Home » Daynotes Home » Week of 13 June 2005
Photograph of Robert Bruce Thompson
 Daynotes Journal

Week of 13 June 2005

Latest Update: Friday, 17 June 2005 10:06 -0400 		Free Speech Online - Blue Ribbon Campaign
Paying for this Place
 Visit Barbara's Journal Page
Monday, 13 June 2005
[Daynotes Forums]    [Last Week]   [Mon]  [Tue]  [Wed]  [Thu]  [Fri]  [Sat]  [Sun]   [Next Week]    [HardwareGuys Forums]
10:00 - Another $55 billion down the drain, most of which came from the pockets of US taxpayers. The G8 nations announced they're writing off massive "loans" they made to poor nations, most of those in Africa. Bizarrely, they're spinning this as a success rather than the miserable failure it is. Incredibly, they're talking about this massive default as an opportunity to lend more money to countries that have never paid back earlier "loans" and have no prospect of paying back any future "loans".

This needs to be called what it is: a massive transfer of wealth from the pockets of American taxpayers to hellhole countries and third-world dictators. There never has been and never will be any justification for the US government to distribute foreign aid of any sort. If they have the money to do that, they should be reducing the tax burden on the US taxpayer, not sending our wealth overseas. Nor does the US government have any business participating in the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the UN, and other organizations whose primary reason for existing is to loot the US taxpayer for the benefit of other countries.

US politicians are supposed to act in the interests of US citizens in general and US taxpayers in particular. Period. As I prepare to write yet another large check for estimated taxes, it enrages me to know that a significant percentage of the amount I'm forced to send to the US Treasury will be wasted on foreign aid and similar giveaways to other countries. How about keeping that money at home? The Social Security trust fund is going bankrupt, and our politicians are sending billions to Africa. Jesus.



Thanks to everyone who requested a review copy of Astronomy Hacks. I've sent the names and addresses of everyone who responded to O'Reilly. I don't know how many review copies they plan to send out, but my guess is that those who registered for a review copy have a better than 50-50 shot at receiving one.

If you do receive a copy, please read it and post a review of it at your earliest opportunity. Amazon.com is the most important place to post your review, although you're of course free to post it on the Barnes & Noble site and other on-line review sites.



11:27 - Okay. I don't usually print press releases and similar announcements, but this time it's only fair that I do so, since I've been beta-testing Xandros 3 since last fall and have been recommending it for a year now.

Xandros Logo

Upgrade Today and Save Up to 70% off on Xandros Business 3!







          Business box
Don't miss out, Upgrade to Xandros Desktop OS - Business Edition 3.0 today and save up to 70% off the retail price of $129.95.

Why wait? Give your business an advantage today! The new and enhanced features of Xandros Desktop Business Edition 3.0 including improved wireless network support and Xandros Anti-Virus (US $24.95 MSRP) and Firewall Wizard offer the most compatible and easy-to-use Windows alternative ever!!

To upgrade now, use one of the Click To Buy links below*.

*The discounted price will be applied at the end of the checkout process, before order confirmation. Prices do not include shipping and handling. All prices in US dollars.

Upgrade to Business 3 from
Upgrade Discount
Your Price
 Discount with Existing and New Membership Click To Buy 
Deluxe 2.x
 25%
 US $97.46
 35% Box / Download / Both
Business 2.x 35% US $84.47 45% Box / Download / Both
Standard 3.x 30% US $90.97 40% Contact Customer Service For Upgrade Discount Coupon
Deluxe 3.x 60% US $51.98 70% Contact Customer Service For Upgrade Discount Coupon

New and existing Xandros Networks Premium Members receive an additional 10% off. Contact Customer Service to get personal upgrade discount coupon, including upgrades from older versions and trade-ups for version 3 Standard & Deluxe. 

Dear Xandros User,

We are pleased to announce the availability of Xandros Desktop OS Business Edition - Version 3. As always, we have listened to your requests and have added features you’ve asked for - including the latest wireless and networking capabilities - to bring you the best desktop experience available.

Version 3 of the Xandros Business Desktop is compatible with the latest Windows 2003 Server Service Pack 1, providing a secure, stable alternative to costly Windows desktops. It provides seamless sharing of Windows network resources with domain authentication support for Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 servers, logon scripts, and group policy profiles. Other enterprise-class features include:
  • Speedy performance on large Windows networks
  • Seamless Microsoft Exchange connectivity
  • Latest wireless network card support including Intel Centrino, 802.11g speed with WPA configuration
  • Xandros Click-N-Connect wireless network AP (Access Point) finder
  • Thin clients and terminal emulation
  • SMP and Hyper-Threading support
  • And more

Best of Both Worlds

Business box The Xandros Business Desktop offers a complete desktop experience including Firefox web browsing, Thunderbird e-mailing, Skype Internet calling, and the Star Office suite. Loaded with security features - including Xandros Anti-Virus, the Xandros Firewall Wizard, encrypted home folders, and secure access to virtual private networks - you can finally say goodbye to the frustration related to Windows security.

Xandros Desktop can be installed either standalone or alongside Windows to create a dual-boot “Best of both worlds” machine making using and migrating to Linux from Windows a simple and natural experience.

Here's what beta testers had to say about V3 Business:

"I put Xandros Business Edition on my office, home and laptop computers, not because I'm anti-Microsoft or anti-any other Operating System ... but because it's BETTER than any OS I've seen to date." -- Alton Jones, Technology Development Administrator, Starpoint Communications, Inc.

"The team at Xandros has created several wizards, but the most notable is the Ndiswrapper wizard which will make connecting wirelessly easier than any  other distribution available." -- Eric Strawn, Attorney at Law

"Working easily within an existing Server 2003 AD environment without dedicated support people has always been a stopper for other Linux distributions. ... Windows days on the desktop are numbered. Microsoft should be afraid, very afraid, of what Xandros has to offer." -- Ray T

"Xandros has put out a solid operating system that should give Windows a true run for their money. ... I can not tell you how much time is saved by not constantly having to  update Windows with security updates etc." -- Matt Stein, Orange County, California

"With the exception of one or two systems that we keep around to run our few remaining Windows-only legacy applications, we've converted our entire business to Xandros, and have no regrets. If you want a top-notch Linux distribution to replace Windows on your desktop, look no further than Xandros Desktop 3.0 Business Edition." -- Robert Bruce Thompson, Author, PC Hardware in a Nutshell & Building the Perfect PC

Happy desktop computing from the Xandros Team!

You can turn off future mailings by logging in to https://shop.xandros.com/login.php,
selecting My Account, selecting Notifications and disabling Notifications.





This from Jim Cooley:

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Prescott over-heating problem solved
Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 08:24:14 -0400
From: James Cooley
To: Robert Bruce Thompson

http://www.peteredge.orcon.net.nz/casepics.htm

Yep, that ought to do it.

Jim Cooley
Computer Closet

Heh. That beats my record, which was 17 fans in a PC Power & Cooling full-tower case.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Xandros BE vs Deluxe 3 SP-2
Date: Thu, 9 Jun 2005 21:41:29 -0600
From: Captain Ronal B Morse USN
To: Robert Bruce Thompson

Robert,

FWIW, been playing with SP-2 and the 2.6.11 kernel update for Xandros Desktop Deluxe for a couple of days.  The experience was OK, not perfect, not debilitating. A little aggravating at times. 

At any rate, finally got around to paying for and installing BE3.02 tonight. The BE package is screwed together much tighter than the SP-2 package. I had none of the niggling little glitches  Well worth the upgrade price (in my case $59 going from 3.0 Deluxe > BE) just to avoid the hassle of installing SP-2 and the kernel update.

These guys make we want to send them money just to encourage their efforts.

Yeah, me too, although of course with me being a computer journalist *and* a beta tester they send me everything for free.

I have the same impression of X3D/SP2 versus X3BE. There are some very minor glitches in the former, but the latter seems rock-solid. I'm running X3D/SP2 on my primary system and my den system, and have X3BE running on Barbara's primary system and a couple of other systems. I much prefer X3BE.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: More thanks
Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2005 07:23:03 -0400
From: mikeric
To: Thompson

Hi,

Been waiting on Xandros BE 3.0 since you mentioned. Ordered.

Then in a few short paragraphs, you explain more about what I need to know thank hours of searching Xandros' web site.  A tribute to your expertise and succinctness.  That is why I read every word, every day of your posts.  I (we) depend on your table scraps.  I (we) trust what you say. 

Thank you.

Installed kmail, and quite happy with it.  Thanks again.

Thanks for the kind words.



[top]
Tuesday, 14 June 2005
[Daynotes Forums]    [Last Week]   [Mon]  [Tue]  [Wed]  [Thu]  [Fri]  [Sat]  [Sun]   [Next Week]    [HardwareGuys Forums]
08:30 - Astronomy Hacks hits the warehouse tomorrow, so we should have an early copy Thursday or Friday.



I spent some time last weekend ripping CDs and DVDs, and learned some interesting things.

First, more than a few of Barbara's CDs aren't CD-DA audio CDs at all. They're some bastard hybrid of an audio CD with a data CD. The publishers claim that the data portion enhances our experience, but what they really mean, of course, is that it prevents us from copying the CD, or so they fondly hope. Well, screw them. Barbara wants MP3s of her CDs to carry on her MuVo MP3 player to the gym, and I'm not going to let them get in my way.

I have zero respect for the RIAA and the big music companies. I might have had some respect for them--not much, but some--if they'd admit what they're doing instead of sanctimoniously claiming to be enhancing our "experience". Why can't they say something like, "We think our customers are all a bunch of thieves, and the reason this data session is on this disc is because in our inept way we're trying to prevent people too stupid to figure out how to get around it from copying our music."

At any rate, something's happened to the GNOME grip app I had been using to rip audio CDs. It used to rip and encode an entire CD to MP3, using LAME, at about the maximum DAE rate the drive supported. It was always a bit strange, because grip wouldn't do two CDs in a row unless I exited the application completely and restarted it for the second CD. Then it started leaving a zombie process after ripping one CD. I tried to use Xandros Process Manager to kill the zombie process, but it refused to die. So I went out to command line and killed it dead, using the "die, Die, DIE, and this time I really mean it" command. After that, grip would load again and start to work, but die part of the way through a CD. Ultimately, I ended up having to reboot the system between CDs, which is ridiculous.

But it got worse. On my new primary desktop system, I've yet to succeed in ripping a full CD before grip dies on me. Even a reboot doesn't solve the problem. The same is true on two other systems I've tried it on. I'm forced to conclude that grip and Xandros 3 just don't play nice together.

So, I decided the simplest solution might be just to use the ripping feature integrated into Xandros File Manager. Sure enough, that works fine. Click on the CD, highlight the audio tracks, and copy/paste them to the directory where I want the MP3s. Up pops a dialog, asking what format I want to use and how to name the ripped files. I accept the defaults, which are MP3 and to use the track name rather than the track number. Xandros rips and encodes the audio tracks to 128 Kb/s MP3s. (I can't find a way to specify bit rate, but 128 Kb/s MP3s are fine with Barbara for use in her portable MP3 player at the gym.)

Ordinarily, the ripping and encoding process takes only a few minutes per CD. About every fifth or tenth CD, I run into one that for some reason rips and encodes a lot slower, as much as five or eight times slower. I'm not sure what causes that, and I haven't tested to see if it's reproducible by CD. It may be there's something about particular CDs that makes them difficult, or perhaps the slow ones are just dirty.

But then I run into CDs that aren't CD-Audio discs at all. When I call them up in Xandros File Manager, instead of seeing the list of audio tracks, I see readme.html, executable files, and so on. These are hybrid CDs, which include a data session. The manufacturers have no right to represent and sell them as audio CDs, because they're not. There's no way to rip them with Xandros, but grip and all of the other ripping apps I've used simply ignore the data session. Which means I have to get another ripper working if I want to rip all of Barbara's CDs for her.

The other thing that surprised me was just how little music is on some CDs. CDs were originally designed to contain 74 minutes of music, and most albums contained at least an hour. I noticed when I was ripping Barbara's copy of a Jackson Browne CD that it didn't have many tracks, and the tracks weren't very long. Sure enough, when I added it up, it came to about 34 minutes of music. Talk about a rip-off! They could easily have fit twice as much music on that disc. And I'll bet the short disc wasn't much if any cheaper than a disc filled closer to capacity.

That's an idea that Proctor and Gamble would love. Use the same size package, but include only half as much product. I don't think they'd get away with that, and the music companies shouldn't be allowed to, either.

The good news is that I think I've learned to rip and burn DVDs reliably. The problems I had burning DVD dupes had nothing to do with the ripping and everything to do with the burning. DVDshrink was doing its job perfectly all along. The problems arose when I attempted to burn the rips to disc.

Oddly, there's no problem burning DVD+RW discs at 4X. The problem comes in burning DVD+R discs at anything faster than 2.4X. Anything burned at 4X or faster simply won't play reliably, at least in our cheap-o $36 CyberHome DVD player. That's true regardless of disc quality or burner quality. I tried numerous burns at 4X, 8X, 12X, and 16X, using Plextor drives and top-quality media, and all of them had at least some artifacts, if indeed they'd load and play at all. Typically, the problems became more severe later into the disc.

There are only a few, very large files that need to be copied for a DVD-Video, so in theory burning on-the-fly should work about as well as burning from an ISO image. But based on my testing, burning my daily backups from an ISO image is much more reliable, so I decided to use an ISO image for burning the DVD-Video discs as well. So far, they've all worked perfectly. Perhaps I'll try burning an ISO image at 4X or higher just to see what happens. Not that it really matters. I can set a disc to burning just before dinner, and come back after dinner and walking the dogs to find a completed disc.



When I installed KMail for Barbara, I was faced with a choice I didn't fully understand. KMail allows each mail folder to be set up as "mbox" or "maildir". The program defaults to and recommends maildir, claiming it is more robust, although admitting that it is slower on some systems. The help isn't very helpful.

The mbox format is a standard format that creates one file to contain all of the messages in a folder. Mozilla Mail uses mbox, as do many other Linux and Windows mail clients. The maildir format creates a physical directory for each mail folder, and stores the messages as individual files within that directory. Although I can see that keeping messages as individual files might have some real advantages, I was concerned about filesystem overhead when copying and backing up our mail. I probably have 50,000 or more messages in my current folders, to say nothing of my archive folders. I receive hundreds of new messages per day. Having one file per message seems a bit excessive.

So I did what I usually do when I'm unsure of myself. I asked the experts. I emailed Brian Bilbrey and Greg Lincoln to see if they had any advice for me. The exchange follows:

I'm setting up Kontact (with KMail) for Barbara, and I'm offered the choice between mbox and maildir format for each folder I create. The KMail docs, such as they are, say that maildir is used by default and that it is more "robust" than mbox.

The choice between mbox and maildir is per folder. Right now, I have Barbara set up using the default maildir, but I can move her to mbox simply by creating new folders configured to use mbox and moving her messages to the mbox folders. I am seriously considering doing that for ease of back up. It's a lot easier to back up one mbox file than literally thousands of individual message files in a maildir folder.

So, my question is this. Is there any really good reason to use maildir rather than mbox format on a desktop system? I'm assuming that since both are open formats there's no advantage either way in terms of how easy it'll be to migrate Barbara's mail at some future time if I move her from KMail to something else. I'm more concerned about robustness and reliability.

Thanks for any advice you can offer.

Greg was first off the mark:

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: mbox versus maildir
Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 10:21:50 -0400
From: Greg Lincoln
To: Robert Bruce Thompson

I've always used mbox for just the same reason you'd like to. I also found that it performed better, at least in Kmail, when I had lots and lots of mail in a folder. (Thunderbird/Mozilla was always much much faster for me with searches and loading a large folder of mail)

I've never had any problem with reliability using either format.

But then Brian weighed in with this:

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: mbox versus maildir
Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 12:36:42 -0400
From: Brian Bilbrey
To: Robert Bruce Thompson
CC: Greg Lincoln

Ah, I love an opportunity like this...

Just to be contradictory... Grin.

I like maildir. Individual messages, one per file. Easy to process with scripts, easy to back up just new messages (think rsync). No humoungous files (Marcia has several large (50M+) mbox files, even though she's fanatical about sorting mail. With mboxes at work, we have a few multi-gig (in a single mbox) users.

There are many opinions:

 http://www.google.com/search?q=maildir+vs.+mbox

 http://www.google.com/search?q=mbox+vs.+maildir

This link was interesting, too.

http://www.courier-mta.org/mbox-vs-maildir/

There are a number of performance-related claims about mbox == better than maildir, nothing I've experienced. My major interest is this: If I suffer a filesystem problem, I can lose one big file with many messages in it, or one little file, with one message in.

Think about searching a maildir with grep - isolates the message you want!

Note:

I use maildir on an imap server running on the local home server to save messages. I have NO direct local mail storage on any machine that I use as a client. So, using tbird, I have:

Orb: IMAP on zidane.mazin.net
NFR: IMAP on l10n.hq.nfr.net
NERDS: IMAP on mail.nerds.net
TEST: IMAP on vroomfondel.home.orbdesigns.com

Any workstation I use (desktop, laptop) I simply configure to look to the IMAP server(s) I need access to. My read mail is read from everywhere. I've got scripts backing up the mailstores on all those servers, and I file personal stuff permanently on vroomfondel (off of zidane).

Easier to back up one file than thousands? You write a script. You run the script with cron. What's to be harder?

Thanks to both of you.

I'll probably leave Barbara's mail as maildir for now, but I may change it to mbox later. Brian, the reason it's easier to backup mbox is that it's one big file rather than thousands of little ones. It's much quicker to write the one file to DVD than to write a ton of small ones. Of course, I've started using K3b to write an ISO first rather than do an on-the-fly copy, so that speeds things up a bit. Still, it takes a while to do the disk-to-disk copy that I use for ad hoc backups during the day.


[top]
Wednesday, 15 June 2005
[Daynotes Forums]    [Last Week]   [Mon]  [Tue]  [Wed]  [Thu]  [Fri]  [Sat]  [Sun]   [Next Week]    [HardwareGuys Forums]
08:50 - My readers keep me on my toes...

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Amazing!
Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 08:08:05 -0400
From: Marcia Bilbrey
To: Robert Bruce Thompson

No comment in your website about the Michael Jackson verdict?

You're slipping!

Sorry, but I have no idea what you're talking about. Is he the one that showed his nipple at the World Series?



Doing some research, I learned that Michael Jackson is a formerly popular musician who was apparently charged by a malicious prosecutor with molesting children. No evidence to speak of. Tons of reasonable doubt. A waste of everyone's time and money, most particularly Mr. Jackson's.

It used to be that district attorneys prosecuted cases when they were convinced that the defendant had committed the crime, and that they could prove that he had done so. When both conditions were true, district attorneys generally were successful in prosecuting the accused. Nowadays, it seems, district attorneys prosecute cases when they are convinced that they have some hope of gaining a conviction, whether or not they actually believe the defendant to be guilty, particularly if that defendant is well-known. We've seen this in several high-profile cases recently, including the abomination that was Scott Peterson's conviction and the trial of a basketball player whose name escapes me for rape.

So, O. J. Simpson was almost certainly guilty, but was acquitted. Robert Blake was almost certainly guilty, but was acquitted. Scott Peterson was almost certainly innocent, but was convicted. And the basketball player shouldn't even have been charged, but at least those charges were dropped, albeit after costing the basketball player and the county government a ton of money.

It seems to me that district attorneys in question should be dismissed for incompetence in the first two cases and should be subject to being prosecuted themselves for engaging in malicious prosecution in the latter two cases.



O'Reilly sent me some early sample copies of Astronomy Hacks. It's very pretty, and it should be in the bookstores by the end of the month.

As to review copies, O'Reilly tells me that everyone whom they select to receive a review copy should receive it by the end of the month. Their policy, except for recognized members of the press, is to send review copies directly only to individual reviewers in the US and Canada. The one exception to that is that they'll send review copies in bulk to their British subsidiary, which will in turn send review copies to UK reviewers.

I have no idea how many copies they plan to send out, or which of the people who submitted requests will receive them. It's better for me that O'Reilly makes those decisions. That way, people aren't angry at me if they don't get a review copy. But the feeling I got was that most if not all of those who requested a review copy will receive one, at least if they're in the US, Canada, or the UK. Requests for review copies are now closed and being processed, so please don't send in any more requests.



10:10 - Microsoft has released another bunch of patches. I'm tired of Microsoft spinning the severity ratings to make severe flaws sound minor, so I've developed my own severity classes, as follows:

Definition
 Microsoft Rating
 My Rating
A vulnerability whose exploitation could allow the propagation of an Internet worm without user action. Critical
 Catastrophic
A vulnerability whose exploitation could result in compromise of the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of users data, or of the integrity or availability of processing resources. Important
 Disastrous
Exploitability is mitigated to a significant degree by factors such as default configuration, auditing, or difficulty of exploitation. Moderate
 Critical
A vulnerability whose exploitation is extremely difficult, or whose impact is minimal. Low
 Important

I think most people will agree that my severity ratings are closer to reality than Microsoft's. Keep in mind that even an exploit that Microsoft assigns its lowest severity rating may allow a malefactor to "own" your computer, which most people would consider a pretty important security hole. On that basis, of the ten patches that Microsoft released yesterday, three are Catastrophic, three are Disastrous, and four are Critical.

If you're still running Windows, you should definitely apply these patches. Better still, consider applying this comprehensive patch.

Speaking of which, I did a quick check of my web stats the other day. A year ago, ignoring search engines and similar bots, about 10% of my traffic originated from Linux clients, and 50% from Mozilla or Firefox. Now, about 20% of my traffic originates from Linux clients, and 70% from Mozilla or Firefox. My web sites aren't representative of the entire population, of course, but even so these are pretty impressive numbers. Linux definitely has its foot in the door among the people who matter most. Where my readers lead, others eventually follow.


[top]
Thursday, 16 June 2005
[Daynotes Forums]    [Last Week]   [Mon]  [Tue]  [Wed]  [Thu]  [Fri]  [Sat]  [Sun]   [Next Week]    [HardwareGuys Forums]
08:46 - Barbara has not been feeling well. She'd been plagued by sinus problems and a sore throat, and finally decided to do something about it Tuesday night. She didn't want to go to the doctor, so she asked me to prescribe for her. I didn't know much about the local drug resistance of the organisms that cause sinusitis and pharyngitis, so I started her Tuesday night on 500mg of oral amoxicillin tid, intending to maintain that for 10 to 14 days if it worked.

If amoxicillin was going to work at all, it should have knocked down the infection noticeably overnight. Wednesday morning, Barbara still wasn't feeling much better. In particular, her throat was still sore, which told me that her pharyngitis was probably resistant to amoxicillin, so I shifted her to 500mg bid of Ceftin, which is a second-generation cephalosporin. That's twice the recommended dose for sinusitis and pharyngitis, but acute sinusitis is nothing to mess around with, particularly since Barbara is subject to sinus infections. The Ceftin knocked down the infection by that afternoon, so I'll keep her on it for 10 to 14 days, although I may back the dose down to 250mg bid after a few days.



More on Microsoft's bug fixes:

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: patch severity.
Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 22:08:12 -0800
From: Jan Swijsen
To: Robert Bruce Thompson

I think the first two categories should be swapped.

I would call "A vulnerability whose exploitation could allow the propagation of an Internet worm without user action."  critical/disastrous.

While I rate "A vulnerability whose exploitation could result in compromise of the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of users data, or of the integrity or availability of processing resources. " as catastrophic

Passing a worm or other nasty stuff is bad but I think the compromise of user data is the worst thing that can happen to a box.

I compare the first one to a car slowly driving trough your street with an installation blaring out Britney Spears music at 200db. Very annoying, maybe cracking a few windows here and there and driving people and pets nuts. But once past everything is OK again.

The second one is like someone breaking in into your house and moving stuff around. Even if nothing gets stolen or broken you'll never feel safe again.

But each of Microsoft's categories incorporates the risk from less severe categories.

Their most severe category, which Microsoft labels "critical" and I label "catastrophic", enables a malefactor to compromise a machine without the user taking any action at all. A machine that suffers a catastrophic bug can be "owned" simply by having it connected to the Internet.

Their second category, which they call only "important" but I call "disastrous" requires that the user take some action, but that required action may be as trivial as visiting a web page.

To extend your house analogy, here's how I'd define Microsoft's severity ratings:

Definition
 Microsoft Rating
 My Rating
Microsoft forgot to lock the door.
 Low
 Important
Microsoft forgot to close the door.
 Moderate
 Critical
Microsoft forgot to install a door. Important
 Disastrous
Microsoft forgot to install walls. Critical
 Catastrophic



[top]
Friday, 17 June 2005
[Daynotes Forums]    [Last Week]   [Mon]  [Tue]  [Wed]  [Thu]  [Fri]  [Sat]  [Sun]   [Next Week]    [HardwareGuys Forums]
10:06 - The end of an era.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Kodak ends B&W paper
Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2005 05:52:31 -0700 (PDT)
From: Roy Harvey
To: Robert Bruce Thompson

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=&q=kodak

Back when I was a teenager, black and white printing was mainstream. I also did color printing, of slides and negatives, but that was expensive, fussy, and it took as much as an hour to process one print. My friends and I shot a lot of Tri-X, Plus-X, and Panatomic-X film in everything from 35mm to 11X14 formats, and printed to Velox, for contact prints, or Kodabromide for enlargements. I knew that color would eventually become more popular than black & white, but looking at the great works by Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and others, it never occurred to me that black & white would ever disappear.

To me, color was something you used for family snapshots and wedding pictures. Serious photography was done in black & white, preferably with a large-format view or field camera. And gelatin-silver prints were the standard. I experimented a great deal with alternative printing processes, including albumen-silver, carbro, dye-transfer, platinotype, palladiotype, and so on, and I admired the beauty of those processes. But gelatin-silver was the standard. And now it's disappearing.



I'm already hard at work on a new book. We don't have a title for it yet. It's similar to Building the Perfect PC, but oriented toward upgrades and repairs rather than building new. It'll be about the same page count and trim size as BtPP, and will also be four-color. The goal is to have the manuscript 100% complete by 17 October, and in the stores late this year or very early next. We think the market for such a book, selling at the same price as BtPP and also in full color, is probably even larger than the market for BtPP. Time will tell.

As usual, I'll be posting draft chapters for my subscribers and soliciting their comments and suggestions.


[top]
Saturday, 18 June 2005
[Daynotes Forums]    [Last Week]   [Mon]  [Tue]  [Wed]  [Thu]  [Fri]  [Sat]  [Sun]   [Next Week]    [HardwareGuys Forums]
00:00 -



[top]
Sunday, 19 June 2005
[Daynotes Forums]    [Last Week]   [Mon]  [Tue]  [Wed]  [Thu]  [Fri]  [Sat]  [Sun]   [Next Week]    [HardwareGuys Forums]
00:00 -



[top]
Copyright © 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 by Robert Bruce Thompson. All Rights Reserved.