Hey, many thanx to graphics goddess Andrea Parent for pointing us toward these Quicktime VR panoramas of the inaugural Apple Salon Store in the Pleasanton, CA CompUSA. We at AtAT had heard Steve Jobs demo the Apple section at the November 10th announcement using, presumably, these very same QTVR files. At the time it was frustrating to hear him point out the salon's features while not being able to see what he was talking about. And now that we can finally see what all the hubbub's about, we're impressed.

Anyone who's been to a computer superstore (yes, including CompUSA) is used to seeing one lonely 6500, usually in a nonfunctional state, sitting in the back of the store behind forty or fifty Wintel boxes. It's quite a shock to see a full range of bright, shiny Macs, plus Powerbooks, eMates, tons of software, and even huge Apple banners hanging from the ceiling. CompUSA has committed to putting these Apple ministores into every CompUSA superstore in the country, with over forty supposedly to be in place and functional by today.

You'll need Quicktime 2.5 and v1.1.1 of the Quicktime plugin to view these files, but it's very much worth it.

We never thought we'd be sending you to the Macs Suck page, but now we know that anything's possible. As the page's author states, "I used to be a member and support page for Team Mac Suck. I am hereby resigning myself as a member."

What prompted this change of heart? Why, actually using a Mac, of course. The former "Macs Suck" page now loudly proclaims, "OS8 is wonderful, I admit it!" The one major criticism is of the Mac Link Plus translators-- which, of course, are not even Apple products. It just goes to show you how unfamiliarity breeds contempt. The very idea of constructing and maintaining a web site dedicated to the tenet that "Macintosh computers are worthless, and the people who use them are generally snobs" who should be "smashed" and "dealt with like the worms they are" without ever having even used a Macintosh is beyond us. (And yes, the same goes for those of you who do the equivalent for Windows; use it before you condemn it.)

AtAT welcomes any and all new Mac users to the community. And by the way, this mind-broadening epiphany can work both ways. Just today I was impressed to see Windows 95's Plug-and-Play almost work. Yeah, it selected the wrong driver, but hey, at least it realized we had installed a new CD-ROM drive in the first place. Maybe in Windows 98?

You may have heard this elsewhere by now, but we just had to mention the recent legal victory in the fight against spam. Craig Nowak didn't even bother showing up for his court hearing in Austin, Texas, at which a judge ordered him liable for $18,000 in damages and legal fees and forbade him to spam people in the future. There's more info on the case here.

Nowak apparently forged the sender information in his spam to appear to originate at a domain other than his own, which appears to be a fairly typical practice among spammers. In this particular case, Nowak's messages appeared to come from the domain flowers.com-- which is a real domain, which was subsequently flooded with irate messages from spam recipients. Ouch!

Nowak's loss is hopefully another step in the long struggle to reduce (and, dare we say, eliminate?) the pinkish luncheon meat from our inboxes.