So much for the catastrophe, right? On New Year's Eve, the clock struck midnight and everyone heaved a sigh of relief. Or at least we'd like to say that, but in reality, very few people seemed worried enough about the Y2K bug to be relieved. The most strife we witnessed while walking through downtown Boston after midnight involved a cabbie arguing with his passengers over the fare. No looting, no pillaging, no terrorist attacks-- in fact, the biggest net effect of Y2K would appear to be this: there are now a whole lot of people with a six-month supply of Beefaroni in their basements who are feeling just a little bit foolish right about now.

That's not to say that Y2K didn't cause some very real problems, but earlier in the day we watched the reports of New Year's clicking over in Japan, China, and even India with no major infrastructure failures. Later we were struck with just one thought: if the power had gone out in the U.S., it would have been pretty damn embarrassing. No, all major systems continued to work just fine, and since the world was not deprived of electricity, water, or any other basic needs (any more than usual, anyway), we found we could turn our attention to the single most prevalent Y2K bug out there: goofy cosmetic date problems. All over the world, computers continued to function just fine-- except they often reported the new year as anything ranging from 00 (which we consider correct) to 100 to 19100 and beyond. It's true-- lots of software really doesn't know what year it is. As it turns out, though, it wasn't all that big a deal.

Still, it was fun to tour the 'net and see what year different companies' servers thought it was. The Register has what appears to be almost a canonical list of Y2K dates errors on the web. Hewlett Packard's site was arguably the most entertaining, temporarily showing a date of "January 1, ***DATE INVALID***." Microsoft's Terraserver site was really cool, originally claiming the year to be 19100, but then being "fixed" to say 192000 instead-- and when last we checked, it was reading 100. But hey, don't get too smug-- even Apple's web site thought it was 20100 until an embarrassed webmaster pulled the clock down completely.

So Happy New Year, everybody, and welcome to the year 20100. Join us as we give thanks that the Y2K bug was relatively minor. As for how Y2K most affected your friendly neighborhood AtAT staff, Jack's still bummed about a Y2K bug in AtAT's server software that's delaying AtAT 2.0 even further, while Katie, AtAT's resident fact checker and Goddess of Minutiae, is still reeling from the injustice of having been made to pay cash for a manicure when the salon's credit card system failed. The horror... The horror...

It's a whole new year. (Yes, we know, "Nobody likes a math geek, Scully," but it's not a new millennium-- in fact, it's not a new century or even a new decade. We'll shut up now.) So is it time for a whole new set of colors to gain popularity? No, we're not advocating that Apple replace its current selection of fruit flavors with something else-- we're wondering if maybe the buying public is going to develop some broader tastes within the current Fabulous iMac Color Wheel. We'll leave Graphite out of this for the time being, since the Graphite iMac is in a class by itself. The standard iMac DV comes in your choice of Blueberry, Grape, Lime, Tangerine, or Strawberry. So how come so many of you are picking Blueberry?

It's not that we don't like Blueberry-- our iBook is Blueberry, and it's quite nice. But we wanted Tangerine, because frankly, Blueberry's a little bland. And in the case of the iMac when there's also the choice of three other colors, we're still sort of surprised that Blueberry remains the most popular color, far and away; according to a San Jose Mercury News article, Blueberry iMacs are selling as well as "the other four colors combined." Originally we were wondering whether that was just due to stores stocking more Blueberry iMacs than other flavors... we're not sure if Apple is still shipping iMacs that way, but we're pretty sure they were at one time. And we've heard from multiple sources that several (if not all) CompUSA stores only ordered Blueberry iBooks, assuming that Tangerine would be unpopular. Way to skew those popularity numbers, guys.

But a few of us being forced to accept Blueberry when we really wanted one of the "less popular" colors can't negate the fact that, apparently, Blueberry and Grape are in such high demand that some retailers are actually giving away free RAM to customers willing to "settle" for Tangerine, Lime, or Strawberry instead. Hmmm. So much for The Gap's attempts to make orange "the new black." But it's a whole new year, now, and maybe, just maybe, Lime will be all the rage. Meanwhile, we're seriously wondering if perhaps Apple's going to rethink its whole "your choice of colors" strategy and just ship everything in Graphite, since that shade seems so overwhelmingly popular with everyone. Bye-bye inventory stocking issues, hello big sales. Hey, it's not impossible.

And in the "Things That Make You Go 'Huh'" department: faithful viewer Keith Lim informs us that a small Russian vodka company is releasing a new beer called Windows '99. No kidding. This company has decided that the best way to make its product stand out in a crowded and growing market is to steal the Windows name from Microsoft. It's sort of refreshing to see someone blatantly and unrepentantly ripping off Microsoft, isn't it? It's a sort of karmic realignment. If you take a look at a picture of Windows 99 beer, you'll see that the label on the bottle sports a logo remarkably similar to the one on Microsoft's operating system; seems the Russians have not only taken the name, but also the whole "look and feel."

See, apparently Russian trademark law is quite a bit less mature than that of most industrialized countries, and the makers of Windows beer have legally registered the Windows trademark as "a brand name for food, drinks, and tobacco." (We can only hope that Windows cigarettes are just around the corner, because that would be way too appropriate-- addictive, expensive, you know you should quit but you just can't.) And the company isn't afraid of lawsuits from Billy and the boys, since Windows '99 beer is well within the limits dictated by Russian law, and in fact, any lawsuit against them would simply bring free publicity. You just gotta love these guys!

We've got to wonder, though, just how much of Windows this Russian company copied when making their beer. First of all, we imagine that using it makes you less productive-- that's pretty much a given. But does it lack consistency? Is it flat and unengaging? Can you only drink it with certain foods? Worse yet, when visiting certain restaurants, will Windows '99 beer be a mandatory purchase, even if you decide to drink water with your meal instead? And most importantly, will users have to worry about Windows 99 beer occasionally causing the dreaded Blue Face of Death?