I just loaded a few things up on my link blog. My batteries are dead, have a good evening. Talk to you sometime on Sunday, probably. I'm gonna go and try to charge up in first class. Heh.

Already I see skepticism from my readers behind Apple's move to Intel.

Make no mistake. This is a real story and I've gotten confirmation from people who know. I can't say more, though, cause I don't want Apple to sue me to find out my sources.

From what I hear, though, they have had a version of OSX running on Intel for a long time and are ready to go.

What does this all mean for Microsoft? Not sure yet. It sure will be interesting to watch this play out.

Some questions in my mind:

1) Is Apple going to give people a choice of Windows or OSX on their machines?

2) Will Apple lock out Windows from running on their machines?

3) What will the performance of OSX on Intel be like?

4) When will we see a Tablet PC from Apple? IBM's inability to get Apple high-performance, low heat, and low power chips played a part here. Now that Apple's going with Intel, will we see some innovative portable devices from Apple?

5) Will there be an OSX version that I could buy for my Tablet PC?

6) What will the stock market think? (It spanked Apple today because of a ThinkSecret report that iPod sales were going down -- at least that's what Bloomberg Radio was reporting to me on the way to the airport).

Is that the real reason Apple wanted to shut down ThinkSecret? They put out a report and Apple's stock tumbles about 5% in one day. Whew. The power of blogs.

What do you think? What questions are you wondering about?

I'm IM'ing with people from the plane. One problem: I only have two hours of battery left. Turns out that to get a seat with power I'd need to pay $250 more per ticket, one way. Yikes.

SAS has a nice computer system for each seat, though. A decent selection of music and movies. All run from a touch screen. Running on Windows.

They are talking about the new Start.com over on Channel 9. Cool news aggregator.

Hello from 32,000 feet somewhere over Canada. Wild!

Boeing Connextion service rocks. Rocks. Rocks.

Why doesn't every airline have this?

$30 to get on the Internet.

So, I sign on, and visit Dave Winer's blog and see this headline: "News.com: "Apple Computer plans to announce Monday that it's scrapping its partnership with IBM and switching its computers to Intel's microprocessors."

My brother-in-law won't talk to me about this either (he works on the Mac team). I still don't really know what it all means, but the story on this one hasn't been written yet. I wish I could be a fly on the wall during the meetings with IBM and Steve Jobs.

And with that, next time I write, I'll probably be at 35,000 feet using Boeing's Wifi (the SAS flight we're taking has Internet connectivity). Maryam is bummed about that, by the way. She likes traveling with me cause I usually have no Internet to distract me while on the plane. Can't escape from the inkernet anymore.

Our book publisher, Wiley, has just shipped a book on podcasting. Chris Webb blogs an excerpt so you can check it out.

Michael Gartenberg riffs on about the Kathy Sierra and Dori Smith posts. Interesting points. I agree with them. Luckily blogs are a great way for people to share what's cool about computers (whether you use a Mac or not).

Vic Gundotra's kid, for instance, uses a computer to control his telescope. I'll see if we can get him to write a blog post about the software he uses.

InternetNews gives me a promotion (in an article about Yahoo's blogging). Just for the record. I'm not an executive. I'm also not on a marketing team. I'm in the evangelism and platform strategy one.

Thanks for the promotion, though!

News.com columnist: five reasons social networking doesn't work.

I'll be honest, out of all the email I get, I answer that that comes through social networking services last (in other words I almost never get to it anymore). I don't know why, but I think it's the lack of personal attention. These things are trying to systematicize a relationship network and that's just not the way things work in the real world.

I can see how they'd work for some people, but I have a very strong relationship network that's overwhelming me with email (I can't keep up, sorry) and this stuff just always falls on the floor in my life. Sorry again.

Maryam and I are giddy. Later today we leave on our first European trip (which is due to being invited to speak at the Reboot conference in Copenhagen, Denmark). Here's our rough itinerary.

Today, leave and fly to Copenhagen.

Saturday, have lunch with Thomas Mygdal (Reboot's conference organizer). Then fly to London in the evening.

Sunday, play tourist in London.

Monday morning, play tourist in London. Afternoon, get tour of Microsoft Home.

Tuesday take train to Cambridge. Get tour of Microsoft Research in Cambridge, go and see Cambridge and play tourist. Take train back and have dinner with the geeks in London.

Wednesday, morning, play tourist in London. In afternoon, fly back to Copenhagen, arrive at 6:40 p.m.

Thursday, visit Microsoft's MBF team in morning, play tourist rest of the day, attend Thursday Meetup.

Friday and Saturday, attend Reboot.

Sunday, fly back. Try to be in office on 13th, but probably will take off until the 14th.

Nicole Simon has a Reboot podcast going (I'm one of her early interviews, done via Skype).

Can't wait to meet you all. It's my first time to either Denmark or the UK. We're meeting Maryam's brother, Keyvan (he's a bus driver and also is a popular poet) in London too.

Julie Leung and I are still trying to put together a one-day camping trip the day after Gnomedex. Here's the campground we're thinking of with details.

Why there? Because it's close to Seattle, so everyone who wanted to come over and hang out would be able to.

Randy Holloway, I love your blog. Simple. Sexy. Safe. Oh, I'm spinning again, but nice developer-focused blog.

Kathy Sierra and Dori Smith are absolutely right. Kathy says Microsoft has it all wrong in the "our passion, your potential" marketing campaign. I like our new "start something" campaign a lot more.

I totally disagree with Dori's point that all those Windows users in the airport are only using Windows because their boss tells them to. That's a common theme that Mac users repeat often, but it simply isn't true if you do your homework and ask people.

Have you ever gone up to people and asked them why? I have. And the reasons people give are quite varied. Yes, "my boss gave me this" +is+ a common answer, but it's only one I hear maybe one out of four times.

Other common answers I've heard: 1) I already own the software that runs on Windows, switching to new platform would be very expensive. 2) I needed a feature that only Windows has (there are more than a million Tablet PC users, for instance, and more than a million Windows Media Center users). 3) My friends have Windows and I know I can get support and software from them. 4) You get more machine for the dollar. 5) There's a lot more choice of machines and configurations. 6) More of the software I want to run is on Windows. 7) It's easier to use my machine for both home and work tasks on Windows. 8) It's what I've used for years and don't see any reason to switch.

Here's the deal: blogging is a passion chamber (some call it an echo chamber). Remember, we were mostly for Howard Dean too. Why? The passionate political people liked him. The electorate (the ones that matter) didn't.

Now, let's stop spinning for a minute. Apple's market share has started to climb back up (if I'm reading the tea leaves correctly from the last financial reporting period). It's still about 4%, but it is going up, which is a change from what it was doing. Why?

One word: security. (Actually, security and iPods cause my brother-in-law who works at Apple says they are seeing quite a few Mac sales happen after people buy iPods).

If I was a Mac evangelist that's what I'd keep emphasizing over and over and over. It hurts me everytime I visit someone's home and see the spyware and malware that's on the average user's PC.

Wanna see how Microsoft is perceived? Just visit the Security Awareness blog.

This is job #1 at Microsoft. Fancy Tablet PC features or Media Center features or anything else will be slow to get serious uptake until we make it far far easier to have a secure experience on Windows.

Yes, you can make Windows secure. Follow my tips and you'll be very safe. But here's the rub. Apple's OSX doesn't run as administrator by default. Windows XP does. Until we solve that one our users won't have a good experience like Apple's customers do. And, yes, I +AM+ jealous of Apple's leadership here. It's taken too long to get Windows off of the "run as administrator by default" boat.

I hate having to say "wait for Longhorn," but that's exactly what I have to do. And, to save the Mac evangelists the typing, yes, getting a Mac today is better in this area.

Luckily, there is light at the end of the tunnel. In every team I visit lately they detail the work that's being done on security. I'm very excited by the work I'm seeing get done and can't wait to see your reaction at the PDC.

Along that path, Vic Gundotra (my boss's boss) lays out what excites him about Longhorn. EXACTLY right. If Longhorn does only one thing, it better be "no admin mode by default."

Vic is the best evangelist I've ever met and he's on the senior leadership team here. So, when he distills Longhorn's story down to three words, that's pretty significant. Safer. Sexier. Simpler.

Longhorn will be judged by how well we meet the bar in those three areas. But, it all starts with security. If the first people who get Longhorn beta 1 find that they are still getting malware, spyware, or other crud, then it won't matter how pretty the UI is.

Kathy and Dori: I can't wait to show you Longhorn and some of the stuff we're working on. Will we live up to our potential to make you passionate about your computer again? We'll be judged on how good a job of that we do. Hint: I didn't move to Redmond just to let Steve Jobs have all the fun in Cupertino.

Oh, and Dori, yes, I'm still working on Team 99. I probably won't have an announcement about that until after I get back from Europe. We want to make sure it's done right and we're trying to figure out how to broaden our touch to all sorts of different kinds of people not just influential bloggers.

David Koch (the guy who disappeared on a Vancouver mountain more than a week ago) is still missing. His friends and family have now started a blog.

If you aren't following this, over on our book blog we've had terrific response. People on the search party, and quite a few others, have posted there.

When I say that our world has become as small as a conference room, this is exactly what I mean.

I hope they find David. Time is certainly running out, though. Even weirder? There is a camera at the top of the mountain and it snapped a picture of him getting off the tram.

Podcasting continues being hot. The GOP (Republican party in the US) now has a podcast.

I hear Rush Limbaugh is starting a podcast today. So, that'll potentially bring millions of people into podcasting.

Micah Alpern, interaction designer at eBay, invited me to come to their big conference (named eBay Live! 2005). Unfortunately it's the same time as Gnomedex. Drat!

He told me about some of the stuff they have planned and it sounds like a total blast. I think moving it to Silicon Valley is a good thing.

I wish eBay had more bloggers. It's weird that they don't, or am I just missing them?

Not many of you subscribe to my comments feed, but if you did, you might want to unsubscribe from the old feed and subscribe to my new feed since I switched servers this week.

DNJ Online just published a ton of articles about .NET 2.0.

The first Avalon-based applications are starting to appear over on Channel 9. It's fun watching developers discover a new platform.

Feedbeep sends SMS alerts to your cell phone by listening to your RSS feeds. When I get my cell phone back I'll have to try that out.

Evan Erwin grokked why I was so happy about the new Office file formats.

Tomorrow I'll be "OOF." Ever wonder why it's "OOF" and not "OOO" for "out of office?" The Exchange Team Blog has the answer.

By the way, I'll be OOF until June 14. Officially I'm taking a vacation. Unofficially I'm still doing a lot of work related stuff.

If you're having a ball at work how can you tell when your vacation starts or stops?

The regional directors are doing something cool at TechED next week. They are hosting "GrokTalks." Ten minute micro-presentations. I hear that they are gonna put some of these up on the Website. Sounds like a great podcasting idea.

MaxiVista v2 was released yesterday. This is a software KVM which allows controlling up to three secondary PCs from the mouse and keyboard of your primary PC. Very useful if you have a laptop and a desktop and you want to make use of both machines at one time.

Richard MacManus tracks the RSS Ripoff Merchants.

Now, some of you might be thinking that I'm gonna defend folks who just copy and repost. I'm not. There's a huge difference between my linkblog (where I only reprint maybe 10% of any one person's blog, and that's on a day when they are just writing spectacularly, and a blog that reprints every single post and doesn't give clear credit).

Some other things? My link blog never mixes in my own words. So, you know exactly what you get there. Also, my link blog always links back to the original source. Many of these RSS Ripoff Merchants don't (my blog, for instance, is being reprinted on at least one site where they don't link back to the original content).

There are two separate issues here. One is copyright law. Which is pretty clear. But going to court is prohibitively expensive for most bloggers. The other one is accepted community standards. Most people are OK with some reuse (I give permission to anyone who asks, by the way, and never charge) but clearly the sites that Richard is talking about are way beyond any accepted community standards.

I don't know what you can do about such sites, though. Other than to expose them, and get Google/Yahoo/MSN/Feedster/Pubsub/Technorati to remove them from their indexes, which removes the incentive to behave this way.

What do you think?

Now, on the other hand, I'm a tool for Chandu Thota. He works on the Virtual Earth team and is the guy who does the BlogMap that's at the right side of my blog.

When he asks me to link to his blog, I comply. Why? Cause he does cool s***.

And next week you can meet him at TechED, where he's hosting a mapping geeks dinner, among other things.

Todd over on ActiveWin thinks I'm possibly manipulating the press. Hmmm. I've never demanded a link. I put my content out there and let everyone know about it. It's your choice whether to link to it or not.

I don't ask Chris to email around things. I just tell him when I think I have something his network might find interesting. It's up to him whether or not to pass it along. And, if you think you can control any of this you've got another thing coming.

Chris has passed along more bad news for Microsoft to his network than he's passed along good.

If there's a difference here is I take the bad with the good. I just want to participate in the conversation. Is that a bad thing? Speaking of which, ActiveWin is one of my favorite Microsoft news sources (and was even back before I worked at Microsoft). It's why ActiveWin has a permanent link on my blogroll. ActiveWin didn't get there by just "being a tool" as Todd put it.

Christopher Coulter sends this one along. Final Draft is holding a screenwriting contest. Sponsored by the Tablet PC team. Final Draft, Chris tells me, is a killer app for people who write screenplays.

Dave Ciccone, the guy who does the very cool "Dave's iPaq" site sent me an Audiovox SMT 5600 phone unprompted today. You know, a lot of people ask me "how do you deal with your readers?"

This is why I still love blogging. Dave didn't need to do that.

By the way, Oakland International Airport called me and said they think they have my phone. I'm not going to get it back in time to leave for Europe (Maryam and I will leave tomorrow afternoon) but this is good news.

Dave, thanks for the generosity. I greatly appreciate it. I'll send it back.