Year: 2001

Titan Computer has released a demo for Alien Nations, a new real-time strategy game that features interaction and confrontation between three different nations: Pimmons, Amazons, and Sajikis. Beginning with a small main building, players must construct houses and specialty buildings in order to attract inhabitants to work as masons, wood-cutters, and researchers in your budding town.

StimpSoft has released SnapperHead 4.0, a free application that will automatically take a screenshot and upload it to a server for viewing. Version 4.0 adds the ability to capture specific areas of the screen, corrects bugs with Mac OS X 10.1, adds contextual menu support, and more.

Online usage in the U.S. fell in September, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. Average online time per user fell by 2 minutes to 32 minutes, while active online users fell by 1.8 million to 110.8 million. The decline was blamed in part on the attacks of September 11, the affects of which were also felt sharply by ecommerce sites. News sites, in contrast, experience a large boost in traffic.

A rather arrogant Steve Ballmer, President and CEO of Microsoft, today dismissed Sun’s efforts to create a user identification system that would rival Microsoft’s Passport. “I think what we announced is right. I think the Sun thinghas absolutely no probability of mattering to the world. That’s my nonemotional view,” Ballmer said. Sun’s technology, dubbed the Liberty Alliance Project, has more than 30 partners, including the likes of Cisco and Intuit.

Thurbsy Software plans to release another public beta of DAVE for Mac OS X within two weeks, with the final version expected to ship in November, reports MacUser UK. DAVE allows Mac users to browse and connect to Windows-based PCs on a network, and also share Windows-specific network printers.