Palm Beach Daily News from Palm Beach, Florida • 20

Palm Beach Daily News, Sunday, February 4, 2001 MliiiMifiliMiiMitiMniWmM-'1iriltililllinf-riiiilii'rt-liTWiiim-iit-riill ri ri iiirr-inrn II Gates to the Internet 'World War 3.0' argues rush of technology may make Microsoft trial irrelevant Mini book pkcks insightful punch most every way, according to Auletta. It could have settled the antitrust suit in 1998 by agreeing to some restrictions that would have been far less severe than what ultimately happened. The company viewed the universe as a video game where the ob- ject is to zap anything perceived as a threat jiji-. i i aim uus auuiesuem view was a luacuuei when it went up against the government. The issues of the Microsoft antitrust trial go beyond the trial itself; World War 3.0 means both the recent courtroom battles and the technological battles to come, the biggest of which will be whether the consumer or the conglomerates will have the ultimate say in what is available.

"If there are truly multiple broadband choices the CO world's personal computers. In an attempt to be the Internet gatekeeper, Microsoft bundled its own Web browser, called Explorer, into Windows, and insisted that PC manufacturers use only that browser. It was also a blatant bid to crush competitor Netscape. Auletta has gained the trust of many major industry players with his fair and perspicacious reporting on communications and technology for The New Yorker. His take, based on extensive interviews with nearly all of the principals and attendance every day of the trial, is that Microsoft didn't have to be broken up, and that Gates is largely to blame.

Cut to the video the videotaped deposition that Gates gave for the trial, and never recovered from. Under relentless questioning from the government's hired-gun prosecutor, David Boies (later Al Gore's lead attorney in the Florida recount), a shifty Gates swore he was not trying to destroy Netscape. "It's like in a gangland trial where the gangster says, 'No, I'm in the olive oil Auletta quotes an unnamed Gates friend as saying. Even given that deposition, World War 3.0 makes a strong case that the Justice Department had an extremely weak case in the issue of consumer harm. Franklin Fisher, an MTT economist who was a paid expert witness for the government, admitted that consumers had not been hurt by Microsoft's hard-core business practices.

If anything, giving consumers a free, easy-to-use browser was a benefit, even if the intent was to slam Netscape. Microsoft may have been right in some ways, but it played its hand wrong in al By PHIL KLOER Palm Beach Daily News-Cox News Service WORLD WAR 3.0: MICROSOFT AND ITS ENEMIES by Ken Auletta. Random House, 436 pages, $27.95. Dn Bill Gates' high-tech Xanadu of a home in Seattle, the library has a dome, and around the base of that dome is this inscription: "He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close he could hardly fail to grasp it." The quotation is from The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald's meditation on the self-invented man and the American dream.

Though the literary soul shudders at such a notion, Gates sees himself as a Gatsby figure, self-made, fabulously rich, romantic. And while there is something permanently and endearingly adolescent in Gats-by's obsessive pursuit of his youthful love, the adolescent streak in Gates, as related by Ken Auletta in World War 3.0, is anything but endearing. It is the petulant, self-absorbed side of the young, with an incessant need to win, and a childlike rage when thwarted. Nothing thwarted Gates more than the 1998-'99 antitrust trial of the company he co-founded. The Microsoft trial arguably the biggest and most important such trial since the 1911 takedown of Standard Oil ended in a judge's devastating order that the software colossus be broken into separate companies, one selling the Windows operating system, the other applications like Microsoft Office and Word.

That decision is under appeal, with hopes from Microsoft that the new Republican administration cable, telephone, fiber-optic and wireless connections then power resides with the customer who has choices, not with the gatekeeper," Auletta writes. But what happens if the "corporate ele-' phants" the merged AOL Time Warner, a a mn v--n 1 Microson, a i i ua, etc. Decome so puweniu inai uiey coniroi yuui access xo PholoN.Y. Times News Service will somehow reverse the course. The six-month trial was a test of whether 19th-century antitrust law could be applied to 21st-century technology.

Many economists of the Information Age say that technology monopolies today are fundamentally different from John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil, because new technology has the potential to break through and make the old monopoly irrelevant. This is what Gates and Microsoft feared when they recognized the potential of the Internet in 1995 that consumers' ability to download software and applications from the Net would devalue Windows, the operating system on 90 percent of the By JONATHAN YARDLEY Washington Post THE CLOTHES THEY STOOD UP IN By Alan Bennett. Random House, 159 pages, $16.95. Here is proof positive that small can be beautiful.

The Clothes They Stood Up In is, at 4-by-6 inches in hardcover, smaller than the average mass-market paperback; at 159 very loosely packed pages, it runs to 25,000 words at most. To call it a novella borders on exaggeration. Yet there is moce to it more wit, more complexity and ambiguity, more depth, more sheer plea-sureand satisfaction than there is to just about any new novel of whatever length that I have read since Saul Bellow's Ravelstein or Michael Cha-bon's The Amazing Adventures Bennett's first published work of conventional fiction is anything but conventional. More a fable than a novella, it focuses tightly on a couple in their fifties, the Ransomes, prosperous Londoners locked in a dreary, childless marriage. They live "in an Edwardian block of flats the color of ox blood not far from Regents Park." One night they come home from the opera to discover that their residence has been burgled, and indeed not just burgled but totaled: said Mrs.

Ransome, 'the air freshener, the soap dish. They can't be human; I mean they've even taken the lavatory The police are called. A bored constable assumes that "you'll want counseling." The counselor, Brenda Briscoe, immediately concludes "Client in denial," but in fact something much more complicated cveiyumig uie wiieu wunu, jusi eta uauie operators decide which channels you get? In his final chapter, Microsoft Loses Even Jflt Wins, Auletta posits that in some ways, the digital revolution has moved beyond Microsoft and the issue of whether it is a monopoly, to the struggle for control of the broadband pipeline into people's homes, an arena in which Microsoft probably will not contend. He does not point out that in Gatsby, the line after the one Gates has inscribed in his library starts out: "He did not know that it was already behind him POET'S CHOICE Survival guide found in poet's words IMUI I 111 I IIJIIIIIH.il. I i r- i It LllfrB dentists, vets, physiotherapists, manicurists, hairdressers, dieticians of psychologists in your vicinity.

Carry your keys in a separate pocket. The mist is clean and good for your skin. Like an unlikely breeze on a still and sullen afternoon, Karen Press' poems swept into my world two years ago, during a period when I despaired of reading anything truly fresh and original. At an end-of-semester cocktail party the host, recently returned from South Africa, had urged a slim book into my hands. Echo Location: A Guide to Sea Point for Residents and Visitors is a fantastical journey through a small community hugging the western shore near Cape Town, at Africa's southern tip.

Sprinkled liberally among the thumbnail sketches of Sea Point's residents are pieces that could be billboard advertisements or library card catalogs, found poems and poems masquerading as apartment bylaws. Here is the list of the best-selling books at Palm Beach bookstores last week. CLASSIC BOOKSHOP 310 S. County Road 1. NICK OF TIME by Theodore Bell.

Bluewater Press, 411 pages, $25. 2. A DARKNESS MORE THAN NIGHT by Michael Connelly. Little Brown, 418 pages, $25.95 3. REFLECTING THE SKY by S.J.

Rozen. St. Martin's Press, 312 pages, $24.95. 4. LOST FOUND by Jayne Ann Krentz.

Putnam, 341 pages, $23.95. 5. ROSES ARE RED by James Patterson. Little Brown, 400 pages, $26.95. PALM BEACH BOOK STORE 215 Royal Poinciana Way 1.

MARK STOCK by Barnaby Conrad III. Metropolitan Books, 160 pages, $45. 2. HOSTAGE TO FORTUNE: THE LETTERS OF JOSEPH P. KENNEDY Edited by Amanda Smith.

Viking, 764 pages, $39.95. 3. A DARKNESS MORE THAN NIGHT by Michael Connelly. Little Brown, 418 pages, $25.95. 4.

CONSTANTINE'S SWORD: THE CHURCH AND THE JEWS by James Carroll. Houghton Mifflin, 756 pages, $28. 5. THE KILL ARTIST by Daniel Silva. Random House, 428 pages, $25.95.

MAIN STREET NEWS 255 Royal Poinciana Way 1. PALM BEACH, POWER AND GLORY, WIT AND WISDOM by James Jennings Sheeran. Palm Beach Media Group, 479 pages, $22.95. 2. SPECIAL OPS by W.

E. B. Griffin. Putnam, 448 pages, $25.95. 3.

ICE BOUND by Dr. Jerri Nielsen, with Maryanne Vollers. Hyperion, 362 pages, $23.95. 4. A DARKNESS MORE THAN NIGHT by Michael Connelly.

Little Brown, 418 pages, $25.95. 5. THE GIRLS HE ADORED by Jonathan Nasaw. Pocket Books, 665 pages, $25.95. The legacy of South Africa's apartheid years runs deep: The First Thirty-Seven Years We were just camping out.

I put up a wall and my mother bought carpets. There was a door for the sea. My father stood dropping anchor year by year. I watched him lowering the rope, he was swaying with a faraway look and he said he loved me, lowering the rope. My brother kicked a ball around a lot and I was reading.

I never knew he broke his heart young. I buried mine in a wave. My father died. My mother went home. My brother was away somewhere, walking.

I moved to the other side of the wall, just camping out. The sea could come in my sleep, or the wind. I've no rope, my father left no rope, Rita Dove is the Poet's Choice columnist for the Washington 'Tips for Visitors' and 'The First Thirty-Seven Years' was reprinted from 'Echo Location: A Guide to Sea Point for Residents and Gecho Poetry, Durban, South Africa. 1998 by Karen Press. Small bushes at ground level contain rats.

Don't visit the library if you're in a hurry. There are tiny green parks on many corners. People shouting are not calling you. Fresh water is available in all public toilets. Never sit alone in a park.

All pharmacies sell chocolates. Halaal food is safer. On hot evenings big things fly through windows. Count your change. The condemnation is subtle, couched in the kind of sardonic understatement that spelled survival during the oppressive years of apartheid.

The chilling import of the line "People shouting are not calling you" creeps up on you, into your bones for why would the incidence of people shouting be so high that it would be necessary to warn strangers? The unspoken questions and their disturbing answers form the true guide to survival in this seaside resort. Tips for Visitors Eat slowly and sip water frequent- ly. Close envelopes with extra glue. Everything warms up. The thin small angular men with low-slung pants are the dangerous ones.

You need never be satisfied with yesterday's bread. Ask at any corner cafe for doctors, is going on. While Mr. Ransome, "seemingly impervious to events," plods back to his lawpffice and resumes his deadly-dull routine, Mrs. Ransome sets out upon "small adventures, it's true, but departures nevertheless, timorous voyages of discovery which she knew her husband well enough to keep to herself." With the apartment completely, terminally empty, Mrs.

Ransome is forced to go out shopping. She wanders into a store, that once had been Miss Dorsey's but is now under the management of "plump and cheerful Mr. Anwar," who helps her assemble "the rudiments two camp beds plus bedding, towels, a card table and two folding chairs," as well as "a couple of what she called beanbags, though the shop called them something else; they were quite popular apparently, even among people who had not been burgled." It is "a stripped-down sort of life" that she finds "not unpleasant," but more: "Mrs. Ransome had begun to see that to be so abruptly parted from all her worldly goods might bring with it benefits she would have hesitated to call spiritual but which might, more briskly, be put under the heading of "improving the Then, quite miraculously, their old possessions reappear. They are back to normal: "Sometimes, though, lying there on the bed or waiting to get up in the morning, Mrs.

Ransome would get depressed, feeling she had missed the bus; though what bus it was or where it was headed she would have found it hard to say." Her story, though, is far from over. It turns out that her past, and her present, too, are but prologue. You will read it in a couple of hours at most, but you will think about it for a long, -longtime. Futuristic 'Killing Time' reads like torture Here is the list of best sellers for the week ending today, compiled by The New York Times. HARDBACK FICTION 1.

A DAY LATE AND A DOLLAR SHORT by Terry McMillan. Viking, $25.95. 2. A DARKNESS MORE THAN NIGHT by Michael Connelly. Little, Brown, $25.95.

3. FROM THE CORNER OF HIS EYE by Dean Koontz. Bantam, $26.95. 4. THE FIRST COUNSEL by Brad Meltzer.

Warner, $25.95. 5. SPECIAL OPS by W.E.B. Griffin. Putnam, $25.95.

NONFICTION 1. AN HOUR BEFORE DAYLIGHT by Jimmy Carter. Simon Schuster, $26. 2. ICE BOUND by Jerri Nielsen with Maryanne Vollers.

Talk MiramaxHyperion, $23.95. 3. THE O'REILLY FACTOR by Bill O'Reilly. Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing, $23.95. 4.

TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE by Mitch Albom. Doubleday, $19.95. 5. THE DARWIN AWARDS by Wendy Northcutt Dutton, $16.95. By GREGORY FEELEY Washington Post KILLING TIME: A NOVEL OF THE FUTURE by Caleb Carr.

Random House, 336 pages, $25.95. Caleb Carr's high-velocity tour of the year 2023 does not possess the speculative cast of most novels of the near future. Like a prophet too concerned with the urgency of his message to worry about stylistic felicities, Carr presents a fast-moving but almost incoherent tale that rails and waves its arms but manages only to alarm its potential audience. The story begins when "a handsome, mysterious woman" walks into the office of Gideon Wolfe, who teaches criminal psychiatry in New York City and does a fair amount of consulting work. The woman produces evidence that heramous hus band, recently murdered by apparently impossible means, had used his expertise in "image manipulation" to fake the evidence by which someone had been convicted of the assassination of a recent president.

When Wolfe shows the evidence to a cop friend, what they soon discover about the apparent unreliability of the data records that form the basis of 21st-century civilization is so disconcerting that the reader is not surprised when a shot rings out and Max falls dead. We are now on page 20, and, before another 10 pages are through, Wolfe has been yanked onto an invisible airship whose crew is engineering the daring jailbreak of a prisoner Wolfe was trying to interview. In the manner of Jules Verne, Carr takes us on an extended tour of the marvelous ship and the startling world outside its hulk conveyed in a series of breathless lectures. It is difficult to convey the awful-ness of Carr's prose, an unbroken succession of frenetic cliches and inept sentences. Carr's desire to mix mini-lecture with fast-paced action leads him into repeated syntactical car-crashes, of a sort that his previous novels (The Alienist, The Angel of Darkness) never showed.

Killing Time raises issues about government disinformation, ecological damage and cultural imperialism that novelists more adept at writing about the near future, such as Bruce Sterling, have dramatized with elan. But Carr's strengths seem to have abandoned him here, and the result is a shockingly bad book that he should have been dissuaded from publishing. Gregory Fedey writes frequently about science fiction,.