Ladies and Gentlemen: You now have eight calendar days to find, buy and wrap (or have a professional at the mall wrap) your Christmas 2001 gifts.

Yes, normally this space has my lucid analyses on tech subjects like how sad the HP/Compaq non-merger looks right now, the injustice of Russian hacker Dmitry Sklyarov's slap on the wrist for showing digital thieves how to steal from Adobe Software or how this whole 9-11 charity mess could be fixed if Larry Ellison donated Oracle 9i to the September 11th Fund rather than the CIA. It's a shame because I've got plenty to say about all those things, too.

However, this week is going to be different. Christmas is a favorite holiday of mine and despite what you wacko Linux cultists might think, I'm a pretty darn nice guy. All this week here at the World Tribune's tech page, I'm going to ask our readers what they want Saint Nicholas to give them on the 25th. For the next five days, it will be the highly educated international readers of the World Tribune who determine what appears here on the tech section. Email me at scott@worldtechtribune.com with which tasty nuggets of technology you would like to find under your Christmas tree next Tuesday and I will post your lists here. I can handle emails in English, Spanish, Mandarin and Cantonese, but include your name and town, please. Yes friends, the World Tribune technology page is now your page for a week.

I'll start off the week with my wishlist:

1) The VisionTek GeForce3 video card. If web surfing and word processing is all you do on your PC, the VisionTek GeForce3 video card is not for you. No, the VisionTek GeForce3 is only for PC enthusiasts who crave retina-melting frame rates in their 3D video games. The three-year warranty and TV-out capability is nice but the real benefit of the VisionTek GeForce3 is its speed. The card is based on Nvidia's GeForce3 graphics chip boasting a whopping 64MB of texture memory and a super-fast video processor capable of 800 million operations per second. Other 64MB video cards like Matrox's G550, ATI's Radeon 8500 and Guillemot's Hercules 3D Prophet 3500 are on average much cheaper than the GeForce3, but come nowhere near the same performance level. The VisionTek GeForce3's $350-$500 (US) price tag will put off most shoppers, but for those gamers who scrape together enough to buy this card will not be disappointed.

2) An Apple G4 Power Mac with Adobe Premiere. I had initially thought that a career in movie making would suit me, but realized that because I did not buy a Mac in college, I would be forever resigned to the slightly-less glamorous life of an IT industry insider. In the ten years since then, I've paid too much to see substandard movies and want to start making my own again. The best way to make movies today is with a digital video camera and an Apple G4 Power Mac.

HBO's lame Project Greenlight contest gives filmmakers a Dell Precision Workstation 220 with Avid editing software, but frankly that setupÊdoes more harm than good for a budding film auteur. From Hollywood to Bollywood, the professionals are all squarely in the Apple camp and swear by the PowerMac G4 and Adobe's Premiere video editing software. The price for this Mac setup will cost close to $6,000 (US), so this is not for those wanting to make cutesy videos of your daughter being a pumpkin in her school play. For that $6,000 (along with some time, patience and talent) you will be able to make commercial-quality video productions and burn them onto DVDs playable in any DVD player. If one is in your area, shop for a PowerMac G4 at one of Apple's very cool retail stores.

3) A punch in the mouth for Steve, the kid in the Dell TV commercials. More than ever, this holiday season should be one of peace on Earth and goodwill towards men. However, any of such feelings fly out the window as soon as Dell's smarmy fake-teenage pitchman hits my television screen. "Steve", the insufferable Eddie Haskell-like spokesman for Dell Computers, is far less evil than Marin-county Taliban traitor John Walker Lindh, but no less deserving of a good punch in the mouth. Some of you might think this is in poor taste, may have no idea who I'm talking about and think this request is not exactly "high-tech," but I don't care. For everyone else, I ask who here doesn't want to see "Steve" get a good throttling?

What new high-tech toy is on your Christmas list? A new Palm m505? A 1.5Mb DSL line in your house? A satellite radio for your car? Let me know what's on your list by emailing me scott@worldtechtri bune.com.