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THE VIEW FROM CHAOS MANOR

VIEW 146 March 26 - April 1, 2001

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This is a day book. It's not all that well edited. I try to keep this up daily, but sometimes I can't. I'll keep trying. See also the monthly COMPUTING AT CHAOS MANOR column, 4,000 - 7,000 words, depending.  (Older columns here.) For more on what this place is about, please go to the VIEW PAGE.

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Monday  March 26, 2001

Actually I am putting this up Sunday night. I'm in Anaheim, and Gates speaks at 0800, and I'll be there...

4 PM  I am on a bit of information overload. Some good stuff here, and some boring. Microsoft is REALLY pushing Windows XP as the wave of the future. When asked by one press guy "What is it?" I said "It's Windows Me only it works." Larry Magid said "It's Windows Me that works or you can call it Windows 2000 with a friendlier interface." Which is a good observation. We will be getting the Beta 2 here; I have actually had a beta Windows XP running for a while, and I have to say I like it.

Microsoft intends that XP will take over the slots of 2000, 9x, and Me. Me has some cool stuff built in. It is also supposed to be a lot less prone to crash and to have much friendlier error messages. More as I run the new beta, which we will get tomorrow afternoon.

 

The Marriott Hotel has a high speed Ethernet connection and I am using it. And a phone guy at a telephone pedestal switch down the street said they are getting high speed onto my block. Now.  So we will see. I sure like high speed connections...

And: re the program I mentioned in the column,

SUbject: http://www.errorscan.com/index.html 

Gary Vankirk 

says the program is apparently free....

 

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Tuesday, March 27, 2001

It has been one busy day.

I have discovered that DVD-RAM while technically still an excellent way to go is unlikely to have any market share at all. Pity. But DVD +RW is likely to be available this summer to fall. Meanwhile in Japan very large Magneto Optical drives are available but apparently not here. Sigh.

I have my Beta 2 copies of XP and Whistler. I'll try them when I get home. Meanwhile Roland points to this observation regarding XP:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/17907.html 

which is in fact quite interesting.

And I have got to get to bed.

 

 

 

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Wednesday, March 28, 2001

Morning. I have about half an hour to get packed and get coffee before a 3 hour session in which Peter Glaskowsky tells us of the future of the chip business. This is the talk that was given by Michael Slater in former WinHec conferences, and which some consider the most important talk of the conference.

Yesterday I spent some time talking to the people at Acer and AMI and looking at the next generation of motherboards for Athlon and Duron. In particular Iwill has a pretty neat new board (looks good, specs good; but of course I don't HAVE one). Athlon has the advantage of DDR ("Double Data Rate" memory) which is faster than SDRAM without the cost of RAMBUS, and when good DDR boards for Athlon are out then Athlon systems will have some significant advantages over Pentium 4: Pentium 4 either needs costly RAMBUS, or goes with cheaper but slower SDRAM. Of course that's a temporary thing, and there will be DDR boards for Pentium 4, but those are Real Soon Now.

So the big AMD vs. Intel matter that I got beat up over resolves to questions of when new generations of boards are available and at what prices. For the moment I'll stay with what I said earlier: the Intel D815EEAL is an excellent choice for most systems. Get the latest SOUNDMAX drivers for the sound. The onboard AGP video is good enough for business applications. If you want to go for games and hotter video in general, there's an AGP slot, and nVIDIA and ATI will be glad to sell you a hot video board (saw some good ATI video products that should be out soon; on the other hand nVIDIA is coming out with the Ge-Force 3.  Ain't competition grand?).

But if you use the Intel D815 then you have no choice but to use Intel chips.

Soon now, though, there will be new DDR Socket A boards for the Athlon (and Duron), and that may change things considerably. 

The real bottom line is that most any system you can build or buy right now is going to be faster than the software you run will need, with of course exceptions in the games and video processing and some other specialty departments; and assuming you buy decent stuff it will be Good Enough until the next generation of software comes down the pike. Moore's Law continues...

And I am off to learn more and then appointments in Hollywood, or rather with a Hollywood producer in Santa Monica.

Well that went well. We will see if anything comes of it. Meanwhile

Roland points to http://www.msnbc.com/news/550565.asp and wonders how long it will take to engineer around that...

 

 

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Thursday, March 29, 2001

I hate these small computers. They clearly have a malevolent intent. Today I have things to do , so of course something horrible happened to the net to make me waste time. And Waste Time.  Eventually it was all fixed -- bad Earthlink modem I think -- but ye gods. In fact it is still like glue has been poured into the net. Earthlink today is mudlink...

 

At least Outlook can't spread foot and mouth virus. I have an email claiming this is the first time Outlook has failed...

At Winhec I was pleased to learn that I wasn't nuts in my column. There's a great deal of new information on AMD vs. Intel, and it's complicated. There are new motherboards. Acer is developing boards, and Iwill is sending me one, that use DDR SDRAM for Athlon Chips. This looks to give an overall reliable system with more bang for the buck than Intel Pentium 4 with Rambus RAM until that cost come down -- it will but hasn't -- and more speed than Pentium 4 with regular SDRAM. Eventually we will have Pentium4 with DDR boards. Meanwhile Pentium 4 is as I said: faster for software compiled to take advantage of it, but there ain't much of that out there. 

It is still the case that the Intel D815 and a good Pentium III makes for a useful and complete system at good cost. Good systems/boards for AMD are in delivery finally -- there were reviews long before you could buy one -- and we'll be looking into that. Clearly the 815 Intel board video is not up to high speed games and high end graphics and never was intended to be. The sound, on the other hand, is right up there provided you get the newest drivers. The original drivers shipped with it were certified but sucked rocks. The newer ones finally got certification and are excellent.

For most of us the differences in overall costs and performance once you get past about 750 MHz aren't very great. I still have reservations about VIA chipsets and those I confirmed with some of the peripherals engineers at WINHEC. There were and apparently still are some USB problems with VIA that you don't get with INTEL 815. Intel has hundreds of people to do thousands of compatibility tests. That makes a difference. But most of the problems have to do with difficulties in writing drivers: of course those aren't trivial either.

The latest generation of VIA chipset may not have these difficulties. I don't have any boards built with those. 

Bottom line on most people I talked to: they use Athlon for home systems because they got more bang for fewer bucks, but they tend to Intel systems at work and for mission critical applications. This is I suppose an impression rather than a formal inference from statistically reliable data, but it's sure an opinion I heard a lot among people who really know this stuff.

I will do a WINHEC photo essay for subscribers shortly. I have put the INTERNET WORLD SPRING 2001 photoessay, formerly hidden for subscribers only, out where it can be found. This was mailed to subscribers when it was first written.

From time to time I do reports for subscribers only, and more frequently I alert subscribers to reports that I make difficult to impossible to find if you don't know where to look...

And Noel Nyman gives this link to the fix for the Verisign fiasco

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/release.asp?ReleaseID=28888 


Long hike with Sasha. 

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As you can see, he's looking his old self again.

 

Big box of books on the language PYTHON. Looks very interesting. Not sure I have the language itself. Where does one get it?

That was quick. Thanks, I now have several sources. PLEASE I do not need any more help finding it. 

 

 

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Friday, March 30, 2001

First for those who continue to send me email based on what someone said I said about open source, please see

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/view145.html#absurd  

before sending more. Bloody hell.

Next, I have been told where to find PYTHON. Thanks to those who took the trouble. But really, someone must have broadcast that I didn't know offhand -- why should I have? -- and now there's mail on that. 

And if I am a bit irritable this morning, these little machines are driving me mad. Roberta's perfectly normal Pentium III 550 with Windows 98 SE now  has two defects: while I see her machine on the net from all other machines, and I can access her files; and while previously mapped drives to other machines on her machine are accessible; when I do NETWORK NEIGHBORHOOD on her machine it searches endlessly and never finds anything. Ever. I tried taking her machine off the local net and then putting it back on. Same result. And then I found that the FIND (search) program doesn't work. It comes up, it looks as if it is going to work, but NOTHING HAPPENS.

So I am about to install Windows 98 SE again having done a backup of everything on there. Only of course I can't find the Microsoft Windows 98 SE update disk I bought from Microsoft, meaning that after I do a repair installation (I hope I can do a repair installation) I will I suppose have to send her system off for critical updates. Well, OK, I can do that, but sheesh! I ought to put Windows 2000 Pro on there and be done with it, but she doesn't want to learn yet one more thing just now.

So here we go again. And I get nothing done. Well, I get something to write about, but ye heavens... At least the net is working again. And there seems to be DSL on the next block so there is hope for me yet...


Insanity.  I can't run Windows 98 Setup on Roberta's machine. It starts the wizard, and never comes back. Clearly I will have to scrub this stupid machine to bare metal and start over. I hate doing that, but I don't see any other way out. Why this went this way I do not know.

I hear stories like this a lot but they don't often happen to me. This time it really has. Well, I have done a full backup of her system so it's just a matter of bringing it up here and having at it, but what a colossal waste of time for both of us.

1505: Well well. I got a test stand ready to bring Seattle -- Roberta's ailing system -- up to since I was going to scrub it. Actually I had decided I would put 2000 Pro on it as an "upgrade" to see how that took care of the problems. But when I went down to look, after half an hour Windows Setup Wizard was ready to install 98, so I'll try reinstall of 98 first. If that does it I am done. If that does not do it then I am going to do what I originally intended and install W 2000 Pro. Meanwhile Sasha is sitting here telling me that this is all silly, the really important thing I need to do is to walk the dog...

1525: Well, it ran through copying files, and for at least 5 minutes has sat there having copied all the files, no hourglass -- and nothing happening at all. I will give this not a heck of a lot longer before the scrub operations begin. I'll bring it upstairs, but Roberta remarks "Have you noticed how much speed they lose when you carry them downstairs?"

1547: Happy Ending.  Reinstalling Windows 98 did it. It took forever. When I went downstairs to get the machine with the threat of bringing it up here, Windows after a long time of doing nothing after showing 100% of file copy was in the process of Shutting Down. Naturally it failed to actually do that and I had to power cycle the machine.

But after that everything went automatically, the desktop was restored as it was before I started, Network Neighborhood now finds all the computers on the network, and Find works properly. Roberta's machine seems to be restored to health. As she says, "We'll see if it lasts a week so you can write about it in the column."  But for now I have fixed the problem by reinstalling Windows 98 SE. I still have to set the system to download the upgrades but I can do that later.

Now to do something important like walk the dog.

Next week I will try to get Earthlink to start over on DSL to Chaos Manor. I prefer their service if I can get it; for all I may rail at their occasional glitches, I notice that I have far fewer problems than most people; and I continue to recommend Earthlink as the ISP of choice if you have that choice (and yes I know there are local outfits that do better and more custom service but if you have one of those you know who you are).

 

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Saturday, March 31, 2001

Cool and cloudy. A lot to get done. Taxes coming up. Column coming up. 

Windows Me continues to be a problem. I have a Windows XP Beta 2 and I am thinking of installing that on the Windows Me system, then if that doesn't go well, installing Windows 98 on Galacticus. Windows 98 SE has some problems but nothing like Windows Me.

 

 

 

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Sunday, April 1, 2001

I have decided to convert to S-100 systems running CP/M and thus avoid Microsoft...

Roland observes that the good, old days are here again:

http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/04/01/us.china.plane/index.html 

and that the Chinese version seems awfully familiar. Alas, that's not an April story.

See this link on the intelligence loss this  represents:

http://www.fas.org/irp/program/collect/ep-3_aries.htm 

Remember the Pueblo.

Roland also notes Bluetooth Problems.

http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20010325/tc/germany_bluetooth_blues_1.html

Alex concludes from his CeBIT experience (see his report on www.byte.com) that Bluetooth is real and will get there. I will have some words on Bluetooth vs 802.11 shortly myself.

 

 

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