FIRST PRINTED SEPTEMBER 1999
MY WIFE ONCE ASKED ME to print out 200 programmes for a play she was starring in. The document already existed, from a previous run, and needed only a couple of lines updated. I figured five minutes’ actual work and an hour’s laser printer time, tops. A day later, not a single new programme existed yet, and I’d ruined almost 300 sheets of paper. Software problems, then hardware problems, then failure of a new toner cartridge.
I bring this up because, as I was cursing, Jeanne mentioned something interesting. She said in the fifteen years I’ve been printing out programmes for her dance concerts and plays, and manuscripts for my novels, not once has an important print job gone smoothly—they always require at least an extra day of frustration, rage and heartache. And you know something? She wasn’t exaggerating.
So I called some friends, with widely different cyber platforms and levels of expertise…and none of them had ever had an important print job go smoothly either.
We’re in denial. Intelligence doesn’t help: the brighter we are, it seems, the more determined we are to stick our heads in the sand. That’s exactly the problem: somehow we’ve become enthralled by sand. We’ve become silicon-worshippers.
Don’t get me wrong: I love my Mac. I was a professional writer for eleven years before I got one, and I occasionally have actual nightmares about being forced to use a typewriter again. No one who has not spent a decade wrestling one of those mechanical monstrosities for a (precarious) living can possibly imagine how odious they were. The error-correction process in particular was a horror. Hours of tedium and constantly interrupted concentration. On computer, I fix mistakes without thinking about it. I pick up copy here, and put it down over there—magic! Lots of cute font and size options. If I get bored, I can go sink imaginary battleships. I’m addicted, now, and can never go back.
But I used to spend fewer unpleasant hours with Correctype than I now spend trying to get my computer to work right. And I’ve got one of the good ones.
I fantasize about using a time machine to visit my 1984 self. He’s just contemplating purchase of his first computer, and asks my advice.
Well, I say slowly, it’s not the price; it’s the upkeep. In buying that Fat Mac, you’re also committing to all the ones after it, each bigger and faster—and more expensive. Fifteen years from now you’ll be on your fifth, with 160 times more RAM and a hard drive 300 times roomier than anything you can buy today, running programs so huge they couldn’t possibly be loaded onto any 1984 personal computer. And for its intended purpose—as a typewriter-replacement—it will be not quite as good as the one you’re about to buy.
That’s right, I tell my bemused younger self: as a writer’s tool, a modern Powerbook PowerPC with 80 megs running Microsoft Word from a CD-ROM is inferior in several important respects to a 1984 512K Mac running MacWrite 4.5 from a 400K floppy.
Then why upgrade? he asks.
Because everyone else will. By 1999 MacWrite will be a fond memory; Fat Mac parts and repairmen will be long extinct. Everyone will use Microsoft Word. It will force on you many unwanted capabilities—page layout, outlining, graphics, charts, sound, “spell checking” (an exciting opportunity to spend hours teaching a machine how to spell common words), grammar advice (expletive deleted), a thesaurus (easily one fifth as good as the worst in print), voice annotation, even video annotation…but as a word processor it will be just barely useable: slow, clunky, unstable and (sigh) the unchallenged universal standard.
So what’s this gonna cost? 1984 Spider asks.
By the millennium, I reply, between hardware, software and this and that, you’ll be in for something like twenty-five large.
He pales. Wait, I say. To be fair, by the time you’re in that deep, you’ll have a genuine miracle you didn’t expect: the Internet! And I riff awhile, explaining that.
Let’s see if I’ve got this, he says. It’s like, back in the sixties when Ken Kesey and the Pranksters were outfitting the Magic Bus, and Neal Cassidy wired up speakers and mikes at every seat, all live at once—and there was so much noisy chaos that within twenty-four hours all the speakers got ripped out—like that, only on a planetary scale?
I explain further. He frowns. So basically, he says, we’re talking about a stupendous heap of suspect data? With no index or table of contents or editor or peer review?
And none possible, I admit. In essence, it’s an immense encyclopedia that any moron may contribute to and nobody can edit…and for some reason the whole world will decide to behave as though it were a source of reliable information. They’ll let their hard drives be colonized by parasite programs given the deceptively friendly name “cookies” and share the most intimate details of their lives with invisible strangers. They won’t even notice their browser crashes at least twice a day. Everything will run unbelievably slowly, and there’ll be several competing access systems, none delivering more than half of claimed speed at best.
Then I tell him how much fun large print jobs will be.
As I say, I’m committed to my Mac now. But I think the 1984 Spider, given honest projections, might just have kept his typewriter. Ask any programmer: if it runs successfully once, it’s considered ready to market; if it runs twice in ten tries, it’s ready to ship. But whatever you type on a typewriter is what comes out on the page, at once, every time, with 100 percent reliability.
WYSIWYG, they call it.
Nuking Themselves in the Foot or, Look out, tech’s press!
FIRST PRINTED MAY 2000
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN said the way to assess the intelligence of a committee is to divide the IQ of its stupidest member by the number of members. There’s a rather large software concern whose recent corporate behavior has been so transcendently stupid as to suggest that an IQ no higher than that of its own rather notorious operating system has been divided by the number of installed copies worldwide, then given a negative exponent equal to its founders’ personal wealth expressed in Canadian pennies. If a corporation is an imaginary person, this one makes Homer Simpson look like Freeman Dyson.
Unfortunately, I can’t name it here. D’oh!
I dare not. Its lawyers—as if they don’t have enough to do—have censored people who said critical things about it in what amounts to a techies’ coffeehouse in cyberspace. Imagine what they might do to me!
But to get the full beauty of this, you need a bit of historical/technical context. This corporation—we have to call it something for discussion; let’s arbitrarily honor comic Phil Silvers and call it BillCo, shall we?—BillCo had a spot of legal trouble a few years back in one of the larger nations adjacent to Canada. Less said the better, of course, but in essence a large-ish number of folks there felt BillCo was (a) too big, (b) less than competent and (c) a bit of a bully. There had even been loose talk, at the higher levels of that nation’s justice system, about crippling or dismantling BillCo by government fiat.
It was at this cusp in BillCo’s corporate history that an unfortunate occurrence unfortunately occurred. One of the most popular of its many products contained an innovative feature—ironically, one of the few genuinely original features ever offered by BillCo—called “scripting,” which unfortunately was really not a feature but a bug. A gaping security flaw, in fact, begging to be exploited: a backdoor big enough to admit a Visigoth horde in full kit without waking the watchdog.
Get this: BillCo’s e-mail agent—let’s call it LookOut! for convenience—was deliberately designed to let strangers easily send you e-mail that can issue commands to your computer without consulting you. No, really! If you use BillCo’s operating system—let’s call it OpenWindow—and run LookOut!, your computer’s no longer merely user-friendly: it’s now a user-slut. One too dumb to carry condoms…or even take names.
Perhaps the thinking—if any—was that somehow only corporations as big and respectable as BillCo would ever take advantage of this wide open back window. But then the worldwide Peabrained Vandal community, after months of ine
xplicable restraint, finally decided the time had come to party, and things got ugly real quick. Dismayed LookOut! users soon found their promiscuous program had given them not just viruses, but worms, which is exactly as horrid as it sounds.
Turns out quite a few people use LookOut! and some version of Open-Window. Collectively they lost a fair amount of time and data—and money—and it’s safe to say many were unhappy and some outright peeved. It was only a matter of time before they all wised up and figured out how the vandals got in. If I had been a BillCo attorney, already sweating a momentous verdict, I’d have spent my time preparing to go to the mattresses again, restocking the bunker with supplies against yet another long siege. And if I were (shudder!) a BillCo PR flack, I’d have spent that time racking my brains for some way to make BillCo skew positive—come across warm and likeable and beleaguered by bureaucrats.
Hearken to what they did instead.
There’s another operating system I can call by its right name here, because nobody owns it. Linux is open-source: anybody can get under the hood and suggest or demonstrate improvements, and good ones get adopted by the community. This makes for superb, cutting-edge software—free! A number of years ago, for instance, volunteers developed Kerberos: an open-standard security system that authenticates the identity of users who log into Unix networks. Theodore Ts’o and others worked on it together until it was Way Cool, inviting others to use and/or improve it.
Then BillCo showed up at the barn-raising, eager to help.
Next thing you knew, OpenWindow 2K had a version of Kerberos built in. Only theirs was copyrighted. Proprietary rather than free. And funny thing: it didn’t interact effectively with Unix or Linux computers…
A few programmers discussed this at a website called Slashdot. It bills itself as “news for nerds,” and that’s exactly what it is: a big public bulletin board on which nerds rap with each other. No matter how heated the discussion might have become, there was no possibility of any tangible consequence in the real world. Until BillCo decided to try and censor it.
I’m not joking: BillCo asked Slashdot to delete the Kerberos discussion-thread. No specific “or-else” was named…but it was lawyers did the asking. It’s alleged that some miscreant revealed secrets of BillCo’s proprietary software…
Say again? The sergeants of BillCo—which was seriously threatened with the corporate equivalent of lobotomy and castration, and which only the week before damaged millions of its customers through apparent gross Internet-security incompetence—decided in their corporate wisdom that that was the moment to make sure not only Linux weenies, but everyone literate, thinks of them as creeps and bullies. That’ll make the federal judges feel merciful…
Wish I could help. But so far my attorney and I have never met, and I like it that way. So please don’t e-mail and ask which OS I’m talking about. Apropos of nothing, by the way, my neighbor Homer hates black birds—so my crows oft win d’oh!’s.
Devil’s Advocate
FIRST PRINTED NOVEMBER 1999
SOME OF US HATE MICROSOFT. But nearly all of us hate Bill Gates. His features are available on dartboards, “Wanted” posters and squares of toilet paper. I know several terrific and savage jokes about him, and so do you. Every professional comedian has at least a dozen. If you want your photography to appear in every single print medium in the world, just lurk in ambush until you catch a candid shot of Mr. Gates with an unflattering expression on his face. Any day now, handgun shooting ranges will start replacing their generic silhouette targets with just such pictures. He may not be the antiChrist, but he seems to be the antiSaraLee: nobody doesn’t hate him.
Why? His massive wealth obviously must have a lot to do with it…but that can’t be the whole story.
Try this experiment: buttonhole average citizens on the sidewalk, and ask them to identify a photo of Bill Gates. I predict a very high success rate. Next ask what he is famous for—and again, a very high percentage will have at least a vague idea, although they may be hazy on the details. (“The guy that, like, invented computers,” “The richest son of a bitch on earth” and “Doesn’t he own the Internet?” will be commonly-heard answers.)
Now repeat the experiment—using a photo of Warren Buffett, a man richer than Mr. Gates.
I predict the number of correct identifications will be roughly zero. If you reveal his name, you’ll get a bit more response: several people will give you the same wrong answer—some variant of, “Isn’t he that guy that sings about Margaritaville and cheeseburgers in paradise?”
What is it that makes Mr. Gates a uniquely excellent focus for society’s free-floating hatred? After all, we didn’t have to buy his kludge of an operating system or his bloated buggy applications. That was our fault, for failing to do our consumer homework. A few hours’ research would have showed us that a better operating system existed, and that it made sense to pay 10 percent more up front to get a machine in which installing—or deinstalling—an application was effortless, connecting up peripheral equipment was utterly painless, graphics and sound functions did not require elaborate and buggy workarounds, and so on. If we had, that system might now be the de facto world standard instead of Windows. We did not, in short, have to settle for what we now have.
Why did we do it, then? For the same reason we used to give our first-grade teacher for silly behavior: everybody else was doing it. The great and powerful Oz—almighty IBM—had given DOS and its descendants-to-come the Seal of Approval, and that was all anyone wanted to hear.
So it’s not Bill Gates’s fault that he’s rich. That’s our money he has, and he has it because we gave it to him. We were not absolutely required to buy the cheapest and dumbest operating system available; we chose to.
Is that it? Do we loathe Mr. Gates so much because he symbolizes, and thus reminds us of, a series of bad decisions that we made, and of which we now repent? For those bad decisions certainly impact on our personal daily lives. If Warren Buffett decides to corner some market or raid some industry, his decision may affect me…but I’ll probably never notice the effect. Whereas even I, a confirmed Mac guy, must use—and curse—Microsoft Word every working day of my life. (I have to. Everybody else is doing it.)
But I remind myself that there might not be a Macintosh today if it hadn’t been for Mr. Gates. I got one of the first Macs sold—and for a long time, its survival was in doubt, because there was almost no software for it. Just about the only non-Apple application available was…Microsoft Word! Mr. Gates, an early Mac enthusiast, had ordered Word ported over to the new platform. Others slo-o-owly followed his lead, and the Mac began acquiring the third-party software that saved it from oblivion.
Last week I took a notion to reread a document I wrote back in 1984. Problem: it was created with MacWrite, the Apple word processor then bundled with the Mac, and now extinct. I still have that version of MacWrite here in my office—on a 400K floppy!—but it’s useless to me. Apple did not maintain backward-compatibility with its own products, so if I try launching MacWrite 2.2 or 4.5 or even MacWrite II on my present PowerPC desktop, it crashes the system.
But my present version of Microsoft Word (v5.1a) can read a vintage-1984 Word document. In fact, it can read a 1984 MacWrite document!
Civilians seldom realize how rare backward-compatibility is and always has been in the computer industry. The only company to provide it routinely has been Microsoft. So I have Mr. Gates to thank for the fact that I was able to reread that old 1984 file after all.
It bears repeating that Mr. Gates has given more money to charity—real money, not hot air—than just about anyone else in history. (“More” both in dollars and as a percentage of his net worth.) And if he’s done anything uniquely awful with the residue, I haven’t heard about it. He married for love. He did not get contact lenses or shoe lifts or plastic surgery to look more like Diana Ross. As multibillionaires go, he seems a pretty decent guy. Okay, he made those billions by exploiting the creative work of others, and paying them bean
s for it—but what billionaire didn’t?
There were some excellent arguments for breaking up Microsoft’s monopoly. (You remember how much cheaper and easier making a phone call became right after they broke up Ma Bell, right?) But if we go that route, let it not be simply because we want to see old Bill get one in the eye. I’m not sure the man has it coming.
“Fool, fool, back to the beginning is the rule—”
FIRST PRINTED JANUARY 2000
TIME WAS, A SCIENCE FICTION WRITER could be presumed not to be a Luddite. But times have changed. I could probably name six—successful ones!—who openly despise science and its whole ethos, loathe sf and its entire pantheon; several seem to have entered the field for the specific purpose of sassing Robert A. Heinlein. (Now that it’s safe.). I myself am obviously an unreconstructed hippie, and I majored in English. So first let me summarize my anti-Luddite credentials:
Not one of my seventeen science fiction novels (and no more than a handful of my very earliest short stories) is set in a depressing future. The bulk of my short fiction, beginning with my very first sale to Ben Bova, originally appeared in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, fondly known in the field then and now as The One With Rivets—or Ben’s next magazine, OMNI. I owned a 512K Macintosh (a “Fat” Mac!) before they hit the street, having wheedled one out of Apple Canada as a Celebrity Endorsement. I think anyone who says phonograph records sound better than CDs is kidding himself, I’d rather we burned uranium than oil or coal or gas and I think within this century nanotechnology will make everyone immortal and ultimately rich. (Or destroy the race. No third choice. But I’m very optimistic.) I’m alive today because of surgical procedures that were sf when I was born. I’m as far from being a Luddite as I think it makes sense to get. I like good technology…what little of it there is.
The Crazy Years Page 21