There's a reason you never see an Apple store empty

Maybe it's because I'm a tech guy, but everyone in my orbit who makes "The Big Switch" always seems to tell me about it first. Voice low, eyes wide, they confess to buying an Apple the way one admits to robbing a liquor store, or running off with another woman: Having loved their sleek and functional iPods and iPhones for years, they finally broke down and crossed all the way over to the Dark Side. And yes, they are inevitably happier as a result.

PC makers abound, but there's only one Apple, which creates both advantages and disadvantages for prospective buyers in terms of price, software integration, and overall compatibility. With only 6.5 percent of worldwide market share compared to Dell's 31.4 percent (all stats are from Gartner, Inc.), Apple may be a small player in absolute terms, but they remain a definite "prime mover" as measured by growth and influence.

And it's not hard to see why.....

As our Macs mature and get newer software, they can lose the ability to perform even lightweight tasks with reasonable speed. Upgrading is one way to improve their useful longevity, as I discussed in Know your Mac's Upgrade Options.

However, there is another method: Modification (or "modding") is the practice of reengineering something to your own specifications.

Ambiguous as that definition might be, it really is as simple as that. The viability of your ideas is the limit to what you can do. Think of it as an art form: If there are things about your Mac that you've wanted to change or perhaps just spice it up a bit, this is the way to go.

On October 5, 1991, the young man who would one day become the world's most famous programmer - and the brand name and poster boy for the open source software movement - sent a message to a newsgroup announcing the birth of what would become the Linux operating system.

You can read that original message that marks the birth of Linux as an open source project, posted by Linus Benedict Torvalds, on the Google's archive of a mailing group called comp.os.minix .

It is hard to guess how many programmers and system administrators have been educated by the Linux development project, but it forms the core of what so many experts and newbies believe in terms of what an operating system should have in it, how that code is created, and how the systems software stack that rides atop of it is created and maintained.

It is safe to say that many millions of IT experts have been affected, either directly or indirectly, by Linux and the open source software movement it unleashed on corporations. While academic and government institutions had long since supported open source software projects as well as the Unix open systems movement, it is Linux - first and foremost - that made open source a commercial idea and one that corporations could embrace.

Toshiba has grown its slimline Portg laptop range with the birth of a new model which the firm claims is the world's thinnest and lightest fully featured machine to date.

The R600 weighs in at 1.1kg (2.4lb) and measures 283 x 215.8 x 19.5-25.5mm. Unfortunately for Toshiba, the R600 will have to share its attributes crown with its older brother, the R500, which weighs exactly the same and has identical dimensions....

Unlike the MacBook Air, the R600 packs in a multi-format DVD writer too.

Mozilla Corp. will use a several-week delay it recently added to the Firefox 3.1 schedule to build a private browsing mode and beef up the browser's address bar, the company said today. Three weeks ago, the company said it would insert four to five more weeks into the timetable, part of a reaction to changes in the browser market, including the introduction by Google Inc. of its Chrome browser. Then, Mozilla said it would probably use the time to add a privacy mode and to punch up its TraceMonkey JavaScript engine performance.

OpenOffice.org will host a launch party in Paris on October 13 to celebrate the eighth anniversary of OpenOffice and the release of version 3.0.

That day will hopefully mark the actual availability of the software as well; "[The] target date is now 13th or 14th of October," Charles Schulz wrote on the OpenOffice marketing blog on Oct. 2.

One of the earliest superstitions bandied about when it came to a Mac was that it wasn't a serious business computer. In those days, real computers used command line interfaces, and Apple's graphical flourishes were meant as entertainment. You couldn't, they said, get any real work done on one of those little boxes. But since Apple wasn't heavily into games, just what could you do?

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