Congress and the President have signed off on funding of numerous cabinet departments and agencies. Defense R&D was cut by 2%. The NIST Advanced Technology Program got $225M, despite an earlier Senate vote of just $60M. NIST also gets $268M for its laboratory research programs. [Robert L. Park, WHAT'S NEW, 10/4/96.]

An independent analysis of 30 House science bills found that twice as many Democrats as Republicans voted in support of science. [Science Watch, Inc. Robert L. Park, WHAT'S NEW, 10/4/96.] (This lopsided result is considered surprising and controversial.)

Florida is planning to offer tax credits and a $15M cash incentive fund to boost its semiconductor industry. The cash will be used in matching grants at state universities. [Enterprise Florida. WSJ, 10/2/96, F1. EDUPAGE.] (If you've got a business plan that would create jobs and tax revenue, talk to state agencies about creative financing.)

Microsoft is giving its ActiveX file-linking technology to the Open Group (Cambridge, MA), which should encourage more developers to build ActiveX modules for rapid construction of custom applications. CORBA is a competing technology, backed by Oracle and Netscape. [WSJ, 10/2/96, B1. EDUPAGE.] (Or one could use Frontier scripting, or Apple's solutions. Pipes? Shell scripts? Unix is doomed, although it won't die out for decades.)

Apple's System 7.5.5 Update will be the final System 7 release for the 16-bit Macs: the Plus, SE, Classic, Portable, PowerBook 100, SE FDHD, SE/30, LC, II, IIx, and IIcx. Future releases will require 32-bit addressing. [TidBITS, 9/9/96.] (System 7.5.4 was skipped, due to last-minute problems with a few Macs.)

Netscape's next release of Navigator will include group collaboration, plus multimedia email and a Web page editor. [BW, 10/7/96, p. 34. EDUPAGE.] (The groupware feature may be an attack on Lotus Notes, although Notes has other features such as database replication.)