In the good news department, a Tompkins County grand jury indicted the two Cornell sophomores arrested in March on suspicion of releasing the MBDF virus

Laurel Lammers of Microsoft Word Marketing writes in regard to our article "CompuBigotry" in TidBITS-122: To Gann Matsuda and all others concerned about the Microsoft Word Speller: Microsoft values diversity in its workforce and its customer base

We've just heard from Pythaeus that Apple Canada is not yet selling the PowerBook 170 configuration with 4 MB of RAM and an 80 MB drive (with or without the internal fax/data modem), which is the highest end PowerBook available from Apple

Compaq Computer recently dropped out of the Advanced Computing Environment Consortium (ACE), claiming essentially that it could make do just fine with Intel's P5, or 80586 chip, in its high-end PC servers and workstations

Just as many of us received our long-awaited upgrades to Norton 2.0, Central Point Software upped the ante with a version 2.0 of its MacTools utility package, adding a number of new and cool features as well as a completely new virus-checking module

When Apple unveiled the PowerBook line six months ago, it appeared that they had made an odd and inconsistent mistake. The PowerBook 100 (which was designed by Sony, remember) has the ability to act as an external hard drive for a desktop Mac, but the otherwise more capable 140 and 170 lack this useful feature

CE Software has been in the press quite a bit lately, and deservedly so. The latest piece of news out of West Des Moines, Iowa, is that CE has announced two new pieces in the QuicKeys product line, one of which will ship later this month. QuicKeys is CE's macro product for the Macintosh, allowing users to customize and largely automate their work environment by assigning frequently-used or "menial" operations to one-or-two-keystroke commands

Microsoft's Word has a ton of options buried in its menus, though it can take patience to make these options show their heads and perform their tricks

CE Updates -- Mark H. Anbinder passes on this information. "CE Software, Inc., has just announced that the company is now shipping System 7 compatibility upgrades for its products DiskTop, In/Out, and Amazing Paint

Tad Davis writes: Kudos for the review of Inspiration. I've been a user of this program for some time, and was in fact one of the beta testers for the most recent version

Jeffrey L. Needleman passes along this note from Microcom. The following is a revised version of the UDV (user defined virus) code necessary to update Virex 3.x to detect the recently discovered CODE 252 virus. The original UDV falsely identified the virus in a number of files under specific conditions

Matt Neuburg writes: It appears that the problems some applications are having with StyleWriter 7.2.2 are the fault of those applications, not of Apple

Greg Marriott of Apple writes about why Apple decided not to install the disappearing files fix into the System file directly: "Actually, it may seem like a no-brainer to just install the fix in the System and leave it at that

Hatred is not dead. I'm sure that surprises none of you, but it always bothers me, especially when people use computers to spread hatred. The most recent examples would only be interesting for their trivia value were it not for their closeness in time and the fact that both cases directly involve Microsoft. Several weeks ago on the Info-Mac mailing list, a discussion list dedicated to things Macintosh, Gann Matsuda posted that he had noticed that the spelling checker in Microsoft Word 5.0 suggests "Nips" as a replacement for "Nisei." Now, "Nisei" means "second-generation Americans of Japanese ancestry," but more to the point, "nips" is derogatory slang for "Japanese-American." Based on a posting Gann made later, I don't believe he was implying in any way that Microsoft is racist, merely that this was an unfortunate coincidence that could have been avoided had "Nisei" been in Word's dictionary

[Speaking of an entertaining and often stunning use for computers... -Adam] Berkeley Systems, Inc., has just announced the winners of its 1992 After Dark Display Contest