Er, I know I can now run Windows XP on my Mac. Or at least I could if I had a fancy new one like Quentin has. But answer me this: why would I pay £195 + VAT to make my machine vulnerable to the plagues of viruses, worms and trojans to which Windows is vulnerable?
Daily Archives: April 6, 2006
Podcasts are huge; it’s just the audience that’s tiny
From Good Morning Silicon Valley…
Who’s listening to podcasts? Apparently no one. According to a new report from Forrester, only 1 percent of online households in North America regularly download and listen to podcasts. “Podcasts have hit the mainstream consciousness but have not yet seen widespread use,” Forrester analyst Charlene Li explains. “One-quarter of online consumers express interest in podcasts, with most interested in time-shifting existing radio and Internet radio channels. Companies that are interested in using podcasts for their audio should focus not only on downloads but also on streaming audio as a means to get their content and ads to consumers.”
So podcasting, for the moment at least, is not only a bare trickle in the media stream, but one whose appeal is limited to those who use it to time-shift broadcast radio. Now to be fair, we’re only 18 months or so into the podcasting phenom, and Li predicts that it will grow to reach 12.3 million households in the U.S. by 2010. So there’s a chance yet that it will someday become a mainstream medium. But right now it seems there’s little evidence to merit all the bloviating we’ve been hearing from podcast evangelists.
How I Work: by Bill Gates
Interesting interview in Fortune…
At Microsoft, e-mail is the medium of choice, more than phone calls, documents, blogs, bulletin boards, or even meetings (voicemails and faxes are actually integrated into our e-mail in-boxes).
I get about 100 e-mails a day. We apply filtering to keep it to that level—e-mail comes straight to me from anyone I’ve ever corresponded with, anyone from Microsoft, Intel, HP, and all the other partner companies, and anyone I know. And I always see a write-up from my assistant of any other e-mail, from companies that aren’t on my permission list or individuals I don’t know. That way I know what people are praising us for, what they are complaining about, and what they are asking.
We’re at the point now where the challenge isn’t how to communicate effectively with e-mail, it’s ensuring that you spend your time on the e-mail that matters most. I use tools like “in-box rules” and search folders to mark and group messages based on their content and importance.
I’m not big on to-do lists. Instead, I use e-mail and desktop folders and my online calendar. So when I walk up to my desk, I can focus on the e-mails I’ve flagged and check the folders that are monitoring particular projects and particular blogs…
Hmmm… I get more emails than Bill Gates. What am I doing wrong?
The Donaldson murder
Many things puzzle me about Denis Donaldson, the senior Sinn Feiner who spied for the Brits in Northern Ireland, not least the question of why the Director of Public Prosecutions decided some time ago that it was “not in the public interest” to proceed with the prosecution of Donaldson and others for their alleged espionage in Stormont.
His murder took place in one of my favourite parts of Ireland — the hinterland of Glenties, a lovely country town where we always stop at Highlands Hotel on our way through. So there was a creepy edge to the story for us. It’s a reminder that Ireland is sometimes like Sicily — all that warmth and family values and hospitality, while below the surface is a dark underbelly of savagery.
Robin Wilson has a thoughtful piece about the murder in OpenDemocracy.net. Excerpt:
My guess (and that is all it is at this stage) is that the deed was done by IRA members embittered by Donaldson’s treachery, and meanwhile keen to taunt the Sinn Féin leadership of Adams and McGuinness for their endless preening in front of the TV cameras in pursuance of a “peace process” that is doing nothing to deliver the objectives for which the ordinary IRA volunteers sacrificed so much of their adult lives.
An additional political aim would be to signal to the governments of Bertie Ahern in Dublin and Tony Blair in London that some Republicans remain defiantly outside any tent of “inclusion” and “reconciliation” they can construct.
If dissident IRA members are indeed responsible, this might signal the beginning of the collapse of the organisation’s own edifice, which could take place quite quickly and engulf a Sinn Féin leadership that is already finding the reception has got much colder in Dublin, Washington, and even London.
It seems highly improbable that the attack could have been authorised by the IRA leadership. Adams and McGuinness “condemned” the killing, a toxic word they have not used since the Real IRA splinter-group committed the Omagh atrocity in August 1998; this suggests they are serious about their denials of any responsibility (when the Provisional IRA commits a murder but won’t admit it, the organisation just says it’s “wrong”). And while I think the Real IRA or Continuity IRA would have claimed Donaldson’s murder if they had authored it, internal Republican dissidents who had decided it was time to give up on loyalty to the leadership and “whack” the informer would have no reason to identify themselves.
Aside: I launched Google Earth to have a look at the location of the cottage — only to find that it had been obscured by cloud on the day the satellite pictures were taken.