As the anticipation for PowerPC news builds, we bring the bad news of another virus sighting and the decimation of the community Info-Mac archive site. Craig O’Donnell dispenses more speaker wisdom; Tom Abbott reviews a PowerBook 160 upgrade; America Online, CompuServe, and NIFTY-Serve improve their Internet access; and finally, Mark Gavini relates his discussion with Intel about why he should switch to Pentium rather than buy a PowerPC Mac.
The big news last week was the decimation of the Info-Mac archive site at by an unknown cracker. This troglodyte seems to have gotten his jollies deleting hundreds of files at a public Internet resource and depositing kiddie-porn, along with an undoubtedly bogus email address
Jonathan Schultz reminded us that Alarming Events is one of several former CE Software products that are now published and supported by PrairieSoft, not a current CE product as we implied in TidBITS #215
Connectix has announced plans to port RAM Doubler to the Power Macs sometime in the next few months. I don't believe the current version works on the Power Macs under emulation mode, which isn't too surprising given the low level at which it hooks into the operating system
Claris Resolve has faded away entirely, with Claris announcing that it will no longer continue development work on the spreadsheet. Claris will continue to support Resolve until 31-Mar-95 and will sell Resolve through 31-Mar-94
Positive Experiences? -- Craig Isaacs wrote to suggest that we not only talk about negative (but constructive) experiences in our Caveat Emptor column, but also positive experiences
Floppy Concerns -- There has been concern that people would have trouble replacing the floppy drive in an old SE/30 or Plus, since those machines cannot physically accept the new manual inject drives
Technical Support Coordinator, BAKA Computers
The 21st century is close at hand, and we're impressed that Apple is doing a better job of taking advantage of technology at its disposal
According to a bulletin from Professor Gene Spafford of Purdue University, a new Macintosh virus was recently discovered by Mac users in Italy. This virus, dubbed "INIT-9403," has the potential to erase information on hard disks attached to infected computers.
The virus apparently was initially spread through altered versions of pirated commercial software
For those thousands of people trapped on America Online and yearning to escape onto the Internet, well, you still can't. But the gates were lowered slightly last week when AOL provided access to Usenet news via an interface that's somewhat similar to the one used for reading forums on AOL
In days gone by, people worked to make their cars go faster. These days we work to make our computers go faster. We get under the hood to improve our machines by adding more RAM, a bigger hard drive, a faster modem, or a faster CPU
Author of Cool Mac Sounds, Second Edition
People complain that the low cost Sony speakers such as the SRS57 and SRS58 models "cut off" beeps because they power down when there's no audio signal
As you might have seen, Intel is running ads in MacWEEK and other Macintosh magazines touting their 80x86 chip architecture as an alternative to the PowerPC chip as developed by Apple, IBM, and Motorola.
I called the number, received the literature and called the 800 number they reference for technical questions (I encourage you and all your Macintosh friends to do the same