Say what you will about the iPod (I love mine), It's tough to load anything onto it accidentally. In fact, if apple doesn't specifically allow for the type of file to be there, it's difficult to load anything onto it at all...

Which leaves my Google calendar and my Thunderbird address book off my iPod. Can someone explain to me why Apple is pushing people at Windows products?

A very good question.

I'm pretty sure that the secret of the success of the iPod is that Apple has strongly resisted the impulse to add features. In fact, it has pared them to a minimum. The idea is a tool that does one thing so well that you don't even think about it. You just DO it, like walking or talking. Notice that the various would-be competitors seem to have more features than the iPod, and none of them have flourished.

What will be really interesting is the iPhone. It's an iPod, a phone, web-browser, camera, and various other things. Will it still have that feeling of clarity that the iPod does? Will we just use it, or will it be one of those things where you need to keep looking at the instruction booklet and puzzling out which button to push?

I agree that the iPod has a nice, clean interface. Still, I wish I could install things like the BART schedule without having to basically re-program the thing. There is a certain strength to the locked nature of the device, but there are drawbacks as well.

Do you remember about 2 years ago we were at Dave Trowbridge's place, and I was making a comment about phones? I said that the telephone had reached the point of maximum complexity and usefulness-- until someone reinvents its interface...

Jobs must have been listening...

And how is this virus supposed to get to the iPod?

Even if you run linux on your PC, it uses a different instruction set than the cut-down version
used on iPods, which use some ARM variant.