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Pastimes : NNBM - SI Branch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Clappy who wrote (23292)	2/17/2003 5:54:34 PM
From: lurqer	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 104164

Well after spending most of the long weekend programming, I'm ready to "catch up" on some posts. The first link didn't usefully connect. Liked the second link, but I expect quality from that poster. Also, from an earlier post on this board The penalty for masturbation in Indonesia is decapitation. just wanted to make sure that Flirting with the headless Indonesian was added to the list. I'm increasingly convinced that Windows ME is a kludge. I use a TCP/IP LAN. It's easy enough to share resources (hard disks, zip disks, printers, scanners, etc.). For a shared hard disk, if you map the drive in Windows Explorer, you can browse the drive on another machine, and (by clicking) you can run a program that resides on the other machine (barring registration problems). But even though the program resides on the hard disk of another machine, it runs on your machine. If you want to run the program on the other machine, then additional software is required. For this purpose, I use a program called Batch Server. Some time ago, I installed it on my Windows ME machine, and on some Windows 95 and Windows 98 (and more recently Windows XP) machines that are also on my LAN. Everything worked fine. But Windows ME has a curious (and frequently infuriating) behavior of modifying itself over time. One of these modifications results in any program that is run on my ME machine (and initiated on another machine) is run not once, but twice. Since Batch Server worked just fine when I first installed it, I tried uninstalling and reinstalling. No improvement. After diddling around (technical terminology), I noted that Volatile Environmental Variables on ME do not behave as advertised - they are neither volatile nor process specific. So I created my own non-volatile Volatile Environmental Variable called Reply, and used it as a semaphore. That way, any program that is initiated from another machine is funneled through a program called ReplyFilter that uses the semaphore to terminate the second thread. So most of my time was spent correcting for Microsoft, rather than adding new functionality. But it all plays now. On a different note, I happened to catch part of a panel discussion on C-SPAN2's BookTV yesterday. Unfortunately, there were unavoidable distractions here, so I only got a very partial view. The discussion was about American hegemony. The views expressed were witheringly devastating to the neo-con perspective. It's not just that the neo-con's goals are inappropriate, but that a through analysis demonstrates that they are impossible to achieve. Any attempt to do so, can only lead to disaster. For example, while militarily, we live in a unipolar world, economically, we live in multipolar world with the USA's power in decline. Not only not a good foundation for a hegemony, but likely to produce an economic catastrophe if an attempt is made to established the hegemony. Much was discussed, and on a sophisticated level. I'm hoping for a repeat. lurqer