Apple’s in the news, announcing a deal to license the Mac OS to Motorola plus the first beta of Cyberdog, its set of OpenDoc-based Internet tools. Also this week, we have news on Macromedia’s Shockwave plug-in and Sun’s Java Development Kit for the Mac, Garry Kasparov’s chess match against Deep Blue, and a TidBITS survey (the future of the Reviews column hangs in the balance!). Finally, Matt Kall contributes an overview of the reality and the implications of the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
New URL Format -- We've finally bowed to pressure and will be listing URLs with angle brackets around them, starting next week with TidBITS-316. We've resisted making this change because our previous URL style was almost completely unambiguous, and we didn't want to add unnecessary characters to each URL
Chat with Tonya -- I'm currently warming up my fingers for Tuesday night, 20-Feb-96, because I'll be the featured person at an America Online conference about Web authoring (I can also answer some TidBITS questions)
Smart Licensing Move -- On 19-Feb-96 Apple announced a licensing agreement that allows Motorola to distribute the Mac OS with computer systems based on Power Macintosh designs and the PowerPC Platform specification
Beta Java Development Kit Released for Mac -- Javasoft, Sun's subsidiary handling Java development, has released the first beta of its Java Developer's Kit (JDK) for Macintosh
Cyberdog Beta Available for Power Macs -- Last week, Apple released the first beta version of Cyberdog, its long-awaited OpenDoc-based Internet technology
Shockwave Beta 1 Netscape Plug-In -- Macromedia has released beta 1 of the Mac version its Shockwave Plug-in for Netscape Navigator 2.0, which allows Netscape to download and play multimedia content created in Macromedia Director
Corel "Quadrupling" Mac Team -- In an apparent effort to squash speculation it will not pursue development of WordPerfect for Macintosh (see TidBITS-313), Corel announced it is "nearly quadrupling" its Macintosh development staff and plans to release CorelDraw for Macintosh this June
Netscape Live3D -- Last Friday, Netscape announced that it plans to acquire Paper Software Inc., makers of the popular WebFX VRML (Virtual Reality Markup Language) software for Windows
Royal Software Acquires Heizer -- Royal Software, Inc. and Heizer Software jointly announced on 17-Feb-96 that Royal Software will acquire Heizer General Corp
We're considering dropping our Reviews column, and we want to know what you think of the idea. The Reviews column is located at the end of each TidBITS issue, and lists product reviews from several major Macintosh magazines
If he hadn't lost the first game, world chess champion Garry Kasparov says, a false sense of security might have gotten him in trouble in last week's historic man-versus-machine chess match against a massively parallel IBM SP supercomputer
Amidst much hoopla, on 08-Feb-96 President Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 into law. This law has been almost universally condemned by the online community due to a single provision making it a felony to distribute "indecent" materials to minors