How to heal

Dave Farquhar Christianity , , ,

I had a conversation with a friend over the last couple of days. I won’t go into specifics to protect the people involved, but this friend is in the unfortunate situation of being surrounded by people with problems.
One of those people called on Tuesday night. It was a two-hour conversation. I asked how it went. Short version: The caller received a long list of things to do that will help solve the problem. But my friend wasn’t optimistic and fully expects to hear back from this person again in a couple of weeks, miserable as ever, and having not done a single thing on the list.

Someone else in this person’s life is facing a horrible disease. This disease wasn’t my dad’s area of specialty, but it was an area of interest for him. He wrote about a form of the disease in the Journal of the American Osteopathic Association in 1979. I wished aloud that Dad was still alive so I could get his opinion on what this person needs.

Then I realized it doesn’t take Dad’s Bachelor’s degrees in physics, chemistry and biology and his Doctorate of Osteopathy and his 23 years of practicing medicine to understand what this second person needs. I don’t know much about this second person’s needs, but I saw a common thread between the first and the second.

Neither of them want help enough.

I’ve been there. I battled depression from the ages of about 14 to 21. I wasn’t willing to do anything about it until spring of 1995. I was used to it and I’d always managed to live with it. Part of me believed I thrived off it. My favorite writers were always depressed, so to me, being pessimistic and gloomy all the time was an asset. And I still believe to this day that some of the best stuff I ever wrote was written during a mood swing. I knew–or at least suspected–that I had a problem, but I wanted that problem.

Then one day, that problem became too much to bear. I woke up one morning and realized I couldn’t live like that anymore.

I relapsed a couple of years later. You see, I hadn’t wanted the depression to go away. I just wanted a milder form of it. Or I wanted to be able to invite it back over for a visit, because it was my crutch. I was fortunate. When it came back, it came back harder. It crushed me under its weight. I couldn’t get to work on time anymore, and when I did get there, I was unproductive. Most of the people I worked with couldn’t stand to be around me. My friends from that time period felt sorry for me, but I only have one friend left from those days. Some of those friendships would have gone away anyway, but I think part of it was just that it was too much work to be my friend right about then.

I knew life couldn’t go on that way. And in both cases, getting help was a lot of work. I came away from my therapy sessions with more homework than I got from some of my college-level classes. And the work was harder than a lot of my 300-level Journalism classes.

When you’re lurking in the Valley of the Shadow of whatever, and it took a culmination of events that took place over a lifetime to get you there, you can’t expect a two-hour phone conversation to change it. And you can’t expect it to go away on its own.

But I wanted to beat it badly enough. I was willing to do my homework. I wanted it gone, at any cost. If that meant I’d never write again, so be it. Better to be unpublished and happy than published and miserable. And–this will come as a shock to some, and as an “oh, duh!” to others–once I was rid of my problem, I found I didn’t need it. I went on to publish a book that went so far as to be Amazon.com’s #1 seller in Canada for a couple of weeks–and the concept was something I thought of after therapy, so it’s not like I developed it in depression and saved it up for afterward–and then I published a handful of magazine articles across the Atlantic.

So take it from me. You can turn around, even when you think you have everything to lose by facing your problem and getting it fixed.

So how do you pray for someone who doesn’t want help?

I think it helps to remember that there is one prayer that God will always answer yes to, no matter who prays it, no matter when they pray it, and no matter how they pray it. When someone says get lost, God complies immediately. And when our lives without Him become so miserable that we can’t take it anymore and we want Him back, He’ll come back even more quickly than He left, if that’s possible. But I think those are the only two prayers that are guaranteed to be answered with a yes.

When a person doesn’t want help from you or me or their doctor or their therapist, they don’t want help from God either. And it’s not really in God’s character to butt in uninvited and give unwanted help to somebody. It seems like sometimes He intervenes anyway, but I have to wonder if it isn’t because His back was against the wall and He had to do it for somebody else’s sake. (This is just me talking; don’t get any ideas about me being a prophet or anything.)

So how do you effectively pray for someone in that situation?

I think it’s pretty simple. They have to want help. They have to want it enough to be willing to change. I knew I was on the right track when I wanted my depression gone so badly that I didn’t care if I ever wrote effectively again. I was willing to pay any price to beat my problem, including giving up the most important part of my identity.

You can’t truly be helped until your problem is so big and so crushing that you’re willing to do absolutely anything to get rid of it. My friend Mark once said that nobody knows that they have the will to survive until they really need it. I’d rather say nobody knows that they have the will to survive until they really want and need it. Mark would probably agree. He didn’t say it in so many words, but I got the distinct impression that he didn’t really want the will to survive until he had to pick out his own coffin. The problem wasn’t real to him until then. But something about picking out a coffin did it for him. But once the problem became real and he wanted to beat it, he did. “There’s no way… I was going to let them put me in that box,” he told me. And even though it was more than 10 years after the fact, he still had the determination of a marathon runner in his eyes when he talked about it.

So when a person doesn’t want help, I think it’s premature to pray for healing. Pray for the problem to become real to the person who has it. Pray for the problem to become crushing if necessary. Pray for something to happen that will make the person want help. At any price. It hurts to pray like that for someone you love. Even when you know God loves that person more than you do.

I know, as Christians we’re supposed to pray for miracles. But you know what? I’ve spent a lot of time around apathetic people. I think being cured of apathy is a bigger miracle than being cured of almost any disease. Praying that way still leaves plenty of room for God to work, which opens the door to lots of other nice possibilities, like praying with that person be so much better than merely praying for that person. And of course, that’s the perfect time to pray for that second miracle.

If I had my own Linux distribution

Dave Farquhar Linux , , , , , , , ,

I found an interesting editorial called If I had my own Linux Distro. He’s got some good ideas but I wish he’d known what he was talking about on some others.
He says it should be based on FreeBSD because it boots faster than Linux. I thought everyone knew that Unix boot time has very little to do with the kernel? A kernel will boot more slowly if it’s trying to detect too much hardware, but the big factor in boot time is init, not the kernel. BSD’s init is much faster than SysV-style init. Linux distros that use BSD-style inits (Slackware, and optionally, Debian, and, as far as I understand, Gentoo) boot much faster than systems that use a traditional System V-style init. I recently converted a Debian box to use runit, and the decrease in boot time and increase in available memory at boot was noticeable. Unfortunately now the system doesn’t shut down properly. But it proves the concept.

He talks about installing every possible library to eliminate dependency problems. Better idea: Scrap RPM and use apt (like Debian and its derivatives) or a ports-style system like Gentoo. The only time I’ve seen dependency issues crop up in Debian was on a system that had an out of date glibc installed, in which case you solve the issue by either keeping the distribution up to date, or updating glibc prior to installing the package that fails. These problems are exceedingly rare, by the way. In systems like Gentoo, they don’t happen because the installation script downloads and compiles everything necessary.

Debian’s and Gentoo’s solution is far more elegant than his proposal: Installing everything possible isn’t going to solve your issue when glibc is the problem. Blindly replacing glibc was a problem in the past. The problems that caused that are hopefully solved now, but they’re beyond the control of any single distribution, and given the choice between having a new install stomp on glibc and break something old or an error message, I’ll take the error message. Especially since I can clear the issue with an apt-get install glibc. (Then when an old application breaks, it’s my fault, not the operating system’s.)

In all fairness, dependency issues crop up in Windows all the time: When people talk about DLL Hell, they’re talking about dependency problems. It’s a different name for the same problem. On Macintoshes, the equivalent problem was extensions conflicts. For some reason, people don’t hold Linux to the same standard they hold Windows and Macs to. People complain, but when was the last time you heard someone say Windows or Mac OS wasn’t ready for the desktop, or the server room, or the enterprise, or your widowed great aunt?

He also talks about not worrying about bloat. I take issue with that. When it’s possible to make a graphical Linux distribution that fits on a handful of floppies, there’s no reason not to make a system smooth and fast. That means you do a lot of things. Compile for an advanced architecture and use the -O3 options. Use an advanced compiler like CGG 3.2 or Intel’s ICC 7.0 while you’re at it. Prelink the binaries. Use a fast-booting init and a high-performance system logger. Mount filesystems with the highest-performing options by default. Partition off /var and /tmp so those directories don’t fragment the rest of your filesystem. Linux can outperform other operating systems on like hardware, so it should.

But when you do those things, then it necessarily follows that people are going to want to run your distribution on marginal hardware, and you can’t count on marginal hardware having a 20-gig hard drive. It’s possible to give people the basic utilities, XFree86, a reasonably slick window manager or environment, and the apps everyone wants (word processing, e-mail, personal finance, a web browser, instant messaging, a media player, a graphics viewer, a few card games, and–I’ll say it–file sharing) in a few hundred megabytes. So why not give it to them?

I guess all of this brings up the nicest thing about Linux. All the source code to anything desirable and all the tools are out there, so a person with vision can take them and build the ultimate distribution with it.

Yes, the idea is tempting.

Outages

Dave Farquhar General , , , ,

Yes, I’m still alive and so is my server. Unfortunately (note to self: cue up “I Hate My Frickin’ ISP” by Todd Rundgren in the background) Southwestern Bell seems intent on proving my theory that their technicians’ favorite thing to do when bored is to run around unplugging stuff to see what happens.
What usually ends up happening is my Speedstream DSL modem gets hopelessly confused and I fall off the ‘Net. Although this weekend the problem wasn’t that my modem couldn’t connect, it’s that I couldn’t authenticate. Hello? How could I have changed my password? I was offline!

Now, maybe my Speedstream is a piece of junk. Maybe Southwestern Bell is a piece of junk. Were I in the habit of looking around in toilets, I’m pretty sure I could find a better modem and ISP. Unfortunately, I signed a one-year contract. It expires in October. I look forward to telling them to find another sucker.

Meanwhile, yes, I’ve been on a bit of an unannounced sabbatical. What happened? Well, an editor on a power trip over at Wikipedia turned me off to all writing for a time (Zoe, if you’re reading this, just because you don’t know how to write or research doesn’t mean you need to take it out on the world, OK?) and then I found myself swimming in a video editing project that made me believe anew in curses, because I don’t think I’ve seen so many things go wrong since a weekend about four years ago when Steve DeLassus and I tried to install about 4 different flavors of Linux on his 486SX/20 and turn it into a router. When I finally put that project to rest, my leisure activities tended to drift towards anything that didn’t involve a computer.

So I’ve been tired and just haven’t had the energy or will to write much or deal with questions. It happens sometimes.

I guess the Wikipedia snipe deserves a little clarification. I love the project idea. I love writing history. Unfortunately, the project is tainted by several editors who delete anything they don’t like, often without much reason. An article I contributed to about osteopathy garnered a comment from an overzealous editor saying the article raised more questions than it answered and if those weren’t answered he was going to delete it. Well, duh! A lot of things raise questions. If osteopathy didn’t raise any questions, then allopathy (the medical techniques practiced by your friendly neighborhood M.D.) wouldn’t exist. The more you know, the more you realize you don’t know, and if you don’t understand that you really have no business associating with anything with the letters “pedia” in its name.

Working along with one or two others, we were able to answer enough questions to save that article. But I was mad. The osteopathy article had minor problems and was on the chopping block, yet the article on Joseph Smith was so biased and incomplete as to be unusable, but was being ignored?

At one point I got into the habit of checking the historical events of the given day and looking for holes in the linked articles. It was fun, I learned a lot, and I think some articles improved for the better. I fondly recall writing about Joseph Pulitzer (as in the Pulitzer Prize). He’s a very misunderstood figure in history. On one hand, he was one of the biggest innovators in journalism, ever. On the other hand, he and William Randolph Hearst pretty much created the Spanish-American War just to sell newspapers, which is despicable. (Hearst falls a bit lower on the slimeball scale though; at least Pulitzer didn’t ever openly advocate the assassination of a president.) I came out of that endeavor with more respect for Pulitzer than I’d had before though.

But one day I found a photograph of Booker T. Washington at the Library of Congress and uploaded it. It got deleted when I neglected to answer a query as to its copyright status after 24 hours. Was the picture copyrighted? Very highly unlikely. Washington died at the turn of the 20th century and any published work prior to 1922 is now in the public domain. The Library of Congress isn’t willing to guarantee that particular picture is in the public domain, but they provide a huge, archival-quality TIFF for download, suitable for commercial printing use. So they must be pretty certain. You think the Library of Congress wants DMCA-related legal problems? William Jefferson Clinton may be above the law, but the Library of Congress isn’t.

Yet it turned into a controversy. A huge controversy. That particular editor wasn’t interested in improving the quality of Wikipedia; she was on an ego trip. Somehow she got gratification from teaching me and the person who re-uploaded my image (and then replaced it with another one) a lesson.

Meanwhile, an unattributed image of Britney Spears remains.

Of course there’s another lesson to be learned: When you’re trying to be an open-content encyclopedia, you need to attract people. You attract people by having lots of articles. The more articles you have, the more people read you, and the more people you have reading you, the more readers you’ll be able to convert into contributors. The Wikipedia would be a much better place with that editor writing articles and not harassing people who are also doing their best to make it a better place.

I do expect to return someday, but when I do, I’ll be writing the biographies of people like Calvin Schiraldi. Few people besides Red Sox fans care about Calvin Schiraldi, but that’s the point. I’ll get left alone if I linger in the obscure and I don’t upload images. I’m less valuable there, but we’ve already seen what happens when I think about value.

But in the shorter term, I need to find a paying gig. I’ve got a couple of leads on that. I can really use the money, but besides that, it’ll be nice to do some writing for magazines again. For me, writing stopped being about money at about age 19.

An easy way to improve audio quality

Dave Farquhar Video

A lot of people think audio doesn’t matter when they edit video. They’re wrong. If you notice the audio, something’s wrong.
An easy way to improve audio quality is to normalize it, which makes the volume more consistent. Windows users can do it with Normalizer, a GPL command-line utility (a GUI is available). Linux users can use Normalize.

Normalizing still won’t make bad audio sound good, but it will at least make bad audio sound better.

What brand of hard drive should I buy?

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , ,

LinuxWorld posted an article today on how to install another hard disk in Linux. The guide’s pretty good from the software side.
The advice is slightly questionable from the hardware side. Author Joe Barr states that it doesn’t matter which connector on the cable you use, as long as one drive is jumpered master and one drive is slave. For years that was true, but you’re actually supposed to put the master on the end and the slave in the middle. Usually it doesn’t matter. But the newer your drive is, and the newer your controller is, and the longer your cable is, the more likely it is to matter. You also shouldn’t attach a drive to the middle and leave the top connector hanging. Again, you can usually get away with it–and people have gotten away with it for more than a decade–but the likelihood of not getting away with it increases with every passing day, as hard drives get faster and faster, and thus more and more touchy.

What happens when you do it wrong? Usually it works anyway. Sometimes it’ll be flaky. And sometimes it won’t work at all. Don’t you love predictability? So it’s really best to follow the rules unless the layout of your case makes that impossible.

But the main reason I’m writing is because the usual expected flamewar erupted in the discussion thread. Barr bought a Western Digital drive. Predictably, someone responded that Western Digitals are junk. Then someone responded to the response and said Maxtors are junk but Seagates are good. Then someone responded to the response to the response and said Seagates used to be junk. Before you knew it, every brand of hard drive on the market–IBM, Samsung, Seagate, Maxtor, Western Digital–had been trashed. Curiously, except for Fujitsu. But Fujitsu recently had a big scandal with a failure rate on one particular model of drive higher than 90 percent. (Meanwhile, my own experience tells me Fujitsu SCSI drives are fantastic.) And lately, Samsung drives have been getting praise all over the place. So what gives?

The problem with these statements is there’s a degree of truth to all of them. There was a time when Maxtor hard drives were the worst thing you could buy. Ever heard this joke? Fast, reliable, and cheap: Pick two. Well, in the early to mid-’90s, Maxtors weren’t fast, they weren’t reliable, and they weren’t consistently any cheaper than any other brand. The only reason to buy them was because the familiar red boxes were everywhere. The only place you couldn’t buy them was the corner gas station. Well, in St. Louis at least.

During the same time frame, Seagate had similar troubles. Their drives were expensive, but they weren’t fast. I didn’t see enough of them to get any kind of handle on reliability because I was so turned off by their price and underachieving performance that I wouldn’t go near them, and neither would anyone else I knew.

In the mid to late ’90s, it was Western Digital’s turn to go 0 for 3 on fast, reliable, and cheap. From 1997 to about 2000, I saw more dead Western Digitals than every other brand, combined. And I saw a lot of drives come across my desk.

With its GXP series a couple of years ago, IBM had the fastest drives on the market, and they were also among the cheapest. But they were exceedingly touchy, and became notorious for premature failure.

I bought a handful of Samsung drives over the years, never willingly, because of their terrible reputation. They’ve been reliable. And when you look at reviews of their recent drives, they run cool and they’re reasonably fast. They’re not necessarily the fastest on the market at any given time, but they may very well be the best combination of fast, reliable, and cheap right now.

I’ve been around long enough and seen enough that every time I see unqualified statements like “Western Digital drives are junk,” or “Maxtor drives are junk,” or “Seagate and Maxtor drives are the best,” whether it’s from some end user in a discussion forum or a professional hardware reviewer, I get suspicious. The end user is probably basing those conclusions on a too-small sample size, and the professional reviewer probably isn’t doing the necessary homework.

Let me tell you why.

We know how to build a completely reliable hard drive, one that will run for 10 years and never have problems. But it would cost too much money, its capacity would be too small, and it would be too slow. The technology in hard drives changes with each generation, and the company with the best technology is generally the one that produces the most reliable drives. But the most advanced technology isn’t always the best technology, as IBM found out with its GXPs. The GXPs were too far ahead of their time.

It should come as no surprise that when Maxtor was producing junk drives, they weren’t in very good shape financially. There wasn’t much money for R&D. When Maxtor’s financial situation improved, its R&D improved, and its drives became faster and more reliable.

There was a time when someone could ask me what hard drive to buy and I could give them a brand and model number that would give them the best combination of fast, reliable and cheap. But my newest computer at home was built in the summer of 2001 and I very rarely work on desktop systems anymore–I’m a server guy these days, and I have been for the past 18 months. If I’m honest with myself and with the person asking the question, a lot can change in 18 months. In 2001, as far as I could tell, the best drive to buy was a Maxtor and the worst to buy was a Western Digital.

I can go with my old prejudices and continue to dispense that advice indefinitely. But there was a time when that was reversed. And what about Samsung? They’re quiet and they run cool, which is a good sign, they’re very affordable, and while they’re almost never the fastest, they never get blown out of the water by benchmarks.

The best thing to do is to talk with someone who actually works with the equipment on a regular basis, and in large volumes. I want the opinions of someone who speaks from recent knowledge and experience, not someone speaking from old prejudices or a gravy train of free hardware. That means I’d call up a couple of former coworkers who still do some desktop support, or who at least handle the RMAs for subordinates who do desktop support. I’d ask them whose drives have been failing the most lately, and if they notice much performance difference between brands. Benchmarks are more precise, but they can also be fooled. If you can’t notice the difference in the real world I really don’t care about it. If you do notice the difference, I don’t care much about percentages. It’s subjective, but as long as I trust the people whose opinions I’m soliciting, that doesn’t matter much to me.

And after talking to a couple of people who actually handle a few drives a week, I’d go plunk down my cash.

Linux gets more attractive on the Xbox

Dave Farquhar Linux , , , , , , ,

There’s been another milestone in getting Linux running on Microsoft’s Xbox game console. It’s now possible to get it going if you bridge a couple of solder points on the motherboard to enable flashing the unit’s BIOS, then you use the James Bond 007 game and a save game that exploits a buffer overflow, and with a few more tricks, you can unlock the hard drive, put it in a Linux PC, install Linux, then move the drive back to the Xbox and turn it into a cheap Linux box.

Read more

This is a so-you-know-I’m-alive post

Dave Farquhar Baseball, Saving money , , , , , ,

I don’t expect my daily doings to be interesting to anyone. I mean, c’mon. Who wants to read ordinary? But since I haven’t posted in forever, I’ll post what I’ve got, which is this.I’m getting a lawnmower today. That’s good because I can’t get anyone to mow my itsy-bitsy yard for less than $25. For that kind of money, I’ll do it myself.

A friend is coming over this afternoon to help me install a programmable thermostat. That’s good because my utility bills are out of control. If I’d done it in December, I’d be about $400 richer right now. I’m also looking at some other creative ways to knock utility costs down, like compact fluorescent light bulbs, which use about 1/5 the wattage of a standard bulb and have about 10 times the life expectancy. They claim to save you about $30 in energy costs over their life expectancy. Multiply that by the 20 or so bulbs around the house that they’d be suitable replacements for, and you’re talking some real money.

My DSL connection has been sporadic the last couple of days. It seems to finally be stable. I’d get better reliability by upgrading to a static IP, but that won’t happen before summer. I’m still dealing with those unexpected expenses that creep up on new homeowners, and, well, I’m young. I don’t have the kind of resources someone 10 years older than me would have.

If I can find a steady writing gig, that’ll help.

I’ve got a couple of tape backup issues to look at for work. And that’s pretty much my day.

I wrote what I thought was a decent piece on bleeding-edge hardware. But somehow I managed not to save it. I may get time to rewrite it tomorrow, depending on how productive I am today.

Oh, and, tee hee hee, my Royals are 8-0. The last team that started the season 8-0 won the World Series. It was the 1990 Cincinnati Reds, who beat an awfully good Oakland Athletics team. And there’s reason for hope: The Royals have been doing it without Carlos Beltran (leg injury), and yesterday they won in spite of half the team battling the flu. Beltran and Mike Sweeney are the Royals’ only star players.

But the 1990 Reds only had two bona fide stars too, in Eric Davis and Barry Larkin.

Do I really think my Royals will win the World Series? Not yet. But I think this is going to be a fun year.

What needs to happen for Linux to make it on the desktop

Dave Farquhar Linux , , , , , , ,

I saw an editorial at Freshmeat that argued that there’s actually too much software for Linux. And you know what? It has a point.
I’m sure some people will be taken aback by that. The number of titles that run under Windows must number into six digits, and it’s hard to walk into a computer store and buy Linux software.

But I agree with his argument, or at least most of it. Back in my Amiga days, the first thing people used to ask me was, “What, do you not like software?” Then I asked why they felt the need to have their choice of 10 different word processors, especially when they’d just buy pirate Microsoft Word or WordPerfect anyway. (Let’s face it: Large numbers of people chose PCs in the early 90s over superior architectures was because they could pirate software from work. Not everyone. Maybe not even the majority. But a lot.) I argued that one competent software title in each category I needed was all I wanted or needed. And for the most part, the Amiga had that, and the software was usually cheaper than the Mac or PC equivalent.

Linux is the new Amiga. Mozilla is a far better Web browser than IE, and OpenOffice provides most of the functionality of Microsoft Office XP–it provides more functionality than most people use, and while it doesn’t always load the most complex MS Office documents correctly, it does a much better job of opening slightly corrupt documents and most people don’t create very complex documents anyway. But let’s face it: Its biggest problem is it takes an eternity to load no matter how fast your computer is. If it would load faster, people would be very happy with it.

But there is nothing that provides an equivalent to a simple database like Access or Filemaker. I know, they’re toys, and MySQL is far more powerful. But end users like dumb, brain-dead databases with clicky GUI interfaces on them that they can migrate to once they realize a spreadsheet isn’t intended to do what they’re trying to do with it. Everyone’s first spreadsheet is Excel. Then someday they realize Excel wasn’t intended to do what they’re using it for. But you don’t instantly dive into Oracle. You need something in between, and Linux doesn’t really have anything for that niche.

People are constantly asking me about a WYSIWYG HTML editor for Linux as well. I stumbled across one. Its name is GINF. Yes, another stupid recursive-acronym name. GINF stands for “GINF is not Frontpage.” How helpful. What’s wrong with a descriptive name like Webpage-edit?

More importantly, what was the first non-game application that caught your fancy? For most people I know, it was Print Shop, or one of the many knockoffs of Print Shop. People love to give and receive greeting cards, and when they can pick their own fonts and graphics and write their own messages, they love it even more. Not having to drive to the store and fork over $3.95 is just a bonus. Most IT professionals have no use for Print Shop, but Linux’s lack of alternatives in that department is hurting it.

Take a computer with a CPU on the brink of obsolesence, a so-so video chipset, 128 megs of RAM and the smallest hard drive on the market, preload Linux on it along with a fast word processor that works (AbiWord, or OpenOffice Writer, except it’s not fast), a nice e-mail client/PIM (Evolution), a nice Web browser (Mozilla), and a Print Shop equivalent (bzzzt!), and a couple of card games (check Freshmeat) and you’d have a computer for the masses.

The masses do not need 385 text editors. Sysadmin types will war over vi and emacs until the end of time; one or two simple text-mode editors as alternatives will suffice, and one or two equivalents of Notepad for X will suffice.

Linux’s day will eventually arrive regardless, if only because Microsoft is learning what every monopolist eventually learns: Predatory pricing stops working once you corner the market. Then you have to raise prices or find new markets. Eventually you run out of worthwhile markets. So in order to sustain growth, you have to raise prices. Microsoft is running out of markets, so it’s going to have to raise prices. Then it will be vulnerable again, just like Apple and CP/M were vulnerable to Microsoft because their offerings cost more than Microsoft was willing to charge. And, as Microsoft showed Netscape, you can’t undercut free.

But that day will arrive sooner if it doesn’t take a week to figure out the name of the Linux equivalent of Notepad because there are 385 icons that vaguely resemble a notepad and most of them have meaningless names.