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Week of 11 September 2000 Friday, 05 July 2002 08:13 A (mostly) daily journal of the trials, tribulations, and random observations of Robert Bruce Thompson, a writer of computer books. |
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recent update Monday, 11 September 2000 [Last Week] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] [Next Week]
Our SETI@Home group now has 53 members and has passed 9,700 work units complete. Congratulations to team members JCMorales and Dave Browning, who recently passed the 100 work unit milestone, and johnny5, who recently passed the 50 work unit milestone. If you haven't joined our SETI effort, please do. Here's how. Malcolm tried to bite me last night. Fortunately, at age 47 I still have the reflexes of a rattlesnake. An old, decrepit rattlesnake, perhaps, but a rattlesnake nevertheless. It started when I walked into the den. Kerry was lying on the floor with his food bowl in front of him. Malcolm was lying a couple of feet away, staring covetously at Kerry's food. Standing between them, I reached down to pet Kerry, and Malcolm growled at me. Malcolm then snouted my other hand, asking to be petted. I reached over to pet Malcolm, and he lunged with a vicious snarl and snapping of teeth. Reminded me of a crocodile charging out the river to snatch a calf. After I finished yelling at him and beating him about the head and shoulders, I dragged him over and tossed him in his crate. Except for the fact that he'd drive me insane with his whining, I'd just leave him there until Barbara returns home. I finished up the article for the O'Reilly web site last night and sent it off to Pournelle for a sanity check. Barbara's name is on the article, too, but she'll just have to trust me. O'Reilly originally wanted the article by Wednesday the 6th, but the delay in publication of PC Hardware in a Nutshell from 9/22 until 10/10 allowed them to extend that deadline somewhat. Pournelle sent back the article with annotations early this morning, so I'll get those changes incorporated and get the article off to O'Reilly today. And then I'll get back to work on the HardwareGuys.com web site. I haven't published any of the changes I've made to it, but I hope to have it whipped into shape enough to do that later this week. -----Original Message----- Thanks for the correction. I do my ripping on my HP burner, which seems to perform accurate DAE with EAC. I can hear absolutely no audible difference between source and copy (and I havve listened pretty carefully). nor are there any audible artifacts such as pops, crackles, or dropouts. I've found that my CD dirve (a Canadian brand called LG), wihich seems to be sompetent enough otherwise, will not do reliable DAE, even with EAC. I can guarantee you that my next machine will have a Plextor, either a drive or a burner. Best If I were building a new system right now, I'd use the Plextor 10/12/32A ATAPI drive. We've been delighted with ours, both for burning and for DAE. -----Original Message----- Hi Robert You can pull an individual file out of a Ghost image file using Ghost explorer. Though it is not 100% successful as sometimes the file gets corrupted when it is extracted from the drive image. At work when we upgrade some one to a new PC we often put a copy of a drive image of their old PC on the new one so if some of their data was missed during the migration they can use Ghost explorer to grab the file. Yep. That "not 100% successful" part is what I meant when I said I didn't trust image file backup for general backup purposes. -----Original Message----- Regarding the DVD not working on a G2K system after installing a new video card. I too experienced the same problem. I installed a TNT ULTRA II video card and the DVD would not work. I am running my screen at 1024x768 resolution. Dropping the resolution to 800x600 enabled the DVD to play properly. Seems that the G2K DVD decoder does not know how to handle the higher resolutions. Thanks. I hope that works for him. -----Original Message----- My father worked in the US Embassy in Lagos, Nigeria for a couple of years, and saw plenty of these scams played on Americans. A common trick was to tell victims that they do not need a visa to go to Nigeria, which is false, and lands them in a very uncomfortable situation. The best story, though, was of an American who was approached in the Lagos airport by a scammer. The would-be victim pretended to go along with the scam, got in his car with the scammer, but instead of driving the scammer where he wanted, suddenly pulled through the gates of a military barracks. The scammer jumped out of the car and tried to run, but was caught. The would-be victim explained what had happened to the commander, who after listening said "Ok, we'll take him out and shoot him". The American of course protested that this would be too much, and was told "Ok, we'll just beat him up then." I'm not sure if the American ever found out what eventually happened to the scammer. In Lagos, US embassy personnel did not drive to the airport except in an armored car -- not because of terrorism, either; just due to random violence. This was about three years ago. The quotes are of course approximate. -- Hmm. No "of course" about it. If I'd found myself in that situation and the commander had offered to shoot the miscreant, I'd have said "thanks very much" and offered the commander and his men a gratuity. Apparently, Nigeria is more enlightened in at least some respects than the US. -----Original Message----- Bob – Read with interest your comments on your tape backup method vs. cloning copies. I have always wondered how tape (or cloning, for that matter) could achieve a 100% accurate copy of the OS it was running on. I strongly suspect it cain't be did. I know from experience that winfile.exe cannot copy certain files in NT4 when I am using NT4 to copy. That is one of the reasons I have a second OS in all of the boxes I use (except for SANDBOX – The Linux experiment). I use NT4 to copy all the partitions except F: (where NT4 lives), then switch to W2K Pro to copy F: to my second duplicate HD, on partition L:. I then archive the second HD to a series of 1.1GB MO disks on a monthly basis, as disaster recovery insurance. At all times, I have a 100% accurate, up-to-date (< a week) copy of DRIVE0. I can restore from this by copying back down to individual files, if desired, quickly and easily – and have often done so. I dare say that changing the settings in winfile.exe would enable me to make daily incremental copies very quickly, rather than the ~30-40 minutes it takes me to make a full copy of DRIVE0 on Sunday evenings. I have not as yet had the need to do this. YMMV, of course. Certainly, MO media as a backup copy method would not handle archiving an 80GB Maxtor HD. Tape backup from the copy on DRIVE1 would be more appropriate in this case. My HDs are both <9GB, so I do not have that problem. I will likely go to tape when MO media become unwieldy for archiving. Perhaps you might consider thinking "out of the box" imposed by your dependency on tape. Tape is not the only alternative, y'know!<BG> - and a second HD is a lot cheaper than tape and all its paraphernalia. Regards, JHR -- There's no "out of the box" thinking involved. The simple fact is that there is no alternative to tape for routine general backup. Every alternative has one or more fatal flaws, whether it be media cost, speed, capacity, drive-dependency, transportability, or whatever. In fact, I use a variety of methods to protect my data, including mirrored hard disks, an xcopy batch file that copies data from one machine to another, copying data periodically to CD-R discs, and so on. All of those are a useful adjunct to tape, but none of them are a replacement for it. My DDS3 tape drive writes about 100 MB/min to a 12/24 GB tape that costs about $12. I can carry that tape off-site for protection against fires or other disasters. I can restore it using the original DDS3 tape drive or any other DDS3 tape drive. When an alternative technology can match or exceed all of those criteria, I'll consider replacing the tape drive. But not until then.
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Tuesday, 12 September 2000 [Last Week] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] [Next Week] Thanks to everyone who has ordered PC Hardware in a Nutshell and let me know that they'd ordered. So far, I've heard from seven readers who have ordered copies, but my report page on Fatbrain is reflecting only three of those orders, all on 9/8 or 9/9. Before things really start to roll, I want to make sure the bugs are worked out, so I've contacted Fatbrain to make sure the links I'm using will get proper credit assigned to me. It may be that I've botched the link (in the sense that it works, but I don't get credit) or it may be that Fatbrain doesn't update my stats page immediately. I'll find out. In the mean time, if you order the book from the above link, I'd appreciate it if you would either send me a copy of the confirmation email or your order number (which looks something like YAF9999). Malcolm acted like a normal puppy all day yesterday and this morning. Apparently, being thrashed after trying to bite me taught him a lesson. Barbara and I have gone back and forth about whether Malcolm's behavior problems are a dominance issue or a fear-aggression issue. In favor of the latter, he trembles terribly when he's in growly mode and we attempt to pet him. But in favor of the former, my long and loud laying down of the law the other night appears to have worked wonders, so perhaps it is a dominance issue and he's realized that I'm not a good candidate for being dominated. Then again, it may be a combination. Having two intact males living in such close proximity is not natural from a dog's point of view, so Malcolm is having to deal with something that he's not equipped by instinct to handle. Oh, well. We'll get it worked out, or so I hope. The other thing that seems to help is taking him outdoors every couple of hours and running him ragged. I sent the web article off to O'Reilly yesterday, and immediately began work on the HardwareGuys.com web site, although I haven't posted any of the changes up to the server yet. I think I'll do so today, although things are still a mess. There are all kinds of obsolete, incomplete, and otherwise unsuitable pages, a bunch of broken links, and so on. It is, to say the least, a work in progress. But if you want to see where we're heading with it, check it out. Once I have things in a decent state, I'll ask my readers to report problems, errors, broken links, and so on, but for now just assume that if there's a problem I already know about it but haven't had time to fix it yet. Well, I'd better get back to work. In addition to everything else, I have to find the estimated tax forms--not easy with Barbara gone--and pay my state and federal estimated income taxes before the 15th. Grrrrrr.
-----Original Message----- Bob - I still don't understand how tape (or any other copy/backup scheme) can make a 100% accurate copy/backup of the OS it is running on; for instance, backing up your NT4 partition while the tape is running on NT4. Elucidate and enlighten, please! Regards, JHR Well, there's no rule from on high that says an open file can't be copied. That's simply a restriction enforced by the OS to prevent data corruption, as for example if an open database file were copied and then subsequently an index file that had been updated in the interim. Backup software can and does copy files that would normally be open, including system files such as the hive files that comprise the registry. If you're really concerned about that, though, there's an easy solution. In addition to your main NT installation, put a minimal installation of Windows NT on another partition. In addition to being great insurance against a problem with the main NT installation (you can boot the minimal installation and use it to access NTFS volumes), you can run your tape backup software after booting from the minimal installation, thereby guaranteeing that everything on the main volume is closed and static. Neither tape nor the method you use guarantees an exact copy, though. There is no way to guarantee an exact copy of a Windows 9X/NT/2K volume using file-by-file methods because of the way Windows dynamically generates short aliases for long directory names and then references those short aliases in the registry. That is to say, if you shut down Windows as you describe, boot a different copy of Windows on a separate volume, and then copy your main Windows volume to an MO disc, then delete your main Windows volume, then copy the contents of the MO disc back to the original location, some of your programs may no longer work. You may think you have an exact copy of your main Windows volume, but you don't. And there's nothing you can do about it, short of using something like Ghost or DriveImage. -----Original Message----- To you and your husband. I am the 51st person in your Seti@home effort and I thought you'd just like to know that I'm reading, etc. Not quite sure I even remember anymore how I found your journal -- perhaps a link off of Jerry Pournelle's mail page or something. Though I wasn't reading his very much either until very recently and I like that I can always find today's stuff on your page without having to search through a bunch of junk. I havent yet figured out how to get quickly to the current day's stuff on Mr. Pournelle's page. Some of the hardware stuff you talk about goes over my head. But I love the talk about your work, your family, general politics stuff. Communication and the other -- well, it is keeping me up in the computer business more than I'd otherwise be. And I do find that stuff interesting even if I don't understand it completely. I am a 27-year old database programmer currently working for Boeing. I have my notebook on all day even when I am working -- for to check messages and stuff. So I figured that it might as well be running SETI if it is on anyway. At Boeing, we are not allowed to run Seti over the company network. They made a big deal about this a while back. But the notebook is my personal computer. So. Anyway, where do you stand on the MCSE certifications. Are they worth anything out in the workforce? I got this job as a fortunate upgrade from a temporary job I had. I have learned pretty much everything I do from hands-on -- doing it instead of being taught it in any class. But I keep looking for the theoretical knowledge to back up my practical. Sarah Heacock Thanks for the kind words. As far as Jerry's page, he does have links for each day down the left, but the problem is that he tends to stick new stuff in the middle of older stuff when the new stuff pertains directly to the older stuff. I decided long ago that doing that led to insanity among my readers, so I post stuff purely sequentially. As far as the MCSE, it's not worth what it once was. As happened with the Novell CNE/MCNE, there are now a lot of "paper MCSEs" out there. Still, if you're interested in working with NT/2000, the MCSE is a must-have, if only because potential employers may not consider you unless you have one. When I got my CNE/ECNE/MCNE, having the Novell certification was still worth an extra $10,000 to $20,000 in annual salary. The same was true initially of the MCSE. But nowadays, there are so many MCSEs out there that all having an MCSE does is help you get hired. If it were me, I'd learn Red Hat Linux and get a Linux certification. The demand for Linux gurus is climbing and will continue to do so as Linux extends its domination over Windows in server space. -----Original Message----- Bob, Know you are busy but I have a quick question for you. I have heard that m/boards w/support for DDR SDRAM are supposed to be released starting in October. Have you heard of any and/or seen any early engineering samples??? How much real world difference do you think DDR SDRAM will make? I'm still of the opinion that the biggest bottle neck in a PC is the Hard Drive. On another subject, I know you've stated before that you like to keep your male dogs intact. But, have you considered getting Malcolm neutered? Growing up on a farm/ranch and being around several Australian Shepherds I think that eliminating the male hormones would reduce a lot of Malcolm's aggressiveness. Just a thought. I haven't yet seen any of the DDR motherboards, and my guess is that DDR will have little practical benefit in most mainstream applications for the next couple of years at least. As you say, memory bandwidth is not a bottleneck on most PCs. DDR will be worthwhile in the sense that it will come at little or no additional cost, so it will be worth having but at this point it's not a priority. Obviously, there are applications (video cards and high-volume servers come to mind) where DDR would be helpful immediately, but most ordinary users will see little to no real-world benefit. As far as having Malcolm castrated, Barbara has mentioned it and our vet is of course in favor of doing so. I confess that as a man I regard castration as an extreme step, and so I look out for Duncan's and Malcolm's interests because they can't look out for their own. Barbara and I think the problem is that Malcolm is having to grow up as a junior male in the presence of Duncan, a very senior and dominant male. Interestingly, Malcolm was a good pup yesterday. No growling or snarling at all. He let me pet him whenever I wanted. I attribute this to the fact that I scared the hell out of him the other night, making him realize that I was a very senior male indeed. -----Original Message----- In reply to: "Hmm. No "of course" about it. If I'd found myself in that situation and the commander had offered to shoot the miscreant, I'd have said "thanks very much" and offered the commander and his men a gratuity. Apparently, Nigeria is more enlightened in at least some respects than the US." It is not just a matter of squeamishness, though that may well have played a large part. The American in question probably worked for an oil company, since that's the best reason that Americans have to visit the armpit of darkest Africa. (Nigeria's oil production is huge, and is the dominant feature of their economy; and in their oil industry, almost all the work that needs technical expertise is done by foreigners.) If there were a shooting, the scammer might become -- in the eyes of Greenpeace and the like -- a protestor for social justice, who was cruelly silenced by an oppressive foreign oil company, whose agent bribed the commander of the barracks to do his dirty work for him. His oil company might become a subject of a boycott; he might be fired, and might be shunned by other companies in his field. This is no imaginary scenario; oil companies are so afraid of being blamed that they hesitate even to hire guards to protect important facilities. There are some decent people in Nigeria; but their system is not enlightened; it just makes the opposite sorts of errors from the types we make here. Being subject to the whims of the local commander can become unpleasant very fast. -- Actually, I was kind of kidding about the enlightened part, although not entirely. I think everyone charged with a crime is entitled to a fair trial and the presumption of innocence, but I also think things would be a lot better if habitual criminals like scammers were executed in a timely manner, say within a week of their trials. Hanging 1% of the population would probably eliminate 99% of the actual crime, by which I mean crime against persons and property rather than arbitrarily-defined "crimes" that are in fact consensual conduct, such as drug dealing, gambling, and prostitution. As far as Greenpeace, I have only contempt for them, and I don't know why everyone else doesn't ignore them. It seems that Political Correctness has come to the oil companies and Nigeria. As Vanderbilt once cogently observed, "The public be damned." I've never cared what anyone thought about me or said about me, and the world would be a lot better place if everyone else had the same attitude and minded their own business. -----Original Message----- Robert, Sorry to hear about the trouble with Malcolm. We experienced "random" fear periods with both our Shetland Sheepdogs at about the 7-9 month point. Very strange in that they would suddenly refuse to (fill in blank) that they would happily do the day before. We were never able to link a specific event to the change in behavior, but it passed after a few weeks. All the "dog people" we know told us this is "normal" and the best thing to do is be firm and consistent in addressing the transgressions. Hope this resolves itself quickly. Thanks. I'm still hopeful that things will work out. He's been a much better puppy since I roared at him the other night. I think he realized that he was literally in danger of dying when he attempted to bite me. He attempted to bite me some months ago, and I did the same thing. That lesson lasted months, until the other night, and I suspect this one will as well. Border Collies are extremely dominant dogs, and sometimes the only way to get their attention is to get in their faces and let them know in no uncertain terms that what they're doing is unacceptable. I'm going to continue the in-his-face method until he realizes that attempting aggression toward me or any other family member is a sucker bet. -----Original Message----- I seem to recall an article on your web site which addressed the curious bug in IE5's links bar. The problem is as follows: If you click on a link/favorite that is nested within a folder on the links bar, the link will ALWAYS open in the first open instance of IE5 and NOT the existing instance (which directly contradicts Microsoft's own documentation regarding same). In other words... 1. Open two sessions of IE5 This is driving me nuts!... Of course, the problem evaporates if the links are NOT placed with folders on the links bar; a ridiculous workaround which allows only a five or six links to be readily visible. It's as if we've stepped back in time to IE3!! This links bar problem did not exist in any flavor of IE4. Any suggestions? Mr. Bill and the fine folks at Microsoft provide only minimal information regarding this issue. I guess if Microsoft ignores the problem, IT DOES NOT EXIST. Frankly I can't imagine that ANYONE is still poking around the web utilizing only one browser session/window. This is a fairly serious flaw in my estimation, since navigating via the drop down "Favorites" menu item is a pain. Have you heard anything about a future fix? I don't know of any fix for this. I haven't tried IE 5.5, but my guess is that the problem isn't fixed in it either. My solution was simple. I just stopped using favorites. I have a local page with my links on it, and set IE5 to display that page by default. If there's a fix planned, I don't know about it.
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Wednesday, 13 September 2000 [Last Week] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] [Next Week] Congratulations to the members of our SETI@Home group. Last night sometime, we passed a major milestone--10,000 work units complete. This morning, with the addition of new member Tom Stidham, who brought 247 units, we're at 10,327 units complete. At this rate, we'll soon be appearing on the Top 100 Clubs list which, bizarrely enough, actually lists the top 200 clubs. As of today, we'd have needed about 27,000 work units complete to appear on that list, so we're already a third of the way there. Our group is currently adding completed work units at something like 5,000 per month and people are still joining us, so I predict we'll make that list in the next six months. If you haven't joined our SETI effort, we need your help, so please do. Here's how. Speaking of SETI, there seems to be a lot of interest in how long it takes to complete a work unit on different processors, so I figured I'd put up my averages in case anyone wants to compare them:
Which totals about 12.5 units per day. The differences between machines are interesting, but I don't have adequate data to make any firm conclusions. Obviously, the machines differ in memory, L2 cache, processor speed, operating system, and how heavily they're in use at any given time. Memory is unlikely to be a significant contributing factor, because all of the machines have plenty of RAM for what they're doing and the SETI client requires only 16 MB or so. The two Pentium II/300 machines are both test beds, both lightly used, and differ only in operating system (the first one is an LX, the second a BX). The minor difference between them is more likely in my estimation to be due to the difference between the LX and BX than between Windows NT 4 and Windows 2000. The first two Pentium III systems are Katmai-core, which means they have 512 KB of half-speed L2 cache. The last system is a Coppermine, with only 256 KB of L2 cache, but running at full processor speed. If I didn't have so much else to do, I might try normalizing some of the systems and comparing apples to apples. But, for what it's worth, these are my current numbers. I made pizza and garlic bread for my mother and me for dinner last night. Well, I say "made", but the pizza was actually some that Barbara had made last Friday and stuck in the refrigerator for us to have leftover. I'd intended to eat it earlier, but forgot about it. I figured it wouldn't kill us to eat pizza that was left over from Friday to Tuesday. As far as the garlic bread, it actually comes with the butter and garlic pre-installed, so that was just a matter of popping it in the oven. And speaking of the oven, Barbara forgot to leave instructions concerning how to reheat the pizza. I was considering using Broil, just to see what happened, but I eventually set the oven to Bake at a random temperature (around 275F, I think) and everything worked out fine. Barbara has spoiled these dogs, getting them into the habit of going for a walk at lunch time, after dinner, and before bed. I despise any form of physical exercise, and that most emphatically includes walking. I took a shower at about 1630, and then they expect me to walk them and get all sweaty after dinner, with them pulling the whole time. That's just not on. There aren't many things more miserable to me than being pulled around by dogs and sweating. I wasted 15 minutes with Malcolm on a leash sniffing around the front yard, but he didn't do anything. So I left him out on the rope, with a stern warning not to bark. My attitude is that one should treat dogs like most people do cats. Open the door, let them out, and let them back in again later. Barbara doesn't like that idea because of the anti-dog ordinances, the fear that someone will poison the dogs, and the fear that they'll get hit by a car. I tell you this, though. When we move to New Hampshire, we're going to have some acreage, and we're going to have a dog door so they can let themselves in and out as they please. They don't go far from home when they're loose, anyway, seldom more than 100 yards in any direction. And any dog should have a territory at least that big. I got mail back from the Affiliates folks at Fatbrain.com. They tell me that the reports I can view on-line are updated only sporadically and that the current version reflects sales only through 9/9, so it appears that my concern over "missing" orders was unfounded. Thanks to everyone who sent me copies of their order, but it seems that all is well now. In addition to everything else on my plate right now, I'm trying to work on the Processors chapter for the book Pournelle and I are doing. When I finished PC Hardware in a Nutshell, the AMD Duron processor was just about to ship, so I couldn't write much about it. Obviously, that needs fixed for the big book (as well as for the next edition of PC/Nut). So I spent some time on the phone yesterday with my contact at AMD. He's shipping Jerry and me each an AMD Duron-based system so that we can get some experience working with the Duron. I know that for anyone who doesn't write about PC hardware for a living, that sounds like an incredible deal. Call up a company and get a free system (well, free in the sense that you don't have to pay for it, but you don't own it, either). Take it from me, though, getting a free computer is not cause for jubilation if you're me or Jerry. I sit surrounded by nearly a dozen computers now (with more elsewhere), and so does Jerry. So getting yet another computer is an obligation--it just means more work. But that's what we do. When I called Jerry to ask him if he was willing to let AMD ship him a Duron eval system, his response was, "Do I have to?" Then we both laughed helplessly at the irony. I've sometimes been asked by readers if it compromises objectivity to accept hardware from manufacturers. The answer is no. For the guy who wants more computers than he has, a free computer might make a pretty good bribe. For the guy who has so many computers he is literally running out of space to put them and places to plug them in, yet another computer is not something that tops one's wish list. But it's what we do, so we do it. This all reminds me of when I worked at Entré Computer Center back in the early days of PCs. Manufacturers ran promos, whereby they rewarded salespeople who sold their products with prizes. For every seven NEC printers I sold, for example, NEC would send me a free television or VCR. From NEC's viewpoint, though, the problem was that Epson, Oki, and every other printer manufacturer was running a similar promotion at the same time. I liked NEC printers, and sold a lot of them, getting my TV, VCR, and so on in the process. Another guy I worked with preferred Epsons, so that's what he sold, also getting his spiffs in the process. The upshot was that these spiffs had absolutely no effect on what got sold because you got spiffs no matter what you sold. So we just sold what we would have recommended anyway, and collected the spiffs. And to top it all off, if one of my customers wanted an Epson, I sold it to him without a qualm and gave the invoice to my buddy so that he could submit it with his other Epson orders. When he had a customer who wanted an NEC, he sold it to them without a qualm and gave me the invoice copy so that I could submit it with my other NEC orders. Duh. Both of us swapped like that for onesies and twosies, but if we were going to sell a bunch of them, we just kept the invoice copies and collected the spiffs from the "other" manufacturer. Actually, there were more than two of us involved, and the break room sometimes sounded like an auction. "I have two LaserJet II and one Epson LQ-1050 invoice copies that I don't need. Does someone else need them?" "Yep, I'll take the Epson, thanks. I have two NEC MultiSync invoice copies and four for Herc Graphics Cards if anyone needs them...." I remember a conversation I had with one of my customers. He was buying six systems, all with printers, and I'd proposed NEC printers for those systems. As we were finalizing the deal, I said something like, "Jim, I should tell you that NEC gives me a TV or VCR for every seven of their printers I sell." He asked, "Is that why you're recommending the NECs?" "No," I told him, "I bought an NEC for myself because I think it's the best printer on the market. I could just as easily sell you Epsons if you'd prefer them, and Epson also has a similar spiff program. Same thing with Oki." "Okay," says Jim, "why don't you just write up that order with seven of the NEC printers instead of six? That'll make it a nice even number for your spiff, and we need another printer to replace one that's failing anyway." So the lessons I learned there were that it pays to be honest with your customers, and that NEC, Epson and everyone else were giving away good stuff for no discernable benefit to themselves. And I think they finally figured that out, because the spiff programs pretty much went away soon thereafter. But it must have taken courage to be the first to drop the spiff program. -----Original Message----- Bob, Per Mike Boyle's Comment last Saturday (Sept, 9th). It was my home machine (a Pentium 200, VIA motherboard) that processed a unit in 57 minutes. You are correct in that it was the first unit processed. The second took over 68 hours (:-), finishing this morning. I guess I'm getting too paranoid about on-line security. My name is now visible on the SETI site. Reading your site is both a pleasure and an education. Looking forward to picking up a copy of your new book as soon as the budget allows. Dave Spooner PS. Please don't publish my email address. Working out of a client site. I suspect that what happened was that you got a block with noisy data in it, and the client discarded the data after only 57 minutes of processing. According to the SETI FAQ, that happens occasionally, and they credit you for the unit even though it was aborted. Apparently, it happens much more often than I would have thought, because I've noticed it at least three or four times now, and it's only noticeable for people who have only zero units complete. That makes me think that it probably happens once in a while for all of us, and yours just happened to occur when it was very noticeable. Incidentally, with regard to SETI speed, your 68 hour time on a Pentium/200 is probably about right. It takes me about 14 hours to complete a unit on a Pentium II/300, and that machine is probably about five times faster overall than a Pentium/200, when you consider CPU speed, architecture, and memory/cache performance. -----Original Message----- I use folders two and three deep in IE5 Links and do not have the problem Mr. LeBlanc experiences. BUT, I found out early-on that the Links item on the Toolbar must be ONLY wide enough to display the word "Links" and the double-right arrow. Click on the double-right arrow, and the folder and file list drops down. Then choosing anything from however deep, always displays in my current browser. I dragged things around so the second toolbar contains the following, left to right: Address; Go button; Links. Just make Links as small as possible. The problem I experience with the IE browser relates to opening web pages from the Windows\OfflineWebPages (the Synchronize) folder in Windows Explorer. There is just no rhyme nor reason for which opened instance of IE will display what I choose in WinExplorer. These quirks are all craziness, but must point to how complex programming a browser is--and how difficult to identify all the bugs. Not that MS tries. They should work with their users more. Never-ending PR proclamation of the brilliance of their programmers defining the new world order, while ignoring users' plights, is going to be their downfall one day, if they don't stop it. And don't get me started on all the interrupting popup dialog boxes for processes that should be automatic in the background (like dialups initiated by automatic settings). I've done some serious damage when one of those dialogs suddenly appears in the middle of composing some document, and my typing accidentally triggers an event I didn't intend--and I can't Undo'd it. Btw, having the address line display in WinExplorer is a quick way to copy a full path name into the clipboard for use elsewhere. Works just like the address line in IE. --Regards, Chuck Yep, I still have my copy of IE setup with just Links and the little double right arrow showing. That indeed works, but I found it so inconvenient that I've basically stopped using Favorites entirely. I just put anything I want to bookmark on my local Links page. Since I almost always have FrontPage up and minimized, editing that page is about as easy as creating and then organizing a Favorite. -----Original Message----- yo, robert could i make a cd burner with out buying one? Probably not. -----Original Message----- FWIW I am running IE 5.5 and the bug reported by Eric Leblanc does not exist for me. Which is to say I can open a favorites folder from a secondary browser window and the secondary window takes the focus, not the original, mother window. This may or may not be due to IE5.5 because I never noticed the problem before, but then, I didn't run IE5 for very long- so maybe I just didn't pay attention. Well, the bug definitely exists under IE5, so perhaps I should load up IE 5.5 and give it a try. Thanks. -----Original Message----- It's remarkably hard to find any argument against the death penalty that isn't just empty sentimentalism. In my readings, I've only run across one such argument, and that from a book written a hundred and sixty years ago. But it's a good one, worth quoting in full: "First among the punishments provided for offenses by this code stands death. No argument that has been brought to our notice has satisfied us that it would be desirable wholly to dispense with this punishment. But we are convinced that it ought to be very sparingly inflicted, and we propose to employ it only in cases where either murder or the highest offence against the State has been committed. "We are not apprehensive that we shall be thought by many persons to have resorted too frequently to capital punishment; but we think it probable that many, even of those who condemn the English statute book as sanguinary, may think that our code errs on the other side. They may be of opinion that gang-robbery, the cruel mutilation of the person, and possibly rape, ought to be punished with death. These are doubtless offenses which, if we looked only at their enormity, at the evil which they produce, at the terror which they spread through society, at the depravity which they indicate, we might be inclined to punish capitally. But atrocious as they are, they cannot, as it appears to us, be placed in the same class with murder. To the great majority of mankind nothing is so dear as life. And we are of opinion that to put robbers, ravishers, and mutilators on the same footing with murderers, is an arrangement which diminishes the security of life. "There is in practice a close connexion between murder and most of those offenses that are next to murder in enormity. Those offenses are almost always committed under such circumstances that the offender has it in his power to add murder to his guilt. They are often committed under such circumstances that the offender has a temptation to add murder to his guilt. The same opportunities, the same superiority of force, which enabled a man to rob, to mangle or to ravish, will enable him to go further, and to despatch his victim. As he has almost always the power to murder, he will often have a strong motive to murder, inasmuch by murder he may often hope to remove the only witness of the crime he has already committed. If the punishment of the crime he has already committed be exactly the same with the punishment for murder, he will have no restraining motive. A law which imprisons for rape and robbery, and hangs for murder, holds out to ravishers and to robbers a strong inducement to spare the lives of those whom they have injured. A law which hangs for rape and robbery, and which only hangs for murder, holds out, indeed, if it be rigorously carried into effect, a strong motive to deter men from rape and robbery, but as soon as a man has ravished or robbed, it holds out to him a strong motive to follow up his crime with a murder. "If murder were punished with something more than simple death; if the murderer were broken on the wheel or burned alive, there would not be the same objection to punishing with death those crimes which in atrocity approach nearest to murder. But such a system would be open to other objections so obvious that it is unnecessary to point them out. The highest punishment which we propose is the simple privation of life; and the highest punishment, be it what it may, ought not, for the reason which we have given, to be assigned to any crime against the person which stops short of murder. And it is hardly necessary to point out to his Lordship in Council how great a shock would be given to public feeling if, while we propose to exempt from the punishment of death the most atrocious personal outrages which stopped short of murder, we were to inflict that punishment even in the worst cases of theft, cheating, or mischief." -- from "Notes on the Indian Penal Code", by T. B. Macaulay The context of this quote was that an entirely new penal code for British India had just been written by Macaulay and about three other people; the "Notes" are an explanation of key parts of it. -- The fallacy in that argument is that a criminal will avoid murdering his victim in order to avoid being executed if caught. But, as is apparent from a quick look at crime reports, many criminals murder their victims gratuitously, presumably on the assumption that the additional risk is minimal whereas eliminating witnesses greatly decreases the likelihood of apprehension and consequently the likelihood of being punished at all. Which is probably true. -----Original Message----- Hi, Read your article about USB. I have a doubt. I bought a computer camera which is USB compatible. But my m/c does not have a USB port. The configuration of the m/c is CYRIX 300 Mhz, 66MHz bus. Is this board USB compatible ? Or Is there any adapter from USB to just serial ? Can you help me ? Thanks and Regards, There are many USB-to-serial converters available, but all of them I've seen connect to a USB port on the computer and allow you to connect serial devices to that USB port. I've never seen one that does the converse. However, there are many add-on USB cards that you can use to add USB ports to a computer that doesn't have them. One we've used successfully is the PCI USB Port card from ADS Technologies. The cards are relatively inexpensive (US$35 or so), but it'd be worthwhile checking compatibility with your equipment before you buy one. Also, you'd need to run Windows 98 or better (late versions of Win95 provided limited USB support, but most such cards require 98 or higher). -----Original Message----- Bob - Can we make that three intact males in the pack? I doubt that Malcolm sees you as other than a rather peculiarly configured male of the species, with enviable attributes - beginning with opposable thumbs, etc. I admire you having enough of his juvenile crap and laying down THE LAW in no uncertain terms. Glad to hear it had a beneficial effect. I am growing to like Malcolm. He, like other genius juveniles, badly needs extra guidance and understanding. I think and hope it will be worth the effort. Just wait until he discovers that manipulation gains more than aggression! Then you really _will_ have problems! Regards, JHR You're right, and Barbara and I have discussed that. At first, we thought it was a male thing. In nature, adult males tend to kill juvenile males, and we thought Malcolm was in fear of his life from Duncan and me. But he acts the same way with Barbara, although less so, so we think it's probably more a dominance thing than a male thing. And, believe me, Malcolm is already a master at manipulation. All Border Collies are, from the day they arrive home. 8:00: Virus Warning (actually, a Trojan). Jerry Pournelle called me a few minutes ago to tell me that he had several systems behaving strangely. His Notepad.exe file (which should be about 52 KB on a Win98 system or 50 KB on an NT system) was about three times that size, and the original Notepad appeared to have been renamed to Note.com. As it turns out, Jerry has been infected by the Worm.Qaz Trojan. There's more information up on Jerry's page, as well as here.
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Thursday, 14 September 2000 [Last Week] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] [Next Week] See the Virus Warning above. The following material was written by Alex Pournelle and posted on Jerry Pournelle's web site at 20:52 ET last night:
Our SETI@Home group now has 55 members and has passed 10,500 work units complete. Congratulations to team members Tom Stidham, who recently passed the 250 work unit milestone, and Robert Esguerra, who recently passed the 50 work unit milestone. If you haven't joined our SETI effort, please do. Here's how. Yet another flashlight eaten. Malcolm loves to chew flashlights for some reason. This is the second one in as many weeks. Not long before Barbara left, Malcolm chewed up the small flashlight she keeps on her end table. During a Lowe's run for painting supplies, we picked up a couple of more inexpensive small plastic flashlights, the kind that take two AA batteries. Yesterday morning, I'd completed work on a test bed system that I had set up on the kitchen table, and then moved it back into my office. When I returned for the keyboard, I found Malcolm chewing the end off the flashlight I'd left on the table. Since the two flashlights we got were identical, I considered telling Barbara that Malcolm had eaten her flashlight, but that wouldn't be fair. And, anyway, mine still works. The butt end is a bit ragged, that's all. I spent some time yesterday getting my credenza/test-bed area organized. For the ATX test-bed systems, which is all but one of them nowadays, I plan to install the 4-port Belkin OmniView Pro Administrators Model. The ATX test-beds will use that to share an old Mag Innovision 15" monitor, a Microsoft Internet Keyboard Pro, and an IntelliMouse. These systems include:
Which reminds me that I really must do something about cooling. Winter is no problem. I just shut the supply vent and the machines keep me more than warm enough. It'd be nice to have some air circulating, but the last thing I need is more warm air. The fan Barbara bought for me works well enough. Summer, on the other hand, is a real problem. Even with the supply vent wide open there's simply not enough cool air coming into the room to offset the heat load that I, nearly a dozen computers, four or five monitors, etc. add to the room. After we move, I'm going to put some thought into electrical supply and HVAC for my office area at the new place. I've started running SETI on a seventh system, this one a 440BX
system with a Pentium III/750 and 64 MB. It's cranking out units at just
over 7.5 hours each. Here's the new chart. I won't even attempt to
correlate CPU speed and other factors. As far as I can see, you get what
you get for processing times. A faster machine (usually) turns in faster
times, but there doesn't appear to be much else to be said.
-----Original Message----- "yo, robert could i make a cd burner with out buying one?" Do you get many like that one? Obviously insane ones, but not out and out rubbish bin bound ones? How's about a top ten page, updated once every now and again? ATB. Phil ___________________________________________________ Nutter. I've always liked that word. So descriptive. I wonder why it's almost exclusively used by Brits. Yes, I get quite a few like that one, probably one or two a week. My favorite so far was the guy who took me to task because it was so unfair that I had more than one domain name (or was it website?) and that he didn't think anyone should be allowed to have multiple domains/websites until everyone who wanted one had one. As far as the Top Ten List, perhaps I should consider it, but I have so many balls in the air right now that I probably won't. -----Original Message----- Hi, I read your review of the above mentioned product. It sounds like it worked rather well for you. I, however, am having a hard time getting it to work. I have installed everything, but the system hangs and crashes constantly. If there's anything you can help me with, I'd appreciate it. Matthew Teal I had some stability problems with early versions of Echo running on NT4, but the drive has always been completely stable under Windows 98. I haven't tried it since early days under NT, though, nor have I tried it under Windows 2000 Professional, although I understand that OnStream now has a W2K version of Echo available. Obviously, I can't diagnose hardware problems remotely, but the first thing I'd check is that the tape drive is on a different IDE channel than the hard drive you're backing up. Also, make sure you've downloaded and installed the latest version of Echo and the latest firmware update for the drive. If that doesn't help, I'd contact OnStream tech support. -----Original Message----- Dear Robert: I just wanted to let you know that you and Jerry Pournelle have been the inspiration for me to start using my domain (bruceedwards.com) for something more than receiving e-mail. I have decided to start a day notes/journal section. Here is the link to the first week which has only an entry for today, so far: http://www.bruceedwards.com/journal/000911.htm If you go there you will see that the navigation column along the left side does not have many active links yet but it will give you an idea of what I aim to do. I'd love your comments as well. I do have a question: Your legal disclaimer - I have seen this type of language on many sites and can see the importance of it. Did you review other sites and think about all the possibilities to come up with yours? I need to do likewise and wonder if you know of good reference sites to go to to get tips on that kind of information. Thank you, have a good day! Sincerely, Bruce :-) Thanks for the kind words, and good luck with your site. Perhaps some of my readers will visit you. As far as the legal disclaimer, my corporate attorney insisted that it was a good idea. I don't know of any sites that are helpful with stuff like that, but then I haven't looked. -----Original Message----- Robert I've seen several computers whose motherboards have usb on them but don't have usb connections. Worth a look. Mike Boyle Good point, and one I should have mentioned. I emailed the gentleman who sent the mail originally and mentioned this to him. I'm not sure why I didn't think to mention this, because I did cover it in the book. -----Original Message----- In response to: "The fallacy in that argument is that a criminal will avoid murdering his victim in order to avoid being executed if caught. But, as is apparent from a quick look at crime reports, many criminals murder their victims gratuitously, presumably on the assumption that the additional risk is minimal whereas eliminating witnesses greatly decreases the likelihood of apprehension and consequently the likelihood of being punished at all. Which is probably true." Still, the overwhelming majority of robberies and rapes don't end in murder. And from everything I've heard, gratuitous murder is most prevalent among teenagers, who haven't yet learned its consequences -- which some of them have to do the hard way, but most learn by seeing what happens to those few. Those consequences aren't just a matter of harsher punishments; in addition, the police investigate murders much more thoroughly than they investigate robberies or rapes. As far as I know (which is not very far, and corrections are willingly accepted), the only exceptions to the punishment of murder being harsher in this country are the recent three-strikes laws; and those laws do not impose the death penalty, which means that in states that do execute people, murder is still punished more harshly. Three-strikes laws also exert their strongest pressure only on the relatively few people who have two strikes against them already. So basically we have no direct evidence of what would happen if we punished a wide spectrum of crimes by execution; if we want to know, we have to speculate. We have done one relevant experiment, though: we have made drug dealing a capital crime, and spent as much police activity on it as is normally expended on murder; and the result is as the argument would predict: drug dealers murder much more often than criminals of any other variety do. (As an aside, Macaulay would have strongly opposed such stupidities; indeed, he wrote: "We conceive the general rule to be, that nothing ought to be an offence by reason of any harm which it may cause to an adult of ripe age who, undeceived, has given a free and intelligent consent to suffer that harm or to take the risk of that harm." That was actually written into the law of British India as a general defense against any and all charges (with the sole exception of homicide), in much the same way that the insanity defense is a general defense today.) But I'm still not claiming that the argument I quoted is decisive. In the case of gun crimes, there is another, purely mechanical, reason for criminals not to progress to murder: gunshots attract attention. Knife killings also attract attention: it is hard to ignore someone covered in blood, as the killer often ends up being, since murder victims often try to fight back. It is hard to tell which reasons are the more powerful ones. -- Interesting point, but I think the drug dealers' proclivity to murder is more a matter of culture and the amount of money involved rather than from any consideration of punishment if caught. The only test of this hypothesis that comes to mind is what happened with kidnapping. Prior to Lindbergh, kidnapping was punished less stringently, and kidnappings happened constantly. The kidnappers usually killed their victims. After Lindbergh (and the consequent more common execution of kidnappers) the rate of kidnapping plummeted. Kidnappers were no more likely to kill their victims, and probably less so. -----Original Message----- People seem to be using "Links" and "Favorites" interchangeably. These are two very different things in IE. The main thrust of the "Links" seems to be to allow toolbars. Who needs 'em? :) You can put a button called "Favorites" on your main toolbar. When you press it you'll get a pane on the left of your browser window with a treeview of all of your favorites/bookmarks. This pane has two buttons at the top, Add and Organize. It supports drag-and-drop. You can make it display or disappear with the press of a button. Very handy. Yes, I've always used that button in IE, as well as the extremely useful Font Size button, which for some reason is not displayed by default. But I think the issue is that the links bar, if it worked properly, would allow one to keep a horizontal menu of drop-down bookmarks, which is considerably more convenient than opening a new window. -----Original Message----- Robert, My next door neighbor came to me with an interesting question last weekend. We can't get true broadband in our area. We are currently limited to 256k wireless. His question for me. Why can't we order a T1 and put up our own small ISP for the neighborhood. I laughed and said I'd no interest in being an ISP for anyone other than me. Of course, the stinker has now got me thinking. Why couldn't a neighborhood do such a thing? Wouldn't something like a cisco wireless wan be practical? Ever thought about it? Of course, if we had broadband of any ilk, we'd never even think about it. In rural areas however.... -- It's really all a matter of economies of scale, or rather diseconomies of small scale. In addition to the not inconsiderable cost of equipment, high-speed connection to the Internet, and so on, you have to hire and pay people. And the kind of people you need to hire and pay don't come cheaply. That is, let's assume (optimistically) that you can get a skilled tech for $40,000 annual salary. Your actual annual cost after benefits will probably be at least $52,000. Call it $4,500/month. If you're charging customers $50/month for service, that means you need 90 customers just to pay for that one guy. And you need more than just that one guy, believe me. And then there's the cost of your main Internet link, which at DS1 speed to a remote area is likely to be several thousand dollars a month. And you do want to have redundant links, don't you? The upshot is that to pay for equipment, service, and people, you're going to need a minimum of probably at least a thousand customers, and probably many more, all just to break even. And if you have a customer base that large, you're going to find that that base draws interest from other, larger ISPs, who can kill you with their own economies of scale. Or so I'd think.
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Friday, 15 September 2000 [Last Week] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] [Next Week] Today is the 30-day anniversary of our SETI@Home group, which is now nearing 11,000 units complete. Thanks to everyone for supporting this effort, and congratulations to team member Jonathan Hassell, who recently passed the 50 work unit milestone. If you haven't joined our SETI effort, please do. Here's how. Microsoft is at it again, according to this article in The Register. This time, it looks as though they're trying to lock a particular copy of Windows to a particular computer. Not just lock it by license, but literally lock it. I've written before about Microsoft's desperate attempts to maintain their revenue stream by implementing increasingly more restrictive licensing terms, but things are starting to get ridiculous. I wonder when a Just Say No grassroots campaign will start. Just Say No to the next version of Windows. Just Say No to the next upgrade of Office. Just Say No. In effect, I've done that myself already. Oh, I run Windows 2000 Professional and Windows Me, but only on test-bed systems. I have to run them, because I write books that require I do so. And I'll run Whistler once it's finally released, and probably whatever comes after that. But only on test-bed systems. My main systems--the ones I actually use to get my writing and other work done on--are all running Windows NT 4 and Office 2000. And at that I could revert to Office 97 without significant pain. I have no plans to upgrade to Office 10 under any circumstances, and I will never run Windows 2000 or Windows Me on production machines. When I finally abandon Windows NT 4, it will be because I have made the move to Linux. I wish that Linux was a viable alternative to Windows as a client OS right now, but it's not. Yet. From what I see today, and looking back to where Linux stood a year ago, it's pretty clear that it's making progress as a client OS. It may arrive as a viable alternative to Windows in a year, or perhaps two. But I have little doubt that arrive it will. Even now, Linux is a serious contender in server space, having overtaken Novell NetWare as the biggest threat to Windows Server. With the number of smart people working on Linux, it can't be too much longer before Linux becomes a realistic alternative to Windows on the desktop. Actually, Linux is a viable alternative to Windows on the desktop now, but only for a relative few. Anyone who is willing to invest some time and effort in learning the intricacies of Linux can run a Microsoft-free computer and get useful work done. That's not true for most of us, as became clear to me when I attempted it, but how much longer can it be before Desktop Linux becomes something that any competent Windows user can install and run? When that happens, sell your Microsoft stock fast. The bad news is that we ran out of frozen dinners last night. Fortunately, Barbara left me with cash, so I can always have pizza and Chinese delivered. Barbara usually handles the ordering for food we have delivered, but I suppose I can find the phone number, call them, and say, "Send food." Interesting goings on in Europe, where protests against high fuel prices have basically shut things down in Britain, and are spreading across Belgium, Germany, and other countries. At least France, which seems to have started the whole thing, appears to be getting back to normal. But as a result of all this, our European friends are running out of gasoline/petrol, food, and (presumably) patience. As far as I'm concerned, the protesters are thugs at heart. When members of a labor union down tools and refuse to work, that's a strike. But when they attempt to prevent others from working, that's thuggery. Same with the fuel protest. If you don't like the price of fuel, don't buy it. But don't try to stop me from buying it. I may well have other things more important on my mind than the price of a litre of petrol. I wonder how many people have died because ambulances were too late because of the delays these protesters caused. Or how many homes have burned or crimes have been committed because emergency vehicles were unable to arrive in time. No doubt the protesters would claim that they would not intentionally cause such harm. But what they're doing risks such things occurring regardless of their intentions, and they are fully as guilty whether or not they intended the damage to occur. I remember during the OPEC crisis back in the mid-70's, we had "rolling roadblocks" here, which were simply trucks driving 55 MPH side-by-side in all lanes. That infuriated many other drivers, including me, but at worst those truckers were forcing everyone else to obey the speed limit. In Britain, I understand, it's quite a bit worse than that. I've heard reports of truckers simply blocking lanes entirely or blocking access to service stations, thereby preventing anyone from buying fuel. For more on this, see the daily journal pages of the European members of Daynotes.com. Those include Bo Leuf, Sjon Svenson, Chris Ward-Johnson and Wendy Ward-Johnson (who have other problems at the moment), Moshe Bar, Bob Walder and Lynne Walder, and Phil Hough. Rip my TCP/IP Master epaulets from my shoulder boards and drum me out of the corps. I installed Windows 2000 Professional on a system the other day. Everything went very well. Too well, in fact. When I restarted the system I fired up Network Neighborhood intending to map a drive on a remote machine. As I waited for the program to load, I realized that I'd forgotten to go in and change the TCP/IP defaults, which are to use a DHCP server to obtain the IP address and other TCP/IP options for the client. Imagine my surprise, then, when Network Neighborhood fired up showing all the other machines on the network. How could that be? The chances of Windows 2000 Setup accidentally choosing the private C-block I use (192.168.111) were pretty small, and I don't have a DHCP server on the network. Or so I thought. I'd responded to Jerry Pournelle yesterday about his Trojan problem, and one of the things that I mentioned was that private IP addresses (e.g., the 192.168 block that Jerry and I both use) are unroutable. That is, in theory at least, any router which sees an inbound or outbound packet with a private IP source or destination address is supposed to discard it rather than forward it. Another guy responded that many of the Internet backbone routers don't discard such packets, so I went over to meepmeep, my Roadrunner box to try a test traceroute to a private IP address that he had mentioned he could tracert to. Sure enough, I got about four hops into Roadrunner's local network and then got a Destination Unreachable error, which is as things should be. But that got me to thinking. I didn't remember setting up any packet filtering when I installed WinGate on meepmeep, so I fired up the WinGate management program to check. Well, the reason I didn't install any packet filtering is that I'm running WinGate Pro 3.0, which doesn't really have firewall features, although its proxy features provide a very good level of security. I could install WinGate Pro 4.0, which does have firewall features, but I'm comfortable with the protection I have. At any rate, while I was looking at WinGate's configuration, I noticed a tab for DHCP Server. Duh. WinGate automatically installed and configured a DHCP server and I didn't even realize it was there. Duh. Don't let me near your internetwork, and if you see me playing with anything sharp please stop me before I injure myself or someone else.
-----Original Message----- Robert I thought you might be interested in the new TAX law below. Also, I tried to cancel my order for your book at Fatbrain. I ment to re-order it from your link. I sure couldn't find a way to cancel a order. Mike Boyle -----Original Message----- Hi All, This is for REAL! You can check it out at http://rs9.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query. I got the e-mail below just today. Start calling your Senators NOW!!!!! >Gun owners beware! > >Senate Bill SB-2099 will require us to put on our 2000 1040 federal tax form >all guns that you have or own. > >It may require fingerprints and a tax of $50 per gun. This bill was >introduced on Feb. 24. This bill will become public knowledge 30 days after >it is voted into law. This is an amendment to the Internal Revenue Act of >1986. This means that the Finance Committee can pass this without the Senate >voting on it at all. > >The full text of the proposed amendment is on the U.S. Senate homepage, >http://www.senate.gov/ >You can find the bill by doing a search by the bill number, SB-2099. You >know who to call; I strongly suggest you do. > >Please send a copy of this e-mail to every gun owner you know to help STOP >this bill!! Thanks. I hadn't ever tried to cancel an order with Fatbrain, although I suppose that you could do so via their 800 number. It's really not necessary, though, although I do appreciate you trying to get me credit. Actually, if you want to, you can just leave the existing order in effect and send me the order number (something like YAF9999). If I provide the order number, Fatbrain credits me for the sale. As far as the anti-gun bill, I confess that when I first read the message I thought it was bogus. I went over to the Senate home page, though, and was surprised to find out that there really is such a bill. I couldn't find any reference to a requirement to report ownership on one's 1040, although they do mention a special form, but other than that the essentials of the message appear to be accurate. Geez. -----Original Message----- Robert "We have done one relevant experiment, though: we have made drug dealing a capital crime, and spent as much police activity on it as is normally expended on murder; and the result is as the argument would predict: drug dealers murder much more often than criminals of any other variety do. (As an aside, Macaulay would have strongly opposed such stupidities" It doesn't matter what the law says, you have to actually execute some before it matters. Look how many condemed murders have been laying around on death row for 30 years or more. Mike Boyle Good point. The chances of actually being executed after committing a serious crime and being sentenced to death are almost vanishingly small. Even if it does happen, it'll be only after years (or decades) of appeals. If we actually executed murderers, arsonists, and so on in this country, we'd be executing 1,000 or more people a day. Of course, that wouldn't go on for long, because we'd soon have executed the fraction of 1% of the population which commits the vast majority of violent crimes. And that would be all to the better. -----Original Message----- Thanks for the info...I have since installed it on a different machine and it seems to work fine. I also installed the latest sotware/firmware. It seemed a little touchy at first, but now it is working great. Once again, thanks. Matthew Teal Glad it worked out for you. I was pretty sure it wasn't the drive. -----Original Message----- Subject: I gotta ask . . . . . . Malcolm isn't eating the flashlight out of hunger, is he? You are feeding him, right? I had to check-- I've been good not bugging you about taking your vitamins (are you taking your vitamins?) or making sure you weren't starving (although you didn't sound like you were on your posts). Have you created any new and exciting menu items for us? If you do: share them with us, Bob! Have you heard from Barbara? Is she having a good time? I hope she's taking lots and lots of pictures!! TTYL, ===== Yep, Malcolm is indeed getting food, as are the other dogs. I will admit that I feed them less intricately than Barbara does. I shovel dog food into each of their bowls and put it down for them. If they eat it, fine. If they don't, fine. I figure they'll eat it if they get hungry. Also, I don't worry about them eating out of each other's bowls. I figure that's a dog thing, and they can work it out. Vitamins. Arrrrghhh. I'm glad you reminded me. I've been giving the dogs their pills every morning, but I've entirely forgotten to take mine. Barbara gives me half a dozen with dinner every night, and put pre-sorted sets into a little container with a labeled section for each day. I've just forgotten about it until you mentioned it. Oh, well. No harm done. I have the leftover pills for Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, as well as today's set. I'll just take them all tonight with dinner. No new menu items, and I haven't heard from Barbara. I hope she's having a good time. I am suffering terribly, and the dogs are all doing their best to add to my suffering. I took them out twenty times yesterday (I counted), because they sit at my office door and whine constantly, and taking them out buys me at least 15 minutes of peace. The trips out ranged from 5 minutes to 20 minutes. The last one was immediately before I went back to the bedroom with them. I was so beat that I turned out the light immediately instead of reading for an hour or two as I usually do. About five minutes after the light went out, I heard a trickling liquid sound. I flipped on the light, and there stood Kerry, urinating on the floor. So I got up, cleaned that up, and went back to bed. (Thank goodness for hardwood floors and polyurethane). At 3:45 a.m. I heard more trickling, turned on the light and found that Kerry was at it again. And I'm not talking little trickles. I'm talking about a pint or more each time. If I didn't think that Barbara would notice the reduced dog count when she returns, I'd have taken Kerry out in the back yard and shot him. So I'm stuck with one dog that tries to bite me, another that pees all over the floor, and Duncan. Duncan is the only good dog we have. -----Original Message----- Hello Robert, I found your article dated the 5 of June very interesting. I'll explain it. My company bought 12 PCs equipped with the CA810E motherboard, because they were Intel and very cheap! Nice...not? Well I'm the tech that should have had installed this machines with the standard software of the company, but some of them were to be setup with NT4Workstation. And then began my nightmare it's impossible to keep these machines working for more than ten minutes! I fought my way to try to make the company exchange these PCs but all I got were complaints about my supposed inexpertise mounting PCs...Well I've just been working with computers for fourteen years (I'm 27)..... Well, forget those complains...just a couple of questions: 1.- Did you receive some kind of answer from Intel about this issue? Or did you solve it? 2.- Did you notice some problem with the CA810E and Win95B+Usb Update Pack? It hangs a lot of times.... Thank you! Servicio de Atención al Usuario sau@nextret.net Looking back, I see that I actually encountered this problem twice. In the first case, the problem turned out to be that I had used commodity memory. When I replaced that memory with Crucial SDRAM, the problems went away. The second time I encountered the problem, I'm not sure what the cause was, but I suspect it may also have been memory that time. I no longer have any 810E systems running NT4, so I can't say for sure. As far as Win95B/USB, I don't run Win95, so I can't say. However, the USB support in Win95B is quite limited and buggy, so you really would be better off running Win98SE on systems that require USB. -----Original Message----- Robert Locally (Toledo, Ohio) two murders buried a "friend" alive. The wanted to sell his car. I happen to be acquainted with one of the murders and the victim. These were all very young (20). The fools got his drivers license and attempted to change the picture, then sold the car to a car lot on the far side of town. Got caught when someone recognized the car. This was about 5 years ago. They were both sentenced to death. They are still sitting on death row waiting for some liberal governor to pardon the death penalty part of the sentence. The last liberal governor we had (before this) pardoned about a dozen. Mike Boyle I'm not surprised. We have one woman on death row here in North Carolina who was in the habit of feeding arsenic to her husbands. Finally, someone noticed that husbands kept dying, and they tried and convicted her, sentencing her to death. She's been on death row for what must be 15 years now. -----Original Message----- Robert, I've been reading your comments on murder and punishment and thought that, with your copious free time, you might be interested in a series currently running in the Ottawa Citizen on the "War on Drugs", the net effect of which seems to have been the creation of a highly profitable, illegal and therefore untaxable industry, with a countering enforcement system comprised of folks pretty much guaranteed lifetime employment. The series is still running, but is available to date at http://www.ottawacitizen.com/national/drugs/index.html. Another effect would appear to have been a severe increase in the murder rate, because after all, if the business is illegal, you can't use the courts for redress when wronged. Brian Cheesman Another good argument for legalizing drugs. Thanks. -----Original Message----- Interesting letter from your correspondent mhuth (weren't the 'Huth' the baddies in one of the Star Wars movies? Anyway...) Anyway, there's a project going on in London to do exactly this - build a wireless WAN network with those who have ADSL/Cable Modem/T1/Whatever broadband access to putting a wireless transmitters/receivers in their attics. Some of it's actually up and working right now in various places around the city - details at http://www.consume.net/ Haven't tried it myself yet, but I'm in town next week so I'll see if I can scrounge a wireless card for the laptop and see what happens. Regards Chris Ward-Johnson Hmm. I've brought up enough networks to believe that such co-op efforts are unlikely to succeed, at least unless at least one of the volunteers involved is a competent internetworking guy whose willing to subsidize the effort with his knowledge. Let me know how it goes. -----Original Message----- Mark, I read your note on Bob Thompson's web site about trying to be a local ISP for your neighborhood. I'm currently discussing upgrading our corporate ISP from a 256K fractional T1 to a full T1. At our location, by signing a 5-year contract, I can pay about $775/month including the fees to the phone company for the actual local loop. Cost would probably be half again that for only a one year contract. But we are in the local metro area here in Dayton, OH and so the local loop costs (quoted as $226/month for the local loop alone) are low. If everybody lived close together and was friendly you could plug the internet connection into a hub and run lines to each house, assigning IP addresses as needed. It's going to get more expensive to make wireless connections, at least the up-front cost. And you have to worry about the maintenance costs of the hub/router and also a place to keep it. So I suspect that Bob is right, that by the time you're all done you have a fair chunk invested and heavy monthly costs. ------------------------- This email was sent without any attachment and should have arrived without any. If there are attachments, DON'T OPEN THEM! Benefits are always obvious. Costs less so. -----Original Message----- You are correct about the diseconomies of scale here. Myself and a few colleagues/friends tried to be our own ISP for a period of a year. It cost us a lot of money compared to what we are now paying. I think those charges are designed to put smaller ISPs out of business in the hope that later the large ISPs remaining will be able to recoup the cost by jacking the prices up. Still, we learnt one hell of a lot about internetworking and I do not regret the money spent on that account. Especially we learnt what it means when someone discovers they can relay spam through your SMTP gateway. We ended up blocked from many sites and once you are on the hit list, it appears you cannot get off them. Our IPs were still blocked 12 months after the hole was closed and still are AFAIK. Managing the security issues ate a lot of time. Jonathan Good point. In addition to the connectivity requirements, they'd also need to provide, at a minimum, POP3, SMTP, and DNS servers, none of which are trivial to configure or maintain. -----Original Message----- Robert, You're thinking on a much grander scale than I. While you may be correct I'm not sure. Let me natter a bit more and lets poke holes at it. We run a fractional T1 at work and pay for actual usage. Cost is $300/month inclusive. We pay a local ISP another $300/month to service the line. I'm sure we could negotiate the same deal for a community setup. So we've recurring costs of $600/month for the line. Need routers and servers at the head end. Need something to distribute the signal. Cisco sells wireless broadband gear. For example, the WT2700, lists at 30k. Receivers at the homes, installation for the users. need support, but doubt that it would take a full time guy. Probably too much of a pain in the butt, but balanced just on the edge of insane. Mark Huth Well, it depends on what you mean by "fractional T1". Most fractional T1 is tarriffed and charged for on the basis of DS0 equivalents, that is 64 K/s increments. Your fractional T1 at work may be as little as a single DS0, although it's more likely to be 128 K/s or more. Then again, the data rate and the backbone rate are not necessarily related. For example, for reasons I needn't go into here, one client I set up years ago ended up with a 384 K/s T1 from the phone company, but only 128 K/s of bandwidth to the Internet backbone. And don't assume that the monthly rate you pay in one location will be the same as that in another, even if they are reasonably close. I also think you underestimate the amount of work involved in setting up and maintaining things. Where will you locate your servers, for example, and who will configure and maintain them? But if you're determined to proceed, please let me know how it goes. -----Original Message----- Bob, You wrote on Jerry Pournelle's web site: "I can think of a lot of nastiness that could be performed using just those functions. Of course, you're behind a firewall, so the worst that happens is that they get the public IP address of the firewall, which is accessible anyway or that they get your 192.168 private addresses that are behind the firewall, which they (in theory) can't do anything with. I say "in theory" because my friend John Mikol, who has skills comparable to those of Mr. Dobbins, reports that he watched external inbound and outbound traffic to his boss's machine, and those packets were using private IP addresses and going through an industrial-strength firewall as though it wasn't there. I don't know how this can be (and I write books about TCP/IP) because the border router at the company, as well as every intermediate router, should have been discarding any packet with a private IP address. But John says he watched it happen, and I believe him." I can understand how the router can pass the private IP addresses, as routers can bbe set to filter or not filter out the private labeled packets, but doesn't a firewall have to be configured incorrectly to allow that to happen? -- Yes. For details, see RFC1918. -----Original Message----- Hi Robert I wonder of you could point me in the right direction please? I am looking for someone to allocate me a static ip so I can set up my own server. I want to prove an initial ideal before committing my self to a possible business. ISDN is too expensive just now so it will look to use a 56K modem? During this trial phase only about four people will possibly log on. Sorry if its a daft question! best regards Cost is going to be the problem, and you may also have to change ISPs. Most ISPs that provide standard $20/month dialup service also offer an option for "dedicated dial-up", which allocates a phone line and a static IP address. Trouble is, the cost of that service is normally pretty high. At the very least, they need to charge enough to cover the dedicated 1FB business line that they have installed to handle your account, and business lines don't come cheap. A typical ISP might charge $100 to $150/month for dedicated dialup. The only way I know of to get something cheaper, assuming that you don't have access to cable modem or DSL (which are inherently "always-on"), is to sweet-talk a small local ISP into setting you up with a static IP address. You'd still use their normal dial-up pool, which means you'd have to pre-arrange times when your server would be dialed in and accessible. I'd really strongly recommend that you not attempt to host your own server. Better by far to go with one of the commercial hosting services like pair Networks, which hosts this site. Web hosting companies offer everything from shared space on one of their servers for $5/month up to dedicated servers, which cost from a few hundred to perhaps $1000/month, depending on traffic volume and so on. You can run anything you want on a dedicated server, because you're the only one on it. Many also offer co-location services, whereby you provide the computer and they install it at their site and provide the connectivity for it. One of those options is nearly always better than attempting to host your own. -----Original Message----- Thank you Robert! Your article and your answer have helped me a lot. Today I achieved my goal of limiting these machines to 98SE and as far as the Chief Technologist wants the net running 95B clients [HELL, I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHY??], I suppose these PCs will be given back to the provider. Anyway, I'm very grateful for your help, and of course you can count on me to help you with anything at my reach (and, please, excuse my poor english). Just a last question, would you recommend some kind of integrated motherboard? I suppose they'll be asking me for some advice after all these problems, and I never really have cared about this kind of motherboards... So, thanks a lot again! And please remember that you have gained a friend in Barcelona (Spain)! Your English is fluent, and certainly much better than my (nearly nonexistent) Spanish. As far as an integrated motherboard, I think pretty highly of the new Intel D815EEA, usually called the "Easton". I've been running one for a while now, but I haven't really had a chance to torture it. It runs Windows 98SE, Windows NT 4 Workstation, and Windows 2000 Professional flawlessly. I haven't tried it under Windows Me, but I expect it will be just as stable with that as well. As far as I'm concerned, the new 815E chipset is a worthy follow-on to the venerable 440BX. The 815E is everything that the 820 should have been but wasn't. The 815E is rock-solid, fast, and supports AGP4X, Ultra ATA/100, and the 133 MHz FSB. The D815EEA motherboard has embedded video and sound (and, optionally 10/100 Ethernet), all of which are more than sufficient for business use. The 3D video is the weakest part, and hard-core gamers will sniff at it, but even the 3D video is more than good enough for most purposes, including games other than graphics-intensive ones like Quake.
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Saturday, 16 September 2000 [Last Week] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] [Next Week] Our SETI@Home group continues to crank out work units. Congratulations to team member JohnN, who recently passed the 50 work unit milestone. If you haven't joined our SETI effort, please do. Here's how. Barbara called last night. Everything is going fine, and they're due back tomorrow, perhaps in time for dinner but more likely late in the evening. I can't wait. That means that tomorrow will be a Tasmanian Devil blur of getting things cleaned up, counting dogs to make sure they're all here, and so on. It's interesting how soon we forget. I first noticed that when I was doing tech review corrections on PC Hardware in a Nutshell. O'Reilly had sent me a printed copy, which they usually don't, and I settled in on the sofa to read and annotate it. As I found the first thing worthy of comment and started to write down my thoughts, I realized that I'd forgotten how to write. I know that sounds stupid, but it's true. And it makes sense when you think about it. For the last twenty years, about the only cursive handwriting I've done is to sign my own name. Nearly everything I "write" nowadays is done on a keyboard, and has been for years. When I have to hand-label a CD or something, I print. But as far as cursive handwriting, I just haven't done much of it since the early 1980's. Oh, I hadn't really completely forgotten how to write, but I had to think about it. It was no longer second nature. It was awkward, nearly as bad as trying to write left-handed would have been back when I was accustomed to writing right-handed. Then, yesterday morning, my phone in the den started ringing, but with a very strange ring cadence. My first thought was "what the hell is that?" I looked down to the system phone on my desk to find that none of the extensions or CO lines were lit up. So why was my phone in the den ringing, and why was it ringing with such a strange sound? Well, as it turned out, the lightning storms and power failures we had the previous evening had popped the GFCI breaker in the basement kitchen, and that's on the same circuit as my telephone system controller. That controller has a fail-over mode, whereby in the absence of power, it directs ring on CO1 to the first station set, CO2 to the second station set, and so on. What I heard was my den telephone ringing in response to CO-generated ring voltage, just like an ordinary phone always does. But it sounded completely bizarre to me. So things that are commonplace for most people are becoming complete oddities for me. As I delete more spam from my inbox, I wonder why Outlook doesn't allow me to create a simple anti-spam rule:
If Outlook would let me do that, I'd (almost) never see another spam message, and I'll still get all my regular mail, including list-serve mail, bulk mail from PR agencies and so on. In fact, they could implement it very easily as a special spam-filtering dialog. Enter the address(es) and/or domain(s) in the first box--one of which must appear in To: or the message will be deleted--and enter exception From: and/or X-Envelope-From: address(es) and/or domain(s) in the second box. Very few spams are sent to the To: address. Nearly all are CC'd, which results in them being addressed to the To: address, but using the X-Envelope-To: field. This filter gets rid of those spams while allowing the bulk mail you do want to see get through. I've long suspected that Microsoft doesn't implement such things (as well as decent cookie filtering) because they don't really care about their users. It appears that Microsoft has done everything possible to make it difficult for users to protect themselves against commercial interests who consider users as nothing more than sheep to be shorn. So Microsoft has for years done nothing to prevent obnoxious third-party cookies from doing their privacy-violating thing. Microsoft's pathetically weak spam filtering also seems part of this mindset. I don't see how it's possible that Microsoft could do this bad a job on spam filtering unless it were intentional. In fact, they recently so much as admitted that they were out to protect commercial interests at the expense of users when they talked about the new cookie filtering features they plan to release shortly for IE 5.5, trying to make it sound as though ad-server software that uses cookies to track users was essential to the continued growth of the Internet. For example, Microsoft says in part:
Huh? Give me a break. The Internet is not "free today" for me or for anyone else I know. We pay for it. Perhaps he's confusing the Internet with certain web sites which use these obnoxious cookies and third-party ad servers to violate our privacy. Third-party ad servers have no benefits for us, the consumers. It is quite possible to track ads (whether views or click-throughs) without using cookies and third-party ad servers to gather personal information about us. What those third-party ad servers do is correlate our identities with our habits and preferences, massively violating our privacy in the process. And as far as the statement that "most" of us like ads of whatever sort, I can only quote Buffy the Vampire Slayer, "Your logic does not resemble our Earth logic." -----Original Message----- Thank you, but I think faster than I can write in English so I'm not always sure about my messages...I mean, I don't know If I really have said what I wanted to say! By the way, I don't usually speak spanish but I speak Catalonian :) I'm going to Intel.com to find details about the D815EEA. My boss wants ONLY Intel motherboards, so if this one works we got the BINGO!....No problem about 3D video, network games are banned, and jpegs and gifs do not need much 3D although you can see a lot of curves in them :) Seriously, I have just found now how to change the MAC address of a NIC in Win98SE....It's astonishing! I just installed a HP Vectra 8i with the master CD and found that I couldn't connect to my domain....First tried the link, it was ok. Network configuration, ok. Finally, I run WINIPCFG just to find that my PC had an IP address and that it was not anywhere in the MS TCP/IP configuration panel???? So I looked for it in the registry and TADDAAA! It was there! I have found a key with some more than ten subkeys, very interesting all of them. And do you guess? One of them is called HardwareAddress, It's the MAC of my NIC. Next step, try to change it and see what it does. After rebooting I went to the registry and found the newly changed MAC. Did you find this issue before?? I'm really very shocked, and just try to think about the problems it could generate in a network to have two or more PCs with the same MAC..... Oops. Sorry, I should have known that. I know that pure Catalonian is spoken in Spain, but my provincial US upbringing causes me to forget things like that sometimes. That reminds me of the daughter of some friends of my parents. She was several years older than I, so she'd be in her early 50's now. She took five years of Spanish in Junior and Senior High School. She majored in Spanish in college, and then (I believe) went on to get her Masters degree in Spanish Literature. As a graduation present, her parents sent her to Spain for the summer. The day she arrived, her parents got a telephone call from her, wailing "I can't understand a word they're saying..." From what you say, I suspect the D815EEA would be the best choice of motherboard for you. I only have one of them, and I haven't really "put it through the wringer" but I've been quite pleased with it so far. As far as changing the MAC address in Win98, I wasn't aware that one could do that. I'll have to give it a try. With few exceptions, Ethernet cards have MAC addresses burned into ROM, so I'm not sure how changing the MAC address in Windows could have any effect. Also, the MAC address functions at the Datalink Layer, so the OS should have nothing to do with it, although it would of course be possible to modify Layer 2 behavior by means of the driver. There are some Ethernet cards that allow the MAC address to be changed, however. We used to have those on our DEC servers. The theory was that well-known machines, such as servers, should have a known MAC address, so if a server failed and was swapped out, we could reprogram the Ethernet card in the new server to the same MAC address as the old server. -----Original Message----- First, the only way to be absolutely sure your computers are secure is to NOT have them connected to the general Internet at all. I am convinced, once the connection is made in any way, that if the reason is strong enough (information, revenge, etc), someone will find a way of getting in. So, you have country-level secrets to protect -- put them on the computer that can't even see the Internet. Force those spies to get physical access to the hardware itself to steal them. I know, it doesn't make for good spy movies. But this is how we work it in our White Wolf Roleplaying game to prevent someone with a laptop and some high skills being able to rob the government blind. Getting through the physical security and THEN having to put those computer skills to work is much more difficult. At http://www.morrock.com/powell.htm, John David Powell looked in the Gun Law email you published. the title of the column? "Gun registration email is not a hoax" -- but he does point out a few of the details that are wrong. http://www.morrock.com/ is a daily news web site that I visit for a short encapsulation of the day's news and engaging and interesting columns that downloads quickly (no fancy graphics, bouncing ads, etc) Sarah Heacock I'll agree with what you say about security, at least so long as we continue to use IPv4, which was never designed to be secure. Once we make the transition to IPv6, however, I think things will improve. As far as the gun law email, my first thought was that it was a hoax, based on the way it was written and other factors that it seemed to have in common with hoax mail. I was quite surprised to find out that it was correct in the essentials, although, as you say, some of the particulars were wrong. -----Original Message----- In response to: "Interesting point, but I think the drug dealers' proclivity to murder is more a matter of culture and the amount of money involved rather than from any consideration of punishment if caught. The only test of this hypothesis that comes to mind is what happened with kidnapping. Prior to Lindbergh, kidnapping was punished less stringently, and kidnappings happened constantly. The kidnappers usually killed their victims. After Lindbergh (and the consequent more common execution of kidnappers) the rate of kidnapping plummeted. Kidnappers were no more likely to kill their victims, and probably less so." What also happened after the Lindbergh kidnapping was that the FBI was given jurisdiction over kidnapping. Previously, local police were the only ones who could investigate kidnappings; that meant when kidnappers crossed state or even town lines, multiple police agencies had to cooperate to catch them, with all the inevitable bungling and footdragging that involved. In any case, the murderousness of drug dealers is so extreme that there can easily be (indeed, there almost must be) more than one reason for it. But criminals usually do know what the possible punishments for their crimes are, and the knowledge does shape their actions. I've heard that in Texas, for many years, bank robbery was punished much more lightly if committed with unloaded guns, and that as a result many bank robbers in Texas did exactly that. -- Indeed. -----Original Message----- Mr. Thompson: You wrote: "My main systems--the ones I actually use to get my writing and other work done on--are all running Windows NT 4 and Office 2000. And at that I could revert to Office 97 without significant pain. I have no plans to upgrade to Office 10 under any circumstances, and I will never run Windows 2000 or Windows Me on production machines." I'm still of the mindset that while NT4, Win9x, and Win2000all have their benefits and bells'n'whistles, I still could be performing well with Win3.11 and Office 4.2. From a user's perspective, we keep on having new versions foisted on us with very little actual return or benefit. From a support perspective, I would love to have my .ini files back, instead of the registry. I fondly remember the days when I could clone my hard disk to a new system, turn the sytem on, and get back to work... Thank you for your courtesy, Richard Micko Well, I wouldn't go that far. One of the reasons I use NT4 is its support for pre-emptive multitasking, which I regard as essential. On that basis, I could probably have settled on NT 3.51, but I didn't really start using NT heavily until NT4 shipped, so that's what I settled on. -----Original Message----- you wrote: >I also think you underestimate the amount of work involved in >setting up and >maintaining things. Where will you locate your >servers, for example, and who will configure and maintain them? >But if you're determined to proceed, please let me know how it goes. nahhhh You're thinking way to complex. A single Netopia router with NAT translation, a single wireless hub for the neighborhood _or_ running twisted pair to the five or six folks on the block. No servers, no nothing. A single NAT/DHCP server, and nothing else. Well, sure, as long as your customers don't mind not being able to send or receive email, access newsgroups, and so on.
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[Last Week] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] [Next Week] Barbara is coming home today! Joy, happiness, jubilation! Just imagine me doing my Snoopy dance, because that's what I'll be doing. When she comes in the door, she'll have three dogs and me all circle-dancing around her and licking her face. I'll try to avoid getting so excited that I pee on the floor, as the dogs sometimes do, but no guarantees. Our SETI@Home group now has 56 members and 11,111 work units complete. Congratulations to team members soloman and BFMersion, both of whom recently passed the 250 work unit milestone. If you haven't joined our SETI effort, please do. Here's how. And I'd better go into Tasmanian Devil mode and get this place cleaned up. -----Original Message----- Hmmm, ok, I'm confused. How is this different than my situation at home _now_ where I have a DSL modem, 5 dynamic IP Addresses, and 5 email accounts from my ISP. The point is, I'm sharing ACCESS to the "real" ISP, not setting up an ISP, it's a neighborhood ROUTER. No different than my office LAN. Or, if your picture was true, I could STILL use hotmail email, and access newsgroups through Deja.com. Heck, my next door neighbor is talking about stringing a piece of 10-base-t across the driveway the 38 feet to get him a cable modem access, and we split the bill. Gets us BOTH high speed access for $15.00 and the cable modem access comes with 5 emails, so what the heck. Well, one big difference. You don't control any servers. And without those servers, you can't provide services. Servers are where one sets up accounts, as for POP3, and without them you're at the mercy of your upstream provider, who isn't going to take kindly to you sharing your connection in that manner. As far as your idea of stringing wire across the driveway, it does have the huge advantage of saving you each $15/month. Balanced against that, however, are a few minor disadvantages. First, your cable provider is going to terminate your service for violating the terms of service. Second, you're going to get arrested for theft of services. Third, if you have a close lightning strike, you may very well find that one or both of your homes burns down (literally). And fourth, your fire insurance isn't going to pay for it. But you will be able to save the $15. -----Original Message----- Here is what Neal Knox had to say about SB 2099, a few weeks ago: (I find his mailing list to be the best source of information about gun legislation; information on it is included at the end.) [copyrighted material removed. It made the point that SB2099 has no chance of passing and that there are many more serious problems to worry about. RBT] This is the Coalition Alerts list. To subscribe or unsubscribe send mail to fco-request@lists.best.com with the word "subscribe" or "unsubscribe" in the body. Archives of these messages are stored at http://www.nealknox.com/alerts/. Copyright (c) 2000 Neal Knox Associates. All Rights Reserved. [[ But I'm sure he wouldn't mind you reprinting it on your web page ]] I suspect you're right, but my policy is that I don't knowingly reproduce copyrighted material without permission. For anyone concerned about Second Amendment rights, this web site and mailing list appear to be worth reading. Thanks. -----Original Message----- Robert, I don't know Outlook nor am I an expert in Eudora, which I do use. What I do have is a curiosity of emails that are spam. They almost always show different addresses in the header and in the email subjects list. So the program MUST be able to parse the message to get the two disparate from fields. Why can't programs allow for a difference between the two be labeled as spam? Is it because some isp's use the same concept to allow for client companies to have several different accounts? I'm pretty lucky in that I send more mail than I get. Pretty manageable to write filters on the spot (I have about sixty at this point) and catch most garbage. But if I ever got a domain to play with, I'm pretty sure my temper would wear thing pretty quick. GM The key to filtering spam is that nearly all spam is sent "to" a CC list. That results in the addressee being in the X-Envelope-To: field rather than the To: field, and that's easy to filter on, or would be given the necessary filtering tools. There are two problems with filtering on X-Envelope-To: First, and easiest to deal with, is the problem of mailing lists, which are also sent X-Envelope-To: Because those messages originate with a known source, however, it's easy to add them to the exceptions list. For example, the other day Pournelle forwarded a message to Larry Niven, Roland Dobbins, and me. All three of our addresses were on the To: line, so even with the filters I describe in effect, I would have gotten that message. But what if Pournelle had sent that message "To:" Larry, and CC'd it to Roland and me? I'd never have seen it if those filters were in effect, because I would have been only an X-Envelope-To: addressee. Obviously, I'd configure my filters to make jerrypournelle.com (and any other domains I commonly get mail from) a member of the exception list, but the problem remains. That's the only reason I haven't implemented server-based filtering along these lines, which pair Networks provides the tools to do. The real answer, I'm afraid, is for all of us to stop using the CC field, leaving it the exclusive province of spammers. -----Original Message----- I'd like to be able to agree with your statement that: "And as far as the statement that "most" of us like ads of whatever sort, I can only quote Buffy the Vampire Slayer, "Your logic does not resemble our Earth logic." I detest being advertised at unless it is advertising focussed on my needs (directly related to the editorial content type stuff). However, here in Australia and in the UK AFAIK, there are multiple TV and radio broadcasters, some commercial and some commercial-free. The ones carrying commercials have many more viewers/listeners than their commercial counterparts. This is not just a programming content issue. Some years ago, the British FA cup final used to show here on both commercial and commercial-free TV. The commercial station had the bulk of the audience. The same applies to shows that are sold on by the commercial-free TV network to the commercial broadcasters, such as the British drama, Heartbeat. Clearly, for whatever reason (insanity?), most people do prefer advertisements. Jonathan Sturm More likely, they were watching the version with commercials so they'd have convenient times to use the bathroom or prepare snacks. I mean, when was the last time you waited for the commercials to finish and the show to come back on before ducking out for a bathroom break? Or taped a program on your VCR and then watched the commercials and fast-forwarded through the show?
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