[10/12/2000]
Cube fix and Insane Quake scores
xlr8yourmac has a very interesting user report that the random sleep/shutdown issue encountered with many Cubes may in fact be a problem caused by loose screws inside the box. After retightening the screws, all the Cubes worked flawlessly, according to this user.
I was often thinking that it might be something that was loose and producing false contacts, resulting in short-circuits. I knew that because during some of my experiments on my Beige G3 Tower, I also hapened to short it a few times, which resulted in shutdowns. Unwanted contacts to the metal case for example can have really weird effects. Also attaching a remote control unit of a Performa 6200 to the remote control connector of the personality card resultet in an infinite loop of startup and shutdown impulses.
The other note is from a reader who got his GL Quake to run really fast with a few command line tweaks. Around 166 FPS is not bad, even for Quake 1.

10/12/2000]
New 3D company
Shugashack notes that yet another scandinavian start-up company plans to deliver us a new 3D chipset using a tile based renderer. Of course the specs are impressive, but they also admit they have never done anything like this before, so we better look at "Advanced New Technology" as we look at "Bitboys Oy".

10/12/2000]
Apple offers rebate(s)
the register notes that Apple offers a 300$ rebate on the Cube, if you buy an Apple monitor along with it. It is said that Apple has realized that the Cube's high price is one of the main reasons why people don't buy as many of them as Apple had hoped. A rebate for current PowerBook models may be planned as well.

10/12/2000]
Office 2001 ships, Mac OS X feats
MacWEEK notes that Microsoft has officially launched Office 2001 for Mac today and that Apple, MS and FileMaker Inc. have been talking about future versions for Mac OS X.
The more interesting story is here, where they discuss the benefits of MP Macs under Mac OS X along with other aspects of the Mac OS X - PPC duo. Interesting read.

10/12/2000]
MOSR
MOSR has a few tips how you can "make your own location manager" under OS X beta. It's about 2 pages of command line text you'd have to enter in the console. Thanks for the tip guys, but that is exactly the thing I DO NOT WANT TO ADOPT when I move over to Mac OS X. I can as well go and use DOS for that.