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Week of 28 June 1999 Sunday, 04 July 1999 09:23 A (mostly) daily journal of the trials, tribulations, and random observations of Robert Bruce Thompson, a writer of computer books. |
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Monday, 28 June 1999 [Last Week] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] [Next Week] I see in the morning paper that several states have passed some desperately needed new laws. To wit:
So, can people caught with urine in South Carolina now be charged with possession of a controlled substance? * * * * * If you want to build one of those cheap dual-Celeron systems, now's the time to do it. Apparently, Intel is now considering disabling the AN15 pin in the Celeron, which will prevent them from being used in a dual-CPU environment. So long as dual-Celeron systems were limited to enthusiasts willing to drill holes, wire wrap pins, and so on, Intel didn't perceive much of a threat. The Slockets were the first crack in the dam. Now that Abit and others are actually producing dual Socket 370 motherboards, Intel apparently fears a flood of cheap dual-Celeron systems and has decided that enough is enough. Get 'em while you can... * * * * * This from Emily [emily16976@aol.com]:
Thanks for the kind words. My links page is actually for my own use (I have the local copy of it set as the default page in IE), but I publish it just in case anyone else is interested. I tried Acses. It would indeed be useful if it worked reliably, but I had some problems with it. For example, I searched by title for my most recent O'Reilly book, "Windows NT TCP/IP Network Administration", and it told me that there were no books found. So I searched by author, "thompson, robert b.". It found the book, along with several of my others, but under the mangled title "Win NT TCP/IP Network Administration". What's interesting is that they apparently do the comparison search by ISBN rather than by title, because the comparison found that book at several sites, including Amazon, that I *know* list it by its proper title. I'm sure many people would find this site useful, though. I don't buy purely on price, so the only thing I would use it for would be to compare prices among the dealers that I do buy from. That is, when I search Shopper.com or Price Watch for a particular computer product, I sort by price, but I ignore the cheapest sellers. I've not had good experiences in the past with the bottom-feeders--many of them ship late, not at all, or returned and repackaged products as new--so I simply locate the lowest price among the sellers that I'm willing to do business with. Shopper.com, incidentally, would be considerably more useful to me if it listed such vendors as Insight and PC Connection. About the only seller they do list that I do business with is NECx. * * * * * This from Neil Sherin [nsherin@mindless.com]:
Thanks for the kind words. As far as I know, Microsoft provides no NAT support in NT, either natively or via Proxy Server. I did find the following page, however, which lists a lot of products that provide NAT services on NT. As far as NT at home, I don't see it as overkill at all. With memory selling for a buck a meg, hard disks for $10 a gig, and 400 MHz+ processors for under $100, the resource requirements of NT over and above those of Win9x are no longer an issue. Of course, I don't do all the things that a lot of home users do. I once wrote a hardware review where I spoofed the Quake benchmarks you find over on Tom's Hardware and AnandTech. For my game benchmark, I used Solitaire and reported that "... when I won a game, the cards moved really, really fast." There's no doubt that Win9x still has much broader hardware support than does NT, although that gap is disappearing fast. Once Windows 2000 Professional ships, if it ever does, I suspect Win9x will be relegated mostly to those using older PCs. W2KP's support for Plug-'N-Play and its broad support for peripherals should eliminate the last reasons to go with Win9x. It'll be faster than Win9x on systems with 64 MB or more, and is likely to be an order of magnitude more stable. * * * * * This from Neil Sherin [nsherin@mindless.com]:
Glad I could help. Incidentally, I forgot to ask last time, but why are you replacing your PC66 SDRAM on the system running dual Celeron/366 CPUs? Running a 100 MHz FSB with those CPUs puts you at 550 MHz, which probably isn't going to work. Or are you planning to use something odd like 83 MHz FSB? * * * * * This from Matt Beland [belandm@syspac.com]:
I'd read through that article when he first posted it, but I'd forgotten it was there. Bringing up a Linux box is on my list of things to do, albeit toward the bottom of the list, so I'll be sure to check this article before I start.
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Tuesday, 29 June 1999 [Last Week] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] [Next Week] Regular reader and contributor Shawn Wallbridge has opened his own web site, http://www.maximum-tech.com/. For now, you can read his personal page at http://www.maximum-tech.com/shawn.htm. He has some interesting stuff there, including daily notes on his experiences with Windows 2000. * * * * * Productive day yesterday. I got a couple of thousand words written on the book, exchanged tons of email and phone calls with vendors, and got a couple of new systems planned out. I'm going to shoot for at least another couple thousand words today. That should be a realistic goal, given that I don't have many vendor calls scheduled for today. We'll see what happens. * * * * * Interesting news on the FrontPage front. I may have been too hard on Microsoft. If so, I apologize to them. Pournelle says in Sunday's View that when Microsoft called him Monday morning (yes, I know, but then Pournelle is a noted SF author, so temporal displacement is commonplace for him...) they explained that the extensions work just fine if they are installed correctly. Now, it is conceivable that pair Networks does not know how to install and configure the FrontPage extensions properly, although they do host tens of thousands of web sites, including many that run FrontPage. On the other hand, say what you will about Microsoft, their people are good, hard working, and honest, almost without exception. When one of them says that something is or is not the case, I tend to believe him. It may be that, in the words of Cool Hand Luke, "what we have here is a failure to communicate." If the problems with the FrontPage extensions at pair Networks are in fact a result of misconfiguration rather than inherent flaws in the product, the fault may lie with pair Networks for paying insufficient attention to how the extensions should be configured, or it may lie with Microsoft for providing inadequate documentation. In either event, the problem should be solvable. But until someone can point me to an actual real-world web site of 25 MB or larger that is in fact using the extensions successfully, I have no way to judge. Any number of people have said anecdotally that FP extensions work, but I've yet to have anyone actually point to a working large-scale site that uses the extensions. Actually, whether they work or not is of no concern to me now. I'm happily running without them, and will continue to do so. But it would be nice to know the truth about this whole matter. * * * * * I spent a long time on the phone yesterday with Larry Aldridge at PC Power & Cooling. Among other things, we talked about power supplies. I asked him why PCP&C power supplies were better than the cheap Taiwanese stuff used in most systems. Most of what he said--bigger capacitors, ball bearing fans, running at a fraction of component ratings rather than near rated capacity, and so on--I already knew about. But he mentioned one thing that I didn't know about. Apparently, PCP&C frequently gets calls from customers who've just installed one of their power supplies, saying something like, "my system seems to be running faster now. Is that possible?" Larry's answer is that the system is now running the way it's supposed to run. Apparently, less capable power supplies strain to supply the properly regulated voltage required by the hard drive. As a result, although all modern hard drives are designed to run at a 1:1 interleave, many systems are not ready to read the next sector by the time it's under the drive head. The drive has to complete another rotation before that sector can be read, which greatly damages hard disk throughput. I've been building and working on PCs for more than 20 years now, and that's the first time I'd heard of that problem. Perhaps that explains the terrible performance of the Seagate UltraDMA hard disk in the system sitting behind me, which has a no-name Taiwanese power supply in it. Who'd have ever thought that replacing your power supply with a PCP&C unit could actually make your system run faster? I have a PCP&C power supply on the way in, so I'll replace the power supply in that system and see what happens. * * * * * This from Paul Robichaux [paul@robichaux.net]:
Hmm. I've not experienced anything like that. My problems with FTP Voyager had to do with the fact that its synchronization didn't work. I've not had any problem at all with the ftp client bundled into FP as the Web Publishing Wizard (or whatever they call it). My first thought would be that perhaps there's something weird in the Mac TCP/IP implementation. Can you try publishing from a Wintel box to see what happens? * * * * * This from Tom Syroid [tsyroid@home.com]:
Glad you like it. Actually, it's very much a work-in-progress. I'm gradually adding stuff as I actually hit the sites in question. Ultimately, my links page will probably be five to ten times its current size, perhaps more. I was messing about the other day with expandable/collapsible outlines, but I noticed FrontPage embedding JavaScript in my page, and that scared me. Perhaps I'll be forced to give it another try as the size of that page balloons. * * * * * Several messages from Bruce C. Denman [bdenman@ftc-i.net] [http://web.infoave.net/~bdenman], which contain quite a few interesting observations and questions. I've simply posted them as a continuing series, with my comments embedded:
Well, I posted that material in jest, but it does bring up a serious point. I don't concede that screening urine for drugs is in any respect "necessary." When mandated by a private company, that is acceptable, because any employee has the right to refuse the test and find work elsewhere. But when mandated by a governmental or pseudo-governmental body, such testing is clearly in violation of the Fourth Amendment. Such bodies should be permitted to require such tests only by establishing that probable cause exists and apply for and being granted a search warrant. Period.
Well, I quote the Fourth Amendment:
That seems pretty clear-cut to me. And people wonder why I have a link to the Bill of Rights on my links page.
You're right. I should probably update that page much more frequently and provide much more detail, but it's just not a high priority. Part of the problem is that things are very fluid around here. Barbara has a main system named thoth; I have four computers on and under my desk: my main workstation, kerby; my secondary workstation, sherlock; a resource server, currently named "temp"; and a test-bed system, currently sulla. In addition, there's another test-bed system on my credenza that's not really recognizable as a computer. It is a working computer, but has no case. The components simply lie on the work surface. Then there are other computers that perform specialized functions: a NetWare server, theodore; a voicemail/automated attendant system, valentine. There are several others similarly dedicated to particular purposes. Then there's the scads of stuff I have covering every horizontal surface (just ask my wife). Over the next couple of weekends, we'll be building at least two more and possibly as many as four more computers, which will be dedicated to such things as a Win98 test-bed; a Win2K Professional test-bed; a Linux test-bed, and so on. Stuff migrates back and forth between various systems, so saying what has what at any given moment is an exercise in frustration... All of that said, I will be creating a new web site for PC Hardware in a Nutshell and PC Hardware: The Definitive Guide (or perhaps two web sites). These will include a "Recommended" page of stuff we actually use and find useful, including low-cost & high-performance options. For example, we might recommend the Toshiba XM-6402B 32X ATAPI CD-ROM drive for those on a budget, while we'll recommend the Plextor UltraPlex Wide SCSI CD-ROM drive for those who are looking for take-no-prisoners performance. Or we might recommend a $200+ Matrox Millennium G400/Max for those who want killer 2D/3D performance and are willing to pay for it, while recommending a $35 Intel i740-based video card for those who want maximum bang for the buck.
The rest of us are benefiting from the technology that's been rolled out to appeal to gamers. A few years ago, there were real differences in video cards and chipsets that impacted regular users. Nowadays, just about anything good enough to claim some shelf space is going to be more than sufficient for any but the very hard-core gamer. Performance benchmarks and the similar stuff that claims so much attention over on AnandTech and Tom's Hardware really doesn't have a lot to do with the real world. Any video card based on the TNT2, Voodoo3, or G400 is so fast that distinctions are meaningless to the 99.99% of computer users that don't live in Quake. Much more important than raw speed are issues like driver functionality and stability, hardware compatibility and quality, and so on. I've used Matrox video cards for years, and nothing I've seen from other manufacturers even tempts me to change that. As far as the vertical integration you mention, companies like Matrox and ATI have always used their own chipsets. Other companies are beginning to see the advantages of such vertical integration, but the likely result is a consolidation in the video card industry. My guess is that there will be only a handful of video card manufacturers two years from now. Which those will be will depend on how good a job their marketing and engineering departments do. My guess is that Matrox will continue as the Gold Standard in business video; nVIDIA and their TNT line will eventually kill 3dfx and the Voodoo. There will probably be one or two other major or semi-major players remaining, possibly including Intel, and a handful of also rans.
I must confess that I don't know all that much about sound cards, although that will change as I start writing about them. Once again, I'm not a gamer, so I haven't had reason to look at the high-end stuff. I think that eventually sound cards will go away, except for very high-end cards designed for gamers and dedicated cards used by professional audio folks. Note the increasing number of motherboards that embed sound functions, many using the Creative ES1373 chip. The sound that chip provides has been more than good enough for anything I've cared to do. We'll see what happens as I get deeper into sound.
Modems are essentially at the end of their life cycle. With V.90, the technology has gotten about as good as it's ever going to get. Not much more can be done with modems because a standard telephone line provides only 3 KHz of bandwidth (2,600 Hz with guard bands). We're very nearly at the theoretical Shannon Limit now. So basically, modems have become a commodity. As with any commoditized product, the low-cost producer is the guy who makes the money. One way to be a low-cost modem producer is to offload processing from a chip on the modem board itself to the main system CPU. That's the reason (and the only reason) for the so-called WinModems. They're a horrible idea, but they allow the manufacturer to save a few bucks. In an industry where saving a few cents is a goal worth pursuing, saving dollars is the Holy Grail. But buying an external modem is a better idea anyway.
I ordered my Dell Dimension XPS-M200s with 64 MB installed, so I don't know from firsthand experience. However, you can find memory facts for these systems here. That page says, "The only 32-MB SDRAM DIMMs validated for use in this computer are the following: Samsung KMM366S403AT1-G2, Hitachi HB526A464EN-10, Samsung KMM366S403AT-G2, Toshiba THMY644021AEG-12A. But I suspect you'll find that any equivalent DIMM will work just fine.
Yes, I bought sherlock fully aware that it would never have more than the 64 MB of RAM I ordered it with. At the time, 64 MB seemed likely to be enough for the life of the system. Nowadays, I build Win98 boxes with 64 MB, and NT boxes with at least 128 MB. There's a lesson there... I no longer buy systems from Dell or Gateway, although I continue to recommend Dell to friends who are considering buying a machine. Gateway's tech support simply got so bad that I could no longer recommend them. Also, the historic price difference between Gateway and Dell of $200 to $300 has completely disappeared, and that differential was my only reason ever for buying Gateway. Gateway simply makes no sense to me now that Dell is at or very near Gateway's price (and often below it). As far as modems, I'm still running a 33.6 USR Courier v.Everything. I get about 3.3 to 3.5 KB/s. For a long time, it wasn't worth upgrading to 56 KB/s for me, because we're at the very end of a long local loop. A year or so back, the phone company buried a SLC (subscriber loop circuit) box (one of those things the size of a tractor-trailer) in a parking lot at a shopping center a mile or so from here. Now I get 31.6 connections almost every time, and could probably get pretty high throughput with a V.90 modem. But I'm perfectly happy with 31.6. All my mail runs in the background, WinGate caches web pages for me, etc. A 56K modem just won't do much for me. I'm holding out for ADSL and/or cable modem.
I haven't looked at the price of RAM recently, but $75 seems high for a 32 MB upgrade. As far as the cost of NT, I'm sure it varies from manufacturer to manufacturer. Dell pays a lot less for it, I'm sure, than a smaller maker. On the other hand, now that Dell is selling systems with Linux pre-installed, they may suddenly find they're paying more for NT. At any rate, the actual cost of NT Workstation versus Windows 98 is indicated by the fact that most dealers charge $49 to $99 additional for NT. I've seen NTW advertised for about $40 more than the same place was charging for a full Windows 98, so the price difference shouldn't be a major issue.
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Wednesday, 30 June 1999 [Last Week] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] [Next Week] What a way to start the day. I was working on this page when Barbara headed down the stairs to leave for the library. She called up to tell me that Kerry, our older Border Collie, had been sick all over the place. He had a minor accident last night, so we gave him some Imodium and left the door into the unfinished part of the basement open for him. When I got downstairs this morning, there were accidents all over the carpet in my mother's apartment, as well as all over the floor in the basement. Probably 15 or 20 separate little surprises. I used the hose to wash out the basement (and the dog), but that wasn't an option in my mother's apartment. What a way to start the day. * * * * * Microsoft still hasn't made Windows 98 Service Pack 1 available for download as a single integrated product, but they have put parts of it up on their corporate page here. It's "corporate" only in the sense that you can download the updates in batch mode and apply them locally to multiple machines, as opposed to the "Windows Update" feature, which requires you to download each update individually for each machine you want to patch. * * * * * This from Ricky Mortimer [ricky.mortimer@bt.com]:
The Promise FastTrak is a good solution for small servers and high-end personal PCs. I've posted an updated review on the original FastTrak here. You may also want to consider the FastTrak/66, which support Ultra/66 drives. The Promise FastTrak gets around a lot of the limitations of ATA, but it is still ATA, and cannot compete on an equal footing with a high-end (U2W) SCSI solution. On the other hand, it doesn't cost like U2W, either. My advice is to go with the FastTrak or FastTrak/66 for either a personal workstation or a small (< 10 or 15 users) server. For bigger servers, SCSI is the way to go. For a personal workstation, SCSI may also be the way to go if: a. The additional cost is not a major barrier * * * * * This from Shawn Wallbridge [shawnw@elections.mb.ca]:
I'm sorry. I wasn't clear. What I meant was an example site that was running on UNIX. I have no doubt that FP Extensions work correctly on NT. But the problem seems to be with UNIX, either because pair has not configured it correctly or because the UNIX version of the Extensions simply doesn't work properly. As far as your web site, you might not have expected Tom or me to mention it, but you should have. That's one of the interesting things about the web. News gets out fast. If you're set up to log accesses (which you should be), I suspect you'll find you'll be getting hits from all over the world soon. As far as Shaw, I'm not sure why they care how you choose to use your upload quota. Speaking of which, some may not be aware that @Home has quietly implemented a 128 K/s upload throttle on their accounts. They're still advertising that they provide speeds hundreds of times faster than dial-up, which obviously is not the case with uploads limited to 128 K/s, but there it is. * * * * * This followup from Shawn Wallbridge [shawnw@elections.mb.ca]:
Yes, Microsoft does provide UNIX extensions. I doubt there's any conscious attempt on their part to make the UNIX versions less capable than the NT versions, but I suspect a lot more attention is paid to the NT versions. Congratulations on your site. I suspect you'll be getting a lot more than 14 hits before long. I guess the restrictions and new tier of service are kind of inevitable. A lot of people will be taking advantage of that cheap big pipe, but ultimately it all comes back to how big Shaw's pipe to the Internet is. On the other hand, a lot of web sites have run successfully with a 128 K/s pipe, so I suspect you'll be fine. * * * * * This from Dave Farquhar [farquhar@lcms.org]:
Indeed. PC Power & Cooling isn't the only company that makes decent power supplies, but in my experience they make the best ones. And they're not really that expensive. One can get one of their lower power units for under $50, and even the 300W units cluster around $100. As far as the RAM, I was assuming that the $75 price was for a 32 MB DIMM installed. I consider that a pretty high price. If it was for the DIMM alone, that's outrageous. As far as running 384 MB, I think you might find that overkill. In my experience with NT, the move from 32 MB to 64 MB makes a huge improvement; from 64 MB to 128 MB makes a big improvement; from 128 MB to 256 MB makes a barely noticeable improvement. That obviously depends a lot on what you're doing. If you're an industrial strength Photoshop user, 256 MB is almost certainly worthwhile, and more would help. If you're running a typical application mix, though, 128 MB is definitely the sweet spot for NT. I was surprised to learn of the problem with the Dell power supply. I'd never thought about it. I've come to expect that kind of thing from Compaq, which has a tendency to use proprietary designs for what appears to be the sole sake of being proprietary, but I'd have thought that Dell would stick to standard components. I agree about the memory/motherboard issue. While the cost of a new motherboard isn't trivial, there are many benefits to getting one. Not least is having a current chipset with support for large hard drives and for new technologies like AGP and UDMA. I'd agree that anyone who is considering spending a significant amount of money on a memory upgrade should compare the total costs of simply buying additional older style memory versus buying a new motherboard with memory to fit it. * * * * * This followup from Dave Farquhar [farquhar@lcms.org]:
Well, that's a radical thought. I can't imagine running Windows 98 on a 384 MB system, but I guess it sure would be fast running from a RAM disk. On the other hand, I'd think it'd be pretty fast running natively in 384 MB as well. * * * * * This from Colm De Barra [colm@lab.cio.dnp.co.jp]:
Thanks for the kind words. I probably wasn't clear about the hardware issues. With Windows NT, people assume that they can assemble any kind of miscellaneous collection of pieces and have NT work. Microsoft is up-front about what's certified to run NT, and I've never had any stability problems running NT on a box that was fully HCL-compliant. For that matter, I've had few problems running NT on one that wasn't, but used recent mainstream components. The problems start when people attempt to run NT with old components or strange no-name stuff, and particularly with third-party drivers. That's not an issue with Linux, which supports a much narrower range of hardware than does NT. Also, with Linux, drivers are developed on the Open Source model, with ad hoc peer review, an advantage that third-party drivers don't have. My gut reaction is that NT and UNIX variants are about the same in terms of overall stability at the kernel level. I have NT servers that run for months on end without a reboot. In fact, about the only reason that our NT machines get shutdown (other than for hardware or driver upgrades) is when we have a long-term power failure. My wife's main workstation, thoth, is also the main data depository on our network. It once ran for more than seven months without a reboot. The only reason that string was broken was a major power failure. I have spoken to many people who routinely run NT for a year a more without a reboot, so I don't think the inherent stability of NT is the issue.
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Thursday, 1 July 1999 [Last Week] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] [Next Week] Well, Barbara concluded that perhaps the dog food was at fault. We didn't really think that was the likely cause, but Duncan started refusing to eat it a couple of weeks ago. He went days without eating, until we finally gave him another brand of dog food. At that point, we figured he was just being weird, as Border Collies often are, so we started giving the old food to Kerry. Kerry is the anti-Mikey--he'll eat anything. So when Kerry started having diarrhea and vomiting, we figured that perhaps the dog food was bad. That meant disposing of 30 or 35 pounds (say 15 kilos) of dog food. We thought about putting it in the trash, but I came up with the brilliant idea of putting it down the disposer in the kitchen sink. Not one of my better ideas. The disposer clogged and overheated. We kept trying to reset it after letting it cool, and were able to get a bit down at a time. What I really needed was one of those gasoline-powered disposers that Tim Taylor installed on Tool Time. We did eventually get it down, though. And just as the last chunk of dog food disappeared down the disposer, Barbara decided to empty the bucket of water that she had her paint brushes and rollers soaking in. The roller was jammed on the handle pretty tightly, and as she yanked on it, it came off. Unfortunately, it let go suddenly, and the bucket of white paint-water ended up all over the kitchen and both of us. At that point, all you can do is laugh. In the immortal words of someone or another, "I should have stood in bed." * * * * * Here's an attempted intellectual property grab of mammoth proportions. Wired.com reports that Yahoo, which recently bought GeoCities, has instituted a few minor changes in the service agreement for GeoCities users. In simple terms, Yahoo claims unlimited and irrevocable rights to any content posted on GeoCities. That's right, if you maintain a web site on GeoCities, tough break. Yahoo says it owns all web pages, articles, and images on member sites and has irrevocable rights to them for all time. Geez. * * * * * Sometimes I wonder if I'm the only one who reports on common IE bugs. I keep running across them. I mean, it's not like these are particularly obscure bugs, and yet I see nothing in the mainstream media about them. Here's another one, which didn't crop up with my original IE5 installation, but has occurred ever since I installed Office 2000. The fonts don't stay put. IE offers five standard font sizes, from Smallest through Largest, with the middle setting, Medium, the default. I've always kept my default font size set to Larger, but that no longer works properly. IE arbitrarily resets the default font size to Medium, and I can find no rhyme or reason for it. It makes no difference whether or not other instances of IE are open. For example, I have my default start page set to the local copy of the Links page for this site (that, incidentally, is itself a workaround for the fact that selecting a URL from a menu on the links bar opens that URL in the first instance of IE rather than the current active instance). If I start IE, it may come up in Medium. I reset it to Larger and exit. I then immediately start IE again. Half the time, it comes up in Medium, and half the time in Larger. The only consistent aspect of all this is that once IE comes up in Medium, it will never again come up in Larger until I manually choose Larger. * * * * * This from Frank A. Love [falove@home.com] regarding the Promise FastTrak IDE RAID controller:
No. Embedded ATA interfaces on motherboards require one IRQ for the Primary channel and a second IRQ for the Secondary channel. The Promise FastTrak requires only one IRQ to support all four devices. In theory, you could keep both Primary and Secondary enabled on the motherboard and allocate an unused IRQ to the FastTrak, which would allow you to support eight devices (two on each embedded controller and four on the FastTrak). In practice, there are not many systems with that many drive bays or that many free IRQs. Probably the best overall solution is to keep your boot drive and CD-ROM drive on the embedded Primary controller, disable the Secondary controller, assign its IRQ to the FastTrak, and use the FastTrak to support two, three, or four drives in an array. * * * * * This from Andrew Sabel [asabel@wrtsun02.svidaho.net]:
As far as I know, it's not. To the best of my recollection, what they passed was a law making it illegal to award a prize larger than $1,000 in such a race. * * * * * This from Ken Scott [kscott@pcisys.net]:
Well, in general it's a good idea to let the operating system handle resources itself, so I'd be inclined to just give Windows NT the memory and let it make the best use of it. In my own environment (clients and small servers), 128 MB is sufficient for NT to do next to no swapping, and with 256 MB I can go all day long with very little disk access, except when I do an explicit save or something similar. Thanks for the kind words.
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Friday, 2 July 1999 [Last Week] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] [Next Week] Executive Software, the Diskeeper folks, are trumpeting the results of a recent study by NTSL that found that defragmenting a hard disk can provide significant performance increases. Given that Executive Software engaged NTSL to do the study, I'm sure some people will regard the results as biased. Be that as it may, my own experience is that defragging an NTFS volume can pay big performance dividends. When I first started with NT, I believed Microsoft's assertions that NTFS was not subject to fragmentation. I ran one NT box for more than a year without defragmenting it. I had a general impression that disk access had slowed down, but the process was so gradual that it was hard to say whether the disk was really slower or it was just my imagination. Then one day I happened across the free Diskeeper Lite product. I download it and ran it. It took forever to run because the disk display was pretty much the solid red used to flag fragmented files. After it completed, disk access seemed about twice as fast. I use Diskeeper on all my NT boxes, and recommend it to others. If you're running NT on a personal workstation, the free Diskeeper Lite is more than Good Enough. If you're running a server or need such things as scheduled defragmentation, the commercial version is worth paying for. * * * * * A big truck just showed up out front to deliver a mattress. I must say that $500 for a mattress seems expensive to me. It's much thicker than the old one. That'll take a little getting used to. But Barbara's happy, and that's what counts. * * * * * This from bdenman [bdenman@FTC-I.NET]:
Right. The problem does not occur in the situation you describe. Here's what causes the problem reproducibly. 1. Make your Links bar a full bar by dragging it down below the address bar. 2. Rather than putting URLs directly on that bar, create folders to put the URLs into. 3. Open an instance of IE and display a page. 4. Open another instance (doesn't matter how -- via icon on desktop, Ctrl-N, etc.) 5. Click on a folder on the "menu bar" to display a drop-down list of the URLs it contains. 6. Click on one of those URLs. 7. IE leaves the current page displayed in the active instance and displays the new URL in the first instance of IE you opened. I wanted to use a "menu" bar with tiered folders/files to make it easy to jump among web sites. That doesn't work. I can make it work by dragging the Links bar to make it so short that all that shows is the >> on the right of the address bar, but that means extra mouses clicks to get what I want. I settled on just making my own links page, which gets around that problem nicely. * * * * * This followup from bdenman [bdenman@FTC-I.NET]:
I guess it does it under Win98 as well. I thought it did, but I couldn't remember for sure so I didn't want to say it. * * * * * This from Dave Farquhar [farquhar@lcms.org]:
Good points. And although the "instant on" feature would be nice, I'd much rather have an "instant off" feature. My main workstation, kerby, takes literally 15 minutes to half an hour to shutdown. I know the problem--there's a service that's not terminating in a timely manner--but I sure can't fix it. * * * * * This from [CatCandi@aol.com]:
Sure. Just about any mail-order supplier should carry them, and you can probably even find them locally at a CompUSA or similar place. I found one at NECx here. I've never much liked cleaning cartridges of any sort, and I don't use them in my Travan 8 drive. Instead, I vacuum it out every couple of months. Once a month or so, I use a cotton swab and rubbing alcohol to clean the heads and rollers gently. Cleaning is particularly important with Travan drives. When I first got mine, I noticed that the manual said to clean it after every 10 hours of operation. I ignored that, of course, because I'd never done much cleaning of any removable media drives other than blowing out the dust occasionally. But after I used that drive for a while, I couldn't complete a backup without getting at least half a dozen errors. I finally cleaned the drive, and the errors went away. * * * * * This, regarding the Yahoo content grab, from Bo Leuf [bo@leuf.net]:
Yes. Yahoo now says they don't really mean it, but I don't see them changing their verbiage. It seems to me that the safe thing to do is abandon your GeoCities sites entirely. Of course, given their recent grab, Yahoo is likely to say that they own anything that's abandoned. But they can't have it all ways. I have never much liked Yahoo. They are sloppy and unresponsive, among other things. More than a year ago, I noticed that they had another company named Triad Technology Group, this one an Oregon-based employment agency, pointing to my URL. I emailed them repeatedly, and never got so much as a reply. To this day, the pointer is still wrong. I have no use for Yahoo whatever. * * * * * This, regarding the IE font problem, from Bo Leuf [bo@leuf.net]:
Sure, but that's not at issue here. Example: (1) no applications running. (2) Start IE5, and it comes up with Larger font. (3) Close IE5. (4) Start IE5, and it comes up with Larger font. (5) Close IE5. (6) Start IE5 and it comes up with Medium font. I mean this literally--no steps in between. And it's not reproducible. Sometimes it does it the first time it comes up, and sometimes it will come up with Larger several times before it changes its mind and goes to medium. And that's not the only inconsistent thing. Literally 99% of the times I start IE5 by double-clicking the desktop icon, it comes up full screen, which is my preference. One time in 100, though, it comes up windowed. And there are many other similar problems, which I don't have the time to write about. IE5 simply does not behave reproducibly. That's odd for any piece of software.
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Saturday, 3 July 1999 [Last Week] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] [Next Week] Not that much going on today. I pulled the Dell Dimension XPS m200s box off my desk to do some cleaning and upgrading. It's sitting on the kitchen table right now with the cover off, leaking dust dinosaurs. After we get it cleaning out (and perhaps replace the CD-ROM drive which is either dead or simply too dirty to read CDs), we're going to install the proprietary interface for my Plustek scanner. Incidentally, don't even think about buying a Plustek product. Not only do they not update drivers for recently discontinued models, they don't even provide updated drivers for current models. Shortly after I bought this Plustek Color 6000 scanner, I asked them when they'd ship a driver for NT4. They said they had no plans to do so. Their solution was that I should buy a new scanner. Which I may do, but certainly not from them. So, as far as that scanner is concerned, I'm limited to running it under Windows 95. I'm turning the Dell into a dedicated Windows 98 box. Perhaps the Plustek Windows 95 drivers will work with Windows 98. We'll see. * * * * * This from H [hstuck@excite.com]:
I'd like that too, but it doesn't look like it will happen any time soon. I had originally drawn some of the same conclusions as you have about window size and positioning, but they turn out not to be the case. IE5, for example, sometimes opens in a window rather than maximized even though it was last maximized, and even immediately after a reboot. I've resigned myself to the fact that IE does not behave consistently, and probably never will. I still use it, because with all its faults its still better than Opera and much better than Navigator.
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Sunday, 4 July 1999 [Last Week] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] [Next Week] Independence Day (US) Well, I'm now the proud owner of an HP 6200CXi scanner. After rebuilding the Dell box, installing Windows 98, and attempting to get the drivers for the damned Plustek scanner to load, I gave that up as a bad idea. I checked KillerApp.com to see what the best-selling scanner models were. HP headed the list, of course, but I was shocked to find just how inexpensive a decent flat-bed scanner is nowadays. The 6200 had everything I wanted, so I started checking prices. PC Connection was, as usual, high. They wanted $399 for it and said they could drop that only by $10 or so, even though numerous places on the web were selling that model for $350 or so. Even if I'd ordered it from them, I wouldn't have gotten it until Tuesday, so decided to check local prices. I called Computer & Software Outlet. They had it for $389, but were willing to drop that by $10. There was less than an hour until they closed, so Barbara and I headed over and bought a scanner. It's set up on the kitchen table, where the Dell box is living temporarily. The 6200 has USB and SCSI interfaces, so I installed an Adaptec 2920 SCSI host adapter. I don't have an external cable handy (although I'm sure there are some in my cable boxes somewhere), so I decided to use USB. Everything works fine. * * * * * The following exchange of email between Tom Syroid and me started when he asked me if I could send him a CD. I didn't know exactly what I had to do to make sure it got through customs, which started this exchange.
Okay. Will do. I assume the post office will have the green
customs thingee. Whatever happened to the North American Free Trade
Agreement?
Frankly, I'm not sure why we have customs between our two countries. Perhaps it's naive of me, but I think goods should be completely free to move between Canada and the US without any government hindrance. It seems to me that I should be able to just drop something in the mail with your address on it (or vice versa) and have it delivered without further ado. I mean, the concept of countries is all well and good, I suppose, but it seems to me that they take themselves too seriously.
On the other hand, I have to say that if I were Canadian I'd be
concerned about climbing into bed with the 900 pound gorilla. The logic of
empire is that two exist, one wins, and that one proceeds to suck up
everything it wants. I half-seriously suggested several years ago to a
British friend that it was time for a rapprochement between mother country
and colonies, and that England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales would make
four good states.
* * * * * This from Judas [Judas@gbso.net]:
Unfortunately, phone tapping isn't something one can explain briefly. A complete explanation would be book-length, and a partial one is fairly useless. You can certainly tap and record your own residential phone line, although doing so may be illegal. Some states require that only one party to the conversation be aware that the conversation is being recorded, while other states require that all parties be aware. The easiest way to record conversations is to use an inductive coupler to feed a tape recorder. If that recorder has a VOX (voice activation) setting, you can turn that on so that the recorder tapes only when there is activity on the line. For a more formal installation, you can install a high-impedance bridge across tip and ring on the CO line and feed the output to the recorder. * * * * * This from Chuck Waggoner [waggoner@gis.net]:
I know what you say is true, because I've encountered it myself. Fifteen years ago, my brother was Technical Director at a local television station. They, of course, used mostly the big reel-to-reel VTR machines, as well as cartridge loaders for promos, PSAs, etc. But they also had several high-end Beta and VHS VCR's. While I was visiting the station one time, I happened to mention to Bill that I needed to buy some VCR tapes. He said not to bother, because I could have as many as I wanted for free. He took me to a closet where they had probably several hundred top-quality VCR tapes sitting in racks. I felt funny about accepting any, but he said that they used them once and then retired them to this closet where any employee was welcome to take as many as he wanted. They also followed a head cleaning regimen much like that you describe. I suspect the reason so many of us are able to treat head cleaning so casually is that video recording is analog, with no error correction, while computer recording is digital, with ECC out the wazoo. Still, you've convinced me, and I plan to start cleaning my tape drive heads much more frequently. As far as Quicken 99, I'm sorry to hear about your problems, but I can't say they surprise me. Intuit has long been one of my least favorite companies. In addition to obnoxious attempts to force registration, they also force you to look at ads when you use products that you've bought and paid for. Barbara uses Quicken to manage our checkbook, but I hate it. I tried at one point to convince her to switch to Microsoft Money, but she's happy with Quicken.
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