For those of you who are counting the days until "Pirates of Silicon Valley" premieres on TNT, you're going to have to add thirty-one. An article at Mac OS World alerted us to the fact that the premiere date has mysteriously shifted from its original May 20th to June 20th. If you've programmed your VCR three months in advance, you should remember to adjust the date-- and you might want to look into the possibility of perhaps developing some outside interests. Seriously.

"Pirates," for the uninitiated, is TNT's upcoming movie blockbuster that portrays the forging of Apple and Microsoft by following Steve Jobs and Bill Gates "from the dorm room to the board room" and tracing their "passion, luck, and genius." (We at AtAT assume that the passion and genius they describe belong to Steve-- you can decide for yourself where the luck resides.) Noah "Dr. John Carter" Wyle stars as Steve Jobs-- a fitting role, given that actor's penchant for Macs. Batting for the other team is Anthony Michael Hall, the omnipresent geek in 80's-era John Hughes teen angst flicks, portraying Mr. Gates. Typecast much, Anthony? It's good to see him getting back to his roots after making those regrettable forays into playing dumb jocks in Johnny Be Good and Edward Scissorhands (though we still want to see him as the murderous sculptor wannabe in the 1995 made-for-TV remake of Roger Corman's beatnik horror classic, Bucket of Blood. C'mon, he stars opposite Justine "Mallory Keaton" Bateman! How can you go wrong?).

No reason is given for the delay, though we expect it's probably just the usual production snafus rearing their ugly heads. Oh, sure, it's possible that one or both of the real-life Silicon Valley bigwigs portrayed in the flick are pulling strings to delay the movie's appearance, but we don't see much point. Nope, we're going to forgo the typical conspiracy theories of which we're so fond and chalk it all up to everyday production issues. Yep, nothing untoward here. And we're definitely not being paid to say this. Now excuse us, as we have a Porsche to go buy...

It's always sad when an apparent victory turns into a devastating loss. You will all probably recall a lone Mac user's valiant struggle to change Bell Atlantic's boneheaded policy of not supporting any non-iMac Macs for its high-speed ADSL Internet access. Steve Godun noticed that a Pentium-based computer or an iMac was required, and thus began his heroic saga to purchase ADSL service for his Power Computing Mac clone, which, from an ADSL network connection standpoint, was functionally equivalent to an iMac, but which Bell Atlantic staunchly refused to support. If you'd like to read the whole story, it's available at the MacInTouch site, but be forewarned-- Mr. Godun's willingness to brave the depths of stupidity and bureaucracy of the modern large corporation are not for the faint of heart nor the short on time. He makes Aeneas and Odysseus look like lightweights.

To bring you up to speed, here's the story in a nutshell: Steve was given several run-arounds and talked to about a kajillion different Bell Atlantic representatives, none of whom was able to provide a good reason why they refused to take his money just because his Mac wasn't translucent. Eventually, it seemed that he'd won the day, and the Mac populace rejoiced in victory when Bell Atlantic updated their web site to claim that they expected to be able to support all Macs-- not just iMacs-- in mid-February, at which time they planned to have software available that would enable Mac users to determine their computer's hardware Ethernet address. (Never mind that several pieces of software already let Mac users do this-- a point which Steve had shouted several times and which had evidently fallen on deaf ears.) Anyway, with their public declaration of imminent support for the Mac, it seemed that one more battle against ignorance and irrational anti-Mac sentiment had been vanquished.

But apparently one should never underestimate the potential depths of ignorance. Mid-February has come and gone, and Mr. Godun is still without ADSL service. And, as detailed in the closing chapters of his saga, he has attempted dozens of times to contact various people he had spoken to within the Bell Atlantic ranks, and all of them have refused to return his calls. When speaking to yet another new contact at the company, he was told that there was "no projected announcement" regarding Mac ADSL support, despite the mid-February date quoted on the web site. So Steve's giving up; he plans to wait for a different company to offer ADSL service in his area, while he also switches his phone service to another carrier. And what's so absurd, of course, is that at any time, Bell Atlantic could have taken Steve's money, come over, and installed the line. There is literally no technical reason why they couldn't have done this. But apparently money that's been touched by a Mac user is for some reason not welcome in Bell Atlantic's pockets. After all, Bell Atlantic could simply state, "We support any computer provided you give us the hardware Ethernet address in advance. Here are some links to software for various platforms that will let you determine this required value." Truly bizarre...

Well, heck-- that didn't take long. Remember all the controversy over Intel's new Pentium III? Basically, several privacy advocates are concerned about a new feature that Intel added to the processor, which functions as a software-readable serial number. Intel's vision for this is basically to function similarly to a "cookie" that you might receive from a given web site, which allows the site in question to identify you when you return and to remember your name, user preferences, and all that good stuff. Sites that perform e-commerce functions and the like are probably very excited about this Pentium III serial number. Of course, when you get a cookie from a web site, you can delete it-- and, in fact, you can simply refuse to accept it at all. The serial number in the Pentium III, however, has been referred to as a "nuclear cookie" because it's always there and it has the potential to eliminate the anonymity of the Internet-- it's like surfing the web with a bar code tattooed on your forehead.

So, of course, a bunch of privacy advocates threatened a boycott and various other nasty things, until Intel caved and announced that the chip would be shipped with the serial number module in the "off" position. End users would be able to decide whether or not they wanted the feature active, and they would be able to turn it on or off as necessary, with a restart of the system required for the change to take effect. Sounds pretty good. Unfortunately, in a plot twist that a semi-comatose lemur could see coming from about three miles away, someone's already figured out how to read the serial number even when the user thinks it's off. According to an article at c't Magazine (a big German guts-level computer electronics publication), their own chip specialist came up with a piece of software that switches the feature on, immediately, without a restart and without the user's knowledge.

Intel's response was basically, "Oops!" And their solution isn't to change the chip, of course, since it's now shipping and they're in the middle of spending a ridiculous amount of advertising money to promote it. Instead, they state that "PC manufacturers are encouraged to integrate the configuration of the switching into the BIOS," which would prevent any simple switching on of the chip's serial number function by a piece of software. Unfortunately, that also means that the end user is going to have to get down and dirty with the BIOS of his/her machine to enable and disable the serial number, which is not something that your average user is going to want to do-- and that's why Intel opposed that method in the first place. And, as c't points out, this new strategy is far from foolproof, anyway, since the setting read from the BIOS will still have to be held in memory. How long will it take for someone to hack that, too, we wonder? (Well, what time is it now?)