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This announcement has caught both Apple’s customers and the rest of the industry by surprise. Especially given the fact that sales of PowerPC-based Mac hardware have never been stronger than they are now. Apple’s 43 percent increase in quarterly sales from a year ago is simply outstanding.

As trite as it sounds, I’m inclined to believe Jobs’s explanation during the keynote, that Apple believes it can make better computers down the road with Intel processors, and that the difference is enough to justify this painful transition.

Maybe the PowerPC roadmap looks good, but the Intel roadmap looks better. Or maybe they see the PowerPC roadmap as downright bleak — e.g., say, no G5 PowerBooks in the foreseeable future, even if Apple wanted to stick with the PowerPC.

The thinking seems to be: better to act now, from a position of strength, and absorb the costs of the transition while the company is doing well, rather than wait a few years and risk being forced to act from a position of weakness or desperation.

“I stood up here two years ago in front of you, and I promised you this,” Jobs said during the keynote, in front of a slide picturing a 3.0 GHz PowerMac G5. “And we haven’t been able to deliver that to you yet.” He went on to say that they’d like to be offering G5 PowerBooks, but can’t.

I’ve seen some interpret this as petulance or spite — that this switch is just Jobs picking up his ball and leaving for another playground because he feels IBM has embarrassed him. That interpretation is foolish. I really think Jobs was just being honest, or at least as honest as he could be in a public statement.

I think it boiled to a choice between two difficult options: either initiate a painful and expensive transition to Intel processors, or stick with PowerPC and fall behind.

Daring Fireball has more interesting speculation on the switch

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On the left is the Xbench under emulation and on the right is Xbench running on a Dual 2.7GHz PowerMac G5. This simply shows that Rosetta certainly works, but is hard to give us real performance comparisons until the final shipping machines come.

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A range of fashion clothing for chickens has been launched by a group of designers working in Austria and Japan.

Austrian Edgar Honetschlaeger said he decided to work with the Japanese on the project because he hoped to make the chicken label clothing essential. He said “It’s something that you don’t really need but everyone wants to have anyway”.

The idea has already taken off after the designers staged a fashion show that is now touring the world.

Several farmers have already had chicken suits with the name of their farm ordered and many advertisers have enquired about the possibility of having sponsored suits promoting everything from KFC to chicken soup.

The chicken suits come in various sizes, and had their first presentation in the Austrian pavilion of the World exhibition in Nagoya, Japan, where 20 chickens paraded a catwalk with Mozart music playing in the background.

The chicken suit collection will continue its world-wide tour with shows planned in Tokyo, Paris, Mexico City and Vienna.

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For the first time since the war in Iraq began, more than half of the American public believes the fight there has not made the United States safer, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

While the focus in Washington has shifted from the Iraq conflict to Social Security and other domestic matters, the survey found that Americans continue to rank Iraq second only to the economy in importance — and that many are losing patience with the enterprise.

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Even after reducing its recruiting target for May, the Army missed it by about 25 percent, Army officials said on Tuesday. The shortfall would have been even bigger had the Army stuck to its original goal for the month.

On Friday, the Army is expected to announce that it met only 75 percent of its recruiting goal for May, the fourth consecutive monthly shortfall in the number of new recruits sent to basic training. Just over 5,000 new recruits entered boot camp in May.

But the news could have appeared worse. Early last month, the Army, with no public notice, lowered its long-stated May goal to 6,700 recruits from 8,050. Compared with the original target, the Army achieved only 62.6 percent of its goal for the month.

Army officials defended the shift on Tuesday, saying it was not uncommon to change monthly goals at midyear. They said that the latest change reflected the reality that the Army was not going to meet its May goal, and that it made more sense to shift some of that quota to the summer months, traditionally a better season for recruiters to attract new high school graduates.

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A White House official who once led the oil industry’s fight against limits on greenhouse gases has repeatedly edited government climate reports in ways that play down links between such emissions and global warming, according to internal documents.

In handwritten notes on drafts of several reports issued in 2002 and 2003, the official, Philip A. Cooney, removed or adjusted descriptions of climate research that government scientists and their supervisors, including some senior Bush administration officials, had already approved. In many cases, the changes appeared in the final reports.

The dozens of changes, while sometimes as subtle as the insertion of the phrase “significant and fundamental” before the word “uncertainties,” tend to produce an air of doubt about findings that most climate experts say are robust.

Mr. Cooney is chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the office that helps devise and promote administration policies on environmental issues.

Before going to the White House in 2001, he was the “climate team leader” and a lobbyist at the American Petroleum Institute, the largest trade group representing the interests of the oil industry. A lawyer with a bachelor’s degree in economics, he has no scientific training.

All this was paid for by Exxon, from the looks of it:

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President’s George Bush’s decision not to sign the United States up to the Kyoto global warming treaty was partly a result of pressure from ExxonMobil, the world’s most powerful oil company, and other industries, according to US State Department papers seen by the Guardian.

The documents, which emerged as Tony Blair visited the White House for discussions on climate change before next month’s G8 meeting, reinforce widely-held suspicions of how close the company is to the administration and its role in helping to formulate US policy.

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In briefing papers given before meetings to the US under-secretary of state, Paula Dobriansky, between 2001 and 2004, the administration is found thanking Exxon executives for the company’s “active involvement” in helping to determine climate change policy, and also seeking its advice on what climate change policies the company might find acceptable.

Other papers suggest that Ms Dobriansky should sound out Exxon executives and other anti-Kyoto business groups on potential alternatives to Kyoto.

Until now Exxon has publicly maintained that it had no involvement in the US government’s rejection of Kyoto. But the documents, obtained by Greenpeace under US freedom of information legislation, suggest this is not the case.

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I like to think that behind every good developer there is a good woman. No. A great woman. It takes a special breed to put up with the stuff that comes along with dating a computer nerd. Those of you who have ever been with a hard core geek know what I’m talking about. Some day I think it would be easier to date one of those guys who hangs out at the golf course all day with his buddies drinking beer.

This weekend I drove up from Nashville to see Justin. I knew he was busy with a Web development project, but I have dealt with that stuff before so it was no big deal. This particular project was for the Rails Day contest. This contest went from midnight on Friday to midnight on Saturday. While he was working I did some MacZealots work, caught up on sleep, cleaned the apartment and did the laundry. While I was folding some shirts I got to thinking about what life with a developer is like. I thought I would share my thoughts with you.

(too long to include here – read it!)

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Apple Computer’s iTunes online music store is as popular as most music-swapping networks, according to a study released Tuesday.

The survey by market research firm NPD Group found that approximately 1.7 million U.S. households downloaded a song from iTunes in March. That was good enough to earn the store a second-place ranking with peer-to-peer downloading service LimeWire.

The most popular digital music service during the month, however, was P2P site WinMX, which was used by 2.1 million households to download music during the month.

“One of the music industry’s questions has been, when will paid download stores compete head-to-head with free P2P download services?” Russ Crupnick, president of the NPD Group’s music and movies division, said in a statement. “That question has now been answered. iTunes is more popular than nearly any P2P service.”

On NPD’s list of the top 10 digital music services, iTunes was ranked ahead of file-sharing companies such Kazaa and iMesh. Other paid online music services such as Napster and RealNetworks’ RealPlayer store also edged onto the list.

“These (paid) digital download stores appear to have created a compelling and economically viable alternative to illegal file sharing,” Crupnick said.

According to NPD, about 4 percent of Internet-enabled households in the nation used a paid music download store in March.

In this photo released by the Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium in Tacoma, Wash., a male infant sea otter, believed to be two-to-three weeks old, lies on a towel Tuesday, May 31, 2005, at the zoo. The pup was mistakenly taken from a beach near La Push, Wash., by well-meaning campers who believed the mammal to have been stranded. State Fish and Wildlife marine mammal expert Steve Jeffries say people who see what appears to be an abandoned sea otter or seal pup should leave it alone and give its mother achance to retrieve the baby. Sea otters are endangered in Washington. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is trying to find a rehabilitation center for the pup because it requires intensive care and will have to spend the rest of its live in captivity. (APPhoto/Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium)

Gregory Despres is shown in this image from television. On April 25, 2005, Despres arrived at the U.S.-Canadian border crossing at Calais, Maine, carrying chain saw stained with what appeared to be blood, a homemade sword, a hatchet, a knife, and brass knuckles. U.S. customs agents confiscated the weapons, fingerprinted Despres, and then let him into the United States. Despres, the suspect in a grisly double murder in New Brunswick, Canada, was arrested in Mattapoisett, Mass., on April 27, 2005 and is being held in a jail there, charged with two counts of first-degree murder. (CP PHOTO/HO/WHDH-TV)

But don’t you dare bring in a nail-clipper!