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PC Forum

I'm headed to PC Forum this weekend. The speaker list, as usual, is awesome and the theme... "Erosion of Power: Users In Charge" ...takes the premise that "the power institutions once held over (people) is eroding for three technology-based reasons" and the implications of that is what the conference is going to explore.
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Tollbooths on the Internet Highway - New York Times

Is it just me, or does it seem a little hypocritical for the NYT to be lecturing others about "net neutrality" and insuring that the Internet "remain(s) free, and freely evolving?" The hypocrisy is that the NYT itself has walled off vast areas of its own content which use to be "free" and still is if you go to the library, make a copy and put it in your scrap book. So let's include in the definition of net neutrality the provision that if it's published openly anywhere at any time, and Brewster Kahle for example puts it in his Internet Archive, then its subject to net neutrality and free forever and the NYT can't make "profit-driven choices, rather than users' choices" and can't determine "which sites and methodologies succeed and fail" for its own content.
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Energy Profits

I got tired of the hype about "excess" oil company profits and decided to get the facts. It turns out that the oil and gas industry generally is near the middle of the pack of American industries earning about 8% on sales in the 3rd quarter of 2005 as compared to the average of about 6.5%, but far lower than, for example, the semiconductor industry which earned about 14% on sales in the same period, or pharma & banks which both earned more than 18% on sales.
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wikiCalc

Dan Bricklin [the author of VisiCalc] has come up with another brilliant idea called "wikiCalc." Here's how he describes it at the alpha test site "The wikiCalc program is a web authoring tool for pages that include data that is more than just unformatted prose. It combines some of the ease of authoring and multi-person editing of a wiki with the familiar visual formatting and data organizing metaphor of a spreadsheet..." Daniel Terdiman of CNET News.com wrote about it here today. WikiCalc kind of looks to me like a poor mans [open-source] version of what I think Quicken is trying to do with QuickBase and what Dan suggests Microsoft might be trying to do with Grove . Some people will object to putting the data in spreadsheets out in the open like this but the dirty little secret of private spreadsheets on individual PCs is that they are full of errors and inconsistencies. A little openness [in other words transparency] is likely to be a very good thing both f...
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