Article excerpt from the New York Times (12/16/2004): ...APPLE is well positioned for the future. When consumers open their wallets to buy things that have machine intelligence, or provide digital entertainment, or link to the Internet - that is, just about everything in a household that is not edible - they are likely to be drawn to the company with cachet, offering the best-designed, best-engineered, easiest-to-use products, priced affordably thanks to ... Mr. Jobs's new pragmatism. They'll turn to the company that best knows how to meld hardware and software, the company embodied in the ecstatically happy hipster silhouette. The company that is, in a word, cool....

Excerpt from Microsoft Geek Blogger ...So, what is the new branding? It's the likelihood you'll tell your friends, family, or readers about your new product. Apple's product quality and marketing are working to make Apple's brand love very high. Steve Jobs now gets applause just for displaying a product box.

Companies with low brand love (and, yes, I do count the company I work for on that list) will find it tougher to get adoption. Not impossible, though. Remember the Halo 2 lines? All you need to do is build the best-of-breed product and people will line up to buy....

So, how does Apple manage to turn so many heads? Because PC makers busy are turning out too much crap like this that's manages to look awful, be pretty less than impressive specwise and cost more. Yes MORE. And people diss' Apple.

The folks at the Unofficial Apple Weblog have some inside scoop on (and pictures) of the Mini and it's under the hood features like easy RAM accessibility.

New to OSX? Does that "Dock thing" down there bug you? Not make sense? Don't "get it"? For those stumbling to wrap thier mind around the whole dock thing, this might help.

This article very nicely explains the differences of the Dock in OSX to that of the Taskbar in XP, and the variables and intricacies therein.

And remember, you can alter all your dock settings from the "System preferences" panel (loocated your dock), and cliking the "dock" icon.

You can adjust all sorts of things in there, including how big becomes, or doesn't become. ifit hang out at the bottom or a side. If it hides or is visiable all the time.

Once you play around with it a bit, I think you will find it's very customizable.

I got some large ticket items (ALL FOUR seasons of farscape on DVD!) and some clothes of course. Nothing mac or techy really. What did you get?

Even when they don't exactly work for apple anymore.

There is nothing on the web that bothers me more than a poorly written review coming from a supposed "tech guru", but that is exactly what you get from PC Magazine's Jim Louderback in his opinion piece entitled "Ten to Avoid - The Worst Products of the Year."

Several sites, including The Register, have noted that Real's Harmony DRM conversion technology no longer works. Why did it take so long to notice?

For once in my life I clicked the details link. Good thing I did. "If you have a third-party FireWire hard drive connected, turn it off and disconnect it before installing this update. Reconnect it and turn it back on after installation is complete and you've restarted." Is that normal for OSX updates?

Mondays are dull, let's all meet in the chat room every Monday night and have a party! I won't bother with times and time zones as we all live in so many different places, but stop in in the evenings and see who is in. Hang out a while! And let's do it every Monday! (And any other time you want) Note, for those who might like the info, the chatroom seems to work best in Firefox as Safari seems to sign you out every 20 min or so. Until I find a fix, and god knows when that will be, there's your info to make it easier for ya. Come chat with us!