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Week of 21
February 2000
Sunday, 27 February 2000 08:46
A (mostly) daily
journal of the trials, tribulations, and random observations of Robert
Bruce Thompson, a writer of computer books. |
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Monday,
21 February 2000
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Our schedule is a bit askew this week. Ordinarily, Barbara cleans house
on Sunday. While she does that, I do laundry. Yesterday, she played golf
in the morning with a friend. When she got back, the Daytona 500 race had
already started, so she never did get around to cleaning house and I never
did get around to doing laundry. I spent most of yesterday writing
instead.
Speaking of which, I'd better get my shower and then start on laundry
and writing.
* * * * *
-----Original Message-----
From: TTG [mailto:ttgnet@operamail.com]
Sent: Saturday, February 19, 2000 10:33 AM
To: Robert Bruce Thompson
Subject: W2K
You said:
With the W2K rollout, Microsoft is
apparently belatedly admitting what a POS* Windows 98 is. They're also
saying nasty things about NT4. Apparently, W2K runs for 90 days without
crashing, while Windows 98 crashes every two days, and Windows NT4 every
five days, or something like that.
I just received the retail packaged Windows
2000 Professional. The byline:
The Reliable Operating System for Business
The cynic would say they're burning the OS's
that they're going to be forced to divest as a result of the DoJ case.
I don't believe Windows 98 compares with NT
for stability, but when well configured, it does run for weeks without
reboot. I have first-hand experience.
I doubt it has much to do with any possible divestiture of the
older versions. More likely, it's just Microsoft marketing. What they have
available to sell is is always the best thing since sliced bread until its
replacement comes along, at which point the old product suddenly becomes
junk.
* * * * *
-----Original Message-----
From: Frank McPherson [mailto:frank@fmcpherson.com]
Sent: Sunday, February 20, 2000 12:53 PM
To: Robert Bruce Thompson
Subject: DSL
I know that you have looked into getting DSL
to your house. I came across this site last night that I thought you
might find useful, if you had not already seen it. http://www.2wire.com/
Frank McPherson, MCSE
frank@fmcpherson.com, www.fmcpherson.com
Microsoft MVP - Windows CE
Windows CE Knowledge Center, http://start.at/know_ce
Thanks. I've been to that page before. In my browser, it displays
as an empty page. I did a View-Source and found that it's all Javascript
and Shockwave. I won't deal with any company dumb enough to use something
like that for its home page. Nor will I turn on Javascript just to see
what they have.
Actually, it doesn't make any difference anyway. All these
third-party DSL providers depend on copper provided by the phone company,
and Bellsouth can't provide DSL to my area right now. That means no one
else can, either. Sometimes a third-party company can provide DSL when the
phone company can't, but when that happens, it's simply a matter of tariff
issues. The phone company has everything in place to provide DSL, but
hasn't gotten regulatory approval. That's not the problem here.
What is the problem is rather incredible. BellSouth has been
busily burying SLCs all over their service area for the last several
years. A SLC is basically a big box with a fiber coming in one end and a
bunch of copper pairs coming out the other. Instead of running a copper
pair from my house all the way back to the Central Office seven or so
miles away, BellSouth runs copper to my house from the SLC (which is half
a mile from my house) and then muxes that copper pair onto the fiber which
goes to the CO. The incredible part is that BellSouth apparently has no
idea what they buried where. That is, they don't know whether a given SLC
has the necessary interface circuits, power supplies, etc. to provide DSL.
The only way they can find out is to go look. They've buried thousands of
the things, and no one has any idea which ones are DSL-capable or what's
needed to make them so. So rolling out DSL is going to be a slow process.
* * * * *
-----Original Message-----
From: Scott Van Note [mailto:scottv@asu.edu]
Sent: Sunday, February 20, 2000 9:42 PM
To: thompson@ttgnet.com
Subject: <unnamed>
I was surfing around trying to find
references to how far you could push an Epox kp6-bs. Found your
halloween 99 page.
I just got burned by supermicro with their
PIIIDME and still need a dual option for upgrade. would like PC133
(supermicro lists that you can put PC133 in the PIIIDME - they just
don't bother to tell you that memory only runs at 100 - between crashes
that is)
Didja ever build it?
Don't see any stock PC133 duals out there -
Rambus is out of the question.
ScottV
student/sysop/scientific illustrator
Dual PPro 133/512k - time to upgrade
My current main system, kiwi, is built around the EPoX KP6-BS
with two Pentium III/550 processors. I checked the specs on it, and it's
limited to running 66 MHz or 100 MHz FSB. The fastest processor it
explicitly supports is 550 MHz, although there are "reserved"
jumpers for faster CPU speeds. One problem, of course, is that the 440BX
chipset is only rated for 100 MHz FSB. Some motherboards allow you to
drive it higher than that, but overclocking is never a good idea, and is a
particularly bad idea with a dual-CPU box. I'd say the best bet is to wait
until EPoX and/or Intel release suitable dual-CPU 133 MHz motherboards.
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Tuesday,
22 February 2000
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I usually write up notes for each days posting the previous evening.
Last night, I got a chapter from Tom Syroid that needed to be tech
reviewed ASAP, since his deadline was 11:59 p.m. yesterday. So I spent a
couple of hours on that, and never did get around to writing up any notes
to post today.
Then, at 0400, we were awakened by a chirping sound coming from my
office. Well, Barbara was awakened, and she awakened me. I ended up
sitting, bleary-eyed, underneath my desk trying to figure out why the APC
Smart-UPS 1000 UPS was unhappy. My first thought was that the problem was
due to the Panamax Max 2 surge suppressor. It plugs into the wall
receptacle and provides two surge protected receptacles. I have the APC
plugged into one of those and a TrippLite 675 plugged into the
other.
The problem is, the Panamax just plugs into the receptacle. There's
nothing securing it, and the two UPS power cords tend to pull it away from
the receptacle. Several times recently both UPSs have started screaming
because a dog knocked the Panamax loose. It was still connected to the
receptacle, but not providing power to the UPSs. I figured that was the
problem this time, too.
So I started wiggling the Panamax to see if that was the problem.
Astonishingly, as I wiggled the Panamax, the APC UPS went completely
black--all status lights out--and the two connected computers died. That's
not supposed to happen. I thought perhaps I'd somehow pressed the power
button or something, and I'm still not sure what happened. At any rate, I
decided to get rid of the Panamax. The UPSs themselves have pretty decent
surge protection built in. All the computers connected to the APC unit
were dead anyway, so I disconnected both UPS power cords, pulled the
Panamax, and plugged both UPSs back into the wall receptacle. Everything
appeared normal, and I restarted all the machines.
I'd just gotten back to sleep when, at 0500, chirping noises started
coming from my office again. I stumbled back into my office, where I found
the APC UPS chirping again. One of the status lights was blinking,
indicating some problem with the mains power. The TrippLite unit was
silent, as was the APC Back-UPS Pro 650 back in Barbara's office, but that
didn't necessarily prove anything. The Smart-UPS might simply be more
sensitive to line problems, or so I assumed. Hoping to get at least a bit
more sleep. I shut down the computers and the APC UPS and went back to
bed.
First thing this morning, 0700, I fired everything up again. At first,
everything appeared normal, but as I sat here responding to mail and
checking my daily web sites, the APC started chirping again. Enough being
enough, I again shut everything down, moved the APC Smart-UPS out from
under my desk, and replaced it with the Smart Power Systems SineSmart
2000, a 2 KVA unit. It's been running for an hour or so, and everything
appears to be working. I'll have to have a look at the APC unit when I
have a spare moment.
* * * * *
-----Original Message-----
From: Scott Van Note [mailto:scottv@asu.edu]
Sent: Monday, February 21, 2000 12:26 PM
To: Robert Bruce Thompson
Subject: Re: <unnamed>
The problem is that no-one makes a chipset
that supports PC133 and dual processor. And am not aware of any
announcements from chipset makers saying that they will. Will be a long
time before dual PC133. Everyones doing RDRAM. DDR might get here first.
Intel has just confirmed that their i840/i820 SDRAM translator doesn't
work - looks suspicious, Intel has invested heavily in RDRAM and now you
can't run SDRAM on any of their new chipsets. . . It only ran at 100
anyway.
The KP6-BS will let you overclock the FSB
incrementallly to 133. PC133 and the EB suffix processors are stable at
133 - but as far as I can tell the AGP doesn't run on a separate divider
so most video cards would give up. And you would have to run a cooler on
the BX chipset.
Oh well. thanks for the reply
I wouldn't count out PC133 SDRAM just yet. You're right that no
one makes a dual-CPU chipset that supports PC133, but I suspect Intel will
remedy that situation later this year. As far as the i820/840 MTH not
working, that's not actually the case. There's a bug in the i820 that
results in memory errors when using ECC. Not ideal, but as far as I know
the i820 MTH works properly with ECC disabled. How fast it is relative to
chipsets with native SDRAM support is another question, of course, and one
that I hope to answer for myself. I have a CC820 motherboard and a VC820
motherboard, which differ only in that one supports SDRAM and the other
RDRAM. We'll see what happens. As far as running the BX at 133, I'm not
sure I'd want to do that even with a chipset cooler.
* * * * *
-----Original Message-----
From: J.H. Ricketson [mailto:culam@micron.net]
Sent: Monday, February 21, 2000 3:39 PM
To: thompson@ttgnet.com
Subject: SCSI & IDE: Dual Boot
Dear Bob,
Fascinating article
today at Ars Tecnica on the arcane spells & technology involved in
successfully achieving a dual-boot SCSI & IDE HDD box.
Regards,
JHR
--
[J.H. Ricketson in San Pablo]
culam@micron.net
Thanks.
Noon: Trying to
write with Border Collies around is such a joy. Malcolm is a paper-hound.
He sits beside my chair for long periods with his snout stuck in the
pocket of my sweat pants, rooting around for a paper towel or whatever
else he can find. I craftily removed all the paper towels from my right
pocket and transferred them to the left pocket while Malcolm wasn't
watching.
In the mean time, in the high-tech version of "the dog ate my
homework", Duncan rebooted my system for me. He was standing next to
my tower system, shook his head to get his ears arranged properly, and
rammed his snout into the reset button on kiwi. There I sat, typing
away, when suddenly the screen cleared and the memory check started.
As I was waiting for the system to finish booting, trying to remember
the last 10 minutes or so of work that I'd done so that I could
reconstruct it, what should I feel but a puppy snout rooting in my left
pocket. Malcolm is both smart and relentless. Barbara will be attending an
out-of-town meeting Thursday and Friday. That's going to be a long two
days.
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Wednesday,
23 February 2000
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Howls of protest have put plans on hold for a dress code for the
Winston-Salem Forsyth County school system. The proposed dress code would
have banned certain revealing clothing, wearing t-shirts with profanity or
nudity, wearing underwear outside the clothes, wearing jewelry in pierced
noses, tongues, and cheeks, and so on. This whole thing probably wouldn't
have been worthy of comment except that the proposed dress code was to
apply to teachers, not students. Apparently, the teachers regard the
proposed dress code as an unwarranted intrusion on their freedom of
expression. I can only think that our schools are in serious trouble if
the teachers don't realize that one is supposed to wear one's underwear
inside one's street clothes.
The Register posted an article
this morning reporting what happened to one early adopter of Windows 2000.
Not a pretty picture.
* * * * *
-----Original Message-----
From: Scott Van Note [mailto:scottv@asu.edu]
Sent: Tuesday, February 22, 2000 12:22 PM
To: Robert Bruce Thompson
Subject: Re: <unnamed>
I'm kinda hoping that AMD will get their
dual capable system out first.
I've been checking around and apparently the
BX440 chipset will quite easily push to 150Mhz. Most current boards
actually have a heatsink on the hottest chip of the set. It looks like
it *is* possible to comfortably push the KP6-BS to 133 using PC133 and
an EB suffix PIII. The only question is if the chosen AGP card will be
stable at 83MHz instead of the normal 66.
Though I'm still not comfortable with
overclocking, the performance increase for EB suffix processors is quite
substantial. Mostly because of the reconfiguration of the coppermine
cache. My hurdle is that I've been running duals and ECC (started with
EDAC - error detection and correction) since 1994 - and am set in my
ways - I want duals, ECC and the fastest renders for the dollar. Also
makes little sense to run a 133 FSB processor on 100 memory - only
cache-work takes advantage of the technology upgrade.
The 533EB is listed at www.krex.com for
236.75 and the non-coppermine (re slower) 533b is 265.75. The 100FSB 550
processor is even more expensive! The same price order holds if you
search elsewhere - the faster processor is cheaper. For comparison the
switch from 100FSB to EB at the same CPU speed (say 600) gives a greater
number crunching (render) capability than the difference between a 500
and 700Mhz PIII (100FSB) - and the price goes down instead of up. But if
you factor RDRAM in - all price advantage flies away.
Hope I didn't bend your ear. Just that I
decided to upgrade at a weird moment in technology. *I* thought that
finally upgrading my dual ppro board when Intel finally got back to full
speed cache (forget XEON) was a good idea. (sigh)
And yep. As far as I can see the 820/840
SDRAM translator bug is confined to ECC. Though I do think it a self
serving coincidence that Intel made the MTH and MRH run at 100 MHz
instead of 133. Makes RDRAM look better.
I wouldn't count on seeing MP Athlons any time soon, if ever.
Although reports say we can expect that later this year, I'll believe it
when I see it. Motherboard makers have had a hard enough time producing
stable motherboards for one Athlon.
As far as pushing the 440BX to 133 MHz, I don't think that's a
good idea, pariticularly in an MP environment. I'm not sure how you'd do
it, anyway. At least on my KP6-BS, there don't appear to be any settings
for host bus speeds above 100 MHz. Also, even if you somehow do that, you
may well have BIOS problems. The ATC on the processors you mention
operates differently, and I suspect you'll need a BIOS update to allow it
to function properly.
* * * * *
-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Ward-Johnson [mailto:chriswj@mostxlnt.co.uk]
Sent: Tuesday, February 22, 2000 2:24 PM
To: Robert Bruce Thompson (E-mail)
Subject: Saving your work
You wrote today: "As I was waiting for
the system to finish booting, trying to remember the last 10 minutes or
so of work that I'd done..."
I've set Word to save my work every one
minute. Even typing flat out, it's only a few sentences and, on a
dual-CPU system seems to involve no noticeable pause on the system as I
used to get with a single CPU. Works for me, anyway, and my short-term
memory is such that I'd have no hope of remembering anything I've done
in the past 10 minutes. My friends my age are now starting to complain
that they can walk to the kitchen, stand in front of the fridge and
wonder what they're doing there. Welcome to my world, I tell them - I've
been like that ever since I can remember. Which is about four minutes
ago.
Regards
Chris Ward-Johnson
Chateau Keyboard - Computing at the Eating Edge
http://www.chateaukeyboard.com
I'd never thought of that. My Autosave is set to ten minutes. As
it turned out, I'd only lost about 5 minutes of work the other day, and
much of that was time spent staring at the screen thinking about how I
wanted to phrase something. But, as you say, it makes sense to set the
Autosave time shorter on a fast system. Thanks.
* * * * *
-----Original Message-----
From: J.H. Ricketson [mailto:culam@micron.net]
Sent: Tuesday, February 22, 2000 7:14 PM
To: thompson@ttgnet.com
Subject: Intel Confusion
Dear Bob,
Register has an article here
on the extremely confused (and confusing) Intel chipset &
microprocessor situation. It confirms my intuitive take that Intel is
charging off in a dozen different directions and pleasing no one in the
process MoBo makers, Memory makers, or customers, corporate or
individual. Meanwhile, it also seems, Intel is aggressively pursuing a
policy and strategy of planned rapid obsolescence. (I was stung by this.
Bought an ASUS dual-processor MoBo and one PII300 CPU, intending to add
a second later as the price became more realistic. 6 months later the
PII300 had been abandoned, along with its customers.) And the saga
continues. I am now building a dual Celeron 466box. Will there be be any
Celerons a year from now, when I hope to UG to a faster version? Will
they fit the receptacle on my board? It seems highly unlikely at this
point. The plethora of CPU & chipset configurations and receptacle
types all incompatible with each other - issuing from Intel boggles the
mind. This is not accidental, IMO. The sooner Intel can abandon a
cheaper configuration, the sooner they can sell their latest and most
expensive product. I, for one, am really tired of this. AMD is beginnig
to look better & better to me. At least they seem to have some clear
direction in mind, and are pursuing it.
Regards,
JHR
--
[J.H. Ricketson in San Pablo]
culam@micron.net
As I've said before, I don't think planned obsolescent has
anything to do with Intel's planning, although it may seem that way. Most
people don't upgrade systems, so Intel's focus is on selling processors
here and now. As you've learned, there is good reason for my constant
harping on the necessity of buying both processors at the same time. Even
if 300 MHz PIIs had still been available when you were ready to add the
second processor, you might have had problems. A dual-CPU system should
always use two processors with identical S-Specs, and there have been many
S-Spec versions of the PII/300. As a workaround for your situation, have
you considered buying two inexpensive Celeron/PPGA processors and a couple
of slockets? All together, that should cost you less than buying one more
PII/300 would have, and you'll have a considerably faster system.
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Thursday,
24 February 2000
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I guess you really can find anything on the Internet. If you've ever
seen the movie 12 O'clock High, you may remember the airmen singing
the ballad Bless 'em All. When I watched that movie one time with
my father, who was in the Eighth Air Force during WWII and flew bombing
missions over Nazi Germany in a B-17, he commented that the words they
sang in the movie weren't exactly the ones he remembered.
Years later, a friend of mine who'd as a U.S. Army sergeant landed at
Omaha beach and carried a Thompson gun all the way to Berlin sat down at
his piano and sang several verses of the unexpurgated version for me. I
decided last night to see if I could track down those lyrics. Sure enough
(not for the easily offended) here
they are. Or at least some of them. I know there are more somewhere,
because I distinctly remember my friend singing one verse that had
colonels in it. Actually, I may have found the
version with colonels too, but the server is not responding. I did
find another Bowdlerized version here.
There must be hundreds of versions out there. Interestingly, when I tried
the same search two years or so ago, I didn't find any of this stuff. The
Internet really is growing.
* * * * *
Are spammers really as stupid as they seem, or do they just think the
rest of us are stupid? Here's the first part of a spam I got last night:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
World Wide Web Opt In Mailing List
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
To Unsubscribe your email address from our
Opt-In listserver, see end of message.
Duh. Maybe if they call an opt-out mailing list an opt-in mailing list,
people will be too stoopid to notice. Duh.
* * * * *
I love this job. What other job would allow me to spend hours
connecting and configuring different game controllers, playing various
games, and still call it work? When Pournelle called yesterday, I
mentioned that I was playing with games, which was something I had
studiously avoided in the past, fearing their addictive nature. He opined
that perhaps that would have been a danger when I was 25, but not now that
I'm 45. Yeah, right.
* * * * *
It looks like another Brit has joined the ranks of the daily journal
keepers. Bob Walder
maintains a diary in much the same form as Chris Ward-Johnson's Chateau
Keyboard. Bob has clients for whom he does computerish things having
to do with firewalls, but he apparently makes his wife do all the real
work. He's only posted three days' entries so far, but it looks like a
promising start.
* * * * *
If you thought the DDoS attack a couple weeks ago was impressive, just
wait. The Register published an article
this morning that reports the necessary client software is now available
for Win32. Uh-oh.
* * * * *
Barbara is off this morning to a meeting in Georgia or somewhere.
She'll be gone until late tomorrow night, or possibly Saturday morning. I
tried to convince her to take Malcolm along, but (as usual) without
success. I pointed out that a 5-month-old Border Collie puppy would be
very popular with the other attendees, which she admitted. But she still
refused to take him. Women are so unreasonable.
Within literally five minutes of her departure, I heard splashing
sounds in the den, followed by the sound of the stainless steel water bowl
turning over and dumping a gallon or so of water on the den floor.
Fortunately, the floor is hardwood. We have to keep the laundry basket of
used towels in the bathtub in the hall bathroom to prevent Malcolm from
pillaging the used towels. I ran into the hall bathroom, grabbed a couple
of slightly damp bath towels, and ran back into the den to start blotting
up the water. Unfortunately, I forgot to shut the bathroom door behind me.
When I arrived back with the now-dripping towels, Malcolm had unrolled
most of a roll of toilet paper from the holder and eaten a good bit of it.
I shooed him out of there and cleaned up the mess. When I came back into
the den, there Malcolm lay on the love seat, eating a book. I can see that
I'm not going to get a lot of work done until Barbara gets back.
* * * * *
-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Michael Todd [mailto:rmtodd@mailhost.ecn.ou.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2000 1:11 PM
To: thompson@ttgnet.com
Subject: re: your comment today on MP Athlons...
Regarding your comment today [yesterday.
RBT] on not being likely to see MP Athlons anytime soon. Probably true,
and even if you did see one, it's not clear that that you'd be able to
do anything with one if you had one. As I understand it (correct me if
I'm wrong, oh hardware guru :-), the proposed interconnect scheme for
the MP Athlons is based on technology derived from the Alphas, and thus
not compatible with the APIC hardware used by Intel. Now, even if the
motherboard fairy dropped an MP Athlon on your desk tomorrow, what are
you going to do with it? All the MP-capable OSes (NT, Linux, FreeBSD)
only support the Intel APIC hardware. Given how much work went into
making the existing APIC-based MP code work reasonably stably, I
wouldn't hold out hope of seeing working OSes able of using MP Athlons
anytime soon, even if the hardware exists.
Good point. Intel owns MPS and I suspect they will not likely
license it to AMD or anyone else planning an MP Athlon.
* * * * *
-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Ward-Johnson [mailto:chriswj@mostxlnt.co.uk]
Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2000 2:34 PM
To: 'webmaster@ttgnet.com'
Subject: Joke
The first par of your journal today [yesterday.
RBT] is the funniest thing I've read in a very long time. I've just sent
it to my sister, who's head of science in a large secondary school in
the UK. I'll let you know what she says.
Regards
Chris Ward-Johnson
Chateau Keyboard - Computing at the Eating Edge
http://www.chateaukeyboard.com
So, am I making it up? Heh, heh, heh.
* * * * *
-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Ward-Johnson [mailto:chriswj@mostxlnt.co.uk]
Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2000 4:04 PM
To: 'Robert Bruce Thompson'
Subject: RE: Joke
Doesn't matter; comes under the heading 'Too
good to check'.
Regards
Chris Ward-Johnson
Chateau Keyboard - Computing at the Eating Edge
http://www.chateaukeyboard.com
I'm telling the truth, more's the pity...
* * * * *
-----Original Message-----
From: S.S.Ghosal [mailto:ssghosal@caltiger.net.in]
Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2000 11:02 AM
To: Mr. Robert B. Thompson
Subject: Mail from Soumya Shankar Ghosal
Dear Mr. Thompson,
Sir, how are you? It's after a long time I'm
writing to you. Sir, do you remember me? I'm Soumya Shankar Ghosal from
Calcutta, India who has written a few letters to you earlier requesting
to visit my home page. You visited my home page.
Once again I wish you a very Happy New
Millennium. I hope you had received my greetings card via email. I
thought earlier writing to you but I was unable to do so since my father
was ill and he was admitted to Nursing Home.
My B.Com (Bachelors in Commerce) Part 1
exams are due on the March 14th. I seek your blessings for the exams and
also for my future career. I will write a detailed letter to you soon as
I need to discuss a few important things about my future career. I find
you to be the right person to guide me. I use your photograph as my
computer's wallpaper. I would like you to be my Guru. I would be
grateful if you accept me as your sishya (Student).
Hope to hear from you soon.
Waiting eagerly for your reply.
With due Respects,
Soumya Shankar Ghosal
ssghosal@caltiger.net.in
http://angelfire.com/me/ghosal
Sure, I remember you. I'm sorry to hear your father was ill. I
hope he is doing better now. Unfortunately, although I am flattered by
your request, my existing commitments to home, family, and work impose
time constraints that prohibit me from offering detailed personal advice
or counseling. However, I wish you all the best.
14:45: Malcolm
has just eaten a feather duster. All that remains is the handle, with
three or four pathetic little feather stubs sticking out of it. Around
13:00, I went downstairs to make my mother a cup of tea. As usual, I let
all three dogs out in the backyard, which isn't fenced. They usually stick
pretty close--our back yard and two of those behind us--and there's
usually no problem leaving them out there loose for the few minutes it
takes to make my mom tea or whatever. When I went out to call them in,
Kerry and Duncan were in our backyard and came immediately. Malcolm was
nowhere to be seen. After calling him repeatedly, I finally got in the 4X4
and drove off in search of him. I found him in the front yard of the house
behind us, lying on his back with the dog that lives there staring
balefully down on him.
I think I'm going to keep Malcolm penned in his crate the whole time
Barbara is gone, for my sanity and his own safety. He's particularly
demonic when she's gone, and I simply can't watch him all the time. I'll
let him out periodically to get water and food and to go out. I'll let him
sleep back in the bedroom with me, and allow him to run free in the
evenings while I'm reading or watching TV. But other than that, it's
solitary confinement for Malcolm.
16:45: Something
has poisoned, kiwi, my main NT system. I downloaded the current
week's MP3 file of Jerry Pournelle, Mary Moscone, and Paul Schindler
discussing the current issues and started to play it. About 3 minutes into
it, the audio died. At first, I thought it was just a long pause. Then I
thought perhaps the file was corrupt, so I tried playing another
known-good MP3. No audio. Then I figured perhaps my audio input cable had
finally died completely (it had been providing only the left channel, but
I was too busy to replace it). So I replaced the audio cable. Still no
audio. So I decided that rebooting might help, and restarted the
system.
After watching a blank green screen for a couple of minutes, I headed
back to Barbara's office to do a couple of things. When I came back 15
minutes later, the green screen was still up, and there was no disk
activity. I finally ended up pushing reset. That's one nice thing about
NT--NTFS is very robust. I had this problem with ridiculously long
shutdowns on kerby, my former main system. It had gone from
requiring a minute or so to shutdown and restart up to taking literally 45
minutes to shutdown. At one point, I actually solved the problem on kerby
and got back to one minute shutdowns, so I'll have to go back to my notes
and find out what I did.
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Friday,
25 February 2000
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Well, FrontPage managed to lose my data. This file contained several
paragraphs here, mostly about Pstores.exe, but now all that text is gone.
Just to make sure I hadn't perhaps put them in some other page, I used
FP2K's global search to search all html pages in this web. It found three
occurrences of Pstores, but none recent. So I'll try to reconstruct.
Basically, what happened is this. After pushing reset to restart the
system and logging back in, I fired up IE5, whose start page is set to my
links page. All of those links are, of course, normally purple, because
they've all been visited. This time they were all blue, indicating that
the IE5 history file had been cleared. Obviously, one of things that's
taking so long to shutdown is something to do with IE5. My first suspect
was Pstores.exe, that mysterious service that first showed up around the
time Microsoft shipped IE4. I don't recall exactly what Pstores.exe does,
but it has to do with storing passwords, S/MIME data, and so on for IE5
and related programs like Outlook Express.
So I went into NT's Services applet and set Pstores.exe to start
manually. While I was at it, I shutdown Pstores.exe. Then, I decided to
get rid of the obnoxious Loadwc.exe service. All that really does is check
to see whether IE5 is the default browser. Duh. And that takes the better
part of a megabyte of RAM at all times. I killed that one by deleting it
from the Run key in the Registry. I then shutdown the system. Sure enough,
it took only about a minute to shutdown and restart.
Once the system came back up, I got a scare. When I fired up Outlook
2000 and told it to go check the mail, it went catatonic for a minute or
two and then displayed the dialog that says it can't connect to the mail
server. Okay, I canceled out, assuming that killing Pstores had also
killed my saved password. I then shutdown and restarted Outlook, and told
it to check for mail. It immediately displayed the dialog prompting me to
enter my password, which I did. There was a check box there to mark if I
wanted it to save the password. I did so, figuring it was worth a shot but
probably wouldn't work with Pstores disabled. OL then checked the mail
successfully. I shutdown OL and restarted it again, just to check. It
checked mail successfully without prompting me for my password. Being a
suspicious cuss, I fired up Task Manager, assuming I'd find that
IE5/OL2K/NT had started Pstores again without permission. Nope. Pstores
was still dead.
Oh, yeah. The restart fixed the audio problem, and I was able to listen
to the Byte.com MP3.
* * * * *
-----Original Message-----
From: J.H. Ricketson [mailto:culam@micron.net]
Sent: Thursday, February 24, 2000 10:09 AM
To: Robert Bruce Thompson
Subject: RE: Intel Confusion
At 08:55 AM 2/24/00 -0500, you wrote:
>I see. Well, I prefer continuing
technical advances to backward >compatibility. Look where that got us
with DOS.
Dear Bob,
No argument there. I agree. AMD seems to
have made some technical advances along the way, too - at least enough
to seriously threaten Intel. I think both can be said to do very well in
that area. My question was about Intel's confused and confusing
multi-path advance.
If you were a Mobo or Systems maker - which
would you rather bet the farm on - Intel's erratic, multi-path, and
ever-changing advances, with its hazards to itself and its customers, -
or AMD's relatively straightforward path of advance? Bear in mind - your
company might go down the tube if CPUs could not be provided on time, as
planned. (PIIIs in February?)
JHR --
You want a serious answer to that? I'd go with Intel in a
heartbeat. Their problems are always short-term. AMD's problems are
chronic. Right now, things are going right for AMD, and Intel is having
some problems delivering product. That won't last. And that's not only my
opinion. You'll notice that most motherboard and system makers stick with
Intel as much as possible.
* * * * *
-----Original Message-----
From: bilbrey@pacbell.net [mailto:bilbrey@pacbell.net]
Sent: Thursday, February 24, 2000 9:43 PM
To: webmaster@ttgnet.com;
Marcia Bilbrey
Subject: Malcolm in solitary,
followed by the death by poisoning of Kiwi.
Hmmm. I am minded of Star Trek TOS episode 60, *And the Children Shall
Lead* ++, Malcolm shakes his paw in a slow, deliberate manner, and off
goes Kiwi, to never-never land. Hehehe.
++ Episode
reference
.b
--
regards,
I replied, in my best eastern dialect
Brian
Bilbrey
"Were you addressing me, a$$hole?" and
www.OrbDesigns.com the conversation went
downhill from there.
bilbrey@orbdesigns.com RBT
Yeah, I remember that episode. I didn't think it had a Border
Collie puppy in it, though.
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Saturday,
26 February 2000
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Barbara got home late last night. The dogs (and I) are happy. I'm sure
she'll tell you about the trip on her
page.
Yesterday was a zoo. Tom Syroid, who is striving mightily to get
Outlook 2000 in a Nutshell to 100% completion, shipped me one last
chapter to do a quick review on. Yesterday was drop-dead day--all chapters
to his editor by the end of the day, period. He should be having breakfast
with Leah and the kids as I write this. After spending an hour or so on
Tom's chapter, I finally got my own Input Devices chapter shipped off to
my editor and got started (or re-started) on the Audio chapter. Things may
be sparse around here for a while, as I've promised my editor to have
absolutely everything to him by 10 March. That means I have to finish one
major chapter, one shorter chapter, and the Preface.
I found out why FrontPage seemingly arbitrarily decided to change
all my HTML pages, which (a) changes the auto-generated dates on every
page that uses the date/time bot, and (b) requires me to upload the entire
site. It wasn't arbitrary at all. Oh, no. FrontPage was on a Mission.
FrontPage decided, all by itself and for the third time this year, to
delete the bottom shared border, which contains my copyright notice. I
didn't notice that immediately, so when I published my web site yesterday,
FP re-published every damned page, this time without the shared border.
When I noticed it this morning, I fixed the problem. That changes every
HTML page in the site, of course, so this morning I'll have to republish
the entire site yet again. This is getting real old real fast.
Although the year is young, I recently received what has to be the
Spam of the Year. I got a message the other day asking me to consider
the advantages of high colonic enemas. I must admit that's not something I
think about often. Come to that, I don't think I've ever thought about it
at all. This message was so bizarre that I actually read the portion
visible in AutoPreview, which I use in my Inbox. That the message was in
my Inbox was because it was addressed to webmaster@ttgnet.com,
so perhaps it was not a spam at all. Spammers being morons but not idiots,
they don't usually bother sending spam to webmaster addresses. If this was
not a spam, I hope whoever sent it will not bother sending any follow-ups.
At any rate, the portion I read made a weird kind of sense if one likens
the whole process to flushing out one's radiator periodically. I think
I'll pass, though.
Speaking of webmaster accounts not getting spam (other than from
spammers who sell web-site related products and services, of course) makes
me think about those other addresses that receive little or no spam--postmaster@ttgnet.com,
abuse@ttgnet.com, and so on. Perhaps
I should begin using postmaster as my main account address. Then, when I
get a spam addressed to another ttgnet.com address, I could fire off a
fake 550 notification message to the spammer that would cause them to
remove that address from their list. Nah, probably wouldn't work, because
most spam has a From: and/or Reply-To: that's not valid. It was a nice
thought, though.
Finally, I need to register some domains today. My friend John
Mikol has gotten DNS set up for me for the three domains I'm going to
register, so I'd better get that done.
13:20: So much
for my cunning plan. Malcolm pillaged not one but two rolls of toilet
paper while Barbara was gone. I keep forgetting to close the bathroom door
when I leave, or, if I do, I don't quite get it latched. This morning,
while Malcolm was in his crate, I cunningly set a mouse trap, wrapped it
in toilet paper, and left it on the bathroom floor. I then let Malcolm out
of his crate, expecting that within a few minutes I'd hear a loud snap and
a puppy yelping. Well, it was indeed a few minutes, but the snap I heard
was rather subdued, and there were no anguished puppy noises. I went off
in search of Malcolm, to make sure he didn't have a mouse trap hanging
from his nose. I found him lying at the bottom of the basement stairs,
happily chewing a mouth full of toilet paper, and with a dead mouse trap
to one side.
Then Tom Syroid called and we talked for the better part of an hour.
He's still not quite done with the book, but plans to finish it by
tonight. I'm sure he and Leah will be relieved. So, I still haven't
registered the domains and I still haven't gotten to work on the remaining
chapters. I've decided to do them in order of increasing difficulty, the
Preface first, followed by the easy chapter, followed by the hard one.
That way, the two easier elements will be done, and if I need to call an
end to things late on March 10th, I won't be missing the two easier
chapters.
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Sunday,
27 February 2000
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Frank McPherson raises some interesting issues in support of Amazon's
ridiculous patents in his daily journal article
yesterday. However, he entirely misses the point. The original purpose of
a patent was to protect a specific implementation of an idea, rather than
the idea itself. You could patent a better mousetrap, in other words, but
you couldn't patent the idea of using a mechanical device to catch mice,
let alone the mouse-catching concept. The latter is what Amazon is
attempting to do with their patent on the One-Click ordering system and,
most recently, with patenting the concept of affiliates programs.
Leaving aside the question of prior art, which is much in doubt in both
of these cases, the fact is that Amazon is attempting to patent things
that are not patentable, on at least two grounds. First, in order to be
patentable, something must not be obvious, which both of these clearly
are. Secondly, and most tellingly, Amazon is attempting to patent an idea
rather than an implementation of an idea. In fact, one of the original
requirements for being granted a patent was that you had to submit a
working model of the device. Good luck to Amazon in that attempt.
The problem with patents really started with the drug companies. The US
PTO made the mistake of granting patents on specific drugs, rather than on
the equipment and processes used to manufacture those drugs. The problem
got worse with software patents, none of which should have been granted at
all. The reason that companies applied for software patents is that the
correct mechanism, copyright, did not offer them the broad-ranging
protection they desired. Of course it didn't. It was never intended to.
Copyright protected an expression of an idea, while these companies sought
to protect the idea itself. Nor did anyone even think that patents would
be granted in such circumstances. Had the PTO been thinking properly, they
would have recognized that and refused the patent. All software patents
are invalid prima facie anyway. If only the PTO did their job,
that'd be obvious.
Mr. McPherson presents Amazon's patents as justifiable protection of
their competitive advantage. It's not. It's greed, pure and simple.
They've invented nothing worthy of a patent. I'm joining the increasingly
widespread boycott against Amazon.com. They are obnoxious, overbearing,
and, worst of all, expensive. There are better places to buy books. I hope
you'll join the boycott as well.
* * * * *
-----Original Message-----
From: HUPPNUT@aol.com [mailto:HUPPNUT@aol.com]
Sent: Saturday, February 26, 2000 2:02 PM
To: thompson@ttgnet.com
Subject: Lawyers
A very successful lawyer parked his
brand-new Lexus in front of his office, ready to show it off to his
colleagues. As he got out, a truck passed too close and completely tore
off the door on the driver's side. The lawyer immediately grabbed his
cell phone, dialed 911, and within minutes a policeman pulled up.
Before the officer had a chance to ask any
questions, the lawyer started screaming hysterically. His Lexus, which
he had just picked up the day before, was now completely ruined and
would never be the same, no matter what the body shop did to it.
When the lawyer finally wound down from his
ranting and raving, the officer shook his head in disgust and disbelief.
"I can't believe how materialistic you lawyers are," he said.
"You are so focused on your possessions that you don't notice
anything else."
"How can you say such a thing?"
asked the lawyer. The cop replied, "Don't you know that your left
arm is missing from the elbow down? It must have been torn off when the
truck hit you." "My God!" screamed the lawyer.
"Where's my Rolex?"
* * * * *
-----Original Message-----
From: M. Praeger [mailto:athyrio@hotmail.com]
Sent: Saturday, February 26, 2000 5:55 PM
To: webmaster@ttgnet.com
Cc: scottv@asu.edu
Subject: How to raise the KP6-BS over 100
WRT Scott Van Note's emails earlier this
week on the KP6-BS:
There is a "CPU Host Clock"
setting in the BIOS Setup under "Chipset Features". In my
manual it's described as an afterthought, on the very last printed page.
Use Motherboard Monitor or the like to carefully monitor the temperature
of your CPU. Also stick your finger on the two PCIset chips. And, on
your PCI cards' main chips. Don't run them uncomfortably warm.
AGP on the KP6-BS, according to the manual
p. 3-4, is fixed at 66MHz independent of the clock frequency of the CPU.
As I scraped the floor and begged earlier, send me one of your high-end
AGP video cards, whichever one you can't find a home for, and I'll tell
you whether that's a fact or not.
Intel may own MPS, but Compaq owns the
Digital Alpha bus patents and is perfectly capable of
in-house-engineering its own APIC's/ASIC's. When Intel's product
shortages hurt Compaq's bottom line badly enough, Compaq will retaliate.
I don't doubt that by the end of this year we'll see dual-1GHz-Athlon
boards in Compaq machines running double-rate 200MHz FSB using ordinary
100MHz SDRAM --which will make the KP6-BS, and everything else with the
BX chipset, look anemic. Besides, given Michael Dell's recent public
denouncement of the Athlon as insufficient to the needs of Dell's more
extreme, outer-edge, lunatic, --what was the word he used? --fanatical?
--customers, wouldn't that be delicious egg on the face of Compaq's
chief rival.
I've already mailed Mr. Van Note privately to tell him about a
new Tyan dual-Coppermine board that supports the 133 MHz host bus. As
someone pointed out earlier, the issue about multi-processing is not
implementing it in hardware. The issue is that you won't have an OS to
support it. As far as giving you or anyone else video cards and other
stuff, I've made the point before that I don't give away hardware or
software to individuals under any circumstances, but perhaps I need to
repeat that periodically. If you want the latest video card, you'll have
to buy it.
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