Bizzy’s AM Coffee Biz-Econ Links (022006)

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• Winter Olympics TV ratings are awful — “The Turin games drew an average 12.4 percent of U.S. households with televisions in the first seven days of the games, according to Nielsen Media Research Inc. That’s down from the 19.5 percent who watched during the same period at the 2002 event in Salt Lake City, Utah.” NBC Universal may give out free or discounted ads because of the drop.
• You read it here second, but almost a month before one of the UK’s “premier” publications — Rebecca MacKinnon at RConversation wrote up Jingjing and Chacha, the cuddly cartoon characters whose purpose is to remind Chinese Internet users that there every keystroke is being watched, back on January 17, based on an article in the China Digital Times. BizzyBlog piggybacked her post January 21. The Financial Times got around to covering it — on February 17.
• Apple switching to Windows OS? John Dvorak thinks so (HT Mac NN and Return of the Conservatives). I doubt it. Now that new Macs are to be Intel-based (some already are), what will probably happen is that Apple will work to make Windows run significantly better on a Mac inside a new shell program than the only remaining commercial alternative I’m aware of (Virtual PC, which happens, effective about 3 years ago, to be a product of Microsoft) without enabling it to be the startup OS. Except on the fastest of Macs, Virtual PC, though vastly improved over its earlier incarnations, is still pretty slow (a big improvement over “horrid” before Microsoft bought Connectix, the program’s creator, in 2003), and even now is really only useful for limited tasks, such as making sure PowerPoint presentations that look good on a Mac are still visually fine in Windows. An Apple move to beef up Windows performance on a Mac might convince reluctant Windows users, who could credibly be told to take as much time as they need to cut over to the Mac OS while they stick with Windows, to make the switch. It’s also telling that Microsoft appears not to have upgraded Virtual PC since 2004. Perhaps Apple is protecting against Microsoft abandoning Virtual PC.
• In a related item, Apple is doing everything it can to make sure its OSX operating system doesn’t get ported over to PCs (HT Techdirt).
• Privacy enemy within — Houston’s police chief, in an AP story (HTs Information Liberation, Digg, and Techdirt), says he’d like to see suveillance cameras in apartment complexes, downtown streets ….. and even private homes.
• Most underreported tax story in the nation — massive local property tax increases fueled by rapid increases in home values.
• Most underreported tax story in Ohio — the State of Ohio has spent $376 million less during the first seven months of the fiscal year (through January 31) than it though it would, while revenues have come in only $15 million short of expectations (go to this page for the Office of Budget and Management, click to download the February 10, 2006 PDF, and look at pages 20 and 13, respectively).

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• The Wall Street Journal notes that Arizona Senator John McCain switched his vote on the capital-gains rate extension to yes from no in 2003. Wouldn’t it have been just as easy to have said yes three years ago to avoid making Dick Cheney fly in just to break the resulting 50-50 tie in the Senate?