Well, after today's court request in the ongoing antitrust flap, the name of "Microsoft" will be permanently married in our minds to the phrase "unmitigated gall." (Not that the two terms were fantastically separate in the first place, but still.) You are, of course, aware, that the whole point of the timing of the current Department of Justice suit is to try to obtain a preliminary injunction, before Windows 98 ships in volume, requiring Microsoft to allow manufacturers to install Netscape on Windows 98 systems if they choose to do so. That's why it's so incredible that Microsoft is now requesting more than seven months to file its first response to Justice's request for the injunction. An Associated Press article has more.

Microsoft lackey Mark Murray states, "We obviously want to get this issue resolved as soon as possible." Oh, obviously. Because a seven-month delay on the injunction-- during which Windows 98 could ship as planned, tied to Internet Explorer via the licensing contracts-- is certainly not what Microsoft's after. It's just that they would really need seven months (what they call a "reasonable amount of time") to respond to this filing, and the fact that such a long delay would give them plenty of time to continue growing IE's market share is purely coincidental. Hoo boy.

On another note, it's possible to interpret Microsoft's request as a sign that they expect the injunction to be granted. Apparently quite a few legal eagles agree that Justice's case against Microsoft looks pretty solid, according to a Philadelphia Inquirer article. And in this land of litigation, if Microsoft loses the DoJ suit, you can bet that there will be plenty of private plaintiffs filing their own lawsuits against Microsoft, using Justice's case as a precedent. Microsoft's costs, according to the Inquirer, could potentially run into the billions. America loves a winner... unless that winner happens to own the ball. And the stadium.

"Up to twice as fast..." That's the claim that Apple's been making about the speed of the G3 versus the Pentium II. If you know how to squint really well to read fine print at the bottom of commercials on TV, you may have noticed that Apple's speed claim is based on the results of BYTE magazine's BYTEmark tests. There was quite a bit of controversy when the ads first surfaced, as lots of people disputed the results of the BYTEmark testing, claiming that it somehow unfairly favored the PowerPC processor. So it's kind of interesting to see BYTE's posted results and frequently-asked questions, which essentially confirm Apple's claims.

It's not particularly surprising that BYTE subtly tries to downplay the PowerPC's performance lead, given that most of the magazine's revenue probably comes from Wintel advertisers, but the way in which they do so seems a little strange. For instance, there's the way that they claim that the reason the PowerPC absolutely demolishes the Pentium II in one test called "Bitfield" is because the PowerPC compilers "generate code that's significantly different" from that of the x86 compilers. Well, duh. Different chip, different code-- that's always going to be the case. We don't see how that explains anything away.

We seem to recall that several people challenged BYTE to "fix" the BYTEmarks to show that the PowerPC is in fact not that much faster than the Pentium II, but apparently BYTE stands by their results, for the most part. Their answer to the question "are today's G3 Power Macs faster than Pentium II PCs?" is "In general, yes." It's nice to have some validation every once in a while.

Nary a week ago, we talked about the rumor that some major Mac manufacturer was working on a USB hub for the iMac that would provide a set of standard Mac ADB, serial, and SCSI ports. You may recall that we voiced our hope that the "major Mac manufacturer" in question was Newer Technologies, probably best known these days for their killer G3 upgrade cards, but engineers in days past of lots of nifty docks for Apple's PowerBook Duo series. Guess what? Our hopes came true.

Today, just about every Mac news site was abuzz with the announcement that Newer had just formed a group dedicated to developing USB peripherals for the iMac. In the works are such fun plug-ins as an external floppy drive (so quit whining about the floppyless iMac already!) and a USB-to-serial converter, to allow people to use their existing printers, etc. when the iMacs ship in August. Other peripherals are forthcoming, and Newer expects these items to be available "later this year." (We weren't able to find any information relevant to this on their web site, which appears to be going through an overhaul at the moment.

So add Newer to the growing list of companies who will sell peripherals for the iMac. They could really make a bundle on this stuff, if as many iMacs get sold as Apple expects. Anyone else want to jump on the bandwagon?