Tag: Microsoft

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My Music

You have undoubtedly heard about the injunctions and the motions and lawsuits and all the legal technicalities of the Recording Industry Association of America’s battle with Napster. The lawyers must be advising the RIAA that they can have an impact on music piracy– and their bottom line– by winning a few court battles against the software giant.

What is most interesting is not who is in court today, but who is not in court today. Napster, my friends, is a scapegoat. Why did the RIAA not file the same motions, injunctions, and lawsuits against Microsoft? Why is Creative Labs sitting there untouched? Why is Yamaha unscathed? Who gave a special blessing to Samsung? Winamp? Music Match? Audio Catalyst? Sonique? Creative Labs? Philips? Iomega?

If you read the advertising for Windows ME and XP and whatever other version of Windows Microsoft is promoting these days, you may have noticed that Microsoft thinks you want to play music on your computer. It has incorporated all kinds of features to allow you to easily and conveniently rip, download, store, and play MP3 files. You can even store them in a directory called “My Music”! Microsoft is obviously trying to profit from the consumer’s demonstrated interest in pirated music.

And Microsoft isn’t the only corporation benefiting from the digital revolution in music. Yamaha makes speakers that are designed to be used with computers, and almost certainly used to play illegal music files. There are now players from Rio, Sony, Creative Labs, Iomega. How come all of these companies are off the hook?

Could it be because they have better lawyers than Napster, the tiny little upstart, does? Could it be that the RIAA is being arbitrary and selective about trying to enforce it’s copyrights? Could it be that the law is an ass, and the RIAA are even bigger asses?

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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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Microsoft Word Still Sucks

Normally I sit down and collect details for this kind of rant, but I’m too enraged to do it right now.

The subject is Microsoft Office and Front Page 2000.

Microsoft has had a monopoly on office “suites” since they intentionally destroyed Word Perfect for Windows by finagling the settings on the links to the operating system so that Word Perfect crashed frequently. Word Perfect never recovered. (Does anyone still remember when Word Perfect had a huge margin on MS Word, in the DOS world?)

Office has a lot of nice functions, a fairly nice interface, and some intriguing capabilities. You can’t avoid using it because almost every office has standardized on it. Employees request it. And it does have some slick features.

But it has a number of very, very large annoyances, all of which serve to profit Microsoft at the users’ expense.

1. What kind of idiot wants to store all his documents in a directory called “my documents”? Well, an idiot. You get a computer. You don’t understand anything about directories or files. You create something in “Word”. Where is it? Where is my document? Oh! Eureka! It’s in “my documents”. How convenient. Convenient, of course, until you have about 200 documents and you need to sort them into logical directories.

And guess what– Microsoft is carrying this absurdity even further! I just noticed there are two new directories on my computer called “my photos” and “my web pages” and “my music”.

And, after reading Bill Gates’ personal web page, I now understand what the meaning is of “my” in those directory names: your files belong to Bill Gates.

2. I have a lot of documents. I store them in many directories. In order to find what I want quickly, I have a list of “favorites”, which narrows down the search considerably, and quickly. Then I installed Front Page 2000 and Internet Explorer. You know what these incomprehensibly stupid programs did? They added my internet bookmarks to my “favorites” list. Does Microsoft honestly think that I now want to keep all my files on web servers all over the globe? And just try to get rid of the extra “favorites” that refer to web sites like “Amazon” (just where I want to store my personal letters, of course). Does anyone know how to get rid of them?

3. I used to create a certain file in Excel and then save it and then import it into Front Page to convert it to a web page so I could adjust the décor, install some images, and fine tune it for my web page. Well, after installing Front Page 2000, whenever I open the file, it opens Excel! Look, you morons, I want to open it in Front Page, not Excel! You can’t even “import” it into Front Page. Are you people incredibly stupid or what?

4. We have an application in the office where I work that runs on Access 95. When we installed Access 97 (as part of Office 97) on our computers, the application could no longer run. So we tried to install Access 95, while leaving the rest of the Office suite alone. Access 95 killed off Access 97. For what reason, pray tell, can you not run both Access 95 and Access 97 on the same computer? Well, the obvious reason is Microsoft’s desire to bully you into upgrading everyone in your office to Office 97.

5. For that same application, we needed some kind of module from the Developer’s Tool Kit for Office 95, which cost about $1000. We bought it. We installed it. Then we found out the application will not work with Office 97. So we went looking for the Developer’s Toolkit for Office 97. Microsoft didn’t offer it anymore. Tell you what though– if you upgrade everyone in the office to Office 2000, you can buy some other combination of stupid modules for $2000 that might give you the same functionality. But then again, it might not. Nobody knows for sure. And just think: right at this very moment, Microsoft is probably hatching their next evil plan to make your life miserable until you buy some new, expensive Microsoft application, which only make your life even more miserable.

6. I invest a lot of work in templates. They save a lot of time, if you create web pages that essentially require similar formats and images. So where are the templates for Front Page? Where are they hiding? In a directory called “templates”? Damned if I know. Where are the Office 2000 templates now? Here’s a history of where templates used to go:

 

  • Word 6.0 c:\msoffice\msword\templates
  • Office 95 c:\msoffice\templates
  • Office 97a c:\program files\msoffice\templates
  • Office 97b c:\program files\Microsoft\office\templates
  • Office 2000 c:\program files\Microsoft\office\templates\??????

When I tried to find my Front Page templates, I ended up in a directory called:

..\..\..\windows\application data\Microsoft\chromehorse\images\rotw.jpg

Now the “chromehorse” and “rotw.jpg” are mine. They belong in c:\chromehorse. What is this file doing here? Why is Microsoft continually hiding stuff all over the place on my humungous hard drive, so it is almost impossible to figure out what files belong where and what they do? Well, it’s not some weird sort of complex system of preserving your data. In fact, this ‘system’ is designed to embed defaults into Windows that make you wholly and utterly dependent on the operating system (Microsoft) to manage your data. And the aim of all of this is to make it less and less conceivable or possible for you to use any product that doesn’t understand these secrets intimately. In other words, any product other than those made by Microsoft.

7. Do you use the power save functions of Windows? Then your system has probably crashed. It probably went into power save mode and wouldn’t “wake up”. It went into a coma. And guess what? If you shut off the power switch on the back of your computer so you can reboot, you might very well lock the system into a permanent coma. You might have to pull the battery off the motherboard to get it to wake up again. If they can’t make the power save functions work properly, why do they even bother to put them in?

8. Wow. Even as I was writing this, I discovered a new incredibly irritating “feature”. In order to get around the other idiotic defaults of Office 2000, I decided to import my favorite Front Page template into Word and save it as a Word template. Then I can use it to write my rants in Word and save them in HTML for transfer to my web page. But guess what? When I try to import the template, Office opens Front Page instead of Word, even when I try to open the document in Word!

Whoa nelly! I just found out where Microsoft is really storing my Office templates! It’s in:

c:\windows\application data\Microsoft\templates

So we can add this to the list.

And you can think about how efficient it is to keep moving your files around like that. It’s as if every six months, your company moved their head office to a different building in a different town, and hid all the office supplies in various new locations, and changed all your user names and passwords, and won’t tell you where the parking garage is.

Wow.

As for my templates….

I’m not sure where my templates are actually. There are some bizarre file names at the tail end of that directory, none of which tell me where my laboriously designed and crafted templates are.

So, never forget that Microsoft’s goal is to put a computer into every trailer in every trailer park in America. Never forget that customers can be broken down into three categories.

10% all smart people

44% all educated people and smart people

90% people who live in trailer parks and smart people and educated people

And Microsoft probably understands that 90% very well.

“Honey, where the hell are my documents?”

“You don’t have any documents, dear. You are illiterate.”

“Oh yeah. I forgot.”

By the way, Microsoft isn’t the only evil empire out there. Netscape stores your precious e-mails and bookmarks in a directory called:

c:\program files\communicator\users\mail

And your e-mail files are huge. Why? I don’t know. What are they storing in there? One of my email files is about 80 megabytes and contains about 500 messages. What on earth are they storing in there? Every address of every web page on the face of the earth in every message? Details of the merger with Warner Brothers?

Folks, it’s like TV. When TV started, in the 1950’s, we had some first-rate plays and dramas sponsored by Hallmark and other corporations looking for prestige.

Within ten years, we had “The Beverly Hillbillies”, “Green Acres”, “Mr. Ed”, “Petticoat Junction”, and “Gomer Pyle”.

 

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Two Great Movie Ideas: You’re Welcome, Hollywood!

All right, these ideas are copyrighted– okay? So you can’t steal them. They are going to make me a lot of money.

There are two absolutely magnificent, wonderful movies out there just waiting to be made.

First of all, a movie biography of Bob Dylan.

Bob Dylan grew up in Minnesota and wanted to be a rock’n’roll singer like Elvis. He didn’t see the fact that he sounded like a chorus of drowning weasels as an obstacle. He hitch-hiked to New York, found out that folk music was what was happening, man, and began playing at open mic shows at several local folk clubs, sounding more like Woody Guthrie than Elvis Presley. In fact, people used to say he sounded more like Woody Guthrie than Woody Guthrie did. (You can check this out by downloading some Guthrie tunes through Napster– the resemblance to early Dylan is uncanny.)

He wrote some of the greatest folk songs of the century. He was noticed by New York Times folk critic Robert Shelton. Bingo– Columbia (now Sony) signed him to a recording contract. For a while he was known as “Hammond’s Folly”, after John Hammond, the A&R man who signed him. But Joan Baez took him along on tour. Peter, Paul, and Mary covered his best songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All right”. He became big. Very big. Even the Beatles were listening to Bob Dylan. (But Elvis wasn’t– he was in the army, and then he was making crummy “B” movies in Hollywood.) He became the “spokesman of generation”. He didn’t want to be the spokesman of a generation. He shifted to rock’n’roll in 1965, with a bunch of Canadians known as “The Hawks” (later known simply as “the Band”) backing him. He wrote more great songs. Then, in 1967, he was almost killed in a motorcycle accident. In the meantime, the Beatles and Rolling Stones released several massively over-produced behemoths of albums, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Her Satanic Majesties Request. Everyone eagerly awaited Dylan’s response. Would he top them?

Dylan shocked the music world by releasing a very folky, very laid-back album called “John Wesley Harding”, featuring drums, bass, guitar, and harmonica. He retreated into a simpler, more introspective style.

It’s a great story. It covers the most fascinating period of American history this century: the 1960’s. It’s got everything. Everything except… the rights to Dylan’s songs.

Bob Dylan– unlike most musical artists today– actually owns the rights to his songs. If someone were to make a movie of Bob Dylan’s life, he would have to get Bob Dylan’s permission, or make a movie about the greatest song-writer of our century without using any of his songs.

Bob– if you’re listening– I have a great idea for you. Call Martin Scorsese and tell him that he can make a movie about you and you will give him the rights to use any of your songs in the movie. Tell him that you won’t even look at the movie or the script or anything until after it’s all done. Tell him he can do whatever he thinks is best with the story.

Come on, Bob. You gave “The Times They Are A’Changin'” to the Bank of Montreal. It’s the least you could do for your fans. You owe it to them.

The results would be a great movie. It would not always be flattering to Bob Dylan, who sometimes acted like a jerk, and who was known to stand aloof from his friends. But the most flattering thing about it would be that Bob Dylan was big enough and brave enough to do the right thing and let someone else make this movie and to let the director have all the control over the material, the way Bob has full control over his own recordings.

Are you listening, Bob? I ask a measly 1% of the gross in exchange for permission to use this idea, and the right to meet Uma Thurman, if she could be given a bit part, perhaps as Nico.

Okay– my second great movie idea: a remake of the 3 Stooges. This time, they are computer programmers working for Microsoft. While they’re not coding new applets for Office 2003 1/2, they are off creating mayhem at the Department of Justice Hearings, or directing U.S. negotiations at the WTO.

I’m serious. People are ready for unsophisticated, trashy, vaudeville-type humour. The baby-boomers will love it. Young people always find obscure retro-acts hip and amusing. Anyone who has ever used Microsoft Windows will immediately appreciate the humour of Curly trying to figure out how “plug’n’play” works, or writing little Java applets for the Microsoft Web Page or finding ways to make Word Perfect crash.

Well that’s it. Are you listening, Hollywood Moguls? Call me and make me rich.

Who should star in a Bob Dylan Movie:

Sean Penn as Bob Dylan
Robert Deniro as Albert Grossman
Anne Hathaway as Joan Baez (yes, Anne can sing).
Ronnie Hawkins as the ghost of Elvis
Tom Waits as Woody Guthrie
Uma Thurman as Nico
Al Pacino as Leonard Cohen
Winona Ryder as Sarah Lowndes

10 years after I wrote this, Bob Dylan did exactly what I suggested– except, he gave it to Todd Haynes instead of Martin Scorcese. The result was the exquisite “I’m Not There”.   You’re welcome, Bob.  Call me sometime and we’ll work out a gratuity.  [2011-03]

Correction: Todd Haynes was the director, not P. T. Anderson as stated earlier. [2014-09-16]

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Software Police

All over the civilized world, the software police– at taxpayer’s expense– are invading homes and the offices of Internet Service Providers, warrants in hand, to shut down those evil, pernicious, dangerous, malevolent software pirates.

That’s the way the world works. The lawyers for a big company like Microsoft or Lotus calls the police. They say, “arrest that man– he’s stealing our software!” The police say, “yes sir!” and throw on their flak jackets, arm themselves to the teeth, hop into their paddy wagons, and go racing out to courageously fight for justice and truth and all that.

It should tell you something about the nature of our economy and our politics that if you called the police and asked them to arrest Microsoft or Lotus or Compaq, for the same crime, they would laugh in your face. You just know, don’t you, that the police would assume that a lawyer for Microsoft represents the forces of justice and truth, while a mere consumer represents… well… the average person. And the law, my friend, has become a tool of the rich, by which they exploit you and me.

Case in point. Do you own a computer? What does it mean to own? If you own your couch, that means that no one can sit on it without your permission. If you own a house, in the U.S., that means you can pretty well kill anybody who tries to enter it without your permission.

You own this computer. So why is your hard drive loaded with parasite programs that suck the breath out of your CPU? Why is your e-mail flooded with SPAM? Why can’t you delete certain directories like “My Documents”? Why does Office 97 exterminate your copy of Office 95, without giving you a choice? And when Windows crashes for the umpteenth time, costing you hours and hours of precious work, why is nobody accountable for it? Why is Compaq allowed to sell laptops with fake modems? Why can a software company sell a check-writing program that doesn’t work and refuse to give the purchaser his money back?

This is theft, of your time and your property.  It is robbery.

 

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Your Hard Drive is Your Property

Did you ever consider that your computer is private property? You bought it. You paid for it. It’s yours. The hard drive, the motherboard, the CD, the RAM— it’s all your property, just like your couch, your stereo, and your house. If someone came into your house and tried to remove your computer without your permission, you could have that person arrested. If the same person tried to steal your computer three times, in California, he could go to jail for 25 years! Think about that. Our government is so concerned about your private property that is willing to spend millions of dollars to punish anybody who tries to take it without your permission.

The hard drive is your property too. That’s where the programs and data go. The hard drive is like a gigantic cathedral with thousands and thousands of rooms. And you own it! All of it! And like any owner, you can put stuff in your rooms.

Wait a minute! Somebody’s living in your cathedral! Some complete stranger just walked right in and made himself at home without asking for your permission. Not only that, but he’s brought hundreds of his friends. By golly, they are taking up a whole wing of your cathedral!

Why, it’s Bill Gates. He’s living in your house! How about that!

How did he get there? Well, first of all, on the day you bought your computer, Bill Gates and a large number of his friends moved right in. And guess what? Not only does he get to live in your hard drive without paying you any rent, but he gets to make YOU pay rent, even though you might never have invited him in. Yes, you pay the Microsoft Tax every time you buy a computer, whether you want Bill Gates to live on your hard drive or not. If you don’t believe me, go to a computer store and tell the guy that you want to buy a computer but you don’t want Windows on it.

Ever look through your Windows directory? There’s about a hundred subdirectories! That’s where all of Bill Gates’ parasitical friends live. You’ll find his best friend, MSN there, along with IE, and AOL, and Genie, and lots of other weirdos that you didn’t invite in. These guys are taking up space in your house! And they didn’t ask to come in!

Look, maybe you asked Bill Gates in, because you needed to use his Windows software. And maybe you don’t mind that he added a few freebies to your Windows, like CD Player and DeFragger. But after winning your good will with those freebies that don’t really annoy you, he has suddenly pulled up at your front door with two eighteen-wheelers. “Hi there? You don’t mind if I bring all this stuff in, do you?” And there he is loading up your hard drive with all kinds of bizarre little applications.

But this is like inviting an electrician in to come and fix your main electrical panel, and then finding out that he brought about a hundred of his buddies with and they’re all setting up hot-tubs and pool tables and beer kegs and partying down on your hard drive and smoking and blowing your fuses and leaving blood stains on your drapes and so on. Think about this next time your Windows 98 crashes. Why did it crash? Because it’s so hard to write a good computer program nowadays? Or because of all the other crap that got loaded onto your system along with Windows 98?

So you go– what’s wrong with that? Okay. You like hot tubs? So you decide to get into your hot tub. The hot tub manager says, hold it: you have to pay me $300 to use the hot tub. You say, that’s too much. I won’t use the hot tub. Do you think the hot tub is going to go away? No, it’s not. It’s going to stay there, steaming away, corroding your pipes, leaking into tour basement for ever. Every time you walk by, the guy goes, “hey, wanna use a hot tub?”

It’s not only Microsoft that is guilty of this invasion of your private property. Most computer vendors dump all kinds of technotrash all over your computer before delivering it.

I recently bought a Compaq notebook. I needed a lot of disk space, so I paid extra for a 6.3 gig hard drive. Well, Bill Gates had already taken up about half the house there, and then I found out that Compaq had stolen an additional 1.6 GIG of space on another drive. This is called “system-save”. Compaq sets it aside as a backup of the system so that when Windows goes bad, as it inevitably does, you can simply delete all your work and start over again with a fresh install. Great solution, eh? Compaq assumes you are a total idiot who wouldn’t actually decide to customize your software. Well, my attitude is: get the hell off my property! If I want to pay twice as much for a house so I can have a whole wing devoted to backup toilets and appliances, I’ll buy it from somebody else who gives me a choice, thank you.

Even worse– most of that 1.6 gig is not taken up with essential files for running your computer– it’s taken up with all the crap that you didn’t want in the first place and won’t buy! Compaq insists you keep that crap right in front of you because sooner or later…

Bill Gates is getting pushier and pushier too now. You get your new computer—it’s already got a directory called “My Documents”. What kind of idiot is going to create a directory called “My Documents”? An idiot who is going to create all of about five documents in his entire life and wants to keep them all in one folder so he never loses them, maybe. And then there is “program files”. You can’t get to the program files directory by typing “CD \PROGRAM FILES” like you should be able to. You have to type “CD\PROGRA~1” for some bizarre reason! You can’t get rid of these folders either. Why not? If that electrician who fixed your electrical panel decided to leave a bathtub in the middle of your living room, you could get rid of it. But Windows says you can’t delete certain folders, including the idiotic “My Documents”. And when you browse to the Windows directory with Windows Explorer, you don’t see the files that are in there. Instead, you are warned not to tamper with anything.

Microsoft’s mission in life, of course, is to sell as much software as possible. Because there are a lot more dingbats in the world than power users, Microsoft keeps aiming Windows at the idiot-user. Don’t know how to organize your files? No problem—Windows will put them all in one directory. Don’t plan to ever customize your applications or edit their configuration files? You’ll never even know where they are. Can’t figure out how to configure dial-up networking so you can go on the Internet? Hey—Microsoft will do it all for you, and log you into their web servers, and demand your credit card number, of course.

In other words, most people are going: “Hey—I hired a plumber to fix the toilet and you know what he did? He put in a hot tub and a Jacuzzi and a sauna too! And I didn’t even ask him!” Oh, but how much did it cost? “It was free. It came with the computer.” Free, of course, except for the Microsoft tax on every new computer sold by mainstream vendors. Free, at the price of freedom and individuality and choice. Free, except for the fact that the primary objective of Microsoft is to turn the Internet into television: 67 channels and nothing on.

The software companies never tire of trumpeting their rights all over the place. It’s about time the computer user started standing up for his own rights. You own your hard drive. You have a right to demand that software companies and internet servers stop dumping their advertising on your hard drive. It’s time to demand that Microsoft install only the application that you asked for on your hard disk.

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Why is Microsoft Windows So Bad?

Is Windows so bad because Microsoft’s engineers are incompetent? Or is there a conscious strategy here?

It didn’t make sense to me for a long time. Microsoft is a big company. It hires some of the best programmers in the world to work on their products. They have endless resources and talent. So why can’t they come up with an operating system that doesn’t crash all the time?

You have to consider a few basic facts, first of all. How many “power users” are there out there? What I mean is, how many people out there are smart enough to manage their own computer systems properly? Let’s think of percentages. I would say that, of the people I know, about 10%, at the most, are potential “power users”.

Whoa! Let’s step back! Only 10%? Isn’t that kind of insulting to the vast majority of computer users?

Well, what is a power user? Someone who meets these qualifications:

  • creates his own logical directory structure for storing his files
  • backs up his data to a portable, removable storage media, because his work is important
  • installs programs himself, and maybe some hardware, like CD ROMS
  • knows how to fix problems with the computer
  • sets up and configures his own internet connection
  • customizes applications to be more productive (in vain—they will crash regardless).

Okay? So there you go. Power users are basically like people who renovate their own homes: they want to design the system to work for them.

What do we call non-power users? Consumers. Consumers live in malls. Consumers don’t want to be challenged: they want everything provided to them on a silver platter. They don’t care about the environment or monopolies or long-term interest rates. Consumers, after all, just want to consume.

Consumers want to turn on the computer with that knob on the front and then play Doom or cruise the internet for pictures of Alicia Silverstone. That’s about it. And maybe send e-mails to friends that consist mostly of messages like this: “Hi. I have e-mail now. Isn’t this cool. Send me something so I know it’s working.” Of all the people I know, about 90% are potential computer consumers.

Think about that. 10. 90. 10. 90. If you were Microsoft, which would you rather have as your customer base?

That’s why Microsoft expects you to store all your documents in “My Documents”. You don’t get to name this directory something logical like “work” or “data” or “letters”. Oh no. You can’t even delete Microsoft’s “My Documents”. It’s like mom telling you what to wear every morning. “Here’s your turtleneck.” “Think I’ll wear a t-shirt today.” “Here’s your turtleneck.” “Have you seen my t-shirt?” “Here. It’s your turtleneck.”

And that’s why Microsoft puts all your applications in “Program Files” even though, when you go to the dos prompt, you can’t type “CD Program Files” but have to type, instead, the idiotic abbreviation: “CD Progra~1”. Of course. What consumer would go to the DOS prompt anyway?

That’s why Microsoft is constantly trying to run your computer life for you. When you go to the DOS prompt, it puts you into the Windows directory. Why? What idiot wants to go there? When you use Windows Explorer to go looking for files, it displays the names only, without size, date, or type. Why would you want to know those things? You’re just looking for “letter to mom”. Microsoft is pushing modem and printer manufacturers to design their equipment so that it only runs on Windows, even if that means taking precious processor cycles away from your CPU. They don’t tell you, when you buy one of these modems or printers, that they only work on Windows, and that, in a couple of years, you are going to have to replace that equipment because Microsoft will make sure that the software that runs it will be out of date.

Microsoft Word even tells you when it doesn’t like the way you write. Fix it, or I’ll annoy you to death with colored squiggly lines all over the page. All of your family and friends will know that you write stupid.

Microsoft isn’t the only offender here. Quicken used to be a useful, snappy little checkbook manager that did it’s job and got out of the way. Now it tries to reach into your wallet and take control of everything you do. It wants to hook you up to the internet every time you fart in the direction of the phone. It tries to create new accounts and categories for you every time you don’t type something just the way you want them to. When you enter a new check for a payee you have entered previously, it helpfully copies details into the current transaction— including the “reconciled” flag!  Great idea!

Norton Utilities and Norton Anti-virus have the same attitude problem. These tyrannical little programs really get out there and try to push you around, constantly harassing you about rescue disks and live updates and all that baloney. And you know, it wouldn’t be quite half as bad as it is except that most of these programs don’t work! Norton keeps begging me to let it update it’s files, so I say, okay, go ahead. What does it do? Lock up. Norton anti-virus crashes my Windows 98 every time it boots, so I now have to step around it. Uninstall the program? “This application could not be uninstalled”. Best of all, some of the third-party uninstall programs won’t even uninstall themselves!

Netscape thinks you would like nothing more than to go the Netscape web site every time you turn on your computer.

You can see why Linux is getting so popular. Microsoft is like your Mom, constantly harassing you about what you should be doing. Linux is like your Uncle Max. You go up to him and he says, “What do you want?” At first, you might think he’s a little rude, but if you say you want to go out for a beer and a smoke, he’ll say, sure, what do I care?

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Lament for Geoworks

Does it surprise you to know that Windows is only about 9 years old? That it was released in 1990?

That version of Windows, of course, was called 3.0. There was a Windows 1.0 and Windows 2.0, but they were so pathetically, mind-numbingly bad that nobody even tried to use it. Windows 3.0 was different. It was merely incomprehensibly bad. But it was made by Microsoft, the company that gave us Dos 3.0, 3.1, and 3.2, and 3.3, and 4.0, of course, and 5.0 (the best dos ever), and 6.0, 6.1, and 6.2. And Bill Gates, at the press conference announcing the conception of Windows, warned that other graphical user interfaces wouldn’t be compatible with future versions of dos.

In 1990, nobody could have believed that Windows would be so late, so bad, and so slow. Everybody thought that in a year or so, we’d all be happily clicking and dragging around on our IBM compatibles in Microsoft Windows.

Geoworks was released in 1990, and it ran great. It was a true graphical user interface with a remarkably functional core, and real multi-tasking. It ran happily on 2 MB of RAM and required very little disk space.

Just as it was set to take the world by storm, Bill Gates announced that Microsoft was almost ready to roll out it’s own version, Windows, in just a few months.

Geoworks was destroyed, crushed by the announcement. Software developers switched to Windows, so third party applications dried up. Even worse, the investors pounded Geoworks’ stock until it was pretty well wiped out.

It took five years for a truly functional Windows to emerge (Windows 95) and, even then, it still wasn’t as reliable as Geoworks was in 1990. I run both Windows 98 and Windows NT on my desktop. They are both pieces of garbage, to put it bluntly. They are bloated, slow, bug-ridden, and annoying. Why do I use them? Because I make my living with computers. Everybody wants Office 97 and Quake and all the other Windows applications. I get paid to try to solve all the problems that shouldn’t exist.

There are other operating systems: Linux, BeOs, OS/2, but few applications that run on them. These other OS’s are strong, reliable, and fast, but Microsoft beat them off with sticks and stones. That is the legacy of Microsoft’s strong-arm tactics over the last 9 years. The result has been disastrous, though few people seem aware of it. The loss of productivity due to problems with Windows must be phenomenal.

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Microsoft Windows Sucks

I recently reformatted my hard drive, erasing every last vestige of my bug-ridden, over-worked, over-loaded, registry polluted Windows 95 installation. I thought it might help. My hard disk was thrashing like crazy, programs froze-up, graphics broke into fragments of tiny coloured pixels like some splattered silicon suicide on a glass sidewalk.

It did not help. Windows still runs like garbage. I have 64 megabytes of RAM, and it still thrashes like crazy. Word sucks up memory like a drunken politician leaving precious little for really powerful programs like Corel Draw. It is pitiful.

For a quick record, these programs run badly:

  • Word 7.0
  • Corel Draw 5.0
  • Adobe Photoshop 3.0
  • Windows 95
  • Clean Sweep
  • Norton Utilities 2.0
  • Crash Guard
  • Netscape 4.0
  • Norton Anti-Virus 3.0.

These programs run reasonably well:

  • Quicken 2.0
  • Front Page 98
  • Excel 97
  • Cakewalk 6.0

These programs run REALLY well:

  • Paintshop Pro 5.0.

Even Microsoft basically admits that their software is full of bugs. My question is, why can’t we get our money back? Because they won’t give it to you. They simply refuse. They laugh in your face and say, “Go to hell. We got your money. Don’t make trouble or we’ll sick our vampire lawyers on you.”

The automakers must see this and turn green with envy. Why didn’t they think of that? “Sir, the gas tank on my Pinto just exploded incinerating my family.” “Go to hell– what do we care.”