Apple’s iPod music players are wildly popular, and they’re paired with a very good online music service, the iTunes Store. But not everyone loves the famous gadget. Here’s a guide to doing digital music outside the Apple hegemony.
Music services
The iTunes Store is the digital equivalent of a music shop. You buy individual songs or albums [...]

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When you think of videoconferencing, it might conjure up images of a cavernous corporate boardroom, its stiff executives sitting perched in front of costly cameras and viewing a slick video feed of colleagues in, say, Tokyo. Or perhaps you think of Joe Average staring into a cheap Webcam while squinting to make out a garish, [...]

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When you think of legal music downloading on the Internet, you naturally think of Apple Computer’s iTunes Music Store. The first successful legal music service to offer the catalogs of the major labels, iTunes has roughly an 80 percent share of the legal market, according to Apple. It offers 1.5 million tunes, about 50 percent [...]

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The graphical user interface has been a success in the mass market since the Apple Macintosh debuted in 1984, and it has dominated computing since Microsoft Windows went mainstream around 1990.
Its visual display of files stored in a nested hierarchy of folders has worked pretty well — until recently.
In the past few years, computer hard [...]

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For the most serious email users, there’s no substitute for a sophisticated, powerful program such as Outlook and Outlook Express on Windows, or Entourage and Apple Mail on the Macintosh. These programs reside on your computer’s hard disk and store e-mail there. They offer a host of deep features and are very fast. But there’s [...]

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