You know, we can't be completely sure, but we suspect that we may have burst something vascular back when Microsoft was mouthing off to the press about how its new online music store was an original and innovative endeavor that had absolutely nothing to do with the iTunes Music Store. Ever since that Redmond veep said stuff like "we definitely would have done this on our own" and "we were on a path already to provide great music services and so the Apple effort didn't really change what we would have done" (when, as anyone can plainly see, Microsoft's offering is its usual shallow and wholesale Designer Imposters ripoff of Apple's original creation with two quarts of Quaker State 40-weight UGLY poured in), we've had this throbbing pain behind our left eye and we think we can hear colors. Is that bad?

We know, we know, we shouldn't let that stuff get to us. But it's the sheer baldfacedness of the lies, you know? How can we just shrug that off? This is, after all, a company that has been blatantly copying every decent piece of software Apple has cranked out for decades, now, and it's still yammering to the press about its "commitment to innovation." (Just not its own, we suppose.) So yeah, Microsoft ends up with the glory, the market share, and the money, Apple winds up getting shafted, and we get a burst cranial blood vessel or something. By the way, did we mention that everything now smells like almonds and "new car smell"?

So we'll probably be dead by the weekend, but at least we can go out in a blazing fire of righteous correctitude, because Microsoft has finally owned up to the obvious. See, faithful viewer David Poves shot us a New York Times article (found via MacMinute) in which David Pogue decides to refer to the MSN Music Store as Redmond's iTunes Music Store, mostly because it "couldn't look more like Apple's iTunes Music Store if you ran it through a copying machine." (Well, maybe a copying machine that can collate, staple, and uglify. But whatever.) After running down a list of features and characteristics that Microsoft's store just happens to share with Apple's, Mr. Pogue quotes a Microsoft manger-- that's like a manager, but it doubles as a place to stow your infant when there's no room at the inn-- who finally admits that "Apple set the bar very high... we're trying to match that. We told our developers, 'Look at how Apple does it.'"

Finally! Sweet vindication! We smell victory in the air, and even though it smells a whole lot like someone spilled an Amaretto sour in the front seat of a new Dodge Stratus, we're just glad that someone at Microsoft decided to tell the truth for once. Heck, if someone there will go on the record and admit that Microsoft has been copying the Mac OS (both Classic and X), QuickTime, iMovie, and a few dozen other products since the dawn of creation, we might even pull through. We're not starting any long novels, though.

Okay, we've got a weird one for you today, so hold onto your... holding-onto things. You may have noticed us whining incessantly about being way too busy lately, which has led to three developments. The first is that, as you're all too aware, AtAT episodes are broadcasting really, really late. (This is Thursday's episode, remember.) The second is that we're averaging about 90 minutes of sleep per day, all of which is generally accomplished involuntarily in twenty- or thirty-minute intervals, all while sitting up. And the third is that we have no time whatsoever to watch TV, which is a deprivation far more threatening to our lives and sanity than just losing a little sleep.

What this means is that we've got a TiVo full of Six Feet Unders stretching back to June, a complete season of Couplings (albeit a Jeffless one), and we can't record anything new without it getting deleted for the next new thing getting recorded in about an hour and a half. (Incidentally, if you don't have TiVo and you're thinking about getting it, let us know, because if you list us as your referrer, we earn credits toward a second recorder which we apparently really, really need.) And when we're too busy to watch Six Feet and Coupling, well, that's just plain too busy.

The upshot is that we certainly haven't had time to channel-surf late at night on the couch in hopes of coming across bizarre stuff that enlightens even as it baffles, so thank heavens faithful viewer Graham Still is filling in. Graham, you see, stumbled across something so odd that, had we ourselves encountered it in our current extra-deranged state, we likely would have either assumed we were suffering a psychotic break or just gone ahead and suffered one just to get it over with. See, while flipping channels, he wound up on the religious station TBN, which was reportedly showing a Bible trivia game show called Virtual Memory-- complete with a giant Power Mac G4 as part of the stage set.

Yes, we probably would have collapsed to the floor and started speaking in tongues, so it's a good thing that we're getting this information filtered through Graham instead of pumped directly into our eyeballs via the glowing rectangle-thing in the living room.

For what it's worth, the Virtual Memory site has links to clips from the show-- in Windows Media and Real formats only. Geez, for a show that allegedly uses giant Macs as scenery for its set, you'd think it'd at least provide video clips in QuickTime alongside those "other two." Then again, the links are all broken, anyway, so we suppose it doesn't much matter. We did, however, dig around a bit and finally found a link to a complete 27-minute show in RealMedia format. We're watching it right this second, and damned-- er, darned-- if there aren't Platinum-style windows on all the video screens and an honest-to-the-Big-Guy nine-foot Power Mac G4 on stage. And not only that, but the contestant desks look like six big fruit-flavored iMacs.

So there you have it: enough late-night TV weirdness to last you all the way through Sweeps. for our part, though, we're still wondering why those "Macs" were onstage in the first place. Aside from being totally off-topic for a game show about Bible questions, don't these guys realize that the Macintosh is the official Computer of Satan?

Hey, you-- are you running Mac OS X? Yeah? Okay, so when was the last time you experienced a flat-out system crash, like one of those funky multilingual kernel panics or a screen freeze that didn't thaw until you held down the power key and gave your Mac a happy little rest? Odds are, you're having a tough time recalling, because in our experience, at least, Mac OS X is stabler than a three-legged ottoman Krazy-Glued to the floor and pumped full of lithium.

And all those NT-derived flavors of Windows are supposed to be rock-solid, too, right? You remember the spiel: "with Windows XP, crashes are now a thing of the past," yadda yadda yadda. And pretty much everything we've heard about XP is that it is, indeed, a whole lot more stable than Windows 95 and its descendants. Of course, Windows 95 crashed hard enough to leave a smoking crater if you so much as blinked too hard three rooms down the hall, so that's not necessarily saying much. Still, we had been led to believe that even though XP and its ilk were decidedly behind in the categories of looks, ease of use, and human interface that doesn't make you want to drive a pickaxe through the base of your own skull, those modern Windows systems were at least on par with Mac OS X in the stability department.

Well, apparently we done been lied to. Oh, the betrayal...

See, faithful viewer Mike Scherer informed us of a European study of over 1.2 million Wintels in the workplace deployed across seven different countries, which apparently sought to study office computer work habits or something like that, and as a nifty side benefit wound up with some handy stats about Windows reliability. The results have been translated and presented over at The Mac Observer, and they paint a somewhat less rosy picture of Windows stability than society at large had pulled over our eyes: reportedly these 1.2 million Windows PCs "crashed around 8% per session." That may not sound too bad, especially since we're way too lazy to pick through the French to try and find out exactly what constitutes a "session," but TMO's reasonable interpretation is that "Windows PCs crash almost one out of every 12 times they are turned on." Feeling lucky, punk?

Oh, but wait, it gets even better: apparently the failure rate of just Windows XP is "closer to 12%" in a given session, which implies that if you were to spend a morning in an office with nine XP systems chugging away, chances are at least one of them would be wearing a pretty blue screen before everyone broke for lunch down at Bennigan's. Can that really be right? Because that still sounds suspiciously high to us; granted, we have almost zero contact with XP (hence our hearty appetites, full heads of thick, lustrous hair, and complete and utter lack of Dr. Kevorkian's phone number in our speed dial entries), but can people really be touting the reliability of an operating system with a 12% crash rate? Is this supposed to be good?

Maybe something important is getting lost in the translation, or perhaps Europeans just do really bad and awful things to their computers. But if the 12% crash rate is correct and over 90% of the computer-using world really has standards that low, suddenly it becomes a lot clearer how Rob Enderle passes for an "analyst" and Paul Thurrott can call himself a "journalist." So maybe it's not so far-fetched after all.