P.S. A Column On Things

Humor: Computers: Male or Female

Are computers masculine or feminine?

A class learning French and trying to get to grips with gender wondered if the word "computer" should be masculine or feminine. Split into  two groups, men and  women, they were asked to say which they considered a computer to be, and to give four reasons for their decision.

The women decided that computers are masculine because:

• In order to gain their attention, you have to turn them on.
• They are full of data, but are still clueless.
• They are supposed to help you solve your problems, but most of the time they are the problem.
• As soon as you commit to one, you realise that if you had waited a little longer, you could have had a better one.

The men decided that computers are feminine because:

• No one but their creator understands their internal logic.
• The language they use to communicate with each other  is totally incomprehensible.
• Even your smallest mistakes are stored in long-term memory  for later retrieval.
• As soon as you commit to them, you spend half your disposable income on buying accessories for them.

 

Whitney Wolfe Herd

I don’t know how I missed this. According to Wikipedia, “In February 2021, Wolfe Herd became the world's youngest, current, female, self-made billionaire when she took Bumble public. She is the youngest woman to have taken a company public, at age 31.” Sort of the anti-Elizabeth Holmes.

I don’t know if this has happened to you, but periodically I get neat messages on Linked In that disappear before I can copy them or forward them to myself. So, I can’t find the great 100-word bio of her someone sent me. Here is my précis of the bio Time Magazine ran in March 2001.

She founded Bumble, the dating app where women “make the first move,” after co-founding (and naming) Tinder. She left Tinder and won her suit claiming she was driven out by sexual harassment. An amazing and triumphant story, about which you can find more detail in multiple places if you want to dive down that Google hole. Thank God Holmes did not actually screw things up for female entrepreneurs, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding.

Who Do You Write Like?

I was looking around the Internet to see if there was an AI engine that would look at a few thousand words of this column and then write an entry in my style. I couldn’t find a trainable AI of that sort; if you know of one, let me know.

In the meantime, I found Who Do You Write Like and discovered I write like David Foster Wallace―today. Since I had two essays handy from the early 70s, I ran them through the site and discovered that, back then, I wrote like Cory Doctorow―in both essays.

The End of Directory assistance

Pick up your cell phone and dial 411, or an area code followed by 555-1212.. Of course if you’re under 50, this will be the first time you’ve ever done it and the results won’t surprise you.

But for persons of my vintage it may come as something of a shock to discover that AT&T no longer offers directory assistance on cell phones. Given the massive shrinkage of listed phone numbers this probably shouldn’t come as a surprise, but it does anyway, and it makes me feel very old.

Since newspapers are mostly read by old people, I am surprised a big deal was not made of the end of the service late last year. But of course while we make up most of the readership, we don’t make up most of the staff, and they probably didn’t notice.

I remember being shocked back in the 60s when I discovered that they didn’t print telephone books in the old Soviet Union. The rationale was that if people could find each other they could organize a revolution. Please note that our ability to find each other prior to the invention of the cell phone did not cause a revolution in this country; quite the contrary, all the revolutions have come since.

I can still remember the article which listed a number of ways that a modern economy was difficult to run if you couldn’t find people’s telephone numbers. I wonder how many of those are true now.

(I don’t think this is the article I remember, although time may have wreaked havoc with my memory. I was working at the Oregon Journal that summer, where I was paid to read both the Oregonian—which subscribed to the New York Times news service—and the Journal front to back every day as part of my job.)

I am too lazy to find out if the phone company still prints reverse directories: a directory of phone numbers listed by street address. Such directories used to be available to newspapers, police and fire departments and could sometimes be found in libraries. I remember working on several crime stories where it was useful to be able to reach the next-door neighbors of a crime, either of recent vintage, or still ongoing. Of course such a directory would be useless now.

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.