Man oh man, there is just nothing-- and we mean nothing-- better than when CEOs get catty in public. Oh, sure, autumn sunsets are nice, as are inner peace, a child's laughter, and that cool shhhlorp sound you get when you shake the cranberry sauce out of the can just right, but honestly, can any of that hold a candle to big business fatcats swapping oblique third-hand potshots? Especially when one of said fatcats is a lil' fella by the name of Steve Jobs; from the Great Jobs-Dell Snipefest of 1997 all the way up to last week's installment in the recurring trash talk exchanges with Disney's Michael Eisner, we've long been a fan of the hot and cold running drama on tap whenever Steve mixes it up with another CEO in the news.

See, on its own, all this latest hoo-haa about Napster's copy protection having been circumvented is really pretty much a Bucket o' Yawns with a side order of yawn slaw. Faithful viewer C. forwarded us a CNET article about the so-called "Napster hack," but it's all old news: as usual, you can run a stream ripper app that intercepts the audio after it's decoded and sent to the sound card, resulting in a new, DRM-free recording of whatever music you just played-- which is a workaround that's older than dirt, so we're not sure why there's so much buzz about it all of a sudden. What does make it interesting is that Uncle Steve is reportedly sticking it to Napster by forwarding details about the technique to bigwigs at the record labels.

No, really! According to an LA Times article forwarded to us by faithful viewer isaac, Steve actually "sent an email Tuesday morning to top record industry executives" containing a link to a web page that describes how to use a stream ripper in conjunction with a Napster subscription to create unlimited DRM-free music files from Napster's full million-song catalog, all for ten bucks a month. "Thought you should know if you haven't heard about this," he says, clearly expecting the execs to blanch in horror and immediately withdraw all support from Napster for allowing such a heinous loophole to remain open-- which is at least a little disingenuous, since Steve can't possibly be unaware that the exact same stream-ripping strategy can be used to make DRM-free copies of iTunes Music Store purchases, too; the difference, of course, is that copying fifty iTunes albums for illegal mass distribution requires buying those fifty albums in the first place, whereas with a ten-dollar Napster subscription and a month's worth of free time, the entire world of mainstream music is more or less your stream-ripping oyster.

But of course, Napster CEO Chris Gorog fought fire with fire-- or, rather, FUD with FUD. He emailed the same execs to inform them that the stream-ripping loophole is not new, and since it duplicates in real time as songs play, it more or less requires that anyone exploiting it spend ridiculous amounts of time sitting around and recording music just like they were taping songs off the radio. He then noted that, on the other hand, it's "trivial" to download software that can strip Apple's FairPlay DRM from iTMS purchases, resulting in completely unlocked songs at 100 percent digital quality, and included a link to where such software is available. Hoooo, and the gloves are off!

Personally, we doubt anything more will come of this FUDfest, but we can hope, can't we? From a pure drama standpoint, the best scenario we can think of would be for the record labels to sue both Jobs and Gorog under the terms of the DMCA, seeing as each emailed a link to software that bypasses the other's DRM. Barring that, we could always work with the old standby: Jobs and Gorog, steel cage match to the death. Either's fine. We're not picky.

Okay, so we're all rooting for the Mac mini to send Apple's share of the PC market rocketing into the stratosphere, thus toppling the Windows hegemony and ushering in a new Golden Age of Personal Computing That Doesn't Make You Want To Shoot Yourself. But tell the truth-- haven't you also been waiting to see what its first major quality control issue would be? Because let's face it: in recent years, Apple's first models off the assembly lines often possess some pretty funky flaws. Remember the enclosure "cracks" and phantom sleep problems of the G4 Cube? Or the display problems that kept cropping up in early eMacs? Or that weird "static" bug that afflicted the first iPod minis? Well, it took a while, but it looks as though the Mac mini's first major design flaw has come to light, and it just might be a doozy.

Check it out: faithful viewer Bob Estes pointed us toward a thread over in Apple's support discussions which features several Mac mini owners complaining that when they connect a VGA monitor to their minis via the included DVI-VGA adapter, the video output is "very dark." Apparently this phenomenon is particularly noticeable to people who have connected their minis to an existing monitor that's shared with a Wintel via a KVM switch, since they can switch back and forth between both computers and confirm that the Mac's output looks-- and it physically pains us to say this-- a lot worse than the Windows output. (Ugh. Now we need about a dozen showers.) "Whites look gray, it's just dark and not pleasing to the eye"-- and when Wintel users say something looks bad, that can't be a good sign.

So what's up with this? Well, according to MacInTouch, the German magazine C't noticed during its testing of the Mac mini's VGA output that "the peak voltage measurements stayed below 530 mV and therefore outside of the VESA norm." Basically, the mini just isn't pumping out enough ooomph to generate a decent picture (especially at higher resolutions) on a lot of cheaper analog monitors-- which are exactly the sort of monitors that lots of the mini's target market plan to use with them. After all, reusing existing input devices and displays was sort of the point, right?

We can't say if the low-voltage VGA problem exists on all minis or just an unlucky few, nor can we predict whether enough users will be using VGA instead of DVI to irritate vast swaths of the switcher population and send 'em all switching right back. But we're going to go out on a limb and say that it's probably not a good thing that some of these switchers' first impression of the Mac platform is that its output looks substantially worse than what they're used to seeing on their Wintels. If it is a fundamental mini design flaw, here's hoping that Apple fixes the problem and gets "revision B" models on shelves in a hurry-- and if the company really wants to keep some switchers from the Wintel camp (and create more with favorable word of mouth), it'll even dip into that $6.45 billion in cash and pay whatever it takes to make existing minis spit out video that looks good next to what's coming out of those Wintels. You know, the way the universe intended.

Just in case you somehow haven't noticed yet, while our average age is technically a semi-sprightly 23, AtAT's production staff is comprised almost solely of bitter old fossils who don't know what kind of nonsense these kids today get up to, consarn it, but we know they're up to no good. That's right, you young whippersnappers-- don't give us any lip about how you have it so hard these days with your drive-bys and your killer crack and your rampaging mutant gila monsters with laser beam eyes, because when we were young'uns, computers could only display six colors in hi-res mode (which was 280x192, by the way) and even the Apples were strictly command-line interface. So stick that in your new-fangled hippy-trippy "bongs" and smoke it.

That said, we actually just found something that restores our faith-- just slightly-- in the younger generation, at least in another country. According to the Evening Standard, some new market research reveals that teens in the UK have "an honest work ethic," with three-quarters shackling themselves to part-time jobs to pay back money that their parents had loaned them. But we find ourselves liking them despite that revolting development (geez, haven't these kids ever heard of crime?) because "two thirds of British teenagers know how much an Apple iPod mini costs, but more than three quarters have no idea of the price of a pint of milk."

This, of course, reveals a surprisingly well-developed sense of priority among British teens, since the price of milk is, from a practical standpoint, useless trivia. What teen takes his or her own money and buys a pint of milk? If they want milk, no doubt their parents have already bought some, and so knowing that it apparently costs 30p and not "more than £1" (which is what many of them had guessed) would serve no purpose other than to take up valuable space in the brain where one could otherwise store something useful-- like, say, the maximum jail term for grand theft auto. We're proud to say that we, ourselves, haven't the foggiest idea of what a pint of milk costs here in the States-- and, in fact, we weren't even entirely sure what a "pint" was until we looked it up. But collectively we're a walking compendium of far more practical information, such as how long the average adult male can live without either of his kidneys, and how to use pushpins and an eraser to make a little pig.

In contrast to that silly "milk" thing, the price of an iPod mini is absolutely relevant and useful information, since it's a crucial teen accessory that Mum and Dad generally don't pick up on the way home from work and stick in the fridge for general consumption. Therefore most teens are going to have to buy one with their own available funds-- funds that, evidently, most of them borrow from Mum and Dad and then (shudder) work to repay instead of simply rolling uptown drunks for cash, but their own available funds nonetheless. See? Priorities. Who says society is doomed?