When you're clawing away in a three-way battle, nothing's quite as disheartening as watching both your opponents join forces and engage you in a two-front war. Bummer for Apple, then, isn't it? After all, Apple's QuickTime has been duking it out in the streaming media space with competing technologies from Real Networks and Microsoft for quite a while now, so it's got to be a serious kick in the head to hear that Real has gone ahead and bought into some of Microsoft's streaming technology. Yes, that's right; despite the fact that Real leads in market share and Microsoft is bringing up the rear (with QuickTime lodged solidly in between), a CNET article reports that, for some reason, Real felt compelled to license Microsoft's Windows Media streaming audio format. Go figure.

What's this all mean? So far, not all that much; it sort of depends on what Real winds up doing with its Windows Media license. But the very fact that Real and 69 other companies decided to buy into Microsoft's technology implies that, when Microsoft general manager of digital media Will Poole says that "Windows Media is poised to become an audio standard," he's probably not kidding. It's the same old story, really-- Microsoft sets its sights on some particular market, arrives late to the party, and still manages to push its mediocre solution hard enough to get it accepted as a "standard." The plan seems to be to expand market share through sheer brute force-- giving away the product, bundling it with Windows, etc., while throwing vast development resources at the product in order to make up for lost time and hopefully make it competitive in quality. Look, Real sells the "Plus" version of its RealPlayer product for $30, while Windows Media is free to end users. Does that ring any bells? MSIE, anyone?

Meanwhile, QuickTime's still free, too, but this first barest hint of a Real/Microsoft united front has got to have at least some Apple execs biting their nails. Want to hear our prediction? As disturbing as the thought may be, we're seriously preparing for Apple to announce that the company's joined the herd and bought its own Windows Media license for audio streaming. If, thanks to Microsoft's deep pockets and OS monopoly, Windows Media is really about to become a standard for Internet-streamed audio, then QuickTime Player's going to have to support it, or risk losing acceptance. Whaddaya think, too pessimistic?

Crack all the jokes you want about "military intelligence" being a contradiction in terms, but you have to admit that the U.S. Army made at least one smart move last year: they got sick and tired of watching their web site get hacked, so they finally dumped Windows NT and the nest of bugs known as the IIS web server and switched to Macs running WebSTAR. As you can imagine, that was a red letter day for Mac boosters everywhere; finally, the inherent security of the Mac OS was getting some real attention, and of course StarNine, the makers of WebSTAR, milked the whole Army thing for all it was worth. In the end, the Army got a secure web site, StarNine got to crow about signing the U.S. Army as a new customer, and the Mac community at large got another piece of informational ammunition against those bizarre IT types who blindly assume that Microsoft technologies are the only game in town. Everybody was happy.

Fast-forward six months to this morning, when we received word that the Army web site was again vandalized by hackers. Could it be? We've heard of WebSTAR sites being hacked before, but only when some third-party add-on compromised security in some way. We could just hear the sneering voices of those IT guys saying "we told you so." Nervously, we poked about through the new messages in the WebSTAR-Talk mailing list, when thankfully, we found the answer: neither of the two hacked Army sites was running WebSTAR like the main Army site was. Even less surprising, the ROTC server that was compromised is running-- all together, now-- Windows NT and IIS. Sigh. You'd think the whole U.S. Armed Forces would have learned their lesson by now, but noooooo...

The hacked site has long been pulled, but someone was kind enough to post a screenshot of the ROTC site taken when it was still, er, "altered"; what once was presumably some staid little ROTC blurb was transformed into a broken-English tirade dissing the Brazilian government. So what's the moral of the story, kiddies? Simple enough: rely on Microsoft's web server, and your site probably won't be as secure as it should be. And make no mistake-- there's a Brazilian out there with an anti-government agenda and a tenuous grasp of the English language just waiting to take advantage of that fact.

Admit it-- you were a little let down by Pismo, weren't you? Hey, it's nothing to be ashamed of; we'd all been hearing rumors about Apple's next PowerBook for so long, it's only natural to have been just a bit underwhelmed by what we got when it finally surfaced: a brand new PowerBook that looks just like last year's PowerBook. No super-cool translucent Graphite clamshell enclosure, à la iBook. And while the guts were new, they weren't that new; sure, Pismo has a UMA motherboard, supports AirPort, etc., but the 400 or 500 MHz processor blazing at its core is "only" a G3. In recent years we've been a bit spoiled; we've gotten used to Apple's pro portables pretty much matching its pro desktops when it comes to processing oomph. Yeah, a 500 MHz G3 may well outpace a 400 MHz G4 in many tasks, but we've had our expectations dazzled with talk of supercomputers, gigaflops, and the Velocity Engine, dammit. And while only the most diehard of optimists really thought Pismo was going to be a PowerBook G4, deep in our hearts, each of us was at least subconsciously disappointed when the Pismo surfaced with the expected G3 chip.

So we guess it's time to start looking forward to the next PowerBook, right? Well, you're in luck; faithful viewer Tim Rzeznik informs us that the unfortunately-named Go2Mac has an "exclusive report" on Apple's next pro portable, apparently code-named "Mercury." Due this fall or winter, Mercury is said to pack a pistol-hot G4-- early prototypes have been spotted running at clock speeds ranging between 500 and 750 MHz. (750 MHz?! Must be one of the three >500 MHz G4 chips on the planet, at this point.) Other than that, details are sorely lacking, short of the claim that Mercury will be "certified for Mac OS X," which is a relief, because we were worried that Apple would release a system next fall that couldn't run Apple's latest operating system. It's also claimed that Mercury will ship with a "totally new trackpad design" that will accept stylus input, so you can use your incredibly expensive bleeding-edge PowerBook to "take notes like the Palm." That last innovation will be particularly welcome, because personally, when we're typing a long document on a comfortable full-size scissor-action PowerBook keyboard, we really wish we had the option to spend hours inputting it via Graffiti instead.

Seriously, though, if Mercury's time frame for release is really this fall/winter, it's pretty early to expect any real details. Given that our own personal portable needs are adequately met by our trusty iBook, our interest in the PowerBook G4 is purely drool factor. That means we'll eagerly soak up whatever rumors and leaked info dribbles out of Cupertino, but since we're not looking to buy, we're not overly anxious. Product development as spectator sport; does it get any better than this?