We're now only hours away from the grand opening of the Apple Store San Francisco-- can't you just taste the excitement? If not, you can probably at least smell it, especially if you're already in line downwind from that guy who's been waiting since Tuesday and chained himself to the store's front door to preserve his first-in-line spot without really thinking through the whole "lack of showers and toilets" thing beforehand. Nevertheless, everyone's in good spirits, and tomorrow's event ought to go down in the history books as one of the rowdiest grand openings ever. Yes, history books keep track of that stuff. Who knew?

"But AtAT," we hear you asking, "why bring up the Mystery Gift Bags again? After all, isn't that old news that you already covered a week and a half ago?" Well, um... We didn't bring up the Mystery Gift Bags again. You did. But now that you mention it, yeah, it is old news, but you have to understand, folks, sometimes it takes a little while for the really important issues (such as the weighty enigma of the Mystery Gift Bags) to filter down to the mainstream press. But what they may lack in promptness, they more than make up for in actually being journalists and stuff; reporters have managed to dig up a few more details about Apple's inscrutable little bundles o' fun. Whereas previously we'd noted that Apple was marketing the gift bags as including "over $600 worth of Apple products for $249," WIRED reports that the company has now gone on record to clarify: not all bags contain the same stuff, and while all of them will contain at least $600 worth of merchandise, some will pack up to $1000 worth of surprisey goodness-- and not all of it will necessarily be made by Apple. (The company also hinted that not all of the bags will include a miniPod. Buyer beware.)

WIRED also reveals the origin of this oh-so-intriguing promotion: the windswept plains and sweltering jungles of Japan. It seems that in Japan, there's a retail tradition called "fukubukuro," which apparently means "lucky bag" (whereas we just thought it was a really rude thing to say to some guy named Bukuro). Lucky bags "attract tens of thousands of customers to Japan's New Year's Day sales," and the frenzy reaches such a fever pitch that "there are reports of injuries during lucky bag stampedes." (So, we guess, the bags are lucky; the shoppers, not so much.) Anyway, the Apple Store Ginza recently fell in with tradition and sold lucky bags, one of which contained "an iSight camera, a Bluetooth USB adapter, a Bluetooth mouse, Apple's Keynote presentation software, a package for the .Mac online services, and a 10 percent discount card for the store" for $249. They sold like crazy, so Apple's seeing if Americans will pick up the craze as well.

Meanwhile, Macworld has a photo of one of the so-called lucky bags-- it's rather larger than we expected-- and includes a single sentence to answer the burning question on everybody's mind: "No, senior Apple officials said, you can not shake the Lucky Bag."

By the way, if you just can't make it to the party for tomorrow's opening, at the very least you can enjoy the QuickTime footage of the store offered up by faithful viewer Nathan Trebes. It was apparently shot during Thursday's press-only opening, and therefore only offers a view from the outside looking in, but hey, it's better than nothing. We didn't spot any lucky bags, though. Regardless, viewers will be relieved to note that No-Bathroom-or-Toilets Guy has been digitally removed from this footage. Is there anything Shake can't do?

Folks, we need to clarify a little something about the state of the ongoing Disney-Pixar saga, here: nobody's getting voted off the island at the investors' meeting on Wednesday. A lot of people seem to think that there's a chance that Michael Eisner and his cronies will get booted by a flood of "Good God, No" votes by appalled shareholders marshaled by Roy Disney and Stan Gold, but unfortunately (as reported by Reuters), "the 11-member Disney board is guaranteed to be reelected at the March 3 meeting since there are no rival candidates." We know, we know, it sort of sucks a lot of the drama out of the situation, but what Roy and Stan are trying to do is get enough investors to vote against the current board members to "send a message," as it were. The idea is that if enough shareholders show no confidence in Eisner, the guy might finally take off the mouse ears and go play in traffic somewhere.

It might happen, too; sure, Disney's board claims that it won't interpret the vote as "a sweeping referendum on Eisner's stewardship," but everyone knows those guys are puppets; according to the Washington Post, for example, Eisner claims that the board had drafted a rejection of Comcast's buyout offer even before the offer was made, and Eisner read the rejection off his computer screen word-for-word when the call came in. Now, either he's lying, he acted alone, and the board is just covering for him, or he's telling the truth, and the board is so deep in his pocket they drafted a rejection statement without seeing the official offer first. Either way, the board had already decided to reject the offer even before it had even come in, which can't look good to anyone with a portfolio full of DIS. (What if the offer had been for $10 trillion and a pony? Huh? What then? Smart guy.)

But even if the board is packed to the gills with devout Eisnerians, they won't be able to ignore a massive vote against Eisner, because the press will be all over it like Mickey on Minnie at the office Christmas party. And with up to 30% of voting shareholders preparing to tell Eisner just where he can stick his little mermaid, if the board doesn't act, then the company's stock price will fall even farther through the floor. (We're betting that not many people want to put their money in the hands of a board that doesn't listen to its existing shareholders.) The vote is shaping up to be staunchly anti-Eisner, by the way; as pointed out by faithful viewer Gerben Wierda, the California Public Employees Retirement System and state pension funds in six more states were all backing "no" votes as of Friday.

Meanwhile, Disney reportedly ran "full-page advertisements in major newspapers featuring Mickey Mouse and Kermit the Frog and declaring 'Our future is in good hands.'" Ah, yes, the classic remedy when your company is being run by an incompetent money-losing clod and the natives are getting restless: buy a frog and then blow more cash on ads telling everyone that everything's fine. On the plus side, if Eisner does get tossed out on his big, circular ear and Steve Jobs winds up taking over as CEO, does this mean we might finally get a Mac commercial starring Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and Beaker?

Hey, it's Friday once again, and you all know what that means: it's Wildly Off-Topic Microsoft-Bashing Day! We actually had to hang onto today's little gem for a while in order to save it for the weekend, which would gravely compromise our journalistic integrity if, you know, we actually had any. That's not to say we didn't suffer for our art, however. Putting something aside for a couple of days and actually remembering to come back to it puts a pretty serious strain on our delicate frontal lobes, but hey, you know us; we're nothing if not slaves to tradition.

Surprisingly, while today's tidbit does concern Microsoft's security (or gross lack thereof), it doesn't involve the latest hole to be discovered or worm to wreak twelve kinds of havoc on the civilized world. Instead, we're following the Redmond Gang on a trip down Memory Lane. Faithful viewer Jerry Luttrell tipped us off to an InfoWorld which reported a few days ago that David Aucsmith, Security Architect and Chief Technology Officer of Microsoft's Security Business Unit (nice job title; his business cards must have a fold-out panel) flat out admitted that "Windows 95 was written without a single security feature."

We can practically hear your gasp of utter shock from here. Are you okay? Do you want to lie down for a while?

Oh, but it only gets better: not only was Windows 95 (whose codebase formed the backbone of all of Microsoft's consumer operating systems until the release of Windows XP) cobbled together with absolute no security whatsoever, but Aucsmith also tries to excuse that fact by insisting that "many of the current security issues could not have been foreseen." Current security issues? Like, oh, let's say... viruses? Because viruses certainly didn't exist in 1995, no siree. (BBC News gives a nice history lesson that shows just how wrong Aucsmith's statement is.)

And then, of course, there's the coup de grâce. After admitting that Windows 95 had zero security and that the security in Windows NT is lacking because it was "written before the Internet" and that even Windows Server 2003's security was slapped together "before buffer overflows became a frequent target," and after spooking the audience by telling them that all their businesses "face increasing threats from cyber criminals attempting extortion and fraud," Aucsmith offers a simple solution: "If you want more secure software, upgrade."

Hey, David-- what was that part about businesses facing threats from cyber criminals attempting extortion, again?

Remember, folks, you're watching AtAT: where overt and unprovoked Microsoft-bashing is never really off-topic!