Technical Support Coordinator, BAKA Computers The 21st century is close at hand, and we're impressed that Apple is doing a better job of taking advantage of technology at its disposal

According to a bulletin from Professor Gene Spafford of Purdue University, a new Macintosh virus was recently discovered by Mac users in Italy. This virus, dubbed "INIT-9403," has the potential to erase information on hard disks attached to infected computers. The virus apparently was initially spread through altered versions of pirated commercial software

For those thousands of people trapped on America Online and yearning to escape onto the Internet, well, you still can't. But the gates were lowered slightly last week when AOL provided access to Usenet news via an interface that's somewhat similar to the one used for reading forums on AOL

In days gone by, people worked to make their cars go faster. These days we work to make our computers go faster. We get under the hood to improve our machines by adding more RAM, a bigger hard drive, a faster modem, or a faster CPU

Author of Cool Mac Sounds, Second Edition People complain that the low cost Sony speakers such as the SRS57 and SRS58 models "cut off" beeps because they power down when there's no audio signal

As you might have seen, Intel is running ads in MacWEEK and other Macintosh magazines touting their 80x86 chip architecture as an alternative to the PowerPC chip as developed by Apple, IBM, and Motorola. I called the number, received the literature and called the 800 number they reference for technical questions (I encourage you and all your Macintosh friends to do the same

More ARA -- Peter Kaufman passes along word from Cayman Systems that they have no plans to add ARA 2.0 support to the GatorLink. Mark's "ARA Options" article in TidBITS #213 conveyed our assumption that they'd upgrade in the near future

Shawn Ramer writes: In TidBITS #213 you mentioned how PowerTalk could delete email when a gateway service is removed. This just happened to me but I was able to recover by restoring from a backup three files in the PowerTalk Data folder: System Folder:PowerTalk Data:WSBTree System Folder:PowerTalk Data:IPM Bin:QMgrCatalog System Folder:PowerTalk Data:IPM Bin:QMgrPrefs And since we all back up obsessively, this is a great solution, right?

Since even before Apple introduced the MessagePad in August, we've been tantalized with pictures and descriptions of the Newtons of the future. They've come in all shapes and sizes, ranging from MessagePad-type pocket PDAs, to notebook-sized slates, all the way up to wall-sized units that might be the chalkboard of the 21st century. Word on the street has Apple preparing to release the second member of the Newton family, an enhanced and streamlined version of the MessagePad, code-named "Lindy." The new model will feature 1 MB of RAM compared to the MessagePad's 640K, which just about triples the amount of space available for user information

Technical Support Coordinator, BAKA Computers What's the bargain of the decade? Rumors of the upcoming Apple PowerPC accelerator cards aside, a remarkable deal I'm surprised isn't talked about more is the DEClaser 1152 laser printer, at $699. Okay, so that's a bit of a convoluted sentence

For a long time, there were no Mac-oriented network fax products. You could send faxes from your very own fax modem, hooked directly to your Mac, or stand in line to use your office fax machine

For those of you who remember back almost exactly a year, last winter Stac Electronics filed a suit against Microsoft, alleging that Microsoft infringed on Stac's compression patents (TidBITS #164)

CE Software, Inc., maker of QuickMail and QuicKeys, announced today that it has signed a binding letter of intent to acquire all assets of Powercore, Inc., a developer of Macintosh and DOS network scheduling software

When I announced the Caveat Emptor column, I stated specifically that I was only interested in articles that could result in a positive effect for the Macintosh community

Reports flowed in over the past week from kind readers with extra bits of information to share about the upcoming PowerPC introductions, as well as a few corrections