When it first came out, did you spent countless sleepless nights wondering why Apple named its digital music player the "iPod"? After all, it's not exactly a very music-playery sort of name; why "iPod" and not, say, "iBop," "iHear," "iListen," or "iWannaGrooveToSomeGrandFunkRailroad"? (Aside from the fact that all of those names blow chunks, of course, but you get the gist, right?) That the iPod wasn't particularly podlike caused a great deal of consternation among easily-upset people with far too much free time on their hands.

Of course, before long, the nicely inclusive "iPod" moniker made more sense; even in its first incarnation, the iPod held music and data, acting as an ultraportable FireWire hard drive, and its hidden Breakout game hinted at its potential to do a lot more than just play Night Ranger's Greatest Hits. Before long, Apple added contacts and calendar functions, an alarm clock, a notes feature, two more games, and the ability (via third-party hardware add-ons) to record voice memos and offload digital photos in the field. Now that shiny white gadget really is a pod, storing all sorts of stuff you throw at it. (With its highly-polished back, it also serves as a handy makeshift mirror-- and, when placed in the toe of a sock, it becomes a surprisingly effective impromptu Whirling Implement of Pummeling™.)

So what's next for Apple's increasingly-featuritic "music player"? A tip calculator? A metric-to-English units conversion utility? A built-in fish-scaler and miniature Spirograph set? Maybe-- but AppleInsider claims that the next more-than-music addition to the iPod's feature set might be that "Home on iPod" feature whose description mysteriously vanished from Apple's Panther web site shortly before that operating system hit the streets. As of 10.3.5 or so, claim sources, you might finally be able to carry around a copy of your home directory and log into it from any Mac running Panther just by plugging in your 'Pod-- and any files you change will be synchronized back to your own Mac when you get home. Sweeeet.

But if you're holding out for something a little more "gee whiz" in the iPod upgrade department, AppleInsider also reports rumors that Apple is working on "handheld videoconference devices" and that "within the next two years Apple could unveil a product that will allow users to videoconference with friends wirelessly from the palm of their hand." That's some pretty thin speculation, sure, but assuming that the Portable iSightChatThingy comes to pass, will it be its own product-- or just yet another feature glommed onto the 5G iPod? Sure, it doesn't sound much like an iPod-type feature, but if you think about it, it's really no more out of place than contacts and calendars.

At this rate, by the time the iPod reaches its sixth generation, it'll sport a mobile phone, a web browser, a pumpkin-carving kit, a set of fireplace tools, a curling iron, a phaser, a tricorder, and a food dehydrator. Oh, and it might play music, too. Let's hear it for progress run amuck!

Meanwhile, what of the competition? Apple is, of course, no longer the only computer manufacturer making (or at least rebranding) its own digital music player to sell alongside its PCs. The first me-too offender is probably Gateway, who introduced its oh-so-cleverly-named Gateway Digital Music Player in early August; that wasn't exactly an iPod ripoff, though, since it was a 128 MB flash-memory-based model selling for $130. ("One eightieth the storage of an iPod for a little under half the price!") And besides, Gateway is barely even a computer company anymore, anyway; it's clinging to life by selling TV sets, so we can't really begrudge them shipping a music player, too.

Dell, of course, is the most overt copycat. In September the company unveiled the Dell Digital Jukebox (yet another stunningly creative name-- Wintel manufacturers must have a direct line to the muse or something), which looked as close to an iPod as anything can get without actually possessing an ounce of style. And just to take its blatant plagiarism to new depths of shamelessness, Dell also announced the advent of the Dell Music Store, its own online music download service. Unbelievable. We were rendered speechless for seconds.

But the Wall Street Journal reports that, while Dell was unoriginal enough to copy Apple, Hewlett-Packard is now so completely devoid of ideas that it's actually copying Dell. Yes, while Dell swiped the idea of a white hard-disk-based pocket-sized player and a downloadable music service to accompany it, HP swiped the idea of swiping the idea: the company also plans "to introduce an Internet music store and portable music player next year." While we've always been a big fan of HP's printers (we recently picked up an honest-to-goshness laser printer, the HP LaserJet 1012, for about $126 with next-day delivery-- thanks for the (now-expired) tip, dealmac!), we are stricken to our very cores by the revelation that there's a Wintel company that's actually less original than Dell.

Actually, make that two companies; HP isn't the only one copying Dell copying Apple. Gateway's Digital Music Player was one thing, but a few weeks ago it introduced its own iPod clone, with no compunction whatsoever about drawing comparisons: it's "$100 less than Apple iPod," crows the company. And just like Dell's offering, Gateway's looks like an iPod gone evil-- its controls are cheap and lame-looking, and instead of being white with a silver back, it's silver with a black back. Oooooo. Oh, and did we mention that while Dell's thing is called the "Dell Digital Jukebox," Gateway's is called-- we swear we're not making this up-- the "Gateway Digital Music Jukebox"? (Just in case customers might not be aware that a jukebox plays music, we suppose.)

The sad thing, of course, is that there are actually going to be people out there buying these things, and maybe even downloading music for them from the rash of iTunes Music Store knockoffs currently popping up on the 'net like virtual Starbucks locations. Still, without clueless consumer victims in the world, who would the rest of us snigger at?

Slow news day alert! Slow news day alert! Duck and cover, people, because it's time for another round of off-topic Microsoft-bashing! Hey, it's either this, or transcribing pages from the phone book; we've got airtime to fill, ya know. Besides, as we've mentioned numerous times in the past, no matter how dead things get, there are always at least two or three items about Microsoft floating around out there, just begging for smart-ass commentary. It's almost like we've found our true place in the universe.

Today's topic was a tough choice, though, because it's agonizing to pass up Bill Gates insisting to AlwaysOn that Windows is "significantly better" than Linux security-wise, and "way cheaper" as well; heck, we could probably fill an entire episode with nothing but speculation as to what seriously mind-altering substances the Billster must have had in his bloodstream at the time he said that. (We're guessing two parts crack, three parts methadone, a pinch of ecstasy, and a NyQuil chaser.) Still, the topic we do want to cover hits a little closer to home: faithful viewer Peter Krug tipped us off to an InfoWorld article about how bank automated teller machines are being replaced with new models running Windows-- and a bunch of them have already been infected by worms.

Yup, back in August a couple of unnamed financial institutions had to pull their ATMs offline and patch them because they'd become infected with Welchia, that "white hat" Blaster variant that tried to help by patching systems against Blaster infection, but ironically just choked networks with a flood of activity. So now ATMs are going to inherit all the same security holes that Windows has? Maybe it's just our overly-paranoid sensibilities showing, here, but the "near universal decision to use Windows" to drive ATMs sounds like the scariest idea since squeezy-yogurt-in-a-tube.

Is there any technical reason to believe that someone couldn't write a worm that captures account numbers as the ATM card mag stripe is read, records PINs as they're entered, and then sends the data back to the author for later use? As Peter puts it, "Why don't we just find hackers and write them checks directly?" (The answer, of course, is "tax reasons," but we suspect he was asking rhetorically.) Seriously, we'd be a little less concerned about the possibility of Windows-based ATMs getting compromised if it hadn't happened already.

Not to mention the fact that, security issues aside, every time we deposit an AtAT Store check or get some cash, we'll technically be using Windows against our will, and cooties are a major concern. FleetBoston, the official Bank of AtAT and its staff, has already tested a hundred Windows NT-based ATMs in New York and our own town of Boston, and is "certifying Windows XP for deployment." Sheesh... it's almost enough to make us want to walk inside the bank and deal with real live people again.