This is my last column in the pages of Daze, dear readers. The natural inclination for someone in my position is to take the entire space reminiscing and thanking people; I will certainly get to that. However, some big news broke in the tech world last week, with the announcement that database colossus Oracle would purchase Sun Microsystems in a mammoth $7.4 billion deal. This is an earth-shaking event, but for some reason it has not gotten the coverage that I believe it deserves.

Apple recently completed the upgrade of its iTunes music store to the new iTunes Plus standard. This means that when you shell out for music on iTunes, you’ll now be getting higher-quality files that can be freely copied — for backups, not for sharing — without the technical restrictions known as “digital rights management,” or DRM, getting in the way.

Unfortunately, it also means that you can’t count on a consistent 99-cent price point for all music anymore. As part of the deal with the recording industry to offer iTunes Plus songs in the entire music store, Apple agreed to abandon its hard-line strategy on pricing and to allow two new prices: one lower, at 69 cents, and one higher at $1.29.

Twitter is a unique communications service that has been rapidly growing in popularity in recent days. The basic idea is simple: You type 140-character messages, called “tweets,” that are then posted on your page and sent out to all of your “followers” on the service.

The service is an interesting blend of blogging and social networking; college users will recognize a similarity between Twitter’s tweets and Facebook status messages; in fact, Facebook’s recent and highly controversial redesign was characterized by some technology blogs as an attempt to bring the simplicity of Twitter to the news feed page.

I spent part of my spring break on a family vacation in the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C. I love Washington because it’s replete with landmarks that are instantly recognizable across the world. This, of course, is a great opportunity for picture-taking.

On Tuesday, Apple introduced Safari 4, a preview version of its web browser for Mac OS X and Windows. Although it has a far smaller market share than Microsoft Internet Explorer or even Mozilla Firefox, past versions of Safari have been able to run circles around their competitors as far as absolute speed and reliability. The performance gap was big enough that I declared Safari 3 my favorite browser in this column last year.

Facebook found itself at the center of another massively publicized controversy last week, when it announced a change to its terms of service (ToS) that would give the social networking service the right to retain material posted by its users in perpetuity. The change was actually slipped in several weeks prior, but the blogosphere picked up on it the weekend of Valentine’s Day, and once again we were off to the races. Blog articles led to angry Facebook groups, which led to articles in the mainstream media. In fact, the furor built to such a point that Facebook was forced to roll back to its former ToS last Wednesday.

A fact little known to most people is that, on top of being the best smartphone on the market, the iPhone is also a fantastic gaming device. The iTunes App Store is the ultimate candy shop for gamers, where you can easily spend hundreds of dollars on amazing titles without even breeching the surface of offerings. As an iPhone owner who is also a gamer, I have a few favorites of my own.

The software Vista inspires much disgust and disdain from computer users. Even in attempts by Microsoft to improve Vista, it is certainly seen as one of the biggest debacles in the history of commercial software and its public relations.

Microsoft argued that Vista’s problems were all psychological through the massive ad campaigns they launched like the Mojave Experiment. They ignored the fact that there are real and serious problems within Vista. Although bad public relations was certainly reinforcing the bad first impressions, Microsoft’s Vista problems are rooted in serious issues with their product.

With an eye towards further growth of its phenomenally successful notebook line — by far the most popular variety of Mac — Apple introduced a major update in October that dramatically changes the mobile Mac experience. In its consumer-oriented MacBook line, Apple dropped plastic casings on all but the lowest-Another brick in the wall: The new aluminum MacBook, released in October, was known as the "brick" before release due to its new single-piece construction method. The notebook's body is built by carving out pieces from a single brick of aluminum.end model in favor of new aluminum casings that had previously been reserved for professional models.

Ever since Apple switched to Intel processors in 2006, one of the main things Mac users have wanted to do is to run Microsoft Windows alongside Mac OS X. Although Mac OS is one of the main selling points of Apple’s whole computer lineup, there are just some things you need Windows for — many games, for instance, are still not released for the Mac at all.