Like we said yesterday, the mystery is gone; anyone who had been wondering when Apple would finally get a Windows version of the iTunes Music Store up and running now knows that it's going to happen on Thursday. Members of the press have all received invitations to an Apple media event slated for October 16th, at which "the year's biggest music story is about to get even bigger." Like us, you probably first assumed that this had something to do with Britney and Justin "doing the thing" (that girl is a poet), but after a while we realized that Apple's marketing department might consider the launch of the iTMS to be somehow more important. Hey, it takes all kinds.

And by the way, where's our frickin' invite?! Yeah, that's right, Steve-- we're talkin' to you! Punk. Oh, sure, we may not be "accredited," we might not technically qualify as "press," and we may once have been "arrested" for "indecent exposure" after crashing a press event in 1994. But is that any reason, or even three reasons, to snub us when dishing out the invites to what will surely be the non-nude accredited press event of the season?

Okay, we seem to have wandered a bit.

What we're trying to get at is, what if the iTMS for Windows is only part of the story? After all, it does seem a little odd that Apple would rent out Moscone for an invitation-only press kegger if all it plans to do is intro a service that everyone knows is due by the end of the year anyway. It's not out of the question, then, that the iTMS for Windows will take center stage as a cavalcade of guest stars transforms what might have been a yawner of a one-trick pony into a veritable extravaganza of musicky unveilings. You know, kind of like Circus of the Stars, only with Apple products. And without so much Brooke Shields in fishnets and a sparkly leotard-thing (as far as we know).

Well, MacRumors has a Page 2 report stapled to a big ol' salt lick which predicts that the iTMS launch on Thursday will coincide with the release of iTunes 5 for Macintosh and Windows, which not only brings cross-platform support to Apple's pay-per-download music service, but also allegedly introduces an "all-new interface," something called iTMS "listener loans," and (gag) support for Microsoft's Windows Media format-- probably a necessary evil, at least on the playback end, if iTunes is to have half a chance of catching on over there on the Windows side of the fence.

But wait, that's not all! In addition to iTunes 5, we're allegedly also getting a slew of new iPod peripherals-- a "recording device," a dock that allows the playback of "movies and photos on a television," an adapter that accepts Secure Digital and CompactFlash cards to facilitate the offloading of digital photos to the iPod, and a Bluetooth wireless headphone system. And while you might rightly find some of this about as believable as Dick Van Dyke's cockney accent in Mary Poppins, hey, what's a little unbridled optimism between friends?

A bunch of you have written in asking why we haven't addressed ex-Apple CEO John Sculley's latest comments about Apple's missed opportunities. Well, mostly it's because if you ask us, the man's been getting entirely too much press lately for playing Shoulda-Coulda. Barely a week ago, Nostalgia Boy was flapping his gums to CNET about how the Newton should have been "one of Apple's most profitable investments ever" and how Apple should have invented the World Wide Web with HyperCard. And yeah, we ran with it, mostly because it was a really slow news day and it gave us a chance to flog the new goodies in the AtAT Store. But it made us feel cheap and dirty, and we don't think we'll be doing that again.

What's that? Nothing really happened today, either?

And we've still got a ton of shirts to sell?

Huh.

Gee, check it out, everybody! Faithful viewer David Poves informed us that John "Shoulda Stuck To Sugared Water" Sculley is still recounting his Apple-flavored missteps to anyone with a pen and/or a dictaphone; this time it's InfoWorld who quotes Sculley as saying that "one of the biggest mistakes [he'd] ever made" was "not going to the Intel platform" when Intel's Andy Grove made the suggestion.

Of course, as The Register so rightly points out, what John-Boy may be conveniently forgetting is that back when he had to make that decision, Intel's bestest was a 386 or something, which made Motorola's then-current 680x0 offerings look downright attractive by comparison. And based on the best technical evaluations of the time, there was every indication that the PowerPC architecture had serious legs, whereas x86 was already looking pretty tired. Furthermore, it doesn't matter that you're wearing roller skates if there's a rocket tied to your butt, and who could possibly have foreseen that Intel could extend x86 a decade past its rightful life expectancy by virtue of strapping its would-be corpse to bigger and bigger rocket engines? Seriously, x86 is the Weekend At Bernie's of chip architectures, and there's no way that Sculley or anyone else at Apple could really be expected to have predicted that.

Next week: Sculley confesses to WIRED that, in hindsight, it may have been a mistake to mention to Bill Gates that "if anybody copies the Mac interface and slaps it onto cheap IBM clone hardware, I'd probably be dumb enough to let them get away with it via a legal loophole, and then, hoo, boy would we be in trouble."

It's Friday again, and you know what that means-- and the first person who yells "Miss Match!" gets a smack upside the head, even if Cordy is guest-starring. No, it's time once again to check in on Microsoft's progress with that whole "Trustworthy Computing" thing! As you're no doubt aware, way back in January of last year, Bill Gates had an epiphany and declared that security would be his company's number one priority-- even at the expense of rampant featuritis, unchecked greed, blatant antitrust violations, and other Redmond trademarks. Bill even announced that he was "stopping development of new operating system software for the entire month of February and sending the company's 7,000 systems programmers to special security training," so obviously he meant business, right?

Well, let's see how far they've come. The Wall Street Journal has an article titled "Microsoft CEO Vows Better Security," which reports that Steve "100% Human And I Have The DNA Tests To Prove It" Ballmer recently informed his company's resellers and partners that, in light of all that ickiness with SoBig and Blaster causing billions of dollars in lost productivity and disabling safety monitoring systems in nuclear power plants ("whoops!"), Microsoft is full-on "dealing with the security challenge"-- by making it its "No. 1 priority."

Oooooo, progress.

And here's the plan, Stan: Microsoft is now offering partners and customers "more security training" and buddying up to law enforcement agencies "to track down writers of computer viruses and other so-called malicious computer programs." Microsoft also plans to release patches on a "regular monthly schedule," so that customers can make the process of patching up their systems part of their regular routine, e.g. on the third Sunday of every month, you pay your bills, de-tick the cat, and spend the rest of the night trying to make your Wintel act less like a sieve that's taken two or three close-range shotgun blasts through the mesh. Best yet, Microsoft aims to "make it easier for customers to install patches" by setting goals to "reduce the number, complexity, and size of patches by May 2004."

Maybe we're missing the obvious, here, but, um... where's the bit about "not shipping software with holes so big you can pilot most commercial aircraft through them in the first place"? Eh, give 'em another 21 months and maybe they'll clue in to that one, too.