Jon Carroll’s column today really makes you think.

Meerkat is a syndication service that uses RSS files like My Netscape.

Here’s a great example of a solution looking for a problem. Why in the world would someone want this keyboard? How could it possibly be better than they keyboard they already have. (Perhaps the people who came up with this moronic idea don’t know that computers come with keyboards when you buy them.) The ultimate indignity is that the keyboard itself is probably of pathetic quality, offering no advantage whatsoever over the keyboards people already have.

In other high tech philanthropy news, Bob Pasker and Laurie Pitman, two of the founders of WebLogic, donated 2.4 million dollars to endow the history department at San Francisco State. It’s the largest donation to the university ever.

Charles Crystle, the founder of ChiliSoft, seems like a really cool guy. He plans on giving away 11 of the 15 million dollars he made when Cobalt Networks bought ChiliSoft to provide high-tech educational opportunities to people in Central America, where he spent two months decompressing from the stress of his job not long ago.

Freaks and Geeks will be missed in the Colburn household.

Not a surprise: Netpliance prohibits the use of their cheap computers if you don’t sign up for their monthly service. They’re also changing their hardware so that people can’t easily modify their computers to run Linux.

You know what pisses me off? Executive compensation. At some point in the past, people decided it would be a good idea to tie executive pay to the company’s overall performance by compensating them with stock instead of hard cash. Somewhere along the line that got bastardized into giving these executives so much stock that they make out like bandits no matter how ineptly they manage their companies. The article doesn’t even get to the real joke on most of the people who work for a living: if CEOs actually screw up so badly that they get fired, they generally get a huge severence package that leaves them independently wealthy.

Jef Poskanzer has written an excellent to tutorial on configuring and building a PC. He covers all the parts you need and what difference buying different parts makes. Definitely worth looking at if you’re going to buy a new PC or upgrade one you already have.

Observation of the day: pundits who state unequivocally that the browser war is over fail to envision a time when the Windows no longer rules the desktop computing market.