Dayz Past
I now have digital email certificates from Verisign, Inc. for my mail accounts. From now on, if you get email that appears to be from me, but it does not contain a verified certificate, it is probably not from me. Unfortunately, if your email program (e.g. Eudora Lite) does not know what to do with the certificate it will consider it as an attachment and save it to your drive. It won't do either of us much good if that happens so all I can say is perhaps you can use another program for you email. Outlook Express, which is what I use for an email client is compatible with the certificates and unless you have another program that is compatible, I suggest you use that.
On the America's Cup front, the Hawai'i Team Abracadabr2000, won a great race against Team Dennis Conner (TDC) in Stars and Stripes. TDC was ahead at the start and the first four marks. From that point to the end, the Hawai'i team dueled it out with the TDC team winning by a razor slim three seconds. Unfortunately, Hawai'i in an earlier match against Nippon lost by a whopping three minutes 29 seconds. Hawai'i lost the start and never was in a position to challenge Nippon.
Good stuff over at Dr. Pournelle's site re:Microsoft Monopoly. Both in the view as well as the mail. Since most of you will probably be sick of the subject, I figured I would talk about something that Dr. Pournelle mentioned in passing. Namely, the early PCs. No I'm not talking about the IBM PC. I'm talking about the Atari, Amiga, or Apple II. This was in the mid-to-late 1970s, years before the first IBM PC came out. The first PC I ever used was an Apple II. I think it had something less than 64K of RAM and an external 5 and 1/4 floppy drive (no hard drive). The monitor was a 13-inch TV from Radio Shack. The printer was some unknown company that used a roll of silver coated paper and heat to form the letters (well, at least you never had to change a ribbon).
The first PC I ever owned, was an Atari. It had about 64K of RAM, with the keyboard built into the case and a game cartridge port in the top. Again no hard drive and actually came with a cassette interface so you could store your programs on cassette tapes. Eventually I got a floppy drive for it since I got tired really fast of trying to use cassettes. I also had a state-of-the-art YELLOW monochrome monitor!
And remember, at that time, there were no bulletin boards or internet to download programs from so the main source of utilities and such was magazines. That is, you would type in row after row of long lines of gibberish. Then see if your checksum matched the authors. If so, you would then run a translation program which would create the executable. Yikes! Talk about the dark days of PC computing.
Of course, once the IBM PC came out in the early 1980s, everything changed. On one hand, the industry was able to standardized on one architecture. And this was good. But on the other hand, the industry standardized on one architecture. And this was bad. But there was no looking back and I traveled to Los Angeles and bought a 8086 clone (I think it was an NEC chip if I remember right). This one had about 256K of RAM, and 5MB hard drive, a 5 and 1/4 floppy. The video card was a Hercules compatible monochrome output. From then on, its been one Intel chip after another. From the original 8086, to the 80286, 80386, 80486, Pentium, and now Pentium II. I think I'll skip the Pentium III and go for the next generation after that. But what memories...
Quick Notes:
Dr. Pournelle
has a link to Dan
Bricklin's Log. Once there, there's a subsection
of the log on the Microsoft trial. It's worth a quick look.
Especially interesting to me was the "Ethical
Issues" section which attempts to trace our current laws
back 1500 years! Recommended (as long as you are not offended
by quotes from the Talmud).
The UK Register has a hands on review of the "Chipzilla" CuMine Chip. As always, its worth a quick look at their site. They always have interesting things to say across the pond.
In all the hubbub about the MS trial I forgot to mention a small item about certain builds of Caldera Linux 2.2. There is a small security hole. The default install creates a user called "Help." This user has root access and no password. Let me say that again. It creates a user with root access and no password. This allows even the dullest NT hacker to come in and do all sorts of mischief. Caldera's 2.2 was one of the more popular distributions out there and I bet more than a few of them still have the "Help" account active. Makes you want to switch to OpenBSD Unix doesn't it? OK. Maybe not.