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CHAOS MANOR MAIL

Mail 130 December 4 - 10, 2000

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Monday  December 4, 2000

Coming back from beach to find a disaster

 

 

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Tuesday, December 5, 2000

Column time.

Jerry

So you have a dead server. Despite my sympathy for your plight, I simply have to smile when I think about it. You push the envelope, putting all sorts of gimcracks together and watch them crash. Professional pioneer, with arrows to prove it. Like what the protagonist of Tunnel in the Sky became. I picture you hip deep in muck, saying "Don't come this way."

Interesting:

Jasc Software has apparently bought Quick View, and now has Quick View Plus available for $50. I test drove a trial version that came with Paintshop Pro 7. Works as advertised. Sweet, but the price is far too high for what it does.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that setting up Quick View is no longer an option in Windows ME setup.

On the other hand, quikview.exe still lives at c:\windows\system\viewers. I modified my Registry as follows:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\Shell default = (value not set) HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\Shell\QuickView default = "Quick View" HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\Shell\QuickView\Command default = "c:\windows\system\viewers\quikview.exe "%1""

This gives me a Quick View entry in the right-click menu. Of course, when I use it for most files it goes "ding", tells me the file has no registered viewer, and asks if I want to try the default viewers. Turns out, that's Quick View.

I also went through the Tools/Folder Options/File Types menu, added a New command for a number of files: Quick View, with the command c:\windows\system\viewers\quikview.exe (Explorer automatically added the "%1" file placeholder). In some instances that gives me two Quick View entries, and the same "no viewers registered for this type of file" message. On the other hand, many files are listed in the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\QuickView key, and those seem behave docilely, although this quikview does not read Excel spreadsheets or Word documents.

Don't know what's going on. I suspect that MS and Jasc were unable to agree on a continued license for Quick View. At least we can still kludge it.

You know, I have an old screwdriver with a 1/8-inch blade and a one-foot shaft. I think it might been useful for reaching deep into old TV's and tweaking their settings. When I get down into the registry and kludge around, I think about that screwdriver.

Ed Hume

ehume@pshrink.com

www.pshrink.com

Well, I have recovered. Glad you feel my pain...

The soldier's poem posted on your 11/29/00 current mail page has a diferent origin than that ascribed.

>From the urban legend site: http://www.snopes2.com/glurge/soldier.htm : --------------- The soldier who takes credit for composing this poem is not "a Marine stationed in Okinawa, Japan" but a Major in the United States Air Force named Bruce Lovely, who says he wrote this piece on Christmas Eve 1993 while stationed in Korea (and saw it printed in the Ft. Leavenworth Lamp a few years later). ---------------

The version on your site includes the common urban legend request, 'sending this to as many people as you can?'. Although the internet would be a better place if more spam was poetry...

Jim Lund jiml@stanford.edu  --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Nobel Prize in Physics 1952: The prize was awarded jointly to: BLOCH, FELIX, U.S.A., Stanford University, Stanford, CA, b. 1905 (in Zurich, Switzerland), d. 1983; and PURCELL, EDWARD MILLS, U.S.A., Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, b. 1912, d. 1997: "for their development of new methods for nuclear magnetic precision measurements and discoveries in connection therewith"

OK. Glad of the correction, but it doesn't change things much. Thanks.


I have had problems like the ones you describe in your most recent article for Byte. Especially, one simular to the one described about "Rolands laptop" not waiting to connect to a specific hub.

The problems I have seen in the past though not with that specific model/mfg. were eventually solved by hard setting the NIC's Ethernet options to something the hub could handle. I have had to do this in both win98, and with linux. I do not think this is a OS specific problem. It may however be a driver problem. At the time I did not bother to dig to deep into it. I just hard set the connection options and forgot about it. It would seem that sometimes with cheaper equipment(hubs/NIC's) the auto-negotiation or auto-sensing that is supposed to take place on the initial connection does not seem to work properly.

Once I switched to the more expensive 3com hubs the problems never occured again.

Jimmy

Thanks. That's Roland's sentiment also. Why save a few bucks if it can cost you time? But of course "I do all these silly things so you won't have to..."


I urge you all to have a look at this, which presents a lot of information quickly:

The is a enhanced graphics version of the county-by-county election map. It really makes a statement. Take a look, you'll see what I mean.

A higher-resolution version of this map can be found at http://thematrix.acmecity.com/one/40/votemap.jpg 

Michael Juergens 

Thanks

 

 

 

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Wednesday, December 6, 2000

Column time.

Dear Jerry;

It would appear that the high Democratic presidential vote areas correspond quite closely with the 54 critical prime nuclear target areas that appeared so often in cold-war threat analyses, such as Kahn's "On Thermonuclear War". Just a coincidence? I don't think so ...

Or maybe it's because urban-industrial populations are more heavily Democrat? Or less patriotic? I doubt that.

Hal Frank, DI - Chicago

Well I would have thought there was a simpler explanation. Such as union activities in politics. Which are legitimate activities of course.

Dear Dr. Pournelle

I feel great pity for the eventual winner of "election 2000," be it Bush or Gore. Clinton's impeachment trial will look like a molehill compared to the mountains of trouble the next President will face.

But what's up with the county-by-county election results image you posted in Mail? ( http://thematrix.acmecity.com/one/40/votemap.jpg ) It is a fine case of statistics being used to tell a lie.

My first wicked thought was that the map showed all the counties where cow turds outnumbered people, and I saw nothing patriotic about draping cow turds with the American Flag. Burning Old Glory should be a lesser crime!

Okay, now that I've got my punches in, I say we should all start living in peace, or the next four years are going to be rough.

Keep writing, you are the best!

Craig Hamilton Salinas, California

Hmm. I hadn't thought of it QUITE that way. As to a "do nothing" Congress, Hurrah. We could use some respite from new laws and regulations...


Jerry,

I'm sorry to hear about the dead Western Digital drive in your PDC. That sentence sends chills down the spine of any NT network administrator. I've been working with PC's for only a few years less than you have... yep, I remember my TRS-80 Model 1.

A couple of things about your situation though. Since you mention that the drive was a Western Digital, can I assume that it was an ATA/IDE hard disk? If so, you're breaking one of the cardinal rules of NT networking.

* If you're running a mission-critical NT server, and being a Primary Domain Controller certainly qualifies as mission-critical, make sure your server has a SCSI RAID controller, an array of SCSI disks, and you're running striped with parity. * Try to keep your PDC running on a 'high-quality' server box, IMO that means Compaq. * Try to have a hardware RAID solution. Software RAID may work, but it's not foolproof. * Never let your business depend upon a single point of failure, in this case, a single hard disk drive.

If you'd had your PDC running with a RAID array and one of the drives took a dirt nap, you would have returned from the beach to a notification that one of the drives in your array had failed and that the server was running on the parity of the other drives. This will let you know that you have to replace the failed drive. If you can afford to have an extra drive in the array, you can configure it to come on line to replace the dead drive as soon as it fails.

I've had this happen to me, and I hold firmly to the belief that the cost of a RAID controller and array of drives more than pays for itself the first time you have a drive failure.

Now I realize that Chaos Manor doesn't have the resources that many businesses have, but I sleep better at night knowing that my servers are safe from at least a single drive failure.

Now of course, if more than one drive dies at the same time... that's my definition of living in interesting times.

Thanks,

Ray Ciscon Remote Office LAN/WAN Manager Comark, Inc.

Carthago delenda est.

I agree with every word of that. Most of which I will admit and address in the upcoming column. But in my defense, "mission critical" is not the same to me as to you. For me the worst that happens is I spend all night getting things up (and so does Roland...) All my critical files are on CD's or DVD-RAM. Except of course for User Settings off that blasted server; I had not realized that once you become part of a domain, much of what you think is saved locally is NOT LOCAL and vanishes when the domain vanishes.  

It wasn't hard to restore it was tedious. And  -- "I do all these silly things so you won't have to..."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Thursday, December 7, 2000

When I first got this I couldn't figure out what it was about, but the search engine showed me it was in the mail archives, to be exact mail 60. I had written something about problems with Netscape, and used a dramatic opening line. The actual header was supplied by the editors:  "NETSCAPE MUST DIE."  When Mr. Osmont sent me his complaint, which was certainly not marked as private, he included that header. I posted his letter in Mail 60, and reprint it below.  He has since replied:

Sir,

I have found on yahoo a link to your web site with a page containing my name and an email message I had sent to you a while ago regarding a disturbing article that you had published in some magazine.

Obviously, I find once again your action very disapointing, as you are not only publishing some communication that was intended to be private, but you are also taking the message out of his context by not publishing the one I was responding to. You actually make it sound like I wrote this horrible title, but I was in fact just responding to this very aggressive article of yours.

These is not the type of act that one would expect from a colomnist or journalist. On the other hand, my email is not the type of email a company would expect from one of his employees. I was shocked to see this message, as I could not believe I wrote this. Probably a moment of deep frustration expressed a little to loud.

Anyhow, I would appreciate that you include your article on front of my message or remove this message from your web site.

Thank You.

Stephan Osmont 

So, I wish it made clear that Mr. Osmont did not supply the header. Here is his original letter. The NETSCAPE MUST DIE title is NOT his. His original letter had a Netscape return address. This latest one does not.

Netscape Must Die!

 Your article is pathetic. Did it even come to your mind to question NT's reliability? Shouldn't such a strong OS be able to handle this problem?

Anyway, the point is that people at Netscape or Microsoft deserve respect for what they have accomplished and for what they brought to the world.

On the other hand, whiners like you must die.

Stephan Osmont

Do note that I have more than once spoken of unreliabilities in NT, Windows, and much else.

You  can find the original "NETSCAPE MUST DIE" article at

 http://www.byte.com/column/chaosmanor/BYT19990720S0001 

It's pretty clear from reading the column that the title was supplied by the editors, and it's also clear why they did that. In any event I want it clearly understood that Mr. Osmont did not write the title "NETSCAPE MUST DIE" in his letter sent to me and published 18 months ago, and he has my apologies. As to his "private mail" I think my mail policies are clearly stated. I don't recall if he sent his commentary to me or to BYTE, but given the content it hardly matters, and it certainly doesn't read as private correspondence. When you send letters to authors or their editors commenting on published material, you must expect them to believe you intend those to be published.

Incidentally, what had annoyed me about Netscape (which I used rather than Internet Explorer in those days) was that I had tried to upgrade it. The result was horrible. Among the things I said in that column:

"What is happening is that Netscape's install program doesn't check to see if it has sufficient resources to run before it launches. Once launched, it grabs what it can and if that isn't enough -- it won't be if you have many other processes going -- it blows up instead of shutting down with a message saying close all the other windows.

"One of the things that can blow it up is Netscape running, but of course if you used Netscape's "smart update", then Netscape will be running."

There was more, and it's all there in the old column. Since then I gather that Netscape has cleaned up its act a bit. 

Dear Jerry,

Regarding your past problems upgrading Netscape via interactive online file transfers:

I also had problems when I tried to do an online upgrade from (approximately) 4.0 to 4.5. I dumped the idea of an online upgrade and ordered a CD from Netscape. This approach worked much better, and I got good service from version 4.5. Compatibility was very good for it, and I would resort to Netscape when Opera (my favorite) wasn't compatible with the latest jazzy html somewhere.

Later I ordered a CD for Internet Explorer, installed it in kitchen sink mode (to see what they had to offer), and all was well--although I found myself pruning off some of the pieces of the kitchen sink, just to keep life simple. :-) Internet Explorer 5.0 seems to work well.

I have recently received a CD for Netscape 6 and installed it. Again I asked for a kitchen sink installation. There were no installation problems. I'm evaluating (and pruning) the new Netscape browser now. It seems to work

Based on these experiences, I recommend the CD approach for Microsoft and Netscape browser upgrades. Opera upgrades are performed using simple file transfers across the network with locally controlled installation processes. I have performed a number of Opera upgrades with no problems.

Concerning the "Netscape Must Die!" title: a little hyperbole does no harm here.

Robert Griswold 

I agree completely. But if Netscape had just made it easier to save their upgrade rather than insisting on running it, things would have been much better. I no longer use Netscape. Am I missing much?

 


 

And now this:

Sir:

I think the points made in the editorial are valid, but applied to the wrong party. It is increasingly clear to anyone not a partisan that the majority of votes, not just in the country as a whole, but in Florida specifically, were cast for Al Gore. The republican response to that has been to loudly ask that this all be put behind us, for the good of the country, and just have finality.

I have heard the phrase "stealing votes" used, repeatedly, by Republican loyalists, and I have this question: If a person votes for a candidate, and we can, through manual recounts, determine who they voted for, how is that "stealing" anything? Yes, I am disturbed by the lack of an objective standard for manual recounts. Shouldn't the answer to that be to impose an objective standard, not to abandon the idea of an accurate count? Gov. Bush signed a law specifically allowing "dimpled" chads to be counted in hand recounts in Texas. It is the height of hypocrisy to now claim that such ballots cannot be accurately counted.

No, I believe that Bush will be the next president. I will obey his orders, and treat him with respect. I will also know that he was not selected (I do not say elected here for a reason) by the people of this country. I would take no issue (other than a philosophical one) with the popular vote being different than the electoral vote. I do take issue with the grandstanding, name calling, finger pointing being done by the Republicans. Their actions on the absentee ballots was certainly outside the law, if not specifically illegal, in Martin and Seminole county. I do not think either county should invalidate any votes, despite that being the specific statutory remedy. In those cases, there is no doubt that the people had a right to vote, and the vote is accurate. No technical violation should overturn those votes, no matter how offensive the conduct was in getting those votes. The Republicans are apparently interested in the outcome only, not whether it is the will of the voters, or has any resemblence to accuracy.

I dread the day, and I believe it certainly possible, in the near future when the DOJ discovers actual voter fraud by the republican party or its agents. It will present a crisis for the Bush presidency that no presidency should have to endure.

My conclusion, contrary to that of the editorial of Mr. Praeger, is that the people will grow tired of the rhetoric of the Republicans given their actions, and the elections in two years will be a sweep toward the Democrats.

Please omit my email address and name, for obvious reasons, if you publish this.

Well, I don't agree. It is true that Texas seems to allow "dimpled chad" votes; no other jurisdiction does, and certainly Florida never contemplated doing so. My insistence is that whatever rules are used, they be agreed to in advance; and if there are to be rule changes they be changes that at least MIGHT have been agreed to in advance. California law says a "three corner punched" chad is a punch, a two-corner is ambiguous, and a one-corner is NOT a vote. There is no mention of dimples at all. California uses the same machinery as Florida, and has had a Democratic legislature for some time.

I think the Republicans are insisting largely on application of rules in place at the time of the election. As to "fraud", of course there was fraud, on both sides, and all over the country. There never was an election in which there wasn't. Usually it doesn't matter, but sometimes, as in 1960, it does. But while we can hope to keep partisan fraud down, it's going to happen. That's the nature of the power game. Those who feel strongly tend to dominate parties, and that won't change, because those who don't feel strongly don't compete for party office. It is one of the oldest dilemmas of power: make any office powerful enough and it will tend to be occupied by those unscrupulous enough to do anything to get it; in the end, that can extend to assassinations, locking people in dungeons, murder of siblings, parricide, and Herod's Slaughter of the Innocents. Fortunately we haven't got there yet.

What I really wish would happen is that we would repeal about a million pages of laws and regulations so that Washington would become a sleepy Southern village that commands the Armed Services and conducts foreign policy and otherwise leaves running the country to the states. Of course that won't happen. But I grew up in a time when it was far more relevant to my life who was County Supervisor, or Sheriff, than who was President of the United States; which, except in war time, is the way it ought to be. In my not very humble opinion.


I just finished an article in Salon that compares the current state of the software/hardware industry to that of the US car industry of the 50's and 60's. Simply stated, there are ways to design software so that there are several orders of magnitude fewer defects (bugs) than currently are shipped (and evidently cheaper). The prognosis, only foreign software will cause any change in US software design. 

On another topic, you had said you would be getting an Apple G4. If you haven't done so yet, they should be very cheap once Apple puts in place its inventory clearing sales/rebates. 

Intellectual Capital style columns most definitely would cause me to subscribe, even if I disagree with a lot of what you say in the articles.

Don Scherer

Is there likely to be any foreign software? I certainly would not object to having competition. Microsoft needs that badly.

As to software design, I think the real culprit is C. C is more assembler than higher level language, and now that we have new hardware with great potential, I think a more structured and readable language, such as Modula-2 would improve our software enormously by making it a lot clearer what it is DOING. I really ought to start the language debates again. I never thought C was the proper language for writing complex programs.

I don't entirely disagree with the notion that C and it's variants are to blame for poor code. Any compiled language that doesn't (by default anyway) complain when you toss one data type into another by making some grand assumption that you know what you are doing is bound to be a loaded gun.

 On the Gripping Hand, however, I believe that a good portion of the problem is lack of education in the Computer Sciences. I feel (no exact proof mind you, just hiring experiences) that most CS or related programs let good form and systematic design take a back seat to having the latest software programs and whizbang products in use in the curriculum so it can end up on a resume. I would take a person schooled in Assembler or any other unstructured dialect if they would only demonstrate some sense in design and systematic thought. The tools will always change, the lessons learned are the real value.

 My 2 cents anyway. Keep up the good work!

Marlin Roberts Clearwater Research

Thanks. I think it may be time to open the language debates again. C will compile nonsense. Pascal and its derivatives will not, and do range checking; it's harder to get a Delphi or Pascal or Modula-2 program to compile, but when it does, it will generally do what you expected it to do. With C you have to simulate the compiler in your head, and for many that's a formula for making your head explode...

I think it is time for readability.

 

 

 

 

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Sunday, December 10, 2000

There is a ton of mail on the language debate. I will probably put it up tomorrow. I'm still a bit less than 100%.

Hi!

I've got just one little question for you. Occasionally, I reinstall
windows and office 2000, and when I do that, I tend to get some problems.
For one; all the settings and all the messages that previously where
downloaded by outlook are being erased. I never install office 2000 on the
same partition as win2k, so these files are not erased when c: is
formatted. However, when I reinstall office 2000, the setup removes all
previously installed components, and everything disappeares. Is there
anything I can do to stop this from happening? Save certain files before
reinstalling, for instance?
If you can give me a useful tip on this, I'd be much obliged.
Thanks in advance.

Lars Jakob Furunes,
Norway

If you save the OUTLOOK.PST file in some safe place, start up Outlook after reinstallation, let it make an OUTLOOK.PST file, then either copy your old one on top of the one it created, or delete it and when Outlook says it can't find outlook.pst tell it where to look to find the saved one. 

Fair warning, either way your rules will probably be clobbered and some of the account information may need reinstallation; but all your mail and dates and such like will be there. If there's a better way I don't know it and I invite suggestions from those who have more experience.

I flipped through the Mt. Wilson photos (I recognized the telescope), and it looks like a very interesting trip. A tiny bit of narrative tying thumbnails together would be wonderful. (i.e. what -is- "charas"? Who's the attractive red-headed babe who knows how to operate ancient telescopes? (So Heinleinesque a character deserves comment!) Why is there a hundred meter optical bench at Mt. Wilson? What -are- all those gimcracks...? Is that the guts of an optical interferometric telescope? With active optics?)

Your loyal subscriber,

Ray Van De Walker

That was Dr. Sallie Baliunas, Deputy Director of Mount Wilson, and she really is a Heinleinesque character...

Hello! I read with much pleasure your Byte.com 4th of December column, as i always do to all your columns. Found your comment pertaining Netgear hardware compared to 3COM and Intel more or less true, but not so much as to reliability (having seen 3Com switches break and tear, and some even crashing due to some strange network traffic), but mostly to general performance of the devices. As a rule, for instance, 3COM and Intel switches have an higher speed internal matrix - they can switch more packets at a faster rate. In normal usage it is not noticeable, but in overloaded networks it can make the difference. But, to my experience, we can have both solid and high performance devices in a network, all with a fair price. The brand is DLink. The price is more or less the same as Netgear hardware, the final quality and reliability awesome and the performance impressive. In terms of features they have mostly everything if not everything devices costing the double from 3Com have, from VLAN to Trunking. I am very pleased.

Regards,

Pedro Rodrigues Formtech AB Sweden

Thank you. We have had good success with DLink as well in recent months. I should have more in the column shortly. 


Jerry,

In reply to Mr. NAAW, I would like to point out that the Texas law he points out came into effect in 1986, and was amended in 1993, the amendments taking effect on September first, 1993, 14 months before Governor Bush was elected to his first term. And the actions in Seminole and Martin counties hardly rate throwing out all the absentee votes in those counties, and not even 'despite that being the specific statutory remedy' (which is not the case). Particularly considering that it is not even clear that there was any wrongdoing even with the absentee ballot applications under question, and that there is no question about the integrity of the ballots themselves. I wonder if Name and Address Withheld is aware that while the Republican absentee ballot applications went to the county election office, the Democrat absentee applications went to _Democratic Party Headquarters_, and were brought to the elections office by the Democratic party workers themselves. In other words, if there had been a problem with the Democratic applications like there was with the Republican, the Democtrats could have applied the same remedy behind closed doors and with no one knowing that the applications were being touched at all.

The real significance of that email is that it means that the current Democratic strategy is working, unfortunately. My guess is that for the past week or so the Democrats have not really been trying to overturn the election, but rather trying to undermine the Bush administration. The idea is to implant in the 'popular wisdom' the idea that Gore 'really won' the election, despite a complete lack of evidence to that effect, to get people to believe that the Bush administration is not really legitimate, that Bush won't _really_ be president. To me, this seems a very dangerous precedent to set; it is only the smallest of steps to go from, "We don't trust the process by which this result was arrived at, don't believe that that man really should be president, that he was never fairly elected to that positon and has no moral authority to rule, but we will abide by that result, until we can overturn it," to "We refuse to abide by the result of this election." By taking the first stance, certain elements in the Democratic Party (not all; Pat Caddell had some very sharp things to say about the process, for example) have done what may turn out to be irreparable harm to the institutions of the Republic. We will see.

(You may use my name and address; I'm not ashamed.)

--Robert Brown http://www.godofwar.com "Most computer problems can be solved by a suitable charge of high explosive."

The chap in question is a serving officer, and I wouldn't have published his name if had wanted me to. 

I suspect the Republic will survive this. If the result is to weaken some of the Federal power over the states, and the power of judges in favor of legislatures, there may even be quite a bit of good come out of it, no matter who ends up as President. And I really wish we could get back to where it wasn't all that important who the President was...


LANGUAGE DEBATES BEGIN TOMORROW (with any luck).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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