Hey, we're proud to announce that this week's Clueless Statement Award goes to Tod Caflisch, director of information systems at the San Antonio Spurs Basketball Club Ltd., for his proclamation, "There's not a lot of status in sitting on an airplane playing with a PDA when you can pull out a laptop." He is quoted thusly at the end of a nice Computerworld article on the eMate, Apple's splefty low-cost Newton-based PDA/laptop hybrid. It's currently marketed at the educational market, but rumored to be surfacing in a business version soon.

Tod wins the honor hands-down not only for considering the "status factor" of a portable computing device its highest priority (more important than, say, cost, weight, durability, or ability to get the job done), but also for having such whacked-out priorities while heading up an information systems department! Congratulations, Tod! Keep this honor in mind when you lose your job for buying two dozen jewel-encrusted, solid-gold forty-pound 386 laptops at $20 grand apiece because they look snazzy and really wow the guys in the next aisle.

Ever since word got out that IBM was halting production of the 604e variant known as the Mach 5 (the one that Apple uses in the currently-shipping 8600 and 9600 Powermacs), we've been wondering what chip would take its place in Apple's upcoming high-end machines, codenamed PowerExpress and apparently destined to ship with the unfortunate moniker "Powermac G3 Extreme." Enter Rincon, a new G3 PowerPC variant, whose details we read about at Mac OS Rumors.

The Rincon is a faster variant of the PPC 750 "Arthur" processor that is about to be used in Apple's Powermac G3 and Powerbook G3 computers. It seems that a Rincon running at over 400 MHz has already been tested in a Powermac G3. The Rincon also improves upon the Arthur's relatively lackluster floating-point performance, which is what made the Mach 5 a logical choice for high-end graphics Macs. Unfortunately, the Rincon is just as hobbled as the Arthur when it comes to multiprocessing-- a cache limitation makes it impractical to use more than one Rincon simulataneously. Since the PowerExpress line was to include several multiprocessor systems, this may just put a dent in Apple's plans.

By the way, if anybody is sure how "Rincon" is pronounced, would you mind dropping us a clue?

The San Jose Mercury News has a nifty little story on the legendary top-secret Star Trek project. For those of you who don't know, Star Trek was Apple's attempt to run the Mac OS on Intel hardware back in 1992. The Mercury article notes that the team of hotshot engineers assigned to the project actually accomplished what many thought was impossible, only to have Apple pull the plug.

That's right, internal politics and financial restraints killed yet another promising Apple technology. Is anyone surprised? The guys who met last week to reminisce about the project figure that if they had been allowed to continue, they would have beat Windows 95 to market by about a year. Now what effect would that have had on the current computing landscape?

One thing we didn't know is that two of the guys who did most of the work on the project went on to form fredlabs, inc.-- the company who got their VirtualMac Mac OS emulator running on BeOS earlier this year, only to cancel the project due to lack of financial support. (Suppose they're getting tired of that yet?)

Probably the best part for us was learning that the back of the project t-shirts sported a "depiction of a crazed guy gouging his eyes out with a pencil." ;-)