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Heads up, schmokers: Lighting up near your computer is heresy enough that Apple says it voids your warranty should you need to bring a smoke-exposed computer in for repair. Specifically, in at least two instances in different parts of the country, Apple has voided the warranty and refused to provide repair service on Macintosh computers exposed to environments where cigarette smoke has been present. Calling cigarette smoke residue (tar and whatnot) inside a computer a health risk and a "biohazard," in both cases Apple customers have been denied service despite having time left on a valid warranty. Apple is standing...

All right, a new report from the NPD Group says that 48% of the retail dollars spent on personal computers in the U.S. now goes to Apple. However, that doesn’t add up to a 48%% market share by any means, because of the price of admission. But, folks, I still maintain there is no Apple Tax. So how does Apple gain such a huge percentage of the money? Well, obviously, the average price of a Mac is way higher than the average price of a PC. Without going into the numbers specifically, the answer why is obvious: Apple won’t play...

Windows 7 passes Mac OS X in market share race Weekend numbers for new OS bigger than for all versions of Mac OS X, says Net Applications Windows 7 passed the 5% market share milestone last weekend, which put it, if only temporarily, above the total market share of all versions of Apple's Mac OS X, a Web measurement firm said today.Last Saturday and Sunday, Windows 7 powered an estimated 5% and 5.14% of all computers that were online those days, according to Internet metrics vendor Net Applications. The two-day average of 5.07% was higher than the 5% of the...

Conclusion After spending several days with Fedora, I find that I'm happy with this release. The live CD by itself was a bit underwhelming, but the distribution as a whole has been excellent. This is probably the most stable and most polished release the Fedora team has put together to date. Security is strong over most of the system, though the hole introduced in the software management system is a concern. Package management is fast and KDE feels like it's getting the attention it deserves. The system is responsive and I have yet to run into any serious problems. Due...