My young and lovely wife, showing what might be overoptimism or maybe artful timing given the economy but more likely just general disappointment with me, has decided to embark on a career in real estate sales. She has taken classes and passed tests, joined one of the very best local firms, and hurled herself into the business of selling historic Charleston homes while they still have some value an...

This is the last week of full-time work at Microsoft for Bill Gates and given that I have written more than 40 columns about Microsoft over the years, it wouldn't make much sense for me to ignore this event. Yet that is almost what I did, which I believe is telling. It frankly didn't matter much to me that Bill was retiring. But then I figured longtime readers would expect a comment and perhaps the...

There is a scene at the end of the movie Back to the Future in which Doc Emmett Brown returns from the far future in his time-traveling DeLorean to get Marty McFly. Before going forward in time to save Marty's family, Doc Brown stuffs with apple cores and diet soda the Mr. Fusion machine now powering his DeLorean. It's a step up from the stolen plutonium or captured lightning required earlier in th...

As widely predicted, Steve Jobs this week introduced at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference the iPhone 3G that was first reported in this column late last year. The $199 price was a welcome surprise but shouldn't have been given Apple's confident predictions that it would sell 10 million iPhones by the end of the year. That's four million more by Christmas in up to 70 countries, so the numbers...

When this column first appeared in 1997, the price of oil in 2007 dollars was about $20 per barrel. This week it is $122 per barrel -- more than six times as high. Many things besides the price of oil have changed in those 11 years. Thanks to Moore's Law a new PC today is typically 25-30 times as powerful as the machines we had in 1997 yet costs less than half as many dollars to buy. Consider infla...