November 2006
President's message

Here we go again…
My over-extended schedule is once again wreaking havoc with my schedule…I should have submitted my column a couple of days ago but just started writing it. Ugh!!!

Upcoming Events
• “Patch Tuesday” – November 14th. Don’t forget to visit the Microsoft update site, http://update.microsoft.com.
Do you have information on any upcoming technology conferences? Please send me the details… I’ll include them in my next column.

Elections/Annual Meeting
DACS will be holding its annual meeting on Tuesday, December 5 at approximately 7:30 p.m. During the meeting we will be electing five directors. If you’d like to run for a seat on the board of directors contact Jim Scheef, chair of the nominating committee, or any officer or director. Our e-mail addresses and phone numbers are on page 3.

Schedules
One of the more common complaints I hear from members is that we tend to let the general meeting agenda slip and/or run long. You’re right—we do, and I’m going to try to put a stop to it. Just so there’s no confusion, the agenda for the general meeting is this:

6:30-7:00 Registration & Casual Networking
7:00-7:30 Random Access
7:30-8:00 What’s News & a short Break
8:00-9:30 Feature Presentation (incl. Q&A)
9:30-9:45 Drawing for prizes (if any)
9:45- Adjourn
A little drift is unavoidable at sometimes, what I’m going to do is try to keep us to within 5 minutes of that schedule.

U.S. Personal Computer Market Share
I usually don’t pay much attention to the personal computer market share
figures, but for a couple reasons the recently released third quarter numbers caught my attention. First, though HP has reportedly passed Dell as the number one PC supplier world-wide, Dell is still the market leader in the US. More interesting than the HP/Dell duel is Apple’s growing market share. Apple led all computer companies with a 30 percent year-over-year growth rate. The table below illustrates the current top 5 in US market share; the numbers in parentheses are the percent of growth.

Rank Company Gartner IDC
1 Dell 32.1 (-7.1) 31
2 HP 23 (+6.3) 22
3 Gateway 6.4 (-1.1) 6
4 Apple 6.1 (+31) 5.8
5 Toshiba 5.1 (+22.3) 4.2

If the current trend continues Apple will soon replace Gateway as the number three computer supplier in the US. Personally, I suspect Apple’s market share will grow into 10-12 percent range over next couple of years.

First Impressions – IE7
Microsoft released Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP on October 18th I’ve been using it for a couple of days now… The only immediate criticism I have is that redesigned user interface is terrible, I’m not sure want Microsoft was trying to accomplish when they redesigned the UI for IE7, but the result is rather kludgy in my opinion.
That said, I like IE7 overall, it seems faster and more stable than IE6 and tabbed browsing and RSS support are long over do.
See http://www.microsoft.com/ie for more information and to download IE7 for Windows XP.

End Notes
Ok, that’s pretty much all I have time for this month… I haven’t finished Break No Bones by Kathy Reichs yet… I have about 100 pages to go… It’s a great read, though. I haven’t decided what to read next; any suggestions?
As always you can contact me at jasetaro@mags.net or jasetaro@yahoo. com with your comments, questions, criticisms or book recommendations.
Cheers;
–Jeff Setaro