10:08 - There's an Interesting article on NewsForge about introducing Linux to folks at a retirement home. It looks like it may not be long before Pournelle's Aunt Minnie is using Linux herself.

Speaking of Linux, I occasionally get nastygrams from people taking me to task for referring to Linux as Linux rather than as GNU/Linux. I've read what Mr. Stallman has to say on the subject, and I'm not convinced. If Mr. Stallman had his way, I'd call the OS I'm running Red Hat GNU 7.3. According to Mr. Stallman, the "Linux" part isn't important because Linux is only the kernel. Only the kernel?

According to Mr. Stallman, the GNU project built most of the operating system, and lacked only the kernel. That strikes me as similar to saying that they'd built most of a computer, and lacked only the chipset, BIOS, and CPU. Certainly the GNU utilities are important to Linux, but without a kernel all they had was a collection of mostly reverse-engineered utilities, which Mr. Stallman refers to as the "GNU Operating System". An operating system without a kernel. Now there's a novel concept. The heart of Linux is the Linux kernel, so it seems to me appropriate to refer to the operating system itself as Linux, which I will continue to do. If that offends anyone, so be it.

11:24 - News on an interesting Mozilla bug:

If I understand the problem, it doesn't occur on Windows. I had several instances of Mozilla open on the task bar when I read your email. When I clicked on the link in the email, Mozilla opened it as a new instance. I'm not sure what "profile corruption" means or why opening a new instance from an embedded link would cause that to happen. Perhaps I'm risking corrupting my profile in Windows by clicking on links in email messages, but if so I haven't noticed any problems other than the usual Mozilla bugs.

9:00 - I suppose it's a commentary on modern life that it always comes as a shock to me when a business does the right thing despite the fact that it costs them some money to do it.

Barbara has pre-paid cell phone service from Cingular. Every three months we buy a phone card to add $20 or $30 worth of time to the phone. Any unused balance "rolls over" and so is not lost. Unless, that is, we let that balance expire by failing to add at least $20 to the balance within the 90-day deadline. Our balance, $49 or so, was due to expire on June 9th. On June 5th, Barbara and I went to Wilson Communications, the store where we'd bought the phone and each subsequent card. We bought a $20 card to refresh her balance.

Yesterday, Barbara called to say that her phone had stopped working. When she called 611 on it, the automated attendant told her that she had $0.00 and 0 minutes on the phone. As soon as Barbara told me that, I suspected that the time on the new card we'd bought on 5 June hadn't been installed properly. In the past, the guy we bought the card from had used the card we just got to re-fill the phone. We thought they did that automatically, since they punch up the serial number on the card into a little electronic thingee near the cash register, and each time we'd bought a card in the past we hadn't had to enter it ourselves.

That turned out not to be the case. They were pretty busy when we went in to buy the card, and apparently the guy we bought it from didn't enter it into the phone. We never even thought about it until Barbara's phone died. So I called them and Gary told me to bring in the phone and they'd make it right. While we sat there, the guy from Wilson Communications called Cingular and explained the problem. He wasn't able to get anywhere with them, of course. So he entered the $20 card Barbara had bought on the 5th and bought and added a $50 card out of his own pocket.

As Gary and I shook hands, I told him that although he'd just eaten $50, that might be the best $50 he'd ever spent on advertising. We'll never go anywhere else for phone stuff, of course, and we'll also tell all our friends how Wilson Communications does business. They'll make that $50 back many times over.

13:10 - The first crack in the dam? Wal*Mart is now shipping eight system configurations with Lindows pre-installed. Microsoft must be gnashing their collective teeth. Microsoft hates it when obscure little garage shops ship boxes with Linux installed. How much more must they hate it when a high-profile mass marketer like Wal*Mart is now advertising and shipping PCs that have no Microsoft software installed on them?

Of course, Wal*Mart is rather exaggerating the capabilities of Lindows when they claim Lindows has "the ability to run most Microsoft programs" (and in bold face, yet). That's misleading at best and many would consider it a fraudulent claim. I suspect Microsoft's lawyers will be all over Wal*Mart before the day ends.

I also find it odd that Wal*Mart is shipping PCs with an OS that's still in beta. When I checked the Lindows web site just now, I found that they still aren't shipping their final version. Also, I can find no link to download Lindows, which is rather strange for a Linux-based OS. Michael Robertson, the CEO of Lindows, has already drawn the ire of some OSS folks for failing to make source code available and for the Lindows End User License Agreement, which flies in the face of OSS and FSF by restricting distribution of the product.

And speaking of teeth-gnashing, AMD hates it when people advertise their Athlon processors using the actual clock speed rather than AMD's hokey Performance Rating model number. I see that Wal*Mart is doing that, which won't make AMD happy.

14:03 - A year ago, I got very few questions about how to reduce the noise of PCs. That subject is getting a lot more popular, possibly because people are using faster processors and more memory, which in turn requires higher output power supplies. I must confess that I've done little research or experimentation on quiet PCs. I sometimes use PC Power & Cooling Silencer power supplies in situations where low sound levels are necessary, but other than that I haven't worked with any of the sound-reducing technologies. Here's an interesting report by a reader who decided to build a quiet PC for himself. If you're interesting in reducing the noise level of your PC it's worth reading.

10:00 - Microsoft says there's a bug in the way Windows XP handles the registry that results in blue screens. Apparently, XP Home and XP Pro can munge their own registries, rendering the system unbootable.

Microsoft has issued a hotfix for the problem, but apparently doesn't trust it much because they recommend you not apply the hotfix unless you are severely affected by the problem. They say "if you are not severely affected by this problem, Microsoft recommends that you wait for the next service pack that contains this fix." Of course, they don't say when that SP will be available, so it appears you have the choice of (a) applying a hotfix that Microsoft itself doesn't trust or (b) going without and risking your system becoming unbootable, at which point you have presumably become "severely affected" and in retrospect should have applied the hotfix. Talk about damned if you do and damned if you don't. Microsoft logic is not Earth logic.

See http://support.microsoft.com/search/preview.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q318159 for further details.

My own view is that anyone who is running Windows XP should upgrade to Windows 2000 immediately.

More on silent PCs from reader Michael Hipp:

Thanks. I must confess that I've never paid much attention to PC noise levels, other than using a PC Power & Cooling Silencer power supplies for systems that are to be used in noise-sensitive environments. It seems to me that a PC that uses a Silencer and a very quiet hard drive like a Seagate Barracuda ATA IV makes so little noise that there isn't a lot of point to looking for further noise reductions, but perhaps I'm just less sensitive to noise than some people. Perhaps at some point I'll build a "Quiet PC" project system.

The weather is to be good tonight, so Barbara and I will probably head up to Pilot Mountain to observe. Nautical Twilight isn't until 21:49 and Astronomical Twilight at 22:36, so it'll be another late night. Luna is at about 28% illumination, and moonset is at 00:11, so we'll have reasonably dark skies for observing deep-sky stuff.

11:20 - When Pournelle first reported problems downloading the latest ATI drivers, I decided to do him a favor and just download the drivers via my cable modem and then upload them to Pournelle's server. To my surprise, that turned out not to work. I've now been trying for two days to download the Windows 2000 drivers, and I can't get them. They're something like 14 MB, and each time I try to get them the download process blows up after anything from 2 or 3 MB up to 6 or 7 MB. Nor does attempting to restart the download work. Instead of restarting the download where it left off, the restart thinks about for a minute or so and then starts downloading the file from the beginning. This is very annoying.

Word on ADSL costs in Spain:

Thanks for the kind words. Those prices seem a bit higher than typical US prices, but not tremendously so. Of course, ADSL prices here tend to vary according to what alternatives are available. In areas served by cable modem, DSL prices are typically a lot lower than for areas that don't have cable modem as an alternative. When BellSouth first offered me DSL three years ago (even though they really couldn't provide it at my location) they were offering 1.5 Mb/s down and 384 Kb/s up for $70/month, but that was because cable modems hadn't been deployed here yet. Also, the speeds they quote for ADSL are "typical" and aren't guaranteed. Those at the far end of the loop are likely to see slower speeds.

Business school teaches a concept called price elasticity of demand. That's a fancy way of saying that more people will buy something at a lower price than will buy it at a higher price. If the product you're selling has high fixed costs and low marginal (unit) costs, you'll probably make more money by selling more product at a lower price than you will selling fewer units at a higher price.

Broadband Internet service, cable or DSL, has very high fixed costs and very low marginal costs, so the idea is (or should be) to get as many people signed up and paying by the month to help offset those high fixed costs. (Before any writes to tell me, I realize that if you take a long enough view "fixed costs" aren't really fixed. It's safe to call broadband infrastructure costs "stepped costs" in the sense that if you keep adding customers you'll eventually have to upgrade your infrastructure--faster servers and routers, a bigger pipe to the backbone, etc.--so your "fixed costs" do increase over time.)

It seems to me that cable modem and DSL providers have done a pretty poor job of optimizing revenues. One sure sign that you've not done price elasticity of demand calculations correctly is that your product has poor penetration, and broadband has very poor penetration even in markets where one would expect it to have high penetration. I've read various figures, but some indicate that broadband penetration in many middle-class and upper middle-class neighborhoods is as low as 5%. That in areas where nearly every household has a PC, many have multiple PCs, and most of them connect to the Internet by some means, such as AOL dialup. So for every twenty households, one uses broadband and perhaps 15 use dial-up. Why? Because dial-up costs them $25 a month, whereas broadband might be $50 or $60 a month.

The advantages of broadband over dialup are clear--higher speed and always-on. But it's obvious that most people aren't willing to pay twice or more as much for those advantages. If a broadband company already has the infrastructure in place (and has already paid the costs of putting it there) it's simply stupid to let so many potential customers continue using dialup. If the broadband companies dropped that differential to $10/month, they'd get a lot more customers, enough more I suspect to make substantially larger profits on their investments. If they dropped the differential to $5/month, they'd get most of the dialup customers, and it they dropped it to $0/month they'd get essentially all of them. Their revenue from those 20 households would increase from $60/month to $400/month, and their costs would not increase proportionately.

I think the problem is that the broadband companies are still focused on the early adopter phenomenon. With any new technology there is going to be a certain percentage of the population that is willing to pay high prices to have that technology first. That's all well and good from the point of view of the company that produces the technology. They get very high per-unit profits, which helps them pay the development and deployment costs. But if they make the mistake of trying to maintain those high prices too long, they miss the boat on mass market acceptance. Which is what I think is happening with broadband.