Have you ever wished that the company you work for was a little... well, cooler? We're guessing that the employees at Kaidan don't. If you happen to have done any work with QuickTime VR, you have probably heard of Kaidan-- they make object rigs and tripod turntables for the acquisition of pictures to be stitched into QTVR panoramas and object movies. It's pretty neat stuff. But Kaidan's development of "Immersive Imaging Technology" isn't why they're heading up AtAT's "Cool Company" list right now-- rather, it's because of the early Christmas presents they've just given all of their employees. Hint: Think Bondi.

That's right; according to a press release, Kaidan is actually buying an iMac for every single employee. And we don't mean iMacs on their desks at work (as if that wouldn't be cool enough)-- we're talking about free iMacs given to every Kaidan employee to take home for personal use. Kaidan's president, James Anders, says that his company will be making the $29.99 monthly payments per iMac as recently made possible by Apple's Consumer Loan Program. It's not a gift, he says, as much as it is an investment: he wants everyone at his company to have "unlimited access to the tools they need for their personal and professional growth."

We have no idea how many employees Kaidan has; probably not all that many, given the niche market for their products. But regardless, buying personal iMacs for all of its workers is a nice gesture, "investment" though it may be. It just goes to show you, not all jobs are created equal... Plenty of AtAT viewers tune in from jobs where they're forced to use Windows, which is a far cry from being given a free iMac. Oh, well... here's hoping everyone makes the best of what they've got.

It's taken a while to kick into gear, to be sure, but the flow of peripherals for the iMac really seems to be picking up speed. The iMac, as we're sure you're all aware, has only a single peripheral interface: USB. USB is a cool technology; it's hot-pluggable, supports 127 simultaneous devices, and offers higher performance than the Mac's older ADB and DIN-8 serial connectors. Unfortunately, the iMac is the first Mac to support USB-- in fact, it positively relies on it-- and so the choice of peripherals has been slim, to put it mildly.

Let's look at a particular example: more than a couple of AtAT viewers have written in over the last several months to say that while they'd love to get an iMac to replace their older Mac, they rely on Iomega Zip disks and therefore the iMac wasn't a viable choice for them. At one time that was certainly true, but suddenly it seems like iMac owners have Zip choices coming out of their Bondi-blue ears. First there was the "bleeding edge" option, the iZippy from iDrives; this particular solution actually doesn't use USB, but rather requires the customer to open his or her iMac and install an interface cable onto the motherboard. It's not for folks who faint at the sight of techno-guts, though iDrives claims that installation is a snap (though it's apparently an iMac-warranty-voiding one).

Of course, many people would prefer an actual USB Zip drive for convenience's sake; after all, the point of the iMac is that it should be easy to use. Not a problem, since now there's the "official" solution we've all been waiting for: earlier this week, Iomega announced that its ice-blue translucent USB Zip drive is now shipping, and should be available from retailers shortly. We saw prototypes of this thing several months ago, and it looks cool. But soon, there will be still another option for iMac owners who want to get Zipped: if you've already got a standard SCSI Zip drive, there may be no need to replace it with a USB one just to use it on your iMac. According to TheiMac.Com, Microtech's Xpress USB is a $79 USB-to-SCSI interface that supports up to seven SCSI devices, so you can use your older SCSI peripherals on your new iMac-- if you can wait until January when the Xpress will ship. See? The list of possibilities is definitely getting longer, and the list of reasons not to get an iMac is getting shorter. Now let's see if the sales figures reflect that...

"Redmond Justice" lurches along in its fifth week, as IBM executive John Soyring testifies that Microsoft's "contract restrictions on software developers" pretty much killed OS/2, IBM's PC operating system that tried to compete with Windows and wound up winning only a tiny chunk of the market. Apparently Microsoft gets programmers hooked on their programming tools and then forbids them to use them to write software for any non-Microsoft operating systems. A New York Times article has more details, but it's just more of the same allegations. We'll be glad when Microsoft's witnesses start showing up, because that should really get things rolling.

The real news, however, is happening on the sidelines: Larry Ellison (head guy at Oracle, member of the Apple board, Steve Jobs' best friend, and notorious blabbermouth) announced in a news briefing that he's figured out how to resolve the whole Microsoft antitrust issue. According to ComputerWorld, Larry's suggestion is not to split Microsoft into several "baby 'Softs" responsible for different products, but rather just to divide them into two equal halves, one run by Bill Gates and one run by Microsoft president Steve Ballmer. Here's the innovative part: each half would work on the same products.

The idea is that suddenly you'd have some real competition driving innovation in Microsoft products. Whose Windows is better? Which Office is less bloated? Which Internet Explorer actually supports real Java instead of a watered-down brew? We at AtAT are not typically effusive when it comes to Larry's ideas, but we plainly admit that this one is brilliant. And for those of you who thought he was joking, well, that's what they want you to think.