Okay, this is getting ridiculous: regular viewers frustrated with our recent spotty broadcast frequency should perhaps take up the issue with the universe at large, because all sorts of distractions and impediments have been cropping up recently on a near-daily basis. Just in the past week we've had an unscheduled server migration followed by a corrupted routing table that prevented our access for a full day, an ensuing server hardware failure that limited our access for three more, and a database cratering (apparently caused by the hardware repair) that required a full night's rebuild. Insert platitude about the likelihood of precipitation occurring only in copious quantities here.

And that's just on the server end. Down here at the AtAT compound, our main production Power Mac suddenly started shutting itself down randomly and without warning. We eventually figured it must have lost a fan, and it was shutting itself off when it determined that temperatures were getting into the red zone (nifty design, if it's true!); we don't have time to find and replace the fan, so the system's currently running with the side door open two inches, which seems to have lowered the internal temperature by 25 degrees, and we haven't had a shutdown since. Pity Anya doesn't have a side door to crack open a smidge, too, because as of today she's running a few degrees hot herself-- and a toddler with a fever and a stomachache requires 130 percent of our attention, instead of her usual 110.

Suppose the cosmos is trying to tell us something? Because it's getting kinda hard to ignore the hints. Maybe we should quit and take up dentistry. Or banking.

On the plus side, at least it seems like Apple isn't suffering the same sort of annoying cosmic roadblocks when it comes to the development of Tiger. Steve said it'd ship in the first half of this year, which is a pretty wide window; it could be three months from now, it could be tomorrow, or it could be six weeks ago (but probably won't be-- er, won't have been-- willn't have not being been-- ah, whatever). All we know is that Tiger's Steve-mandated deadline is June 30th, and now we've got a pretty decent clue that it might hit store shelves quite a bit before then. No, we're not talking about how the ship date for faithful viewer Joao's Amazon Tiger preorder slipped from March 31st to April 20th a couple of weeks ago-- and then moved up from April 20th to April 18th just a week later. (Although that's, you know, pretty enthralling stuff in its own right.)

No, we're more excited about a hint from Apple itself: faithful viewer Stephen Beckwith was the first of several to notice that the company has added a few new categories to its Productivity Tools download page-- namely, Automator Actions, Dashboard Widgets, and Spotlight Plugins. Unless you're woefully out of the loop-- and we mean, more so than we are, which would be tragic on a practically biblical scale-- you recognize Automator, Dashboard, and Spotlight as three of the heavy hitters in Tiger's lineup of new features. And while all three of Apple's new pages dedicated to extending their functionality are currently dead links, we happen to be just optimistic enough to interpret the fact that the links have been posted at all as a solid indication that Tiger will be shipping sooner rather than later.

But is it just misplaced optimism? Faithful viewer CJ Corbett notes that, according to dirt from "multiple sources" posted at macosXrumors.com, "Apple's development effort on OS X 10.4 Tiger is possibly running late" due primarily to "problems with Spotlight, XCode 2.0 and general stability." If that's indeed the case, a release in late June seems far likelier than any date sooner-- but hey, who are you going to believe, multiple independent developer sources with corroborating stories, or three dead links on a random Apple web page?

Actually, uh, don't answer that.

We're in the midst of some heavy shake-ups at Sony, so grab onto something firmly bolted down! Or don't. Whatever-- after all, it's just Sony; it's not like Steve Jobs is being replaced at One Infinite Loop by Tom Arnold or Apple has announced that it's ditching this dead-end digital music business to focus on the lucrative world of downloadable odors. Still, it's vaguely relevant because, as faithful viewer Harry informs us, Reuters reports that CEO Nobuyuki Idei is being replaced by British-born Howard Stringer, the current head of Sony's U.S. operations. Most people are focusing on Stringer, seeing as he's the first non-Japanese CEO ever to be appointed by the company, but in our charmingly myopic way, we're far more interested in Idei getting the boot.

See, we don't know Stringer from a warm bottle of clam juice, but Idei has made a couple of guest appearances in previous AtAT seasons, cast as "that Sony CEO that didn't like Steve." Way back in 2001, some rumors hit the markets that Sony was in talks to buy out Apple-- and Idei practically trampled a puppy, a pregnant woman, and a whole pack of sickly orphans in his mad dash to quell the rumors, even going so far as to say that Sony wouldn't even consider buying Apple if Apple extended a bid. (Less than a year later, Apple shipped the iPod, which eventually nuked the Walkman brand into plasma and relegated Sony to the role of Also-Ran in the digital music race. Ha!) His haste to deny any possibility of a Sony-Apple merger may well have had something to do with his personal dislike for Steve Jobs, which crystallized a year later when the two CEOs sat down to discuss possible joint ventures-- until Idei "scrapped the negotiations" because he couldn't stomach Steve's utter lack of humility.

And get this: Idei had another chance to hook up with Apple just last year, when Steve offered him the opportunity to glom onto the iTunes Music Store in a team-up intended to pool the companies' technical, design, and brand strengths against the inevitable brute-force push into digital music by Microsoft. Idei said no, Sony went its own way with the abominable Sony Connect service, the company cranked out several lackluster iPod wannabes that further nuked the Walkman brand, and Idei got canned this morning. All because he just couldn't see himself working with Steve. Bummer, hmmmm?

Then again, getting along with Steve Jobs in and of itself wouldn't necessarily have been a job-saver, either: according to the same report, "President Kunitake Ando will also lose his job as part of the major management overhaul." If you caught the last Stevenote, you probably recall Ando as the affable guy Steve trotted out to talk about Apple and Sony working together to make 2005 the "Year of High Definition Video." Onstage, the two of them were appropriately fawning to each other, while also swapping jovial little barbs about Sony/Apple competition-- Ando even did his own "one more thing"! And it all felt real, like they might get together for a round of golf after the show. Or maybe they could costar in an ill-conceived buddy-cop flick. Instead, of course, Ando wound up getting the shaft. But hey, maybe Apple's hiring; he knows someone who could maybe pull a few strings.

So how do we know that Apple's digital music one-two punch of the iPod and the iTunes Music Store has really hit it big? Well, if you look really closely and maybe squint a little, there are a few subtle hints out there-- such as the iTMS having recently sold its 300 millionth song with an ever-increasing run rate, or the comforting regularity of foamy-mouthed people with wild eyes loudly attempting to sell their own grandmothers (it's a buyer's market for geriatrics, we hear) to Apple retail staff in exchange for the hard-to-find iPod model of the moment. But if you want proof you can take to the bank-- sure, the teller might back away slowly and signal for security, but such is the price of art-- then look no further than the fact that patent lawyers are pouring out of the freakin' woodwork, and they're in a suin' mood.

For instance, take a gander at the ZDNet blog called Between the Lines pointed out by faithful viewer Gene Feierstein. It reports that an entity called Pat-rights (a name that just screams "bottom-feeding, land-grabbing patent portfolio holding company") claims that the FairPlay digital rights management scheme at the heart of the iTMS violates U.S. Patent #6,665,797, which seems to describe the mechanism by which iTunes can restrict playback of purchased iTMS songs on up to five computers registered to the buyer via the 'net. Our attention spans are way too short to dig through and try to determine whether or not the claim has technical merit, but the flashing yellow "HEY!! EXTORTION!!" sign on the company's legal strategy seems a little suspect: Pat-rights says it will file a lawsuit on March 21st unless Apple agrees to pony up a whopping 12 percent of Apple's gross from every iPod and iTunes sale.

And yes, of course it's threatening to seek treble damages. Duh. You remember how these shakedown artists operate, don't you? After all, the Imatec/ColorSync lawsuit wasn't that long ago.

Meanwhile, the iPod itself has also come under legal fire. Faithful viewer Graham Nealon tipped us off to an article in The Register which reports that an outfit called Advanced Audio Devices is suing Apple for violating U.S. Patent #6,587,403, which describes a "music jukebox which is configured for storing a music library therein." We know that the patent in question was filed on August 17th, 2000, so you might well be jumping up and down and yelling "PRIOR ART!" but unfortunately, that's probably not going to fly. True, Apple wasn't the first company to ship a hard drive-based MP3 player; it was merely the first to ship one that didn't blow chunks, and a couple of chunk-blowers definitely preceded the patent filing. But before you go pointing at, for example, this MP3newswire.net article covering the announcement of Creative's NOMAD Jukebox (which was published six months before AAD filed its patent application), you should note that the filing was "a continuation of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/111,989, filed Jul. 8, 1998, which claims the benefit of U.S. Provisional Application No. 60/051,999, filed Jul. 9, 1997." So that's probably not going to help.

The Reg seems to think that Apple's lawyers' best bet is to dicker over whether or not a song stored on the iPod's drive qualifies as an "audio signal," and if that's really the optimum strategy, Apple may well be in trouble from a patent perspective. But who cares? Look at the big picture: lawsuits like this are the surest trappings of success! Both patents, if valid, clearly cover a whole lot more products and services than just iTunes and the iPod, but the holders have chosen Apple as the target with the fattest wallet. C'mon, Microsoft has so many active lawsuits at any given time that, collectively, their gravitational pull affects the tides. They're accessories, like belts or shoes-- and Apple's wearing Prada. Now all we have to do is hope that the outcome of the lawsuits doesn't downgrade Apple to Payless.