Financial Software Shake-Up -- In the continuing merger merry-go-round, Microsoft and Intuit announced amicable merger plans at a joint press conference on 12-Oct-94

Internet arachnids will want to check out the public beta release of a new World-Wide Web browser from Mosaic Communications , the company formed from a number of the original developers of Mosaic

Acrobat flips to 2.0 -- In a welcome change from Acrobat 1.0, Adobe has released a free viewer for Acrobat 2.0, enabling users to view, navigate, and print any PDF (Portable Document Format) file

Faster CD-ROM access is promised by PLI's upcoming 15X CD-ROM drive, based on a PLI-designed mechanism rather than the typical OEM product. The SCSI device, which works in Macintosh, DOS, and Sun environments, provides data transfer of up to 2.25 MB per second and an effective access time of 40 milliseconds (ms), much faster than the 300K per second transfer rate and 300 ms access time offered by drives such as Apple's double-speed CD300

Now Utilities and System 7.5 deal -- Klaus Fechner researched a deal regarding the pricing of System 7.5 (see TidBITS-243): I confirmed with MacWarehouse (two weeks ago) that one can get a 7.1 upgrade kit without any restrictions and then qualify for the 7.5 upgrade

Apple's financial results for the final quarter of the company's last fiscal year should be released tonight. Reliable sources indicate that the results are "wildly better" than most predictions. Apple sold more in its fourth quarter (ended 30-Sep-94) than predicted, and dropped costs further than they said they would

I've been quiet in TidBITS for the last few months, but I haven't been sitting around twiddling my thumbs (which would be bad for my carpal tunnels, anyway)

The previous upgrade, from Now Utilities 3.0 to 4.0, was torture. Many users experienced crashes; most felt anger over the upgrade charge coming so soon