Wouldn't you know it; on the very day we were about to purchase a brand-spanking-new Power Macintosh G3 at one of our day jobs, news comes over the wire that we might want to wait another couple of weeks. According to several Mac news sites (including MacNN and MacInTouch), Apple is expected to cut the prices of several of its systems on August 1st, or a week from this Saturday.

At the lower end, a G3/233 in a desktop case will reportedly go for $1399, down from the current $1699. If you already had $1699 saved up for that no-frills, baseline G3/233, now you can spend it on a desktop G3 266 instead-- complete with an internal Zip drive, which is a nifty extra. And for those of you looking for something a bit bulkier, there's the 266 MHz minitower for $1999, and higher-end systems shedding between $350 and $1100 from their prices. Something for everyone, and a bargain at twice the price. (Almost.)

There's no doubt that these price drops are being spurred by both the August 15th ship date of the iMac (which, at $1299 for a complete system, apparently outperforms even the G3/266) and by the expected unveiling of new Pro models at Seybold at the end of August. So if you need something more expandable than an iMac but don't have a compelling reason to wait for the new Pro systems, now might be the time to start scraping together your cash in preparation for taking the G3 plunge. Remember, these price drops are just rumors right now, but when both MacNN and MacInTouch report this sort of info, it generally turns out to be correct. Happy shopping...

Man, those new PowerBooks are hot! Er, literally. Seriously, if you've used one for any length of time, you couldn't help but notice that the bottom of the thing gets almost frighteningly hot. If it weren't for the blazing speed, all that heat might lead you to suspect that there's a Pentium in there. So is your beloved new portable faulty? Apparently not, says Apple, whose new Technote not only assures owners that their PowerBooks are behaving perfectly normally, but also provides some tips on how to keep those laptops running a little cooler.

Among the suggestions, the easiest to follow is to keep your PowerBook on a hard, flat surface when you're going to be using it for a long time. This allows airflow to help cool the bottom of the system. Note that your lap does not qualify as a hard, flat surface unless there's something quite seriously wrong with you, and given the uncomfortable level of heat emanating from a juiced-up G3's underside, you probably want to keep it a safe distance from your, er, "generative equipment" at all times.

Hey, no matter how hot it gets, we're just happy to hear that the PowerBook G3 isn't a portable incendiary device like certain faulty-battery-equipped PowerBook 5300's were. Besides, think of the extra heat as a nice little bonus: in the winter months, you'll be able to compute outdoors and still keep your lap nice and toasty, and when you're in the office, you can set your coffee mug on your PowerBook and keep your beverage warm for hours on end. Who says it's a bug and not a feature?

And, in the realm of the not-really-related-to-anything-Apple-hardly-at-all, faithful viewer Edward Liu points us to an interesting GCN article about a Navy Smart Ship which, in his own words, leaves him unsure of whether to laugh or to cry. The Smart Ship may not be so smart after all, it turns out; last year, a total system failure occurred following a divide-by-zero error, which left the USS Yorktown dead in the water for almost three hours. The ship eventually had to be towed back to the naval base.

Now, everybody knows that computer systems fail. But Anthony DiGiorgio, an engineer with the Atlantic Fleet Technical Support Center, says that in this case, the operating system is at fault; according to him, had the ship's computers been running something as robust as Unix instead of the still-unproven Windows NT, we wouldn't have seen something as tragicomical as a U.S. warship completely disabled by someone accidentally entering a zero into a database field. Unfortunately, NT is in heavy use due to "political pressure."

Yeesh. We hope the weapons subsystems aren't controlled by NT, too, or we're running for cover. There's little doubt at this point that NT is simply not fault-tolerant enough to be trusted in mission-critical scenarios; if it absolutely positively has to happen, don't rely on Windows. Heck, even Bill Gates himself knows about the perils of relying on NT for such purposes; he recently wrote about his own NT-controlled house, including a retractable TV in his bedroom-- which he discovered he could not retract or turn off, so he threw a blanket over the set in order to get some sleep. So the real question is, will the next Windows NT fixpack include a heavy blanket? And a pair of oars?