SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Apple Inc.'s delayed update to the Mac OS X operating system is hitting store shelves as consumers are increasingly snapping up Macintosh computers to complement their iPods and iPhones.Dubbed Leopard, the upgrade went on sale at 6 p.m. local time Friday at stores around the world. It offers improvements to an operating system that already was widely praised for its ease-of-use and slick interface.Leopard boasts more than 300 new features, including one called "Boot Camp" that lets users install Windows on Macs, though both operating systems can't run at the same time. "Time Machine," an automated data backup system, and "Spaces," a way to simultaneously view open applications, are among the other highlighted features.Macs have reached record sale levels, and the launch of Leopard is expected to bolster a continuing rise.At Apple's flagship 5th Avenue store in New York City, a line of about 500 people snaked around the block before Leopard went on sale.

MacDailyNews - Where Mac news comes first

In a November 13, 2007 press release headlined, "Direct Comparison of iPhone and Hard-Key QWERTY Phone Owners Indicates Higher Text Entry Error Rate for iPhones," User Centric, Inc., a Chicago-based usability consultancy, states that they have finished a third and final study examining the user experience of Apple's iPhone. Our study involved data from 60 participants who were asked to enter specific text messages and complete several mobile device tasks. Twenty of these participants were iPhone owners who owned their phones for at least one month. Twenty more participants were owners of traditional hard-key QWERTY phones and another twenty were owners of numeric phones who used the “multi-tap" method of text entry. MacDailyNews Take: Everything you are about to read from this point on from User Centric's press release (in italics) is virtually meaningless and applies only to a miniscule sample of 20 people who have owned an iPhone for at least a month plus 40 other non-iPhone users.

NASA STS-120 Report #09 1 a.m. CDT Saturday, October 27, 2007

This image, captured by the MODIS on the Aqua satellite, shows the California fires on October 25, 2007 at 2:30 pm local time.

When you compare this image to the image of the fires on October 23, you can see that the smoke is more diffuse, and that the wind has changed directions, and is no longer blowing the smoke out over the ocean.

If you look at the plumes coming from the fires (the fires are marked in red), you can see the wind is coming in from the water, blowing the smoke inland. The Santa Ana winds have continued to weaken, helping firefighters, but the fires are still serious. So far, they have destroyed 1500 homes, displaced half a million people, kill up to 12, and caused and estimated $1 billion in damage, according to the Guardian Unlimited.

.