Friday, March 31, 2000
Top Stories
Macintosh Users Lose Round In House Affair Committee
A House panel on Wednesday took the teeth out of a resolution aimed at allowing candidates for major offices to file their campaign finance reports using any type of computer.
News
Microware To Fight On For "OS-9" Trademark
Software company Microware Systems Corp. will appeal a U.S. district court's decision from earlier this month to allow Apple Computer to use its trademark "OS-9", the company announced Thursday.
Upgrades Put Some Beige G3s In Jeopardy
If you're an owner of a beige, first-generation Power Mac G3 system, you might be considering a processor upgrade to bring your Mac into the G4 generation. But beware — a small but critical component in Apple's beige G3 models can potentially wreck upgraded processors.
MetaCreations Updates 3-D Apps
As MetaCreations prepares to divest its remaining graphics applications, the company has issued free maintenance updates for Carrara, Poser and Canoma. The updates offer a variety of bug fixes and corrections to the user manuals.
Internet Explorer Media Toolbar On The Way
"Microsoft chose to hold back the Media Toolbar out of respect to our content partners," said Irving Kwong, Microsoft's Macintosh product manager. "We want to preserve the rights of digital-media content providers and have been unable to complete our partnership agreements ensuring owners' rights in time for this release."
Opinion
Simultaneous Releases Are Wonderful, But...
In the best of all possible worlds, every Mac game port would be released simultaneous or at least near-simultaneous with the PC version. From a gamer's perspective and from Apple's perspective that would be ideal. But like herding cats or dribbling a football, there are difficulties that make simultaneous releases darn hard to accomplish.
Can PowerPC Keep Up With Intel?
As the first 1GHz Windows PCs hit the market, Apple's Power Mac systems top out at 500MHz. Faster PowerPC chips are on the way, but questions remain about relations between IBM and Motorola.
Review
New Microsoft Browser Shines
The newly-released Internet Explorer 5.0 for the Mac is not only much better than the previous version, but sets the standard for Web browsers. Best of all it's still free.
Microsoft Builds A Magical Mouse
It's a mystery why Apple doesn't at least provide a two- button mouse, but the IntelliMouse fills the gap quite nicely. If only it came in candy colors.
Sidetrack
Join in the fun. Join in the community. Check out The AppleScript Weblog.
I don't know, but do expect major changes tomorrow on the Mac web scene. Looks like somebody is getting serious.
Question: If I were to change the name AppleSurf to something else, what would you suggest?
Wintel
In Search Of Loopholes In Microsoft's Proposal
Over and over again for the last several years, Microsoft has asserted that separating its Web browser from Windows was impossible. And yet, in settlement talks with the government, the company has reportedly offered to do just that. One possible reason for this change of heart, some experts say, is that it doesn't matter anymore.
MS Plays The 'Open Source' Card
In recent weeks, Microsoft seems to have stepped up its attempts to capitalize on the gray area between open and closed. First, according to some developers close to the company, Microsoft was contemplating the idea of making its Windows CE source code available for free to embedded device vendors. Sources say Microsoft was planning to play that up as "opening up the Windows CE source code."
Hard To Gauge Extent, Effectiveness Of Microsoft Concessions
Microsoft has made concessions in its ongoing antitrust settlement talks, but fear of the unknown is keeping the sides apart.