Stan's List

According to a PC World article, the IRS is warning all taxpayers that the crooks are out in full force sending bogus emails phishing for personal information on bogus cloned IRS Web sites. Don’t fall for it. The IRS never uses email. More …

Maine’s Department of Education and Apple Computer have reached agreement on a contract that extends the historic Maine Learning Technology Initiative (MLTI) with Apple iBooks for four more years according to a Maine press release.

TG Daily is reporting that Samsung has just announced a new 32 GB Flash storage device. The aim of this new solid state disk (SSD) drive is to completely replace the traditional hard drives in many laptops on the market. Some of the advantages offered are the 1.8″ form factor, read speeds more than twice that of a normal hard drive, and the promise of 95% less power use. More …

LinuxInsider opines “If I were shopping for a Mac portable now, I’d seriously consider the MacBook Pro, even if this configuration’s $3,000-plus price tag may cause an information technology director to gasp. It’s a quality machine that offers a good deal for the money.” More …

Single of the Week

Named after a curious sort of bird, London’s Guillemots do their own fair share of feather-strutting on Trains to Brazil, the groups second single. Many caught wind of the euphoric pop act when they opened for Rufus Wainwright last year. That initial press and the strength of their first single put them in the running for 2006’s “it” band. Trains to Brazil is a buzzing, jangling bit of joyful pop and we’re proud to have it is our “free” Single of the Week.

ZDNet reports that Microsoft has once again delayed the oft delayed Vista—the company’s next-gen (sic) operating system. Although the ship date has slipped only a few weeks, it eliminates any chance PC makers will have Vista-enabled product in time for Christmas.

“The new launch is now scheduled for January 2007 … Considering the amount of resources being thrown at the Vista project, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer now face unyielding embarrassment. How could things go so wrong this late in the process?”

If you look at Plenty of Fish can you see this page earning over $10,000/day in Adsense revenues, There are a lot of ugly websites that are extremely successful. The reason for this, according to a blog on SiteReference, is that ugly websites do a few things that beautiful websites tend to lack.

Apple’s engineering teams are furiously engaged in finding out what went wrong when a MacBook Pro’s MagSafe power adapter caught fire. Ars Technica has more details and a picture.

Back in December IGM reported that OS X usage had passed 4 percent and here in March were back to report that another milestone has been reached—more people are using the Mac (online) than Windows 98. Or, at least, that’s how HitsLink tells the story:

“Mac OS market share in February was 4.28 percent, while Win98 dipped to 3.89 percent. Apple market share first broke 4 percent for the month of December 2005, and has hovered around 4.25 percent since.”

AppleInsider reports that Apple is addressing backlog of its new Intel-based MacBook Pro professional notebooks as quickly as possible and now looks poised to reach an overall supply and demand balance early next month. More …