Tired of hearing how well the iMac is selling in this country? Well, no wonder-- with two different independent studies showing the iMac as being in the top three when it comes to computers selling at retail, we can understand how you might be getting just a little sick of hearing all the good news. So for a change of pace, we're going to look at something completely different: how well the iMac is selling in Japan. Who says AtAT can't inject a little variety?

Faithful viewer Peachawat wrote in to tell us that Yahoo! Japan has daily and weekly listings showing the ranking of the best-selling computer models in the Land of the Rising Sun. While the page itself is in Japanese, all of the product names are in English, and the rankings are plainly easy to see even if you, like us, don't know a scrap of Japanese. A quick inspection of both the daily and the weekly rankings shows that the iMac is kicking some tail in Japan, too; at last check, the numbers for December 2nd show the rev. B iMac ranked first both for the day and for the week. Interestingly enough, the rev. A iMac is also still on the charts-- fourteenth daily, and fifth in weekly sales. And the Power Macintosh G3, with its more pedestrian stylings, is a big player, too-- there are models at second and fourteenth on the daily list, and sixth and fifteenth weekly.

By the way, we took this opportunity to try out the "international web browsing" feature of Mac OS 8.5, which was an optional installation. After we loaded the Japanese daily sales stats, all the text surrounding the English product names was complete gibberish. But when we selected "Japanese (Auto-Detect)" from the "Encoding" list in Netscape's "View" menu, suddenly all that gibberish turned into Japanese characters. (Of course, since we don't know any Japanese, it may very well have been Japanese gibberish, but we're pretty confident that it's intelligible language.) Pretty cool! Now if only Mac OS X will also translate it, too, we'll be in business...

It seems like we've been hearing about Yosemite forever. No, not the national park-- we mean the next-generation Pro Macintosh architecture, which is slated to replace the Gossamer motherboard used in today's Power Mac G3. Gossamer, you may recall, was never intended as a professional-level motherboard; its RAM and PCI expansion limitations are clues to its original consumer focus. The professional motherboard was supposed to be the Power Express, but Apple killed that project when it got out of hand and started from scratch with Yosemite. (It's a good thing that the raw power of the G3 processor enabled Apple to reposition the Gossamer G3's as "pro" systems.)

Well, good news: Apple is almost certain to unveil the new Yosemite Macs at Macworld Expo, which is only a month away. And the better news is that Mac OS Rumors has unearthed a wealth of information about the new systems' specifications. Finally, the slot question appears to have been answered: three 64-bit slots, and a single 66 MHz slot to be used with an included ATI RAGE 128 graphics card. The RAGE 128 should absolutely scream in both 2D and 3D performance, and the remaining three 64-bit slots allow the use of legacy 32-bit PCI cards-- but 64-bit cards can hold twice as much functionality as 32-bit ones, and therefore new cards might consolidate several functions that previously used to take up multiple slots. So that may have been what RFI's Robert Morgan was talking about when he said that Yosemite's three slots were enough. Pretty neat-- if the cards actually get made.

Anyway, there's a ton of information over at Mac OS Rumors, and we encourage anyone anxiously awaiting the next generation of professional Macs to take a gander. Processor speeds will range from 300-400 MHz to start, and with the fast bus of the Yosemite, the 300 MHz model is said to be 20% faster than the current G3/300. Yosemite borrows a page from the iMac and uses a smaller hardware ROM, loading most of the Mac OS ROM into RAM from disk, resulting in faster performance. Firewire and USB are standard (though SCSI is not), and there's even an ADB port for a certain level of backwards compatibility. And so on, and so on... This is exciting stuff. We don't doubt for a second that the new Macs (in the stylish El Capitan translucent cases) will make at least a brief appearance in the upcoming Apple Super Bowl commercial. Time to dazzle the world... again.

Isn't it strange that "Redmond Justice" spent the last week of sweeps month boring audiences to tears with tedious economic debate (albeit punctuated with occasionally interesting heated arguments)? Isn't it even stranger that, now that sweeps month is over, "Redmond Justice" has taken a ratings-boosting mildly scatological turn? Okay, the timing may be off, but it's still a crowd-pleaser to hear the world's richest man debate the meaning of the phrase (and please pardon our French-- or, rather, the French of the engineer who emailed Bill Gates) "pissing on." A CNET article has all the vulgar details.

Basically, now that Sun's James Gosling is on the stand, the government's case against Microsoft has been refocused on the issue of whether or not the software company intended to kill Java illegally by making its own version incompatible with others, effectively wrecking the whole cross-platform promise of Java. The government prefaced Gosling's testimony by showing yet more video footage of Gates' pre-trial deposition. In that footage, Gates is questioned about some email he received from engineer Ben Slivka, in which Slivka states that "JDK 1.2 has JFC, which we're going to be pissing on at every opportunity." Most would interpret this "common vulgarism" to mean that Microsoft planned to "publicly disparage" that Java product, but when questioned, Bill Gates came up with a quote that is sure to live on throughout the ages: "I don't know if he's referring to pissing on JFC or pissing on JDK 1.2, nor do I know what he specifically means by 'pissing on.'" It's kind of long for a bumper sticker, but we bet it'd look great on a t-shirt.

As usual, the videotaped footage prompted laughter from the courtroom, which apparently got bad enough that a bailiff had to tell the court to simmer down. Heck, even Microsoft spokesman Mark Murray admitted that the footage was "occasionally amusing," though he maintains that it was "largely irrelevant to this case" and that it "undermined the government's claims." But the important thing is, everybody agrees that it's entertaining, and isn't that what it's all about?