Daily Archives: November 13, 2006

The $100 laptop in context

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Part I of a nice essay by James Surowiecki which likens Nicholas Negroponte’s laptop project to Andrew Carnegie’s library benefactions.

Carnegie is usually talked about today as a precursor to people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, multi­billionaires who have dedicated most of their wealth to philanthropic endeavors. But when you look at the way Carnegie built libraries–seeding institutions around the country and encouraging local involvement in the hope of convincing people of the virtues of free access to knowledge–what it calls to mind most is not Gates’s prodigious effort to fund the fight against infectious diseases but, rather, an endeavor called One Laptop per Child (OLPC)–or, as it’s colloquially known, the $100 laptop…

A forecast of Vista consumer adoption

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Forrester Research, a consultancy, has published A Forecast Of Windows Vista Consumer Adoption. Alas, it costs $249. But the online flyer says that it contains the following illustrations:

  • Figure 1: Consumers Keep Their Computers Forever
  • Figure 2: Consumers Are Moving To A Multicomputer Era
  • Figure 3: Income Is The Biggest Predictor Of Multicomputer Ownership
  • Figure 4: Forecast: US Windows Vista Adoption, 2007 To 2011

    • Allchin recants, er, clarifies

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    Further to that earlier post, Jim Allchin has been, er, clarifying his remarks about Vista and anti-virus software.

    During a recent discussion with journalists about the release to manufacturing for Windows Vista, I made a comment about how attacks on the Internet are getting more and more sophisticated, and some of the security features in Windows Vista really help our customers. This somehow morphed into people thinking I said customers shouldn’t use antivirus software with Windows Vista.

    When the articles and blogs started appearing, I asked the PR folks to send me a copy of the transcript of the call so I could read it over and see if I said something I didn’t mean. After reading the transcript, I could certainly see that what I said wasn’t as clear as it could have been, and I’m sorry for that. However, it is also clear from the transcript that I didn’t say that users shouldn’t run antivirus software with Windows Vista! In fact, later in the call, I explicitly made this point again, because I had realized I wasn’t as clear as I should have been. It’s important for me that our customers are using the appropriate security solutions for the right situations, whether that’s security functionality integrated in the operating systems, or add-on products.

    The point I had been trying to make (albeit unclearly) is that Windows Vista includes new security features that can dramatically help improve our customers’ security for certain situations. I was asked a question about how I rated the protection provided by Windows XP with Service Pack 2 and whether or not it was still effective. I ended up telling a story about how the machine my seven-year-old son uses has no antivirus software installed because it runs in a very locked down configuration, which includes only being able to visit websites on an approved list (approved through the parental controls feature in Windows Vista). He also has no access to email or instant messaging and he doesn’t run as an administrator of the machine. In fact, parental controls in Windows Vista requires that the user you apply controls to is not running as an administrator. Email, phishing, and other social engineering attacks are definitely among the most prevalent attacks that home users experience today, and his machine has been locked down in these regards.

    My point in bringing up this extreme example was really meant to emphasize that importance of defense-in-depth measures we put in Windows Vista—both the number of defenses and their combined effectiveness.

    Now, the comments have unfortunately been cited out of context implying that I said Windows Vista users shouldn’t use antivirus. I want to be clear, most users will use some form of antivirus software, and that will be appropriate for their scenarios. In fact, Windows Security Center, a great feature in Windows Vista, specifically encourages the use of antivirus software.

    G’day Bill; pardon me while I strain the potatoes

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    Microsoft Office 2007’s dictionary will recognise Australian colloquialisms such as g’day, sheila, bogan and dag. Microsoft said that 24,000 Australians voted in an online poll on its website for the 20 Aussie words they felt were most culturally relevant. G’day led the pack with 2868 votes, following by sickie with 2152 votes, ute (1912), trackies (1597) and bogan (1557).

    Previously, when typed into Microsoft Word, all of these words appeared with a red line under them, indicating a spelling error. Tony Wilkinson, information worker business group director at Microsoft Australia, said the reason for incorporating the above “quintessential Aussie vernacular” into Office 2007 was to make the software more user-friendly for Australians.

    “Although many Australian words and spellings are alreadyincluded in Microsoft Office, we saw the upcoming release of the 2007 Microsoft Office system as the ideal opportunity to make sure the Aussie classics weren’t forgotten and new Aussie words were added,” he said.

    Online voters got to pick from a shortlist of 41 words, compiled by a panel of local language experts including David Blair, the founding member of Macquarie Dictionary’s editorial committee. “Australia has a unique cultural background and, as a result, there are a number of Australianisms in our language,” he said, praising Microsoft for its recognition of Australian culture.

    [Source: Sydney Morning Herald]

    The inexplicable success of the Daily Mail

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    As I noted earlier, Andrew Neil gave the Keynote Address to the Society of Editors conference in Glasgow, in the course of which he argued that newspapers that don’t embrace online media are doomed.

    During the Q&A at the end, a smart journalist named Donna Leigh asked a simple question. If he was right about the urgency of going online, how did he explain the continuing success of the Daily Mail which, to date, has rather avoided Cyberspace?

    It was interesting to see that Brillo Pad was unable to deal with the question — and indeed reverted to type by suggesting that he and the questioner (an attractive woman) might discuss it further, er, later. (I’m sure that was entirely innocent, but it brought to mind the famous observation of one of his subordinates at the Sunday Times that “if you couldn’t f*** it or plug it in then he [Neil] wasn’t interested”.)

    Anyway, Roy Greenslade has returned to the issue raised by Ms Leigh. Here’s part of what he has to say:

    The undeniable truth is that the Mail, as the questioning Leigh correctly said, has been defying the overall downward trend that’s affected the rest of the market, and that does deserve some explanation. Neil pointed out its professionalism and its attention to editorial detail. I could have added that it has positioned itself perfectly in that bit of the market which has grown in the past 20 years, the working class who have aspired to be middle class (and largely achieved it). It also purveys the values of the middle class, a commonsensical conservatism allied to a pervasive sense that those values are under attack. Unlike the red-tops below it, it has maintained a sense of dignity. Unlike the serious papers, it has embraced populism without appearing to find it somehow distasteful. It has also – and Neil also noted this – benefited from the collapse of its middle-market competition in the shape of the Daily Express.

    In other words, the Mail (and its successful Mail on Sunday stablemate) is living on the laurels of long-run demographic change and its clever identification with the people who have lived through it. That change may have reached its zenith or, just possibly, may yet have a little way to go. But the Mail’s success, having inured it to the circulation problems suffered by other papers, meant that it didn’t see the point of investing some much time and energy (and money) in digital platforms. Now, belatedly, it is doing so.

    I may be wrong, but I don’t think the delay will necessarily have a negative effect on the Mail’s future. It will surely have learned from the lessons of those papers that have pioneered online journalism. But the really interesting factor is the conservatism of the current Daily Mail audience and the likelihood that fewer young people will be drawn to its values and its agenda.

    Cracking the Da Eliza code

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    Peter Preston, writing about last week’s blood-curdling speech by the Director-General of MI5…

    Does Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller truly believe that the cult of Osama is some passing, youthful fad that will one day be gone, like David Cassidy’s fan club? Will it somehow be swept away by new boy bands or iPods? Not exactly, it seems. We must all stand up for our core values, “equality, freedom, justice and tolerance”, she says. We must therefore confront “the powerful narrative that weaves together conflicts from across the globe, presenting the west’s response to varied and complex issues, from longstanding disputes such as Israel/Palestine and Kashmir to more recent events, as evidence of an across-the-board determination to undermine and humiliate Islam worldwide”.

    Code-crackers will note that she lists those issues and disputes alphabetically. “Afghanistan, the Balkans, Chechnya, Iraq, Israel/Palestine, Kashmir and Lebanon are regularly cited by those who advocate terrorist violence as illustrating what they allege is western hostility to Islam.” They should also note that she goes way back before 9/11, which means before Baghdad and Kabul, too – to the 1990s, when al-Qaida was blowing up Nairobi and Dar es Salaam and killing hundreds of innocent Africans. So these “roots” go very deep.

    And where, in any meaningful sense, can they be reckoned to start? Not in Kashmir, against a Hindu enemy; nor in Chechnya, unless Putin has become an honorary pillar of “the west”. Did Washington dismember Yugoslavia? Is Tony Blair about to sabotage the birth of a Muslim Kosovo? No, the loose threads of this tapestry lead inescapably back to what she calls “Israel and Palestine”. Maybe bringing peace to the Middle East after over half a century of vicious strife wouldn’t bring total generation shift, the lessening of a fury, the erasure of hatred. But it would be a beginning, a symbol, a chance to start afresh…