Transcript of a talk by my favourite living novelist on (one of) my favourite dead novelist(s).
Here.
Dave
Keane to retire in 2006
Roy Keane has confirmed that he’ll be retiring when his contract runs out in 18 months’ time.
Obviously, as a Forest fan, I’ve followed Keane’s career over the years, and I have to say I have never felt much antipathy for him since he left us. I’m just pleased that he has come back and proved so many of his critics wrong this season. There was an excellent write-up about his resurgence in The Guardian earlier this week.
FeedDemon decision
Well, my trial has finished on FeedDemon, and at the moment I’ve decided not to go ahead and cough up, mainly for one very good reason: BlogLines, which suits me better because it is more portable. If I had a laptop or tablet PC, I would stick with FeedDemon, because it’s a great piece of software. But I do my blog reading at work, largely, and don’t have time at home. So being able to access by feeds from anywhere is a big bonus for me.
It’s a shame, in a way, because I really liked the system.
New Cringely Column
Another great column today from Bob Cringely, this time on the subject of the resignation/firing of Carly Fiorina as CEO of Hewlett-Packard.
Usually I come up with my own column topics, but sometimes readers simply demand that I write about this or that. This week, the pull is coming from two different directions — those who want a take on the Toshiba-Sony-IBM Cell Processor announced this week, and those who want my reaction to the firing of Carly Fiorina as CEO of Hewlett-Packard. These would seem to be very different topics, but if you stand far enough away and squint, they look nearly the same. The Cell Processor represents a technical revolution that is about to take place in high-tech business, while Carly Fiorina represents management that was poorly prepared to lead or even adapt to that revolution. It was a smart move to let her go, though the real test for HP’s board will be finding a proper successor.
John Naughton blogs the subject here.
Good News / Bad News for Firefox
Computer Weekly reports that large companies are being warned off switching to Firefox.
The Gartner report said Firefox’s growth, so far, was “unsustainable” as many of the features that had made it popular were primarily aimed at individual users not businesses.
A simple case of FUD?
Better news, however, is that Yahoo! are offering a version of their toolbar for Firefox users, as reported by MediaPost.
The initial Firefox toolbar is specifically designed for Windows, and will not include Yahoo!’s spyware-fighting Anti-Spy tool, which was added into the Internet Explorer toolbar last year. A company spokeswoman said that Yahoo! plans to build Mac OS X and Linux versions and extend Anti-Spy to the Firefox toolbar in the near future.
Yahoo!’s search blog cautioned Thursday that the beta has some wrinkles that need smoothing. “Like any Firefox extension, it may cause your browser to misbehave in unexpected ways,” reported Duke Fan, Yahoo! toolbar product manager.