"We're dying to work with you." That's the message Steve Jobs gave to the National Association of Broadcasters today, as he delivered his keynote address at their convention. The inimitable Mr. Jobs made his best pitch for broadcasters to embrace Quicktime as the basis for their continuing transition from analog to digital video signals. An Associated Press story has the scoop.

The broadcasting industry faces a tricky technical hurdle over the next several years, as they must convert completely from existing standards to all-digital formats by the year 2006. (AtAT, as you can see, is one show that's simply miles ahead of the game on this issue-- "100% Digital Since 1997!") Jobs' points are good ones-- Quicktime is here now, so broadcasters can give it a whirl, and Apple is ready and willing to listen to the needs of broadcasters, and to add the features they need to get their jobs done. "The computer community knows nothing about entertainment," he points out; but who in the computer community is closer to pure entertainment than Apple? I mean, that's what we're here for, after all.

We at AtAT are quite pleased at the prospect of an Apple technology possibly forming the basis of the future of entertainment. We're only worried about one tiny thing-- in seven or eight years, is a commercial called "Get Quicktime Pro" going to pop up on the screen every single time we turn on the TV?

Here's the scenario, hot-shot: You're a multi-billion-dollar computer manufacturer with a veritable lock on the educational market, when suddenly (say, over the course of, oh, several years) you make six or eight really serious mistakes and you find yourself losing that market steadily to the competition. What do you do? Not an easy question, but if Mac OS Rumors is correct, Apple may just have found one heckuva good strategy. One word: "Network Booting." (Well, okay, that's two words, but let's not get snippy.)

According to Rumors, it's possible that all Macs built by Apple as of this autumn will have the capability to boot up via a networked server. Basically, that means you can have a Mac with no hard drive that still boots, runs applications, stores files, and just generally functions fine entirely by accessing a Rhapsody server via a network connection. You know, that whole NC idea-- except regular Macs will be able to do this, too, even though they will also have the ability to boot normally from their local hard disks. If that doesn't sound particularly interesting to you, it's likely because you've most likely never tried to administrate (hmm, is that a word? It is now.) a cluster of computers being used by several people. Believe us-- installing the Mac OS 8.1 upgrade on thirty machines is not fun. Installing it only on one (but having it take effect on thirty machines) is a much nicer scenario.

So, if we were running a school computer lab, we know which scenario we'd pick, especially given how many local hard disks we also see fail in the field. And in fact, this paradigm sounds nifty for the business environment as well, for all the same reasons: simpler administration, easy-to-track licensing, fast upgrades, less ground to cover, and less to go wrong on the user end. And since the net-booted computers would all be Macs, there's no question of ease of use. This could be a recipe for success-- let's see if Apple pulls it off (or even tries).

It's finally coming-- the second round of government-filed antitrust lawsuits against Microsoft. And the first round isn't even close to being finished yet. A Reuters story claims that the Department of Justice believes it's got enough evidence to build a new case by the end of this month.

The legalspeak at the center of the expected case is "illegal maintenance and extension" of Microsoft's de-facto monopoly on operating system software. In essence, we're not talking about anything significantly different than the charges in the current case, which alleges that the forced bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows 95 was a deliberate attempt to force Netscape out of the market and establish a browser monopoly as well. In fact, the only real difference is that the new case will explicitly include Windows 98 in its scope-- which could prove sticky for Microsoft, who plans to ship that particular product by May 15th. If Justice has its way, Microsoft will have to deal with the headache of possible temporary restrictions such as a required version of Windows 98 without Internet Explorer included. The new case is also expected to focus on "exclusionary contract terms" that Microsoft may have established with PC manufacturers and ISP's in an effort to force IE into the market while pushing Netscape out.

While we at AtAT are pleased as punch to see that we'll likely have tons of material for the show once the new case gets up and running, we're a little bummed about this "small potatoes" stuff. For instance, the DoJ already got a temporary injunction against Microsoft, preventing them from forcing PC companies to load IE on every Windows box. But no one opted to ship machines without IE once given the choice-- and if Microsoft hadn't been silly enough to fight the injunction in the first place, we probably would have heard no more about it. We say, c'mon, DoJ: Go for broke-- nail Microsoft on something big. We'll be glad to offer our services if you're not as conspiracy-minded as we are. For starters, there's their covert attempt to tag and catalog info on all Mac users (including credit card numbers, favorite websites, and shoe sizes) via hidden modules in Internet Explorer and Office 98...