Stories by: Mark Hall

In late October, a buddy from my MacWeek days e-mailed me with this half-joking dig: "Apple's worth more than IBM. The Mac wins!!"

There are two kinds of people: optimists and pessimists. Sadly, I'm one of the latter. So I wasn't surprised when the vast majority of scientists concluded that human contributions to the buildup of greenhouse gases are a key component of global warming.

Microsoft is officially handing its future to Ray Ozzie, who is replacing Bill Gates as the company's chief software architect. Over the next two years, Gates will be giving up his responsibilities to Ozzie and Craig Mundie. But it's Ozzie who gets the role of chief software architect (CSA), the most significant of the jobs Gates is relinquishing.

Spammers steal IP addresses ... and threaten the Internet's system of trust among networks. Malware malcontents, especially spammers, are temporarily stealing IP addresses from their rightful domains and using them as their own for as little as five minutes but as long as a day.

The surly Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw once observed, "It's just as unpleasant to get more than you bargain for as to get less." He must have been thinking about mass storage systems.

Consumers who attend Macworld Expo Web will have multiple course options to choose from. But IT professionals will have almost no sessions to attend at this week's event in San Francisco. In fact, the first course offered to "Mac Managers" is called "Linux for the PPC".

More application service providers (ASP) are flying in the face of the one-to-one mantra of Internet supporters.

Intel CEO Craig Barrett last week told an audience of 4000 developers at the company's semiannual technical conference that peer-to-peer computing is becoming a technology "that IT managers are going to have to worry about".

Not unlike the legendary Beach Boys and Huey Lewis and the News, who entertained IBM's 4000 independent software vendors, resellers and distributors here last week, IBM is ready to continue rocking and rolling with its venerable AS/400 server in the fast-growing application service provider (ASP) market.

Steve Jobs, who has dropped the "interim" from his role as chief executive officer of Apple, has demonstrated publicly for the first time the client version of Mac OS X and new Internet tools before a packed and cheering auditorium here.