The following Players are supported under Mac OS X: Rio Cali, Rio Chiba, Rio Fuse, Rio Forge, Rio Carbon, Rio 500, Rio 600, Rio 800, Rio 900, Nike PSA Players, Rio one, Rio S Series (S10, S30, S35, S50).

Itunes 4.2 or later has built-in support for Rio One, 500, 600, 800, 900, Nike PSA, S Series players, Fuse, and non-Mass Storage (MSC) Cali and Chiba. Download it here. Mac OS X Installer

If you have a Cali/Chiba Mass Storage (MSC), Forge, or Carbon player then you'll need to install a plug-in for your player to be recognized by iTunes. You can install the plug-in using the Mac OS X installer.

With the Mass Storage (MSC) players, you can begin using your Rio immediately without installing any software. Simply drag and drop MP3s directly onto the player. The plug-in is only required for Itunes.

iTunes and the plug-in are required to transfer Audible content to the Carbon and Forge players.

Gateway is joining the band of computer makers selling hard-drive-based digital audio players, but its riff adds miniaturization and a color screen for displaying photos.

The company on Thursday announced its $249.99 Gateway MP3 Photo Jukebox player, which has a 4GB capacity, a 1.6-inch display and a rechargeable battery that can be replaced.

The player can connect to PCs and directly to digital cameras over a USB 2.0 port. Photos can be viewed individually or in a slide show.

Gateway is taking preorders and will begin selling the device in mid-November. The MP3 Photo Jukebox could be in retail stores as soon as the first quarter of 2005, Gateway said.

The new iPod Photo is bigger than Gateway's device but also have much higher storage capacities--40GB and 60GB--as well as [much] higher prices, $499 and $599.

The Photo Jukebox uses Microsoft's "Plays for sure" standard and is compatible with Media Player 10 ... Gateway's player can be used with other music services, such as MusicMatch, but it comes with a prepaid month with access to the Napster To Go music service ... The support for Napster's subscription service will be one of the early implementations of Microsoft's new "Janus" digital rights management technology, which allows subscribers to all-you-can-eat monthly services take music to portable devices.

Lost among all the new iPod Photo hoopla are a couple of new iTunes features that I find extremely helpful.

The first is the Show Duplicate Songs command in the Edit menu ... Also, iTunes 4.7 now allows you to search the iTunes Music Store’s iMixes.

Ten short days ago a single call went out inviting you to proudly proclaim your support for a better browser.

You answered with a storm of support. Congratulations Firefox users!

The NYT campaign has now closed. But the Firefox 1.0 launch is just around the corner - Firefox needs your ongoing support to spread the word.

This campaign drew on worldwide support from over 80 countries including Jordan, Gibraltar and Estonia.

More stats and complete country list coming shortly...

As I mentioned in the first post, this campaign has been a fundraiser for the Mozilla Foundation. Check the FAQ for more about how money is used.

The T5 is based off the design of the Tungsten E. The abhorrent plastic casing of the TE is gone, replaced by a case which--while still plastic--is of infinitely higher quality than its predecessor. The new casing is a darker, harder plastic, steely gray in color, with a lot more strength and appeal thant the E ever had. I'm very glad that PalmOne used a good casing--if they had used the same one as on the E, I would have had to invent a new word for flabbergasting insanity.

The biggest disappointment with the new "multi connector" is that it completely eliminates all previous accessories. From keyboards to sync/charge cables, PalmOne's Power To Go external battery, Enfora's WiFi portfolios, cradles, everything is gone. PalmOne does promise that the new connector will offer more flexibility though, we'll have to wait and see on that. Adding insult to injury, PalmOne doesn't even include a cradle with the T5 out of the box--you have to toss another $30 at it to get one. That's just insultingly cheap.

I admit a certain fondness for the design. My first Palm--in fact, my first handheld of any description--was a Palm m505, which used much the same design as the T5. I just wish PalmOne had learned from the Tungsten E and made some much needed changes. The power button, a power LED, a stylus-tip reset button... These aren't trivial things--the power button is one of the three most heavily used components on the entire device, along with the screen and stylus. And it's not like they can't do these things, because everone else already does them. On the bright side, the application buttons and d-pad are great. The overall form and design are appealing. I just wish they learned from history.

There's been a lot of confusion over how the T5 handles its memory. Part of this is created by the unique memory configuration, part of it by PalmOne's moderately befuddled marketing. In the same breath, PalmOne refers to the T5 as having 256 MB of memory, then as having 215 MB of memory. Which is right? Well, both and neither.

There's been a lot of confusion over how the T5 handles its memory. Part of this is created by the unique memory configuration, part of it by PalmOne's moderately befuddled marketing. In the same breath, PalmOne refers to the T5 as having 256 MB of memory, then as having 215 MB of memory. Which is right? Well, both and neither.

The $249 [iPod] Mini holds just 1,000 songs, versus up to 10,000 for the regular iPod, and is relatively pricey -- just $50 less than a larger iPod that holds five times as much. But it has proved so popular, especially with women and teenagers, that Apple has had trouble keeping it on store shelves.

My assistant and I have been testing three of the challengers: Dell's $199 Pocket DJ and the Rio Carbon and Creative Zen Micro, which are both $249. The Rio Carbon hit shelves about a month ago, and the Dell and Creative players will be available in November.

Compared with the Mini, all three of these players offer 25% more storage capacity -- five gigabytes vs. four gigabytes, or about 1,200 songs at standard recording quality, vs. the 1,000 Apple claims for the Mini. Each player also claims to have a longer battery life than the Mini, which runs up to only eight hours -- the Rio Carbon boasts up to 20 hours. And, unlike the iPod, all work with the numerous online music stores that sell songs in Microsoft's ... file format.

In our judgment, the three players are closer in style to competing with Apple's Mini than competitors have been in the past. But all three still lag behind badly in simplicity and ease of use -- so badly, in fact, that we can't recommend them over the Apple.

The contenders have mimicked aspects of the iPod's user interface -- music is organized in clear lists that can be displayed according to various categories, and the "Now playing" screens even show which album a song comes from, something the Apple Mini doesn't show.

The play/pause button below the Pocket DJ's dial took more effort than the iPod wheel, which has buttons right on it.

There was a time, not too long ago, when the typewriter and notebook ruled, and the computer as an everyday tool was simply a vision. Revolution in the Valley traces this vision back to its earliest roots: the hallways and backrooms of Apple, where the groundbreaking Macintosh computer was born. The book traces the development of the Macintosh, from its inception as an underground skunkworks project in 1979 to its triumphant introduction in 1984 and beyond.

The stories in Revolution in the Valley come on extremely good authority. That's because author Andy Hertzfeld was a core member of the team that built the Macintosh system software, and a key creator of the Mac's radically new user interface software. One of the chosen few who worked with the mercurial Steve Jobs, you might call him the ultimate insider.

When Revolution in the Valley begins, Hertzfeld is working on Apple's first attempt at a low-cost, consumer-oriented computer: the Apple II. He sees that Steve Jobs is luring some of the company's most brilliant innovators to work on a tiny research effort the Macintosh. Hertzfeld manages to make his way onto the Macintosh research team, and the rest is history.

Through lavish illustrations, period photos (many never before published), and Hertzfeld's vivid first-hand accounts, Revolution in the Valley reveals what it was like to be there at the birth of the personal computer revolution. The story comes to life through the book's portrait of the talented and often eccentric characters who made up the Macintosh team. Now, over 20 years later, millions of people are benefiting from the technical achievements of this determined and brilliant group of people.

The high-level goal of the 0.4 release is to be "experimentally usable" for a few key end-user tasks. In 0.4, you can:

• Create, edit, and view PIM Items: Email, Calendar Events, Task, and Notes.
  
• Add or change the Task, Email, or Event properties of any PIM item, in a process we call "stamping".
  
• Share collections of items (including calendars) via a WebDAV server.
  
• Perform very basic email and calendar operations (e.g. sending and receiving email, or creating and modifying calendar events).
  

In addition, the 0.4 Release provides:

• Sending and receiving of mail over a TLS/SSL connection (a fully secure TLS transport is not implemented yet)
  
• A basic UI landscape: Sidebar, Tabs, Summary & Detail views
  

You can download the release for Linux, MacOS, and Windows here.

More detailed information on this release see the 0.4 Readme document.

There is also a Guided Tour (PDF 1.8MB) that walks you through some of the new features in 0.4 like stamping and sharing.

After making their fans wait 86 years for a World Series win, the Red Sox decided they'd suffered long enough. Boston is celebrating its first title since 1918 thanks to a sweep of the Cardinals that put the Curse of the Bambino to rest.

Thirty-one thousand, four hundred and fifty-eight days passed without a Red Sox championship after Boston won the 1918 World Series. But the 31,459th day -- well, that turned out much, much differently.

Free of 86 years of despair and disappointment, haunted by names like Buckner and Bucky and Boone, Red Sox fans may not know quite how to react, now that they are the patrons of World Series champions. But the Red Sox players were not so conflicted tonight, as they closed out a 3-0 victory in Game 4 of the World Series and a sweep of the St. Louis Cardinals.

The Red Sox never trailed in this series, becoming only the fourth team in major-league history to win a World Series in that manner (the '63 Dodgers, '66 Orioles, '89 Athletics), and that reflected their absolute domination of this series. They shut down the powerful St. Louis offense, outscoring the Cardinals 24-12, and when the Red Sox batted, their hitters controlled the strike zone, dictated the ball-strike counts. The St. Louis pitchers would throw 679 pitches in this series, and of those, the Red Sox swung and missed only 37 times; the Cardinals' starting pitchers produced only 17 missed swings in 369 pitches.

These words must be repeated slowly, to be believed: The Boston Red Sox are champions.

Pigs can fly, hell is frozen, the slipper finally fits, and Impossible Dreams really can come true. The Red Sox have won the World Series.

Ridiculed and reviled through decades of defeat, the Red Sox didn't just beat the St. Louis Cardinals, owners of the best record in baseball, they swept them for their first crown since 1918.

Johnny Damon homered on the fourth pitch of the game, Derek Lowe made it stand up and the Red Sox won 3-0 Wednesday night, wrapping up a Series in which they never trailed.

Chants of "Let's go, Red Sox!" bounced all around Busch Stadium, with Boston fans as revved-up as they were relieved. Only 10 nights earlier, the Red Sox were just three outs from getting swept by the New York Yankees in the AL championship series before becoming the first team in baseball postseason history to overcome a 3-0 deficit.

It was Boston's sixth championship, but the first after 86 years of frustration and futility, after two world wars, the Great Depression, men on the moon, and the rise and fall of the Soviet Union.

After all that, on an eerie night when the moon went dark in a total eclipse, the Red Sox made it look easy.

You have a fancy home-entertainment system that can record and play TV programs, DVDs, show digital photos, and tap into your collection of digital music. If, however, you want to enjoy all this anywhere other than the room where the system is set up, you're out of luck. Now, Microsoft has unveiled a solution -- though it has some major limitations.

The offering is a black box called the Media Center Extender, which will work with any PC running the newest version of Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition (Oct. 18). You attach the Extender, available initially from Hewlett-Packard (HPQ ) and Linksys for about $300, to a TV set anywhere in your home and connect it to the Media Center PC over your home network

It seems just about perfect, but there's a problem, and it's the wireless network. Video requires moving a mighty stream of data, and the slightest glitches cause screen freezes. Microsoft's solution is a high-speed form of Wi-Fi wireless called 802.11a, which is immune to interference from cordless phones and microwave ovens. Fortunately, adding this capacity to a home network is simple. An access point or router that adds 802.11a to the more familiar "b" and "g" forms of Wi-Fi costs less than $150 and takes no more than 30 minutes to install. I suggest you follow Microsoft's advice and confine your Web surfing and other PC-related traffic to your existing Wi-Fi channel, reserving 802.11a for the Media Center Extender.

To complicate matters, for best results you want a wired connection between the Media Center and the access point. I've given up at home and installed Ethernet cables between rooms. There are also content limitations. Extenders can't show high-definition TV. And some premium cable shows, notably on HBO, won't play because of copy-protection measures. Microsoft expects to have a downloadable software fix for this in November.

Despite its flaws, the Media Center Extender is a breakthrough product. At least for those who can meet its tough bandwidth requirements, it really does deliver on the much-promised convergence of entertainment and computing. And as home networks get better and easier, Media Center and the Extender will become an attractive option for more and more consumers.

Dell plans to continue expanding its stable of consumer electronics products and services throughout the rest of the year, looking to the gear to help it generate new customers and ultimately to sell more PCs.

The Round Rock, Texas, PC maker is introducing products and services ranging from a beefed-up Inspiron 9200 notebook with a 17-inch screen to new all-in-one printer models and a suite of in-home services designed to help consumers sort out home networks and living room electronics.

"We recently measured a few of our newer categories, such as music players and TVs. For those products, 52 percent are going to new customers," Mike George, general manager of Dell's consumer business, said in an interview with CNET News.com. "It would appear that those customers have a disproportionably high likelihood of then coming back to us and buying a PC. It's given us more confidence to be bolder in how we talk (in advertising) about our electronics."

Smart phones, which combine the attributes of a cellular phone and a PDA like Dell's Axim, represent a potential opportunity for Dell, executives say.

Dell doesn't plan to offer devices such as DVD players, either. There's little opportunity for profit in the high-volume, low-price electronics space, George said ... Dell recently announced plans to add two new 42-inch plasma-screen TV models to its television lineup and is likely to add a few more TV models over time, executives said.

All right, Apple. The iPod has 92 percent of the market for high-capacity music players. You sold two million of them in the last quarter alone. Your music store, whose songs play only on the iPod, has 70 percent of the online song sales market, and you've just rolled it out in 10 new countries. What on earth do you do for an encore?

Apple ... takes the iPod concept in a new direction that's simultaneously risky and overwhelmingly natural. Instead of just playing your music, this model also shows off your photos.

Of course, a two-inch display isn't what you'd call a billboard; it's no bigger than the screen on the back of a digital camera.

Fortunately, you can also connect the iPod Photo to a TV.

As it turns out, the existing iPod's design, originally conceived for music, lends itself beautifully to photo shows.

But as about six million people now know, buying an iPod isn't a rational decision. It appeals to people's emotions, their creativity, and even their vanity. It's not a machine, it's a personal accessory. In fact, it's practically jewelry.

[Steve] Jobs, Silicon Valley's most creative promoter, unveiled a premium iPOD portable MP3 music player in glorious red and black which contains the complete collection of over 400 U2 songs including some never released material.

This should have marked the most impressive bundling job anyone has done since Adam Osborne bundled $2000 worth of software into a $1500 computer and changed the desktop computing business forever.

With this U2 bundle the numbers skew wildly in Apple's favor with two-thirds of the money going to Apple. In fact the bundle done as a licensing deal should be sold for far less than $100, not $149. In fact the bundle should be more profitable for Apple and hardly represents any sort of breakthrough in record pricing.

The 65-cent licensing rate should only apply to new music, not old tracks. Old tracks should be selling for less than 50-cents with 13-cents going to the labels. With really bad material where the labels get the rock bottom 4-cents per track there is no reason not to sell these songs online for 25-cents.

I don't think Steve Jobs intended to create a controversy with this issue, but merely a gimmick to sell more iPODS. I can assure you that a controversy will soon develop into something more significant.

Meanwhile, expect to see more bundling gambits until the MP3 makers run out of artists and genres. I'll probably buy the all do-wop MP3 bundle when it comes out myself.

Today we have our first Firefox 1.0 candidate builds available for testing. If all goes well in testing these builds, then we're on target for our 1.0 release in early November. If you're interested in testing these candidates and reporting bugs to Bugzilla, you can get them from FTP. If you've already downloaded 1.0 PR (the "feature complete" preview) and you're not particularly interested in active testing and bug reporting, then you should probably stick with 1.0 PR for a couple more weeks and upgrade when we release the official Firefox 1.0.

The release candidates include about 250 bug fixes since Firefox 1.0 PR and we'd appreciate any feedback around any of those areas. If you can help in verifying (feel free to skim the bug titles and find ones that interest you) that would be great!

Like no other, iPod U2 Special Edition stands out. Jet black, it bears a prominent red Apple Click Wheel and, on the flip side, the autographs of each U2 band member. Available for just $349, it comes with an exclusive U2 poster and, of course, the signature white iPod earbuds. As an extra special treat, it includes an iTunes Music Store coupon you can use to get $50 off your purchase of “The Complete U2.” As unique as the iPod itself, this digital boxed set brings together an amazing 400 U2 tracks. Songs span the band’s celebrated career. From “Boy” to “War” to “The Joshua Tree” to “Zooropa” to the soon-to-be-released “How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb,” it includes every U2 album and brings us over 25 rare and unreleased tracks. Look for it on the iTunes Music Store at the end of November.

A delight for the ears. A feast for the eyes. Though it’s no bigger than a pack of playing cards and weighs in at just over 6 ounces, iPod Photo delivers a one-two sensory punch. Letting you carry an entire library of your favorite music — up to 15,000 songs — or enough photos — as many as 25,000 — to fill nearly 200 slide trays or cover nearly 5,000 square feet of wall space. Got a really big den?

The newest member of the iPod family, iPod Photo comes in two sizes: a 40GB model, available for $499, and a capacious 60GB model that sells for $599. Both feature a razor sharp LCD display that lets you see your photos in vivid color — 65,536 colors, to be exact. And with its built-in backlighting, you’ll be able to admire those photos indoors or out.

Like its famous siblings, iPod Photo features the touch-sensitive Apple Click Wheel that’s the envy of the industry. You’ll use it to navigate iPod Photo’s new menu. Now in living color, its easier to read than ever. That’s thanks in part to the clarity of the display — it offers 220x176-pixel resolution — and in part to the new Myriad typeface. Spin the wheel to Music, and you can scroll effortlessly through dozens of playlists, hundreds of albums or thousand of songs.

Apple is no longer so much a computer company as a digital entertainment company.

It's good news for Apple, because the entertainment business is far more profitable than the computer business. While the company's total revenue was up only 37 per cent, its profits doubled, indicating the much higher margin Apple earns from iPods compared to the iMac, for instance.

Sadly, Apple's retailers aren't enjoying the same returns. They're still stuck on the pitiful 8 per cent that makes their existence more than a little fragile. They're probably only surviving on the thriving trade for iPod appliances, where the mark-up is probably somewhat higher.

In that and one other respect, Apple is still a computer company: from time to time it still treats its customers badly.

Apple's quality control is better than the average and its products generally perform very well but they're by no means perfect. Over the years we've reported on a range of software and hardware faults. The company has mostly failed to acknowledge them.

It has been able to get away with this in the past because of extraordinary forbearance by its customers. Indeed, Apple doesn't really have customers so much as disciples. Journalists who dare to criticise the company or its products can expect a flood of insulting emails from users.

The danger for Apple is that it might expect this attitude to continue. Now it's in the entertainment business, it won't. These new customers aren't one-eyed Apple supporters and they're going to expect a more immediate response to problems.

At least a dozen portable music players are angling to steal sales away from Apple Computer Inc.'s wildly popular line of iPods this holiday season. In the past month alone, five companies have unveiled their iPod challengers -- pocket-sized players with hard disks that can store anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 songs.

There's Dell Inc.'s new Pocket DJ, Virgin Electronics' Player, Creative Labs Inc.'s Zen Micro, iRiver America Inc.'s H300, and Archos Inc.'s Gmini XS200.

"Everyone is trying to get a bite out of Apple's piece of the pie," said Susan Kevorkian, analyst at market research firm IDC.

Apple was not the first to introduce a high-capacity hard-disk portable music player -- Archos was. But Apple's October 2001 launch of the sleek, white iPod defined the market.

Today, Apple rules the field, riding high with a gizmo that's both fashion chic and a cultural icon.

Worldwide, Apple enjoyed a 54 percent chunk of hard-disk unit shipments in 2003, maintaining a strong lead in a market predicted to grow to 25.5 million units in 2008, up from 2.7 million units shipped in 2003, according to IDC.

The competition also includes players introduced earlier this year from Samsung Electronics Co., Sony Corp., and MP3 player pioneer, Rio Audio. For their part, Samsung, Sony and Virgin have brand and style cachet -- not to mention deep pockets. Rio and Creative, smaller companies, have earned points in user-friendliness, while Dell and Archos are offering lower prices for the capacity.

The Mozilla Foundation expects one in 10 Internet users to be browsing using Firefox within the next year.

Maybe the browser wars really are back.

Bart Decrem, the marketing contact for the Mozilla Foundation, told ZDNet UK on Friday that he expects the browser's market share to reach 10 percent by the end of 2005.

"I think we'll get to 10 percent over the next year. We don't have 10 percent of the Web at the moment, but we have the momentum," claimed Decrem.

He is confident of hitting this goal as interest in the browser has been accelerating over the last few months. He said this momentum can be seen in the increasing number of downloads for each version of Firefox: version 0.8 was downloaded 3.3 million times in four months; 0.9 was downloaded 6.5 million times in three months; and the pre-release version was downloaded five million times in just one month.