Remember Apple's brain drain a couple of years ago? Back when the "Cupertino Titanic" was most definitely a sinking ship, the talent was heading for the lifeboats quicker than The Mod Squad came to home video. Only the truly dedicated-- and a few truly delusional-- remained. Of course, once Steve Jobs re-energized things and got the company back on track, Apple became a relatively safe place to work again, and we presume that these days Steve's not having too much trouble hiring "the right stuff" to get the job done. Provided he's gotten past that whole "Are you a virgin?" interview style, of course.

So now is it all gung-ho and "Rah Rah Apple" behind the Silicon Curtain? Not necessarily. A faithful viewer who requested not to be named for modesty's sake (you guys crack us up) pointed out an interesting little Reuters article about Amazon.com. Apparently Amazon's getting a little heat about its practice of tabulating and revealing "group purchasing patterns." If you visit Amazon (<SHAMELESS PLUG> say, by clicking the "Books" or "CD's" buttons in the AtAT Home Shopping banner above </SHAMELESS PLUG>) and browse around a bit you may notice that there's a "Purchase Circles" page that lets you look at the top selling titles for a particular company, or geographical region. For instance, we notice that the top-selling book at Microsoft is Bill Gates' latest, Business @ The Speed of Thought. (Suppose it's just Bill buying as many copies of his own book as possible?)

Now, it seems that certain companies aren't too crazy about Amazon publicly disclosing the buying habits of their employees, and according to the article, Amazon plans to remove companies from the "Purchase Circles" listings if they are requested to do so. But what made us giggle was the disclosure of the top two best-selling books to Apple employees. Apple Confidential: The Real Story of Apple Computer, Inc. by Owen Linzmayer was number one, which we hear is a great overall behind-the-scenes look at our favorite computer company, but number two is Jim Carlton's infamous Apple : The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania, and Business Blunders, which took a decidedly "the beast is dead" slant. So are Apple employees reading it in disgruntled glee, or is it a handbook of what not to do in order to do things right this time?

Incidentally, rounding out the top five at Apple are former Head Evangelist Guy Kawasaki's Rules for Revolutionaries, famed cyberpunk author Neal Stephenson's latest, Cryptonomicon, and Hannibal by Thomas Harris, the return of Hannibal Lecter. Make of that what you will. ;-)

Speaking of company histories, we know where Steve Jobs stands on TNT's made-for-cable romp, "Pirates of Silicon Valley." He actually invited his buddy Oracle CEO Larry Ellison over to watch it on the night it premiered, and while Steve wasn't too thrilled with having been written as a big meanie, he did keep his sense of humor. In fact, he was so impressed with Noah Wyle's portrayal of His Royal Steveness that he called the ER star the very next day and invited him to take the stage at the Macworld Expo keynote address, which was a fun stunt to say the least.

Now, for those of you who saw the movie, you'll probably agree that Bill Gates came off better than Steve did; sure, he was a geek who couldn't get the chicks, but he was a shrewd geek with a profound amount of business sense. And while he was shown to have made some weaselly moves in the establishment of the Microsoft empire, at least he wasn't a psychotic drug-abusing child-abandoner like Steve was portrayed. But there's been no sign of a Gates response to the film-- until now.

A Reuters article details how Gates finally broke his "Pirates" silence while addressing the audience at a Dell customer conference. "Maybe I'm too close to the situation to like the portrayal, but that was not history," quoth the hometown-geek-made-good. "They didn't get the facts quite right." Wow-- a made-for-cable prime-time TNT movie didn't get the facts quite right? And here we thought they were making a documentary. This makes us wonder if Bill demanded his money back from the theater manager after complaining that "Robin Hood: Men In Tights" wasn't historically accurate.

You know things are slow in the world of Apple when we resort to telling you about the latest Microsoft security flaws, but hey, it's the silence before Seybold, you know? So until Steve takes the podium and announces new "Yikes!" G4 Power Macs in Salmon and Burnt Umber and the next big controversy erupts once John Dvorak proclaims that only child molesters would ever buy a G4, well, we'll take what we can get. Besides, this latest Microsoft hole looks to be pretty major. As in, "massive data loss" major.

In fact, you remember all the hubbub that ensued when the Melissa virus emerged? (Mac users were generally safe, so maybe you don't-- but trust us, it was a wild week in the Wintel world.) A Wired article quotes Dan Wallach, a computer science assistant professor at Rice University, as saying that this latest flaw is "the Melissa virus, but even worse." Basically it's a bug in Microsoft's implementation of Java, which allows malicious souls to gain access to a Wintel computer's data just by sending email or having said computer browse a web site. If the hapless victim opens the message or visits the site, he or she may find the system's hard disk being reformatted. Whoops! Yeah, we'd call that a pretty big security hole.

For what it's worth, Microsoft has issued a fix for the problem, which is freely available at the company's web site. But the flaw exists in millions of unpatched copies of Windows 95/98, and we think it's a safe bet that not everyone's going to apply the patch. If you use Windows, we suggest you look into it. A couple of noteworthy facts: if you use Netscape instead of Internet Explorer, you're safe from web sites that may exploit the problem, since Netscape fixed the bug long ago; and "users of Unix, Linux, and Macintosh computers are not affected," apparently even if you're running a Mac version of IE using Microsoft's Java virtual machine. So most of us can relax.