Douglas L. Ross - My Personal Reflections

I needed a new computer. I decided to buy an HP Pavilion Notebook on sale at a local retailer. The HP notebook only came with Microsoft Windows Vista software. There were no new computers of any brand available with Windows XP any longer. (I know it's possible to buy XP and change the OS, but who wants to go to that much trouble?) To put it bluntly, Vista is a nightmare. So far I've spent roughly 20 hours on the phone with Tech support from both HP and Microsoft. In general, the support staff have tried to be helpful but don't know how to diagnose, much less fix, the multitude of Vista issues. Among the many nasty surprises I've had with Vista are the following: Initially ITunes was un-usuable until I discovered (by myself without help from any Microsoft or HP tech support who should have known this) that a Microsoft Vista update was required to have been installed before installation of ITunes 7.3. Having fixed ITunes myself, I then discovered that my IPOD itself was a...

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...