While most of the industry is awaiting Apple's Wednesday event to hear just how Apple fared financially last quarter (have you entered the Beat the Analysts contest yet? Last chance!), we'll admit that we're not overly interested in that part of the program. Sure, we're as curious as anyone else about how much Apple was able to rake in in the quarter that they released the iMac, but we're pretty sure that Apple's profit was similar to or better than last quarter's results.

What we're really interested in now is the official introduction of Mac OS 8.5. While we're certainly not going to be hearing about any features we haven't heard of already, we at AtAT are hopeful that Apple will reveal a little more about the system update's pricing. We know that it'll be available for about $90 retail, and that all new Macs are shipping with an upgrade coupon that will let the customers get the new OS for about $10 via Apple's Mac OS Up-To-Date program. But we're really hoping that Apple does right by its iMac customers and gives them all a really cheap upgrade, as MacNN seems to be anticipating. Especially since the iMac was originally expected to ship with Mac OS 8.5 preinstalled, way back when it was still referred to as Allegro and had an August ship date.

Meanwhile, Apple's Mac OS Up-To-Date web site is less than helpful, seeing as it still talks about computers that might qualify for a free copy of Mac OS 8.0. Holy Reruns, Batman! Time for a fresh broadcast, guys.

So will the season premiere of "Redmond Justice" be delayed still further? Following a couple of reschedulings already, the big courtroom showdown is set to commence on October 19th-- less than a week away. Can't you just smell the excitement? But Microsoft hasn't stopped begging for extensions-- according to ZDNet, they've just started begging for slightly more reasonable ones.

Apparently Microsoft has accepted the fact that they're just not going to get the extra six months they claim they need to prepare their case now that Apple and Sun executives are set to testify against them. (Sun veep James Gosling will likely testify that Microsoft tried to kill Java by poisoning it with Windows-only extensions, and Apple's own golden boy Avie Tevanian will probably reveal how Microsoft tried to get Apple to stop development of QuickTime.) Since Judge Jackson seems unwavering in his commitment to get this trial over with as soon as possible, Microsoft has stopped whining about needing six more months and now says they'll settle for two more weeks.

Wow, from six months to two weeks! That's, let's see, about a 92% reduction in work time. Microsoft's lawyers are apparently the best in the business if they can squeeze that much work into so little time. If Microsoft's system software engineers could do the same, maybe Windows NT 5.0 would have shipped by now...

When WebTV first hit the scene, most of us that had already been on the Internet for a number of years dismissed it as a gimmick that would likely fade into obscurity as a clever idea wrapped in a less-than-compelling implementation. That is to say, it kind of sucked. Sure, it was cheap, but the savings came at the cost of a decent web browser with modern features, and web pages looked absolutely awful. We at AtAT are less than thrilled with any device that relies on the low-quality display of a television to show text to the user, probably due to all those hours spent getting headaches while using a TV as the monitor for Atari 1200XL's and Apple ]['s; when Digital TV becomes the standard it'll make more sense.

But all that hasn't prevented WebTV from becoming popular enough to keep from getting canceled. You may recall that Microsoft liked the product so much, they bought the company. And Microsoft's sizeable coffers have kept the product alive long enough to gain new features and new life. The thing is, at least one of those "features" is so Microsoftian it's practically got Bill Gates' personal autograph on it: according to a ZDNet article, WebTV devices keep records of every show their users watch, and every web site they visit, and then quietly upload that information back to the WebTV company every night. WebTV has "a whole department that does nothing but look at the information," says WebTV's president Steve Perlman.

Tom Rheinlander, an analyst at Forrester Research, Inc., cautions that WebTV users may not even know that their actions are being tracked, and if they are aware, that they may not "understand the extent of this. It's recording everything they do. This is like having a video camera on them 24 hours a day." And remember, whatever info WebTV has, Microsoft has. That all being said, we rarely see any people tuning into AtAT via WebTV devices, but then, if you've got WebTV, you probably don't have a Mac-- and if you don't have a Mac, why would you watch AtAT? Still, if you've got friends or family using WebTV, you may want to make sure they understand that Big Bill is watching.