[11/23/2001]
Starting off with games
The news are: RTCW (Return to Castle Wolfenstein) is msot likely going to ship in a special Mac box, so you won't have to buy the PC version. Release date for Mac is pretty much up in the air though, soon for sure, but nothing specific. Also Blizzard has released Starcraft for Mac OS X removing all network protocols aside from Battle.net and instead adding the new UDP/IP LAN protocol. (Starcraft couldn't do TCP/IP over a LAN, used IPX instead, now IPX is gone and IP is there, good news for all those who know how annoying MacIPX can be. The adapted versions using UDP/IP for Mac OS 9 and Windows will also appear shortly. (See the Quake3World Macintosh forum for more details, or visit Battle.net.

[11/23/2001]
Sun breaking barriers?
the register reports taht first benchmarks of Sun's new SPARC chip show that the chip is up to 5 times faster then the fastest Alpha chip and up to 20 times faster than the fastest AMD or Intel chips...uhhh. They're trying to get more info on the issue, but as you probably know, Thanksgiving is happening over in the states and so there's no one on the phone.

[11/23/2001]
Mac OS X in March?
the register reports that Phil Schiller wants all Macs to ship with Mac OS X as the default OS starting in March next year. OS 9 will still be there, but not set as the default OS. That of course raises doubts, whether the new Macs that will be announced at MWSF will a: be fully exploited by Mac OS 9, or b: won't ship at MWSF after all. I actually thought the G5s were going to ship with Mac OS X as default anyways...maybe we gotta wait a little loner, it seems.

[11/23/2001]
Intel still sickly at 64bit
the register also notes that Intel is aware that their first 64bit chip (Itanium) isn't going to knock the world out of its angles, but they're working on new chips, they say, which might, in a few years, actually compete with rival products from Sun or IBM...Well if the above rumors about Sun are true, I doubt they will catch up anytime soon.

[11/23/2001]
Comdex part 2
FS has eventually posted the second part of their Comdex report 2001. See what the companies had to show off and read on.

[11/23/2001]
iPod future uses?
MOSR has some nice facts about the innards of the iPod and some even nicer rumors about what you could possibly do with it in the future with added software (firmwares).

[11/23/2001]
Office X as a Mac OS X herald?
MacCentral notes that at Apple, everyone is ecited about the latest release of Office X for Mac OS X. Aparently it's going to earn our favorite OS quite some reputation.

[11/23/2001]
New games gone gold
IMG reports that RedFaction has gone into duplication and will ship sometime next week (not yet for OS X though). And Sacrifice has gone Beta.

Final word
I found this little table on the discussion forums about SPARC speeds posted above:

    CPU           Clock     Int     FP    (Int+FP)/2
  ----------------------------------------------------
    PPC G5        1600     1340    1359    1349.5   (G-News: I added that myself. Those scores are not confirmed nor are the clock speeds (currently rumored to peak out at 2.8GHz)
    Power 4       1300      808    1169     988
    Alpha EV6     1001      679     960     820
    Sparc III     1050      610     827     718  (?)
    Pentium 4     2000      664     734     700
    Athlon XP     1600      701     634     668
    PA-8700        750      604     581     592
    Itanium        800      379     701     540
    MIPS R14000    500      427     463     445
    Pentium III   1000      462     340     401