So this email watch thing that everyone's buzzing about-- you know, the one that Swatch is working on, which will apparently be available in an Apple-styled Mac-compatible version-- we thought we had it all figured out. The original MacSR report has since been updated and clarified, and here's what we make of it: The watch itself has a Radio Frequency ID chip in it that can communicate with the special included mousepad. When the mousepad senses the presence of one of these special watches, it's able to read the user's email info (server, login, password, etc.) wirelessly and send that data to the computer, which can then connect and download the user's mail. The watch is just a passkey that lets you easily check your email on any computer with the special mousepad, without requiring you to enter all that tedious server and account info yourself. Neat, but not that neat. After all, it's not like the watch itself downloads the email and lets you take away on your wrist.

Or can it? Now a Wired article has gone and confused the issue again. According to Wired, Swatch officials stated that "the mousepad will download the email before beaming it to the watch." Suddenly this email watch sounds a whole lot more interesting, right? Being able to download your email and read it on the bus on the way to work in the morning might be worth the $125 you'll have to shell out for the watch/mousepad combo.

So is Wired correct, or was there just a misunderstanding? Perhaps something got lost in the translation. We have a feeling the email watch won't do anything except beam your account info to properly-equipped computers, but it's nice to dream. And anyway, if it's a nice iMac-styled watch and mousepad, the set might be worth $125 right there. (The iMac ad right on Swatch's home page gives us hope.)

We've all heard plenty of stories about higher education institutions who were formerly huge Mac supporters starting to lean towards the Windows side of the world in recent years. Apple maintains that its educational market share is either holding steady or increasing, but whether or not that's technically true, there's something very damaging from a morale standpoint when a Mac campus suddenly goes Windows. So it's not good news that one of the most stalwart defenders of the Macintosh platform in the educational sphere was made an offer they couldn't refuse; Dartmouth, the school who once again strongly recommended Macs for their incoming student body, has also just accepted a donation of $450,000 worth of Windows NT workstations, servers, and software from Microsoft. (That $450K supposedly covers forty workstations and a server, plus hardware support and software, which comes out to like ten grand per workstation-- man, who says Wintels are cheaper?!)

A Mac Observer article includes a letter sent to Dartmouth alumni announcing the gift, and it actually makes for some pretty entertaining reading if you keep a sense of perspective. Most of the letter is obsequious pro-NT propaganda, but at one point, Professor Bruce Randall Donald (who went to Microsoft and proposed the whole thing in the first place) actually tries to justify the donation by saying that "a mixed environment is ideal for universities." If that sounds strangely anti-familiar, it should-- it's the exact opposite of what we so often hear when IT folks are trying to justify ripping the Macs out of a multi-platform environment: "Supporting two platforms is too difficult and expensive." So if your school is trying to dump their Macs in favor of Wintel boxes, tell 'em the computer science department of Dartmouth says not to.

It's easy to get bent out of shape when Microsoft and Intel give their stuff away to universities in a baldfaced attempt to squeeze out the Macs and UNIX systems, but hey, Apple used to do pretty much the same thing-- that's why the Macs are there in the first place. In fact, we wish Apple were still aggressively donating hardware and software to schools, because we suspect that's the only way to hold onto educational market share these days. As for Dartmouth, fear not-- the influx of forty NT systems into the computer science department isn't going to turn the whole school anti-Mac. We think Professor Donald inadvertently said it best: "This donation will provide [Dartmouth] with modern infrastructure to attack the computational problems of the 21st century." There you have it, folks: if you're looking for 21st-century computational problems, look no further than Microsoft. Too bad that donation included hardware support and not software support...

QuickTime 4 has been out for a while, now, and Apple recently announced that it's been downloaded more than eight million times-- "underscoring the growing popularity of QuickTime as a streaming media format." Well, yeah, except that as far as we can tell, there are still very few web sites actually using QuickTime to netcast their live content. But it's unrealistic for us or anyone else to expect that well-established sites who paid good money for a RealVideo server are going to chuck it out the window just because there's another option now, even if that new option does seem to yield a better viewing experience for the average end-viewer. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

So we'll just have to wait for new sites to spring up with live video content to offer, who will have the choice of either paying Real's "server tax" or using Apple's free and open source QuickTime Streaming Server. Until then, we can entertain ourselves with the wealth of entertainment available via live QuickTime Streaming from Apple's own site, like Bloomberg News. Or, uh, BBC World. Or the Weather Channel. Hmm, most of this stuff is infotainment at best, and actually informative at worst-- not exactly the mind-numbing brain-candy entertainment we were hoping for. Sure, there's HBO, but that's usually just trailers for real HBO events, and not the channel itself. And Fox Sports might be entertaining if you're into that sort of thing, but we're not.

Fear not! There's a brief respite from the deluge of live educational, financial, and atmospheric data Wednesday night after Apple posts its quarterly financial results. (By the way, you did enter the Beat the Analysts contest, right? It's open until 2 PM EDT on Wednesday.) Tune in via QuickTime 4 at 8PM EDT and catch a live performance by the Eurythmics, reunited for their upcoming PeaceTour, which aims to raise funds for Greenpeace and Amnesty International. Tune in, rock out, and consider making a contribution to a couple of worthy causes. The financial news can wait.