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THE VIEW FROM CHAOS MANOR

View 225 September 30 - October 6, 2002

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Monday  September 30, 2002

Fiction, beginning column. Did a lot of mail.

 

 

 

 

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Tuesday, October 1, 2002

Column coming up. I'll try to put some thoughts up later.

====

Dear Jerry

In your latest column you mentioned:

"He would like a file manager or an updated Norton Commander. On that score, I have good news: It's abandoned ware, but Norton Commander for Windows works very well with Windows XP if you can find a copy. And most of the file viewers in the old DOS Commander work too".

I don't remember where I heard about it but shortly after Norton Commander for Windows left the market I started using Windows Commander from http://www.ghisler.com/  and have been more than happy with it ever since. It has evolved to point where it does just about anything you can think of without losing the original Norton Commander feel.

I recommend it highly. The free trial version is complete and the licensed is inexpensive and provides free updating.

I have enjoyed your articles for something like 16 years now. Thanks a lot.

Hart Keeble Quito, Ecuador "The Center of the World"

I used that at one time, and it's pretty good. That was years ago and I have not tried it since, because I find the actual Windows Commander works just fine for me; but I don't know how anyone can get that. I have it on 3.5" floppies and it installs fine on all my new machines....

I learned a lot about power supplies and BIOSes in really fast machines. That will all go in the column.

I think I am recovering from the creeping crud that hung on for nearly 2 weeks. It sure was not fun.  I also rediscovered Sudafed's Non-Drowsy Non-Drying Sinus Gels, which will keep my head open when nothing else will. Your mileage may vary, I do not give medical advice, etc., etc.

 

 

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Go read:

http://nytimes.com/2002/09/29/weekinreview/29LEON.html 

Out of a Job and No Longer Looking

IN New York Times, 29 September, 2002 (Week in Review)

By DAVID LEONHARDT

THE American welfare state was supposed to be dead, victim of the free-market economy and its success in creating a job for anybody who wanted one.

While European countries maintained huge social-service programs and paid for them with high unemployment, the United States sharply curtailed its best-known welfare program in the mid-1990's and the jobless rate just kept dropping. Even today, two years into an economic slump, the labor market appears healthier than it was for most of the last three decades.

But the current downturn is beginning to expose an uncomfortable truth: the American economy looks more like Europe's than most people ever imagined during the triumphal 1990's.

Millions of people, particularly men, have dropped out of the labor force over the last decade, apparently unable to find work that pays near what they once earned in the blue-collar jobs that have since moved to lower-wage countries. Unwilling to take new jobs that pay far less, neither employed nor looking for work, they are not counted in the jobless rate, and a surprising and growing number of them instead depend on a government check to get by.

Once these statistical nonpersons are counted, the labor market of today looks all too similar to those of supposedly bleaker past decades, according to a number of recent studies by economists. <snip>

And think again about the cost of exporting jobs.  I am more and more of the opinion that Free Trade is an illusion.  As to alternatives, I am not so certain. I keep being pushed toward a flat 10% tariff on all imported goods: high enough to protect some jobs and industries, low enough that really inefficient industries feel the pressure. I have absolutely no magical commitment to the 10% number. 

Once again, my concern is for American citizens displaced by having their jobs exported. That particularly applies to those on the lower side of the Bell Curve, who aren't so easily re-educated to new jobs after spending a good part of their lives learning a blue collar skill.  This is not Lake Woebegone where all the children are above average. Half the population has an IQ of less than 100. I doubt that includes many of my readers. Indeed, I doubt that many of my readers spend much time with people of IQ 110 and below.

Below average doesn't mean stupid or unable to function. It doesn't mean being a hewer of wood or drawer of water. Below average in intelligence doesn't mean noticeably uneducated. It does mean a bit slower to learn new skills, a bit slower to adjust, and a lot more likely to know and enjoy hand working skills -- building really fine furniture, tuning up and repairing machinery, operating a particular piece of equipment, and so forth. Indeed, down at the low end of the scale, say 80-85 IQ, are many jobs that must be done, require considerable skill, and are sufficiently repetitive to drive and IQ 110 or above stark raving mad. 

My favorite example was soldering mini-plugs in the aircraft industry, a job that was eventually relegated to people who were (in the terminology of the time) legally morons (mental age of 12).  Smart people learned this skill fast, and hated it, and after a while made too many errors or quit from boredom. The less gifted loved the work: they could do it, they were contributing to American life, and they earned darned good money, often more than their smarter relatives. 

And that was the low end of the scale. People of IQ 85 - 100 are some 30% of the population, and IQ 85 - 115 is a full 68% of the people. A country that doesn't provide meaningful work and a way to be part of the middle class for that group is not a republic.

=========

Incidentally, the above is an illustration of the problem of working with memory: I used to be considered somewhat expert in normal curve statistics, and yet I managed to mis-remember the standard deviation to which IQ is normalized, and the percentage of the population within one standard deviation of the mean. Bob Thompson pointed this out within minutes and I've corrected it. It doesn't change the argument.

In a normal or "bell" curve, 34% of the population (34.13 to be exact) lies within one standard deviation of the mean in one direction; thus 68.26% is within plus or minus one standard deviation, usually called 'sigma" in statistical terminology, and if you want to get really refined you use a different symbol for the -- theoretical -- population standard deviation than the one you use for the sample standard deviation. The normal or bell curve is a theoretical construct drawn from mathematics. It seems to fit the distribution of many random aspects of a population, including such unrelated stuff as the distribution you get when you put a class to repeated measurements of the diagonal length of a laboratory bench using a tape measure, and a bunch of other stuff, as well as the distribution of IQ scores, which, in the United States, are mathematically manipulated so that the mean will be 100 and the standard deviation 15. Note that the bell curve can't be an exact fit, since any IQ below 50 isn't likely to survive, and we don't know of any above about 200 (and can't really determine IQ with any accuracy above about 150; but the difference between 150 and 200 is pretty apparent if you ever meet such people).

It isn't an exact fit, but it's close, plenty close enough to be useful in making predictions about the population. 

====

That digression aside, the economic problem I see is that we no longer make things. Now that's an exaggeration; but in 1995 or so, the financial contribution (moving money around, investment banking, insurance, real estate) to GDP surpassed the manufacturing sector; we were "creating" more wealth through distribution and financial moves than we were creating by making things.

A manufacturing economy automatically distributes wealth. A financial economy concentrates wealth: as Kevin Phillips points out the median income in the US has barely kept ahead of inflation since 1980, but while in 1980 the ten highest paid executives in the US had an average compensation of $3.45 million, by 2001 that number was $155 million.  This is quite a lot of money for taking us through the boom and bust and getting us out of the manufacturing business.

 

 

 

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Thursday, October 3, 2002

I have been putting up some of my Intellectual Capital columns. That will take time and it's column time so I won't be able to get it all done for days or longer. The first ones are up now. These include my take on the IBM / Microsoft situation and how Microsoft became dominant. Others went into foreign policy, and other applications of technology to society. 

I miss Intellectual Capital. It was a good read and forced me to think about issues to write about.


And this from Bob Thompson:

Microsoft has released yet another security patch to repair a critical flaw in the Windows help system. This bug is present in all current versions of Windows, including NT4. Unpatched, this vulnerability allows an attacker to run arbitrary code. Microsoft's explanation and the patch are available at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/
treeview/default.asp?url=/technet/security/bulletin/MS02-055.asp
 

For more details on this and other recently-announced security holes, see:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/27409.html 

-- Robert Bruce Thompson thompson@ttgnet.com http://www.ttgnet.com <http://www.ttgnet.com>


And Sue Ferrara finds us a new source:

http://www.omanobserver.com/ 

Which is pretty interesting.


And over in the Press Release Page there is an announcement of White Box support from Kingston.


From a reader:

Someone posting under the name "dama9ed@dama9ed.com" has flooded ABE-B with 1500+ posts containing hundreds of book and stories, most currently under copyright protection. Authors include Harlan Ellison, Ed Bryant, Frank Herbert, Douglas Adams, Dean Koontz, Donald Westlake, Arthur Clarke, and dozens of others. I can't attest to the content of the posts, as they're done using a compression format I can't unpack, but the subject lines are there to be seen.

I know no more than this.

 

 

 

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Friday, October 4, 2002

I have put up the first 8 Intellectual Capital columns. Number 8 was about what might end the boom; it's a bit fascinating in retrospect.

Yesterday the SBC (Pacific Bell as far as I am concerned) techs were here to install a new line that is supposed to carry partial DSL. Today a lady named Chakalit from Covad was here to install the router and get the line from outside up to the cable room.

That worked, and she was able to access the Internet on her laptop. I saw it. Visions of sugarplums and all that. But alas. I got this service from Megapath, not Covad. Covad isn't allowed to give me the information I need to make it work with my system (although I guess I could plug a computer directly into the router, and maybe I could use WinProxy or Windows XP to distribute that through the system). But mostly I am supposed to get a Megapath "bring up team" on the phone.

Of course what I got on the phone was sales who transferred me to tech support which has a bunch of cheery messages interspersed with rock music; after half an hour of that I gave up. They say they will call me. Real Soon Now. The salesman says they will call me. Real Soon Now. I began all this at 1300. It is now 1400 on a Friday afternoon. It will be interesting to see if anything happens. Sunday I head for Anaheim for a Windows conference, so if they don't get it today they won't get to it for a week.


And we have:

Jerry - You might want to take a look at this utility for XP. It seems to have made quite an improvement on the speed my systems operates. I have a megabyte of ram and loading the XP kernel permanently really helps. http://www.totalidea.de/frameset-products.htm 

JOHN

Which looks interesting but I don't want to get involved in some other project while I am waiting for Megapath.Net to get to me Real Soon Now.

OK, a very knowledgeable tech from Megapath has called me, and now they are giving me the fixed IP address I thought I was getting in the first place.  Once I have that I can set things up. Apparently if I had been willing to run with a dynamic IP address using their router I would have been on their DSL already.

I am now waiting for the fixed address; which should not take too long, and their tech support office runs 24/7 so the phone waits should not be too long after business hours are over.  They had tried to call me while I was on hold to them...

So things move along. Slowly. It is now 1530.


A Democratic National Committee web site shows President Bush pushing an aging lady in a wheel chair over a cliff.   This is known as responsible campaigning, good clean fun I am sure.


 1730: Caloo Calay!

We have DSL, fr0m Megapath!

2330: It works! And the Megapath tech people are pretty sharp, and can be reached by telephone although it takes longer than I like waiting for them. But all is well that ends well, and I have partial DSL.  It's a bit faster than the 144K they contracted for. How much faster I have to measure. But it works, it's crisp, and there is no latency....

 

 

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Saturday, October 5, 2002

A new Virus warning: see mail.

 

iDSL works at about 135 Kbits measured by CNet's services. That' certainly within tolerance since it contains Internet congestion. More on all this in the column.


On Being Depressed:

The following interchange happened in a conference I participate in:

> A man named Patrice Lumumba Ford, the son of "former Black Panther Kent Ford" > turns out to be a terrorist. Who would have suspected? 

> > > I will wager than of 100 Harvard undergraduates, chosen at random from walkers in the Yard, no more than five will be able to identify with ANY accuracy Patrice Lumumba, INCLUDING who had him tortured and murdered and why; and no more than, say, three for Kent Ford. This does not excuse them from not knowing: they just don't know ANYTHING in this domain, because nothing is taught except in some black studies courses, and there what is taught is, well, tendentious.

The sad part is that I won't take that wager. 

============

I have put up more of my Intellectual Capital columns from years ago. They still make a certain amount of sense. I'll have them all up eventually. One, on The Business of America, was more optimistic about the dot boom that perhaps it ought to have been, but I have little to be ashamed of.

===============

I am changing "main" communications computers. The new one will be Principessa, a 2.8 GHz system with 533 FSB and a partridge in a pear tree.  This ought to make answering mail a bit faster...

One goal is to get the XP Home system off my network. It slows EVERYTHING down just by existing.


 

ON iDSL: I find that if I am doing massive update downloading on one machine the system slows a lot; not astonishing. But if I had a lot of that updating to do, I'd switch to the satellite which is at least 3 times faster. For the most part, though, this is wonderful!

 

I have managed to transfer almost everything from the old computer to this one. This is much faster. So far all is cool.

 

 

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Sunday,October 6, 2002

I am harried. Also behind deadlines.

 

This ought to make you feel better if you have to take an airplane trip:

British warplanes were scrambled early yesterday after a

conversation between two passengers caused an alert on a flight

from Baltimore to London, a British Airways (BA) spokeswoman

said. "Flight BA288 was met by police officers who questioned two

male passengers regarding a conversation that was overheard by

another passenger," she said. "Both men have since been allowed

to go on their way," she added. She declined to reveal the nature

or content of the overheard conversation or the nationality of the

two passengers. Police said the incident, had triggered a

precautionary contingency plan. — Reuters

And if you want to build a Mac

http://www.macopz.com/buildamac/ 

 

 

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