Category: Best

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Napster

I have followed, with some amusement, the misadventures of the American legal system over the insidious, corrupting, devilish program Napster.

Napster allows users to “kidnapster” music files from other users on the Internet running the same application. You log on and type in a search string and the Napster finds MP3 files on other users’ computers and allows you to download them onto your computer and listen to them.

Well, right is right and wrong is wrong. Is it wrong to “steal” music over the internet? Yes. Is it wrong to rip off young artists? Yes– but that’s what the music industry does better than a million internet users. Is the current system of distribution of music unjust, unfair, and grossly inefficient? Yes. It will die of it’s own contradictions.

I watched the debate and the court proceedings with amusement because the judge that tried to shut down Napster made a ruling that is ridiculous and will only bring scorn and ridicule to the legal process.

Here’s why:

1. Though shutting down the Napster site will temporarily stop people from using Napster to download MP3 files, there are dozens of other programs that do the same thing. When the Napster site was temporarily shut down last month, the Gnutella site had so many hits that it too went down. Shutting down Napster will have almost no effect on the distribution of music over the internet.

2. Sony has announced that it will sell music over the internet for $2.98 per cut. This is a bad joke. This is obscene. It is more obscene than millions of users sharing their music over the internet without paying the artist. This amount is so ridiculously high that it will only serve to increase the scorn and hatred of the music industry out there among computer hackers. If the music industry is going to sell music over the internet, the price is going to have to be about ten cents a cut. At this price, the music industry will– believe me– still make piles of money, because they will sell 100 times as much music as they currently sell.

3. The other programs that do the same thing as Napster don’t do it in the same way. Napster still requires a “server” which a judge could order shut down. Other programs, however, function in a more decentralized way. It may be impossible to shut down these systems by shutting down a small number of servers. A zealous judge would have to shut down everybody– which means it won’t happen.

4. Even if Napster, and Gnutella, and all the other programs succeed and prevail, the music industry will survive, and it will continue to sell music through music stores. In the first place, MP3 is not really a very good music format. The new generation of DVD’s will provide better quality sound and there will always be a market for disks. In the second place, even though it has long been possible to record music off the radio and television programs off the TV, the markets for CD’s and video tapes continues to grow. A lot of people just want to get the disk or tape in their hands.

5. The music industry will cease to have a cooperative monopoly (something the banks and oil companies already have) over the sales and distribution of music. Anyone can get on the internet and distribute and promote his or her own work.

6. Video is next. The fact that we cannot, at the present time, watch television programs when we want to, rather than when they are scheduled is, when you think about it, absurd. If Monty Python is on at 2:00 a.m. and I want to watch it, and the television station showing it wants me to watch it, why shouldn’t I be able to move that program to a day and time when it would be convenient for me to watch it? Furthermore, why can’t I watch programs that aren’t scheduled whenever I want to? Want that Dick Van Dyke episode from 1964? The news footage of the Munich Olympics hostage crisis? The Beatles appearance on Ed Sullivan? Someone should have it on file somewhere. If the television industry was smart– and I don’t think they are– they would put up web sites right now and announce plans to make the entire back-catalog of television programs available as soon as it is practically possible to make them downloadable. They would publish the specs for creating the compression algorithms necessary, and make it freely available to all.

Yes, I know, we already have the means with which to “time shift” television programs: the VCR. However, even after twenty-five years of development, most people still don’t use it regularly to tape programs they would otherwise miss. What do they use it for? To watch pre-recorded tapes rented, at outlandish prices, from a video store.

That should teach us something. For one thing, it indicates that there will continue to be a market for CD’s and video tapes in spite of new medias. For another, it indicates that a large number of people will never learn to master some new technologies.

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Gorilla Bars

When the children of Toronto came to school this September, a little surprise was waiting for them. In their playgrounds, instead of monkey bars, slides, and jungle gyms, they found… nothing.

Yes, the Toronto School Board decided to rip out 172 sets of playground equipment and take them away. Are they buying new equipment? No. They don’t have enough money to do that. It will cost about $27 million to replace them. That’s right: $27 MILLION.

What happened? Did a lot of parents complain about children getting injured on the equipment? No. Did someone die? No. Did the insurance premiums suddenly go up? No.

What happened was this. An inspector from Ottawa had created a report that laid out some guidelines for new playground equipment, with the laudable goal of ensuring that they would be as safe as possible. The new guidelines were better than the old guidelines, of course. Some clever people have found ways to build playground equipment that is safer than ever before.

The Toronto School Board, having received their new guidelines, hired an inspector from a private service to check all of their playground equipment to see if they conformed with the new guidelines. They did not, of course. The old playground equipment is, well, old.

As it turns out, the old playground equipment was not very bad at all. Out of the hundreds of thousands of children who had played on them, no one had ever been killed, nor, apparently, were there many serious injuries. In fact, more children are injured on the paved areas of the playground and the yard than on the playground equipment.

Still, no cost is too high when it comes to children’s safety. Except for the cost of common sense and rationality. The Toronto School Board ordered 172 sets of old playground equipment removed, on the off chance that someone, some day, might get hurt really bad. Not including the children who now play on the paved areas of the playground.

The head of the school board defends this decision. “No cost is too high.” Well, then, why not hire individual bodyguards to follow every child around all day to make sure the child never gets hurt? But that would be ridiculous. Why would it be ridiculous? Because it would cost too much. It would be too expensive. It would be unreasonable. The cost would be too high. There you go.

The head of the school board is a liar.

Now the School Board is going to go to the parents– whose opinions about removing the equipment they did not seek– and ask for donations to pay for new equipment.

The irony is that the man who was in charge of the Toronto School Board’s equipment originally has stated that the old equipment was fine. But of course, they didn’t hire him to do the inspections– they hired a consultant. From an outside firm. Just so someone on the school board could cover her ass.

He even said that when it was first installed, the number of reportable “incidents” went down, because, with the jungle-gyms to occupy them, fewer children got into trouble rough-housing or fighting in the school yard.

Sounds like the guy has some sense.

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Gush Bore: The 2000 Election

The Difference Between Al Gore and George Bush Jr….

As everybody seems to know, this election is about purity, innocence, and fidelity. God knows, we could have 15% unemployment, a –4% growth in GDP, riots in the streets, and war in the Middle East, but what we really care about is whether the President loves his wife.

So Al Gore kisses Tipper passionately on stage at the Democratic National Convention. The steam hissed from both their ears as the astounded press corp dropped their pens and microphones and gasped.

Clever, don’t you think. Instead of saying, “I will never screw around with any interns, no matter how doe-eyed and lovely and naïve”, which sounds like, “No, I don’t still beat my wife”, Al Gore plants a passionate kiss on his wife. Message: hey, I don’t need to fool around. I’m passionate about my wife.

Well, the Republicans could not let that stand, by golly, no. They had to be equally subtle, equally insidious. So they leak this story about George Bush Jr. dealing with a flirtatious staff member during his father’s 1988 presidential campaign. It seems that the stalwart George Bush Jr. got sick and tired of all this flirtation so he just marched right up to this woman and told her off, right then and there. When another staff member remonstrated with him about treating a loyal staff member so harshly, George Junior barked out, “Good. I’m a married man!”

There. This proves that George Bush Jr. is just as honorable and faithful as Al Gore.

Maybe this is a good illustration of the difference between the two candidates. Gore believes that marriage is a good thing because you get to spend your whole life with a beautiful sexy person that you really care about. Bush believes that marriage is a good thing because the Bible darn well tells us that it is and you just better get that straight.

Now I understand.

Well, I thought I did. The trouble is… can you tell me which candidate supports which position on any of the following issues?

  • Military build up
  • Less regulation and government intervention
  • Lower taxes
  • Capital punishment
  • Spending billions on the war on drugs
  • Persuading Hollywood—with logic instead of laws—to tone down the sex and violence
  • Improving education
  • Campaign Finance Reform
  • Welfare “Reform” (read “slash welfare programs”)

You’re right. They both have pretty well the same positions. So what’s the difference?

Well, in all fairness, Gore probably won’t set out to break all records for executions the way George Bush Jr. did in Texas. Of course that is at least partly because the Federal Government in the U.S. has very little responsibility for capital punishment: that is a state issue. But I can see Gore saying something like, “by golly, we ought to make sure these guys are guilty before we execute them,” whereas George Jr. would probably say something like, “if they weren’t guilty, what the heck were they doing on death row?”

Gore is probably a little more environment-friendly than Bush, but probably not very much. Like Bush, he tends to give business interests, including the oil and forestry industries, pretty well everything they want.

Gore claims to be serious about campaign finance reform. We have not seen a leader yet, however, who is dumb—or smart—enough to cut off the very branch upon which he is sitting. Will Gore bring in serious campaign finance reform and cut off the very moneyed interests that have sponsored his campaign to an unimaginable degree? Not very likely.

Gush/Bore. Take your choice.

Chromehorse.net officially endorses Ralph Nader for President.

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Dr. Seuss and Chaos Theory

How important are childhood books? I’m not sure. I suspect they can be very important. I read “The Cat in the Hat” when I was quite young, and became convinced of chaos theory.

I’m only partly kidding, you know. In that story, you may recall, these two children in a very tightly ordered house are looking through a window at the rain. They are bored. Bored bored bored! Mother is gone shopping or something– not working, in those days. The house is supposed to be kept neat. Neat neat neat! The goldfish nods approvingly at the docile, cowed little children.

Suddenly, there is a knock at the door. Who could it be? It’s the cat in the hat! The cat in the hat bursts into house in search of his “missing moss-covered, three handled, family gredunza”. He tells the children that he is going to make their day very exciting. The children are conflicted– would mother allow this? The goldfish says “No! No! No!” But it’s too late. The cat in the hat turns the whole house upside down! There he is juggling furniture on his unicycle (even the goldfish bowl, the water shlepping overboard). Mayhem! Chaos!

Then, just when it seems like things couldn’t get worse, the cat introduces the children to his two little friends, Thing 1 and Thing 2. They resemble little urchins, gremlins, munchkins. They behave like whirling dervishes, smashing everything in their paths.

I won’t explore the Freudian overtones of “Thing 1” and “Thing 2”. But it’s rather obvious, isn’t it?

The children? Are they amused? Alarmed? I think they were both. I think that girl grew up to burn her bra, and that boy burned his draft card. But it doesn’t matter what they think. The house is now a disaster. And look! Whose feet do they see striding purposefully past the window? Mother! Authority. God? Now, all is lost.

You don’t know what exactly mother is going to do. All you know is that it will be something very, very unpleasant. The goldfish righteously denounces the cat as an anarchist and atheist. (It is clear that the cat is liberal, the goldfish, conservative. Or is the mother a PC liberal?! And the cat– Anne Coulter!) The children are in despair. What will they do? First of all, they kick the Cat in the Hat out of the house. But they’ll never get this house back into an semblance of order….

Then a miracle. The Cat in the Hat returns. But he has brought a wonderful, magical cleaning machine. The machine cleans up the entire house in the flash of an eye. Then the cat and his machine disappears and mother appears in the doorway. All is well.

Is it really? I can vividly remember my childhood impressions of this book. There was an element of terror. The house, you see, was a metaphor for life itself. Everything seemed to be orderly and tidy and coherent. Suddenly, the cat enters the picture and the thin veneer of civilization and restraint gives way to a horrifying– and fascinating– disorder and violence. Furniture, appliances, and even creatures are exuberantly tossed into the air, juggled, hurled about with complete disregard for safety or sanity. The children stand helplessly by, overwhelmed, and enraptured. The goldfish– like an ancient biblical prophet– warns of doom and gloom. Indeed, when God’s feet appear, all seems lost.

And it is lost. Yes, I know– in the story, the cat in the hat returns with his magical cleaning machine and, in the nick of time, everything is put back in its place before mother enters and asks the children if they had an eventful day. But what can this possibly mean? That in real life, something magical is going to come along in the nick of time and rescue us from disaster?

I know that the children can no longer rely on this façade of order. They can no longer rely on the idea of a moral universe that holds together on the basis of clear rules and lines of accountability.

They are going to rock’n’roll. They will do drugs.

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The Tomb of the Unknown Fool

The Royal Canadian Legion has persuaded the government to pick up the interned body of a dead Canadian soldier from World War I and fly it back to Canada to be re-interred under a new monument in Ottawa. This monument will be called the “tomb of the unknown soldier” and will be reverentially saluted by all Legion members who, when they aren’t busy trying to prevent Sikhs from entering their pubs, like to parade around insisting that the only way to prevent another war is to arm ourselves to the teeth and adopt a belligerent attitude to all foreigners.

If I had the money, I would like to set up a counter-monument: the Tomb of the Unknown Fool. And I would demand a body too. There’s lots to go around. Millions.

Who says only the pro-war faction gets to haul bones around at taxpayers’ expense?

And I want a ceremony too: with a bunch of clowns and folk singers. We would sing songs, maybe even with bagpipes, and celebrate the fact that most people nowadays are smart and educated and would gladly refuse to travel to some rat and leech-infested bog in Europe to shoot at Germans or French or Italians for no other reason than that the Canadian Establishment, the owners and movers of capital in this country, said they should. To defend the motherland…. To preserve the nations’ honor…. To make the world safe for freedom and democracy…. Right.

The confusing thing about the issue, in the minds of most Canadians, is the fact that virtually everyone proclaims him or herself to be opposed to war, and visibly moved by the sacrifices of those brave young men who were shipped overseas to die on the alters of British and French Generals’ egos. It’s an apple pie kind of thing: who would NOT wish to honor men who gave their lives in war.

But the blurring of motivations here benefits the pro-war faction. Pacifists feel great sorrow, of course, for the loss of life in war, and in joining the mourning, respectfully, even feelingly, appear to affirm the political agenda of the Legion and the army bands.

Yes, everyone says he is against death and suffering and anguish. That means nothing. The difference is, the Legion and its followers are clearly quite willing to inflict suffering and death on others if it preserves something “pure” (and mythic) like “honor” or “liberty” or the heritage of our forefathers. Listen to the language with which they embellish the remains of that poor sucker: He was noble and proud and courageous and selfless and honorable. He may have been. Without a doubt, he was a sucker. He believed his government when the government said its cause was righteous. He trusted in his commanding officers even when they were complete fools. He obeyed orders without question, even when the orders were stupid.

What suckers! What foolish, gullible, ignorant people! What did the dead of WWI sacrifice their lives for? Which side was honorable and right and just? What were they fighting for?

General Motors and Exxon.

Goodyear and Rockefeller.

Dupont and Macy’s.

George Bush Sr., with toady Billy Graham at his side, proclaimed that the American-led armies of the Gulf War were fighting for democracy and freedom. Kuwait– you remember, don’t you?– had to be rescued from the forces of darkness. Right. Now we know that most of George Bush Sr.’s illustrations were lies.

They were fighting for Exxon and Shell and Amoco and BP and Texaco. It was the biggest tax subsidy of modern times: billions of dollars of military hardware, paid for by you and me. The Pentagon employed as security guards for oil refineries.

Who pays the price of war?

Who always pays the price of war?

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Burt, Rock, J. Edgar, and 250 Marines

In the 1960’s, I watched a television show on Sunday nights called “The FBI”. This show, every episode of which was approved to the smallest detail by actual FBI agents, showed how these clever FBI agents tracked down and arrested inter-state kidnappers, smugglers, murderers, and bank robbers. We were supposed to be thrilled to see these re-enactments of cases from “actual” FBI files.

The producers of this program did a great disservice to the American public when they left out some of the more colorful and exciting episodes of FBI astuteness. Like when they tapped Martin Luther King Jr.’s phones. Or when they tried to harass John Lennon into leaving the country. And how come we didn’t get to spend an evening with J. Edgar Hoover and his life-long male “companion”? And what about an episode on how Burt Lancaster single-handedly threatened the stability and integrity of the U.S. government?

Burt Lancaster? Well, yes. It seems that FBI kept a close eye on this reputed saboteur and Soviet plant. Seems that Mr. Lancaster was a tad on the liberal side, you see. The FBI, ever vigilant, ensured that Burt never got the chance to undermine the U.S. government, by, say, spying on conservative citizens or harassing pro-war activists.

Mr. Hoover felt that Mr. Lancaster’s passionate embrace of Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity– the famous scene in the rolling surf– was obscene and lewd. He watched it hundreds of times just be sure he didn’t miss any part of the alleged lewdness. He had FBI agents demand out-takes from the movie studio to study the issue in greater detail. [Added 2011-03: I am not making this up.]

Yes, this man was paid with your tax dollars.

Incidentally, the FBI claimed, in a report, that Lancaster had taken part in a homosexual orgy with Rock Hudson and 250 U.S. marines. I am not making this up. It is in the Toronto Star, March 12, 2000.

What I’m curious about is how they– Burt and Rock, I mean– found 250 marines. I mean I know it’s almost unbelievable, but this is a report from the FBI, the most renowned police organization in the world! So, if they say it’s true, it must be. But how did Burt and Rock find that many marines who were gay? Did they put an ad in Stars and Stripes’ personals: “Famous movie stars would like to meet large numbers of open-minded marines for weekend frolic at exclusive L.A. mansion…”

Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m ever so relieved that at a time when our culture was extremely vulnerable to communist influence, those staunch allies of freedom and liberty at the FBI were standing firm, devoted to their cause and standing resolutely on guard against the perils of godless atheism and socialism!

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Dumbing Down Computers

The dumbing down of Computers
You bring your garbage out to the road. You go back inside your house, take off your coat, your winter boots. You pick up a cup of coffee, sit down to read…. Suddenly, there is a knock at the door. It’s the garbage man. He’s standing there holding some lemon rinds and egg shells. “Are you sure you want to throw this out?” he says. You say, “yes, of course.” You go back to your table and your coffee and resume reading. There goes the doorbell again. It’s the garbage man again, and this time he’s holding a broken toaster. “Are you sure you want to throw this out?” You nod. A few minutes later, it’s an old magazine, a pair of leaky boots, a shriveled old sponge. Are you sure you want to throw them out?

Of course I am, you idiot. Why do you think I put them in the garbage?

Of course, in real life, the garbage man doesn’t do that. He doesn’t go through your garbage first to see if you might have made a mistake. Once his truck is in front of your house, your garbage is gone, and you’re never getting it back. Is this so unmanageable?

Obviously not. Yet, this is what Microsoft Windows does whenever you want to throw a file away. “Are you sure you want to throw that out?” Yes, yes, yes.

It tells you something about the world of computers nowadays that Microsoft, which is a very market-savvy company, keeps putting stuff like this in their operating system. Think about the “my documents” folder, and the fact that the dos prompt defaults to the Windows directory, the least useful place for a user to be. Think about Windows 98 and Windows 2000 which have added “my pictures” and “my music” as defaults, as if the user is so stupid, lazy, and trivial, that he will be keeping all of his precious files in these three locations, named, as if by a child, “my” stuff.

Think about the fact that when you go into Explorer and try to look at drive C:, Microsoft presents you with this nebulous thing called “desktop” and then “my computer”. What is “my computer”? I don’t know what Microsoft thinks it is. It wants you to think that your disk drive is attached to something that keeps everything together for you. What Microsoft has done is make the operating system king of your computer. If you want your data, you don’t go looking on Seagate’s 10 GIG hard drive anymore. You go looking in “my desktop” for “my computer” which has “internet explorer” on it as if it was something apart from the software provided by Microsoft, and “printers” as if they existed in the ether and could be invoked only by an application provided by—you guessed it—Microsoft. And there is your hard drive: a mere subsidiary of the true ruler of the universe: Windows! It looks like you could lose a hard drive or two and hardly miss it: you’ll still have “my desktop” and “my computer”—right?

In the old days of DOS, and the present day of Linux, you booted up to a hard drive, which had everything on it: your applications, operating system, software, and – most importantly—your data. You made a copy of your data because sometimes the hard drive—the thing that your data is actually, physically, on—could occasionally fail. But today, in Windows, your data is stored in some labyrinthine network of secret passages, hidden grottos, and camouflaged tunnels. Can you find it? Oh, you can probably find your letters to grandma in “my documents”. But if you think that is neat and you like Microsoft and think it’s great, let me ask you this: where is your e-mail? Do you know? Can you back it up? I thought so. When your hard drive fails, my friend, you will start over from scratch. But then again, a short memory seems to be a requisite of joining the on-line world nowadays.

When you use Windows Explorer to go look for your e-mail files, it doesn’t show the full names of the files, their size, or the dates they were last used. It shows you a stupid picture of what the file is supposed to be like. Windows no longer shows you the extensions of the files, because it supposed to be able to tell you what kind of file it is. In fact, if you rename a file’s extension, Windows doesn’t have a clue what it is.

Windows doesn’t show you “hidden” files: it wants you to leave them alone, and let Microsoft tell you what should or should not be on your computer. Double-click on a certain file, and suddenly Windows is trying to drag you onto the Internet. Haven’t signed up with an Internet Service Provider yet: Microsoft will take care of it. Just click here—or don’t click “no”—and you are hurtled onto MSN, but make sure you have your credit card ready.

With every new release of Windows, the nuts and bolts of your computer are becoming more and more invisible, and you are less and less able to control what is on your system and how it works. With every new release, your expensive hard drive is polluted with more and more hidden functions, routines, and settings designed to manipulate, cajole, and annoy you into doing something you didn’t think of yourself. With every new release, the idiotic short-comings of Windows become more and more embarrassing:

  • – it crashes frequently, even while running Microsoft games, like “Age of Empires” or applications like “Outlook”
  • – it can’t back up your data. It has no idea of where your data is. It has no means of backing up your documents, e-mails, bookmarks, or anything else, efficiently. As a result, most people don’t back up anything.
  • – It is SLOW, SLOW, SLOW, as molasses, as they say. Don’t believe me? Get out an old 486 computer running Windows 3.1 and play with it for a while. You’ll be astonished at how quick and responsive the computer is compared to Windows 98.
  • – It is getting more and more difficult to program for Windows—the operating system is becoming enmeshed with applications, making it extremely difficult to produce efficient, reliable applications.
  • – Microsoft deliberately creates file incompatibilities to drive everyone to upgrade. If one person in your office starts using Office 2000, before you know it, other users will be complaining because they can’t share files anymore. Access will not allow two different versions of the application to run on the same computer: the result is that applications have to be redeveloped for the new version.
  • – Windows is bloated beyond belief. Does Microsoft every throw anything away? I suspect that when the garbage man comes to Bill Gates’ door with a handful of rotting fruit, Gates says, “yes, actually, I did change my mind about throwing that out…”
  • – Windows is often just plain stupid. I installed a network card once, but Windows failed to find the correct drivers for it. Strike 1. No big deal. I installed the updated driver for the network card, but Windows wouldn’t install it because it couldn’t find the card. Strike 2. Annoying, perhaps. Then I decided to remove the card and try a different one. When I told Windows to delete it, it asked for a driver disk. After accepting the driver, it said, “do you wish to remove the card?” Yes, you moron.
  • – Does Microsoft think that people only use CD drives to install software? If I want to install software, I’ll tell it to install software. In the meantime, I’d like to be able to change disks without having the computer come grinding to a halt while it checks to see if something should install itself from drive d:.
  • – When you try to export a file from Outlook, it asks for the Office 2000 CD, but it checks drive a:. Does it think Office 2000 comes on a floppy disk now? When I tell it I want to browse to the files, it dumps me into “My documents”—good place to keep my copy of Office 2000, don’t you think?

In short, the computer is becoming like television. The Internet was a bold, amazing, astonishing innovation in communications technology that promised the world a new means of building networks of communities reflecting the rich diversity of cultures and intellects on this planet. Microsoft’s vision the internet: the “shop” button on your browser.

Now, you may have rightly observed that my opinion is not an isolated one and you may have asked yourself why, if Windows is so bad and so annoying, does everyone use it. The answer is really quite simple: like many other “power users”, I make a living trying to keep Windows systems running smoothly. People pay me, fairly good money, to solve the endless myriad of problems created by Microsoft’s sloppy programming, so I have to understand their products as well as I can. It is also true that there are some dazzling applications that run only on Windows—Adobe Premiere, Sound Forge, Audio Catalyst, Paint Shop Pro, etc. There is a growing number of good applications for Linux, but they can’t match some of these applications at the moment.

But power users are not like salesmen. To a salesman, millions of people buying defective products is nirvana. When the product breaks down, you simply sell them another one.

Computer technical support people see this as wasteful and stupid. They like things that work well, like hard drives, video cards, and RAM. They admire efficiency and durability. They hold reliability in high esteem. It’s part of their nature: that’s why they hack. To play with fascinating technologies that do cool things, like send music over the internet.

Why is Windows so popular if it’s so bad? I have explained that in detail in a previous rant, but, in a nutshell, to reiterate: Microsoft Windows was probably the worst graphical user interface ever developed, but it triumphed in the marketplace by leveraging it’s position when Microsoft’s version of DOS came pre-installed on every IBM computer. Only someone who has never read the news or any books on the history of the computer would really believe that Bill Gates is a technical genius. He is a marketing genius—I grant you that—though a lot of Microsoft’s success is also due to practices which, as the Department of Justice has observed, were blatantly illegal. The final factor in Microsoft’s success came as a result of the first two reasons: the network effect. Everyone wants compatible software. Everyone wants to be able to “borrow” their friends’ applications. IBM compatible computers were about 30% cheaper than the superior Apple McIntosh, and it was easy to copy software. That’s why Windows is on every desktop.

As wonderful and magical as computers are today, they could be twice as wonderful, three times as magical, and reliable to boot, if OS/2 or Geoworks, or the McIntosh, or the Amiga (a brilliant little machine way ahead of its time) or Linux had triumphed instead of Microsoft. The magic and wonder, my friend, comes from the hardware improvements, which have been astonishing. Sound cards, hard drives, video cards, monitors, CPU’s, RAM—all have improved at an astonishing rate. When you can record a ten-minute piece of music into a digital format onto a hard drive, edit it, and then compress it into an eight MB file—that’s impressive. And you know what—none of those functions related to this process were produced by Microsoft! Not one! The digital sound quality came from Turtle Beach (since adopted by Creative Labs). The compression codec came from a German company, Xing. The software came from Audio Forge and others (only dilettantes use the built-in Microsoft software for this). And the Internet, of course, came from the U.S. army.   And yes, Al Gore played a big role in creating it by promoting it to Congress because, yes, he was visionary and understood the potential of the idea.  The browser was invented by Tim Berners-Lee. Microsoft didn’t even see it coming until Netscape had 90% of the market.

When Microsoft does try to compete with real software companies, it generally does poorly. Of all the Microsoft products available that were developed in house, only Excel was superior to it’s competition (Lotus).

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Pushy Annoying Software Turning the Internet into Television

I just installed Music Match, an MP3 ripper and player. It’s a nice piece of software. I got it for free off the internet. No, I didn’t steal it: they’re giving it away. Of course, you can buy an upgrade for $29. But the version you get for nothing actually does pretty well everything I want it to do. Thank you.

However… after I installed it, it started harassing me about upgrading. But, okay, there is a little button I can click to tell it to stop harassing me. However, then it started bugging me about going onto the internet to download more information about the artist whose CD was in the player– Leonard Cohen. Go away. Then I ripped some MP3’s. It did not ask me where to put the files. Why not? If I ordered a pizza, do you think they would hang up before I gave the address? Right. And then they would deliver it to My House in My Neighborhood in My City. And I would have to go out hunting all over town until I found that house, so I could have my dinner.

No, I prefer to say: deliver right here, this place, this location– so I can find it. Put it in this drawer, so I can keep things organized. But Windows wants you to store your pictures in My Pictures because it thinks you are incredibly stupid and haven’t the slightest idea of how to organize anything.

Music Match crashed, by the way, on a Windows 2000 system. Windows 2000 crashes– don’t believe people who tell you that Microsoft has finally put out a reliable product. Microsoft products are full of bells and whistles. They make a lot of noise as they crash and burn. I have had Windows 2000 crash while running Windows Explorer, a Microsoft program. Nothing else.

When I did humor Music Match and told it to go ahead, find some information on the internet for me, what did it do? It called up Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. I don’t use Explorer. I use Netscape.

Music Match is by no means the only software out there pushing you around. Almost everything you install nowadays starts trying to sign you up for Internet access or spam or web portals or whatever. How convenient, right? How nice. It does it all automatically, even if you don’t want it to. Quicken has been harassing me for three years to use their investment services. Go to hell. Sorry– I got mad, after the 1,477th time.

Microsoft, by the way, doesn’t think “spam” is a word. It highlights it with a squiggly red line, as it does words like “honour” and “labour”– legitimate British English spellings.

Anyway, my point is this: we are getting inundated with rude software that knocks on your door offering a valuable service and then takes over your cyber-house. In the process, it uses up valuable resources on your computer, including drive space and CPU cycles, and wastes your time clicking on messages boxes you did not ask for. And if you do accept any of their offers, you are likely to get either spammed or ripped off.

This is all part of a concerted plan I identified years ago: the plan to turn the internet into television. Television invites you to be a passive moron, watching with a vacuous expression, buying whatever they sell you, blithely accepting vulgar interruptions of every program every few minutes to hawk some valueless piece of junk to you.

The internet used to be different. But the corporations have taken it over. They see it as a true wonder of the modern world: a new way to sell things. A new way to manipulate people. A new audience of suckers for these vampires to sink their teeth into.

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Abba Babble

Get this– from the Toronto Star, April 2, 2000:

Buried in their songs is a complex artfulness disguised in simple pop formulas, a carefully crafted infectiousness that resonates in the group’s shimmering four-part harmonies, crisp, Scandinavian enunciation, and deceptively easy rhythms. These songs, these performances, are the work of pop music geniuses. They reel us in every time we hear them.”

And one day we will all come to believe that Gilligan’s Island is really an existential drama about the dread with which modern man faces technological domination.

Their names are Bjorn Ulvaeus, Anni-Frid Lyngstad (the red-head), Benny Andersson, Agnetha Faltskog (the blonde). Anni-Frid, Bjorn, Benny, Agnetha: Abba.

Faltskog no longer has anything to do with music. Lyngstad is into environmental causes. Benny plays accordion in some obscure folk band somewhere in Sweden. Bjorn is promoting a musical, “Mama Mia” based on Abba songs.

The most disgusting aspect of this revisionism is the pompous self-importance it allows small-time talents like Bjorn Ulvaeus.

You know, I could have sort of liked Abba a little, if I hadn’t read this drivel.

 

“Serious music critics now rank Ulvaeus and Andersson’s songs with those of the Beatles and the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson, and their musical weight in European culture alongside Grieg and Sibelius.”

Exactly which serious musical critic?  Let me assure you, serious music critics do not rate Abba with the Beatles or the Beach Boys or even, probably, with Bobby Sherman.  Well, okay: with Bobby Sherman.

What is this? Some kind of neo-con aesthetic putsch? You have to believe that only an idiot who is unaware of the Beatles’ career beyond 1965 could make such a statement. The kind of idiot who never listened to Revolver, Rubber Soul, Sergeant Pepper’s, White Album, Let it Be, and Abbey Road. As for the Beach Boys, well, yeah, lyrically there’s not much to choose from, but please name me a single Abba song that, in terms of musical imagination, could be uttered in the same breath as “Good Vibrations”.

Exactly which Abba song can be compared to “A Day in the Life”, “Eleanor Rigby”, “Norwegian Wood”, “Penny Lane”, or “Fool on the Hill”?

You want to know something else? The girls were never all that good-looking either.

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MP3’s

Let me make it clear, first of all, that I have no desire to save the music industry. The music industry consists largely of blood-sucking vampires who abuse, deceive, and exploit raw talent. A pox on all of their houses.

But, I do want artists to be paid for their work.

It is clear that there is no way to stop people from using the internet and their computers to freely copy music. It’s too easy. Even if you wanted to pay for the music, it is easier to download a copy from the internet than it is to buy a CD at your local record store.

But if the music industry can no longer sell enough CD’s to pay their artists, how will the artists be paid?

Here’s my solution: the government should impose a surcharge on all personal  internet accounts. The surcharge will be collected by all Internet Service Providers and remitted to an organization managed by representatives of the musical artists community. All artists who wish to be paid for their music will have the option of joining or not joining. This organization will find a way to track the volume of downloads for each member artist. Based on these numbers, each artist will be compensated directly from the fund.

The amount of the surcharge will probably only have to be about $2 or $3 a month or less.

The beauty of this plan is that the government is not required to monitor anybody’s downloads, or try to regulate internet usage. All it has to do is impose the fee and ensure that the money is funneled directly to the artists (and not to the parasitical music industry itself).

The only problem with this proposed system is that someone will have to develop a way of monitoring downloads and tabulating the numbers for each artist. I rather think that the makers of Napster, faced with multi-billion dollar law suits from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) would be more than happy to comply. As for all those people who are paranoid of government intervention, it should be stressed that the monitoring is done by the proposed artists’ agency and not by the government or the recording industry.

There. Done. A remarkably simple and effective solution. I hereby copyright it.

All I ask is mere .01% of the take.