8:30 AM Like Tom, I live in a rational area. Did the rest of you have fun with our mild jet lag? <G> All the problems, none of the free booze.

As you can see, I am NOT in North Carolina. Thank God. They hold mornings way too early there. After two solid 16 hour days, I discovered the root cause of the problem - someone on the other end with an inability to understand simple declarative sentences and follow directions. I should have known. I may eventually be going anyway, but for now at least, I get to stay here and call the last two days of last week a waste of my time. Joy.

Speaking of which, I really did mean to mention on Thursday that there most likely wouldn't be a post on Friday. I forgot. Ooops.

I finally got the home network working as I wanted it. The server is (currently, but that's another story) a Pentium 166 running Mandrake Linux. It's running a solid firewall, with VERY few open services, as a good firewall should be. The most fun, though, is the inside. I've got a nice little Linksys hub running (Ooooh! Pretty lights!) with everything routed through that. Since I will shortly be taking a laptop back and forth between here and home, I wanted to be able to run the laptop with a minimum of fuss, so I needed a DHCP server. It was surprisingly simple to set up, helped enormously by this document from the Linux Documentation Project. It's without qualification the best "how to set up a network" document I've ever seen. It's written for RedHat 6.x, but it worked very well for Mandrake as well, and I found only a few things that may or may not work on other distributions.

And now I have to go work for a living. Later.

8:00 AM Hmmm. Do I really need to tell you why today is a bad day for the IT industry? No? Too bad. My page, I'll say what I want. <SEG>

Having read through most of the documents available on yesterday's decision against Microsoft (I was up most of the night nursing a sick server) and I find myself astounded at the arrogance and stupidity of the decision.

Did you know that YOU - yes, you and you and even you - were harmed by Microsoft's bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows? Gosh. With all these cheap set-top boxes and thin Internet clients coming out on the market, I'd say Microsoft could make a pretty good claim on a browser being an essential part of the modern operating system. How else would you get it? Download it? But you don't have a browser...

I bet we were harmed by Microsoft's introduction of integrated networking, too. I mean, my God, have they no shame? Making networking easy? Those arrogant buffoons!

The key point of the decision - such as it is - seems to be that Microsoft has stifled innovation and prevented competitors from emerging in the marketplace, which therefore (according to the Department of Justice) harms consumers. Hmm. OK.

1. I'm sure Microsoft would like to think they're a monopoly. I'll even go so far as to agree that, effectively, they are a monopoly in the general-purpose consumer PC market.
2. How is ANYTHING Microsoft has done to "prevent the emergence of true competition" worse than the message the government is sending right now? Hell, let's rewrite the lessons we teach our children to fit the new reality:
   • "In America, kids, if you work hard for what you want, the DOJ will punish you."
   • "Honesty and hard work might earn you respect, but frivolous lawsuits win the game."
   • "It's not whether you win or lose, it's whatever the judge decides."
   • "Life is like a box of chocolates - you buy the box, eat one, and have the rest taken away in the name of an equitable lifestyle for all."
   • "When life gives you lemons, sue the Fruit Growers Association and the State of Florida."
   • "When the going gets tough, the tough get sued."
   • "In America, anyone can grow up to be President - so long as you were born here, white, male, religious, photogenic, full of charisma (money doesn't hurt) and the intelligence of your average toaster oven." (Sorry, had to throw that one in there.)
3. Finally - in bold print now, so no one misses it - WHO THE HELL GAVE THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE PERMISSION TO DECIDE WHAT IS GOOD FOR ME AS A CONSUMER?

Those of you sitting out there in front of your Linux terminal gloating and laughing about the downfall of "Micro$oft" - grow up. It could happen to RedHat. Hmmm, let's see... I think I'm threatened because RedHat is defrauding me - and, by extension, every other consumer in America, nay, the World - out of my hard-earned money by selling me something I could get for free. Granted, they're giving it away, too, but you don't understand - I have to be protected because I'm too stupid to know better. You are too. Don't think so? Ask the government. They're here to help.

I've been trying to remember a story from elementary school; it was a short story, involving the near-future of the United States. In it, citizens are artificially handicapped - the beautiful are forced to wear masks, the strong to be chained, the graceful to wear oversize boots and stiff clothing, the intelligent forced to listen to random noise to make it impossible to think - in the name of equity. In the end, two beautiful young dancers are executed for the crime of being better by an official - who needs no handicaps - with a shotgun.

Good bye, Microsoft. It was a beautiful dance, for all its missed steps. But here comes the shotgun...

9:00 AM Methinks I struck (or smacked the heck out of) a chord...

First, thanks to Richard F. Booth for being the first to (correctly) identify the story I was thinking of as Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s "Harrison Bergeron." There's an online version of the story here that's pretty close to my memory of the story.

A couple of comments that I got which seem to be representative of most of the email I received (excepting only the "pawn of Micro$oft" flames)

-----Original Message-----
From: Gary M. Berg [mailto:Gary_Berg@BunkeBerg.com]
Sent: Tuesday, April 04, 2000 11:09 AM
To: matt@rearviewmirror.org
Subject: Microsoft decision

Matt,

Mostly I agree with you. To me the things that MS has done that might harm me are some of the bundling deals they at least used to make - offering a much lower price if the hardware vendor sells a copy of DOS/Windows with every PC they sell. Which makes it harder to buy hardware without an OS. But I believe MS already got kicked in the teeth and quit that.

The other thing that they can do is to sell software at a loss to gain market share. But I don't think they did that with IE - and a browser seems pretty much like standard OS fare to me anymore. Gosh, even Linux distributions come bundled with a browser these days.

"Do not meddle in the affairs of SysAdmins, for they are quick to anger, and lack subtlety."

10:30 AM Had to go away for a bit, now I'm back...

After some email conversations with various people, including fellow Daynoters Sjon Svenson and Dan Bowman, I did some thinking on the matter. (Before that point, I wasn't exactly shooting from the hip, but you know what I mean...) As a result of some separate discussion with Dan, I found myself thumbing through my well-worn copy of Heinlein's "Glory Road." Although I did find what I was looking for, I also found another interesting passage; a description of American society from a supposedly outside viewpoint. It's too long to reproduce completely, but the general gist of it was that no form of government or society is "good." The forms that come closest can be of any form that isn't strictly enforced; as the character (Rufo) put it, "There has to be enough looseness in the corners for Heroes to do their work." He continued with the comment that he liked the American system; it had enough looseness to do the job and would last a long time.

Provided the looseness wasn't destroyed from the inside.

The punchline, of course, was that the remainder of the book deals with the life of a Hero in America; taxed, burdened, locked up for carrying a sword (it was a concealed weapon, being in a scabbard), harrassed by traffic, and in general restricted. Every turn, another law. My favorites were the dreams; he has a recurring dream where he's riding along a dusty road towards a castle in the distance. Sometimes, he's stopped by a little traffic cop who deals out citation after citation; other times, a little man from the IRS who wants 10% more than he has; the worst one, though, is where he rounds a bend - and 5 lanes of freeway traffic are heading straight for him.

I think Heinlein has a point. American society in particular, and most other "modern" societies in general, once had the looseness that made things work. We no longer do, and that is not the fault of the government. Oh, they've helped, certainly. ID laws, racial profiling, tax laws, laws laws laws. No help there at all. But the root cause of the problem is that we as a society have eliminated our own looseness. Frivolous lawsuits, news stories blown out of proportion, lack of privacy. Government is not the problem in eliminating privacy; they're simply the easiest target. The lack of personal respect and responsibility, there's the real problem. The culture of "it's not my fault." Blame my parents, blame society, blame schools, blame the government, Blame Canada!(TM) just don't blame me. Don't hold me responsible for my own actions. It's dangerous to teach infants and toddlers to swim - regardless of how good they are at it - because we don't want to actually WATCH our children. That's not our job. If my kid falls in the pool and drowns - blame the pool company. Blame the government for not requiring the pool company to put up a fence and guardtowers. Just don't blame me for not watching the kid - it's not my fault!

The looseness is gone, and it is our own fault.

10:00 AM Interesting few days. Lots of work, lots of reorganization, and some interesting new projects on the horizon.

More personnel questions in the land of fun and excitement. (There needs to be a sarcasm tag...) How do you normally handle internal advancement? You would think a company so concerned with hanging on to their "key people" would be more interested in promoting those people, which would make them less likely to look for that advancement elsewhere. Ah well. I guess we can't expect them to get everything right. Well, we could, it just wouldn't happen.

Busy today. Lots to do. Later.