Aaaaaaand here we are again, right back broadcasting late as usual. You know, we really thought we'd start this week off on time for once-- and we would have, too, if we hadn't had to take time out to answer about eleven hundred bajillion email messages telling us what an "arse" is. Yes, folks, it's clearly time once again for a new induction into the AtAT Failed Irony Hall of Fame, home of such grossly misinterpreted scenes as "Ninja Attack 2?" (which apparently convinced several viewers that Apple had dispatched a deadly squad of shadow warriors to silence rumors sites at their sources), "A Whole New Direction" (which caused widespread unrest among viewers who believed we'd actually sold AtAT to Microsoft), and "Is This a Flaying Offense?" (which several viewers thought was an earnest claim that Panther supported AMD chipsets). Well, it's been almost a year and a half, so we suppose we were overdue: please give a warm welcome to the Hall of Fame's newest hamfisted inductee, "A Puzzler for the Ages"!

Yup, here we thought we had crafted a scene positively dripping with sarcasm as a clever commentary on both the foibles of U.S.-centric thought and the worldwide stereotype of same, but clearly we only ladled on the satire when we should have hooked up the firehose, because the rest of the human population (imperialist yanks and shifty-eyed foreigners alike) thought we honestly had no clue what an Australian newspaper could possibly have meant by the term "a***hole." Let us assure you all that nothing could be further from the truth; indeed, Jack spent a couple of his formative years living Down Under, and Melbournians on the AtAT Reality Tour can even drive past 17 Brisbane Street in Ascot Vale to see the house in which Jack first had his mind warped beyond repair by exposure to Lewis Carroll, Douglas Adams, and Monty Python and the Holy Grail (but please don't hassle the nice people who live there now). Furthermore, the AtAT compound is equipped with hot and cold running BBC America, a fine selection of British comedy on DVD, and a two-year-old who giggles like a maniac whenever anyone yells "ARSE!" in the manner of Father Jack from the brilliant series Father Ted. Yes, even the toddler on staff is arse-aware.

We should have learned our lesson last time something like this happened and been a bit more careful, but hey, we went nearly eighteen months without a major irony breakdown, and that's well within OSHA guidelines. Still, given the sheer bulk of the response generated, this was clearly our fault, and we'll be sure to double-check all sarcasm levels when we address certain topics in the future-- such as, say, Bill Gates's recent personal antitrust fine. That's right, we said personal; this fine is his and his alone, not Microsoft's. Faithful viewer jammerb tipped us off to a CNN article which reports that Gates violated "premerger reporting requirements" when he bought $50 million worth of stock in the pharmaceutical company ICOS a couple of years back. (That'd be the folks who make Cialis, a named recognized by the spam-ridden everywhere; let there be no more debate over why Gates named his company "Microsoft.") It seems that he was required to report such a massive purchase to the feds and kindasorta didn't bother, so the FTC and the Justice Department have slapped him with an $800,000 fine.

So the question that CNN asks is, "Will the world's richest man feel an $800,000 fine?" Well, let's see, here... when a mosquito lands on a rhinoceros, does the rhino scream in pain? And the answer, of course, is: of course it does. It screams like Jamie Lee Curtis in any of her four dozen '70s- and '80s-era horror flicks. In point of fact, due to a congenital larynx defect, Ms. Curtis is incapable of screaming on her own, and all of her onscreen shrieks were actually dubbed-in recordings of black rhinos being buffeted by the tiny airborne feet of the common mosquito. So there you go.

To get a sense of the pain Mr. Gates must surely feel upon learning of his sorry fate, let's employ the unbeatable comparative power of fractions. Let's say you're doing reasonably well for yourself and have managed to amass $20,000 in your various bank accounts, mattress stashes, and piggy banks. Well, an $800k fine to Bill Gates, who has $47 billion stashed away, is proportionally equivalent to your $20-grand-having-self being forced to shell out the exorbitant sum of 34 cents. Why, if the feds weren't sticking it to you so hard, you could have spent that money on a First-Class stamp a couple of years ago. So yeah, you can be sure that ol' Billy-Boy is boo-hooing into his chocolate milk and trying to figure out how he's going to pull his life back together.

Now excuse us, we have to go answer 1.6 trillion email messages about Bill Gates's relative wealth. Sure, we dig our own graves down here, but hey, it's something to do until Carnivàle gets back on the air.

Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs, rah rah rah! That's right, folks, we're in full-on cheerleader mode for Big Steve, because we're not sure he's been getting enough praise lately, and our researchers have reason to believe that his Reality Distortion Field is powered by raw ego. (Explains a lot, doesn't it?) Since we all know that Apple's continued success and growth are hugely dependent on Steve being able to bend mere mortals to his every whim, we always try to do our part by sending the Magic Happy Vibes Cupertinoward. It's the least we can do to keep our platform healthy, short of expending any actual effort or anything.

It looks like we can probably take a breather for a little while, though, because faithful viewer A.T. Stefansky pointed out that the San Francisco Chronicle is dishing out the kudos in full force right now: the paper has officially named Steve Jobs "The Chronicle 200's CEO of the year." Why, you ask? (Oooh, so negative all the time. You should take more vitamin C or something.) Well, it's not just because he's keeping Apple profitable. The Chron picked Steve for the honor "because he excelled at running two companies." Remember that Pixar thingy? The company that make movies about cowboys and clown fish? Right. Whereas plenty of CEOs drop the ball when running even one company, somehow Steve manages to juggle two and keep them growing.

Congrats to Steve for the honor, and yay for the Chronicle for having such good taste (and keeping the RDF fires stoked and roaring)-- but we're a little surprised that, in addition to playing up how one man is running two profitable and innovative companies that are "helping to reshape some industries," it didn't mention just how little those companies are paying for his magic. Oh, sure, you get all these articles about how Steve is the CEO Overcompensation Poster Child because he's occasionally been given aircraft or enough stock options to crush a tank, but if you apply the principles of "what have you done for me lately?" and "now now NOW," it actually looks like Apple and Pixar each retained the best CEO in the business last year for dirt cheap.

Way back in March we wondered how much Steve makes from his gig at Pixar, and faithful viewer Shane was kind enough to look it up from the company's annual report. In 2003 Steve scored $52 for running Pixar, which is a whopping buck a week compared to his buck a year from Apple. All together, the guy's pulling down $53 a year for heading up two incredibly influential companies. Now, we know what you're going to say, "stock options," "jets," "free Taster's Choice in the executive break room," yadda yadda yadda. But here's the thing: we don't know about Pixar, but according to the Associated Press, the $75 million in stock Steve got from Apple last year can't even be sold until 2006, and since we're live-for-the-moment types down here, that stock might as well be Monopoly money. In straight-up, actual spend-it-now paychecks, Steve made $53 last year for running both companies. Make no mistake, the man works cheap.

Which brings us to the little matter of a job offer. Hey, Steve: we really need a babysitter Friday night. How'd you like to make six months' dual-CEO pay in just one evening? Think about it. Oh, and can you juggle? Balls, that is, not companies. She really likes that.

Say, do you folks happen to remember that QuickTime vulnerability that surfaced a couple of months ago? Sure you do; after all, it's not like Mac security issues make the news every other day, right? (cough Sasser cough). The flaw we're talking about apparently made it possible for evildoers to "reliably overwrite heap memory with user-controlled data and execute arbitrary code in the context of the user who executed the players or application hosting the QuickTime plug-in." In other words, bad guys can do bad stuff to you from far away. Well, the good news is that Apple has fixed the problem. The bad news (maybe) is that the company doesn't seem to be telling anyone about it.

See, according to TechNewsWorld, the latest version of QuickTime corrects the bug, but Apple has refused to characterize the problem as a security flaw and, accordingly, hasn't exactly been shouting about the fix from the rooftops. Meanwhile, eEye Digital, the firm that discovered the flaw in the first place, baldly states that "Apple is doing a disservice to its customers by incorrectly labeling this vulnerability as a 'crash bug' rather than stating correctly that attackers can compromise systems running the affected Apple software." And "independent security expert" Ryan Russell says that Apple's behavior "hints that there is a real lack of maturity, or inexperience may be a better way to put it, with their response."

Well, duh; the company may release Security Updates every so often (2004-05-03 available now-- get it while it's hot!), but they almost never have to address a flaw that can actually grant scary people the ability to run code on a remote Mac; in contrast, Microsoft generally has literally three or four holes of that severity every month (or week or minute), so those guys are used to dealing with it. Russell implies that Apple will learn the ropes "with a little more experience." More experience? As in, Apple's going to start shipping more and more products with severe security problems? Unless Apple's hiring away all of Microsoft's "programmers," we're not holding our breath.

On the notification front, though, it's not like Russell and eEye don't have a valid point; after all, that Sasser worm that's currently running amok throughout the Wintel universe exploits a security hole that Microsoft plugged three weeks ago. Patches don't help if people don't use them. That said, at least one security expert thinks Apple may have been right not to issue an advisory: iDefense's Ken Dunham notes that "the likelihood of attack is lower" and "there's a benefit to not sending out such advisories, which might lend importance or risk." After all, it's no coincidence that all these Windows worms show up a few weeks after Microsoft has patched the hole they will eventually exploit; Microsoft says "hey, there's this hole, so run this patch," customers say "yeah, whatever, maybe later," virus guys say "neat, look at that hole we had no idea was there waiting to be exploited, let's write a worm because it's not like anyone's going to patch the problem until they have to." So maybe keeping mum's the right strategy for a lowish-risk flaw like this.

Whatever. Luckily, you don't have to wait for Apple to acknowledge the hole before you plug it. Heck, if you're in the U.S. it's likely you already did; the newly-released iTunes 4.5 requires QuickTime 6.5.1 to let you play iTunes Music Store tracks in non-iTunes applications, so the odds are pretty good that you grabbed it as soon as you had a chance. But if you didn't, now you know: 6.5.1 also fixes that security flaw-- er, crash bug-- that might have let the naughty people mess with your Mac. So install it already, because it's good for you.