8:00 AM There were no updates over the weekend, as my wife and I spent it babysitting out almost-two-year-old goddaughter. Two year-olds, as many of you know doubt know, are charming, wonderful creatures, at least when they're your own children. Babysitting them is another story. <g>

We did go visit the Phoenix Zoo, something I hadn't done since I was about 8, which was a lot of fun. Beautiful park; a large, semi-arid desert botanical garden and zoo placed smack in the middle of Phoenix, but done so cleverly that you'd never guess you were within 100 miles of any town, much less in the middle of one of the top 10 cities in the United States. If you ever get the chance, it's worth the price of admission. Besides, they have camel rides. (That was the big hit with my goddaughter, anyway.)

I also get to enjoy watching my fellow Daynoters and also my family grumble about the end of Daylight Savings Time. You might have noticed that the time-zone indicator at the top of this page has always been Mountain Standard Time (UT -7:00) rather than Mountain or Pacific Daylight Time. Arizona is its own time zone; we feel that we get too much sun as it is, there's no need to conserve it during the summer. So we don't do that. On the plus side, I don't have to change my clocks, internal or external; on the down side, people from out-of-state are invariably off by one hour in calling me, since they don't realize we don't change. Oh well, plusses, minuses.

To wrap up last week's discussion, here's a series of replies, most of them short:

-----Original Message-----
From: John Doucette [mailto:jhdoucette@home.com]
Sent: Friday, October 29, 1999 3:41 PM
To: matt@rearviewmirror.org
Subject: Students Thinking

Hi Matt

I totally agree with your points on students (people in general) needing to be able to think and reason, not just do math etc. But can anyone be taught to "THINK", I don't think so!

I recall a study which showed that even though there are X times more students going through engineering programs today, than there were 20 years ago, that there is still only X number of competent capable engineers coming out of the programs. The number of graduates has gone up but that has not equated to more good engineers. I am only using engineers as an example, as the study covered many disciplines. Why this bears some truth is that teaching people book knowledge does not make people excel at anything except maybe taking exams.

I don't believe that just anyone can through parents and teachers can be taught to think. Some people are just born thinkers ( it is the way they are wired ), some others learn to think by rewiring themselves, and the rest just don't have what it takes to be thinkers.

John

You raise some excellent points; it is indeed difficult, if not impossible, to teach people to think. However, we CAN avoid teaching people NOT to think. That's what we're doing now. I stated in the beginning as part of my hypothesis that many - I'd even go so far as to say that most - people are simply incapable of learning to think for themselves. Unfortunately, we seem to take that as our lowest common denominator and teach our children as though that is the best and most correct means of learning. I'm not concerned about those people who CAN'T think. There's nothing that can be done for them; they shouldn't be punished for it by trying to make them something they're not.

I'm concerned about those who CAN think for themselves, who have the ability, but who don't. I don't think it's that they've made the decision not to, at least not the majority. They've simply never been taught that they can.

To use your engineering example, I have some insight on the matter; I went through it, after all. And they're right, there are many more engineering students than there will ever be engineers. Some of them, like me, find that they are excellent engineers, but hate engineering as a career; I found the politics and business structure too Byzantine for my tastes. Perhaps I would have in almost any career field. But most of them were simply not good engineers. They could learn all the formulas, memorize every property of every material, and even - wonder of wonders - learn to draw a straight line without a ruler. But they could not be engineers. They made the same mistake most of my professors did; drawing the line and doing the math is not engineering, it's clerical work. Engineering is something entirely different, and it's something that's difficult to teach; it involves thinking for yourself.

In short, I agree, it's not just book learning. <g> But we do have a responsibility to these children; we have to encourage those that have the ability to think. Otherwise, they won't ever learn to use it.

But that's last week's topic. This week, as suggested, it's Saving the World, Part 1. Any takers?

Tuesday

9:00 AM An indicator of how my day is going is the number of open application windows. If things are running smoothly, I'll have Outlook, IE5, Veritas Backup Exec, and a System Monitor open.

Yesterday at three in the afternoon, I had a counted 18 windows open on my machine. Tom usually refers to this mode as "dragon-slaying" mode, because I'm running on "interrupt-mode," hammering all the problems I can find as quickly as possible. Yesterday changed from "Dragon-slaying" to "Hydra-slaying," because every head I killed resulted in two or three more popping up somewhere. I hate those kinds of days.

How am I doing this morning? 8 windows so far. I pray it doesn't get any larger.

Got some email on the topic of the week, but it was all complaining about how broad the topic was. So, we'll limit it a bit; how about Saving the World from GreenPeace? Yes, that's right, I'm wearing my asbestos clothing, so bring it on. The topic for the week is environmentalism. To kick things off, I'll start - these environmentalists annoy me. Let's rape and pillage the Earth for everything we can get, and when we're done, we'll start on the other planets.

And if that doesn't get a reaction, nothing will. <g> 

---

3:30 PM Well, so far I've had three mini-discussions involving various themes on "You're kidding, right?" and a back-and-forth with Dr. Keyboard; the highlight of which was probably this comment:

-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Ward-Johnson [mailto:chriswj@mostxlnt.co.uk]
Sent: Tuesday, November 02, 1999 1:23 PM
To: 'Matt Beland'
Subject: RE: Saving the World

*** PGP Signature Status: unknown
*** Signer: Unknown, Key ID = 0x467724FF
*** Signed: 11/2/1999 12:24:14 PM
*** Verified: 11/2/1999 1:24:54 PM
*** BEGIN PGP VERIFIED MESSAGE ***

AARRGGHH! The Anti-Christ Speaks! Quick, nurse, the Foie Gras!

Regards
Chris Ward-Johnson
chriswj@mostxlnt.co.uk
Dr Keyboard - Computing Answers You Can Understand
http://www.drkeyboard.co.uk

I'd explain, but it would just ruin it. So I won't. I did have someone ask why I always refer to Chris as "Dr. Keyboard," whilst everyone else in the Daynotes Gang calls him Dr. or Chris Ward-Johnson. The answer is that the Great Satan of Bean-Counting here at iTOOL, our illustrius CFO, is named Chris Ward, and I, being notoriously horrible with names, can never keep them straight if I call them both some variation of Chris Ward - even a variation like Chris Ward-Johnson. Especially since they both enjoy fine food and wines and have similar senses of humor. So there you have it; nothing sinister, just my poor memory.

It must seem that with all this, I haven't done any real work today, but I've actually been quite busy. And I found a new application out of it; Aladdin Systems' Aladdin Expander. This is a simple compression/decompression utility, but it has some very nice features, most notable of which are the the fact that it A) didn't make a fuss about WinZip 7 already being on my machine, and B) it uses drag-and-drop decompression. This is important because I was the recipient of (literally) several hundred zip files, each containing a single file, and all of which needed to be decompressed and placed together in a directory. With WinZip, this would take hours; with Aladdin Expander, I just opened the directory with all the zip files, selected all of the files, and dragged them onto Aladdin's window. The machine trundled for a bit, and that was all it took. Done. Definitely a nice piece of software. And for those of you out there who don't like Windows, there's a Mac version as well.

Wednesday

6:30 AM Yes, that's right, I am here, at my desk, at six thirty AM. Or, as Tom just ICQ'd me, "WTF are you doing there at 6:30? You really do love your job don't you???"

No, I don't love my job all that much... at least not enough to be here at 6:30. We're going to be replacing one of our servers today; the main server, the one that hosts www.itool.com and all the nifty tools that make up iTOOL, is a dual-PII 300, over 2 years old. First server the company ever bought, and boy, is it SLOW. You can't tell out there in browser-land, but I watch the performance monitor all day, and I can tell when Tom checks his stats, all right? (Well, no, not really, but generally speaking...)

So he (the server's name is Berlioz, so that makes it a "he") will be replaced by a brand-new Dell PowerEdge 2300. Dual PIII 600, 512MB of RAM, lots of storage space, and all the new versions of software. This requires lots of preparation, and that's why I'm here so early. Hmmph. I am not a morning person.

Lots of email from last night, but unfortunately (fortunately?) most of it isn't fit to print. There's a comment from Brian Bilbrey, though:

-----Original Message-----
From: bilbrey@pacbell.net [mailto:bilbrey@pacbell.net]
Sent: Tuesday, November 02, 1999 10:00 PM
To: matt@rearviewmirror.org Subject: Where can I sign up

to do other planets. This one's been done, if you know what I mean. Besides, don't forget the first rule taught to all plebe Vikings

"First rape, then pillage..."

I did like the beginning of Armageddon, an otherwise drab movie with very little science to the fiction, had Bruce Willis firing at the treehuggers with a driver and a box of Top Flites. I like.

Meantime, what's the difference between a gerbil and a hamster?

--
regards,
Brian Bilbrey bilbrey@pacbell.net
http://www.OrbDesigns.com/

Right! Except that I learned it as "First you pillage, THEN you burn," but whatever works for you works for me.

I wasn't able to watch all of Armageddon; as an Aerospace Engineer, the sight of two space shuttles taking off within a mile of each other and flying in formation all the way to orbit, not to mention that most interesting 180-degree turn to land on the asteroid, pretty thoroughly shut down my synapses. <g> I'm willing to suspend my critical thinking facilities for a movie, but there comes a point where if I shut anything else down, I lose autonomic function, and that would be bad. Although I did like that beginning, you have a good point there.

As for the difference between a gerbil and a hamster, I thought that'd be obvious to a cook such as yourself; hamsters are served with a mushroom sauce and white wine, while gerbils are definitely served with a brown sauce and chardonnay.

Unfortunately, that has to pretty much end the topic; my wife the tree-hugger hath decreed that it be so. <g> When the Boss speaks, you have to listen...

Ah, I see on the performance monitor that Berlioz is ready for the next part of his lobotomy. Later.

Thursday

7:45 AM Morning all. I survey my office and see that yes, everything is here and running. That may not seem like much; it would if you'd been here yesterday. I had two YANTIs and a series of preperatory surgeries on our main server, which, while unusual and therefore more interesting than the usual crap, was still only slightly more fun than, say, watching grass grow. But I prefer that to the excitement last night.

Seems that somehow, development code for the next version of iTOOL (coming soon to a web server near you!!!) got uploaded to the production server. This was bad. We got it fixed, and very quickly, I might add, but it was still a problem that ate up far too much of our time. And things were quite hectic for a while, as the CEO, CTO, CFO, and a bunch of other "C" people, plus investment bankers, were watching over our shoulders the whole time.

I still have a job, so I did something right. <g>

Jan Swijsen is stepping into the debate on Hamsters and Gerbils:

-----Original Message-----
From: Jan Swijsen [mailto:qjsw@oce.nl]
Sent: Thursday, November 04, 1999 3:31 AM
To: Matt Beland
Cc: Brian Bilbrey
Subject: Hamster.

I knew the Americans were culinary underdeveloped, but serving hamsters with white wine and a mushroom sauce? Ts ts ts.

It should be obvious you serve them with grilled mushrooms, filled with an onion and parsley paste. And of course you provide a strong blond beer such like a Trapist grade 8.

We don't have gerbils in Belgium (Europe?) so that could be used in a true American dish but I doubt that the Chardonnay fits in well with it.

Svenson

I stand - or sit, rather - corrected.

I found an interesting detail on Windows 2000 Professional installations. Some of you probably already know that the venerable old habit of storing documents and data in the user profile, under C:\WINNT\Profiles\#USERNAME#\Personal has changed. There's now a folder on C:\ called "Documents and Settings", and in that folder is a separate folder for all your settings, folders, and documents. In and of itself, this is great; it means it's possible to rip "c:\winnt" out by the roots and reinstall, without losing program settings or data. If, that is, you're foolish enough to store data on the system partition.

In the case of an upgrade from Winnt, however, using roaming profiles - which we use here - it causes a minor problem. I've been experienceing this since I installed W2K on my new workstation, but I didn't put all the pieces together until yesterday. The problem is that whenever I open a text document, for example, I get an error that some component, or the file itself, is missing - but the document is open behind the dialog box. Close the dialog box, and you can proceed, the document is open and waiting. When I open Outlook in the morning (or any other time, really) I get an error that my application extensions are invalid. Which is incorrect, because they all worked fine once I'd installed them. I hadn't left any of them out, but I was still getting the message. I'd about written it off to a missed application when I <gasp> bothered to read the full text of the message.

It was looking ofr settings in "C:\Documents and Settings\mbeland\Application Data\Microsoft\AddInsc:\WINNT\Profiles\mbeland\application data\Microsoft\AddIns".

In other words, when W2K upgraded my Winnt4 profile - which it did, in fact, tell me it was doing - it simply copied the program paths into the new strings, but it didn't replace the %SYSTEMROOT% variable with the correct root path.

It's more of an annoyance than a problem, and I expect I can root out the source of the trouble without difficulty, but it's an odd little bug, anyway.

Friday

8:00 AM TGIF, everybody. Of course, that doesn't mean much around here, since I'll be in the office tomorrow and probably Sunday, as well. At least the Vikings game isn't until Monday night.

Hordes of rabid gerbils (catching a theme for the week?) stole all my time yesterday. I was busy, I did a lot, and I got a lot done - but damned if any of it was what I would normally consider important. I was in interrupt-driven mode all day, and I do mean ALL DAY; I left around 6 PM - for an hour. I was back at 7, and finally went home at 11. Piffle. And now there's a meeting (read: as much fun as a root canal with no anesthetic) in half an hour. Grand piffle.

Wasted some of that time last night playing a truly excellent game - Homeworld. It's the type of game I usually like, real-time strategy, but it's unlike any of the strategy games I've ever played. This is like a cross between X-Wing and Warcraft, but more realistic. Sub-unit commanders actually act intelligently; no more micromanagement of every battle. You take units with you from mission to mission in the single-player campaign, rather than starting from scratch. And so on, and on, and on. I have yet to find anything about this game I dislike, except perhaps for the hardware requirements. The missions have a steep learning curve, but not drastically so, and if you grow tired of them you can play up to 7 other humans plus 3 computer players online or by LAN. I don't play games much, but with this one I'm going to wear out the CD.

Piffle. Meeting time. Later.

Saturday

11:30 AM Hey, check it out, an update on SATURDAY. <g> Bet you thought you'd never see one of those...

I see the Microsoft ruling is out. Bother. Piffle. Damn, spit, hellfire, AND damnation. Does that adequately express my feelings about the government's actions in this matter? Let's see, what was that quote from this morning's Arizona Republic newspaper...

Attorney General Janet Reno, who brought the sweeping anti-trust case against Microsoft 18 months ago, hailed Jackson's opinion as marking "a great day for the American consumer." She said it fully supports the Justice Department's view "that this case is about the protection of innovation, competition and the consumer's right to choose the products they want."

For some reason I'm transported back to my youth on the dairy farm in Minnesota... specifically to the barnyard...

My views on this are plain and simple. I dislike Microsoft's products in general; some I like better than others, and I think that Windows 2000 Professional, at least, shows signs of being a remarkable improvement over NT. For a company like iTOOL, it's worth the upgrade price simply because we won't really pay that price; we'll pay a much lower volume price on a series of licenses. That said, I think the Server product is terrible, and although there are signs of things that will be really good once the bugs are worked out, they aren't there yet. That may be a simple business position; as others have pointed out, no serious companies are going to be in any position to begin upgrading their servers until at least the end of Q2 2000, anyway, so there's no point in holding up the Windows 2000 Professional release waiting for a product no one's going to use.

But as much as I dislike Microsoft, I dislike the government's position on this even more. This is supposed to be a free market economy, no ifs, ands, or buts. It's nothing like if a company can go to court and say "This competitor of mine took advantage of my mistakes and my weaknesses, traded on them sharply but well, and now I want to be compensated for my mistakes." Particularly not if the court agrees, as this court apparently has.

You see, it's really quite simple. Microsoft built a product that, horrible and crippled as it was, it could sell to the public. Call it marketing, call it public stupidity, call it anything you like, that's what they did. And by doing that, and doing it better than any of their competitors, they grew to have the largest market share in the industry. Can we find any other companies that have done that?

Adobe. PDF documents are the foremost means of transferring large documents in such a way that the formatting and style are exactly as you intended. How are they created? With Acrobat. Period.

Intel. Only one serious competitor, and they've got serious problems. Not AMD's fault; earthquakes happen, and there's nothing to do but tighten your belt and rebuild.

Apple. They dominate the market on Motorola-based processors.

It's not just computers, either. Kleenex owned the market for so long we forgot what a "tissue" was. Xerox - same thing. You don't "use a copier;" you "xerox it." In virtually every field, there's one or two clear leaders, and they use every tactic they can think of to increase their lead. Is that legal?

There've been two companies that were declared illegal monopolies, and broken up into smaller companies. Standard Oil, in 1911, and AT&T in 1984. Standard Oil was, or was alleged to have been, a company that used everything from blackmail, theft, and arson to murder and assault to keep competitors out of their market. That's not a free market; that's organized crime. Breaking up the comapny was a fair decision, but it was the beginning of a slippery slope.

AT&T was essentially a government-created monopoly, in that the government subsidized the company in spreading phone service throughout the US. Breaking the comapny up into pieces was probably seen as a way of equalizing that, by forcing the companies to spend money and time and talent in reorganizing and rebuilding. So again, probably a good decision, but a lot more questionable, and farther down that slippery slope.

Finally, Microsoft in 1999. Or rather, if it ever happens, in 2010. There's been no proof that Microsoft harmed the consumer, and one hell of a lot of evidence that they helped us all out by creating a market for cheap computers. Run linux on that screaming dual 600 Mhz machine if you like, but you'd damned well better thank Microsoft that you have it. But, they harmed their competitors in doing so. Oh, too bad, so sad. In case you hadn't noticed, that's what happens in business. There's a limit amount of market, and the goal of any company is to secure a hold on the largest share of it possible. Doing that involves taking that share away from other companies. Which hurts them.

Microsoft's reward for building the market and capturing the largest share of it is stability, growth, and strength. They can afford to "live off the fat" for a time, if necesary, to beat competitors. It is the goal of a competitor to be lean, mean, and strong, sufficiently so that they can take away some of that market, and keep doing so until THEY become the dominant player. It's not a matter of "fair play;" and no one guarantees you entry into that market. If your product is better, the market will reward you. If your product is crap - or if you quit the race before reaching the finish line - the market will forget you. And that is the way it should be.

While we're at it, everybody's ignoring the biggest, baddest, most harmful monopoly of all. The US Government. Do they really think no one will notice that they've passed laws to protect US Governement institutions from competition? The United States Postal Service delivers mail, we all know that. Why is there a law prohibiting US citizens from shipping non-priority first class mail through FedEx or UPS? Air travel has become a fast, efficient, relatively inexpensive, and relatively convenient means of travel and shipping, enough so that aside from certain rare conditions, rail travel is not economically feasible. Why does the government subsidize and support AmTrak? 

I want to begin a full probe of anti-trust and illegal competition by the US Government. Let's see how far THAT one goes.

Sunday