Bad news for you drama fiends out there: if you were looking forward to a protracted courtroom battle between Apple and the Beatles (complete with surprise witnesses, Perry Mason moments, and gasps from the spectators that elicit a round of irate gavel-banging and the judge shouting "one more outburst like that and I'll clear this courtroom"-- man, we love that!), you may just have to let go of the dream. We're not naïve or anything, here; we never expected the case to go all the way to a judge's ruling, but we'd still hoped for some legal fireworks to entertain us all before either side decided it had enough leverage to wrangle a settlement. Take "Redmond Justice," for instance: the Microsoft antitrust case gave us all tons of fun courtroom hijinks over the course of years and years before it all ended with a fizzle of a settlement that was the worst series finale since... well, either Seinfeld or The X-Files. Don't make us have to choose.

But word has it that the Apple vs. Apple lawsuit may zotz out long before it even gets off the ground. Faithful viewer mrmgraphics noted a MacMinute article reporting that, according to Variety, a settlement "could be imminent," which, of course, would spoil all the fun. Sheesh, can't these guys think about the fans for once? Honestly, what are we supposed to watch instead? Wife Swap?

Oh, but hang on just a second, here, Mavis-- maybe there's some world-class angst to be extracted from this whole scheduling mess after all. See, Variety not only says that a settlement is just around the corner, but also states that it will "massively dwarf" the settlement that Apple paid the last time the Beatles' lawyers came scuttling around for a handout. The figure back then in 1991 was a whopping $26.5 million, and that was just for shipping Macs with speakers and line-in and -out ports, so, yeah, we imagine that Apple (our Apple) may be on the hook for a slightly larger sum now that it really is in the music business, what with iPods, iTunes, GarageBand, Logic, etc. So how much do you suppose Apple might have to carve out of its $5 billion cash wad?

Well, this is where it gets interesting, folks, because one lawyer reportedly told Variety that "people are expecting this to be the biggest settlement anywhere in legal history, outside of a class action suit. The numbers could be mind-boggling." Truth be told, we haven't a clue what the current single largest non-class action settlement is (the largest class action one is probably that $200 billion tobacco industry one from a few years back). All we know is that Apple can't be keen to win its spot on top of that particular heap. And we can't imagine Wall Street will be too thrilled about it, either.

That is, assuming it's true in the first place. We eventually got sick enough of the whole "whoops, it's been a little over a decade, time to extort some more cash from Cupertino" routine that the Beatles appear to have adopted and we went looking for the original agreement wherein Apple paid for the use of the trademark in the first place. Eventually we found the salient bits in a UK court judgment from last April when Apple was trying to get the case moved from London to its home turf. Check it out if you're interested, but be warned: legalese abounds. (We're still bleeding from the ears, here.)

If you dare, pay particular attention to Definitions 2 and 3 (which set out each company's "field of use") and Rights To Use Trade Marks 3. From what we gather, Apple Computer's field of use includes "data transmission services" and "broadcasting services" (which ought to cover the iTunes Music Store) and "the parties acknowledge that certain goods and services within the Apple Computer Field of Use are capable of delivering content within the Apple Corps Field of Use," in which case Apple Computer is apparently in the clear "provided it shall not use or authorize others to use the Apple Computer Marks on or in connection with physical media delivering pre-recorded content." Like we said before, what physical media? Apple has yet to ship a music CD.

So we're a little skeptical that Apple is preparing to pay more money than any company in history to settle a case for which, it seems to us, it has a pretty solid case to argue. But hey, don't ask us-- ask a lawyer. We're just the ones killing time until The Venture Bros.

Granted, we're lucky enough to be able to keep our Mac experience pretty Windows-free, and we realize that many people don't have that luxury, but frankly, we've been a little surprised by how everyone's all ga-ga over Microsoft finally planning to ship Virtual PC 7 next month. Sure, it'll be the first version that'll actually run on the G5 (gee, and only a little over a year after the G5 first shipped; isn't that convenient), and Microsoft doesn't stand to net any particular gain by somehow hobbling it as we rabid anti-Redmond conspiracy theorists are naturally predisposed to suspect. We suppose the idea of running Windows on a Mac at drastically reduced emulation speeds is, if you have no compelling need to do so, both underwhelming and maybe just a little bit nauseating.

But life's one long kick in the teeth, so plenty of people apparently do have a need to run Windows-native software on their Macs, and ever since Connectix sold off the one useful Wintel emulation product for the Mac to the Evil Empire, people have been rightfully a little tweaked about what might happen-- like, say, needing to wait over a year before the product made it to a G5-compatible state. We know, we know-- there's no conspiracy, Microsoft got it done as fast as it could, Connectix would have take even longer, yadda yadda yadda; nevertheless, if a Windows emulation product is necessary to keep the Mac market viable, we'd feel a lot better if Microsoft didn't have its claws into the only product currently filling that need.

That's why this WIRED article that faithful viewer Mike Scherer sent us is so intriguing. It seems that some outfit called Transitive Corp. is demoing software called "QuickTransit" that allegedly "allows applications to run 'transparently' on multiple hardware platforms, including Macs, PCs, and numerous servers and mainframes." Yes, it's an emulator, but Transitive refuses to call it that because it lacks the most commonly known earmark of existing emulators: it's not slower than a glue-soaked snail on two bottles of cough syrup. Indeed, one of Transitive's killer demos is reportedly showing "a Linux version of Quake III running on an Apple PowerBook," and anyone who's ever been fool enough to try to play a semi-modern first-person shooter in Virtual PC can tell you exactly how impressive that is. Says Transitive, "you can't tell the difference between a translated application and a native application."

So how's it work its magic? Supposedly instead of translating every little bit of code as it comes through the pipe, QuickTransit can translate larger chunks at a time and also "identifies and store the most commonly executed code." The result is 80% the performance of the native processor, which, in emulation terms, you may as well round up to 100% because at least as far as x86-to-PPC is concerned, no one's ever come close. We have no idea whether this is all legit or not, but Transitive claims it's already signed up six PC manufacturers to ship QuickTransit on their hardware. Wouldn't it be interesting if one of them were Apple?

Don't get your hopes up too high just yet, though, since Transitive says it's going after the mainframe and server markets first, so we doubt the next PowerBook will ship with Windows compatibility out of the box. It's something to think about, though, while you go buy Virtual PC, since it's currently the only game in town. But who knows? Maybe in a year the cross-platform compatibility landscape will look a whole lot different.

By the way, does anyone else think it's odd that none of Microsoft's "Top 10 tips for Mac users getting started with Windows" is "get really drunk first so you'll be less aware of your soul fleeing from your physical body when you click that 'Start' button"? No? Just us? Hmmm.

Consarn these kids today with their newfangled toys and gadgets! In our day, our action figures didn't have any fleebity-flobble "67 points of articulation"-- Spider-Man's arms went up and down, the head maybe turned a little side to side, and that was it. What's more, they were choking hazards and constructed cheaply from highly flammable substances, but did we complain? No, we didn't-- mostly because we were choking to death and on fire at the time, but even with unobstructed tracheae, you can bet we still wouldn't have whined about a little oxygen deprivation and some napalm-like stuff sticking to our skins, because we knew it built character.

Oxygen. Pfft! Kids today don't even appreciate it.

And what's with Mommy and Daddy buying them all the latest gear? In our day we didn't have any of these here "allowances"; if we wanted to buy the latest crappy toy, we had to raise the cash ourselves, so we grabbed a lead pipe, went down by the docks, tried to roll a drunk and like as not wound up eating pavement for our efforts. Or we submitted to horrifying medical experiments that permanently affected our fine motor skills and our gag reflexes, all for a few bucks so we could buy our crummy barely-bendable action figures that caught fire halfway down our windpipes while we twitched uncontrollably and threw up all over the room, and we liked it. We loved it!

We swear there's a point to all this.

So why are we bringing up how decrepit we are and how Dickens-meets-Tarantino our childhoods happened to be? Sour grapes, mostly. See, faithful viewer Ben Hur forwarded us an article from this week's Newsweek about how parents today have too much cash and absolutely no ability whatsoever to say no to their kids-- to the degree that the first mom mentioned in the article was "struggling" to hold the line and not buy her 9-year-old son the latest little toy he wanted: an iPod mini.

That's right, a 9-year-old kid. And while it might not be odd that he'd ask for a miniPod, it strikes us as 33 flavors of skullwhack that his mom is having trouble saying no. Oh, sure, our moms would have a tough time saying no to that request, too, but only because they'd be laughing so hard. And get this: in the end, this woman finally did agree to blow $249 on a miniPod for her precious third-grader, although the poor little tyke had to forfeit his birthday party to get it.

Now, about that point we promised-- you thought it was just going to be about how iPods are so hot, even 9-year-olds want them, right? Nope, although that's apparently all too true. To see where we're going with this, you need to know why the aforementioned miniPod-buying mom finally caved and dropped a quarter-grand on a sophisticated piece of audio electronics for her little kid: apparently he told her that "everyone has one"... and when she called a bunch of other moms in her neighborhood to ask, she found out that he was right.

Believe it, kiddies: there's at least one suburban New York neighborhood out there where all the third-graders are running around listening to miniPods that their parents bought them. So, again, a little off-topic jealousy-- aaaarrrrggghhh-- and then comes the startling revelation that we had to share with you: hard drives, shmard drives; the reason that miniPods have been so scarce for the past eight months is because they've all been bought up and given to whining 9-year olds.

Now, given that oh-so-simple explanation for one of Apple's worst product shortages, we here at AtAT did a little digging to find out if maybe the company's other recent and ongoing shortfalls might simply be due to overwhelming demand among unanticipated demographics. What we found may shock you: most infants under the age of 18 months have high-end Power Macs next to their cribs, there's nary a dachshund on this continent that isn't packin' an Xserve G5, and those "late" 30-inch Cinema Displays are actually all shipping to department store mannequins. Who knew?