We're taking the next two weeks off, so don't look for TidBITS until the 08-Jan-96 issue. Happy holidays to you all, and may all your wishes come true

PageMill Demo -- Intrigued by my PageMill review in TidBITS-305? Try the demo! The demo appears to be fully functional, except it cannot save or print

Gartner Tech Support Study Online -- Back in TidBITS-299, we reported on a study by the Gartner Group that found technical support costs for Macs lower than those for Windows machines

Symantec Announces Java Tools -- Not to be left out of the Java frenzy sweeping the Internet, Symantec announced last week it has licensed the Java language technology from Sun Microsystems and released a Java development environment for Windows called Espresso

Not All that Flickers is Gold -- There have recently been numerous reports of video flickering and color distortion in 5200-series Performas and LCs - particularly distressing to owners because the built-in monitors can't be detached for service

More Secure Mac Web Servers -- StarNine recently released the $1,295 WebSTAR SSL Security Toolkit. The Security Toolkit includes WebSTAR/SSL, a version of WebSTAR that uses the open-standard SSL (Secure Socket Layer) protocol developed by Netscape Communications and RSA Technologies

It Takes Two to Tango -- Web site developers may be interested in Tango, a new product from EveryWare Development. Tango enables Mac-based Web servers like WebSTAR to communicate with Butler SQL, EveryWare's relational database

PPP Comments & Updates -- Travis Butler passed on a summary of the messages he received about his two-part PPP overview starting in TidBITS-306: Many comments concerned the now-defunct MacPPP 2.2.0a

Holiday Lights -- David K. Dean writes: I'd like to recommend Holiday Lights 3.0 from Robert Matthews of Tiger Technologies. It started out as Xmas Lights 1.0, then changed to Christmas Lights 1.0 (from the now-defunct Atticus Software), and has now become Holiday Lights 3.0

Shopping has changed a bit over the last year thanks to all the retailers appearing on the Web. In 1993, sales via the Internet were estimated to total about $100,000; in 1995, that figure should be over $70 million, and current estimates for 1996 are over $500 million

Although I own several compact discs by Journey and have been known to watch re-runs of Family Ties, I never thought I'd be nostalgic for the bad graphics and jerky animation of those Atari 2600 video games which appeared under the Christmas tree when I was a pre-teen

At the beginning of 1995, there was one pan-European online service: CompuServe. Since then, Europe has seen announcements of three new online services, but as the year draws to a close only two exist: CompuServe and America Online

[This a follow-up to Steve's Quicken 6 review from TidBITS-299. -Geoff] Quicken 6 users should be aware of several bugs. Quicken's Portfolio window includes several performance calculations that may produce inaccurate or misleading results

For ten years we've been gathering a herd of nerds and feeding ourselves at the Hunan in San Francisco (on Sansome at Broadway). This year we have something new: online registration and payment. http://iw.cts.com/~jonpugh/nettersdinner.html ftp://iw.cts.com/public/JonPugh/ RegisterNettersDinner.hqx Due to the phenomenal 50 percent no-show last year, we had to do something about the low turnout