Dear Mr Pournelle

I hope you don’t mind that I took your word for granted about a "contest" (Wonder how many ppl will write to you in this matter). I am one of those who heavily defend your way of layouting your page, as you probably saw on "webpagesthatsuck".

As an old friend of Bo Leuf I have seen the growth of his page, yours, Bob Thompsons and Tom Syroids and how they influence each other. I myself think that your viewpoint could be well defended but... (Here it comes...)

No page is so good that it cannot be improved and I took the chance of making some slight changes, just to show you my viewpoint on weblayout. BTW... No, I am not talking about Web design. WWW is filled with wannabee designers and I don’t think it needs one more. So I am trying to make layout instead of design.

Let me just correct you in one small matter. It is true that fonts like Times New Roman and other serif typefaces are easier to read on paper. The reason for this is that most printed matter are typeset with 1200 dpi. The screen only has aprox. 92 dpi. All the finer details of the serif fonts are therefore lost on screen.

I only wish I had some articles in English that proves my point but unfortunately, everything I have read in this matter is in Swedish.

This is the reason why text should be shown in sans-serif on screen. My preference is Verdana. But that is more an opinion than a rule. I hope that you find my slight corrections of your opening page interesting enough to let it influence you if you ever consider changing the outlook of your most interesting site.

Do you ever wonder about the irony of it ... here we’ve all been waxing paranoid about Big Brother government raping our privacy, and the primary violators seem to be business, in the form of Microsoft and Intel. I can’t help but wonder whether the serial number ID feature in the Pentium III chips was engineered at the behest of Microsoft. And yes, by now, I am paranoid! For all of the mea culpas done by Microsoft over the serial numbers encrypted in Windows 98 document files, I have yet to hear a Microsoft spokesperson explain WHY it was done, and WHAT was intended to be done with the information. It is for this stealth mentality at Microsoft that I *NEVER* use their on-line registration; it is a transparent effort to download specs on one’s system configuration - the better to "help" us, no doubt.

Larry Anthony

--

Subject: Serial Numbers in your computer

Jerry,

Maybe it’s just me. I just read the Markoff article (New York Times) for the third time and am still unclear what the fuss is all about.

Microsoft, as a part of the on-line registration, is collecting the serial number of the installed software. Nothing surprising here.

Microsoft creates a unique identifier for files in the operating system. Nothing surprising here, OS vendors have been doing this for years. In a highly networked corporate environment, there is an even greater need to do this from an ‘operating’ standpoint. There are various algorithms around used to do this and using a hardware or software serial as a part of the algorithm is also nothing new.

Then the article then talks about ethernet cards and the fact that they also have a unique number associated with them. Also nothing new here. ‘If’ you elect to include the hardware list with your on-line registration, that number is included, but not otherwise. In the article, it’s implied that this is also sent every time, which it’s not. Also, the percentage of readers (of the article) that actually have installed ethernet is probably pretty small.

Intel decided to include a serial number in it’s P3 chips. There are a number of perfectly legitimate reasons to do this. SUN (for years) has included a unique ‘HID’ (Hardware Identification Number) in each and every one of it’s SPARC computers and software vendors have used it as a part of license password algorithms for a long time.

Almost every hard drive, in every computer has an embedded unique serial number that’s software readable. Have been for years. Some vendors use this as a part of an algorithm to create unique numbers as a part of a license password. Nobody mentions this.

My point is that there’s nothing much ‘new’ here other than some Conspiracy Theorists, and others, putting together some slightly related ‘facts’ and finding a new way to draw attention to themselves.

There is a lot of ‘data collection’ going on in this country to be concerned about from a personal privacy standpoint, but I don’t think that this is part of it.

Maybe it’s just ‘me’ and I’m not paranoid enough.

John

Subject: thanks for the red hat install bug report

Hi,

saw your column about Linux not marking the partition bootable.

I ran into the same thing. I’ve entered your problem report into the Red Hat bug tracking system at

Hopefully your very public bug report will get them to fix this for 6.0.

Thanks,

Dan

Dan Kegel [dank@alumni.caltech.edu]

--

Jerry,

I have enjoyed your articles in BYTE, and I am grateful they are still accessible.

I have always felt that Kensington Expert trackballs and any of their accessories are cheap imitations of what has been developed by other companies like Logitech and MicroSpeed, who have poured money into research. Kensington has not particularly considered human and ergonomic factors in their designs. What has significantly helped them is their marketing strategies during a critical stage of expansion.

The only relationship I have to Kensington, Logitech or MicroSpeed is I have used their accessories.

Subject: Kensington Trackball Of Death

Knowing that you recommend and use the Kensington trackball, I wanted to pass along my recent experience with one. I’ve used one on my Mac for years, the old two-button variety, and I’ve used the 4-button variety on other Macs and PCs, and never experienced anything like this.

My wife and I put together a new PC system for Christmas – Intel SE440BX-2 motherboard, 350MHZ Pentium II, Kingston memory, PC Power &; Cooling case and fan, Matrox Millennium II video card, Adaptec 2940UW SCSI, Western Digital SCSI drives. Some of these were components I already had; we purchased the motherboard, processor and memory new.

We got a 4-button Kensington trackball for the pointing device. The initial OS on the machine was NT workstation, for about a month. The trackball functioned just fine during that time, using version 5.04 of the drivers, the version included on floppies with the purchase.

In February I decided to scrub the system and start over for two reasons – I wanted Windows 98 to run some games and some home design software that required DirectX 6; and I wanted to install NT Server to provide Apple file and print sharing for my Mac, among other things.

The installs went fine – I got Win98 installed and running, and then installed NT Server. For those who don’t know, this is the best way to do it; if you have NT on a system already it can be a pain to get Win9x installed in a dual-boot configuration.

The first problem I had was with Windows 98. I installed the Kensington drivers after everything else was configured. Upon reboot, Win98 hung during boot on the blue cloud screen. I had to reboot in safe mode and remove the Kensington drivers in order to get Win98 to boot correctly.

I went to the Kensington web site and obtained version 5.11 of the drivers. Same result: hanging on boot. I contacted their tech support and they walked me through several procedures to no avail. They also had me try the trackball on the serial port rather than the PS/2 port. Once again, the same problem occurred.

I had basically given up on having their drivers work in Win98, and this is when I had serious problems with NT. I had been experimenting with an Ascend Pipeline 50 ISDN router to connect to my ISP. For reasons I won’t go into, I decided to give that up and go back to dial-up networking using a Motorola BitSurfr Pro ISDN adapter.

So: I reinstalled the NT RAS and dial-up networking, rebooted. Reinstalled SP4 because RAS over-writes a bunch of networking files during installation. SP4 removes any custom mouse drivers you have installed, by the way; so after rebooting from SP4 installation, I installed the version 5.11 Kensington drivers.

It turns out that this was a serious mistake. Unbeknownst to me, the Kensington download web site states that there are a number of reported problems with 5.11 drivers and certain SP3 and SP4 installs of NT. Unfortunately, I have now experienced those problems.

After installing the drivers and rebooting, NT proceeded to return a page-fault Blue Screen Of Death during boot. I rebooted and invoked the Last Known Good configuration: Blue Screen. I booted from the NT CD and used my NT Repair Disk, rebooted: Blue Screen. At this point I was really starting to worry.

I again booted from the NT CD and did an upgrade installation. After the install process finished, rebooted: Blue Screen!!! This is on an NTFS partition, by the way, so I can’t simply boot into DOS and remove any offending files. I had to do a fresh install of NT, over-writing the registry; and having to reinstall all of my software.

This was the only thing that fixed the problem. Had I just installed the old 5.04 version of the Kensington drivers, I would have not had to spend all weekend rebuilding my system. As it is, I took advantage of the Kensington 90 day money-back guarantee and returned the trackball. I’m now using a Microsoft wheel mouse.

--

Mr. Pournelle,

Having a very small root partition, then a seperate partition for many other things, such as /var, /home, /usr, perhaps even /tmp or /var/spool/mail or what have you is safer for your data. If one partition becomes either full or corrupt, it won’t freeze your root partition, and thus won’t freeze your machine. And if a partition becomes corrupt, it is less likely it will be the root partition, making it more repairable.

The move to fewer partitions is a problem with either admins who trust the systems to stay in good repair (hardware and software wise) at all times, or who are ignorant of the reasons behind this sort of partitioning scheme.

There is one problem with this scheme, and that is figuring out what size partitions you will need when you set up the disk. That can be hard, and it is difficult to change it after the fact.

Anyway, I’m glad to hear that you have things up and running, and good luck with your future Linux learnings.

---

Hello Jerry,

In general, I actually recommend linux’s fdisk instead of disk druid. You’re technically literate, so I see no reason why fdisk should scare you very much. I admit I was scared of it at first too, but it really isn’t much different than DOS fdisk except it is more flexible. I think you will find that the older DOS fdisk programs also do not make partitions active by default. The difference is that now DOS fdisk assumes you want to make the partition active (bootable) while Linux fdisk does not make any such assumption.

As to distinct partitions on a disk:

I do not believe that root and swap partitions only are a very flexible design. Here are my recommendations:

create your swap partition first. It should be first because that way, it’ll sit on the inside tracks of the hard disk. Since the inside tracks spin "faster" than the outside tracks, that translates to faster swapping.

create separate /, /home, and /usr/local partitions.

benefit?

Linux (and most other Unix) distributions install themselves to the root partition only and leave your /home and /usr/local partitions mostly empty (sometimes there are /home/ftp and /home/httpd directories but these are harmless).

This will allow you to completely reinstall your operating system but leave your user’s home directories intact. And if you have installed applications in /usr/local (the default place that most source packages install to) then those will be left intact as well.

The details of how to go about doing what I have described in the previous paragraph are perhaps a bit too complicated for a typical user, but for gurus, this isn’t a difficult task at all. But the point is that organizing your partitions this way gives you maximum flexibility.

Many sysadmins also insist on a small but separate /var partition. The /var partition typically holds log files. Separating the /var partition therefore puts a maximum cap on the aggregate size of the partitions. Additionally, if the partition actually resides on a separate disk, one can at least begin to diagnose the cause of a system crash even if the root partition has bitten the dust.

Hi Jerry

Your "muddling through" method is the best way to learn linux, in fact it’s the best way to learn most computer OSes. Call the experts after you are stumped for a week, not before you start. I followed this method and doubled my salary. How? Four years ago, I heard of this thing called linux, and I decided it had a potentially rosier future than the BSD variants because it was not the product of the "religious" UNIX crowd (you know the guys, "the UNIX way is the best way, because it is the UNIX way"). I remember that I was impressed by Linus saying he didn’t want to recreate UNIX, he didn’t want to drive Microsoft out of business, he just wanted to run an OS that didn’t crash all the time. That’s what I wanted, too, because I can translate that reliability directly into dollars and cents for a modern business office.

I bought an Infomagic CD set for $12 (it was not the current version or it would have cost $20) and dragged an old 386 out of the back room that had a network card in it. I spent all my free time hacking at it, muddling through the various difficulties of the Slackware distribution, and eventually created an Internet "driving node" - Nameserver, Mail server, routing engine, etc. all for $12 and some junk that the company had directed me to throw out.

I demo’d this to the big wheels, and laid the cost estimates that various predecessors and consultants had given them for true Internet presence on the table. I told them that for $150 and the cost of three pentium 100 computers I would do what everyone said cost over $30,000. Guess what? they gave me some rope to hang myself!

I now run over 400 users with a combination of Pegasus Email (free) &; Netscape on the desktop, and linux servers in the back room. My linux sendmail box takes roughly 40 POPmail hits a minute and handles them with ease (as well as incoming and outgoing SMTP mail) on a 166 pentium with four network cards installed. DNS, DHCP, and LDAP run on the other two which are still penty 100s. I sent $125 to David Harris, author of Pegasus Email (because I like his program and wanted to encourage him) and I now use Red Hat 5.2 which cost me about $40. During the same time period, I’ve installed 10 Novell NetWare boxes and two Windows NT. The NetWare is fairly stable though it is grossly overpriced. NDS (Netware Directory Services) is almost as much of an overhyped solution in search of a problem as Java is. The NT is grossly overpriced and ridiculously unstable - after two years of nearly constant tweaking, and a class in NT setup and adminstration, I still can’t install a new application on it without expecting a crash or the fabled "blue screen of death".

Oh, did I mention? Linux has never, ever, crashed. Not once in four years. I have occasionally hung a process and had to kill it from a separate telnet connection, but that’s it. Seems to be as reliable as VMS at 1/6000 of the price!

• Charlie Brooks

Medievalist [MyName@MyCompany.Com]

PS- Sorry about the spoofed address. You can use

PSS- Enjoyed your collaborations with Larry Niven. Thanks.

fdisk issues....

Tell you what Jerry, if the lack of the ‘display’ command in fdisk really bothers you, reply to this email and I’ll code one up, send you the binary, and send the patch back to the official maintainer. I’ve got a half hour free, and all the source code handy.

Perhaps you could do it as your first act of ‘giving back’ into the development process, making Linux better for it’s users.

It’s a culture thing. Did you know that in MS speak a printer is not the thing that puts ink to paper (thats a print device - the printer is what you and I call the driver)....

Of course, if you decide that it was a problem with your preconceptions of what the verb ‘print’ means (hang on, what does "PRINT" do in BASIC and ‘C’, and if a form says ‘print your name here’ do you need a printer?).

Subject: about your web site

You have prepared very bad and boring web site. I hope it could be more funny and organized. bye!!

Dr. Pournelle,

I am extremely happy you are back at BYTE, on-line. You are the best at what you do and I like your style of writing.

I must say, I do agree with you we should be trying to make a colony on the moon. It seems so natural we already have this in our solar system why not use it ( not enough money on it I suppose! )

I tryed Linux a few years back and just found it too confusing and as it seemed I had to hunt all over the Net to find anything. Maybe that has changed?

I also recenly set up a small home network (three computers) and I used a shareware program called WinProxy (from Ostisis<sp> software,) which works just great!

I just used the built in TCP/IP on each machine and the software does the rest on the machine with the modem. It's nothing fancy just Linksys ISA cards and the coax cable.

I was wondering if you or your son had at anytime tried the Cobalt Kube. I recently saw a review of it and would like to see some real-world hands on trial. Of course it is too expensive for me, about $1000, but I dream alot! :)

Please don't feel it necessary to reply to this message I know your time is far to valuable and your expertise is great!

God Bless you and yours,

Jerry,

Jerry,

I received the same message one time when installing W98 but in reverse. I got that message after trying to install from the CD-ROM drive. After copying all of the files to "Windows/Cabs" the install worked fine. So I don’t think it has anything to do w/copy protection schemes.

I’m not sure why I got the Corrupt CAB file error but the only thing that I had done differently from what I usually do is that we had booted from a Win98 Startup disk that creates the 2MB RAM drive and loads the generic CD-ROM drivers. I like to use that as a quick way to copy the setup files to the hard drive when doing a clean install (don’t have to go hunting for the DOS drivers to the CD-ROM). Usually I always reboot after the copy is complete this time using a regular boot disk so that I don’t get the RAM drive and CD-ROM drivers, then start the W98 setup. Well, on this occasion I was helping a friend setup his new computer and was letting him "drive". (He is a Cobol programmer so you would think he would be able to do some of this kind of stuff himself) After copying the CAB files to the hard drive instead he started the install from the CD-ROM w/out rebooting when I wasn’t there.

So my only theory was that it possibly had something to do w/either the generic CD-ROM drivers that loaded from the W98 Startup disk OR the RAM drive that was still loaded??? Anyway, after I killed the install, rebooted the machine and then started the install from the hard drive W98 installed fine.

Don’t know if any of this relates to what happened to you but that’s the only time I’ve seen that error message. Talk to you later.

I don’t know if you’ve seen this article by Fred Langa, which appeared recently in Windows Magazine. It concerns how to fix problems encountered while shutting down Windows 98 (as well as 95). I’ll quote the relevant section from his article here:

"Problem No 7: Windows won’t shut down.

Solution: You should probably close all your apps yourself before you shut down Windows, but if you let Windows close things down and you never make it to the "It’s now safe to turn off your computer" message, there are two ways to fix things, depending on your symptoms:

"If your system hangs every time, you’re probably running Win98. Win98 uses a Fast Shutdown process whereby it sends a shutdown signal to all running apps and services, and then proceeds without waiting for a response. Some apps and subsystems respond too slowly or require an additional step before completely shutting down. This can foul up the shutdown sequence and result in a hang. The solution is to disable Fast Shutdown. To do that, run MSCONFIG.EXE, click Advanced and check Disable Fast Shutdown. Click OK twice and reboot. Win98 will now shut down in Win95’s slower but sometimes more reliable fashion.

"There’s a world of help in the Resource Kit included on full retail CDs of Win9x. In Win98, click the CD’s \TOOLS\RESKIT\HELP\RK98BOOK.CHM directory. In Win95 explore the CD’s \ADMIN\ directory (see Features, "Win98’s Secret Toolkit," November 1998).

Hope this help!

"THAT WAS QUICK: fdisk /mbr. I’ll put up the actual mail that told me about it tomorrow. It’s 4:30 AM and I need to get to bed. Incidentally, format /mbr gives an "invalid switch" message. but fdisk /mbr just trundles: you never see fdisk at all, and next time you boot the system comes up in DOS."

Incidentally, fdisk /mbr is also a handy way of cleaning out those pesky boot sector virus’ if you haven’t been particularly careful.. Fixed a particularly persistant instance of StealthBoot.B for me after a week long bout of trying to install norton AV, mcafee AV, formatting the primary partition and who knows what else..

Dr. Pournelle:

If you want to install where Windows95 and hopefully Windows98 look for the set-up files, (if you install from CDROM and later copy the .cab files to the hard disk) you can edit a registry setting:

You will find a value named ‘SourcePath’, it’s current value should be ‘D:\WIN95’ - where ‘D’ is your CDROM drive letter.

Edit this value to the path of where you copied the .cab files, in your case ‘C:\Windows\options\cabs’.

The usual caveats apply when working with the Windows registry - backup before you modify anything!

Also, the OEM version of Windows95 was very picky about installing if there was anything on a hard drive, it could be that your problem with installing Windows98 is similar.

Hope this helps...thanks for the site and columns (and books).

Subject: Windows 95/98 Upgrade pages, Removing IE from Win98.

With all your current configuration problems, I think that you might find the following resources useful.

The information on these pages is detailed, complete and up-to-date. A real boon, especially for Windows 98, is that these patches can be downloaded and applied in the usual way rather than through the automagic update feature in Win98. This allows you to keep them on a single CD, say, rather than going out over the network for each and every system that needs a patch.

The simplest method essentially replaces the Win98 shell with the Win95 one. Interestingly, the resulting system is marginally faster than a base install.

Is removing IE for everyone? No, in my opinion, this is just an interface preference issue. I happen to like Navigator and lynx more than IE.

Subject: EBD.CAB

Hi Jerry,

Here is a list of the contents of EBD.CAB file

EBD.CAB in contained in Base4.cab on the CD.

Jerry,

Thought you might be interested in a weird footnote to the current controversy over that creepy secret ID in Windows 98.

Well, the paperback version of the book is just now arriving in the stores, so I was amused to detect this eerie echo:

Maybe it’s worth a mention somewhere...

My vote for the strange web site of the week

You have to have audio and animation enabled to get the full effect.

Subject: DARPA and the Internet

Hey Jerry,

I heard Al Gore's idiotic claim about creating the Internet. I know the real story involves the DARPA computer network back in the late 60's, but figured since you were there you might be able to fill in the details.

Subject: Gore and the Internet

Well, while Al Gore certainly didn’t create the Internet, if one considers what it has become in recent years, well, it’s not quite so idiotic a viewpoint. Is the Internet of today really the same as that of the 70s or 80s? Even in the late 80s it wasn’t even close to what it is today. Sure, Gore isn’t really responsible for webpages in TV commercials, but then neither are the people who were there at the beginning.

Hello, Jerry,

Well, hopefully the letter to Paxton Sanders is nothing more than it states -- I read it as essentially a notification that they have a trademark of that name, nad will try to see that nobody infringes upon them by using that name in a way that damages their company. I doubt if it would have much of any chance of holding up in court (unless you were defaming their product or doing something like that).

I suppose that they sent a similar letter to HyperspaceCowgirls (yes, there is a registered site of that name!) and hyperspace.net (which, I'm sure, would strongly protest any reining in of their use of the name, as well as many other hyperspaceETC domains (the searcher quit after finding me ten)).

I did take a look at Hyperspace's site -- they do have a rather interesting process, which seems to greatly compress information on a WEB page (assuming the site webmaster compresses it into their "CHTML" condensed form. They claim an average of 70 percent compression, and so transit time over the Net would be correspondingly speeded, and the page is then un-condensed in your browser (by a plugin you have to get).

It reminds me of Boostweb, a program I tried, which gets one of its own "booster servers" to get the page you want to view. That server compresses the site's data to transmit it over the web, and your own program decompresses it to put the WEB page on your screen. It started in Europe -- it has some U.S. servers it uses, but when I tried it (in January), many times they were unavailable (and I then had to switch my browser settings back from "use a proxy server". (And switch it back to proxy-server mode when I wanted to try Boostweb again.)

I've tried many of the "Web Accelerator" programs, but most work by pre-fetching links on the page you're on. Their problem is that 95 percent of what they prefetch is stuff you'd never click on (like most ads), and they hardly ever manage to get a link you actually want.

I finally found a program I really like -- LinkFox, which pre-fetches only links that you drag over to its little window. On the ZD site, for example, it used to take me typically 20 to 30 seconds to get a new page in -- now it's generally up in a second when I want it.

I usually turn off the graphics pre-fetching -- I get the text, and the ads and pictures can fill themselves in around the screen as I'm reading the article. (ZD is horrible for pre-fetching programs which cache graphics, since programs like LinkFox and AtGuard can show hundreds of links on a page -- I think most of that has to do with the way that ZD sees your system "reading ads" and provide lots of new ones during a pre-fetch process. I haven't been able to figure out any other explanation, since most of their pages have less than a hundred actual links.)

I found it best to use Windows' Resource Monitor in the little tray, since putting in a large number of links to prefetch can use up a LOT of GDI and User resources. I finally cut the number of simultaneous connections all the way down to three to keep LinkFox from running my system out of those too-small (for today's programs) 64K resource blocks.

But it sure is nice to read down a page and throw in any link you want to follow later, without worrying about having to come back and trying to find that spot again -- especially when you're following links left and right on a lot of WEB pages!

Regards,

Jay Ranger

Ranger-J@altavista.net

IANAL, but I think the other guy has a point. More important, I think he’s going to win if push comes to shove.

As I understand trademark law, a word may be trademarked in a specific milieu. For example, if my name is McDonald and I decide to open a restaurant, I can’t call it McDonalds because that name is protected vis-a-vis restaurants. Nothing would prevent me from opening McDonald’s Plumbing, however, unless someone locally was already using that name. Geographical scope is also an issue. McDonalds is international, and so their name is protected everywhere. If I’m in Podunk, Utah and there’s already a "McDonalds Plumbing" there, I can’t use that name in Podunk. I could however, open a plumbing business in Dogpatch, Idaho under that name.

The issue here isn’t whether hyperspace is a common word, or whether you can establish prior usage. The issue is whether or not "hyperspace" is trademarked as a name related to software, which it apparently is. I suspect if Mr. Sanders contacts an attorney, he will learn that the best course is to change the name of his company and apologize profusely to the trademark owner.

It would be my opinion (but note that I Am Not A Lawyer) that if you were granted a trademark on the word "HyperSpace" in 1993, that the US PTO has erred. This term has been in common use in science fiction as a generic noun since at least the mid 1970s that I’m aware of, and probably much earlier.

I’d have carboned this to USPTO... but they haven’t gotten any further than a web page yet, apparently.

I’d take advice from an intellectual property attorney on this point.

A group of us just finished setting up a new Windows 98 network for my church. The cast of characters included two professional IS folks on the hardware side and me, a person who is probably poorly self taught. The church is going from Mac 7.1 to Windows 98. Cost and zero adminstration being big issues, we did not go with NT (there are only eight stations) and none of us thought that anything stronger than Windows Messaging was required.

In the course of two weekends, calls to Gateway tech support, and a lot of time on the Web we discovered the following. First, the only way to set up network e-mail on a new install of Win 98 is via the Internet or a thrid party product. UNLESS, you go to the Win 98 disk and dig down to the tools\oldwin95\message\us and find wms.exe. Now Microsoft will tell you that, along with the fact that the program is unsupported and that you really ought to get some of their Back Office products.

Follow the instructions and install wms.exe. Ready to set up e-mail? Wrong. The rascal would not allow for a new profile to be set up in Exchange, except for a new ISP account. Through sheer luck we installed the Microsoft Fax file afax.exe. Both programs have to be installed to set up the Windows messaging system. This little factoid is nowhere to be found in all of the research that we did. I pass this along since I am sure that several people on this site get called upon to do volunteer work such as this and it could save someone time and frustration down the road and in the hope that if you cover networking in your upcoming book you might find it useful.

Sir,

Just read the travails of another of your readers regarding Hyperspace, and Bob Thompson’s response. My initial reaction was a quick smile at the litigious nature of the web, and a negative reaction to the "owners" of Hyperspace. But, after having read the letter they sent, I am inclined to agree with Bob’s assessment.

The fact is, the letter is not a cease and desist type letter, but a notification. Unlike the famous letters sent by Fox regarding X-Files and Simpsons sounds and images, this letter really was just letting your reader know that there is a line he should be aware of. The specific use to which they have put Hyperspace is imminently reasonable, as your reader shows by his attempt to do the same. If he uses the name in a fashion which may cause confusion, then he may be in violation of copyright and trademark laws.

Hopefully, the HyperSpace "owners" will continue to be reasonable, and this won’t get ugly. I actually liked the letter they sent, as it avoided the normal intimidation tactics we lawyers prefer as a first course of action.

Subject: the deed to hyperspace

Ignoring the vast number of novels and short stories that made use of the term going back to at least the Fifties, I can think of a company who might claim a prior copyright on the word to describe a feature of a commercial product. Remember Asteroids, the video game? Hasbro, a company that I’m sure retains considerable legal might, is the current owner of that property. I’d like to see some pisqueak utility company try to tell them they couldn’t use the term prominently in their software and advertising for same.

Dear Jerry,

I’m forced to agree with Robert Bruce Thompson. Even if I hate that course of non-action. Although I think Sanders could quickly move to trademark his sites FULL name ie: Hyperspace.org. As we all should take care to note that HyperSpace has two capitilized words strung together, and Hyperspace.org does not! One refers to software, while the other refers to a web site.

This should keep the lawyers busy for a while, and is a really good case in point of the problems of having too many damn lawyers.

Never Weaken!

Dr. Pournelle:

I just wanted to add something to the hyperspace.org discussion. Since I obtained my domain name in 1995, I have had a few organizations make claims of trademark infringement. None of them ever amounted to anything. The difference between my situation and Mr. Sanders seems to be that in my case, the other party was trying to take my domain name away from me, and they thought they could use the threat of trademark infringement lawsuits to do this. A good history of the whole domain name/trademark issue can be found at

Dr. Pournelle:

I think I mentioned this to you in a note last night, but if not, please let anyone who is curious know that I have taken down my web site. Nothing is there. I’ll let HyperSpace.org go away when its "lease" is up with my service provider.

In reponse to your one reader’s letter about "Hyperspace.org" not being equal to "HyperSpace.org," perhaps he should consider that web addresses are case insensitive. I think getting to that level of detail in the use of the word "hyperspace" will only cause further problems.

In any case, HyperSpace.org, HyperSpace Software (my version of it, anyway), and all related issues are gone. I don’t have the monetary ability to do anything legally, and I’m not sure I’d want to anyway.

Thanks for taking time to look at this. I still maintain that this is an interesting question that many more will be asking as everyone moves to the web.

Dear Jerry,

Much of WinXX appears, to me, to be controlled by a Random Number Generator. Thus, things always feel slightly off when working with installation, upgrade, configuration, etc. On many occasions setting up 100% identical systems from scratch, making the exact same option choices, the systems will not be the same: pci boards will be on different ports, or IRQs, one might automatically include the unused (on my net) IPX protocol, etc.

Having a new machine not see other connections on a network is a common situation. I believe it has to do with the "browse network" function whereby a newly attached (or turned on) system announces it’s presence and waits for responses. It seems that machines that have been on for a while don’t respond. If you just let it sit there, sometimes the other nodes become visible, sometimes not. If this systems’ networking setup is correct, however, you should be able to manually connect to resources on the net: Start button, Programs popup menu item, Windows Explorer menu item, Tools menu item, Map Network Drive... drop down menu item, Select a drive letter, type in the logical path to the resource (//Server/C or //Server/C$ for NT default). Sometimes it helps to restart the remote machine that you are trying to connect to, but not always. Generally, the newly attached system is visible to the established members of the LAN. Sometimes it helps to Shutdown and Logon as a new user.

The unfortunate thing is that there is no pattern that I can discern. The situation you describe has been with us since Windows for WorkGroups, as far as I can tell. I have, also, seen systems that NEVER automatically see other resources.

Hope this helps!

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

" John G. Ruff. ‘

‘ System Connector, Inc. "

‘ Wayzata, MN 55391 "

Dear Dr. Pournelle

This is a late comment on the subject and you might already now know this, if so you can disregard.

The behavior you saw is due to the fact that Win98 (and all the Win9x) installs write hidden files to the hard disk with recovery information. This is so that if, as quite probable, the install fails, when you restart the setup you get the: previous setup failed do "blah, blah, blah" to recover. Or message(s) to that effect.

Of course, in true Windows tradition, things get mixed up. Ever so often instead of recognizing that an install failed setup/Windows thinks you are running the recovery floppy because Win9x crashed and guess where EBD.cab resides—on the recovery floppy.

After installing or upgrading Win9x (or fixing trashes/crashes) at a pace of 1 or 2 machines per week I’ve come to the realization that the only way to recover a failed install is to TOTALLY scrub the hard disk—fdisk, format, etc.—and start from scratch AGAIN. Of course, this can get to be a pain when you’re doing it two or three times on the same machine even if you are getting paid to do it.

This is obviously a case of Microsoft trying to "help/protect" the user. Considering the broad span of sales for Windows this isn’t totally bad. It would be nice, though, if Microsoft would describe clearly such behaviors with documentation included with install disks. And, maybe, provide a route for turning off some of the "protections" for the more knowledgeable (or perhaps the brave/foolish).