Taking that risk has paid off handsomely so far. Since it opened its first two stores five years ago today, the Apple chain has become a retailing phenomenon. Necessity and inspiration led Apple to toss out the conventional textbook on computer stores and to ignore the rules of location, design, staffing and services provided.

Revenue for each square foot at Apple stores last year was $2,489, compared with $971 at Best Buy, the big computer and electronics retailer, according to Forrester Research, a market research firm.

This evening, Apple is opening a showcase store in Manhattan that will burnish the company's reputation for clever design. The entrance to the store, on Fifth Avenue between 58th and 59th Streets, is a glass cube, 32 feet on each side, with a suspended Apple logo inside. Customers walk down a circular staircase — or take a cylindrical glass elevator — to the 10,000-square-foot store below. The store will be open 24 hours a day, seven days a week — a first for Apple and an acknowledgment of New York's status as a round-the-clock city.

"We wouldn't do that in Palo Alto, but this is New York," Mr. Jobs remarked in an interview.

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Sez this article:

According to Lyon, the unknown attackers hit a key portion of UltraDNS's network with a flood of spoofed DNS requests at a rate of around 4 to 5 gigabits per second, which is enough traffic to make just about any Web site on the Internet fall over (many Internet routers can handle only a few hundred megabits of traffic before they start to fail). But this was no normal DDoS attack– it was a kind of DDoS on the DNS system that security experts say has become alarmingly more common over the past six to eight months.

Known as DNS amplification attacks or "reflected DNS attacks," these kinds of DDoS assaults increase the traffic hurled at a victim by orders of magnitude. In a nutshell, the attackers find a whole bunch of poorly configured DNS servers and use them to create and send spoofed DNS requests from systems they control to the DNS servers they want to cripple. Because the DNS requests appear to be coming from other trusted DNS servers, the target servers have trouble distinguishing regular, legitimate DNS lookups from ones sent by the attackers. Sustained for long enough, the attack eventually overloads the victim's DNS servers with queries and knocks them out of commission.

 And then dig this!  Oh snap!

Several analysts said Yahoo was staking its turf in the search market with its strategy messages during the event.

"Yahoo is saying, 'We'll move the playing field back to where our strength is: core search,'" said Allen Weiner of Gartner. "It's a statement to the business community and competitors that they are still No. 1."

"I believe Yahoo is well positioned with a large network of existing users and a rich advertising platform," said David Card of JupiterResearch.