McNealy said he expects the transition will take the better part of five years and ultimately could cause a challenge for the software developers that write for the Mac.

"Their ISVs are going to have to decide, do I write to Apple/Power or Apple/Intel?"

Apple's software tools will allow creation of a "universal binary" that puts software for both processors into a single package, but McNealy said a better universal binary is Java, which already lets programs run on a wide variety of computers.

"The big winner on this is going to the Java virtual machine," he said.
Still, he said, it was probably the right move for Apple to make.

Today, all digital cameras support a popular image format called JPEG, which offers so-called lossy compression, in which data is actually deleted to make file sizes smaller. Most cameras offer a few quality settings, and my advice is to always use the highest-quality setting that your digital camera offers so that you get the best possible images.

But JPEG images have problems. The most egregious is that every time you edit a JPEG image and resave the file, it's recompressed, so you lose data again. It's possible to literally degrade the quality of JPEG images over time—a scary proposition. One way to avoid this problem is to make backups of the original photos each time you copy them to your PC. But for an emerging generation of digital-photography power users, there's an even better solution: It's called Raw image format.

Early this month, Microsoft revealed that it would natively support Raw image files in Longhorn, its next generation Windows operating system and, to a lesser extent, in Windows XP as well, through a free Power Toy add-on. Most Windows users are probably unfamiliar with Raw images, however, so I spoke recently with Josh Weisberg, Group Product Manager for Windows Digital Media at Microsoft about this development and how it will make Longhorn more attractive to digital camera users.

Apple today announced that music fans have purchased and downloaded more than 50 million songs from its European iTunes Music Stores in its first year. iTunes Music Stores were launched in the UK, France and Germany in June 2004, and now operate in 17 European countries including Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. The European iTunes Music Stores have catalogs of over one million songs each, and feature content from all major music companies and over 1,000 independent record labels.

As a user-level operating system, Linux is a cruel and tawdry lie. Bigfoot will fly to your house and personally deliver a $30,000 tax refund before there's a Linux that can challenge Windows or MacOS in terms of usability. If anyone tells you otherwise, your only rebuttal should be to administer that thing that Moe used to do to Larry -- you know, where he'd grab Larry's nose with one hand and smack it down with the other.

None of that matters. Linux is still one of the best and most important OS's on the landscape.

Ubuntu (free free free) is ... a snap to install and useful straight from the box; all in all, it's the perfect choice for the Linux-curious.

It builds upon the Debian flavor of Linux (it's what I run on my own Linux boxes), and combines credible ease-of-use with the satisfying crunch of fresh, wholesome Linux.

There's an RSS Team at Microsoft? Yeah there is.

On Friday you'll see how deeply integrated RSS is in the architecture of the browser. But that's just the tip of what may turn out to be a very big iceberg. The people at Microsoft noticed something that I had seen, only peripherally -- that there were applications of RSS that aren't about news. Like Audible's NY Times Best Seller list, or an iTunes music playlist, or lists of Sharepoint documents, or browser bookmarks. Lists are all over the place, and people are starting to move them around via RSS, and they are not the usual kind of data that has been carried by RSS in the past.

Anyway, there's a lot more to what they're doing, but I wanted to say in advance that I think what they're doing is cool. They apparently were concerned about what I would think. I want them to relax and give a really great demo on Friday.

Officials at software developer CodeWeavers Wednesday said developers using its product will be able to create Mac versions of Windows applications using its software.

The St. Paul, Minn.-based company is best known for its CrossOver tool, which allows developers to port, or migrate, to Linux applications developed in Windows. The company also develops CrossOver Office, which lets Linux end users run Windows-based applications like Office, Lotus Notes, Macromedia Dreamweaver and Adobe Photoshop.

"Apple's decision to shift to Intel chips is good news for many Windows developers who, for reasons of time and/or expense, have never created Mac versions of their key applications," Jeremy White, CodeWeavers CEO, said in a statement. "CodeWeavers can give these developers a low-cost and near-instant path to market through the use of CrossOver technology."

According to a report released by market research firm In-Stat on Tuesday, Apple sold 8.4 million iPods in 2004 and captured a market share of more than 30 percent.

Apple blurs sales figures of the individual iPod products, so it was not clear how successful certain products are. According to recent media reports, for example on AppleInsider.com, iPod Shuffle sales are much slower than expected and are likely to even affect overall price levels of NAND Flash. Analysts at Goldman Sachs said that it expects sales for all iPods to be flat this quarter, other sources claim that sales are declining for the first time since the product's introduction in 2001.

Stephanie Guza, an analyst with In-Stat, is more optimistic and expects that the market share of the iPod has climbed above the 30.2 percent level in the first half of 2005. According to Guza, Apple's advantage is still the iPod brand. "What you see is a 'Kleenex' effect. The iPod name is anonymous for portable player."

"Family Guy" creator Seth MacFarlane is preparing his long-awaited direct-to-DVD movie based on the exploits of his cartoon clan for a Sept. 27 release.

"It's been an enormous undertaking to juggle this with doing 35 new episodes of the show, but we think it turned out great," MacFarlane said of the film, his first full-length feature, and the first direct-to-video ever made off a television franchise.

The 83-minute, unrated "Family Guy Presents Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story" ($29.98) is based on the animated series MacFarlane created for Fox Television in the late 1990s. The irreverent series, aimed at adults rather than kids, went on the air in early 1999 and was canceled in 2003, only to be resurrected last month after an overwhelming demand for the show on DVD.

The first DVD set sold more than 2.5 million units ... and two subsequent packages lifted the "Family Guy" franchise's total sales to about 4.5 million units.

With all the capabilities Sony’s PlayStation Portable (PSP), it was only a matter of time until this unit became more than just a gaming system. It not only lets users take games, music, videos and photos on the road, but is also an excellent portable player for TV content recorded with our Beyond TV PVR software.

In this how-to article, I’m going to walk you through the steps to get TV shows recorded with Beyond TV onto your PlayStation Portable.

Copying TV shows recorded with Beyond TV is really a simple three-step process:

Step 1: Record your TV content with Beyond TV 3
Step 2: Convert your recorded TV shows to MPEG-4
Step 3: Copy your shows to your PSP