The RIAA thinks so.

The music industry has turned its big legal guns on Internet music-swappers – including a 12-year-old Upper West Side girl who thought downloading songs was fun.

Can she be held accountable if she’s not an adult?

On the special features of the DVD for The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers(), several of the people involved with the project state that the third installment is by far the best of the three.

Given the near perfection of the first two installments, is it possible for the third to actually be that good?

Chad Dickerson is CTO of InfoWorld.

On a recent Friday, weary from shopping for a new PC, I grabbed the 3-year-old G4 at my desk (a 450MHz processor, same as my Dell) and took it home to see what all the Mac and OS X fuss was about. My plan was to add it to my existing home network, which consisted of two PCs and a Linux server. I plugged the Mac into the fourth port on my four-port KVM switch, mostly excited about iTunes. My Linux-served MP3 collection forced my unwitting experiment in enterprise Mac integration.

Fast forward to Monday and the KVM switch is in storage. I don’t need it because the Mac does everything I need. It replaced the Linux server and one of the PC clients, and I’ve mainlined the keyboard and mouse directly into the Mac. My experience with OS X at home felt like crossing a chasm.

Now maybe more people will take notice.

Apple increased its market share last year.

In both consumer and educational markets.

…Apple’s consumer market share climbed from 1.5 per cent in June 2001 to 3.5 per cent in June 2003, adding that Apple’s US education market share had also climbed, from 15 to 16 per cent.

Could this be the beginning of a comeback for Apple? Stay tuned.

Glad your back, I was beginning to think something
tragic might have happened to you!!!

It’s been a while since I posted here, but now I’m back.

I just needed a break.

I’m back from a vacation and refreshed. I have some new ideas for the site, so keep an eye out.

The Redsox recently traded Shea Hillenbrand for the young pitcher B. K. Kim. Do you like the idea?

Mac users have long felt that Microsoft copies most of its best ideas from Apple. That opinion isn’t likely to change if Bill Gates’ sneak peek at a new computer and upcoming version of Windows is any indication of the future.

At last week’s Winhec computer hardware conference in New Orleans, Gates showed a prototype of an office computer called the Athens PC that Microsoft designed with Hewlett-Packard. It’s supposed to be a “futuristic prototype,” but the snow-white system looks familiar.

Futuristic, that is, except to a number of computer industry veterans who said that Microsoft and Hewlett were leaning too heavily on industrial design ideas that had originated with Apple

The story also notes that Apple executives “took obvious glee” last week in noting that the new graphics software that is scheduled to appear in “Longhorn,” Microsoft’s 2005 version of its Windows operating system, copies features that have been in Mac OS X since 2001.

“You don’t have to look too far to see that this is almost a direct copy of Quartz,” Phil Schiller, Apple’s vice president of marketing, is quoted as saying.

Maybe someday Bill will figure something original out on his own.

Microsoft has announced that they are retooling Windows XP to allow more than one person to run a program on a machine at a time.

Microsoft plans to retool its Windows XP operating system so that two people can run applications on the same machine concurrently, an important step toward the company’s goal of transforming the PC into a home entertainment center.

You mean, they’re finally getting it to do something that UNIX has been able to do for 30 years? Wow!

The iTunes music store is doing huge business!

Apple Computer’s new online music service sold more than 1 million songs during its first week of operation, the company said Monday.

The early sales success suggests that people will pay for music downloads if given the chance, analysts say. “It clearly shows there was some pent-up demand in the Mac community for a legal way to buy and download digital music,” Jupiter Research analyst Michael Gartenberg said.

On Tuesday, Apple plans to add 3,200 new tracks to the music store, including Michelle Branch’s album “The Spirit Room” and the catalog of music from Alanis Morissette.

I’ve told a bunch of friends about this, and they all say the same thing: **Someone finally got it right!*’. One friend actually told me that this seals the deal… ‘*his next computer will be a Mac!**. That’s right folks, Apple continues to do things the way they ought to be done!