From the Dark Side--M$ Quickly Names Antitrust Conviction Compliance Committee

from its board members according to this CNet article. They are James Cash, a Harvard Business School professor, who will serve as chair of the committee plus Raymond Gilmartin, CEO of Merck & Co., and former U.S. Secretary of Labor Ann McLaughlin. All have been on Microsoft's board less than 2 years. The key appointment will be the Compliance Officer.

-- TGIF, November 8 --

[Update Noon ET] $400 Million Gift to Maine Because of iBook Program according to this Portland Press Herald article. EDS is giving Maine software that has a retail value of $400 million. The specific applications are not mentioned in the article except as "The cutting-edge software has applications in manufacturing, aerospace, medical technology and other fields." A principal reason for the gift is the State of Maine's $37 million educational program that provides every 7th and 8th grader plus their teachers an iBook plus sets up wireless AirPort networks in each school. [Dana Baggett]

[Update Noon ET] Tonight on Mac Night Owl LIVE: Gene Steinberg is the host of this internet radio show. Friday's lead topic is Apple's newest revisions to its iBook and PowerBook G4 lines. Our featured guest will be Greg Joswiak, Apple's Vice President of Hardware Product Marketing. Also joining us during the show will be Ryan Rempel, author of XPostFacto, a utility that lets you install Mac OS X on older Mac hardware. Listen in at 9 pm ET, 6 pm PT.

[Update Noon ET] Bugdom 2 CD is Out: Pangea Software's latest hit 3D game is now available directly, and only, from Pangea Software for $34.95. The CD version is identical to the downloadable version, however, the Bugdom 2 CD also comes packed with other game demos and unregistered full versions of Pangea’s earlier games.

“We’ve put a demo or full version of every game we’ve ever done on that CD,” said Brian Greenstone, President of Pangea Software, “Not everyone has a fast internet connection to download these off of the internet, so we decided to load the CD with all of them.”

The CD includes Nanosaur, one of our all-time favorite computer games.

[Update 9 am ET] ThinkFree Office v2.1 (Build 0393.09) is the latest build available for download [MacUpdate.com]. This build of v2.1 carries a creation date of 10/25/02 while the previous build carried a 10/11/02 date. ThinkFree Office is a $50 alternative to Microsoft Office that has a very high compatibility with many M$ Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. ThinkFree has a free full-function demo. One has to login to get the updated build or the demo.

We installed the latest build over the 10/11/02 build with no problems. Previous builds did a very good job with Word and the few Excel sheets that we were able to compare and the latest is just as good. However, most of our moderately complex PowerPoint presentations still do not translate very well.