Sometimes priceless news can be found in places where you least expect them. BusinessWeek, Oct 15, has these interesting nuggets (all literal quotes from that issue): BusinessWeek half-admits that a policy of "licensing portions of Apple's proprietary OS to outside manufacturers, to broaden the Mac market" is being considered

Those of us who engage in sinful activities have become used to paying for them in the form of high taxes. Sin taxes, more commonly known as luxury taxes, bring in revenue from the sale of alcohol, cigarettes, and gasoline

We're trying a slightly different format for displaying text in this week's TidBITS. It is designed for online consumption, whereas we've normally stuck with designs meant for paper consumption

Well, they're at it again, this time in France. Another virus has recently been discovered, though it isn't new. ANTI-B is a slightly different strain of the ANTI virus that despite being discovered almost two years later, appears to be the initial version of ANTI

One of the most popular shareware utilities of all time has been Hiro Yamamoto's Boomerang. Initially free, Boomerang provides several important functions in the standard Open and Save dialog boxes

Bored by that ho-hum magnetic storage? Yawning at the speed of the optical drives? Frustrated by the reliability of floppies? Well Canon has something for you

Sure portable computers are nice. It's fun to just set up wherever you happen to be and work. Unfortunately wherever you happen to be is seldom a good place to set up a machine designed to be placed on a table in a relatively well-lit room while you are sitting on an ergonomically designed chair

Apple has been busy with System 7.0, TrueType negotiations, HyperCard's transfer to Claris, and the like, but they continue to do interesting things. First off, if you've ever watched a TV show that had a Mac with a color monitor on it, you probably noticed how terrible the monitor looked

Lately the market for appointment and reminder programs has offered a number of useful programs. In some ways, it's odd that it took so long on the Mac for alarm programs to appear, since they been around on the PC for a long time, dating at least from the introduction of Sidekick, an early do-it-all TSR (terminate stay resident program). The shareware Calendar DA was perhaps the first of these programs, but it had no reminder capabilities, so it was easy to miss appointments

A few months back Mitch Kapor and others started the Electronic Frontier Foundation to help educate both government employees and the general public to the realities of computer use and abuse

We far prefer the pseudo-free (meaning "somebody pays for this but it's not usually me") electronic services such as Usenet or local BBS's to the pay-per-millisecond-of-access-time services like CompuServe

Vaporware has become all too prevalent in this day and age of knee-jerk competition. Announcements are made to get a jump on competitors or to steal competitors' thunder, but the products seldom follow the announcements as closely as we would like

Well, the font wars aren't exactly over, but a major flag-waving went on recently when Apple and Adobe reconciled their differences. That's literally all anyone knows because Apple and Adobe announced that they would be working more closely

I somehow missed the very beginning of this discussion on Usenet, but the topic seemed clear and important enough nonetheless. Apparently several people have had instances in which they believe a SyQuest drive trashed their hard disk (so watch out for roaming SyQuest drives!)

A reader recently commented that it would be great if we could provide short abstracts with the titles in the distribution files (for those of us who can't sight-read either Binhex or StuffIt format :-))