Douglas L. Ross - My Personal Reflections

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.

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...

In a wonderful irony, the advertisement in the prime center space of the EFF: Homepage today featured ATT, just above the top headline "EFF Sues AT&T To Stop Illegal Surveillance."

Here's a wonderful little online tester to find out what kind of actual Internet Connection you have.

Webby Awards: 10 Web Moments That Changed The World The folks at "The Webby Awards" recently published their list of the "ten web moments that changed the world." The moment that made me a believer that the web might change the world happened sometime around 1994 or 1995. I got on somebody's list [probably because of my involvment in Georgia Tech's GVU annual WWW user survey , which was pretty unique at the time] and I was invited to become an early user of something called PointCast . I became a very enthuastic PointCast user long before Yahoo, Excite, etc. had really developed anything comparable. PointCast was, to my knowledge, the first to recognize the potential of automated delivery of [nearly] real-time news and information to the desktop, personalized to an individuals particular interests. They ultimately failed because they didn't adapt their clunky [ push ] technology, but the idea and the early execution, including the user interface, was bri...

I'm totally addicted to Podcasting. My main source of Podcast marterial is Doug Kaye's " The Conversations Network " which covers an enormous variety of conferences and other interesting conversations. I'm able to make much better use of almost three hours every day with Podcasting [two hours during my commute & an hour when I walk & exercise] . But this has some implications and that's where the "& Cars" comes in. Many people have observed that Podcasting is taking share from mainstream Media [e.g. I never listen to radio anymore, even PBS] and that its business model is disruptive. But I discovered another little subtly of Podcasting that's a bit problematic. I listen to my iPod via a pair of good noise-cancelling headphones. The obvious benefit is great audio quality. But there is a downside that I discovered today. It's kind of a guy thing. You get accustomed to the sounds that your car makes especially if you like cars and yo...

Charles Kruathammer makes a very well reasonsed argument in The Weekly Standard for specific and extremely limited exceptions to the general "rule" that torture should be banned. I find two things praticularly convincing about Kruathammer's arguments: He forces us to deal with the question of whether any use of torture at any time is ever justified in any circumstances. His conclusion is that we must "be honest about [the necessity of sometimes] doing terrible things [like torture]" in those rare cases where by doing so, there is a high probability that we might prevent even more terrible things. Nearly everyone agrees that torture isn't necessarily always the best solution even in extreme circumstances. However, logically the problem is that there is clearly some probability that torture might sometimes be the only practical solution. Another thing that occurred to me was that we [Americans & British] have a tendancy to think of ourselves as being agai...