Now that the new year has begun, CNet has posted their list of the ten best products of the year. Normally we wouldn't care, because we usually find CNet's reviews less than penetrating. However, despite their initially-lukewarm review of Mac OS 8, we're pleased to see that the current version of our favorite operating system ranked fifth in the list.

Chalk it all up to Mac OS 8's subtle charms: little things like popup folders and multi-threaded copying don't particularly knock anyone's socks off at the beginning, but the overall elegance and simplicity of this latest Mac OS overhaul eventually wins over most users. (For instance, we just spent the last two weeks confined to a Powerbook running System 7, and switching back to our Mac OS 8 system feels like stretching our legs after a long coach-class flight. (I can't believe we survived over two weeks without tabbed windows and contextual menus!)

Congrats to Apple and the Mac OS team. And from everything we've been hearing, Mac OS 8.1 will be another must-have update when it's unveiled at the Expo this week.

And speaking of Mac OS 8.1, it seems that Apple is being particularly intelligent in assessing the massive number of people who will attempt to download it when it's made available on the Internet later this month. After all, Mac OS 8 sold well into seven figures, and everyone running Mac OS 8 will want to download this update. Given those numbers, Apple's going to see smoke rising from its servers if they don't prepare for the upcoming assault.

That's why we're so happy to see that MacOS Rumors reports that Apple has upped its bandwidth and server capacity for ftp.info.apple.com, Apple's main software update FTP server. Both these main servers and their mirror sites have had their capacity upped to 9000 concurrent users, which will help prevent users from seeing the tiresome "too many users in your access class, try again later" types of errors. In addition, Apple's temporarily increased the bandwidth of the servers to 45 mbps, which should be a pipe large enough to prevent the massive frustration of 54 byte/second downloads that take five hours to complete, only to leave you with a corrupted and unusable file. Rumors speculates that this beefing up of Apple's servers may signal the dawn of a net-centric online software sales strategy for Apple, though we'd have to take the position that it's too early to tell.

For those of you without 'net connections, Mac OS 8.1 will be available on CD-ROM for a small fee. But then again, if you don't have a 'net connection, you wouldn't be reading this right now. Never mind. ;-)

How about that? AOL is continuing its "war on spam" despite one spammer's threat to post the email addresses of every single AOL subscriber. "But AtAT," we hear you ask, "isn't that undisguised blackmail?" To which we'd have to respond by nodding vigorously while jumping up and down and holding up a sign that says HECK YEAH.

That little fact isn't stopping the "National Organization of Internet Commerce" from making their open threat, according to Newsbytes. Unless AOL lifts its spam-ban, the addresses will be released on January 8th (presumably because that's Elvis' birthday, and he probably liked Spam, given its nutritional properties). NOIC says that if they can't spam AOL's members, they lose almost half of their mailing list. Awwwwww.

What truly surprises those of the AtAT staff who have AOL accounts is that AOL is actually fighting spam at all. Yours truly receives an average of ten spam messages a day via AOL, far more than we receive from any other provider; our AOL signal-to-spam ratio is so low that we have Claris Em@iler automatically label all mail coming to our AOL account spam-pink for easy trashing. Heck, we say go ahead and let the spammers post the addresses; it likely won't affect our in-box in the slightest.