You can tell a lot about a man by watching how he anthropormophizes his life. My brother used to say to me, "If your car were your wife, divorce her." This from a man who had a 1961 "Rosie the red Rambler" well into the 90's, and when I asked why he kept a vehicle whose windshield wipers stopped whenever he went uphill, he'd say "She's too mean to die." And why, exactly, are boats and planes referred to with female pronouns? My wife, of course, would say that it's because men have a highly sentimental nature and an inordinant attachment to old shoes. My huffy response is that it is a good thing men are made sentimental, or they'd be tempted to trade in their wives for a spiffy new model.

I'm defending my behavior, of course, and why I spent three hours yesterday evening trying to get my computer to behave. (No, I do not refer to it with female pronouns, it is still it.) Now you should know a small fact about me: I have been a Microsoft hater since before Bill Gates stole his DOS operating system from a fellow geek. There may still be a blackboard over at the University (if they haven't replaced it with a whiteboard by now) with a chalked in tally sheet entitled "Me / Bill Gates". The last time I updated it, Me was losing 4 to 7. So I have all my home machines running versions of the Linux operating system, but to my shame, I dual-boot them with Windows. That is, they come from the factory with Windows installed, and I leave it on there, making room for Linux. And that was the problem.

As astute readers might have noticed in yesterday's post, I have cancelled my DSL for dialup. That meant I had to replace the Internet cable that runs into the back of the computer with a telephone cable. Windows happily offered me a "wizard" to set up my dialup, and within minutes I was on my way. But last night I needed a program for a task that Adobe wants to charge me real money for, so I booted up in Linux and planned to download the free version of it. (For those of you who know only Windows, Linux is completely free and has 1000's of free programs, easily accessed over the internet.) But after Linux hummed to life, it told me I didn't have a modem, which meant of course, that I didn't have Internet. Now you might think like the Democratic party, that such revelations to a true believer would  cause me to swear "You Liar! " and switch allegiances. But you would be wrong. Instead, like a very good Democratic, I muttered to myself "It's all Bill's fault. It's all a Microsoft conspiracy."

And this is the problem I have with many conspiracy theorists, they are just too gullible, they are just not paranoid enough. It is not that the world separates into two camps: those that believe in global warming and those that want to gleefully incinerate us all. Rather, there are many, many conpiracies, and one can be on the right side of global warming, economic theory, and politcal leanings yet still believe that AIDS is a plot by the West to decimate Africa. Nor is it true that powerlust is the single motivation for conspiracy, for greed and sex and just sheer laziness are all potent conspiracy motivators. That's why there are not one, but seven deadly sins. Bill Gates has a really bad case of greed, which in our capitalist society, is a compliment, but as a consequence he has built not just his company, but his software to maximize income. That means he wants to prevent others from making inroads on his software "markets". This can be seen in how he destroyed Lotus-1-2-3 with Excel, or destroyed Netscape with Internet Explorer. And those that he couldn't out-program, he bought out and dissolved. And those he couldn't buy out, such as Sun, he attempted to redefine the protocols so as to fragment their market and make it unprofitable. The list is endless, and only geeks with grudges will remember fondly this archaic graveyard of software companies. Needless to say, he's been remarkably successful.

In contrast, computer hardware companies have had a horrible time. The once proud Digital Equipment Corporation fell into hard times, dumped their arrogant and nerdy founder, and ended up being bought out by a lowly PC manufacturer which in turn was bought out by a laboratory instrument company. Internationial Business Machines, after rising to affluence and supercomputerdom from therir punch cards readers for the 1890 US Census followed by the spectacular success of their model 360 and the introduction of the PC, has steadily lost manufacturing ability and is now a service company for other people's hardware. And need I mention lesser companies like Sun or Apollo or Apple or Texas Instruments? Hardware is a really hard market in which to retain majority market share. For one thing, nothing can prevent engineers in Taiwan from buying your hardware and then dissecting it under a microscope to find what you did, and then copy it. From bitter experience, software is much, much harder to reverse engineer, even when one is given highly commented source code. And that source code is jealously protected, with lawsuits dragging on for years whether a few lines of someone else's source code appear in mine. But hardware? By the time the lawsuit is finished we are two hardware changes beyond the original patent.

If you had asked me 20 years ago, I would have thought that software would be lightyears ahead of the hardware, but in actuality the opposite happened. It took Microsoft almost 10 years to use all the features of the 386 chipset Intel introduced back in 1985. Of course, like Ma Bell's slow replacement of rotary dial telephones, there's no incentive to change if one has a virtual monopoly. But why did Microsoft have a monopoly and not IBM? Partly because of the factors I mentioned above, and partly because of sentimentality. Like my brother's Rambler, we want to keep our old FORTRAN software running forever, not least because we fired the programmer years ago and can't reduplicate the program. However there is a not insignificant part of this imbalance due to Gate's greed. And that greed is also his downfall.

For to maintain that dominance, Gates not only has to to keep adding features to his software, but he has to make sure everything remains proprietary. That means no allowing 3rd party startups to "attach" themselves to his core products and steal market share. Thus when he drove Netscape out of business, he found he had to incorporate all the capabilites of a browser into the operating system itself. To maintain control, all the key functions must be kept inside the fence. Simultaneously, Gates has to keep the backwards compatibility that us sentimental users demand of software. Windows has to still run my ancient copy of Flight Simulator. So Windows must not only link the new version of Word to my ancient Laserjet III printer, but it must also link the old version of Word 6.0 to my new inkjet printer. I compare this problem to counting the number of lines between n points. Two points 1 line, 3 points 3 lines, 4 points 6 lines, 5 points 10 lines, 6 points 15 lines,  you get the drift. By trying to be the nerve center of everything that happens to your computer, Windows has become a cross between Frankenstein and Godzilla, consuming all your resources and behaving uncontrollably. Just this week I installed the latest Microsoft security patches on my Windows box, and had to endure several "blue screen of death" crashes, three in a row before my machine could even boot up.  Now people more forgiving of software companies than I might yawn about these Microsoft crashes, saying "what else is new"? Well the fact that Gates still can't get his newest software release "Vista" out the door 2 years late, and has reorganized his management, should be telling you something: don't buy Microsoft stock.

But  what has Gates got to do with my Linux problem? Well hardware guys know their product is ephemeral compared to software, but if they can get into bed with the software, why then the hardware will survive longer on the market. Rumor has it that the US military has 30 year old Honeywell computers in a bomb-proof room, still running ancient software that they can't upgrade. So Intel collaborated with Microsoft to save a few pennies (literally) and remove the modulator-demodulator (modem) chip that talks to the phone company, using their  Pentium-XXX  CPU chip  to emulate the hardware with proprietary software. Microsoft put that proprietary software in Windows and calls it a "winmodem". Other than the telephone jack in the back of the computer, there isn't any actual "modem" hardware in the box. So when I booted up in Linux, it was all perfectly true that I lacked a modem. If one complains on the net forums, the usual response is "So go out and buy a modem card for $5 and don't waste my time!"  Once again I feel misunderstood. It's the principle of the thing, it's the tally sheet on the chalkboard, it's for all those poor Chinese who are miles from the nearest CompUSA and are enslaved to the Wintel hegemony!  I can tell you are unimpressed. Okay, I admit it, I have Bill Derangement Syndrome, and if I will die before I give Gates any glory. But just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean that there isn't a vast Microsoft conspiracy!

And here I want to leave behind petty conspiracies, or rather, talk about the mother of all conspiracies. Why do business practices have to be so, well, devious? Why, in a capitalistic society, does business do things that hurt the consumer? Why in an political world do governments do things that hurt the average citizen? Why in a religious world do leaders do things that punish the average adherent? Why, in a transparent society and a Friedman "flat earth", are conspiracies hatched at all? What happened to Kant's ethics of the "Universal Good"? Shouldn't we all be acting so as to ensure the greatest good for the greatest number of people? Whatever happened to rationality in politics, in religion, in economic theory? Did the whole world suddenly become irrational unnoticed during this past 20th century of Rationality?

If I were an economist, I would cite all these mathematical models of human irrationality that have won Nobel prizes in recent years. If I were a political scientist, I would point out that leaders will value their own survival higher than the survival of the nation. Short term goals very often crowd out long term objectives. More than one war has been lost with brilliant tactics but lousy strategy. But I'm a parent, as most of you are, and was once a child, as all of you were. We all have experience in learning ethics, learning economics, learning politics of social interactions, and many of us have experience trying to teach the same. The long term goals of parenting must be always held in view, or we would send them all to their grandparents and visit only on holidays. Gates' business model, his software model are indicative of short term goals. Enron's business ethics, WorldCom's business practices are indicative of short term goals. Chirac's political positions, Putin's oppressive behaviors are indicative of short term goals. These men, these companies, have never grown up. They have never learned that control is a double-edged sword, that responsibility can only be taught by sacrificing control, that growth can only occur with short-term loss, (which we cleverly rename "investment"). That unless a seed is allowed to fall in the soil and potentially rot, we will not have bread for the table. We cannot have our cake and eat it too.

For in the final analysis, I will have to bury my rationality, I will have to sacrifice my right to win the argument in order to love my children, in order to win their hearts. Maturity is the hardest thing to achieve, not only in my children, but in myself.