"Apple Computer Inc. on Thursday launched its iTunes online music store in Canada, the 14th country in which the popular service is available.

"iTunes, which only works with Apple's market-leading iPod digital music player, is, in addition to the United States, available in France, Germany, England, Spain, Portugal and other countries.

"Songs at the Canadian store will cost $0.99 Canadian each. In the United States, songs cost 99 cents each."

"This is my last 'Byte of the Apple' for BusinessWeek Online. I started writing this column roughly three years ago. At the time, I didn't understand what I was getting into. Yes, I had been a Mac user for two decades. My first was an Apple II that my father purchased for my two sisters and me. We used it to write book reports. When Dad wasn't paying attention, we played nifty games like Sneakers and Castle Wolfenstein.

"But I had been a casual Mac user. I never paid attention to the vigorous debate over Apple (AAPL ), the personalities, and the fascinating technologies that invariably emerge from the skunk works in Cupertino, Calif.

"That changed when the iMac came out, and concurrently, Steve Jobs turned the company around. I started buying Macs exclusively. Not only were they once again cool to own, after years of stagnation, the Macospshere again became a very interesting beat for reporters and columnists. So I wanted in for selfish reasons. Not only was Apple a newsy company but I also welcomed an excuse to learn even more about the platform that I had fallen in love with.....

"A disproportional percentage of the high-tech elite use Apple. Software innovator Bill Joy? He uses OS X. Open-source security software expert Martin Roesch? Loves his PowerBook. Prominent author, magazine publisher, and search expert John Batelle? He's a Machead. And on and on. Either Jobs is ahead of his time again, or he has truly figured out how to build the computer equivalent of a Porsche."

"Last March, in this column, I described my fondness for Dragon NaturallySpeaking, the dictation software for Windows that lets me "write" at 120 words per minute. You wear a headset microphone, you speak normally (except that you speak the punctuation), and NatSpeak pumps the words into whatever program is frontmost.

"Last week, the company (ScanSoft) unveiled its new version 8. The shocking twist: the best feature is improved accuracy. That's it. Not bells, not whistles, just doing what it's supposed to do, only 25 percent better. (The company calls it 99 percent accurate, but that's hard for me to measure; I'll generally dictate an entire column without a single mis-transcription. For that document, it's 100 percent.).....

"The field is dwindling. Philips got out of the speech-recognition game, and IBM's Via Voice is now distributed by, if you can believe this, ScanSoft. That development makes me think that keeping Via Voice cutting-edge is not, ahem, at the top of anyone's priority list.

"There are only two programs for the Macintosh, and they're not, in my estimation, ready for serious daily work. (NatSpeak does NOT work on the Macintosh, even with VirtualPC.)"

"IBM this week announced the formation of Power.org, a collaborative community of itself and 14 partner companies with the goal of promoting hardware and software development centered on the Power architecture standard developed by IBM.

The community's members span a wide range of semiconductor, operating system and consumer electronics companies, including Bull, Novell Inc., Red Hat Inc. and Sony Corp.

Sony announced earlier that Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM's Cell processor-a 64-bit multicore processor based on the Power standard-would form the core of its upcoming Playstation 3 game console.

Notably absent from the Power.org coalition are Apple Computer Inc. and Motorola Corp. (and its spun-off chip-making subsidiary, now named Freescale), two founding members of the original AIM (Apple, IBM and Motorola) Alliance, which was instrumental in the creation of the PowerPC processor."

"IBM has launched an alliance with 14 other companies to make Big Blue's Power processor more adaptable and widely used.

"The partnership, called Power.org, will collaborate on deciding what standard features should be included in Power processors and on designing its internal data pathway so it will be easier to customize the chip for specific uses, said Lisa Su, a vice president in IBM's systems and technology group.

"The partnership includes electronics giant Sony, Linux sellers Novell and Red Hat, chip engineering software firms Cadence Design Systems and Synopsys, chip manufacturer Chartered Semiconductor, computer makers Wistron, Jabil Circuit and Bull, and chip designer AMCC, IBM announced at an event Wednesday called PowerEverywhere in Beijing. The group plans to unveil its Web site Thursday.

"Two prominent examples of IBM's Power family are the Power5 used in its new Unix servers and the PowerPC 970 FX used in its blade servers and Apple Computer's desktop machines and servers....."

"Yeah, why? Your typical modern Mac comes with all the Unixy goodness you could ever need, right? But there are a bunch of Linux PPC distributions that you can, if you feel the need, install on your Apple hardware.....

"If you've attended any of the major geek get-togethers of the last couple of years, you can't have failed to notice the surge in use of Apple hardware and Mac OS X. Since it is based so solidly on Unix, yet with an attractive GUI on top, OS X has appealed to a broad range of programmers and technical writers; especially the kind who have no affection for the Wintel way of doing things.....

"Here's a widely quoted assumption: Mac OS X is essentially desktop Linux. In some respects this is true, but the differences between Mac OS X and true Linux distributions are important ones.

"OS X costs money. Linux is free. Mac OS X can only be customized within the constraints placed upon it by Apple. Linux can be customized to an extraordinary degree, with the right knowledge. Mac OS X requires Apple hardware (most of the time). Linux is the same whether its running on a PowerBook, a PC, or yeah, even an Xbox.....

"So you could argue that there are two compelling reasons (although by no means the only ones) for running Linux on Mac hardware: (1) It is far more customizable for those who care and know how, and (2) it feels more like Windows than Mac OS X does, for those who care and have no wish to know how."

"I love it when I save $1000 or so.

"I have an Apple Titanium PowerBook, circa October 2001. Not the latest and greatest, to be sure, but perfectly fine for my main portable tasks: email and 'Net access, reading and writing blogs, plus presentations both desktop and projector-driven. The machine shows a wee bit of wear on its case, having been around the world several times and having been plugged into mains and VGA cables from Singapore to Sweden and back again.

"Recently, however, the TiBook has had trouble waking from sleep mode. The screen would come back but the cursor would not appear and neither the keyboard nor trackpad seemed to work.....

"I tried everything I know about Macs (which is not inconsiderable, given that the TiBook is my sixth PowerBook): permissions repair, software disk repair, PRAM reset, Open Firmware boot and reset, starting in OS 9, fresh install of OS X, reverting to an earlier version of OS X. Nada. Which convinced me it was a hardware problem.

"...Rather than give up and either buy a new machine or send it to Apple for repair, I decided to replace the hard drive. After all, the main symptom was that the machine couldn't find the system on the drive. So I ordered a new drive from newegg.com and installed it according to PBFixIt's excellent guides, and crossed my fingers."

"I'm happy to report that it's been a week and all appears well...."

"Steve Wozniak's Wheels of Zeus is beginning to roll, and enterprise data protection is one destination on the Apple Computer Inc. co-founder's mind.

Wozniak offered a peek into his vision for the company on Ziff Davis Media's Security Virtual Tradeshow, where he introduced "wOz Location-Based Encryption," an application that uses GPS tracking within a wireless hub to encrypt and decrypt sensitive data for large businesses."

"Google Inc. turned on the switch Thursday to its new e-mail list service that combines the Usenet archive with the ability to create and manage new groups.

The new Google Groups, which has been available as a Google Labs test since May, brings the search giant the type of community feature that has been a fixture for such competitors as Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp.'s MSN division."

"Desktop-search tools have become one of the industry's hottest trends, promising to extend the ease of searching for Web pages to the finding of hard-drive files and data.

While end-users may jump at the chance to uncover their lost e-mails or past Web page visits, analysts and IT executives are warning enterprises to think twice about desktop search because of its potential to reveal personal and confidential information on corporate computers.

The problem, they say, isn't necessarily the technology behind desktop search, but rather the unintended consequences of being able to instantly locate previously hard-to-find data such as e-mails and cached Web pages."

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