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The LangaList
29-Jun-99
A Free Email
Newsletter from Fred Langa About BrowserTune,
HotSpots, Columns, Tips & Tricks, and Other Activities
In This
Issue:
Yeah, But Would You Use One?
WINDOWS Magazine to Cease Print Edition
...But What About the LangaList?
Trend Alert!
Cool Tricks and Trinkets
Part 2: Two Gigs and Growing
Three More Bugs
Just for Grins
More!
This is a slightly different newsletter this week. You'll see when you read down a bit and see the news.... But first, this item:
Yeah, But Would You Use One?
A long time ago---in January 1996---in a speech I gave to the Washington Software Association, I joked that AOL eventually would tire of carpet-bombing the planet with free diskettes and CDs and would start giving away free PCs. The catch, I thought, would be that you'd be locked into AOL---sort of like a TV that's permanently tuned to one station.
In January of this year, something close happened: The "Free-PC" company gave away 10,000 free Compaq Presarios (See the WinMag news story at http://content.techweb.com/winmag//news/1999/0201/0208b.htm). The catch was that the "free" PCs were indeed locked into certain advertising displays, and you had to agree to leave the ads in place, and to view them for a certain number of hours a month. We discussed Free PCs in a February Dialog Box.
Then, just last week, Microworkz (http://www.microworkz.com/) announced the iToaster--- a $199 box which features a Pentium CPU (type and speed unspecified!) and an OS based in part on a heavily customized version of Linux.
OK, we’ve seen cheap PCs before. And a nonexpandable PC of uncertain lineage running a nonstandard Linux has obvious drawbacks. But what makes this especially interesting is that AOL is talking to Microworkz about either having custom PCs made for them for resale, or perhaps buying Microworkz outright.
Which brings us back to the idea from four years ago: an AOL PC.
I suppose its possible that AOL could actually sell these things as standalone items, although I’m hard pressed to see why anyone would want to buy hardware from what’s basically an Internet marketing company. But I think it’s more likely that if AOL does anything with them, these boxes would be giveaways: Signup for, say, two or three years of AOL access, and get a "free" surfing-box thrown in.
In a way, that might make sense: The OS doesn’t matter much in a dedicated surfing box (one that would be used only for connecting to AOL). The speed of the CPU isn’t a major issue when the only task the system has to handle is displaying the bits that come in over a wire.
But I sure wouldn’t want one. The thing that’s always appealed to me about real PCs is that I can do with ‘em what I want. They empower me, and amplify what I otherwise would have to do manually. Being locked into one way of doing things is one of the reasons why I’ve always had a hard time with Macs, and why any closed-box, take-what-we-give-you approach turns me off.
But what's your take? Would you take a free-PC from AOL? Are free PCs a great idea, or just another way to try to limit our choices and herd us like cattle to the channels the vendors want us to see? Join in the discussion at http://bbs.winmag.com/columns/archives/062799/monday/column.asp?frames=yes
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Speaking
of WINDOWS Magazine:
WinMag (Print) Is No More!
This press release went out last week:
CMP Media Converts Windows Magazine to an Online-only Information Source, Reflecting the Changing Information Needs of the Desktop Market
Manhasset, NY— CMP Media Inc. announced today that it will cease publication of WINDOWS MAGAZINE’s print edition with the title’s August 1999 issue, enabling the company’s Business Technology Group to expand its focus on media solutions for buyers at companies of all sizes that are driving the growing $488 billion business technology market*.
CMP will continue to produce winmag.com, an extremely popular Website that offers information, utilities and downloads to help technology buyers maximize their investments in Windows applications. The site delivers more than six million page views a month and traffic is growing…."
So, the August, 1999 printed edition of Windows Magazine will be the last one. If you want the full press release, it’s at http://www.cmp.com/cmppr/releases/990625.htm.
IMPORTANT: If you’re a WinMag subscriber (as I am), I don’t know what will happen to your subscription. I’m a freelance writer; I’m not on-staff, and I have no inside information on what’s going to happen. Typically, when a publication stops, the publisher has to offer you an equivalent-value subscription to another publication, or issue a refund. I have no clue what CMP will do in this case.
Ironically, when CMP suspended the print version of BYTE Magazine several months ago, they offered WinMag subscriptions to former BYTE readers to close out their subscription terms. Now those people, plus the 800,000 other WinMag readers, will end up getting some other print publication instead.
I confess to mixed feelings about all this. I’m a freelance writer now, but in1991 when CMP was thinking about launching a magazine devoted to Windows (which was then a graphical shell used by only a few million people), in the best New York tradition, they "made me an offer I couldn’t refuse." <g> I left my job as Editor in Chief of BYTE and moved my family to Long Island to start out Windows Magazine. I was the Editorial Director there for the next six years.
We started essentially at zero: for all practical purposes, there was no staff, no readers, nothing. But over the next few years we built the publication into something pretty decent, if I may say so.
(From the Department of Ironies: In the last two weeks, WinMag won five different national awards in the American Society of Business Press Editors annual competition, and a bunch more in the regional competition. In fact the first-place "gold" article for the year in both the national and regional competition was a WinMag article. I’m especially pleased, not just for the magazine, but because it was an article I co-authored with John Woram. It was called "Do It Yourself" and it was a compilation of the very best ways to troubleshoot and fix all kinds of hardware and software problems. [John wrote the hardware half, I wrote the software half. It’s at http://content.techweb.com/winmag//library/1998/1001/fea0045.htm .] This award was only the most recent of literally dozens and dozens and dozens of awards WinMag won over the years.)
A lot of WinMag's excellence was due to the staff: It was my extreme pleasure to build a staff of talented people the likes of which I’d never seen before or since. Now, with the shutdown of the print portion of the magazine, many of them will lose their jobs. They’re talented, and I’m sure they’ll do fine in the long run, but it’s never fun to lose a job. My sympathies go out to the staff.
So why do I have "mixed" feelings? Well, I believe paper is great for some purposes, but in many fields---especially technology---paper is a real handicap. Printing and distributing a national magazine is a hugely cumbersome, slow, expensive, and environmentally hostile act. Publishing on the web, in contrast, is lightning-fast, nimble, inexpensive, and environmentally benign. Plus, it offers benefits such as live searching that you just can't do on paper.
Also ironically, two years, ago, I proposed to CMP management that we convert WinMag to be the first of a new breed of 21st-century publications: not simply a print magazine that also happened to have a web site, and not just an ezine, but a true and revolutionary print+web hybrid of a sort that still has never been attempted by any publication. Alas, my plan was shot down. 8-)
But the move to the web isn’t intrinsically a bad one, although the way it's having to be done---with all the staff losses, subscriber reshuffles and such---makes it awfully messy. In the end, we’ll all have to see what CMP decides to do with the site and with our subscriptions. Stay tuned.
What About the LangaList?
I may be in the same boat as some WinMag staffers. I have a contract with CMP, and the Windows portion of it calls for me to write columns and manage the BrowserTune and Hotspots web sites. I have no clue yet if the contract will go on as before, or what. (Wish me luck.)
The LangaList (this newsletter) is not a part of what I do for CMP; it's its own thing, funded out of my own pocket. With the recent addition of ads, I'm no longer losing money by publishing this, but the ads merely defray my actual expenses; writing the newsletter is still mostly a volunteer thing, done on my own time and dime. I'd like to keep publishing the newsletter, but I don't know if my finances will allow it if my contract with CMP changes for the worse.
If you like the LangaList and would like to see it stay afloat, could you help? Do you know one other person who might find this newsletter interesting or useful? Click on over to http://www.langa.com/recommend.htm#2 and send them a free, spam-proof copy, in your name.
If you can help me grow the list, it will help ensure that we can keep it going, and free, into the future.
Thanks for your help!
Trend Alert!
Last week’s column and discussion of Microsoft’s Office 2000 (at InformationWeek Online) generated some interesting and passionate subthreads about new file formats. Some readers were angry at the "new nonstandard HTML" in O2K, and thought that Microsoft was either repeating the incompatible file-format debacle that happened with the release of Office 97, or worse, was deliberately trying to co-opt HTML and force O2K users down some proprietary path.
It turned out that XML (the eXtensible Markup Language) was at the heart of the controversy.
I’ll give you a 5-minute primer on XML in this week’s column at InformationWeek Online, but if this sounds like a geek topic that makes your eyes glaze over, consider this:
XML is as much of a leap over basic HTML as today’s HTML 4.0 is over, say, HTML 1.0. But unlike HTML, XML is about content, not layout. In fact, it separates the content from the layout, so the content can be changed, altered, sorted, updated---whatever---without having to diddle with the layout at all. It's a way of exposing the content and giving end-users direct access to the content in a far more direct and interactive way.
XML is enormously powerful and flexible. And it will be at the heart of tomorrow’s mainstream applications. Plus: XML is not a Microsoft format. It was originally proposed in 1996 by the W3C (The WorldWide Web Consortium; see http://www.w3.org/XML/ ) and has been moving forward ever since. When finished, XML will be a full, open, worldwide standard.
One way or another, you will have to deal with XML---you need to know what it's about. So give yourself a leg up: Click on over to http://www.informationweek.com/langaletter starting Wednesday June 30th and get the scoop---and then join in the discussion!!
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Cool Tricks and Trinkets
I just signed up for the free "The Cool Tricks and Trinkets Newsletter," newsletter, and thought you might like to know about it too. It offers weekly insights into new, cool, useful, fun, unusual and interesting sites on the Internet. It’s informative content and yet easy to read with a lighthearted writing style. You can read a sample newsletter and subscribe at http://www.tricksandtrinkets.com . Check it out!
Part
2: Two Gigs and Growing
(An Informal History of BYTE Continues)
BYTE was born in 1975, back when the idea of a computer of your own was something out of purest science fiction. In fact, there wasn’t even a good name for small computers--- that is, not until BYTE coined the term "personal computer" in its May 1976 issue.
To help you see BYTE in its full historical context, Executive Editor Paul Schindler asked me to pull together a two-part timeline of the events covered in BYTE pages. Of course, all the issues of BYTE ever published would fill several long library shelves, so all we can do is show you the highlights (and lowlights!), along with other tidbits of information from the computer industry at large---and from the headlines of the day as well. If you lived through those days, you’ll find a lot of memories in the timeline. And if you’re new to BYTE, fasten your seat belts for a high-speed ride through the history of small computers. We hope you find it an exhilarating, informative and entertaining ride!
Part One (covering 1975-1985) appears here (http://www.byte.com/columns/monitor/1999/05/0524langa.html) and Part Two (covering 1985 to the present) is now available at http://www.byte.com/columns/monitor/1999/06/0628langa.html
Three More Bugs
If you or our company is running NT or IIS, heads up:
The "Malformed Local Security Authority (LSA) Request Vulnerability" can cause the service to stop responding, requiring a reboot. It affects:
- Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Workstation
- Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Server
- Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Server, Terminal Server Edition, 4.0
The patch is at:
ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/bussys/winnt/winnt-public/fixes/usa/NT40/hotfixes-postSP5/LSA3-fix/
The "CSRSS Worker Thread Exhaustion Vulnerability" could be used in a denial of service attack against a machine that allows interactive logons. It affects:
- Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Workstation
- Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Server
- Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Server, Enterprise Edition
See:
ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/bussys/winnt/winnt-public/fixes/usa/nt40/Hotfixes-PostSP5/CSRSS-fix/
The last one affects the least number of people: It's the "Double Byte Code Page" Vulnerability for Microsoft Internet Information Server 3.0 when the default language is Chinese, Korean, or Japanese. If you're running a server like that, see:
http://www.microsoft.com/security/bulletins/MS99-022faq.asp
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Just For Grins:
Reader Jonas S. Madsen claims to have unearthed the top-secret source code for Windows 98. (And you don’t have to be a programmer to understand it--- just read it as if it were plain text!)
/*
TOP SECRET Microsoft(c) Code
Project: Chicago(tm)
Projected release-date: Summer 1998
*/
#include "win31.h"
#include "win95.h"
#include "evenmore.h"
#include "oldstuff.h"
#include "billrulz.h"
#define INSTALL = HARD
char make_prog_look_big[1600000];void main()
{
while(!CRASHED)
{
display_copyright_message();
display_bill_rules_message();
do_nothing_loop();
if (first_time_installation)
{
make_50_megabyte_swapfile();
do_nothing_loop();
totally_screw_up_HPFS_file_system();
search_and_destroy_the_rest_of_OS/2();
hang_system();
}
write_something(anything);
display_copyright_message();
do_nothing_loop();
do_some_stuff();
if (still_not_crashed)
{
display_copyright_message();
do_nothing_loop();
basically_run_windows_3.1();
do_nothing_loop();
do_nothing_loop();
do_nothing_loop();
}
}
if (detect_cache())
disable_cache();
if (fast_cpu()) {
set_wait_states(lots);
set_mouse(speed, very_slow);
set_mouse(action, jumpy);
set_mouse(reaction, sometimes);
}
/* printf("Welcome to Windows 3.11"); */
/* printf("Welcome to Windows 95"); */
printf("Welcome to Windows 98");
if (system_ok())
{
bsod(random_err());
crash(to_dos_prompt);
}
else
system_memory = open("a:\swp0001.swp", O_CREATE);
while(something)
{
sleep(5);
get_user_input();
sleep(5);
act_on_user_input();
sleep(5);
}
create_general_protection_fault();
}
See you next issue!
Best,
Fred
( fred@langa.com )
(P.S. Please email the LangaList to a friend! Use this super-fast form !)
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rates and info available at http://www.langa.com/rate_card.html
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