I know it started long before MicroSoft came on the scene, but I blame Bill Gates for making it into the standard business model it has become today... and thus, a model for anything else to which it sticks.

WordPerfect was a wonderful program. In fact, it was an actual program-- even the DOS version-- not a bunch of crappy macros strung together to dumb down an application for those who were too lazy to learn how to either program or use the real thing!

Worse, though... Gates knew that his products (all of them perhaps) were not as good as others on the market, but did he try to improve the programming? No, he chose instead to twist arms as a marketing ploy to increase his sales, a more fitting challenge, perhaps. After all, any bozo could sell a really good product. It takes a real genius to sell a piece of crap. And make folks ask for more.

There! Now, I feel a little bit better... I have to repeat some variation of that rant every so often.

I live in a 92 year-old house that I love. I also own an iPhone, which is as aesthetically pleasing as an ivory netsuke, yet will disappear into the maw of the recycler long before it ever wears out. This is a much more complicated discussion than we have time for.

I read an article recently, perhaps in the Economist, about the terrible toll taken on the Japanese economy by their reluctance to live in houses previously occupied by others. It was astonishing. These are the same people who take nine months to make a sword, and keep it for four or five generations.

What do I know?

Yes, I did.

True story.

Some years ago I was helping a non-profit (that provides services to mentally retarded adults) write grants -- one of the bigger fish denied us, and at a meeting of the board I sniped that the grant-denier was an outfit of "niggardly jerks."

OMG. Jaws dropped. Eyes went all round. An uncomfortable silence ensued.

So...I began to explain what the word means, and more importantly, to what it holds no relationship. And could tell I was in an "to excuse is to accuse" situation and so then shut up.

Jebbie: My sins are many and the deepest crimson, but for what am I forgiven this time?

Truly, I feel your pain. Then again, there was that professor who said that Muhammad didn't shave his armpits, because it wasn't the custom in his time, and he hadn't yet become the Prophet. The professor wound up on death row, courtesy of the local zealots. You, my dear, were lucky.

Don't do a column on Obama and Tony Rezko without talking with Jane Hamsher first.

I've been reading Taylor Marsh's posts on both Clinton and Obama. In fact, there was one particularly lengthy one on Obama (and Rezko) a little while ago. I think I posted that link before, but here it is again:

http://taylormarsh.com/archives_view.php?id=26871

Taylor has some pretty good posts up now, too, about Feb 5th's results.

Planned obsolescence is overall a huge negative both for the environment and for the consumer. We still have and use solid wood furniture that my wife's parents bought in the 1950's and it is demonstrably superior to almost anything you can get in a furniture store today, the great majority of which falls apart well within a decade and then must be replaced with yet more cheaply made, formaldehyde emitting particle board crap.

America has become the land of waste and we shall eventually pay dearly for our profligate ways.

Funny you should mention that. I just got done with a scientific conference, and it was an amazing shift from several years ago. First off, it was dominated by Europeans. It seems it is more expensive for an American to travel across the U.S. and stay for a week in a hotel than for a European to travel from Europe and do so. The Europeans, after all, are paying in euros, and the dollar is cheap, cheap, cheap. Lots of conferencees from East Asia too. Lots of research euros, won, and yen.

So with that reworking the averages on displays, the slides were packed with information, full of formulas, interesting animations, and embedded video and standardized colors and effects. When Americans got up with their PowerPoint presentations, it looked a bit, well...third world. Avoiding formulas because they're so hard to set, crappy drawings using PowerPoint's lousy primitives, dumb cartoon clip art. Science written in the 8 legged essay format of a business plan.

The influence of 7 years of loss of pre-eminence in American research to too much business focus, even the phony entrepreneurship of the academic community trying to suck up to corporate funding, the antique interfaces that an unpunished monopoly gets away with selling to our market, the inability to pay to go to a conference due to high travel costs and a collapsed dollar. We look tawdry. Lucky for me I used beamer because for once I had a choice. But I also used Illustrator, the god of illustration packages here, and the piss poor help functions and lack of technical drawing support that Adobe gets away with is just shocking -- they never upgrade the lowly Illustrator when Photoshop and Premiere are the hot items for CG. And they last thought about competition or trying to excel in the 1990s, it seems.

But for a contrasting viewpoint go look at the NYT. They think that Microsoft-Yahoo will create competition that will be good for Google's search engine market. Apparently, competition is when monopoly behemoths divide a market in two.

My apologies, I did not think either of you would react so strongly. But I enjoyed your replies, so thank you both.

Ondelette, I am a bit puzzled by the beat frequencies. Are you saying that it is necessary to have the frequencies above, say 20 KHz, in the playback system because these tones can beat in the ear and thus non-linearly generate lower frequency tones that are audible? Do you have a reference?