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Daynotes
Journal
Week of 3 April
2000
Friday, 05 July 2002 08:16
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,
3 April 2000
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The furor over Rambus RDRAM continues. Tom's Hardware posted an
interesting follow-up article, Rambus
Revisited, which rebuts challenges made to their original Dissecting
Rambus article. I have to say that I'm in agreement with what Tom's
Hardware has to say on Rambus, but then I declared RDRAM a dead product
almost a year ago. It's a bad technology, and it seems that Rambus is now
taking the route often taken by those who can't compete in the market by
competing in the court room. Rambus has sued Hitachi, claiming that
Hitachi is infringing Rambus patents. Hitachi has counter-sued, claiming
that Rambus patented technology that had been shared by JEDEC members
while Rambus was a member of that body. I hope Hitachi thrashes Rambus in
court.
* * * * *
-----Original Message-----
From: Jerry Mah [mailto:jmah@zdnetonebox.com]
Sent: Monday, April 03, 2000 3:44 AM
To: webmaster@ttgnet.com
Subject: Single Disk Routers
Bob-
I noticed your interest in some single disk
linux distributions. Here is a link
to a list of single to 3 or 4 floppy disk linux based router or
otherwise.
It's pretty complete, and contains a lot of
links I didn't know existed.
Thanks.
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Tuesday,
4 April 2000
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Well, to no one's surprise, Jackson savaged Microsoft. I've read all
the publicly available documents on the case, and I can't see that
Microsoft has done anything wrong at all. But that doesn't matter anymore.
The tobacco companies haven't done anything wrong, either, and that hasn't
saved them. Nowadays, the government can simply choose a big company with
deep pockets and go after it, with the states' attorneys general circling
like a bunch of vultures. This is all about money, and ultimately about
power. The big companies have it, the government wants it, and the
government knows that big companies will find few defenders among the
people. So they're easy targets. And where does all the money for huge
settlements come from? Our pockets, of course.
Microsoft isn't the only loser here, folks. We all lost. Government is
never your friend.
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Wednesday,
5 April 2000
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Barbara is off to a conference in Washington, DC. I just helped her
load her luggage and she drove away, leaving me with Mom and the dogs.
Tonight, we'll be having doughnuts for dinner. Tomorrow, we'll be having
popcorn for dinner. I haven't done any meal planning beyond that, although
I'm tentatively considering ice cream for dinner the following night.
We'll see.
I have to remember to feed the dogs, too. Barbara buys separate dog
food for each of them. Fat-dog Chow for Kerry, Dog Chow Lite for Duncan,
and Puppy Chow for Malcolm. Well, actually, it's not *-Chow. I think
that's a Ralston-Purina trademark, and she buys premium food for them. She
feeds each of them in his own stainless steel bowl and uses a new bowl for
each of them each day.
We'll be shifting to the male method this week. One bowl for the week,
all dogs share one bowl, and all dog food is mixed together. They love to
eat each others' food anyway.
* * * * *
-----Original Message-----
From: Alberto_Lopez@toyota.com [mailto:Alberto_Lopez@toyota.com]
Sent: Tuesday, April 04, 2000 12:08 PM
To: thompson@ttgnet.com
Subject: Fatal Exception Errors and IllegalOps/Invalid Page Faults
Robert,
Help... Please.
I recently (this last weekend) built a PC
for a family member. Now before you go on about the horrors of using
Win9x, this is a very "non technical" user who would be much
more comfortable with the "consumer" version of Windows rather
than with NT WS... :>)
Well, the specs for the system are as
follows:
BCM IN5340 Motherboard, AMD K-6 500mhz CPU,
96 MB of PC-100 RAM (1 32MB DIMM and 1 64MB DIMM), on-board sound and
video, 20 GB IBM Ultra-ATA HD, 48X generic CD-ROM, Linksys 10/100 NIC,
Generic Floppy, Generic Internal 56K modem. PS/2 Ms Natural Keyboard and
PS/2 MS Optical Intelligent Mouse
The building of the PC itself was
uneventful. I installed Windows 98 SE, Office 2000 premium, AOL 5,
Norton SystemWorks, Norton AV 2000, and all of the MSIE 5 Windows
Updates available from the MS Windows Update Site.
This was all done at my office.
Upon delivering the PC to the end-user, I
installed it, powered it up, and upon initial boot-up was confronted by
a message telling me that the Office 2000 install was CORRUPT. I had 2
options: REPAIR the Install or Uninstall it. Well, I un-installed it,
figuring that a FRESH install would be better than a REPAIR.
Ever since then, The PC has refused to work
correctly.
I have been confronted by a never ending
series of BSOD (Blues Screens...) giving me Fatal Exception OE
0028:C005338 in VXD VMM(01)+00004338. When I mange to get to the actual
Windows Desktop, nearly every operation I try (opening windows, Desktop
Properties, Control Panel, etc.) I get numerous Illegal Operations and
Invalid Page faults (mostly in KERNEL32.DLL) caused by Windows Explorer
and most other programs.
Needless to say, the PC itself is VERY
UNSTABLE. to the point of being virtually unusable.
I have tried the following:
1.- Scrape the HD down to BARE METAL (with
Partition Magic 5.0) and start over.
2.- Remove all attached hardware except for
Video, and keyboard
3.- Remove 1 DIMM and then the other
SAME RESULT. BSOD's and Invalid Page faults
and Illegal Ops.
I am at my wit's end. About the only thing I
have left is to try and replace the IDE cables, as the errors seem to
occur when the HD is accessed.
My questions to you are:
1.- Could a BAD IDE cable cause these sorts
of problems, or would the PC refuse to boot if the cable was bad?
2.- What other kind of HARDWARE CONFLICT
could be causing this types of numerous, very frequent Windows errors?
I'd really appreciate any wisdom you could
send this way!!!
Thanks fir the WONDERFUL Web Site!
Alberto S. Lopez
alberto_lopez@toyota.com (work)
albertol@pacbell.net (home)
Your problems could be caused by any number of things. First
guess, power supply. Second guess, memory. Third guess, motherboard
(although I'm not familiar with the brand name and, if it's not a
high-quality motherboard, that could raise this to two or even one). Bad
IDE cables are also a possibility, although a less likely cause. They're
easy enough to swap out, which should probably be your first step if you
have some known-good ones available. Also, you don't mention whether the
hard disk is an ATA/66 model. If it is, that may be the problem. Some
motherboard ATA/66 interfaces have horrendous problems. Most ATA/66 drive
makers have a utility available that forces the drive to operate as an
ATA/33 drive. That may be worth a try. Readers may have other ideas.
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Thursday,
6 April 2000
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I've spent an hour this morning trying to recover from an Outlook 2000
problem. The first sign something was wrong came yesterday when a couple
of return receipts arrived. I just happened to have Outlook maximized at
the time, and watched the return receipts arrive in my inbox. Ordinarily,
an Outlook rule grabs those and moves them to my Receipts folder. This
time, it did the move (the Receipts folder turned bold and had a number 2
next to it), but instead of deleting those messages from the inbox,
Outlook GPFd.
I killed the Dr. Watson dialog, waited a few seconds, and re-started
Outlook. Everything appeared normal, except that the two receipts were
still in my inbox. I deleted them, did an Exit and Log Off from Outlook,
and it hung. It displayed the small exit dialog that normally appears for
only a couple seconds for several minutes. At first I thought that I'd
exited just when Outlook was retrieving mail and that perhaps it was in
the process of downloading a large message. I looked at the temp directory
to see if there was a large message download in progress, but there
wasn't. After giving it another 15 minutes or so to exit on its own, I
finally fired up Task Manager and killed the process. I then immediately
restarted Outlook and everything appeared normal. I was able to Exit and
Log Off normally.
This morning, as usual, I fired up Outlook on my way to let the dogs
out and so forth. When I finished reading the paper and came back into my
office, I had 112 new messages in my inbox. That's an extraordinarily high
number, because I filter mailing list messages, return receipts, junk
mail, and so on into dedicated folders. Ordinarily, I'd expect to have
perhaps a dozen or two new messages in my inbox, most or all of which
would be actual personal messages sent to me.
As I cruised through my inbox, it quickly became obvious that most (but
not all) of my Outlook Rules were broken. There were two or three dozen
return receipts, a bunch of listserv mail, and so on in my inbox. I check
the Rules Wizard, and found that most of my rules had indeed been turned
off. What's worse, they'd been modified to remove the folders specified in
the rules. Okay, I went in and fixed the individual rules to point again
to the correct folders, and told each rule to run itself against mail
already in the inbox. That cleared out a lot of the stuff, but there were
still messages in my inbox that should have been filtered, so it was
obvious that I'd missed fixing a couple of rules. I went back into Rules
Wizard, and found that all of the originally broken rules were broken
again.
At that point, I decided to exit Outlook, which I'm beginning to think
of as "LookOut", and so did an Exit and Log Off. Outlook hung
again. Eventually I killed the application with Task Manager, but when I
attempted to run Scanpst.exe to check my .pst file, it refused to run,
claiming that some other process had my mail file locked. I found that the
MAPI module and Outlook.exe were still showing as active processes. I
killed those processes individually and re-ran Scanpst.exe, which said
that my pst file had only minor errors. I fixed those and restarted the
system. When it came up, I ran Outlook again, and fixed the rules again.
This time, things appear to be fixed properly. I'm able to exit Outlook
normally, and my rules don't disappear. It seems that Outlook can confuse
itself beyond redemption. At least a re-start cured the problem, and
Outlook has never actually lost any of my data.
Netscape has finally put their long-awaited version 6.0 up on their
ftp servers. I was about to download it yesterday when messages
started coming in from people who had already downloaded and tried it. The
consensus seems to be that it's a dog--slow, poor rendering, buggy, and
unstable--so I didn't bother downloading it.
I saw an article
in The Register this morning that concerns me greatly. A man was
arrested who had, as far as I can see, committed no crime. The police
mounted a sting operation, with a policewoman pretending to be the mother
of two girls, aged 12 and 14, who were available for sex with this man. I
don't have a great deal of sympathy for a middle-aged man who goes looking
for young girls to have sex with, but that's not the point. In the first
place, he was entrapped. By long-standing convention, rooted in common
law, the police cannot encourage someone to commit a crime and then arrest
him for committing that crime. Even more important, what crime did he
commit? He didn't have sex with these non-existent girls. He simply got on
a plane and went to visit the "mother". They arrested him when
he stepped off the plane. What crime did he commit?
We who belong to the loose confederation
of daily journal keepers have a back-channel mailing list that
occasionally has some pretty interesting threads on it. I posted the
following message to this mailing list yesterday, and thought that some of
the responses might be of general interest.
It struck me yesterday that if I wait until I have time to work
with Linux I'll never get started, so I decided I'd best just jump in and
do something. At this point, I'm thinking I need three Linux boxes, one
simple one for a firewall/proxy/router, one for a server, and one for a
workstation. I have a couple of boxes that are serious Linux candidates:
1. An old Gateway 2000 Pentium/133 with a 3.1 GB IDE hard disk,
64 MB memory, a 3Com 10BaseT card, and a Seagate TR-4 tape drive. I'm
thinking about cleaning this one up, pulling the tape drive, adding an
Intel 10/100 Ethernet card as the second NIC, and making it the
firewall/proxy/router. If I ever bring up a local world-accessible web
server, I'd also put it on this box. Is a Pentium/133 and 64 MB adequate
for this?
2. A Dell Pentium/200 with a 6.1 GB IDE hard disk, 64 MB of RAM,
an Adaptec 2920 SCSI host adapter, and an Onstream 15/30 GB IDE tape
drive. I'm thinking about pulling the Adaptec 2920, adding 15 or 20 GB of
IDE hard disk, and making this my Linux server. Onstream has Linux
drivers, so I'd probably leave the tape drive in and use it for routine
backups. Basically, this box would be a file/print server (running Samba),
and would also run routine network services. If I bring up a local mail
server like HP OpenMail, I'd probably put it on this box. Is all of this
reasonable, or do I need more hardware?
As far as the third box, that'd be for using Linux as a
workstation OS, so I'd plan on giving it something decent to run on. I
have an Intel BI440ZX motherboard (Socket 370, Celeron only). If I pop in
a Celeron/400 or /433, 128 MB of memory, some kind of AGP video card (I
assume that Linux supports AGP), a 10 GB IDE hard disk, and perhaps the
Seagate 4/8 GB TR-4 tape drive, will that be a reasonable configuration
for running a Linux workstation?
Any and all comments welcome.
* * * * *
-----Original Message-----
From: bilbrey@pacbell.net [mailto:bilbrey@pacbell.net]
Sent: Wednesday, April 05, 2000 10:01 AM
To: thompson@ttgnet.com
Subject: Re: Looking for Linux advice
The short answer is yes, fine, to all of the
above. Recommendations include using different mfg nics in your
multi-homed box (easier to tell them apart for configuration purposes),
I have a 3c905B and a Kingston NE2000 clone. Re: Video, check [here]
and [here] before making
a video card selection. If you have 10 video cards at home, and you
aren't buying the hottest latest tv-tuner 64M frame buffer 4x AGP card
for playing Quake 3000 live with Regis Philbin, then probably all of
them will work fine with recent distributions.
FYI, I am currently using Mandrake as prime
for all purposes. I have 6.1 running the web/file/backup/firewall server
and 7.02 running dual boot workstations both here and at work. If you
want, I'll burn you a couple of CDROMS. Let me know.
.b
--
Brian P. Bilbrey "I have a cunning plan, my lord..."
bilbrey@pacbell.net "Shut
up, Baldrick!"
www.orbdesigns.com E. Blackadder
Thanks. I have several cards on that list, so video shouldn't be
a problem. For various reasons, I think I'll stick with Red Hat 6.1 for
now, although it's tempting to go to Mandrake so that I'd always have you
to bug. Of course, I suppose there's nothing to prevent me from trying
several flavors, but I think I'll wait and do that once I have a bit more
ability to appreciate the differences.
* * * * *
-----Original Message-----
From: Brian Bilbrey [mailto:bilbrey@pacbell.net]
Sent: Wednesday, April 05, 2000 10:50 AM
To: thompson@ttgnet.com
Subject: Re: Looking for Linux advice
RH6.1 has some bugs in the install routine -
pick up 6.2 from lsl or cheapbytes, more recent x stuff and a couple of
kernel revisions further up the food chain.
lsl - [here]
cheapbytes - [here]
And of course you can still ask - Mandrake
is about 99 % RH with some whizzy stuff on top - mandrake also feels
more *solid* to me than the equivalent RH release.
Hmm. I think I remember reading about the 6.1 installer problems
somewhere, perhaps on your site. I think I also may have been bitten by
them. I tried a month or two back to install RH 6.1 on the Gateway
Pentium/133 and couldn't get past the point where it was trying to install
video for x. I was rather surprised at the problem getting the video card
configured, given that it was a Matrox Millennium PCI, which is about as
standard a card as I can imagine. Perhaps I should give Mandrake a try.
* * * * *
-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Ward-Johnson [mailto:chriswj@mostxlnt.co.uk]
Sent: Wednesday, April 05, 2000 11:05 AM
To: 'thompson@ttgnet.com'
Cc: Daynoters (E-mail)
Subject: RE: Looking for Linux advice
I'm at the same Linux level as yourself and
doing some very similar things at Chateau Keyboard. The only point I
have to this list is that I've been getting mails from readers having
problems getting their AGP cards recognised on install of both the Red
Hat and Corel distributions. There's a hardware compatibility list up [here]
for Corel, which I guess must be similar to other distributions.
Chris Ward-Johnson
Chateau Keyboard - Computing at the Eating Edge
http://www.chateaukeyboard.com
Is it a coincidence that all of us seem to have decided to start
playing with Linux? I don't think anyone else's plans have influenced me,
and although I know I've mentioned that I intended to start playing with
Linux at some point, I doubt that my plans have influenced anyone else. It
seems that everyone just more or less at the same time decided to start
with Linux. Granted, some like Moshe Bar and Brian Bilbrey have been at it
for months or even years, and others like Tom Syroid jumped in seriously a
month or two ago, but it does seem interesting that so many of us have all
of a sudden started to get serious about Linux. A few minutes after I sent
that message this morning I checked Bob Walder's page and found that he'd
posted part of my message and announced that he was getting serious about
Linux as of today. This can't be good for Microsoft.
As far as the problems with Red Hat and Corel recognizing AGP
cards, I can tell you from experience that Red Hat 6.1 didn't much care
for a Matrox Millennium PCI either, so perhaps the situation is worse than
just an AGP problem.
* * * * *
-----Original Message-----
From: Matt Beland [mailto:mbeland@zanova.com]
Sent: Wednesday, April 05, 2000 11:20 AM
To: thompson@ttgnet.com; gang@daynotes.com
Subject: RE: Looking for Linux advice
My $.02...
The router/firewall is more than plenty; the
minimum I'd use for a router after talking to a bunch of people is a
486/25 with 8 MB of RAM. Even as a web server, that machine you have is
plenty. Mine at home is only a 166, and it even runs X when I want it
to. (Never, but still...)
The server machine should also be fine for
file/print tasks and backups.
As for the workstation; my Linux box is a
400 MHz PII with 128 MB of RAM, and it's great. No problems at all. I
have heard a lot of people complaining they can't get their AGP to work
properly, so if you have one lying around I'd use a PCI video card. I
have a Permedia2 card in mine, and it runs XWindows at 1600x1200 and too
many colors to count. Looks as good as my W2K workstation with the 32 MB
AGP Viper 770 card.
Matt Beland
Systems Administrator
Zanova Inc.
http://www.zanovainc.com
(480) 421-1283
"Do not meddle in the affairs of SysAdmins, for they are quick to
anger, and lack subtlety."
Thanks. I have a bunch of PCI video cards floating around, so I
guess I can just do YALI until I find one that works.
* * * * *
-----Original Message-----
From: Bowman, Dan [mailto:dbowman@americanambulance.net]
Sent: Wednesday, April 05, 2000 12:10 PM
To: thompson@ttgnet.com; gang@daynotes.com
Subject: RE: Looking for Linux advice
Hi Bob,
From my somewhat limited experience, you
have plenty of horsepower. Both Corel and RedHat came up fine on a P-75
with 32mb (16 wouldn't cut it with X); they ran slow but that was
expected (and the firewall may end up on that machine). Swapping to a
P-200 with 64mb made for a real reasonable testbed. Caldera loaded fine
on the P-120 laptop and may stay there.
Two caveats: video cards and memory. Neither
Corel or RedHat liked the Diamond SE card in the donated P-75; the next
level up in their PCI line worked fine. Caldera has the best of the
video probes of the distros I've tried; it was the only one that would
work on the laptop's chip set. (If I knew what to tweak, they'd all
work; but I'm a lazy Windows user and I'm used to the installers doing
it all for me <g>.)
Memory: from my reading it seems imperative
that you commit to your memory config before you install as the swap
partition is matched to it. Upgrading later means a new install.
Notes from the front: Corel's a head-bump
install. Caldera is a learning install; Mandrake 7 kicks tail. If your
distro understands RPMs, you don't have to know very much to install
additional tools.
Come on in; the water's fine (albeit a
little cold, to placate the penguins),
Thanks. As far as memory, that's no problem. Both the Gateway
Pentium/133 and the Dell Pentium/200 are effectively maxed out at 64 MB
right now, because they use the 430VX chipset. I suppose I could install
more, but it wouldn't be cached, so I don't see any point to it. Thanks
for the penguin reminder. Now I suppose I'll have to come up with a bunch
of penguin-related host names. I suppose forsteri would be a pretty good
host name for the big dual-CPU box I'll eventually build, and demersus
isn't a bad host name, but patagonicus, schlegeli, and chrysolophus seem a
bit outre.
* * * * *
-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Farquhar [mailto:farquhar@lcms.org]
Sent: Wednesday, April 05, 2000 12:51 PM
To: Bowman, Dan
Cc: gang@daynotes.com; thompson@ttgnet.com
Subject: RE: FWD: Looking for Linux advice
Thanks to Dan for forwarding this to me at
work.
The P133 is more than enough for
firewall/proxy/router, and for light-duty Web serving, it's plenty. By
light-duty, I mean Daynotes-style Web serving (Pournelle excepted, in
all likelihood). I run my firewall/proxy/router on a 66 MHz 486 with 24
MB RAM. I ran my Web server on a P120 with 32 MB RAM until that freak
SuSE accident, where I accidentally wiped out the drive. I haven't set
Apache back up since then, but will soon.
The server looks more than adequate, and the
Celeron board would make for a hot workstation, depending on the
graphics card you put in it. I've always liked nVidia-based cards under
Linux.
P133s and P200s are good for this--since
they run on a 66 MHz bus you don't have to deal with a crippled PCI bus.
But I used what I had available, and even though it's less than ideal,
for what I do and want to do in the near future, it's been fine.
As you suspect, the workstation requirements
are the most severe. Since servers spend most, if not all of their time
running low-overhead text mode, you mostly need efficient network and
disk subsystems, enough CPU power to keep up with those subsystems, and
enough RAM to keep from having to rely too much on virtual memory.
This all looks good for getting started. You
may find at some point that you outgrow it, but I'd be surprised, and
Moore's Law is definitely on your side.
Yes, I was really just looking to get started cheaply. If I get
serious, I'd probably convert the ad hoc workstation into the server, swap
the IDE drive for a Seagate U2W Barracuda, and perhaps expand the memory
from 128 to 256 MB if that seemed needful. I'd then build a new personal
workstation around a dual-CPU board with a couple of Pentium III/600 or
/700 processors, 256 MB or 384 MB of RAM, and probably a Seagate U2W
Cheetah disk drive. In fact, I might just convert my current main
workstation to Linux. It already has dual Pentium III/550's, 256 MB, and a
Cheetah. But I'd have to get comfortable with using Linux as my main
workstation OS first, and that's liable to take a while.
* * * * *
-----Original Message-----
From: Moshe Bar [mailto:moshe@moelabs.com]
Sent: Wednesday, April 05, 2000 1:10 PM
To: thompson@ttgnet.com
Subject: RE: Looking for Linux advice
Hi Robert
Your hardware seems OK for what you plan to
do. AGP support as of kernels 2.2.x is still a bit shaky at best. If you
go with XFree4.0 and kernels 2.3.99pre or 2.4 when it comes out, you
should be just fine.
I am not sure why you would want to put HP
OpenMail on your server. If anything, why not go with qmail or smail?
Obviously, the sendmail 8.9.x comign with most distros is just as good.
Good luck!
Thanks. As far as why I'd install HP OpenMail rather than
sendmail, it's because I'm a wimp. The OpenMail installation procedure
supposedly configures sendmail for you automagically, which is no small
advantage for me. Also, I'd kind of like to have a pseudo-Exchange Server
running locally.
* * * * *
-----Original Message-----
From: Brian Bilbrey [mailto:bilbrey@pacbell.net]
Sent: Wednesday, April 05, 2000 3:23 PM
To: thompson@ttgnet.com
Subject: Re: Looking for Linux advice
The following will be helpful should you
decide to take the RH route, forgot about it until enough caffeine had
penetrated...
[here]
Thanks. Hmm. The more I think about this, the more I think I may
take you up on your kind offer to send me Mandrake. I wish I wasn't
throughput-challenged. Someday, that may change.
* * * * *
-----Original Message-----
From: J.H. Ricketson [mailto:JHR@WarlockLtd.com]
Sent: Wednesday, April 05, 2000 7:15 PM
To: gang@daynotes.com
Subject: Looking for Linux advice
Dear Bob,
Sorry - my advice in this area would be
counterproductive<G>.
However, I have a question only you can
answer: Why? Is it because, as a professional in the field you need the
hands-on knowledge of Linux, or is it to fulfill a perceived need that
Wintel will not, or does the idea strike your fancy? You say, in effect,
"I'm going Linux." That's like me saying "I'm going
shopping for a Humvee." I think in my case at least a few people
would want to know why: I might have a definite need for it on an
upcoming tour of Alaska, or, at the other end of the spectrum, I might
see a Humvee as a really kewel commute vehicle, even better than a
Bimmer.
Without being argumentative, I really want
to know why Bob Thompson is willing to make an investment of his finite
and quite valuable time to go Linux? What is your payoff? I think I may
be missing something here. Your answer would be particularly valuable to
me, and perhaps to others, as I do not see you as any kind of a zealot
(except for BCs!) TIA
Regards,
JHR
--
[JHR, for The Warlock]
jhr@warlockltd.com
Dawn is natures way of saying it's bedtime.
Good question. The answer is that I write computer books for a
living. Linux is already a major player, and destined to become more so.
One must keep up with current trends if one expects to write books that
people will buy. As I've said repeatedly, I don't think Linux is a threat
to Microsoft on the desktop right now, and probably won't become one for
another year or two. It will eventually happen, though.
Server space is different. Depending on whose figures you
believe, there were about as many new Linux server installations last year
as new NT installations. And, no, that doesn't count the kind of Linux
server installations we're discussing. That's serious, corporate,
back-office Linux installations. I believe those estimates are accurate,
because I have many friends who are IS Directors and so on. What I hear
from them is that Linux is arriving in their shops in serious numbers, and
being used for production, line-of-business purposes.
This reminds me very much of what NT did to NetWare. When NT 3.1
shipped, all the NetWare folks laughed it off, if they even noticed it.
NetWare held literally 95% of the network seats, and no one saw NT as any
kind of credible threat. Well, NT has now made NetWare a niche product,
which currently survives only by continuing to harvest its installed base.
That despite the fact that NetWare has always been and remains a better
NOS than NT for most purposes.
I think Linux may well do the same thing to NT that NT did to
NetWare. NetWare never recovered from shipping 4.0, which was an entirely
new operating system. No one understood NDS, and converting from NetWare
3.1X to 4.0 was by no means a simple upgrade. Since people were
considering what amounted to installing a new NOS anyway, they looked at
both NetWare 4.0 and NT, and chose NT in increasingly large numbers. Now
Microsoft finds themselves in a similar position. NT5 is not a simple
upgrade from NT4. It's an entirely new operating system, and no one
understands ADS. Worse still, Microsoft shipped Windows 2000 Server in
what amounts to alpha form. W2KP is reasonably complete, although I still
consider it a beta, but W2KS is in no way ready for prime time. That
leaves the door open for Linux, and I suspect that Microsoft will have
cause to regret that.
My guess is that in 3 years, Linux will be dominant in server
space, particularly if just a few things come together (like Novell
shipping NDS for Linux). Microsoft may well find that Windows 2000 Server
is a niche product by then. So it makes sense for me to learn about Linux
early.
* * * * *
-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Farquhar [mailto:farquhar@access2k1.net]
Sent: Thursday, April 06, 2000 2:00 AM
To: gang@daynotes.com
Subject: Re: Looking for Linux advice
I don't really mean to pre-empt Bob, but,
with all due respect, I got a chance to respond first. :)
The first question is, which of Bob's
fields? As an author, it makes perfect sense to get familiarity with
Linux because that's where the books are. About once a month I get a
phone call from my agent: "Dave, I've got 12 Linux books I need to
find writers for. You interested in any of them?" With all due
respect to my peers writing Linux books, if you can write a compound
sentence and your eyes don't glaze over when you hear the words
"type 'ls'," you can get a deal writing a Linux book. That's
an indication both of how big the market is and how short the field is
of authors.
As a consultant, it also makes good sense.
Windows NT doesn't make sense for a small business when you can soup up
a P133 with a nice SCSI subsystem and a fast NIC, then install Linux and
Samba to serve your Windows boxes, a firewall to protect your LAN (Linux
makes a great firewall--I can tell you exactly who tries to hack into my
network, when, and what he's trying to do), Apache for Web serving and
HP OpenMail for a mail server that integrates nicely with Outlook, and
pay $100 for the software and $800 for a consultant to set it up. You
pay once, then you can pretty much forget about it. The system will go
until the box dies. You absolutely, can't say that for NT or W2K. You'll
at least have to pay the consultant to come out again every six months
to apply the service packs. A semi-permanent solution for less than the
W2K software alone would cost is very attractive.
As more and more people start presenting
Linux in that light, expect it to only gain momentum. Having done
consulting for small businesses, I know how penny-conscious they can be.
A business who's willing to assemble preconfigured servers set up in a
similar fashion to what I described and sell them cheaply (adding, say,
$400 to the price of the hardware for the software configuration, then
spend an hour onsite tuning it to their network) has a license to print
money.
Linux doesn't have to win the desktop. It's
perfectly poised to win the back room, thanks to its low price,
reliability and security.
* * * * *
-----Original Message-----
From: Alberto_Lopez@toyota.com
[mailto:Alberto_Lopez@toyota.com]
Sent: Wednesday, April 05, 2000 10:41 AM
To: thompson@ttgnet.com
Subject: RE: Fatal Exception Errors and IllegalOps/Invalid Page Faults
Robert,
Good Morning...
Thanks so very much for getting back to me.
I have resolved the problem.
I went back to PC Club where I bought the
parts and told them what was happening. I then took the PC over to them
and as soon as the technician took one look at the PC, he immediately
stated that the CPU FAN was the wrong one for this CPU (AMD K-6 500).
He stated that some fans are only rated for
CPU's up to 300 Mhz and other, higher quality BALL BEARING Fans are
better for faster CPU's.
In any case, he replaced the FAN on the CPU
and rebooted. The PC has been running perfectly ever since. Nary a BSOD
or Illegal Ops/Invalid Page fault to be seen.
LESSON LEARNED: If your PC starts flaking
out with RANDOM error messages and BSOD's and you replace the memory, an
OVERHEATING CPU is a likely culprit...
Again, thanks much for responding to my plea
for help and please keep up the Site. I find it an invaluable resource
for PC Technology insights, news and other related matters...
Alberto S. Lopez Torrance, CA
Alberto_Lopez@toyota.com
I don't know why I failed to mention heat, especially since I
recently had some heat problems with one of my own systems that exhibited
similar symptoms. Glad you got it fixed. I've never used cheap CPU cooling
devices, but I'm not surprised that using one can cause a CPU to overheat.
I use mostly retail-boxed Intel CPUs, which come with adequate heat sinks
and cooling fans in the box. Otherwise, I use only cooling devices made by
PC Power & Cooling, with which I've never had a problem. The system I
had overheating had so much stuff in it that the ambient air temperature
was more than 40C, so it wasn't really the fan's fault.
* * * * *
-----Original Message-----
From: Nathan Johnson [mailto:redearth@excelonline.com]
Sent: Thursday, April 06, 2000 3:04 AM
To: thompson@ttgnet.com
Subject: Win2000 question
Hi there just read your article, good step
by step tutorial! I was just wondering if you could help me out for a
moment. I bought a new computer pre loaded with Windows2KP for the
purpose of working in a dual processor enviroment with Graphics programs
such as 3D studio, photoshop, Illistrator etc.
Well when I started to finish the install
(admin password), W2KP would not accept the password I had chosen thus I
was locked out. I then tried hundreds of combinations with no avail. The
customer service from the company I bought from would give no support on
how to reinstall so I was on my own. So I rebooted with the W2KP CD they
gave me and opted to formatt the main partiton. There was 2 partitons,
one at 8megs and the other at 14.5 GB. (out of 15.3 GB hard drive) Setup
wouldnt let me partion the main section so intalled windows on the 14.5
Gig partition. From here I finished setup and was able to access
windows.
When I finished setting up the internet
explorer settings and then was online for a while, I closed out of
i.explored and the machine locked up. I couldnt even shut it down with
Ctrl+ Alt+Del properties. This happens every time like clock work.
Oultlook express will not bring mail in or send out, even though all the
settings are correct. While on the internet i.exporer sometimes locks up
and thus I have to go as far and unpugging the beast. Its hard to find
any help out there with this, that that is available is expensive. Id
would be overjoyed to hear from you, any help would much appreciated.
Thank you
Nathan t Redearth
redearth@bigsky.net
or
redearth@excelonline.com
Well, that sounds inexcusable. If it were me, I'd probably haul
the machine back, demand a refund, and then go buy something else. I don't
really have much experience with Windows 2000 Professional as yet, but
perhaps one of my readers will be able to suggest something.
|
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Friday,
7 April 2000
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Week]
Well, the wheels haven't come off yet, although they're starting to
wobble. I had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for dinner last night.
I'm not sure what's on the menu for tonight. Perhaps Colonel Chicken, or I
could order a pizza. And there's always Chinese takeout. Fortunately,
Barbara will be home late Sunday or Monday.
I've finished some exhaustive benchmark testing on several Intel
motherboards, with Pentium III processors running the gamut from the
slowest available to 800 MHz. I won't post the full benchmark results,
because they take up pages and pages. But I will post the following
results, which show the results at the only common speed across the board,
600 MHz. Incidentally, all of these figures result from running the
benchmarks seven times, discarding the highest and lowest results, and
averaging the remaining five.
I tested the CA810E (with SDRAM), the Cape Cod CC820 (with SDRAM), the
Vancouver VC820 (with Rambus RDRAM), and the old reliable Seattle II
SE440BX2V (with SDRAM). All were tested with 64 MB of memory, because
Intel had only one 64 MB Rambus DIMM available to lend to me and I didn't
want to buy more.
All processors were 0.18µ Coppermines. The Pentium III/600 used in the
CA810 was an FC-PGA (Socket 370) with a 100 MHz FSB. The Pentium III/600EB
used in the CC820 and VC820 was a Slot 1 with a 133 MHz FSB. The 600E used
in the SE440BX2V was a Slot 1 with a 100 MHz FSB.
I think the results are interesting. Across the board, NT performs
slightly better than Windows 98, as expected. That difference probably
would have been more pronounced with 128 MB. In memory performance, the
venerable 440BX chipset blows away the current 810E and the 820 when
running SDRAM (even though the 820 has the advantage of running a 133 MHz
FSB) and also beats the 810E and 820 in ZD CPU performance, albeit by only
a few percent.
|
Windows 98 SE |
ZD WinBench 99 1.1 |
SiSoft Sandra 2000.3.6.4 |
CPUmark 99 |
FPU WinMark |
Dhrystone |
Whetstone |
CPU Memory |
FPU Memory |
600, 810E |
52.8 |
3208.0 |
1616.0 |
802.8 |
211.4 |
223.6 |
600EB, CC820 |
52.3 |
3208.0 |
1617.0 |
803.0 |
203.6 |
234.8 |
600EB, VC820 |
55.8 |
3208.0 |
1617.0 |
803.0 |
359.2 |
457.8 |
600E (440BX) |
55.1 |
3210.0 |
1617.0 |
803.2 |
287.8 |
317.6 |
|
Windows NT 4 Workstation 4.0 w/ SP6a |
ZD WinBench 99 1.1 |
SiSoft Sandra 2000.3.6.4 |
CPUmark 99 |
FPU WinMark |
Dhrystone |
Whetstone |
CPU Memory |
FPU Memory |
600, 810E |
53.5 |
3210.0 |
1621.0 |
805.0 |
211.8 |
214.0 |
600EB, CC820 |
53.0 |
3212.0 |
1622.4 |
805.0 |
204.6 |
231.8 |
600EB, VC820 |
56.8 |
3212.0 |
1623.0 |
805.2 |
375.6 |
466.4 |
600E (440BX) |
55.6 |
3218.0 |
1624.0 |
806.0 |
302.4 |
331.4 |
The really glaring difference, of course, is in SiSoft Sandra memory
performance. On CPU memory, the VC 820 running RDRAM is about 25% faster
than the 440BX running SDRAM, and roughly 75% faster than the CA810E and
CC820 running SDRAM. On FPU memory, the difference is even more
pronounced, with the VC820 40% to 45% faster than the 440BX, and as much
as 118% faster than the CA810E.
Note that these results are the most favorable you could ever expect
from an RDRAM-based system. I used PC800 RDRAM, whereas nearly all systems
that ship with RDRAM use the much slower (and less expensive) PC600 or
PC700 RDRAM. Also, I used a single 64 MB RDRAM RIMM, which provides the
highest possible performance. The horrible latency problems of RDRAM mean
that using more than one RIMM incurs a big hit on memory performance.
All of that said, I have to say that I'm not sure how the memory
performance benchmarks translate into real-world differences. I can't tell
any difference when sitting in front of the machines. I used the fastest
configuration (the VC820 with RDRAM) and the slowest configuration (the
CC820 with SDRAM) extensively and interchangeably to perform my usual
daily work. Both "felt" pretty much the same. Given that PC800
RDRAM currently costs something like eight times as much as SDRAM, if you
can even find it, I don't think I'll be recommending the VC820, except
perhaps conditionally based on the future cost of RDRAM.
I'm not finished with this project yet. I want to benchmark an
overclocked 440BX running a 133 MHz FSB with PC133 SDRAM to see how it
compares to the VC820. I also want to benchmark a VIA Apollo Pro133A
motherboard, which runs a native 133 MHz FSB. I don't much like VIA
chipsets, or SiS or ALi chipsets for that matter. In the past, I've found
all of the Taiwanese chipsets inferior to comparable Intel chipsets in
performance, compatibility, and stability. However, I will give the
Pro133A a chance.
* * * * *
-----Original Message-----
From: Scott Kitterman [mailto:scott@kitterman.com]
Sent: Thursday, April 06, 2000 9:14 PM
To: thompson@ttgnet.com
Subject: Going Linux
For roughly the last year I have been
periodically pestering the manager of our web development group to
consider shifting out of an MS only (NT 4, IIS, SQL Server, and Cold
Fusion) infrastructure into one that is Linux based. In that time he's
gone from a little hostile (why would I want to do that) to too busy
(might be interesting, but don't have time) to, this week, I think we
ought to try that.
I believe it is not only the Daynotes group
that is coming to Linux. I believe he's looked at the path MS is on
(W2KS) and is not anxious to play any part in it. I think your
comparison with Netware may well prove to be prescient.
We'll see. A lot of people have pooh-poohed my comments about
Windows 2000 vis-a-vis the NetWare 4.0 debacle, but I still maintain that
there are a lot of interesting parallels. NetWare 4.0 was a buggy initial
release with an unproven and confusing directory service that very few
people adopted for production use. A rough-hewn but promising competitor
was on the horizon in Windows NT. The situation with Windows 2000 versus
Linux is similar, but Linux has more mind-share now than did NT when
Novell dropped the ball, and Linux is already installed on a much higher
proportion of servers than was NT. It'll be interesting to see what
transpires.
* * * * *
-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Ward-Johnson [mailto:chriswj@mostxlnt.co.uk]
Sent: Friday, April 07, 2000 7:21 AM
To: Robert Bruce Thompson (E-mail)
Subject: Mobo story for you
[here]
Chris Ward-Johnson
Chateau Keyboard - Computing at the Eating Edge
http://www.chateaukeyboard.com
Yes, I was actually reading this story as your message arrived.
Pretty interesting, isn't it? As far as the 700 versus dual 500
comparison, my guess is that SETI had 100% of a 500 with everything else
running on the second 500, whereas the single 700 machine could devote
only a portion of its time to SETI, requiring the rest to run W2K
services, the kernel, etc.
At any rate, this confirms my subjective impressions. My dual
Pentium III/550 "feels" faster overall than a similar system
running a single Pentium III/700.
|
wpoison
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Saturday,
8 April 2000
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Week]
I actually cooked last night, manufacturing a batch of egg salad,
starting with raw eggs. My mother and I pigged out on egg salad
sandwiches. And people think I can't cook.
Somewhere around here is a nest of Ethernet cables, probably
hibernating in a tangled ball like rattlesnakes in their winter quarters.
Every time I need an Ethernet cable (or indeed any other kind of cable), I
always buy two, sometimes three. The theory, of course, is that the next
time I need one I'll have a spare. But it never works out that way. You'd
think I'd learn.
Another little-known fact is that Ethernet cables may change color and
shrink dramatically when stored. The other day, I needed an Ethernet
cable. Somewhat to my shock, I actually found one where I thought I'd left
it. The trouble was, when I put it on the shelf, it was a blue Cat5
14-foot Ethernet cable. When I went over to the shelf to retrieve it, it
had transmogrified into a yellow Cat5 7-foot Ethernet cable.
I've been reading a biography of John D. Rockefeller, and the
parallels with Gates and Microsoft are striking. Just like Microsoft,
Standard Oil didn't do anything wrong, and yet was penalized simply
because they were successful. Just like Microsoft, Standard Oil was
penalized for competing successfully. All of the complaints had to do with
them supposedly damaging their competitors rather than their consumers. In
fact, the keystone of Standard Oil's success was to produce and sell oil
at a profit while charging prices to consumers that were below its
competitors' production costs. Rockefeller intentionally kept his prices
so low that it was uneconomic for anyone to attempt to compete with him.
So where was the damage to consumers?
Like Gates, he was damned if he did and damned if he didn't. If he
raised prices, he was accused of gouging consumers. If he lowered prices,
he was accused of putting competitors out of business. When he attempted
to control his own product by developing his own distribution channels, he
was accused of trying to put independent distributors out of business,
although his real reason was to protect both consumers and his own
reputation. Independent distributors, you see, had a nasty habit of
adulterating his product with cheap oil produced by independent refiners.
The problem was, that adulteration often took the form of diluting
Standard Oil's pure kerosene with benzine (read gasoline), which was at
the time considered a waste product. During the period that Standard Oil
was developing its own distribution channels, between 5,000 and 7,000
people died every year in fires caused by burning adulterated kerosene in
their lamps.
The thing that annoyed Rockefeller's critics like Tarbell the most was
the so-called railroad rebates, which they condemned as an unfair business
practice. Rockefeller responded, I thought reasonably enough, by saying,
"Who should get the cheapest shipping rates per barrel? Someone who
ships 5,000 barrels a day, someone who ships 500, or someone who ships
50?" In fact, these widely condemned rebates were simply volume
discounts, which any reasonable person will admit are not an unfair
business practice.
Rockefeller guaranteed a full train of his tank cars, to be picked up
from Point A and delivered to Point B. That express train was a cheap way
for the railroads to operate, and a guaranteed regular source of income.
Delivering the same volume from independent refiners required a local
train with many stops along the way to load individual barrels (rather
than Rockefeller's tank cars), and there was no guarantee that the train
would not arrive at its destination only partially loaded. Every train the
railroads ran on that basis was a gamble.
So the railroads charged the independent refiners their posted rates,
and charged Rockefeller some fraction of those rates, often half or less.
Nothing unreasonable about that. In fact, the railroads made more money
from Rockefeller than they did from all of his competition combined, not
just overall but per barrel transported. And yet these rebates were
ultimately one of the major issues that caused the creation of the ICC,
the passage of the Sherman Act, and the breakup of Standard Oil.
Rockefeller, who was demonized by his detractors, was in fact one of
the most admirable public figures of his time. He lived modestly,
eschewing the conspicuous consumption of many of his contemporaries like
the Vanderbilts. He invented organized charitable contributions, founded
the University of Chicago, and gave millions to support education and job
opportunities for blacks at a time when that was unusual, to say the
least. He was intensely religious, and followed the dictates of his
religion in both his private and business lives. Even his detractors
admitted that he was charming, polite, and scrupulously honest in all of
his dealings. That wasn't enough, though. He made the mistake of being too
successful.
I won't mention the title of the book I'm reading, because it's really
just another hatchet job.
* * * * *
-----Original Message-----
From: J.H. Ricketson [mailto:JHR@WarlockLtd.com]
Sent: Friday, April 07, 2000 11:36 AM
To: gang@daynotes.com
Subject: Need the fix to get HDDs >8075Mb recognized
I am appealing to you lot to point me to the
fix that allows HDDs > 8075Mb to be fully recognized, both IDE &
SCSI.
I have the "disks > 1GB" option
selected in SCSI, and the "Large" option for IDE HDDs selected
in the BIOS.
Still only 8075Mb on a 13Gb IDE. (New,
Quantum Atlas) and both 9.1Gb SCSI HDDs. (New, Quantum Atlas)
Your help & advice is solicited and will
be greatly appreciated.
TIA
JHR
--
[JHR, for The Warlock] jhr@warlockltd.com
Dawn is natures way of saying it's bedtime.
1. For IDE, don't use "Large", use "LBA".
2. For SCSI, you've done all you can do by setting it > 1 GB.
3. If the motherboard itself is reporting 8075, it must be an old
motherboard. You may need a BIOS upgrade to support Extended Int13.
4. If, as I suspect, it's Windows NT that's reporting 8075, don't
worry about it. NT4 Setup doesn't recognize drives larger than 8 GB, but
NT4 Disk Administrator does. The easiest thing to do is install NT4 to a
partition < 8075 MB. Once you've done that, start NT, fire up Disk
Administrator (Start->Programs->Administrative Tools
(Common)->Disk Administrator) and use it to partition and format the
rest of the drive. If you insist on having a > 8 GB drive as one volume
under NT, it can be done, but it's not easy. The first step is to install
the drive in another NT system. Once that's done, partition and format it
as one volume. Then remove it from the second system and put it in the new
system. Run NT setup and choose to use the existing volume unchanged. Be
aware that I've had problems with this method. I strongly suggest you
create a smaller partition to install NT on and then use DA to partition
and format the rest of the drive.
And later, I added the following remarks:
I replied to that message in book-author mode. Rather than
swapping around hard disks to install NT4 on a > 8 GB hard disk, there
are a couple of alternatives:
1. Use Partition Magic or something similar to pre-format the
drive as NTFS. Setup will still see only the drive as 8.4 GB, but once you
install NT4 and boot into it, it will work (usually). This is the
procedure I mentioned that I had problems with sometimes. I've had it work
successfully on some systems and fail on others. The following method is
better.
2. Use the atapi.sys driver from a late service pack during
setup. You'll find this procedure detailed [here]
* * * * *
-----Original Message-----
From: john biel [mailto:johnny51@home.com]
Sent: Friday, April 07, 2000 10:44 PM
To: webmaster@ttgnet.com
Subject: NDS for Linux
Hello Bob,
Noticed you mentioned NDS in a linux
context, and thought I might let you know that it is available right
now, (Novell says since the 13th of March but having been watching for
it I know it wasn't available at that time, I didn't find a downloadable
copy until the end of March.) Anyway it is available now. Incidently NDS
has been available for NT for the past two years or so, and is now
available for Win2K, Solaris and Linux. While my employer's network is
mainly Novell 5, we have used NDS for NT with good success, I must say I
still like NDS, niche product or not. It was a learning curve from 3.12
but it has proven to be worth the effort.
As an aside, in regards to Netscape 6
preview, don't know where these people are going but as an example your
page downloaded and rendered perfectly in 2.48 seconds on
Friday April 7, IE 5 download and rendered perfectly in 3.5 seconds.
www.cnn.com was 7 seconds in netscape and 5.5 seconds in ie 5, both
browsers rendering perfectly. Not sure what these people are complaining
about. As I mentioned before, because of the smaller size and the lack
of java you may been more interested in the mozilla base than the
netscape version. www.mozilla.org
Thanks. I hope Novell took my advice and released a free version
of NDS for Linux for 50 users or whatever, much as HP has done with
OpenMail. That would establish NDS for Linux as the de facto standard
directory service overnight. I suspect that Novell didn't do that,
however. Their marketing is abysmal.
I'll check out Mozilla. I didn't realize that they were going to
release a fully-functional browser under their own name. The more I hear
about Netscape 6, the less I have any desire to try it. Yours is the first
message I've received that's had anything nice to say about it at all.
|
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Sunday,
9 April 2000
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Week]
I know I don't tell Barbara this often enough, but I really
appreciate what she does around here, which is basically everything.
Having her gone for just a few days emphasizes that. I can barely get
anything done trying to keep up with the stuff that she balances
apparently so effortlessly. I do think I'll suggest that the next time she
goes away she first pick up some Hungry Man frozen dinners or something. I
can deal with heating those, just about. Or there's take-out, I suppose.
Talk about shooting myself in the foot. I was playing around
with the new Windows 98 box I'm building and decided to muck about with
the CD-RW drive. I fished around for a formatted CD-RW disc and came up
with one that last been written to in June, 1999. It contained a copy of
the \usr directory on the main server, with subdirectories thompson and
barbara.
I decided that stuff was too old to care about, so I changed into the
/usr directory, Shift-clicked to highlight both those subdirectories, and
told Windows to delete everything. After only a couple of seconds of
deleting activity, I suddenly remembered that that old data might include
a copy of some old files that FrontPage deleted from my web due to the
case-sensitivity conflict between NT4 and FP. I clicked Cancel to kill the
deletion, intending to check to see if those files were still there.
Imagine my horror when I realized that I'd been deleting from f:\usr (the
main data directory on the network volume) rather than e:\usr (the CD-RW
disc).
Fortunately, I'd just done a full xcopy backup of the entire f:\usr
directory to the \databack directory on the new machine. So I turned
around and did an xcopy right back the other direction. I even remembered
to keep my main Outlook .pst file open on f:\usr so that the xcopy
wouldn't overwrite my current mail data with data from earlier today. It
appeared for a moment that no harm had been done. Until, that is, I fired
up FP to write this sad tale. I have FP set to automatically open the last
web that had been open. Imagine my horror again when FP informed me that
it couldn't open my local master copy of the web because it didn't exist.
Fortunately, FP did offer to convert all of the existing data into an
FP web, which it did after chunking away for several minutes. I knew
what'd happen when I next posted changes, however, so I bit the bullet and
went ahead and published. Sure enough, it published every single page in
the web. I can't blame FP this time. It was my own fault. I was resigned
to having all of the pages showing the current date and time, but it
didn't change those. Very nice. So after a couple of hours work, I'm right
back where I started.
* * * * *
-----Original Message-----
From: Frank McPherson [mailto:frank@fmcpherson.com]
Sent: Saturday, April 08, 2000 11:15 AM
To: Robert Bruce Thompson
Subject: Rockefeller & Gates
Interesting comparison in your daynote entry
for today. Just this morning I read this
article in Salon that points out that Sen. Sherman was mostly
concerned about concentrations of wealth and power. I think the
inference is that the Sherman Anti-trust act was designed to protect
consumer welfare per se, but instead to break up large concentrations of
wealth and power, which Sherman and others thought was bad and
distrusted.
There are also some interesting quotes in
the article from Alan Greenspan.
Frank McPherson, MCSE
frank@fmcpherson.com, www.fmcpherson.com
Microsoft MVP - Windows CE
Windows CE Knowledge Center, http://start.at/know_ce
And, of course, the Sherman Act was so weak and riddled with
loopholes that people ridiculed it when it was passed and for long
thereafter. In fact, Rockefeller and Standard Oil considered the Sherman
Act to be so innocuous that they didn't even bother to lobby against it.
* * * * *
-----Original Message-----
From: Keri M. Beland [mailto:kbeland@itool.com]
Sent: Saturday, April 08, 2000 11:07 PM
To: webmaster@ttgnet.com
Subject: Oh, I hope Barbara didn't read that <G>
> We'll be shifting to the male method
this week. One bowl for the week, all dogs share one bowl, and all dog
food is mixed together. They love to eat each others' food anyway.
Boy, I tell you that you are one lucky guy
if She-Who-Separates-the-Food missed this <G>.
I hope all is well for you guys up there.
I've missed reading everyone's site, and yours ALWAYS makes me chuckle.
Keri M. Beland
"A vague disclaimer is nobody's friend. Have fun!" -
Willow
480-659-0458
http://www.netwidows.itool.com/keri_beland.htm
Thanks. Actually, I was only kidding. I've given the dogs the
same meticulous level of care that Barbara would have done had she been
here. Really.
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