Modern software eats memory -- lots of memory. Jerry decides to investigate and what he finds confirms his worst suspicions. But he also finds a cure -- read about it in "To Cure a Failing Memory" in the February issue of BYTE.
Jerry Pournelle
Regular readers of my column will remember the problems I've had
with hesitations. I cured that problem (a network-setting difficulty), but recently it came back. I would be writing away in Word when suddenly the disk would begin chattering and the
disk use light would blink like crazy. When I'd type the next sentence, there would be a noticeable pause before my words made it to the screen. I truly hate that.
A partial cure is Golden Bow Systems' Vopt: since the hesitation seems to be caused by the computer's attention being turned to disk operations, making those operations more efficient reduces the glitch time. But that's no
t good enough, at least not for me, so I started wondering just why all the disk operations in the first place?
The only open programs were Symantec's Norton System Doctor and Word. System Doctor has a wonderful feature called System Information. Under that is a tab called "memory"; if you click on that, you'll get a revelation. In my case, my 32-MB system was using about 40 MB of memory; the disk operations were file-swapping to get at virtual memory.
What's using so much memory?
Windows 95 itself needs about 15 MB. There's not a lot you can do about that. System Informati
on needs 4 MB; that will go away when you close the System Information window, so we don't have to worry about it. The Microsoft Office 95 toolbar and its related stuff want 3.3 MB. I could close that down, but it's fairly convenient.
Cursor shaping -- the cursor's tab to the Microsoft Intellipoint mouse software -- uses a megabyte (and also slows your system down with an older video card, but it has no effect with the Number Nine Revolution 3D). Norton System Doctor uses 3.5 MB. You can configure it to eat less. HawkEye, the visual accelerator controls for the Revolution 3D video card (highly recommended; this card speeds up a system like the Cyrix 6x86 P-166 to near Pentium 200 speeds), wants almost 3 MB.
Then there's Word itself: 9.54 MB. This is a bit infuriating, but there's not a lot I can do about it. Mrs. Pournelle continues to write in Q&A Write. I miss it sometimes myself, but I'm used to some of Word's features, like undo and WYSIWYG italics and boldface. Also, Larry Niven and I use the
document-comparison features all the time. Like it or not, I am stuck with Word, although I have resisted the urge to go to Word 97, which is even larger.
FreeSpace (a nifty file-compression utility from Mijenix; see the regular column) has a price also. It's using 1.44 MB for a memory-resident manager program (which is presumably how it's making all that disk space and decompressing on the fly).
Add in a few other odds and ends, and we're up to 30 MB; not enough to require disk swapping but already close. Opening almost any other window will put me over the edge.
And then I added Quarterdeck's CleanSweep Deluxe for Windows NT and 95.
Installing CleanSweep was a pain to begin with, because Quarterdeck puts the serial number of the installation CD-ROM on the registration card. I often take new software out of the box and secure the disks inside the manual with rubber bands. This saves a lot of shelf space, as well as bag space when I carry stuff to the beach house for experiments. Unfort
unately, I don't always get the registration card (most software now lets you register on-line, so why bother with mail?) -- and sometimes if I haven't saved that card, I can't install the software.
This recently happened with two pieces of software I'd looked forward to trying. You'll note I haven't said who it was; a story goes with it. I got so mad I wrote the president of the company a stiff note entitled "Enough is enough," detailing my tale of woe. "I took your CD, installation disk, and manual with me, and I still couldn't install it! I hate you!," I said. He wrote back that the same thing had just happened to his sister, and enough was indeed enough. The company is changing its whole serial-number system, and would I please put off reviewing the product until they got that accomplished? Naturally I agreed.
Quarterdeck isn't quite as bad as some. If you have the CD but not the serial number, you can install CleanSweep, but it rather snottily informs you that you won't be eligible for any te
chnical support. That's all right, because I don't think CleanSweep does all that much for you anyway. It didn't find much to do on my system, and given how long this has been my experimental system, I know there are remnants of improperly uninstalled programs all through it.
What CleanSweep does is install a monitor program that watches when you install other programs and makes a log of what you did. When it comes time to uninstall the programs, CleanSweep does a pretty good job of clearing them out. It works quite well, and colleagues tell me it's one of the better, possibly the best, programs that do that.
Unfortunately, the cost of this service is over 10 MB of memory. It was CleanSweep that put me over the edge so that when I was writing in Word I was getting furious disk swapping; and that was one cause of the latest round of hesitations. When I uninstalled CleanSweep (it won't completely uninstall itself, and you have to do some of it by hand), my memory usage fell back below 32 MB, the dis
k swapping stopped, and the hesitations ceased.
Now, I can understand why CleanSweep might need 10 MB when it's doing its job, but not why it needs that much when I'm not installing anything. How much memory does it take to watch for installation activity? Can't it load the rest of itself when it's needed? Anyway, I guess I'll just have to live without CleanSweep until I get out to Fry's and buy another 32 MB of memory for this system; then I'll reconsider. Like disk space, memory is so cheap it's silly not to have enough.
I've been a bit rough on Quarterdeck's CleanSweep, which works well if you have the memory available to let it do its thing. Regular readers may remember that some time ago I reported that I didn't see much improvement from Quarterdeck's MagnaRam. I've changed my mind about that, after reinstalling QEMM97 -- MagnaRam comes with QEMM97 -- on my son Richard's recommendation. The results were nothing less than dramatic. You'll find a full report in this month's regular column.
My son Richard tells me that the biggest success of the Web is in the stock market.
Not only is there humongous cash flow, but the liquidity created changes the nature of the market. Whenever there's a market dip, small investors can hunt bargains almost instantly. For $350 a month, you can get a real-time stock ticker with instant trading access on your computer, and there are people who do nothing but watch all day while building option strategies their computers can implement.
Couple that with the newest statistical tools -- even those built into Excel are more powerful than the best we had available when we first used stationary time series to predict the future positions of airplanes in order to aim antiaircraft missiles -- and you get a brand-new financial world, something that comes much closer to the "efficient market" that economists like to speculate about.
There are also dangers. It used to be that delaying racing results for a minute -- that is, knowing the results of a race jus
t before the rest of the world knew it had started -- was a path to wealth. After the race wire services made that impossible, a standard confidence scam was to pretend you had that ability. In con-game parlance, this was known as "the wire."
Then stock market results were reported by wire service to tickers. Again, the ability to delay the results for a minute or so could be crucial, especially in the volatile commodities market. When it became impossible to do that for real, the con artists invented "the rag," a way to pretend you had the ability even though you didn't. Marks -- victims of the scam -- were invited to trade on this "sure thing," and of course things didn't quite work out the way the mark thought they would.
The movie
The Sting
was taken almost straight out of a sociology study of confidence games I was assigned when I was an undergraduate. I only wish I'd thought to write a movie script based on it.
You can see where I am headed. Suppose I had the ability to delay
that stock ticker for even a few seconds. I probably can't do that, but suppose I can make you think I can? There's probably a good movie in this.
Richard spent a tour in Ireland as manager for his company's products there and reports that this gave him a big stock market advantage. He could get the current
Wall Street Journal
on-line, read it, and set up his trades before the market opened in New York. Insomniacs and vampires can do that from the East Coast. Midwest and West Coast enthusiasts have problems. The
Wall Street Journal
comes out about 2:00 a.m. EST.
We're trying a new use for Dragon Systems
' (
http://www.dragonsys.com/
) NaturallySpeaking. The pastor at St. Mary's in Los Angeles gives impromptu sermons without notes. He's a theological scholar (C. S. Lewis once wrote t
hat he'd heard only about four sermons in his life that weren't an insult to his intelligence, but he never went to St. Mary's) who also teaches in a seminary, and his sermons are definitely worth publishing; but he will not write them down, and there is neither time nor money to transcribe them.
The parish office plans to have Father Gregory teach NaturallySpeaking to recognize his voice and learn his vocabulary. Then they will record the sermons and play the tape into it. This won't be perfect, but it may be good enough to edit into something publishable. I've been thinking of doing something like that with my own talks. I generally speak from notes, tailoring my presentations to the audience I'm talking to, so I never have a written copy of what I said. Maybe NaturallySpeaking can fix that for me; it's certainly worth a try.
Olympus
(
http://www.olympusamerica.com/
) continues developing digital cameras. The latest one I have is the D-320L, which is much like my D-300L except it's smaller and uses a SmartMedia card for image storage. One complaint people had -- I was not one of them -- about the D-300L was that it had a fixed memory. You had to either erase or download pictures to make room for more. With the SmartMedia card, you can simply change cards. At the moment, the only card reader is the camera itself, but I've seen a pilot model of a holder with a floppy disk form factor; somehow. your floppy drive is fooled into thinking this is a big floppy disk.
There's also new batch-file download software.
Like the D-300L, the D-320L has 1024- by 768-pixel as well as 640- by 480-pixel resolution. You can blow up a 1024 picture to respectable size and print it with, say, the Alps MD-2010 dry-ink color printer; and, of course, digital images can be sent by e-mail or put up on the Web. Di
gital cameras are the wave of the future, and I like what Olympus has done with them. They're now pretty well ready for Aunt Minnie, provided you hold her hand the first couple of times she transfers the images from the camera to her computer.
I showed this thing off at a party the other night, and my Beverly Hills plastic surgeon friend instantly ordered one for before and after pictures; he was getting tired of Polaroids. Lately, I find I'm never without that camera. Get one and you'll see why.
While we're on the subject of images -- and disk storage, for that matter -- here's the next installment of Chaos Manor graphics associate David Em's ongoing graphics report.
"Our New Digs" by David Em
"The biggest news from the graphics front this month is that we're finally ensconced in our new lab. Our ever-expanding collection of graphics-testing hardware and software finally has its own dedicated space, and I'm happy to report that the network is humming.
"And brother, do we need a
network. No single machine could handle the huge files every program we've got seems to generate. Our current solution is to have separate workstations for 2-D, 3-D, video, and multimedia that can all talk to each other. In reality, the lines of demarcation between graphics disciplines aren't nearly so easily drawn, but this way, at least none of the systems get totally bogged down.
"It's also remarkable how much space the applications themselves take up these days. Granted, we're working with a lot of software, but it's still hard for me to believe our applications have devoured entire gigabytes of storage. A particularly egregious example is the Service Pack update we got for Softimage 3.7 a month or so back; it required nearly 2 GB of free disk space just to load."
Viva Video
"Our first major project in the new lab has been to ramp up our efforts to wrestle the beast whose name is video to the ground. Last month, we reported on our initial encounters with bad boards and bad drivers, b
ut in the last week, things have improved dramatically.
"I'd finally given up on seeing Windows NT 4.0 drivers this year for our miroVideo DC30 Professional video input and output card from Pinnacle Systems (
http://www.pinnaclesys.com/
; Pinnacle Systems recently acquired the miro Video Group). So, I bit the bullet and installed the card in a Windows 95 system. After a little coaxing, I got it to capture stills and moving video from my Sharp Hi8 Viewcam.
"From what I've seen so far, the DC30 is a solid performer. It comes bundled with the full version of Adobe's Premiere 4.2 editing software for under a thousand bucks, which, for the quality of video and audio it offers, is an outstanding deal. Anyone looking to produce corporate-quality video productions should be happy with this package.
"By t
he way, Pinnacle claims that reliable NT drivers will be up on its Web site by the time you read this. It has also recently introduced the DC30 Plus, which features better data throughput.
"Remember, video requires a lot of very fast disk storage; there is virtually no such thing as having too much. But armed with a Pentium Pro, a few gigabytes of storage, a spare PCI slot, and your home video camera and VCR, a package such as this makes it affordable for anyone to get started with digital video at a high level."
About the Mac
"I've been running Mac OS 8 since it came out, and by and large, it strikes me as a considerable improvement over its predecessors. The biggest improvement is that I've had few system lockups since I installed it. System 7 was crash-prone with many of the applications I run, and that was one reason I moved over to NT back when.
"Mac OS 8 is also considerably better in the multitasking department, though it's not up to NT's level at this point. The overall look
and functionality of the interface have also been improved, although some of these improvements, such as menu and mouse behaviors, have existed in the Windows domain for some time.
"Unlike the jump from System 6 to System 7, Mac OS 8 didn't render half my programs useless or require costly upgrades. It did, however, nuke key components of all my Microsoft programs, including Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer, requiring me to reinstall all of them.
"On the Mac hardware front, I've recently installed an 8-MB Number Nine Imagine 128 Series 2 PCI graphics card into our dual-processor Power Mac 9500 as a second card. It's a fine performer. I've got it set at 1600- by 1200-pixel resolution at 75 Hz, and it looks great. This card will handily take care of anyone doing desktop image processing or publishing on the Mac. Recommended."
Back to War
"Last month, we determined that our snazzy high-end Truevision Targa 2000 RTX card was defective. We returned it, got it back, reinstalled it
on the Intergraph TD-200, invoked Adobe's After Effects compositing and animation software, and were greeted with the dreaded Blue Screen of Death. Other software packages ran fine, but starting After Effects consistently resulted in a complete system crash. On top of that, we now became aware of an intermittent buzz in the Intergraph keyboard's previously clean integrated sound system. Argh.
"Alex and I switched to another Intergraph keyboard (we love this keyboard; it's solid, and it has a volume control knob for the audio). No improvement. Switched over to a set of external speakers and got clean sound. Not logical, but what the hey, the beast was finally at bay. Better yet, we cruised Truevision's Web site (
http://www.truevision.com/
) and found an hours-old driver that resolved the Blue Screen of Death
problem. We began to feel absolutely cocky.
"Next we installed in:sync's (
http://www.in-sync.com/
) Speed Razor editing software, turned it on, and found that the system sound was suddenly and totally nonexistent. Charming. We opened the NT volume control to see if it had somehow become muted and were rewarded with a message that said we needed to install a new sound mixer from the Control Panel. Naturally, there was no mention of where in the Control Panel or what sound mixer this might be. After futzing around for a while with no success, we decided to head for home, neither of us wanting to admit that the beast had won yet another round. Maybe next month."
"One video product I did have luck with this month
is the new AVerKey3 Plus, an external VGA output-to-video system, from AVerMedia Technologie
s (
http://www.aver.com/
), that works on Macs and PCs. The AVerKey3 Plus is designed for doing computer-based demonstrations on video screens; it's very small and lightweight, and comes with a remote control.
"I gave a talk at the University of Southern California film school a couple of weeks ago and wanted to show some new work to the students. Since the multimillion-dollar screening room at the Lucas Multimedia Building doesn't have a single computer output in it (Jerry almost fell over when he heard that!), I decided to use videotape instead. I used the AVerKey3 to get my images off the computer and onto tape, and it worked fine.
"On the hardware front, we've been working with ViewSonic's (
http://www.viewsonic.com/
) new VP140 ViewPanel 14-inch flat-panel LCD. I've been looking forward for years to the day when I could replace a monitor -- any monitor -- with a flat-panel display, and hallelujah, that day has finally come. The screen is nice and bright (I don't even have the brightness turned all the way up in a fully lit room), and the color is quite good. I wouldn't recommend it for extremely precise color proofing, but for anything else, it's more than adequate. We have it displaying 1024- by 768-pixel resolution at 75 Hz, and I love it.
"Finally, a quick update on a Web design tool of note. Last month, I talked a bit about two products from Macromedia (
http://www.macromedia.com/
), Director 6 and Flash 2. Mac
romedia continues to gather no moss in bringing motion to the Web with another new product called Dreamweaver.
"Dreamweaver is a Dynamic HTML (DHTML) Web-page design tool (I've tested the beta version; the product began shipping in early December) that looks to be both capable in its streaming animation capabilities and easy to use. It can incorporate Director ShockWave and Flash 2 files as well as its own, which leads me to believe these three products could be unified into one heck of a powerful package.
"One of the main advantages claimed for Dreamweaver is what Macromedia calls round-trip HTML. If you already have a page laid out, the program won't step on your carefully formatted code. It just adds its own changes to it. If this really works, it's a huge advantage over most other programs, which have a disconcerting ability to make utter hash out of all your careful work.
"If you're looking to make your Web pages dance and sing with files that won't break the camel's back, keep your eye
on Macromedia's latest offerings; it looks to me like the company's pointed in the right direction."
Visit David Em's site, Gallery:
http://www.businesstech.com/art/emgallery.html
Readers seem to enjoy peeking into the Chaos Manor mailbag.
Here are a few more "things my postman brings me."
Jerry,
Your current praise of digital cameras made me think of another
possible use, as replacements for scanners. If you agree, it might be
a topic for one of your columns.
Another matter: I have come across an old InfoSelect memo to ask
what you meant by WOIW.
James A. Christenson
jacpe@midmon.com
In fact, I used the Olympus D-300L digital camera to "scan" a few charts from the last copy I have of The Strategy of Technology; it worked just fine, and you
can see the result on my Web page. It really works. I'm glad you marvel at what I do, and, alas, I haven't the foggiest notion of when I used WOIW, much less what it means!
Note that digital cameras are a poor substitute for scanning if resolution is an issue -- even the really good ones, such as the D-300L, are only 1024- by 768-pixel resolution. Good flatbed scanners are at least 600 dpi and don't have focus problems because of the flat glass.
You said in your October 1997 Web Exclusive: What I want is a way to
leave big messages on the ISP server until I get home from a trip.
This is impossible using POP3. However, as you may have been
informed by now, IMAP, which is supported by Microsoft Internet
Explorer 4 and Navigator 4, does allow this.
Until then, the best I've heard is Jon Udell's suggestion: Ask
people to put on the Web any file they want to send and e-mail you a
link to it (maybe with a filename such as 83JD893QJKDL as a
quick-and-dirty security measure).
Maybe if you mentioned this too,
it would become more widespread. ISPs would undoubtedly appreciate it.
By the way, if you're still looking for suggestions on your Web
site: I think it could use having a little bit of the TOC moved or
copied to the home page.
Daniel Glick
expertool@email.msn.com
Thanks. I have in fact moved some of the TOC; I continue to revise my Web site all the time. And Jon's suggestion is exactly on target. I wish everyone sending me big files would think to do it that way. Thanks!
I enjoyed your recent column in the November issue of BYTE, regarding
SIGGRAPH '97. You are right in that the exhibition is loud and makes
a lot of money for the ACM.
Some of your readers may want more information about SIGGRAPH.
Would you mind listing the following URL: http://www.siggraph.org. It
will help anyone interested to find more information about SIGGRAPH.
Thanks.
John Hart
ACM SIGGRAPH director for communications
hart@eecs.wsu.edu
There you are. And you're welcome!
Jerry Pournelle is a science fiction writer and BYTE's senior contributing editor. You can write to Jerry c/o BYTE, 29 Hartwell Ave., Lexington, MA 02173. Please include a self-addressed, stamped envelope and put your address on the letter as well as on the envelope. Due to the high volume of letters, Jerry cannot guarantee a personal reply. You can also contact him on the Internet or BIX at
jerryp@bix.com
. Visit Chaos Manor at
http://home.earthlink.net/~jerryp/
.
WEB EXCLUSIVE: The Hesitation Blues
