And we're back once again from yet another irksome hiatus, this latest one involving both the mundane-- looming deadlines, refinancing the mortgage on the AtAT compound-- and the not-so-mundane. Those of you who always complain that Katie, AtAT's resident fact-checker and Goddess of Minutiae, never steps in front of the camera will be happy to hear of a meeting in Culver City between our own trivia deity and a certain suave Canadian, where she answered a few questions (or questioned a few answers) to be aired "on another network" on the 29th of May. Check your local listings. And no, we're not telling you how she did.

Anyway, what dragged us kicking and screaming back into production despite our profound depression at shoveling a foot and a half of New England snow after wandering the 68°-and-sunny streets of L.A. (in particular, nine-month-old AtAT intern Anya was thrilled to be outdoors sans pants) was none other than a definitive answer to that age-old question, "How does one cope with both the immediate shame and the forthcoming eternal damnation of shilling for a company like Dell?" Look no further than The Smoking Gun, which not only reports that Ben "Dude, You're Getting Deloused" Curtis got busted for marijuana possession on Sunday night, but also has a scan of the actual misdemeanor complaint.

Dude-- a dope fiend? Consternation! Uproar! Now, we're not going to get into a whole thing about the debate over the health or moral issues surrounding pot use or the controversy over the substance's very illegality-- that's not our place. What is our place is to giggle like maniacs at the thought of Mr. Curtis cooling his heels in a New York holding cell and maybe flashing that cheese-eating grin at some other perp with a short fuse and a home-made shiv.

That said, we have to admire Mr. Curtis's intestinal fortitude; if we were faced with the prospect of selling our souls to peddle bland computer equipment at Middle America by appearing aggressively stupid and sycophantic in front of millions of television viewers, thus torpedoing whatever slim chance we ever had at our dreams of a serious acting career by forever typecasting ourselves as walking catch-phrase-spouting cartoon characters, we'd probably need something a lot stronger than grass to swallow that pill. Say, smack. Or maybe Mexican horse tranquilizers.

Of course, there's always the chance that this was just poor Ben's attempt to get back into the public eye. Remember, last October Dell announced that it would "de-emphasize" the Dude campaign in favor of those lobotomized interns that currently plague our airwaves; that was roughly about the time that Apple's own Ellen Feiss was peaking in popularity. Isn't it interesting that he's now buying pot, given that much of Ellen's mystique stems from the rumors that she was high on that very substance during the filming of her commercial? (Despite Ellen's insistence that she was only on Benadryl, surely by now everyone knows what Google's number one hit for "stoned chick" is.)

One last desperate grab at fame, Mr. Curtis? Tsk, tsk... it's always tough to watch the mighty brought low. Oh, wait, not "tough"... what's the word? "Funny."

Now, it was obviously completely overshadowed in the Mac world by yesterday's revelation that the Dell Dude got busted for buying drugs, so we felt we should mention it since you probably missed it: Apple just updated the Xserve. This follows last week's update of the iMac, which, as usual, happened just as we went on hiatus, simply because Apple really likes to mess with our heads. The iMac update, since we haven't had a chance to mention it before, brought the line faster processors, a zippier SuperDrive, DDR memory, internal support for AirPort Extreme and Bluetooth, and lower prices; check last week's press release for more details, as well as that awesome line about Apple having "ignited the personal computer revolution," which we never get tired of seeing. (It's like Shakespeare, Joyce, or the takeout menu from the Chinese place on the corner; no matter how many times we read it, we always find something new.)

As for the Xserve, well, the upgrades are pretty much along the same lines, only perhaps less so. According to the press release, the new Xserves feature slightly juiced processors (now up to 1.33 GHz), faster DDR RAM, faster hard drives, a higher storage capacity, and a $200 price break. It's nothing that's going to make any sysadmins run up and give Phil Schiller a big, sloppy kiss on the mouth without downing a whole lot of hard liquor first, but it's still welcome news to anyone who had been saving up to drop three grand on one o' those luscious slabs of server-on-rye.

What is slightly more cause for major Schiller smoochage (not to mention a quick cuddle in the coatroom with hardware guru Jon Rubinstein) is the fact that Apple has finally gotten its RAID system out the door-- or on the way out the door, since it's slated to ship next month. This frisky puppy takes the phrase "storage density" to scary new depths, packing up to 2.5 terabytes of hard disk into a mere three units of rack space. For those of you who don't feel like firing up Calculator, we're talking 2520 GB of storage-- plenty of room for even the most demanding environments. And if you need even more (man, that is one immense collection of Internet porn you've got there), you can always just add "more Xserve RAID systems for virtually unlimited expansion."

So what's this RAID system gonna cost you, you ask? Well, the base model is six grand, and that scores you 720 GB of storage; if you want the "Burrito As Big As Your Head" model, the 2.5 TB config costs a surprisingly low $10,999. (Good thing it's not $11,000; that extra buck would kill a lot of deals.) Keep in mind that you'll also have to fork over $499 for a fibre channel card for the Xserve itself, but hey, at least it comes with cables. And don't forget, you're not just paying for storage; you're paying for all sorts of serverish fun, like "redundant hot swap power and cooling modules [that] can be replaced in seconds without any interruption of service," and something that we can only refer to as "crazy-ass fault tolerance": "in the event of a drive failure, access to data remains unaffected while data is automatically rebuilt on a spare drive." Yowza.

Word has it that the Xserve isn't catching on nearly as quickly as Apple would like, so it'll be interesting to see whether the advent of a truly sick RAID option gooses sales at all. Our only concern: what right-thinking IT director is going to buy an Xserve and RAID system when it still lacks an industry-standard floppy drive? After all, a backup of 2.5 TB of data onto 1.8 million floppies sounds like a pretty crucial strategy to us...

One more interesting little tidbit from that Xserve press release: "We were originally looking at a Linux cluster but when Apple announced Xserve, with its promise of great management tools on a UNIX foundation at an affordable price, the decision became easy." Them's the words of assistant professor Michael Giddings at UNC-Chapel Hill. Sadly, them's not the words of Steve Jobs, since, when his other company decided to ditch the Sun servers that had rendered its previous hit movies, the Luxo lads blew off Mac OS X and went with Linux instead. Oh, Steve... how could you?

Granted, Pixar needs some serious "oomph" to crank out all those frames, and according to CNET, they've opted to go with eight Blade servers from RackSaver, each packing 128 2.8 GHz Xeon processors. Even assuming that a 1.33 GHz G4 is on par with a 2.8 GHz Xeon, considering that the same number of G4s in Xserves would take up thirteen racks instead of eight, perhaps it's just a space issue; they couldn't round up any Pixarians willing to help move the sofa bed out of the server room just to make space for an extra five racks.

Or is it the cost? The retail price of the Blade servers appears to come to about $226,000 apiece, for a total of $1,808,000. Meanwhile, 512 dual-processor Xserves spec out to $1,945,088. (Go on, dump 512 of them in your cart at the Apple Store. It's a hoot and a half.) That's a difference of $137 grand, assuming that Steve's employee discount doesn't enter into the picture. Sure, that may not sound like a lot in the context of a big company, but try to think of it this way: $137 big ones buys a whole lotta beer for the company picnic.

The last possibility, of course, is that Steve has a lot less faith in Apple's enterprise server hardware than he might otherwise let on. Hmmm... Isn't it disconcerting when you notice that all the employees of the restaurant at which you're eating are going across the street for lunch?