While there's no doubt [the iPod] is in front of all competitors, is there that much of a difference? RRadio Network's current survey of online radio listeners is showing a preference for other brands too.

Asked "Do you own a portable MP3 player?" and "If yes, which one?", 25.5% of 979 respondents claim to own an iPod. As stated, no doubt Apple's out in front.

But there are other brands on the market that show signs of acceptance. 12.7% of the people reporting to own an MP3 player say they own a Creative Labs unit. 10.5% own an iRiver, and 44.4% say they own an MP3 player model "other" than the 15 brands listed on the survey.

BTW: 66% of respondents don't own a portable MP3 player.

IDC estimates Linux will have 7% of the desktop market in 2008, up from 3% now. This makes it a "mainstream" operating system, according to IDC.

So does that mean the Macintosh isn’t? IDC doesn’t say. IDC doesn’t have to.

IDC previously estimated the 2008 Linux server market at $9 billion, and now has Linux with $11 billion in servers, and another $10 billion in PCs. In this study the total Linux "ecosystem" market grows almost 26% per year, to $35.7 billion in 2008.

Your mileage will vary, of course. These are guesses, estimates, extrapolations, what I like to call "hockey sticks" because that’s what the numbers, when graphed, usually look like. Time, in other words, will tell.

Apple Computer Inc. is suing anonymous people who leaked details about new products by posting information on the Internet, court documents showed Friday.

The complaint alleges that "an unidentified individual, acting alone or in concert with others, has recently misappropriated and disseminated through Web sites confidential information about an unreleased Apple product."

Apple said in the seven-page civil complaint, filed on Dec. 13, that it did not know the "true names or capacities, whether individual, associate, corporate or otherwise," of the defendants. Once they have been discovered, the Cupertino, Calif.-based company said it would amend the complaint.

"Apple has filed a civil complaint against unnamed individuals who we believe stole our trade secrets and posted detailed information about an unannounced Apple product on the Internet," the company said in a statement provided to Reuters. "Apple's DNA is innovation and the protection of our trade secrets is crucial to our success."

"To succeed, Apple must develop innovative products and bring those products to market in advance of its competitors," the company said in its complaint. "If Apple competitors were aware of Apple's future production information, those competitors could benefit economically from that knowledge by directing their product development or marketing to frustrate Apple's plans."

Everyone loves music. When you give Napster for the holidays, you give the best ways to discover and enjoy music. The Samsung Napster MP3 Player (YH-920) has a 20 GB hard drive and can hold 5,000 songs. With this cutting-edge player, you can bring all your music anywhere.

Only $249 with free shipping. Comes with 2 FREE months of Napster.

Features:

Fully Napster Compatible
20GB Hard Disk Drive (1.8")
MP3, WMA, Secure WMA Playback
FM Tuner & Encoding
Rechargeable Battery (Li-ion)
Voice Recording
Can be used as an External Hard Drive for Data Storage
Backlight LCD Display
User Adjustable EQ
Over 10 Hours Playback
USB 2.0 (Backward Compatible with USB 1.1)

The Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving choice and promoting innovation on the Internet, today announced that it has placed a two-page ad in the December 16th edition of the New York Times. The ad, coordinated by Spread Firefox, features the names of the thousands of people worldwide who contributed to the Mozilla Foundation's fundraising campaign to support last month's highly successful launch of the open source Mozilla Firefox 1.0 web browser.

Spread Firefox is the volunteer-run Mozilla advocacy site, with over 50,000 registered members, where community marketing activities are organized to raise awareness and to promote the adoption of Firefox. The Spread Firefox site is powered by the open source CivicSpace web site software. Community members may submit ideas and join volunteer teams by visiting http://www.spreadfirefox.com.

The design and development of the New York Times ad was led by Christopher Messina, a San Francisco-based designer and a volunteer leader at Spread Firefox.

To date, Firefox has been downloaded by over 11 million people worldwide.

The 10.3.7 Update delivers enhanced functionality and improved reliability for Mac OS X v10.3 “Panther” and is recommended for all users.

Key enhancements include improved AFP support for saving documents with long file names, improved OpenGL technology and updated ATI and NVIDIA graphics drivers, improved FireWire device compatibility, updated Preview application, improved compatibility for third party applications, previous standalone security updates.

Apple today announced that music fans have purchased and downloaded more than 200 million songs from the iTunes Music Store.

iTunes has made it easy to give the gift of music this holiday season with iTunes prepaid cards that are available from retailers like Amazon.com, Best Buy, Circuit City, CompUSA, Kroger, RadioShack, 7-Eleven, Target, as well as Apple's online store and Apple's retail stores and offer $15 or $25 of music on the iTunes Music Store. Gift givers can also send iTunes gift certificates in amounts from $10 to $200 by email or regular mail, and can print out these gift certificates in color right on their computer for the perfect last minute stocking stuffer.

"iTunes has now sold over 200 million songs, making it the world's number one online music store by far," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "We're thrilled to be making music an even more popular gift this holiday season with iTunes and iPod."

No longer only a war of words, Apple Computer has quietly started to block the technology that RealNetworks created to get around the iPod music player's copy-protection armor.

Making good on a promise not to sit idly, Apple counterattacked RealNetworks' Harmony technology with one of its newest iPod models, the iPod Photo, which debuted Oct. 26, Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris said Wednesday. She refused to say which, if any, other iPod models may have already received a similar software upgrade.

It's unclear how many people are now stuck with songs they could no longer play on their iPods. The fact that online community banter about Apple's countermove didn't surface until this week suggests Apple still has a near-stranglehold in the digital music market. Given Apple's cultlike following, many Apple endeavors typically generate quick, energetic reactions — good or bad.

For now, RealNetworks has not yet received any customer complaints, but the company will "look at the Apple upgrade and see how it'll make Harmony work once again with the iPod," said RealNetworks' spokesman Matt Graves.

Linux advocates have long insisted that open-source development results in better and more secure software. Now they have statistics to back up their claims.

According to a four-year analysis of the 5.7 million lines of Linux source code conducted by five Stanford University computer science researchers, the Linux kernel programming code is better and more secure than the programming code of most proprietary software.

The report, set to be released on Tuesday, states that the 2.6 Linux production kernel, shipped with software from Red Hat, Novell and other major Linux software vendors, contains 985 bugs in 5.7 million lines of code, well below the industry average for commercial enterprise software. Windows XP, by comparison, contains about 40 million lines of code.

Commercial software typically has 20 to 30 bugs for every 1,000 lines of code, according to Carnegie Mellon University's CyLab Sustainable Computing Consortium. This would be equivalent to 114,000 to 171,000 bugs in 5.7 million lines of code.

The study identified 0.17 bugs per 1,000 lines of code in the Linux kernel. Of the 985 bugs identified, 627 were in critical parts of the kernel. Another 569 could cause a system crash, 100 were security holes, and 33 of the bugs could result in less-than-optimal system performance.

Apple Computer has quietly updated its iPod software so that songs purchased from RealNetworks' online music store will no longer play on some of the Mac maker's popular MP3 players.

The move could render tunes purchased by many iPod owners unplayable on their music players. For the last four months, RealNetworks has marketed its music store as the only Apple rival compatible with the iPod, following the company's discovery of a way to let its customers play their downloaded tunes on Apple's MP3 player.

Apple ... warned in July that RealNetworks-purchased songs would likely "cease to work with current and future iPods." Apple offered no further statement Tuesday, but confirmed that the software released with its Photo iPod will not play music purchased from RealNetworks' music store.

Record label executives, as well as rival technology companies, have repeatedly urged Apple to open up its iPod to play songs purchased from other music stores, but the company has declined to do so. Executives from several labels had applauded RealNetworks' attempt to create compatibility between its store and the iPod, even lacking Apple's permission.

RealNeworks said in a statement that it remains "fully committed to providing consumers with the freedom to use the music libraries they purchase from us on different portable audio devices they acquire, both now and in the future--including the iPod Photo."

I just downloaded and watched the latest episode of The Simpsons and guess what? Homer uses a web browser with tabbed browsing!

It could be the Mozilla Suite, Firefox or Opera, but it sure ain’t Internet Explorer.

Why wait for Longhorn? Microsoft's exciting new MSN Toolbar Suite delivers instant desktop search today! The new MSN Toolbar Suite is quite a bit more accomplished than its predecessor, offering a number of toolbar-based entry points to both local and Web searching. Each of these entry points--including the MSN Deskbar, MSN Toolbar for Microsoft Office Outlook, MSN Toolbar for Microsoft Windows Explorer, and MSN Toolbar for Microsoft Internet Explorer--can search your hard drives, applications, and email as well as the Web. Specifically, you can search all Outlook items (Outlook 2000 and newer, including email, contacts, calendar appointments, and tasks), Outlook Express 6.0 and newer email and attachments, all Microsoft Office document types (including OneNote notes), plain text, Web pages, Adobe PDF files, AVI, Windows Media Audio, Windows Media Video, JPEG, GIF, BMP, and MP3 files, and the contents of all saved MSN Messenger chat sessions (if you've enabled that feature).

Michael Crichton [author of Jurassic Park, The Andromeda Strain, and Timeline] is a big man with big ideas, a storyteller of nearly seven feet who turns popular science into popular fiction.

Now he's questioning global warming in his new thriller, State of Fear, about eco-terrorists who plot a series of natural disasters - earthquakes, underwater landslides, a tsunami - to prove that global warming is a threat to humanity. A ragtag band of scientists and lawyers uncovers the scheme.

State of Fear sounds like a typical Crichton thriller, but this time he's using the novel as a platform, tacking on a five-page message stating his notion that the theory of global warming is speculative at best, and a 14-page bibliography of works supporting his views.

"It was very difficult to get my head around the idea that this widely held belief may not be true, and I thought, 'If I'm going to do a book, how would I structure it so that someone could even hear it a little bit?' " he says, crammed into an armchair meant for size regular at his hotel suite, his youthful face dimpled as he yanks out different graphs to illustrate his point.

Crichton, with more than 100 million copies of his books in print, is ready to defend his view - he's armed with a tape recorder, a steep pile of colourful graphs, scientific data and text books. Pushing rimless glasses up higher on his nose, he's eager to discuss the environment and he's certain his ideas are right. But he doesn't allow ego to swallow him and is quick to laugh at himself and back off when his lecture becomes overbearing.