_______________IS THERE SUCH A THING AS A SOFTWARE MONOPOLY? BY MIKE ROMANO (11/11/98)
	In his Nov. 11 article, Mike Romano reports: "No matter how little a competitor's market share, no matter that computer manufacturers testify that they have no practical alternative, Rule argues that because software distribution and marginal cost are negligible, competitors could instantly supply the entire market if Microsoft's prices became exorbitant. 'Ergo, Microsoft doesn't have monopoly power to set prices,' concludes Rule." Yes it does. It recently unilaterally increased prices for its academic customers by changing its license policies. The customers ate the increase because they have no viable alternative other than scrapping all their PCs and buying Macs. Many vendors provide "network licensing" schemes for their software, so that customers only have to buy as many licenses as they actually use. A server monitors the number of users and enforces limits. Microsoft did this also, but late last year announced it would no longer offer this, allegedly because it's "too complicated." (Not too complicated for many other vendors, who are much smaller, have less money and don't write the OS.) Because of this change, academic customers would have to buy one copy for each computer that could run it. This doesn't work very well in a networked environment, since people move around and use different computers. The schools ended up having to essentially buy copies for each potential user (faculty plus staff plus students). By paying for potential users instead of actual users, some schools were faced with software costs as much as 10 times higher than before. Microsoft even gets paid if a person on campus doesn't use Microsoft software (say, an engineer with a Unix workstation). Mr. Rule is either incorrect, or being less than truthful. -- Jonathan Hendry Chicago
_______________TOKYO SEX WARS BY KARL TARO GREENFELD (11/10/98)
	I am tired of all the salacious sex articles you've published recently. I wonder who is the bigger sell-out, Karl Greenfeld or Salon? Greenfeld wrote the sordid "Tokyo Sex Wars" just to make a quick buck to feed his heroin addiction. And Salon has been pimping us cheap sex as journalism with articles about Japanese strippers, slutting around in Greece and horrific tales of fraternity hazing. How about taking the moral high road? I thought Salon was above the sensationalism of magazines like Penthouse. -- David Swope San Francisco "Tokyo Sex Wars" was an objectionable piece by most standards, but certainly well below those that I've come to expect from Salon. I am not interested in giving Karl Greenfeld a moral lecture on drug addiction or his insidious racism, but I find his characterization of Nigerians as lumpen-headed thugs who are hired for the dimensions of their biceps and not their language ability offensive, primarily because I am Nigerian and I face these casually idiotic stereotypes regularly. -- Olayinka Fadahunsi
_______________I HUNGER FOR YOUR TOUCH: THE PASSION OF PHIL SPECTOR BY MARY ELIZABETH WILLIAMS (11/10/98)
	Brilliant Careers is a brilliant idea, and was carried off well in the Phil Spector starter. But, if ever an online magazine piece cried out for use of multimedia capability, this was it. Oh, how I'd have loved to have "River Deep, Mountain High" playing as I read. Isn't it safe to assume that all us cyberhip Salon readers have RealAudio installed? -- Douglas Milburn Bless you for Brilliant Careers. I had wished for the same kind of profile each time I read an L.A. Times essay about some great film star or singer whose life was summed up before they kicked God's bucket. Great beginnings! -- Bill Peschel Rock Hill, S.C. Your setup for the "living obituaries" column promised something different. This feature would be complete, biting and profound. So what do we get in your first obit about Phil Spector? A fan zine ode to his abundant talents. While I, too, enjoy his music, I'm afraid that Mary Elizabeth Williams failed to deliver on the promise of something more than "glossy glibness." While aiming for the shape of a whole life, she glosses over stories of Spector's madness, drug abuse and spousal abuse in a single line. And she didn't even mention his cameo in "Easy Rider." If you're going to start taking living subjects to the obituary graveyard, dig a little deeper. -- Steve Cooper
_______________CAN WE TALK? BY REBECCA BRYANT (11/10/98)
	It is ironic that Rebecca Bryant sees only contradiction in the election's rebukes to both moralizers and gay rights activists. Perhaps, instead, the electorate is actually being consistent in rejecting invasions into the arena of private and personal morality from any political direction. Bryant's desire to reach out is well-founded, but I think she should be less concerned with understanding the extremists on the religious right and more concerned with understanding the great majority of us who have absolutely no problem with affirming the dignity of gay and lesbian lives, but who have great skepticism about further expanding the authority of government bureaucrats to judge the motivations behind our actions. -- David Lichtenberg Rebecca Bryant mentions an anti-discrimination ordinance that passed in South Portland, Maine, while gay rights legislation elsewhere failed. Part of the reason it passed was because of a 16-page insert that appeared in the Portland newspapers a week or two before the elections. The insert was an advertisement for an anti-gay organization that alleged, among other things, that it was standard practice for gay and lesbian couples to ingest the urine and feces of their partners. The insert was not labeled as an advertisement, and it outraged many people, both gay and straight, in the greater Portland area. This illustrates the polarization of the anti-discrimination argument that Bryant describes but from the opposite direction. As we know from many of the other elections nationwide, outrage to voters is like free beer to partygoers -- an extremely motivating force. What Republicans have learned (the hard way, I might add) is that whoever is most out of touch with the huge mass of mostly moderate voters loses. In the case of South Portland, it happened to be those who opposed the ordinance. Perhaps gay rights activists can learn the same lesson, not only to use their opponents' rhetoric against them, but to also engage in rational and open-minded discourse, not with extremists, as Bryant suggests, but with moderates. -- Alexandria O'Keefe-Dobkowski Memphis
_______________OUT OF ACADEMIA BY ANNALEE NEWITZ (11/06/98)
	I write to commend "Professor" Newitz on her article about alternative careers to teaching. I think her assessment of hidden elitism in the graduate world -- combined with a reluctance to discuss academia as a job as well as a vocation -- is, from the comments of my grad student friends, right on the mark. Ph.D.s should be out in the "real world," for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is to liven up our dying public culture that we hear so much whining about, but also to rip the dominance of public life away from the lawyers (such as, alas, myself -- though one who still reads the Latin and Greek he learned in college!) -- and MBAs with which we are afflicted. One implication of her article, however, is not mentioned: that the elitism of the schools is due in part to their academic jargon, trendiness and sometimes just weirdness, which makes even the well-intentioned doctoral student sometimes out of sync with the rest of us. I do not mean to sound like a right-wing critic, but some subjects in the humanities are easier to translate than others into nonacademic paths. -- Gerald J. Russello SALON | Nov. 16, 1998

R E C E N T L Y+| BAA BAA BLACK SHEEP BY DAVID HOROWITZ

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