Just to clarify something in case it isn't obvious already: we at AtAT aren't money people. We don't play the stock market (nor do we understand it), end-of-quarter financial numbers generally put us to sleep, and when that guy Alan Greenspan starts talking on TV we generally start channel-surfing to find a rerun of Gilligan's Island or something. Economics and high finance are the sorts of subjects that slip right through the fingers of our minds, which are far more interested in juggling details like who's going to be cast in the upcoming Buffy spin-off, how high to set the oven when cooking up a full bag of Tater Tots, and just where the hell we put that damn remote.

And yet, when the drier financial elements get applied to Apple, somehow it's not just palatable-- it's actually exciting. Thrills! Spills! More drama than you can shake a stick at! In particular, have you been watching Apple's stock lately? It managed to bust through the magical $50 barrier before finally closing at 49 7/8-- up two and a half bucks from the day before. More importantly, according to MacWEEK, AAPL's peak yesterday was actually the highest the stock's managed to climb in four years. Now that we look at it, based on a five-year chart, it seems like Apple's stock is the best it's been for the past sixty months-- though it looks like StockMaster's numbers are always a little different from those quoted elsewhere. (Just another one of those Wall Street vagaries we don't understand.)

Bravo for AAPL, which has seen stunning performance since those scary days when it was hovering at about 13 a year and a half ago. We expect a roller coaster ride in the next few weeks, because there are two big events that will almost certainly affect Apple's stock price. First of all, there's the scheduled announcement of Apple's Q3 financial results; that happens next Wednesday (and yes, a Beat The Analysts contest is coming very soon). In general, we've noticed that every time Apple announces numbers that are better than the analysts expected, the stock goes down for some reason. But a mere week later is the beginning of Macworld Expo and Steve Jobs' anxiously-awaited keynote address-- and who knows what surprises he has in store?

Poor Stewart Alsop; the man will probably one day be studied as one of history's great tragic figures. He seems to be pretty technically-minded-- at least, we doubt he has any real difficulty setting the time on his VCR-- and yet, due to a single tragic flaw, his computing life appears to be one of misery and despair. Sure, Hamlet's flaw led to a dozen deaths or so (and a corpse-ridden stage is always a bummer), but consider poor Alsop, who is doomed to spend his life using Windows and hating every minute of it. As faithful viewer Jerry O'Neil points out, he's written yet another Fortune article about how much he despises the diabolical operating system from Redmond which has once again "made [his] life hellish"-- and yet he just keeps on using it.

See, Alsop's tragic flaw ("hamartia" for you lit geeks out there) appears to be his stubborn refusal to notice that Windows is not the only game in town. Read the article. Alsop waxes eloquent about how the personal computer wrested power and control from the clutches of the Evil Mainframe Experts and delivered it into the hands of the Individual. Power to the people, as Alsop says. But Windows has forced him to see through that illusion; following a nasty crash, even a reasonably technically competent person like himself was unable to recover, and he found himself "at the mercy of the experts," for which he blames Windows' complexity. He also goes on about how tough it was to switch to a new Windows machine and bring across all of his old settings, and how he screwed up during a Palm software upgrade which led to all sorts of nasty junk happening. And yet, throughout all of this, never once does he seem to realize that he doesn't have to use Windows if he doesn't want to.

Unsurprisingly, almost all of the "Talk About It" comments posted by readers after the article describe how easy to use and trouble-free Macs can be by comparison. Sure, problems pop up-- but I've yet to hear of a Mac being rendered unusable by accidentally running a Palm installer without the cradle attached to the serial port. The thing is, though, Alsop will never stop using Windows. Despite his claim that he "really wish[es] there were a computer out there that could give [him] basic PC applications that work fluidly with the World Wide Web and networking," his tragic flaw is that he'll never acknowledge that he's just described a Macintosh. People like Alsop wearing Windows blinders are the reason that Bill Gates keeps getting richer off of mediocrity. Alas, poor Stewart; he's locked into a technological death spiral, and the corpses on his stage will one day be whatever patience, good nature, and joy of computing he might still have left. Hey, it ain't Lear, but it's tragic nonetheless.

We don't mind saying that we're a little underwhelmed with QuickTime 4's reception so far. After waiting for a year or so for QuickTime to gain live streaming capabilities, we were expecting a bigger splash. When we first loaded up a live video broadcast over a piddly 28.8 kbps connection and found that we were actually able to see what was happening and even read text subtitles in the broadcast (whereas RealVideo had always just been a colored smudge), we figured lots of Internet video content providers would sit up and take notice. And when Apple announced that a fully functioning open source QuickTime server was available for free, we figured people would be tripping over each other to get in line.

Instead, nothing really seems to have changed. Sites that offered RealVideo before still offer RealVideo. Sites that streamed using Microsoft's technology still do. The only live streamed QuickTime video we've yet stumbled across all seems to be coming from Apple's own servers. Where's the love?

Well, maybe things will heat up now that Apple's announced a new version of its streaming server. Version 1.01 not only runs via Mac OS X Server, but it also supports "Linux on Intel-based systems." That ought to make a big difference right there; Mac OS X Server systems are few and far between when compared to the slew of Linux boxes floating around. There's also the little matter of performance improvements; Apple claims the latest version now supports up to 2,000 concurrent streams-- double what it was before. Let's see if that brings people around.