The inherent flaw in this plan is that even though people tend to enjoy clubbing their neighbors over the head, the neighbors may not necessarily enjoy the experience. They often have a tendency to fight the other guy and possibly even club him over the head, taking all of his stuff instead. Many years ago, some guy wearing a barrel and sporting a nasty bump on his head must have decided that there must be a better way of doing this, and therefore came up with some cool new gadgets with which to take some other guy's stuff. First came the idea that pointy things may be useful, followed by sharp edges, and things to toss large rocks at the other guy with (but only if you didn't want his stuff, since it would probably be in quite a few pieces after being hit by a boulder.) Eventually, some guy in China made this stuff that blew things up, and this quickly became a popular tool of war. Soon people figured out how to use the stuff to make things that would shoot each other. This lasted for a while, then people figured out how to fly, and started drooping large amounts of explosives on top of each other (which really meant you didn't care about keeping their stuff.) Sure, this is an overly simplified view of war, but that's pretty much what it is, isn't it?
Some of you out there may be wondering what this may have to do with the fact that computers are stupid. I'm just about to get to that part. Anyway, it seems that a lot of computer geeks out there seem to think that the computer industry would not be complete without all of the participants being at war eith each other. Due to such popular demand (I think,) the computer scene looks a lot more like a battlefield than anything else that it could look like. Sure, all of the major competitors look like they're all sitting in office buildings, working away at their happy little cubicles, but of course, one can not see the sheer intensity of the competition at hand by merely looking at this somewhat idyllic scene (if anyone can actually manage to call a corporate environment idyllic, let me know.) What is really happening is that this company is trying to destroy all others who would challenge it's domain in the industry.
In particular, the war that catches the most attention is that between those who swear by the PC, and those who think that Macs are perfect. Of course, as any same person knows, the Mac is a platform that was designed mostly to cater to Steve Jobs' ego and to make sure that it's users would never be competent enough to handle a real computer if comfronted with one. The decision was made many years ago by Apple to keep everything as proprietary as possible. This ensured that enough people would dislike their company enough to keep them from ever coming near any of their products. All this time, they brainwashed anyone gullible enough to buy anything that they make into becoming rabid in defending the platform, making the Mac user one of the more common types of extremists on the planet. Any time that someone mentions computers, a Mac user will immediately launch into a tirade about how stupid PCs are (apparently unaware of the fact that their platform of choice really isn't a computer in the first place, merely a bad interpetation of one, possibly with a design influenced more by Picasso than Babbage. And Picasso himself said "Computers are useless. They can only provide an answer." Therefore, we can only assume that the designers of the Macintosh had evil intentions when they designed the machine and inflicted it upon society.
Even in the PC camp nowdays there are battles being fought. Most of these battles aim at the very heart of the computer, the CPU. A sudden challenge has arisen to Intel's dominance of the X86-compatible something-or-other market on all fronts. AMD has recently made it's release of the much-ballyhooed K6 processor, which appears to be blowing the Intel equivilent processors out of the water. Two of Intel's other competitors, Cyrix and Digital, have also launched separate assaults, each throwing lawsuits at Intel for patent infringement. Cyrix's lawuit came merely hours after the patent in question was secured by the company. Pending the result of this lawsuit, there may be some interesting applications for the precedent set in court by this case. For example, what would there be to keep me from obtaining a patent on, well, let's say air or something like that, after which I could then file a patent infringement lawsuit on every living creature, which would mean that the entire world would be paying me licensing fees for the right to breathe. I could then use the "It's not a bug, it's a feature" excuse for things like pollution and big thigs that that fall from the sky, landing conveniently on cut little poodles named fluffy (most likely people would agree on that last one too.) Of course, all of the bugs would have to be reclassified as "undocumented features," which would probably make the entymologists out there to have a fit. It owould not be uncommon to find cadres of heavily armed scientists joining the swarm of rabid computer geeks already surrounding this place. All in all, I don't think that the neighbors (with the possible exception of those who haven't already joined the mob) would notice much difference.
Intel, on the other hand, doesn't seem to have take it all in stride. Sure, they released their equally ballyhooed Pentium II chip, which doesn't seem to have become the instant hit that Intel hoped it would be, at least from the technical standpoint. So far, the preformance of the chip hasn't proved to be all that great in comparison to even Intel's own Pentium MMX chips, and the new "slot one" concept has been slow to catch on, with the odds seeming more and more likely that the whole concept will end up being proprietary to Intel processors. AMD and Cyrix continue to manufacture processors for the incumbent "socket 7" design of CPU, with inpending plans to make motherboards that can run at a 100MHz bus speed in the near future. And to top all of this, Intel's number .99992316th most common chip defect has been discovered in both the new Pentium II and the Pentium Pro. Given Intel's practice of assigning code names to products after rivers in California, we have to wonder if this means that Intel is up a creek, and just tossed their paddle overboard?
Combining this with all of the usual competition to be the one coming around to collect all of the money that we throw into our computers (which someone will hopefully come to collect soon, all that money in there is starting to cause heat problems) we have a virtual free-for-all in the computer industry these days. Let's all be glad that no real weapons are being fired in the industry at this point. Given the tenacity of the competitors, however, we can only assume this will come to pass in a matter of time. When this happens, things may turn ugly for the users. Fir the companies who actually use all of this stuff to run their businesses, worries about year 2000 compliance will take a backseat to worries about ICBMs being launched at them (consultants, still gloating over all the money they made with the year 2000 worries, will have a field day making computers nukeproof.) The end users will be forced to keep a machine gun by the computer, just in case they get raided by marketing mercinaries (I have so far had limited success in convinciny my parents we need an artillery position in the den, and the local authorities are not too crazy about the idea either.) Some of the tech support calls mightbe rather interesting when this comes to pass: I can just hear the users caloling up and saying something like this:
Tech: [expletive deleted] Tech support, how may I help you?
Caller:I was just using your software on my computer when suddenly an ICBM with your competitor's logo came out of the sky and demolished my whole neighborhood, filled Fifi with shrapnel, and left a smoldering heap of ashes wheremy computer used to be. When I finally regained consiousness, I looked up and saw two IRS auditors, who threw me in jail for tax fraud. I didn't even get a chance to save the file I was working on. What do I do about this?
Tech:Well, does it happen in safe mode?
Caller: I don't know. For one thing, I already told you that my computer is a smoldering heap of ashes and melted plastic right now, and besides, I'm gonna' be in jail for the next 15-20 years. How can I tell if it will work in safe mode or not?
Tech: Oh, never mind. By the way, what were you using this system for anyway?
Caller:Well, a little embezzlement here, some money laundering there, some pir-
[Sound of two very large guards carrying some guy off at gunpoint, followed by a dialtone]
Tech:Dang it, and I didn't even get a chance to get his coordinates either. [reaches over and hits the "abort" button on his ICBM control panel]
Of course, living in Microsoft's backyard, I may have to take extra precautions in this case. I wouldn't want to get pelted in the head by an old copy of Visual C++ from back before they started putting all of the docs for the program on CD-ROM, or even worse, a floppy containing Windows 2.0 landing in my floppy disk and installing itself on my computer. Even I wouldn't be so cruel to a computer.