For many online and brick and mortar stores, it has not been a great holiday season. Even with all the after-Christmas sales today, retailers are saying they do not expect to be able to make up for the effects of a dismal economy.

For Amazon, however, things went very well. Today Amazon reported that this has been their best season so far, shipping an amazing 72.9 items per second. Amazon has not reported profits, so with deep discounting they may not have made as much money as last year, even though they have sold more items.

In the electronics category, where computers and MP3 players sit, the Apple iPod touch was a best seller. Of the 25 best selling notebook computers, 7 were Apple laptops when I checked. (These numbers change hourly.) Only one other laptop that sells for more than 500 dollars made the top 25, a Toshiba for $599. The rest of the top sellers were all under $500 and included several netbooks. Are you listening, Apple? Netbooks are catching on. What is so interesting is that Apple users did not seem to be very sensitive to price, and the best selling Apple notebook was not the cheapest, but was in fact the new unibody MacBook.

For desktop computer sales, 3 of the 5 best sellers are Macs, but note these numbers change hourly too. Dell and HP round out the top 5. While not authoritative, Apple seems to weathering some of the economic recession. When Apple releases holiday benchmarks for their retail and online store, the results should be interesting.

Say what you will about Microsoft Office 2008, but even with the advent of productivity suites in the cloud and from the open source world, there's still a lot to be said for having the industry standard package tucked away on your Mac in case you need it. If you don't own it yet, you might consider picking up a copy today: there are multiple deals on Office 2008 Special Media Edition, which includes Expression Media 2 (successor to the veteran content manager iView Media).

Microsoft has dropped the list price of the software to $149 for today only, a 70% discount, and you can do even better than that: Amazon has a one-hour deal for $99 for Office 2008 SME, expiring shortly; for even more savings, NYC retailer Tekserve has the same product for $79, good through 11/30, along with a pageful of other Mac and iPod deals. Time to warm up the checkbook.

Thanks TJ & everyone who sent this in.

Jungle Disk, one of the slickest ways to access your Amazon S3 account, has officially updated to version 2.0. I have two words to say: compatibility and bucket. Compatibility buckets are by far my biggest cause for celebration. You see, I have a disorder that doesn't allow me to do things with just one utility or application, I have to make use of every tool available. I guess it's similar to more mechanically inclined folks who fetishize power tools. I digress. The long and short of it is that compatibility buckets no longer store my files in a flat, proprietary file system. Not only does this mean other tools can access my Jungle Disk buckets, I now have the ability to move and rename files, which I didn't previously. Upgrading your buckets to the new format is optional, and in my experience can ruffle a few feathers if you use it in a shared environment. For reasons noted previously, I was willing to take the flak.

I've only toyed with -- but never used seriously -- the offsite backup features of Jungle Disk. I would say from my brief forays, though, that they rival CrashPlan's abilities. As noted by our friends at the Download Squad, the interface is much nicer now on every platform (Jungle Disk is compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux -- there's even a USB version). There are also new command-line tools included, which is great for scripting and automation. If you use Amazon S3, or if you're looking for cheap and massive storage options, Jungle Disk has officially become worth looking at, in my book. The release notes shed light on quite a few improvements I've neglected to mention.

The program is $20 and is a one-time purchase with free upgrades for life. You get licensed versions for Windows, Mac and Linux, and free reign to install on as many machines as you like with a single license. For $1/month more, you can get Web-based file access, block-level file updates and upload resume features. The storage pricing itself is direct from Amazon and runs about 15 cents per gig with additional charges for transfers ($0.10/gig upload, $0.17/gig download). Jungle Disk is free to try.

I don't think anybody likes DRM. Customers certainly don't like it: they want to listen to music and watch video where and when they please. I don't think it's that popular with the content providers, either, because it's not a perfect solution. It might cut down on some piracy, but by no means eliminates it entirely.

DRM has come up recently in a few places, and companies have set up camps at two ends of the spectrum. Amazon.com is doing a booming business selling DRM-free music, sometimes for better prices than at the iTunes Store. On the other hand, we have NBC, who may or may not be partnering with Microsoft to create device software that (somehow) determines if a particular music or video file has been stolen.

As much as I'm sure that both Zune users would appreciate having access to NBC's video library, the problem remains of how exactly Microsoft would do that, aside from splashing giant watermarks across everything. My money's on unicorn tears.

How much more investment will there be in DRM before content providers realize it's an inefficient, ineffective way of deterring piracy? Sound off in comments.