Jump back-- AAPL's on the rise. Apple stock gained 3 and an eighth today, to close at 16 and a quarter. That's a one-day rise of about 24%. Not bad.

Why the spike? Newsbytes thinks it's due to two factors. Firstly, today was the first trading day in 1998, and the abnormally low price of Apple stock in the past few weeks is attributed primarily to end-of-year loss selloffs for tax purposes. Secondly, MacWorld Expo kicks off on Tuesday, so there's only a couple of days in 1998 to buy before Steve's keynote, and some people on Wall Street may expect a 100% spike the likes of the one that occurred after last August's Microsoft surprise.

Will AAPL continue to rise? Well, we at AtAT don't claim to know anything about the stock market, but our guess is that the stock will spike before and during the MacWorld Expo keynote address, after which it will either stay up or gradually level off, depending on how much substance Steve can provide. All we can say is, we're a little bummed that we weren't able to buy at 13...

In what could only be described as a long-overdue mercy killing, Macintouch reports that the Apple Club has finally been shut down, just less than a year after its problematic introduction. We were unable to connect to the Apple Club site to confirm this, but that fact in itself should tell you something...

...or, at least, it would, if not for the fact that people have always had trouble connecting to that site. Including its subscribers, who paid money for "easy access" to Apple software downloads on special "high-speed servers." Unfortunately, the Apple Club reality didn't share much with the marketing glitz. The troubles started right off the bat, with many people reporting that they were unable to sign up with a credit card via the web site-- until they suddenly found their credit card charged six or eight times for the subscription. And even after people were subscribed, performance from those supposed high-speed servers was benchmarking slower than downloading the software from Apple's standard ftp site, and downloads were often corrupted anyway. Macintouch has a long, long list of painful Apple Club experiences if you want to read about one of the worst Apple ventures in the company's history.

Frankly, we're kinda surprised Apple Club wasn't put out of its misery as soon as Apple increased the bandwidth and number of consecutive logins on its standard ftp servers. That alone basically made the Apple Club superfluous. Still, better late than never, hmmm?

Connectix's VirtualPC is already a miracle, as we've previously noted-- It lets a Powermac G3 266 run Windows NT at speeds about equivalent of a Pentium 133-166. That's plenty fast for most occasional use (though games-playing is another matter). And yet, things are about to get even better, because Connectix has just announced VirtualPC 2.0, which they claim is 25-40% faster than the current 1.0 release.

So let's see... That means that with VirtualPC 2.0, a Powermac G3 266 would likely run Windows about as fast as a Pentium 166-233. And if you ran it on a soon-to-be-announced Powermac G3 275, you could expect 172-240 MHz Pentium speeds. We can't wait to hear the actual benchmarks.

We're inching ever closer to the day when the fastest Windows machine just may be a Mac running VirtualPC. Well, okay, not really-- but this is great news for Mac folks who are being forced to run Windows software-- with a fast Powermac and VirtualPC, everyone's happy. Are you listening, Al Gore?