Problem with nukes and such flying around.

The moral is, if you stomp on little problems, they don't become big problems. And maybe, just maybe, a little bully won't be able to become a Hitler/Stalin/Mao. Note that Saddam and Milosevic (sp?) aren't anywhere near as troublesome as Hitler was. Nor do Saddam and Milosevic have the powerful patrons that Mussolini and Uncle Ho had. (Tojo was a special case due to economic problems, and probably would have gone to war with us even if the European powers had not been busy with Hitler.)

I still hated every second of it. And I wasn't able to vote in an election until after I got out. Why? Well, I was 19 when I went in in '69, and at that time, in California, voting was limited to those 21 or over. And THEY didn't have to go, did they? (Yes, I'm STILL peeved about that!)

Regards....Ward Gerlach

 

I’ll write a long reply but the short one is “national interest.” Both WW II and Viet Nam were in our national interest. There were, as you surmise, big powers with big nukes in the sidelines. Now there are as well, but the potential nuclear enemy is China; China says they are preparing to win a war with the US by 2030. We seem not to have noticed. I had not noted anyone in Europe who so threatens us.

Haiti is at least in our back yard. Kossovo and Bosnia are in EUROPE and are EUROPE’s problem; there is no US national interest in stepping on Milosovec other than feeling good, and there is no end to people it would feel good to step on. No one has yet shown me where former Yugoslavia is a threat to anything outside its own borders or has the potential to be a threat to Austria, much less NATO. Perhaps you know something I don't?

But of course the Albanians are white (more or less: they're a mixture of Illyrians, Slavs, and Alars) while the Africans who are slaughtered by their domestic dictators are, well, African, and it's a lot easier to ignore what goes on in the Dark Continent precisely because it is a lot easier to see that there are few national interests there. It is a lot easier to wag the dog in Europe.

 As to stomping on small  problems, i.e. becoming the world’s policeman – that is the essence of the discussion. No? There is no end to the good we can do and the small problems we can stomp on; protecting the weak and making humble the proud is precisely what Rome did in the last days of the Republic, and that leads inevitably to Empire; indeed, it IS Empire. Once there are powerful special interests involved in Empire – as there surely will be, arms manufacturers, suppliers, settlers, etc. – the expansion of Imperial involvement becomes a matter of domestic politics.

 Empire is attractive. You state the case well. I was an Imperialist once, and it's bloody attractive. But do think about it. There is no end to the needs of empire. Once you must maintain standing armies all over the world, you will find it harder to get recruits for it; even the officer corps become hired guns. At least Rome found it that way. Are we all that different?


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Saturday, February 5, 2000

Hi Jerry,

You wrote:

"And ever since I posted a long formatted bit about DVD over on Mail, currentmail has been sluggish. I tried cutting the entire piece, pasting into WORD, saving, and pasting back into Front Page and got a 4 second improvement in the projected download time, but the Front page editor is sluggish with that essay in there. There seem to be a number of "span" commands built into that; I don't understand those although I think I will have to learn about them. Perhaps there is something else odd about that formatting? I don't have time to study it, I just note that the editor seems sluggish."

When Word's binary document file misbeahve like this, there's a quick and dirty way to strip out most if not all the offending code; at least it works for me. Do a Save as... Rich Text Format, close it, reopen it and resave in Word format. Had to do that recently to a BIG heap of Word 2 documents that misbehaved badly in Word 97.

CHeers

Jonathan Sturm

Just tried that. May or may not have made a difference; I see the "span" tags are still in there. Anyway, it will just have to do...  Thanks.

Jerry,

The <SPAN> tag in HTML is just a generic container tag. That is, it contains text within it, which you can then modify using attributes of the SPAN tag or Cascading Style Sheets.

In your case (currentmail.html), the SPAN tag is being used to set the font of the text within it. I note that in the other mail you have pasted in, Frontpage is using <FONT> tags to accomplish the same effect. I'm not sure why it decided to use SPAN to set the font to Arial for the mail about DVD's. I will note that the way Frontpage is using SPAN occupies many more bytes than the equivalent FONT tags. That's why the page is so large and sluggish.

Perhaps changing the font used in that message will clear the problem up?

Cheers, Jason Berkan

Actually, FrontPage didn't generate that at all: the sender sent it as formatted text, and I simply pasted it in. Apparently, what he used to generate that used the SPAN tags. It looks like a heck of a hand job to go through and change all that and I haven't time, so I have left it alone; I did try cutting it, pasting into word, saving as a .doc, and pasting that back in, then, a minute ago, doing the same but going the .rtf route. Doesn't seem to have changed anything. And I simply don't have time to hand edit it. Ah well. Thanks.


CERT has issued an advisory, CA-2000-02, on the perils of JavaScript et al.

Details at: http://www.cert.org/advisories/CA-2000-02.html  http://www.cert.org/tech_tips/malicious_code_FAQ.html  http://www.cert.org/tech_tips/malicious_code_mitigation.html  http://www.apache.org/info/css-security  http://sun.com/software/jwebserver/faq/jwsca-2000-02.html 

The Apacheweek eletter explained the issue thusly: "Earlier this week a CERT advisory detailed how malicious HTML tags can be embedded in client web requests. The problem is not specific to Apache and has wide reaching consequences for anyone who uses web servers or writes scripts for them."

= John Bartley, PC syadmin, USBC/DO, Portland OR Views expressed herein are mine own. "We should call this Day One of Year One." RAH to Uncle Walter, 1969-07-20. See http://go.to/nt-2000  for a comprehensive review of NT defragmentation.

I post the above without comment because I am in a tearing hurry.


Subject: Microsoft/DOJ

Dr. Pournelle,

Hal Plotkin, writing for sfgate.com, has some good ideas about "what to do about Microsoft" that don't seem too far from your own. They make sense to me as well.

http://www.sfgate.com/technology/beat/

--Dave

 Dave Pierce 

Thanks. It's a rush weekend. I'll look at it next week.


Hi Jerry,

I have an NT 4.0 Server machine with two Netgear FA 310TX cards and an Adaptec 2940U2W PCI controller. After reading the e-mail on your web site I did some quick testing. Everything seems to be ok. I copied a 470 MB file to and from the machine several times. It averaged 60 seconds to copy from the machine to a 98 workstation and about 75 seconds to copy from the 98 box to the NT box. These numbers seems respectable to me. I will try to do some more rigorous testing later.

Regards, Chris Dunbar, MCSE Dunbar Network Solutions

 

I have been unable to make my systems have a problem too.


 

 

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