"Say, AtAT," the quizzical among you have asked, "what's this big shake-up which has thrown the whole compound into a state of even more advanced chaos and now has you broadcasting Tuesday's episode halfway into the middle of Wednesday?" Well, folks, we generally like to keep the non-AtAT aspects of our fabulous jet-set lives out of the plot lines for fear of making you all cringe at the state of your own less-than-fabulous and non-jet-set existences, but in the interest of full disclosure, we should probably own up to what's happening, here: Katie, AtAT's resident fact-checker and Goddess of Minutiae, is moonlighting.

Yes, our own state Supreme Court apparently made her an offer she couldn't refuse (details are sketchy, but we're told it was something along the lines of "come work for us and we will pay you money"), and so we're a little short-handed right now. Moreover, our own access to Katie's not inconsiderable talents and encyclopedic knowledge of Things About Stuff™ has been sharply curtailed. Consequently you may notice a reduction in AtAT's factual accuracy, because the rest of us down here either 1) find the act of consulting actual reference material both onerous and detrimental to the creative process, or 2) can't read yet. So we ask that you bear with us while we adjust to these new circumstances.

Anyway, enough about the changes to our production process; have you heard about what's going on in China? Faithful viewer mrmgraphics was the first to inform us of the joint press release Apple has posted, which reveals that the company has teamed up with Founder Technology to put iTunes on every personal computer that Founder ships. Haven't heard of Founder? Well, truth be told, neither had we, but frankly, why would we? According to Apple, Founder is "one of the largest PC suppliers to the Chinese market," and since we don't buy Wintels and don't live in China, our previous ignorance of Founder's whole spiel is perfectly natural. (To our credit, we understood exactly what was happening when Apple announced a similar alliance with Hewlett-Packard, so we aren't that out of it.)

So about this Founder deal; sounds like a lot more Chinese Windows users are going to be exposed to iTunes's many charms, and considering that China is, if we recall correctly, an arid island nation with a population of 200,000 people, that's good for business. However, we can't help feeling that Founder got hoodwinked a bit; when describing the impetus behind this distribution deal, Founder bigwig Wei Xin remarks that "Apple's iTunes is the runaway market leader" in the world of digital jukebox software. The thing is, we suspect he's actually thinking about how the iTunes Music Store has so far crushed all competition that has dared to venture before it, and since the iTMS isn't actually available in China or anywhere else outside of these here United States, that would appear to be largely a moot point to a Chinese Wintel manufacturer. But hey, whatever puts butts in the seats.

And so, to the literally hundreds of Chinese Wintellians who will soon be joining the iTunes family, we say "Welcome!" (Or, as you say in your own native tongue, "Noedel huis!") Don't fret the lack of an iTunes Music Store in your neck of the global woods, since iTunes does, in fact, have a ton of nice features even without the whole cheap 'n' easy music download thing. Learn it, live it, love it, and then ditch that creepy Founder thing you're using and run it on a Mac instead. Trust us; the experience will leave you thanking us from the soles of your seal-lined snowshoes.

This just in: sources close to the company reveal that Apple has quietly settled out of court with the families of the hundreds of Mac OS X developers who have burst into flame on the job over the course of the past half-decade. Reportedly plaintiffs in the class action suit were prepared to bring in a succession of spontaneous combustion experts to testify that conditions in Apple's operating system development sweatshops were particularly conducive to the whole overly-toasty thing; apparently it's clinically provable that squeezing out four major versions of a single operating system in as many years leads to software engineers catching fire at the brain, wrists, and/or fingers, and being reduced to a small pile of ashes in mere minutes as the burning spreads.

Needless to say, this has all been kept hush-hush for PR reasons, but you have our solemn word that a percentage of the spontaneous combustion report is true. (What? Zero's a percent.) And while you won't see any references to sizzling human flesh in your slightly more mainstream news sources (that's why you love us so), even CNET is talking about the changes that Apple is making as a result of the super-secret class action settlement, albeit in a laughably out-of-context manner: reportedly when discussing Apple's operating system rollouts over the past four or five years, Avie Tevanian was just quoted as saying that "we're slowing that (pace) down a little bit... because that's not a sustainable rate." And so it isn't, at least not without Developer Flambé as a mainstay on the workplace menu.

Not that that's necessarily bad news, mind you. The OS development slowdown will probably strike many Mac users as a blessing instead of a curse, since shelling out an extra $129 each and every year to stay current can't be everybody's idea of a corking good time. And indeed, the necessity of such fast and furious upgrades has toned down a lot; even slavering Apple apologists like ourselves can't deny that Mac OS X 10.0 was woefully incomplete, and it's really only as of Panther that we really get the sense that the operating system feels "done." Now that Mac OS X seems somewhat mature and seasoned with eleven secret herbs and spices, Apple's OS development team can probably ratchet things back a little bit, and not just to avoid doing a short-lived but ultra-realistic impression of Johnny Storm.

Of course, even with the lawsuit, Apple could have kept up its OS development pace if it really wanted to. The settlement provided the final justification, but the real reason for Apple's development slowdown is simple: the company's running out of big cats. When it registered "Tiger" as a trademark, it also grabbed Cougar, Leopard, and Lynx-- and if the company thought that "Ocelot" or "Lion" were at all marketable, you know it would have grabbed those, too. So after Tiger, Apple's only got enough felines to carry it through Mac OS X 10.7, nomenclaturally speaking. If it keeps up its all-out one-big-upgrade-per-year pace, not only will it continue to burn through developers (literally) at an alarming speed, but it'll also be tapped out of cat names by 2008 or so.

Don't worry, though; we're not talking about Apple slowing down to a "Longhorn in 2006, some features in 2009" crawl or anything like that. After Avie announced that Apple wouldn't continue its breakneck one-major-upgrade-per-year pace, he said "But you'll still see us go really fast." Just, you know, not alert-the-next-of-kin fast. And we're cool with that, we guess. If nothing else, it'll probably really help with Apple's insurance premiums.

Based on a subset of the ridiculous amounts of mail we get about all kinds of subjects, we've concluded that there are precisely two species of .Mac subscribers currently populating the habitat. One pays $99 per year mostly for the @mac.com email address, and sees all the other features as a nice bonus. The other shells out the ducats for iLife web integration, the info-anywhere magic of iSync, the convenience of iDisk, etc. and considers .Mac email a freebie add-on. And given how much trouble Apple's had with the .Mac email servers (especially lately), which type of subscriber you are almost entirely determines whether or not you think the service is worth the price.

Well, we're still hearing pretty constant fuming from viewers reliant upon .Mac email, but faithful viewer Josh Lockie informs us that while Apple can't seem to get its mail servers running stably, at least it's pumping up the non-mail aspects of the .Mac service. If you haven't checked it out lately, take a gander: there's a dozen or so new HomePage templates for photos, movies, and file sharing; there are new iCards with new fonts and auto-resizing text (and the service is now integrated with your iSynced Address Book); HomePage now allows you to integrate external web pages for added flexibility; and now you can actually edit all this stuff in Internet Explorer under Windows XP, assuming you're connecting from work or you've totally lost all sense of taste or whatever.

Meanwhile, as an added bonus, one of the new member benefits is a free copy of Norton Parental Control-- whose title, frankly, makes it sound way better than it really is. While it does indeed block access to verboten web sites, that's about the limit of the parental control it offers. It will not, for example, make your two-year-old actually listen to you when you tell her not to try to see how much hummus she can force into both ear canals. Trust us on this one. (And to answer before you ask: about four ounces total.)

Now, members of the subscriber species who view .Mac primarily as an email service will likely not be mollified by discovering that, while they still can't receive their mail on a consistent basis, at least they can send spiffy new iCards to all their correspondents informing them that .Mac still blows chunks. Subscribers like us, however, who really don't bother using the email aspect of .Mac in the first place, are always pleased for new ways to format uploaded iPhotos and send goofy iCards. That said, we really hope that Apple eventually gets its mail service together, in part because we're sure it must be losing renewals and referrals due to frustrated customers and bad word-of-mouth, but mostly because when people can't get their mail they apparently spend all their downtime complaining to us about it instead...