New and Noteworthy: New Grant System Excludes Mac Users; Gates plans 'iPod killer' partnerships; more

New Grant System Excludes Mac Users The Washington Post reports that the new "Grants.gov" system, under development at a cost of tens of billions of dollars -- which aims to replace paper applications with electronic forms -- is not Mac-compatible, "It is being phased in at the National Institutes of Health, Department of Housing and Urban Development and other federal agencies. All 26 grant-giving agencies are supposed to have their application processes fully online by 2007. [...] The problem: Although many U.S. scientists and others depend on graphics-friendly Macintosh computers, the software selected by the government is not Mac-compatible. And it is expected to remain so for at least a year. Last week, faced with evidence that the system will not be fully accessible to Mac users by this fall as promised, NIH quietly dropped its plan to switch to electronic applications for October's $600 million round of major 'R01' grants." More.

Gates plans 'iPod killer' partnerships The Times Online reports that Microsoft is aiming to hit the must-have gadgets market with a two-pronged attack. "The software giant will target the youth market with a range of 'iPod killers' to be released over the next two years and go after high-flying executives with a revamped rival to BlackBerry, the mobile e-mail service. [...] Mr Gates admitted that 'Apple has done a fantastic job with the iPod' before asking the group of assembled students how many of them owned one of the music players. Surveying a sea of raised hands, there was evidently only one answer he could give. 'We are talking with partners about how we can make even better music players,' Mr Gates said." More.

Stream From Your Mac To Your Xbox 360 Jake Luddington points out Connect360, a $10 download (free trial) that says it will let you stream audio and images from Mac OS X to an Xbox 360. "Connect360 supports MP3, AAC, WAV, AIFF and Apple Lossless for music and JPEG, RAW, GIF, PNG, BMP and TIFF for images, streaming an iTunes or iPhoto library, transcoding it instantly over a wired or wireless network." More.

Previously on MacFixIt

• iMovie 6.0 (#7): Playback issues; Reverting to iMovie 5.0.x; more
• Intel-based Macs: Can boot from USB hard drives
• iMac Core Duo (#7): More problems with flash devices; other USB issues
• Intel-based Macs: Rosetta (#6): Latest application compatibility listings
• Mac OS X 10.4.4 (#12): FireWire issues; Inexplicably booting into Open Firmware; more
• Intel-based Macs: "Don't Steal Mac OS" .kext file present on shipping machines

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