Hey, Kids, Lawsuits! Well, okay, make that "lawsuit," singular, but for those of you still mourning the end of that $1.1 billion suit that got slapped against Apple by a rinky-dink outfit called Imatec who claimed that ColorSync infringed its patents, this new bit o' litigation ought to have you grinning like a madman. Granted, so far it lacks one of the Imatec lawsuit's most engaging elements-- namely, the incessant "Hey, look at me, I'm suing Apple! Woo-hooooo!" press releases issued on a twice-hourly basis by one Dr. Hanoch Shalit-- but as faithful viewer Androgen points out, Apple's latest legal challenge definitely bears at least some subtle similarities to the Imatec drama.

Take, for example, the Sketchy Company Factor. According to a Reuters article, Apple has been sued by some entity called BIAX Corp., described as "a small Colorado company owned by a father and son who live in Florida and Colorado, respectively." But the article also notes that "there is no telephone listing for BIAX Corp. at the Boulder, Colorado address listed in the lawsuit, or anywhere else in the U.S., according to the telephone company." On top of that, we were unable to find any mention whatsoever of a "BIAX Corp." in a Google search, and when we finally found BIAX's web site (which does list a phone number, by the way, and not much else), it turns out to be an AOL member site sans non-AOL domain name-- and one that appears to have been put up just two days ago. Geez, Imatec may have been pretty much just Hanoch Shalit and his secretary, and the company may have had zero products and no income, but at least it had the taste to slap together a semi-respectable web presence before trying to squeeze a billion bucks or three out of Apple.

Then there's the Sketchy Patent Issue. Both Imatec and BIAX exist(ed) solely to license intellectual property to other entities. Well, in Imatec's case, you may recall that the court ruled that not only did Apple not infringe on Imatec's patents, but also that those patents didn't belong to Imatec in the first place. Whoops. BIAX's beef with Apple involves two patents dealing with "a computer with instructions that use an address field to select among multiple condition code registers" and "a parallel processor system for processing natural concurrences and method therefore." Don't ask us what exactly that actually means-- our brains click off when confronted with that sort of jargon, though we're guessing Apple's dual-processor Macs are at issue-- but we've been assured by dozens of more technically-minded representatives of the AtAT viewer community that said technologies were used heavily long prior to 1996, when the patents were established.

The big difference between BIAX and Imatec, however, is that while Imatec hogged the press spotlight like some sort of Miss Piggy of the image-processing industry, BIAX is keeping pretty quiet. It was clear from the beginning that Imatec hoped to coerce Apple into a settlement by trying to drag its name through the mud, while also attracting investor capital by publicizing Imatec's potential billion-dollar windfall. BIAX, on the other hand, doesn't even appear to have disclosed to the media just how much cash its hoping to extort from Apple or even which Apple products are allegedly violating its patents. Here's hoping that BIAX is just a little behind with its press kits, the media blitz is just around the corner, and that we'll soon be able to try this case in the media as is our inalienable right. After all, what good is a lawsuit without some public melodrama?

Man, what a bummer way to wind up a week: with a heaping helping of Rumor Smackdown. While we still haven't heard anything that contradicts our last mysterious tip-off that speedy new PowerBooks are slated to surface before the month is up (thank heaven!), faithful viewer Zorro informs us that the recently-reported September 13th target date for a Mac OS X 10.1 release is woefully overoptimistic. Instead, given the current state of development, an introduction at the Apple Expo in Paris on the 26th is far more likely. While that doesn't come as any particular surprise, it is mildly disappointing for those of us who were hoping that the shipping-next-week prediction over at Mac OS Rumors would let us experience Puma a couple of weeks early. (And no, the fact that the latest MacConnection catalog says that 10.1 is "now shipping" doesn't make it so.)

Worse yet, though, for those of you who blithely ignored Uncle Steve's official declaration that there would be no "new hardware products" launched in Paris this year, now you've got even less of a reason to expect a surprise introduction of those long-rumored rack-mount servers that Apple is supposedly kicking around in its secret underground labs. See, some people took the fact that Apple's Power Mac G4 Servers did notget updated with the advent of the new Quicksilver Power Macs a couple of months ago as a hint that something "entirely other" in the server arena was imminent. And it was something of a reasonable assumption, when you think about it; Apple's servers have long been standard current Power Macs with additional software, RAM, and storage. The company's two-month delay in migrating its servers to the new Quicksilver chassis and processor specs certainly implied that some real servers might be just around the corner.

Sadly, though, the prospects of racklicious new servers debuting this month just pretty much dwindled to zero. As noted by The Register, Apple has finally quietly updated its Power Mac G4 Server-- and it's just an entry-level Quicksilver G4/733 with 256 MB of RAM, an 80 GB hard drive, and a bundled copy of Mac OS X Server. Not that we'd set fire to one if it magically appeared on our doorstep one evening, of course, but it's definitely not the "real" server that some people have been waiting for-- and the manner in which Apple introduced this new configuration completely under the radar isn't exactly conducive to hoopla and merriment, which, at the end of the day, is pretty much all we're interested in, anyway.

So, that's one more piece of rumored Apple gear that likely won't be dropping jaws at either of the company's end-of-September events. At this point we're resigned to seeing the new PowerBook and nothing else-- not that there's anything wrong with that, of course. But here's hoping we're not wrong about the PowerBook, because otherwise we're going to fall into a hardware-deprivation coma until the mythical LCD iMac finally materializes.

Is there any greater joy than discovering yet another CNET-sponsored, multi-stage product and/or service "showdown"? If there is, we sure hope we never encounter it, because our heads would likely explode with delight. In fact, we only barely managed to survive the sheer bliss of last June's "Heavyweight OS Death Match," more so because somehow (and we bet CNET's still trying to figure this one out) Mac OS X beat out Windows 2000. So you can imagine our excitement when faithful viewer Jef Van der Voort kindly informed us that CNET is at it again... and this time it's Apple vs. Microsoft from a technical support perspective. (Why this isn't on Pay-Per-View, we'll never know.)

Yes, CNET pitted Apple against the Redmond Beast in four tech support categories: self-help, online support, phone support availability, and phone support effectiveness. Both companies were rated in each round using the extremely technical and precise "letter grade with pluses and minuses" approach. And talk about your close matches! In the self-help category, Microsoft's "B" barely edged out Apple's "B-"; Redmond again won by a nose in the online help round, nudging past Apple's "A-" with a solid "A." But Apple fights back in the phone support categories, besting Microsoft by a full letter grade ("B" to "C") for availability before tying at a "B" for effectiveness.

The final result? A tie... or at least, that's what CNET says. Overall, the article reports that both companies get a "B," but the mathematical precision of CNET's letter grade ranking system sort of loses a little credibility since fully half of the grades reported in the final report card summary are not the grades reported in the individual contest rounds. (If you figure final scores with the actual awarded grades, Apple just barely wins overall.) We are utterly shocked to discover that CNET may not have exercised an appropriate level of care and attention to detail when performing this showdown. What do those guys think this is, an Olympic exhibition sport?

Anyway, if you take this showdown seriously at all, you can either choose to be happy that Apple's tech support is just as good as Microsoft's, or you can be appalled that we Mac users now get support that's apparently hardly better than what those Windows people get dished up. We understand that Apple moved to a more "Microsoft-like" (hey, Apple said it, not us) support policy as a necessary cost-saving measure, but we can't help feeling that becoming more like Microsoft in any way other than financially isn't a wonderful thing. In any case, we'll probably mourn the loss of the once-mighty "free lifetime phone support" 'til we gasp our dying breaths. In the meantime, we'll just petition CNET for a recount.