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CHAOS MANOR MAIL

A SELECTION

Saturday, June 16, 2001

03:05 AM

CLICK ON THE BLIMP TO SEND MAIL TO ME

The current page will always have the name currentmail.html and may be bookmarked. For previous weeks, go to the MAIL HOME PAGE.

Fair warning: some of those previous weeks can take a minute plus to download. After Mail 10, though, they're tamed down a bit.

IF YOU SEND MAIL it may be published; if you want it private SAY SO AT THE TOP of the mail. I try to respect confidences, but there is only me, and this is Chaos Manor. If you want a mail address other than the one from which you sent the mail to appear, PUT THAT AT THE END OF THE LETTER as a signature.

PLEASE DO NOT USE DEEP INDENTATION INCLUDING LAYERS OF BLOCK QUOTES IN MAIL. TABS in mail will also do deep indentations. Use with care or not at all.

I try to answer mail, but mostly I can't get to all of it. I read it all, although not always the instant it comes in. I do have books to write too...  I am reminded of H. P. Lovecraft who slowly starved to death while answering fan mail. 

If you want to send mail that will be published, you don't have to use the formatting instructions you will find when you click here but it will make my life simpler, and your chances of being published better..

This week:
Monday -- Tuesday -- Wednesday -- Thursday -- Friday -- Saturday -- Sunday

HIGHLIGHTS:

•  
• Eric reports on BEOS
• Front page  Problems

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Monday

Dear Jerry:

Save yourself from future new system “CHAOS” when you build a system by reviewing the subtle differences between AT and ATX motherboards  - these ATX boards, like the Intel 440 BX, have onboard power management, and won’t respond like the old reliable AT motherboards, where you could reliably run a “smoke test”. Also note that unlike an AT board, an ATX motherboard is never fully powered down - again the onboard power mgmt - so the power switch doesn’t really shut it off - it must be unplugged before you swap cards, ect.

Regards,

Terry Farnand

Portland, OR

 Power management makes me crazy. Lots more on that Real Soon Now. Thanks.

===

Jerry,

You said that you’re unsure which OS to install on your new machine, Gemini; you then commented that “Bob Thompson points out that I haven’t lived until I’ve done a full NT install without help, but whether that’s practical advice or masochism I am not sure.”

I’m baffled:  I simply don’t see major problems with NT4.  I presently have NT on _all_ the computers around here, including my Toshiba Tecra notebook.  I used to run several flavors of Win95, then decided to go all NT—which, BTW, I’d put off several times because of its reputation.  Now I’m sorry that I didn’t do it earlier, because it has proved much less of a problem than 95, from installation to operation.  And I run a small LAN (actually, I refer to it as a BAN—“B” for basement) and connect each machine to the internet via modem, using RAS; no major issues.

The biggest issue with NT (for me, anyway) was making sure that I’d downloaded all the relevant up-to-date drivers and copied them to floppies _before_ starting the installation.  Otherwise, everything was cake; my single biggest complaint has been about reloading all my software, for lack of a migration utility between Win95 and NT4.

What I see as the single greatest benefit is stability:  I never turn any of the machines off (well, except for the notebook, of course), and NT runs 24/7 without a complaint.  Other than rebooting in the course of software installation or because I forgot to initialize the scanner, I’ve only had two or three restarts in several months.  With Win95, it wasn’t unusual to have several hangs and subsequent hard resets in a day, on any heavily-used machine; I don’t think I ever went more than about three days without the OS crashing (this is a sad commentary on Win95, in my opinion).

I know you didn’t ask for votes, but I’ll volunteer mine:  NT is it.  I confess I haven’t tried Win98, but you’re a better techie than I, and if I can manage NT....

Regards,

Troy Loney

====

Dear Jerry:

Your comments about wanting to write about Littleton have prompted me to stick my oar in as well, but before I do that I wanted to do a bit of "comparison shopping" regarding building versus buying a new computer, knowing you are in the throes of such construction right now.  Two days ago I ordered a new box from Dell, a 500 Mhz Pentium 3 system with 128MB of 100ns RAM, a 13.6 gigabyte hard drive, Diamond's new Viper 770 32 MB video board, sound-enabled Winmodem, Turtle Beach Montego 2 sound card, basic speakers, mouse, and their mechanical (real key-click!) keyboard, etc. (no monitor) for a grand total of $1615 plus shipping.  Before placing the order I gave building an equivalent system a lot of thought, but considering the price and especially the software bundle decided I could not only not do better myself, but couldn't do as well.

The software bundled with the Dell includes Windows 98 2nd edition, MS Office 2000, and Bookshelf, all of which I would have had to purchase retail if I had built the system.  The latest edition of the PC Connection catalog lists a new install of W98 2e at $178.95, and Office 2000 SBE would set me back $439.95, for a total of $618.90 for the software alone.  Add to this the value of the three year warranty from Dell - and their support is terrific - and I didn't see how I could do better "rolling my own."

I'm not stumping for Dell or anybody else, but I just wonder how the price I'm paying compares with your current project, under the assumption that if you were John Doe you would have had to pay retail for all the components and software... in this market of mini-margins, are there really any significant savings to be wrung out by the home brewed machine?

As for the disaster at Littleton, a lot of blather HAS been written and said about root causes, as you suggest.  I doubt there is any one root cause, but a contributing cause which I believe hasn't been recognized is an unintended consequence of capitalism, and is something we need very much to address in this country.  Please bear with me, I feel the idea is valid but my exposition of it may leave a lot to be desired.

You're familiar, I'm sure, with the theory of a Hierarchy of Needs which basically states that as an individual's basic needs are met (food, shelter, sex) the human animal focuses on higher and higher levels of wants and desires, ending (theoretically at least) with a quest for spirit or God.

Capitalism coupled with freedom has been an incredible engine for satisfying the lower levels of physical needs in this country, and the "unintended consequence" of which I speak is that this material well-being has given birth to a Culture of Youth never seen before in human history.  The reason is simple, I think, if not entirely obvious.  As American prosperity waxed greatly in the 1950s and into the 60s, more and more discretionary spending became available to people at a younger and younger age.  While the young still do not command anywhere near the resources of mature (middle aged and older) people, their influence in our society has been vastly magnified by their willingness to SPEND what they have (and more - witness credit-card debt among the "20-somethings").

It's my contention that as the middle class as a whole has moved through the hierarchy of needs, the youngest have been the most willing to spend, while their elders have perhaps been somewhat more willing to save and invest their surplus funds, and even explore that spiritual path.  This, in turn, has over the years not gone unnoticed by the marketers, salesmen, and good old Yankee Traders of America, to the point that today a minute of advertising on TV that reaches the "right" demographic sells for more than a minute that will actually be seen by a much larger audience!  And that "right" demographic is the free-spending young.

What this has meant over time is a complete reversal of the societal norms of every previous culture I'm familiar with: in America today we celebrate Youth over everything; over wisdom, over experience, and especially over age.  It's totally pervasive, and at the same time totally corrosive.  Where in the America of 100 or even 50 years ago the Town Fathers would be the respected leaders of the community today it's rock musicians, TV &; film stars, and super models almost all under the age of 30 or 40 who command our notice.

This isn't news, and I doubt anyone would really dispute the point.  But what it means for the society I don't think has been fully comprehended, and Littleton is one result.  Wisdom, for example, is not only no longer sought by the young, it's no longer considered a virtue.  As financial power and authority have devolved upon the young through the overwhelming success of capitalism the NEED for age, wisdom, education and experience to achieve material well-being and security has almost disappeared.

Oh, not in all cases and certainly not at all levels.  But generally today the easiest to get marginal dollar increase in revenue is to be found among a younger and younger demographic, and with that shift in economics has come a commanding shift in the power of Youth in our culture.

The trouble with Youth, of course, is that it lacks wisdom and maturity.  In other cultures, especially tribal cultures even today, and going back thousands of years, Age has been the keystone.  Power - political, social, economic, spiritual - has rested with the most experienced members of the society.  There Youth strives to share in that power by emulating the Aged, by listening and learning from what experience can teach.

In microcosm, Ricky Nelson in Ozzie &; Harriet wanted to be as much like Dad as he could; in today's sitcoms the hip Dad tries to be as much like the kid as he can.  And America has literally BOUGHT right into this role reversal, with disastrous results like Littleton.  Because fundamentally kids don't bring a lot to the table beside lots of energy, an open wallet, and raging hormones.  They haven't been around long enough to become wise, to control impulses, to learn how to handle rejection and alienation, to make good decisions and healthy choices.  What's different about Youth today is they no longer seek to emulate the mature behavior of the Aged as they have in other times and other cultures; virtue today is doing exactly what you feel like when you feel like doing it.

People who blame the Littleton mess and others like it on guns, for example, are almost literally insane.  Guns have ALWAYS been pervasive and easy to obtain in America.  When I was growing up in rural Michigan in the 60s my father kept three handguns and at least a half-dozen long arms in unlocked drawers and closets: I knew where each one was, and had daily access.  He gave me a 20 gauge shotgun for my 14th birthday, a gun I was proud to own and shoot.  But I never took it to school, and the thought of murdering classmates with it wouldn't have even entered my mind, not for a nanosecond.  Back then I was a somewhat "troubled" youth, and even had a few scrapes with the law.  But what would have kept me from acting out any momentary violent impulse was the sure and certain knowledge of the complete and absolute condemnation I would have faced in the community; nobody, not even my best friends would have thought anything about such an act was "cool" or "awesome."  The Culture as a whole, not just the police or the politicians or even the clergy, prohibited such behavior.

Which is the difference today.  In a society which rewards maturity over youth things are very different.  A mature human being knows the value of life, knows how irreplaceable it is, knows how much easier it is to destroy than create, but knows that creation is the best measure of what being fully human is.  The unintended consequence of capitalism has been that its very success has shifted economic power from Age to Youth, and Youth is impulsive, ignorant, heedless, and without a base of wisdom and experience upon which to make decent decisions that are to the long-term interest of society.

Pick your own examples of how Youth-based our culture has become.  One of my favorites is the current school bussing environment.  Anytime a school bus stops to pick up or drop off even a single kid ALL traffic in both directions comes to a screeching halt.  I'm sure this has done wonders for safety, but at the same time it's telling every kid, twice a day, 200 + days a year, for 12 years, that the world has to stop and look out for you, you don't have to look out for the world.  And they don't.  They don't look out for the world when they have babies at 15, they don't look out for the world when they abuse alcohol and drugs, they certainly don't look out for the world when they pick up a gun and slaughter their classmates at school or in a drive-by shooting.

Please don't misunderstand, I'm not saying Youth itself is a problem, but I certainly think the Culture of Youth that this society has created is.  We need to start a debate about how to move cultural power back to those people and institutions mature enough to have the wisdom and judgement necessary to respect it and handle it responsibly.

All the best--

 Tim Loeb

The current box has a $200 drive, $350 for chip and mother board which includes sound and video, and a $95 PC Power and Cooling box. Add your own keyboard, net card ($25 or so), floppy ($20), CDROM drive ($40 or so) and mouse. Of course there’s no monitor.

I will have a lot to say about education and the problems in  America, but I have to have some off line time to think and write about it, and just now I am in “cure the web site” mode.

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Tuesday, June 29, 1999

Hi Jerry,

I just discovered you column last month, and I’m really enjoying it!  However, I was wondering about your Win G on Window 98 problem... I’ve been able to successfully install an old version of Westwood’s Monopoly CD-ROM (Now distributed by Hasbro Interactive), circa 1996, on a Win98 system. I’m not sure about the newer versions, but this old version definitely uses some Win G API’s... Perhaps it’s the fact that it was a Windows 3.1 program, or that it only plays little clips using Win G, but it does work. I thought this tidbit might be useful...

Keep up the great work!

·        Tim Butler

PS: Maybe it’s the amount of hardware resources Win G on Win98 requires?

Have you tried “This Means War” on a system other than your WinChip system?  The system I ran Monopoly on was a PII 450 with 256 megs of ram, and a 8 meg nVidia Riva ZX AGP video card from STB Systems. Hope this helps...

Interesting. The only thing I have that requires WinG is THIS MEANS WAR, which won't run on anything later that Windows 95  OSR2. Billy Brackenridge, Microsoft's multi-media guru, tried to get them to put some form of WinG support in 98, but it was reasonably pointed out that this is a lot of added code and complexity for a very small number of games that haven't been revised. Ah well. Thanks for the update. I'll try This Means War on other systems just to see, but my guess is that without WinG it's hosed.

===

Jerry,

 I also have been working with FrontPage 2000 and ran across your description of it in my quest for answers.  But, I have a few questions for you.

Did you ever consider researching your problems on the FrontPage newsgroups?  Also, did you think of looking for anybody in your vicinity who had successfully used FrontPage 2000?

I recently switched over to FrontPage 2000 and in the process ran into numerous problems.  After a good bit of research and newsgroup help, my problems were solved completely.  FrontPage 2000 and my web site are now up and running beautifully.  Since then I have had no problems whatsoever with FrontPage 2000 at all.  I has some very valuable features and upgrades compared to FrontPage 98.  Now, don’t take this the wrong way, I am not a die hard Microsoft fan.  I am the kind of person who works at a problem till I find a satisfactory, workable answer.  As soon as I had solved my problems, I posted a message on the newsgroups about my troubles with FrontPage 2000 and the solutions that I found.  I have heard back from a number of people that the solutions worked out elsewhere.  In my instance, as well as several others, I have discovered that FrontPage 2000 isn’t faulty, but just includes the normal amount of nuances and quirks associated with new software.

Sincerely,

 Daniel Ruttenber

 There are plenty of people around who have used Front Page 98 and they all say the extensions won't work properly on an Apache site; FP 98 without extensions is a reasonable way to keep a web. I haven't found anyone who knows much about Front Page 2000, which insists on doing weird things, but whether the oddities are an interaction with Windows 2000 I am not sure.

NIVEN Sent me this, and I pass it along:

I thought this of interest.

My MARTIAN CHRONICLES was 35 cents on the face.

Larry Niven

In a message dated 6/28/99 1:38:20 PM Pacific Daylight Time, cfmiller@primenet.com writes:  

  Subject:     Lost Rocket Summer, 1999  

Wed, 23 June 1999 12:12 AM EDT

Wise, wicked, wonderful Ray Bradbury, sadly, had it wrong.

There are no rockets lifting off in this Rocket Summer of 1999. Despite the heartfelt promise of his now-yellowed Chronicles, there are no launch pads in Ohio, no manned missions to Mars, no first expeditions, and saddest of all, no shape-shifters in the rusty red sands ready to turn dunes into picket fences, rocks into steeples, and dust into sweet apple pies whispering mom and the false scent of home in the thin strange Martian air.

Our rover robots sit on Mars instead, eyes still open but batteries too weak to call home. It is not how things were supposed to be.

The children of a generation just home from the war, raised on black-and-white TV and the promise of all things pulp and science fiction, had bookmarked this season—first predicted in 1950 -- as the first season in color, the first season of things to come, the season the real future would begin. The Rocket Summer of 1999. Instead we have Mars on a webpage.  How did we get it so wrong?

The only rust now is on orbiting patchwork space stations; the only lichen clings to the silent launchpads of Florida. The only collective will is not to try. And if Martians somehow do wait for the first expeditions, surely by now they have gone on to other things. Perhaps that’s why the remote silent videos we call space travel show only rocks and shadow. We were supposed to be the first Martians. But we chose not to go. Certainly not by the summer that didn’t come. Not by Rocket Summer, 1999.

If you’ve read this far go to your bookshelves and see if you have a copy of The Martian Chronicles. Mine is a crinkled paperback from September 1962, Bantam, 50 cents, a 15^th or 16^th printing. It is so browned that the pages make cracking sounds as I open them here in the basement, the family asleep upstairs and the promise of Mars barely flickering within its covers. I open the book and it says my name, printed in impossibly old ballpoint pen, on the title page.

The first chapter is called January 1999: Rocket Summer.

“One minute it was Ohio winter...” it begins.

“The rocket stood in the cold winter morning, making summer with every breath of its mighty exhausts. The rocket made climates, and summer lay for a brief moment on the land...”

Read your copy again. At least read the one-page first chapter. And see if it makes you as teary as I am. Can you be nostalgic for the future? I am...

Because there are no rockets, no launch pads, no expeditions, no Martians and no shifting sands ready to trick us anew this Rocket Summer of1999. The summer when the future didn’t come. The summer when hope—finally and stubbornly—began to fade. The summer we realized that the far-away Martians, whether Bradbury’s or Burrough’s or the tentacled sicklies of H.G.  Wells, no longer even cared enough to watch us with envious eyes...

david

“They had a house of crystal pillars on the planet Mars by the edge of an empty sea... 

{sent to me, Larry Niven, by} Craig Miller

cfmiller@primenet.com

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Wednesday June 30, 1999

Dear Jerry,

First &; most important: My profound sympathy for your struggle to publish your web site. It’s NOT a pretty story. But, as you say: “I go there so you won’t have to.” I deeply appreciate your research so that I won’t have to endure the pain &; frustration you are experiencing. I would have taken the heavy hammer to it long ago.

A reminder - when you _do_ finally get a system working, however kludgy, for gods’ sake - copy it off so you can delete whatever screws up and go back to where you started. I know - very basic, and possibly insulting.  This is NOT my intent. Just a reminder. Take a few deep breaths, or a walk, and perhaps your patience index will be restored to where you will be your usual methodical, analytical self.

On backup, sneakernet, etc: I have just read reviews of DVD-RAM drives (PCMAG). They seem to me like the logical replacement for my beloved DynaMO 640. My HDD partitions are exceeding its capacity. Just in time, Adaptec has come up with a DVD-ROM drive for US$499, and 5.2GB cartridges are US$30 each. I think I’m going to like it. PCMAG claims the cartridges are good for 100K rewrites. Should last both of us the rest of our natural lives, even with daily use.

MY very warmest regards (&; sympathy!)

JHR

culam@dnai.com

[J.H. Ricketson in San Pablo]

Thanks for the kind words. As to backups, I am usually fanatic about that; but I admit I had not thought that installing Office 2000 could cause such problems. On the other hand, it is now clear that my NT installation had grown clunky and cluttered with remnants of old DLL's and other junk, and it is impossible to tell just what caused my problems. To make it all worse, Front Page 2000 has some oddities that cannot have been intended, but which happen on a clean system.

I am looking forward to DVD ROM drives as the best solution to all my problems; until then Tecmar and Exxabyte make great tape drives that work well with all flavors of NT. I don't believe DVD drives are here yet, though; and see below. Thanks again.

====

Hi Jerry,

after I read currentmail and the extra Saturday page, and after I sent you the note about trying HoTMetaL Pro 5.0, out of curiousity I saved the Saturday page to disk and opened it with HotMeTaL.

Oh boy, what a mess!

First HM5 found invalid HTML syntax. Only two or three things, but I remembered that I discovered that already some time ago, when I had a look at your site.

Then - THOUSANDS of “FONT” tags (not really, only about 650 or so).  Each of your HTML documents could be reduced to at least 50% if you would use Cascading Style Sheets !!!!!!!!!  PLEASE let somebody introduce you to CSS as soon as possible.

It’s not only the FONT tags - a lot more can be saved by the use of CSS and it’s classes. You could easily format reader’s messages in one way and your reply to it in another way with “<P class=rm>” and “<P class=jr>” (rm = reader’s message, jr = Jerry’s reply, for example).  Just like you’d format paragraphs using document templates in Word.

HoTMetaL supports CSS, you can create styles easily using dialogs instead of hand-writing them. I guess other web publishing tools will do that too.

Get an O’Reilly on HTML and CSS, or let somebody else transform your site if you don’t find the time (as I assume). The bigger your site grows, the longer it will take for somebody to clean up things, and the worse it will get with all the problems of Frontpage and other tools.  Restructuring the site will be another task to do, and before that starts the formatting should already be improved and be as easy as possible.

Kind regards,

Peter Heberer

Mess it is, although it's slowly being straightened out. I now have the latest Hot Metal and Dreamweaver and the next experiments will be with those. I weary of Front Page 2000's quirks. On the other hand I have to say that it has done very well at keeping track of a LOT of links, changing page names and propagating the change through the whole site, moving folders, and so forth. In that sense it's pretty good. We'll see what comes next.

===

Jerry-

It was known that NT4 had a problem with Ofc2000, I think I saw it on both the MS

newsgroups and a few other sites. I haven't bothered to install on NT4, and probably 

won't after reading yours and other's problems. There is an SP5 for NT4, and many 

recommend it in place of SP4 due to all the problems SP4 creates. MS appears to be 

in the same mode as Novell was in the early 90's, they create as many or more 

problems with each bug fix. 

I use FP98 all the time and rarely have any problems. It's so easy to maintain a site

for novice users with small sites (50 megs - mostly jpegs of products). I use it on both 

WIN95/98 machines with the personal web server. I never did like it on NT4, due to problems 

on both sides (server and client). I agree your site is probably too big to upload all the

changes with a 56k modem, have you tried to make small changes so the upload would 

be smaller? Most folks who use FP98 do have small sites and many IPS's who don't 

use NT servers have a terrible time getting it setup. I think I saw that you're up to more 

than 180 megs, that's huge for FP98 and is not a small site by any measurement. 

I think you've crossed the line in size if nothing else. Most of the big time software brands

do take a lot of learning and are very unfriendly to users. It's not like it used to be in the 

eighties. I, like you, could figure out most packages in a few hours or at worst days. Now 

the size and depth of just getting the darn software to install and work can be a battle. 

I can only suggest that you step back and reduce the size of the upload, go back to

WIN95/98 box, and back off from the bleeding edge. I know it's not a pretty picture

but the KISS philosophy does work especially well with computers and software.

Hope it all works out. I'm a big fan of your books.

John H. Dow
jdow@icsi.net

Thanks. I don't know what you use for line ends, but ^p^p doesn't find your paragraph marks, and I'm running late so it will have to stay like this. As a general note, please do not use fancy marking schemes. Two cr's to mark a paragraph will do fine. Line ends don't need any marks at all.

I can't back off from the bleeding edge. "I do all these silly things so you won't have to..."

====

You have my heartfelt sympathy. MS product is definitely in decline and that makes me sad after more than a decade of using their products. Had a problem with Word 97 at a client’s premises week before last. NO. I had a LOT of problems and was hassled by a colleague for saying W97 was buggy. Searching the MS Knowledge Base I find that there are 329 known bugs in Word 6, 232 in Word 95 and 630 in Word 97.

OTOH, haven’t gotten Linux to connect to the web at faster than 9600 (on a 33k modem) or without netscape crashing. Got Samba to share files, but not the printer. Tried using the clipboard to copy command syntax in HOW-TOs from Netscape to a terminal window. Couldn’t, so it was back to copying by hand, something I thought the computer was supposed to remove the necessity for.

Read “Mote” again for the first time in many years. It’s definitely my favourite contact with aliens novel. Your point about combing the text to remove I think you said 10% pays off. It’s something I do with my professional writing.  Except, because it’s technical, I do the combing several times. Reader response is terrific, the word “clarity” being a common adjective. Writing is HARD work, as well as fun!

Cheers

Jonathan Sturm (jonathan@uprun.com)

Actually, we're climbing up into daylight. As Roland Dobbins is fond of saying, if there's something odd about a system's behavior, there's usually a reason. Something isn't installed properly, or there's an old tag end of a DLL left, or something of that sort. While MS products are complex, Microsoft isn't stupid, and most of the stuff works so long as you understand what they intended. Of course divining that can be a major achievement; some of that stuff is major arcana. There are lots of bugs, but there usually are ways around them. The alternatives tend to be complex too.

Rebel.com and Corel are working hard on bringing out a small Linux box with the Corel Office Suite installed. It's not there yet, but they are getting there, for those who want Linux in a fairly painless manner.

And I'm slowly rebuilding the system here. Things are looking up.

===

I’ve been following your scuffle with FP with interest.

Two remarks about Visual Page I don’t understand.  The one about the restriction on the size/length of the file and the one about not being able to check spelling.

I use Visual Page 2.0 and have no trouble with page length.  To proof this I loaded your current mail page and added the Saturday/Sunday page (see attached zip file).

Also, I can spellcheck by pressing F7.

Good luck.

Koen Broersma

E-mail: K.W.Broersma@iName.com

Home: http://kwb.cjb.net

I don't understand it either, but it was sure real. I had to go back to Front Page to fix that difficulty. (For those who don't recall what this is about, it isn't important; I had a problem with one page, all of which would not load in Visual Page on either my NT machine or my laptop.)

My bottom line on Visual Page is that it's neat for small sites, but the lack of some image handling tools, automatic thumbnails, and keeping track of links and name changes limits its utility for me. There's nothing bad about it, but it is too limited for my needs.

Thanks.

========

Dr. Pournelle:

Regarding your June 21 column at BYTE.COM:

See this: http://www.intel.com/design/motherbd/sr/sr_ds.htm

There is a lot of good info on the sr440bx intel mobo there.

2 points about your column:

a.   intel recommends an active heatsinkfan for the cpu on the microatx form factor sr440bx mobo.

b.   the reason the mobo kept beeping at you the first time you powered it up was because no ram was installed...

c.   remember too the momentary contact power switch uses software to cycle the power supply, possibly in the bios which is why you got the strange results at first...

consider also that a large case tower for a very small mobo may not cool the passive heatsink properly due to the distance from the cpu to the power supply case vents.  Does your atx power supply blow air in the case or out?  The atx used to blow in to cool passive heatsinks, but the last chinese pc case tower I bought from http://www.mwave.com  the atx ps blows out... so I have a fan on my 300a celeroney o/c’d to 450 mhz.

Robert

Thanks. I tend to like fans to blow out; there are lots of places for air to come into a box. I also like little chip fans in strategic places to control the air flow. Modern mother boards have 'features' I don't like a lot, and now they are trying to make "energy saving" a feature you can't turn off. Since the most you will save is a lightbulb or so worth of power, this seems both silly and very annoying.

===

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Thursday July 1, 1999

from http://www.jerrypournelle.com/mail/currentmail.html On Wednesday June 30, 1999, JHR [J.H. Ricketson in San Pablo] <culam@dnai.com> wrote:                                                                                                            

<snip>

> On backup, sneakernet, etc: I have just read reviews of DVD-RAM drives (PCMAG).

> They seem to me like the logical replacement for my beloved DynaMO 640.

> My HDD partitions are exceeding its capacity. Just in time,

> Adaptec has come up with a DVD-ROM drive for US$499, and

> 5.2GB cartridges are US$30 each. I think I’m going to like it.

> PCMAG claims the cartridges are good for 100K rewrites. Should last

> both of us the rest of our natural lives, even with daily use.

<snip>

This implies that DVD-ROM drives can read DVD-RAM disks; sorry to say, they can’t.

Just finished a review of DVD-RAM tech, as the court I work for kills 6,000,000 pages worth of trees a year, and we surely would like to digitize some if not all of the data floating around here.

As for Adaptec, there’s no press release or product listing at the Adaptec site for DVD of any kind. 

http://www.tcp.ca/gsb/reviews/storage/PanasonicDVD-RAM.html had some useful reportage on the Panasonic DVD-RAM.  HiVal is selling it and the Toshiba drive in several packages, and bundles Starship Troopers or four other films with a buy. That is certainly not as good as seeing it at the Mt. St. Helens theatre with Niven and Barnes in RUMMMBLE-RAMA, though.

John Bartley

PC sysadmin for a large national gov’t with offices in all 50 states and the District of Confusion whose views only occasionally converge with mine

johnbartley@email.com

Thanks. I knew that, but things have been hectic and I haven't been as careful in mail commenting as I should be. DVD writers are coming but they aren't here. One thing about this place: I am seldom wrong for long because I have so many expert readers. Thanks again.

===

Set up a list server to send out email like you did recently.

People can self subscribe (with your approval, after a donation) and they can unsubscribe or change email addresses BY THEMSELVES.

Just a suggestion.

Brent Jones

The future belongs to the automated unless the power goes out.

Brent Jones [brtjones@ix.netcom.com]

I agree with your sentiments including the tag line. It's a question of getting control of things here. Thanks to Mr. Dobbins, we've got things in better shape than they have been in a long time, and I can contemplate getting Darnell to help me do that. Thanks.

===

Now a report from Chaos Manor Associate and Byte.com Contributing Editor Eric Pobirs:

I got BeOS installed on Pokey last night. Twice actually, since the included version of Partition Magic is rather stupid about secondary partitions. It blew away the D: and E: partitions without adding the space to either the Win98 or Be areas. In the first go around it didn't acknowledged that these partitions even existed, so it wasn't until they went missing that I also noticed I was only getting 5 GB out of a 10 GB drive. Deleting the Be partition and resizing C: along with creating a new Be space got me about 5 gigs for each OS.

    All of the supported hardware was detected and installed automatically. Unfortunately, while the USB support gets the PS/2 mouse port on the Chicony keyboard working well, it doesn't know about modems yet. I may have to resort to activating a serial port to try out Be's browser and other communication software. Of what little I've been able to examine so far the performance is very good. It really does feel like the second coming of the Amiga.

Pokey is Eric’s older machine, as opposed to Racing Cow, which is a refurbished Gateway 2000. The important thing is that Amiga lives! In BE….

===

[on wednesday june 30 1999 you noted in the current view:]

>My own view is that Front Page is really cool, with the

>minor problem that it doesn’t work. If we can just over

>come that small problem so that it publishes properly

>we’re in business.

I really laughed when I saw that line .... you really have a way with words....  This is good in a writer .... [Well I hope so! JEP]

I am waiting for you to do a satire of the technology industry one of these years ....  It ought to be a real hoot ....

More Seriously ™, the major criticism I have had about Microsoft (and other companies following its lead) is that the technical elements of the the software, as they arrive here in the market, seem to be marketing driven. I think it would be superior marketing to create titanium clad applications, not merely the iron clad ones that rust so easily.

Of course, with the wild diversity of the market as it currently stands, most companies cannot afford the time or money to test everything-everything-everything. Microsoft is about the only company that could afford it .....

I think I’ll stop now before I ramble on too much ....

Michael Zawistowski

Microsoft slogan:

Where do you want to go to day?

Japanese translation:

Where do you want to get taken today?

Market driven is fine. Market driven is better than government driven. Good but six months late dies. And I will say that once you get their attention – which I at least can – Microsoft puts some good people on fixing things. Once you get their attention…

This is being published with Front Page in the normal “publish” command now, and it does work. Hurrah…

====

Hi Jerry,

 I’m glad to see you are getting on top of it now.

[Paragraph on broken links deleted.]

I have been having fun too.  I tried loading Office 2000, probably made a mistake, and got a message “Installation terminated prematurely.” which was not a lot of help.  When I restarted, it refused to let me change the suspect setting (about Internet Explorer upgrading) and gave me the same message.  I tried to find where the information was saved, and eventually removed a chunk of Registry entries.  Then it refused to run setup as it thought another installation was running.  “Format C:” fixed it, but I still have to spend a day or so reloading all the other software.  Moral: don’t try to do anything cunning, such as keeping previous versions of Office on the computer at the same time.

Thanks again for all your interesting and useful information.

Peter Smith

Wonderful. It is usually wise to remove old software before installing new. Norton Uninstaller will make a record of everything it chopped out, and where it found it, and save it all in a zip file so that you can restore; simplest thing is to use that, then install the new.

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Friday  

I seem to have put all of Friday and Saturday's mail in Thursday.

Sorry for the confusion. But this is Chaos Manor...

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Saturday July 3, 1999

I seem to have put all of Friday and Saturday's mail in Thursday.

Sorry for the confusion. But this is Chaos Manor...

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Sunday July 4, 1999  HAPPY BIRTHDAY AMERICA

I seem to have put all of Friday and Saturday's mail in Thursday.

Sorry for the confusion. But this is Chaos Manor...

===

Some time ago (6/21) Bob Thompson sent this. I have since had time to think on it and get some experience. Incidentally, in my WORD document I set Thompsons's text in Arial and my own in Times New Roman. Improved Front Page 2000 put it ALL up in Times Roman, so I must manually change his back to arial. Thanks a whole bunch, Microsoft. You fixed something that wasn't broke:

With regard to the long letter you published 6/20:

> Now, tell us what does work.

I think a lot of the confusion exists because FrontPage can be used in two distinctly different ways:

1.     FrontPage 98 as a stand-alone client = good (maybe even “very good”)

2.     FrontPage 98 on the client-side with FrontPage Extensions running on the server = hideous

Running stand-alone, FrontPage 98 is a very good product. It does everything we want it to do—decent quality page creation and editing; recalculating links when we add or change a page; date/time stamps; an ftp front-end that manages changed files in multiple directories, and so on. Granted, it generates sloppy code, but who cares? It does the job.

All of the problems we’ve had have been caused by our attempts to use FrontPage as a client for the FrontPage extensions running on the server.  The only reason we wanted the FrontPage extensions was to enable site-wide searching, which FrontPage implements as a server-side function that requires the extensions. The comments you’ve made about FrontPage and site size apply only if you have the extensions enabled. Used by itself, FrontPage can manage a site of any practical size.

So, my recommendation for anyone who wants to create and manage a web site, whatever its size, with minimum effort is to use FP98 in stand-alone mode.  But under no circumstances have your web provider enable the FrontPage Extensions for you. It’s easier, quicker, and less painful just to shoot yourself in the head.

As far as FrontPage 2000, I think the jury is still out. It has some very nice enhancements compared to FP98, but you also lose some things that I really liked about FP98, notably the All Files view. I have little doubt that FP2000 will work properly if it is installed cleanly and used with a web site that does not have FP extensions enabled.

Bob

Robert Bruce Thompson

thompson@ttgnet.com

http://www.ttgnet.com

I frankly would not recommend FP 2000, with or without the extensions. It seems to have the nice feature of making subwebs easily, but when it does it smashes links all to hell, so it’s a lot of work to use even though it doesn’t seem to be. Not having a separate Editor and Explorer seemed like a good idea at the time, but it is not. Front Page 2000 seems to drop font information from cut and paste from WORD documents. It used to be that I could set up mail and replied in WORD, get the fonts and colors and font sizes right, copy, and paste, and it would look the same in Front Page as in WORD. No longer. Now it does the same as Visual Page. That was one of the things I thoroughly disliked about Visual Page. Now Front Page 2000 has adopted the same “feature”. It wasn’t broke, but they fixed it.

All in all I HATE the “improvements” in Front Page. Meanwhile I am not finding that web management is easier with any other tool, like Dreamweaver, either. I don’t seem to have anything that manages the site better than Front Page, but I really want Front Page 98 back, and I think I am going to try to get it. This sucks dead bunnies.

===

Hello Jerry...

Love the books...

Do you answer questions about them here to or is this site just about “puter stuff?”

Anyway the real Subject of this note:

Frontpage case sense (or the lack of same.)

This is more an observation about cross platform issues and Frontpage lacks and not really a question.

My first web page was created on a Mac 7200/90 (called Loki) written in Simple text/ and Claris Homepage 2.0. Everything worked fine I put it up in Geocities.com. Good so far. Well anyway I bought a Gateway 2000 P5-200 Pentium 200 system Win95B machine in 97’(called Cow.) So  while I prefer my Mac I figured it would be a good idea to work on the platform that most people would be looking at them on. So I shifted to the IBM platform and first Frontpage 97’ then 98’.

I do stupid things just because I have to....

Anyway. This has to do with file names.

If say..... I create a file on Loki (since that is what my scanner is con. to) called name.jpg. (using internet naming conventions) Cow will see it as “name” hiding the lowercase extension. Now if I add this file to my pages using Frontpage 97’ or 98’ Frontpage will put it into the code as name.JPG but it is inconsistent about this (sometimes it gets it right) Anyway It all works fine on the local system, but when I FTP it to my servers which variously use Redhat Linux or Unix OSs that machine “sees” the original Mac name and it is at odds with the code: broken picture.

Well anyway the Frontpage Explorer shows the whole filenames but it sometimes wont truly rename the files like it says it does.

The work around is to just rename all of the flies when I go cross platform, but I can’t just use Windows I have to use an image application to truly  fix the files or just use caps in the first place for the extension. Not to much of a problem for new files but it truly is a bitch when you are talking about adapting a site with hundreds of image files already made.

(I am a visual artist so the content is in the pictures.)

I work in both the arts and education and here in south Florida Mac is still a big force, so going cross platform is a given.

Now the problem even gets weirder when you go the other way. Say I make a file on Cow called name.JPG and move it to Loki. The Mac will only see the file as NAME.JPG which is the files true DOS name since the long file name support from Win95+ is not contained on the file but in the disk header that the Mac wont read. There is no data fork on the file.  So if I use the file in Frontpage 98 for the Mac (which is just Frontpage 97 IBM ver. retooled for the Mac) Frontpage sees the files as NAME.JPG and puts that in the code. If I ftp the files then from the Mac everything is OK, (the Linux or Unix servers like em fine) but however if I bring them to my IBM, the filenames shift back and the code is broken when it is FTPed to the server.

Yes I could just use all caps for both the filename and the extension and the problem will go away, but you have to know all of this first.

Like I mentioned above it is not a dire problem since the work arounds are just a stiffening of the naming conventions, but I thought it might be of int. to your readers.

Most of whom might not have to jump through as many hoops as me, but you never know.

Of c. you really don’t need to know any of this until you try to go cross platform with a large web site in this case times 3 or four platforms. But hey good trivia!

In any event, the real problem is that Frontpage 97 and 98 is not case sensitive and sometimes writes the code that way almost arbitrarily as far as I can tell about its names.

I wish they would fix that ....  and it seems that Office 200 w/ Frontpage is not the answer either. It sounds like a horror show to me.

Regards,

Andrew Binder

abinder@fau.edu

===

Bob Thompson again:

A couple of notes on FrontPage 2000:

I’d mentioned that All Files view was no longer available in FP2K. That turns out not to be the case. But where FP98 made All Files an icon on the left hand icon bar, FP2K buries it in View—Reports—All Files. I was glad to find that option, because I frequently find it useful to check a sorted global list of all files within the web that I’ve worked on recently.

You’d mentioned the convoluted procedure necessary to import files from a directory elsewhere on your hard disk or network to your current FP2K web by using the File—Import dialog. I don’t bother with that. I just run FP2K Folders view, start NT Explorer, right-click the task bar and tile the two windows, and then drag and drop files from NT Explorer to FP Folders view.  It works fine.

Bob

Robert Bruce Thompson

thompson@ttgnet.com

http://www.ttgnet.com

==

“Another “feature” of Front Page 2000 is that it doesn’t preserve fonts from Word to Front Page. Then to make it worse, although it’s supposed to be better integrated with WORD, the f8 key does not turn on “select”, so you must use mouse scrolling to select, which requires dexterity I don’t have; I often get too far over and hit a margin or the bottom of a table, and it selects everything and you have to start over. Thanks a whole bunch, Microsoft.”

I never used F8 as it was Word specific. I always use Shift + navigation keys that seem to work almost everywhere.

Apropos Office 2000 improvements, I have found only 2 of significance to my work. Two documents I created in Word 97 consistently crash W97 on print, but print fine out of Word 2000. Trying to copy the contents of those documents and pasting them into a new one also crashes W97. I like the improved organizer in OL2000. When you create a new rule, it offers to run the rule on the Inbox contents.

Not a lot for what MS is charging. And I agree about the ugly little icons. I just tried to change the icon with the Change Icon button, but it’s greyed out. Someone must like the little @#$%ers!

Cheers

Jonathan Sturm (jonathan@uprun.com)

Holy catfish. All these years and I never knew that SHIFT arrow keys selected! Somehow I just missed that one. Thanks!

Ah: Yes, indeed, the new "run the rule on mail already in inbox" is VERY GOOD, and much needed, and that is a definite improvement. I knew I was overlooking something. I think Outlook is improved, but whether enough to make it worth getting Office 2000 I am not sure. Thompson likes FP 2000 better than FP 98. So far I do not, but things FLOW here so...

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Entire contents copyright 1999 by Jerry E. Pournelle. All rights reserved.
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