Still looking for the perfect gift for the Machead in your life? Well, if you wait another week, Apple's rewarding procrastinators with a round of price cuts on December 13th, according to Macintouch. How about, for instance, a 20th Anniversary Macintosh for $3999? That's a real bargain (at least, compared to its original $7500 sticker price). One thing: the discounted price doesn't include the special "concierge service." We know you're crushed.

For those of you who haven't got four grand to drop on a stylish but relatively slow concept Mac, how about a Quicktake 200 digital camera for $249? That's a full 50% off its current price. Could be a good stocking stuffer for that Mac lover/shutterbug in your life. It's particularly well-suited for any webmasters you may know (hint, hint). And don't forget-- the Apple Store is still giving away free Quicktake 200's with every order of a Powermac G3 or 8600.

By the way, whatever happened to those "Hot Box" Mac deals that Apple Recon reported? Any sign? 'Cuz, as we all know, Apple Recon has never, ever been wrong.

Mac the Knife may be only marginally more comprehensible than, say, James Joyce on a bad day, but he does dish the good dirt. Of particular interest in this week's installment is the news that Apple has lifted some of the weight from UMAX's cloning restrictions, thus resulting in new G3-based clones this January.

At the height of the Clone Wars, Apple announced that it would not certify any G3-based clone designs, thus killing the Power Computing PowerTower Pro G3 and the Motorola StarMax 6000 before they could even ship out of the factories. This loosening of the reins allows UMAX to ship new versions of the S900 and J700 clones with the speedy PPC 750 at the center of it all. These will supposedly be Apple-certified G3 designs, differing from the PowerTools G3 clones currently available (which are Apple-certified 604e-based systems with an Apple-certified G3 upgrade card preinstalled).

By the way, if any of you faithful viewers are still puttering along on first-generation Powermacs (meaning, a 6100/7100/8100), you should be interested in the Knife's revelation that Newer Technologies is planning a G3 upgrade for your Mac. While they'll only run at 180 or 200 MHz, that's a lot of extra speed for the supposed $500 price tag.

Suddenly Microsoft software doesn't seem like a very good value for colleges and universities. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Microsoft has just killed its concurrent-use licensing policy, moving entirely to a per-computer licensing system. That change effectively prices Microsoft software well out of reach for use in many academic settings.

Under the old plan, a college could purchase fifty copies of Visual Basic, install them on a central server, and make the software available from any computer on the network. Even if there were a thousand computers that had access to that server, any of those computers could run Visual Basic-- as long as no more than fifty of them used it at once. This flexibility allowed students to do their work in the classrooms, in computer labs, from their networked dorm rooms, etc. without requiring a separate license for every system. But now, that same school is expected to purchase a thousand licenses--one for every computer--in order to allow the software to be run on any machine. The other option is to buy fifty licensed copies and require students who need to run that software to use only those fifty licensed machines. No more working in your room, no more stopping in at the closest cluster to get some work done-- if the Visual Basic lab is on the other side of campus, oh well.

Sounds like Microsoft still isn't thinking in terms of distributed networked environments. To them, each computer is a PC; to the colleges, each computer is a terminal, and it doesn't matter which one a given person uses at a given time. Their attitude was clear at a meeting of college computing officials. When Aleisa Spain, Microsoft's director of higher-education marketing, said "You basically know what computers will run this software," the audience's response was, "No, we don't. This is a network."

Sounds a lot like Microsoft's attitude toward NC's.