Once upon a time, in a garage in the ancient city of Rome, a man developed a computer operating system that became the digital lingua franca for the ancient world. How his operating system defeated its competitor is one of the great mysteries of all time. There must have been something about its ugly, utilitarian appearance and its proclivity toward redundancy that appealed to the brutal bureaucrats who established the Roman Empire. Even the name of the operating system came from a word butchered beyond recognition: XC was supposed to be excello, excellent, but was really nothing more than an redundant clutter of labyrinthine pathways. It was no surprise that when Theseus found the Minotaur in the midst of such a maze, he killed it. XC's competitor, based on the more intuitive, graceful, p…