and now, for something completely different

background entertainment: Nova (PBS), "The Sinking City of Venice"

Money is a good thing, most of us will agree. Since the majority of human societies have moved on from the barter system, money is in fact nearly essential for survival. Some of us have gone "back to the land," but from time to time even those lucky souls have need of cash for one thing or another.

The problem with money is that once you get a lot of it, I mean a real lot of it, sometimes you get obsessed with it.

Perhaps you recall Lord Acton's quote, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." In our society, money equals power.

Microsoft has an awful lot of money, and their business practices have been called into question time and again in recent years. Lord Acton's quote comes to mind, and rightly so.

Within the United States, at least, the majority of people still seem blissfully satisfied with the status quo, running their Micro$oft software, paying ever higher prices for it, and often even having to call technical support to get codes to unlock software they already own because they did something as simple as adding more memory or an extra hard drive to their computer. You see, by making this hardware change, the Micro$oft programs now think that they are on a different computer! Oh no! Potential software piracy!

You see, I've lived through this B.S., and in fact the last time I had to call in to have Micro$haft Office unlocked, I was told that if I called again I'd have to pay for a new copy. (I've called three times in two years.)

A little background. I tinker with my computers a lot. I add memory, I add larger hard drives, I replace dead floppy drives, I've replaced motherboards, replaced numerous sound and video cards.

The first time I had to call about M$ Office, I had just built a new PC from scratch to replace the old dinosaur that held the original installation. It was still on the same hard drive, but it knew that the rest of the computer was different. I don't like that.

The second time, I had installed it on my new notebook PC; I migrated all of my Office documents to my notebook and uninstalled Office from the desktop PC, which was now running Linux (and thus had no use for M$ Office). OK, in this case, I can understand having to get an activation code; it was a genuine re-install of the software.

The third time - this one really pissed me off - I added a single 256MB memory card to my notebook. The first time I tried to run Excel, I got the all-too-familiar "you'd better register, or some guys are coming" message.

According to Micro$loth, you need to make "a significant hardware change" for the software to detect a difference in your system. Call me overly sensitive if you will, but I don't consider adding a single memory card a "significant hardware change."

The operator at M$ was very rude. She told me that I had made too many requests for activation codes - I had been upfront enough to give my name and address every time, though they do not require you to - and I would not be given another one if I called back. I explained the minor change I had made to my system, but she was unsympathetic.

I use OpenOffice now. I have it on my Windows and Linux boxes. It reads and writes Microschlecht files; works great, always; it's Open Source, and free; I keep my files on my server, and can edit them from either Windows or Linux, from any machine on my home network. No license fees, no nasty operators.

What has Steve Ballmer been smoking? Hmmm ...



By the way, the rest of the world is sick of Microsoft too.