P.S. A Column On Things

This and That

The Last Page of the Internet
Decades ago, Diana Ben-Aaron pointed me at The Last Page of The Internet. It’s still funny, and fortunately findable in the Internet Archive.

Rethinking Microsoft Redux

Two weeks ago in this space, I asked people to rethink their assumptions about Microsoft. A week ago at Byte.com, I printed the same editorial.

You would think I had set fire to an American flag while defiling Chelsea Clinton in Times Square on New Years' Eve. The average Byte.com article attracts perhaps four email letters. The editorial attracted 40, all but a few of them violently opposed to my simple suggestion--that maybe Microsoft wasn't at fault for every bad thing that happened to every competitor. I am going to take another bite of the apple at the Byte.com site as well, but I will test run it here. Keep in mind this is aimed mostly at the Byte audience. Everyone who reads this column was quite polite.

I have read the trial transcripts, thank you. In fact, I have read more of them than you have, unless you're an attorney for one side or the other. I covered the first four months of the trial every day. I sat through all four hours of testimony before the Senate Antitrust Committee last spring-did you?

Unlike some of you, I have given some actual thought to the subject instead of reacting viscerally and automatically. None of the email we received, not the thoughtful messages (thank you for your time) or the outpourings of foul-mouthed bile (of which we are and will publish exactly zero) gave me a single fact I hadn't already known.

If arrogance and frat-boy boasting were crimes, every senior official of Microsoft would have been in jail a long time ago. Neither activity is against the law.

In my opinion, Microsoft has committed acts that are prohibited to a monopolist. In my opinion, Microsoft is a monopolist. So, in my opinion, it deserves to lose the present case in federal court.

That does not mean that it destroyed OS/2, or DR-DOS or even Netscape single-handedly. It was aided and abetted in all three cases by management error at the companies in question. Yes, thank you, I have considered the fact that it is still a crime to torpedo a sinking boat, or for a rich person to rob a poor one.

We can argue this until the cows come home--and probably will. The simple fact of the matter is that, with a few exceptions, in the early, critical years of this business, when Bill Gates was establishing his empire, he took software seriously as a business and believed in PCs. That's why he won and others lost. For him it was a zero sum game.

For Gary Kildall (DR-DOS), it was a game period. Business never came before pleasure. Gary was a wonderful person--a much more pleasant human being than Gates. But he lacked the killer instinct. As for IBM, it was years before the company believed in the PC; to IBM it was a smart terminal, a mainframe adjunct. They neutered it the first chance they got, and went for the "business" market without realizing that the whole market was a business market.

The only new idea I've heard since the trial started is the one that started this whole brouhaha--Jerry Pournelle's idea that in the case of some Microsoft competitors, it wasn't murder, it was suicide. That's still a refreshingly different idea in this debate. It struck me and I wanted to share it with you.

Jerry also thinks the government in punishing Microsoft for succeeding. I am not sure I agree. If Microsoft is punished, it won't be for succeeding, it will be for succeeding unfairly. If Microsoft gets off scott-free, I will be as angry as you. They have almost certainly broken the law, and they should not be allowed to get away with it, any more than Standard Oil or AT&T were. But not every Microsoft success stems from illegal activity, and we should keep that in mind.

On the other hand, a thoughtful friend of mine sent this analysis after reading my Microsoft editorial here recently. He asked me to withhold his name:

Consumers absolutely have been harmed by the MSFT monopoly. The price of Windows, and Windows upgrades (which are in many cases required bug fixes to previous upgrades) have remained constant or risen in spite of the fact that the prices of computers have dropped by over 50% since 1995, not even accounting for inflation. The price of the MSFT OS has grown to become a greater and greater percentage of the total system price every year.

The cost of "innovations we'll never see" (from competition now out of business or ventures that failed to achieve funding) is impossible to quantify.

Appreciate if you'd ask Jerry to explain these facts. I would in fact be happy if he could, because the blatant anti-competitive situation as it exists in software today seriously depresses me.

I am definitely NOT a libertarian. Capitalism has a serious end-game flaw. Too big all too often means too powerful. Columbine and other recent examples mean you cannot just step back and "let things take their course".

We are all paying the price in this silly lawsuit for Anne Bingaman's toothless consent decree that allowed MSFT to develop "integrated products". What an insane loophole. I'm not implying you are on MSFT's payroll, only that she must have been.

PS It is illegal to use cash flows from a monopoly-protected business to subsidize entry into a separate business. At the time of the great Windows SDK giveaway, it's arguable that MSFT was not in the monopoly position they are today, and giving the driver development kits away for free was just smart business -- you don't get to be a monopoly by being shortsighted or stupid.

Today, however the situation is different. MSFT has won the game. It's time to put the game pieces back in the box, and let someone else play, or put them back on a level playing field.

Mac vs. PC: The struggle continues

Dr. Bob Kaplan, a band buddy of mine, sent me a copy of a column by author Douglas Rushkoff. Two years ago, he wrote a column about leaving the Mac for a Windows PC. Last month, he came back to the Mac and wrote another column about that transition. nettiquette requires me to point you to his column, but here are some excerpts. I am sure the Mac people will be handing this one around for a long time. He posted a couple of different versions around the net, but here's some quotes to give you a flavor of the piece:

Now, two years and three Windows operating systems later, I am finally admitting defeat...

In short, my two years in Windows has fundamentally altered my experience of the computer and of the Internet...

Microsoft is more concerned with fighting wars against its competitors than providing a workable system for its own constituency...

Why I've Gone Back to Mac, Douglas Rushkoff, Electronic Mail and Guardian

For the curious, here's the column he wrote when he left the Macintosh platform

Turning My Back on Mac, Douglas Rushkoff, NY Times Syndicate

[2021 editor's note: Yes, I am the Paul Schindler who predicted, in 1985, when the Macintosh was a year old, that it wouldn't be a success in business. I stand by that opinion. You can see Paul Schindler Pans Mac .

Adam Osborne Face-Hiding Picture

This is the famous photo of Adam Osborne leaving his office the day his eponymous computer company went bankrupt in 1983, shot by Sam Forencich for the Palo Alto Times Tribune, but distributed widely. I knew it was iconic the first time I saw it in the newspaper: Osborne was holding his briefcase over his face, trying (unsuccessfully, given his height and his taste in clothes) to keep from being recognized/photographed. Don’t know why I thought of it, but was surprised how hard it was to find on the Internet―like everything else that happened before 1995.

The photographer told me the story of the shot: The Osborne photo was a weird one. The city editor sent me to Osborne headquarters on deadline to get a shot of the building for the story on it's demise. It was a nice day with only a handful of cars in the parking lot. A security guard approached and I thought he would ask me to leave, but instead he pointed to Osborne's car and told me he was in the building. I didn't think too much of it and continued to size up a good angle to shoot the building. Just a few moments later Osborne marches out the door right in front of me. It was just me and him. As I raised my camera he raised his briefcase, like some awkward dance. I got off one frame and returned to the office on deadline. Took maybe a half an hour door to door. I thought the photo needed too much context to compete in a general photojournalism contest, so I never entered it - though it did run in a few national publications, including Newsweek.

Age of Miracles

We live in an age of miracles.

We just found a new tenant for a rental house with a Craigslist ad (try writing that sentence in 1980, the year we got married), with all the paperwork, such as tenant screening and lease agreements, as well as a PayPal transfer for the rent and deposit (no more worries about bounced checks!), taking place completely online. There’s a statement you couldn’t have made in 1980.

So, there’s The Internet. Cellphones. Movies on Demand. Frictionless home delivery of groceries and meals. Text reminders of appointments. Constantly available small cameras which produce photos instantly, photos which can be duplicated and distributed for free around the world in an instant―as opposed to my youth, when 90% of my pictures are from Christmas Day, and I don’t have a single picture of me working in a radio station, at UPI, AP

Those of us who can remember when literally none of this existed should pause now and then in awe. Especially those of us in the class of 1974 who were told none of this was possible.

Even this column! It is really little more than the Beech Street Bugle, an almost-weekly newspaper I wrote (with Tom Kervin), mimeographed (down at the bowling alley) and distributed to the same subscribers my Dad had 20 years earlier. Well, OK, I like to think the writing has improved. But the miracle part is that it is cheaper to produce, has fewer typos, and the distribution route covers 5,000 miles instead of five blocks.

Mesh Network

If you haven’t considered converting your home wi-fi into a mesh network, do it! I had a local shop install mine, but my son-in-law installed his. There are few things quite as satisfying as uniformly good Wi-Fi in every room of the house, under the same network name for seamless use.

Apple IOS 6 and Podcasting

I avoided upgrading to IOS6 on my iPhone for a long time because I didn't see anything I wanted and was afraid it would mess me up. I also didn't want Apple's brain-dead map ap as my default, and I didn't want to lose the You-tube player ap. Then, at school, they installed Apple TV, but I couldn't project from my phone. I thought it might be the IOS, so I upgraded. Turns out you need a iPhone 4S to project  and I have a 4. So, I did not get the one feature I wanted. And instead, it messed me up, in the ways I expected, and a couple of new ones.

The first time I opened iTunes on my phone, all my podcasts were missing from my playlists. This was extremely frustrating, because I could still see them in iTunes on my desktop. I spent hours trying to work it out, then more hours searching the Internet before a solution. Talk about badly posted and hard to search for! I can only hope the words I have thrown around this solution will help save others from my time and frustration.

IOS 6 automatically moves all your podcasts into a podcast ap that does not have playlists. BUT, to fix this problem, all you have to do is delete the podcast ap, and all your podcasts fly back into your iTune playlists. Sure, I admit that podcast handling in iTunes is terrible. But not being able to organize your podcasts into playlists is much worse.

Credit where credit is due, however, Apple did add a feature I have been waiting for literally since the first day I played a podcast on my iPhone. There was always a "10 seconds back" button to allow you to repeat something you just heard (or more likely, didn't quite hear). I yearned for a 10 seconds forward button, to speed past discussions in which I wasn't interested. The button appeared in IOS 6, and what a joy it has been. Sure, the time slider was always there, but while it is great for a 3 minute song, it is very difficult to operate in a 30 or 60 minute podcast, especially if you are on the elliptical machine or the stationary bike.

One great feature does not make up for one appalling and badly documents foul-up, however. Overall: IOS 6, continue to avoid it if you can.

Verizon's McAdam pretends US leads in broadband: Fun with Statistics

The moment I saw the headline, How the US Got Broadband Right, I assumed it was written by someone from the Heritage Foundation or some other right-wing think tank. I underestimated capitalism's hypocrisy reserves, which is always a mistake.  In fact, it was written by (or under the name of, in any case) Verizon president Lowell McAdam. He's certainly got no skin in the game, huh? Doesn't matter to him how the FCC comes down on Internet issues. In any case, I immediately began monitoring the Internet for an intelligent, expert response that would, I was sure, point out the numerous statistical manipulations he used to disguise the fact that, as Harry Shearer likes to say "We're not number one."

I was not disappointed. An advocacy group for Open Internet called Public Knowledge (with Internet pioneer Brewster Kahle on the board and former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt as a director emeritus), quickly posted this deconstruction of just one of the clever almost-lies, distortions and half-truths which the New York Times allowed this huckster to palm off on America's thinking class. It is depressing to me that intelligent people will now mistake our last place status among the world's Internet users as first place. And hey, don't forget McAdam's public plan to abandon copper everywhere, including rural areas. In my distant suburb of Orinda (20 miles from SF), our landline server is AT&T (which also wants to get out of the landline business). There is, basically, no cell service at my home because of our town's NIMBY planning process. Oops! Oh well, I guess McAdams wants me and several million other people to move somewhere with more cellphone service, or take VOIP from the cable company, whether I like it or not.

Here's hoping that the new FCC chairman stands up for the people, and isn't a dupe who will spout McAdams' garbage and carry his water.

In the meantime, I will keep hoping for a point-by-point rebuttal, and will share the link if/when I find it. In the meantime, if you'd like to bring your blood to a boil, check out this analysis. Of course, my protests, and yours, and pointless and hopeless. Money talks and civilians bend over and grease up. I can afford whatever expensive alternative I will soon need. Can you? Can your grandmother?

Making an MP3 File into a "Podcast" on your Iphone

I place a lot of spoken-word MP3 files on my iPhone manually. It has been extremely frustrating to me that such files have no "30-second backup," and lose track of where you were if you switch to another file. These deficits have been a source of nearly endless frustration. So, this week I got off my dead keister and Googled the question. Turns out the solution is quite simple: simply tell the iPhone that the MP3 file IS a podcast.

CAUTION: For reasons I will explain later, don't do this until you have come up with a naming convention for your MP3 files. Trust me on this.

These instructions are for the Windows version of Itunes. If you have a Mac, YMMV.

1. Select the file you want, in either the music folder on your iphone, or in the playlist. You may select multiple files; this still works.
2. Hit ctrl-i (on a mac, I think the key combination is apple-i).
3. Click on the "options" tab
4. Under "Media Kind," select "podcast"
5. Click the "remember playback position" check box

That is almost there is to it. The special sauce, my intellectual contribution to this subject, comes from the fact that, once I had reset all these files, they no longer appeared in the Music folder on the iPhone. They also didn't suddenly appear in the Podcast folder.  I stitched together information from several sites to come up with a way of managing the songs.

Experienced users realize that if you delete an MP3 file  from a playlist, it is still on the phone, just not in the playlist. For songs and podcasts loaded the normal way, you can got to the folder "Music" or "Podcasts" on your iPhone. When you delete a file in one of those folders, it is really gone.

"Fake" podcasts appear in neither folder. How do you find them? How do you delete them? Well, you can delete them by selecting a file in a playlist, then hitting shift-delete (the key combo is different on a mac; I don't know what it is). Remember, if you just hit "delete," you delete the file from the playlist but NOT your iPhone.

What if you thoughtlessly delete, rather than shift delete? Like Charlie on the MTA, is your file destined to ride forever neath the streets of Boston? Well, no. You can still see every file on your iPhone if you create a Smart Playlist:

1. on the edit menu, select New Smart Playlist
2. Set a rule that none of your files will meet, like "artist is x"
3. The new smart playlist will now show every file on your iPhone, podcasts, music and "podcasts."

Here's a tip learned from painful experience: hand-loaded MP3 files are much easier to manage if you adopt a naming convention. All of mine start with an _ (underscore) character followed by the date (20120805--be sure to use the zeroes if you want alpha order to be equal to date order). Thus, a file I recorded last week would be "_20120815 programname."

It is not often I can make a contribution to the world's store of knowledge, but in this case, I feel I have synthesized and clarified a half-dozen articles. On the other hand, I may be the only person in the world whose iPhone is half loaded with hand-managed MP3 files.

Windows 7 Sucks

Let me be clear about this. My wonderful new Dell Portable, a gift from my daughters, is, well, wonderful. They took pity on me and my technology (as they do from time to time) and decided that my slow, small, decade-old portable was no longer sufficient, especially since I am going out of town more these days. They wanted me to get a Macbook, but I stoutly resisted. There are still a few Windows aps to which I am addicted . Besides, I have to keep at least one PC in the house for the websites I use to support my wife's psychotherapy practice which require (REQUIRE!) Internet Explorer (they aren't fooled by Firefox's spoof mode either), not to mention the applications my school district runs, which also require IE. The temptation to wipe the portable down to the metal and install XP was significant, but I figured I'd be dragged screaming and kicking into the future. I do mean screaming and kicking.

My first experience with the fact that

Windows 7 Sucks

came when I was installing the cable modem for a friend. Comcast insists that you run an install Wizard application that Windows 7 refused to run. I tried it. It won't run, even in "Run as Administrator" mode, which was readily available to me. If you don't run the ap, Comcast will not activate your modem. After two hours, I desperately pushed the button on the Comcast website for "technician" mode. Turns out there weren't any questions I couldn't answer. But when I was done, Comcast insisted on yet another ap that Windows 7 stoutly refused to run, no matter how far down I set the security mode. Again, fortunately, the friend had an XP machine. Thank God!

Windows 7 Sucks

Not since we went from DOS to Windows back in 1991 have I seen a Microsoft operating system that broke more aps than 7, even in so-called "compatibility" mode. One of my favorite word games, E-Words, simply will not work in 7. The software company is long gone, so there won't be an upgrade. None of the other (free or paid) word games I can find does it for me like E-Words did. There's another ap gone; if Microsoft keeps breaking them, there won't be any reason for me NOT to convert to a Macbook.

Did I mention that Windows 7 sucks?

And the file system! Don't get me started on the file system. The default is an absolute refusal to let you anywhere near the Documents and Settings directory. And you're told, even if you're the administrator, that you can't chance the permissions. After a LENGTHY Google search, I found that you need to change the OWNERSHIP of the directory, under the advanced button. How messed up is that? In trying to be more like a Macintosh, Microsoft has succeeded in creating a nearly unusable operating system. As Steve Ballmer used to say, BOGU (you can look it up).