THE VIEW FROM CHAOS MANOR

View 112 July 31 - August 6, 2000

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Highlights this week:

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• The analog stories
  • found
• John McCarthy on the nature of knowledge
• Everquest Help needed
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The Napster issue and the whole question of intellectual property continues to be vexatious. See last week's mail, last week's view, and there will be more this week, including in mail.

There is a new letter from astronomer David Morrison and some other stuff over in the Velikovsky discussion. 

A friend asks concerning some stories in ANALOG perhaps 25 years ago:

There were, I think, 3 stories, all set in the same universe and time -- a
bit in our future.  There were three lead human characters, a young man, an
older man who was his boss, and a woman.  All three of them work for some
sort of gov't agency, name not mentioned, possibly NSA. 

Earth is visited by aliens -- actually, earth is visited by at least two
distinct groups of aliens in the course of these stories.  In one of the
stories, the young human man has his leg broken in an accident involving the
aliens and there's a line in the story something like, "The aliens left on
the day I got the cast off my leg."  In another story (or perhaps elsewhere
in the same one), is a bit about human males getting sexually involved with
the humaniod-but-gigantic alien females -- something about the man facing a
msssth vacuum cleaner. 

It sounds a bit like Christopher Anvil, but I don't think I read those particular stories. Any readers have ideas?

FOUND. Thanks.

When Microsoft first published AGE OF EMPIRES I recall I liked it, but the limit of fifty units or so was just too severe, and I stopped playing it: you'd just get to the point of getting an organized force and you were were stopped from building more.

I didn't recall it was a clickfest, though. Today, I installed the "Gold Edition" of Age of Empires, and I find I simply cannot play it. Either it has speeded up greatly or I have slowed down a lot, because even in the simplest scenarios things happen just too fast for me to keep up with, and trying to control several things at once is impossible. Pity, but there it is.  I tried it on  Mach 9, a Pentium III 933 MHz system with Windows Millenium. It runs splendidly, as you might suppose, but at the slowest possible setting it's still no fun: it's not a strategy game, it's a shooter at the slowest speed I can manage. Oh, Well.

I think I like turn-based better.

But see mail...

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Dr. Pournelle,

The star Delta Scorpii has been brightening lately. This happened about 63 years ago as well. You can read the details on Sky &; Telescope Magazines web site (which is where I learned of it as well). According to the Variable Star Net this is an historic occasion.

The URL is:

http://www.skypub.com/news/news.shtml 

Jim Snover

WOW!  Thanks!

As for the next, don't get your tongue out your ear...

http://billionairesforbushorgore.com/index.html 

In the course of another discussion, John McCarthy of Stanford Computer Science came up with a simple but in my view elegant statement about the nature of knowledge. It's over in mail, but I will probably copy it to a report page of its own to make it easier to find.

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Hollywood Bowl last night. It's column time, so things will be short for a while. Circuit City is a good place to buy appliances: their extended warranties work. I just had several things go bad, and the repair people came on time, and did the work, and cost nothing, and as a bonus one of them was one of Jaime Escalante's students, who carefully explained to the housekeeper why she shouldn't use Joy in the dishwasher...

I have left the FIRST DARK AGES discussion in mail, but I have also copied what's there to a new page devoted to the subject. I have also added a few notes and a letter to the Velikovsky Discussion which is related to but not identical with the Dark Age discussion.

DO YOU PLAY EVERQUEST?

If so, can you tell me how to GET ON? The system rejects all my credit cards. Since the cards are valid, what is going on?  It takes half an hour to try to set up -- I have the disk sent to me by the Everquest people, have they done something that is supposed to give me a free account, but didn't, and yet rejects my efforts to pay?  The credit card information boxes ask for First Name and Last Name, not "Name as it appears on the card" and since all my cards have at least two initials or a name and a middle initial, I do not know what to put in which box.  I have tried several combinations, and in every case I get the entirely unhelpful error message that something is wrong. Nothing more.

It looks to me as if one must be VERY dedicated in order to play Everquest. This seems a pity because it looks as if it might be fun, but I have tried for two days to figure out a way to get into the game, with no result, so it is a colossal waster of time so far as I am concerned.

Understand, I suspect the game is great. They say they have hundreds sign up every day. So what am I doing WRONG???

Following is from Steve Gibson:

I can only say, I completely agree. Thanks, Steve.

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Column time.

From Jim Carr:

What I want Microsoft to do is put a new feature in Outlook. I'll describe it in the column.

Managed to get onto Everquest last night. This thing could eat a LOT of time. You are anonymous, of course. A very nice lady elf decided to help me find my way, and it's sort of romantic in a totally detached from reality sort of way... The graphics are not as good as they could be, and the delays from being on a modem are real, and the server kept crashing, but it was interesting enough that I kept coming back in spite of it. If Jolie hadn't been nice enough to help me out a bit, I probably would have left and not come back.

Incidentally this was on with Fergie, over 500 MHx Pentium III and Voodoo 2 board under Windows 2000 Professional. I had no problems related to my own equipment because everyone else experienced the crashes, not just me.

Column time; much work to do. Building a new machine.

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Wow, now THAT is stuck. Once in Baja Sarge Workman and I had a Jeep decline to start as the tide was coming in. We were pretty sure we were above the water line, but the moon was waxing, and I didn't know the area. (Conception, after a long long dusty trip across and down the grada del muerte before the new road; we were just plain grateful to get near water, and we got a bit closer than we should.)  But it started. I said "Oil pressure's still low" and Sarge said "Don't sweat the small stuff, let's get out of here." Which we did.

But I don't drive in restricted areas. On the other hand, when I did a lot of off roading there were far fewer forbidden areas.

Recovering from having installed Direct CD? See mail.

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Much to do, but all went into the column. Many adventures. As usual. see column when it comes out.

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Column time. Migrating machines. New setups. Do get SR-1 for Office 2000, and SP-1 for Windows 2000. They work.

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