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Couple of Things

Once again I have a few interesting items that don’t quite merit their own articles. Since San Francisco’s Macworld Expo just ended, I figured you would wish to read about what was there and what was not. I couldn’t go for various reasons – not the least of which was 3000 miles of intervening continent – but Mark Anbinder, a local Macophile and president of MUGWUMP, the Ithaca Macintosh Users’ Group, volunteered to send back some articles. Aren’t Mac Portables nice? This is good stuff, and Mark even managed to get press badge because he was writing for TidBITS. If anyone wishes to cover other shows that I can’t go to, like Macworld Timbuktu, let me know and I’ll write you a note on TidBITS letterhead saying that yes indeed, you are an authorized TidBITS Cub Reporter and should get a press badge. Next thing you know we’ll have TidBITS Secret Decoder Rings. Seriously, though, if you wish to do this, I’ll send along article guidelines as well, because a trade is a trade and I would expect decent articles in return for a press badge.

We recently received some nice brochures from Cork about the Cork System 30 (exactly as we reported a few weeks ago). Cork was a little premature in printing their brochures, though, as someone had to hand correct the price ($2999 up from $2299, unfortunately) and the operating system (Apple instead of Cork). Curious. On a related note, if you want more information about the Cork, you must call or write them. Through an unfortunate formatting happenstance, Doug Davenport’s name and address were listed in our article in a way that made it seem as though he is related to Cork. He isn’t and can’t even reply to email sent to that address. So please, don’t ask Doug for Cork information, instead, call Cork in Texas and talk to them. They’re quite friendly, though we’ll be even fonder of them if they send us a review unit. In the interests of science, of course :-). One final note. If you order a Cork System 30 before the end of January, you get a $200 rebate, though there’s no telling when Cork will actually ship their IIci clone.

Cork Computer Corp.
9430 Research Blvd. Bldg. II Suite 250
Austin, TX 78579
512/343-1301 (voice)
512/345-5059 (fax)

Right around Christmas (nice timing) we received a disk from who, of all people, but Ashton-Tate. You know, the people who do dBASE and can’t remember that they have any Macintosh products for a minute or so when you call them on the phone. When they do remember, they make you call all around California looking for help. We were pleasantly surprised to find that the disk contained a free upgrade of Full Impact 2.0. Ashton-Tate claims that the upgrade fixes some slow recalculation times and also improves the memory management to make Full Impact more stable. We haven’t had any problems with it, but we don’t bother to save most of our spreadsheets, not being much in the way of serious number people and having very little in the way of important numbers.

If you have problems with Full Impact, Ashton-Tate says that they’ve moved their Technical Support for Macintosh products to Northern California to improve customer service. I’m not sure I see the connection, but perhaps it helps if you’ve been to Northern California, which I haven’t. If you’re curious, or if you’re having trouble with Full Anything (shorthand for the whole product line and the name they could use for an integrated package) call the number below.

Ashton-Tate — 408/927-0880

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