From the Dark Side

Bill Gates was pie'd in Brussels. Here's a photo and a QuickTime movie as well if one has QT 3.0 installed. The event also made ABC News last night.

Bare Feats tested the new ATi's Xclaim VR Rage Pro 4 MB video board. It did extremely well against the much more expensive 128-bit/8 MB ixMicro ix3D Ultimate Rez card and the specialized 4 MB Techworks Power3D with built-in video card. That's good because after reading Mike Breeden's video card reviews on Accelerate your Mac!, the Xclaim VR was selected for Macs Only!'s new 9600 ($239 from MacZone, including a $10 discount for past purchases)

Apple reported over 200,000 downloads of the Mac OS 8.1 updater from its servers last month.

From Dana Baggett,

" The Governor of Maine has proposed a plan whereby business and industry can contribute "quality surplus computers" (read obsolete) to the state which will upgrade them with work done by prison inmates. The state will then distribute them to schools. See the details at http://www.Portland.com/news/story1.htm. This plan is well-established elsewhere with the help of the California-based Detwiler Foundation which launched the program in CA. seven years ago. Eleven other states have followed suit. It is described as a win-win program in that the donors get a tax break and schools get upgraded computers.

While I am all in favor of the program in concept, it raises the prospect that elementary and secondary schools will become infused with refurbished Windoze machines, thus undermining one of the last bastions where Macs Rule. I just wonder if Apple, which at one time had a foundation of its own, should pick up on this program and somehow get involved with a trade-in program that will keep its presence felt. Or is this another example where Apple has lost its way."

I'm afraid that it is another example....

From Hiram Wilson,

he just released " version 1.1 of Hi's Universal Saver. Hi's Universal Saver is a little application which runs quietly in the background and automatically saves your work at an interval which you select."

Global Village PC Card and Diamond's SupraExpress released firmware updaters for their 56K modems. [Thanks Version Tracker.]

From Alco Blom, URL Manager Pro 2.0v4 is available from here.

From Rich Love,

"Version 1.02 of QuitAll Programs has just been released. QuitAll Programs is an AppleScript applet that quits all running programs on your Macintosh. You will find this very useful if you frequently have numerous programs running and want to quit out of most or all of them before running other programs. What's more, you can create an Exceptions List to tell QuitAll which programs you do not want to quit."