Whoopsie, not everyone's convinced by Steve Jobs' insistence that the iMac connection problems are entirely the fault of the ISP's. According to a ZDNet article, some ISP's are taking offense at the suggestion that they're not v.90-compliant, such as PowerNet Online, who claims to have had true v.90 dialins for five months but still has iMac customers with problems. Then there's also the guy from PlantageNet Internet, who claims that "v.90 hasn't even been ratified yet [as a standard]," which we're quite certain is wrong, wrong, wrong. Personally, we wouldn't sign with an ISP who was so behind on the facts.

Anyway, we suspect that this debate's not over yet. We consider the most likely solution to be a new Apple-supplied modem initialization string that will provide better 56K connections, though it's anyone's guess when (or if) such a thing will ever appear. A much less likely scenario is that there really is something physically wrong with the iMac's modem and Apple would have to service any iMacs that are experiencing continuing connection problems-- let's not even go there.

Meanwhile, Apple's posted a new official "alternate" modem description file for use with the iMac modem, for those unhappy netizens who are experiencing frequent disconnections when dialed into their ISP's at 56K speeds. The new modem file forces all connections to be v.34 (33.6 kbps or lower), which many people are finding to be much more stable than 56K ones "in situations where the phone line quality is marginal." Sure, it's a slower connection speed, but is 56K really faster if you have dial in six or seven times to get anything done?

The competition is heating up in the race to immortalize the tumultuous history of Apple Computer on the small screen. Last June we told you about an upcoming HBO miniseries about Apple's past, which, as far as we know, is still planned. Now we find out that TNT is planning its own made-for-TV movie about Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and all the other "high-tech superstars" who appear regularly on AtAT. CNET has more details, culled from a Variety magazine article.

TNT's project, currently saddled with the unfortunate working title of "Pirates of Silicon Valley," (arrrrr, matey!) is expected to tell "the true story" of the "fierce battles" between the "computer visionaries" and how their "empire has changed the world." There are some interesting casting choices going on, too: ER's Noah Wyle (whom several AtAT viewers suggested when we were discussing the HBO miniseries) is in talks to play Jobs, and Anthony Michael Hall has reportedly agreed to return to his geek roots from classics such as The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles and will assume the role of Gates. Poor Anthony; we thought he had escaped the nerd typecasting when he played a mean dumb jock in Edward Scissorhands. Expect to see "Pirates" hit the airwaves sometime in 1999.

Now, as several faithful viewers have pointed out, AtAT's beaten both HBO and TNT to the punch with the whole "Apple as entertaining story of intrigue" thing. We'll be consulting our legal department to see just what our options are in terms of recourse. Not that we'd ever want to suppress any additional media exposure for Apple; we're just wondering if we can weasel our way into getting free cable for life, or something. You know that Ted Turner has some mighty deep pockets.

Yes, kiddies, it's all true: last week, Quark (makers of the widely-popular Quark XPress publishing software) offered to buy its struggling competitor Adobe. Adobe nixed the idea with a "thanks but no thanks," claiming that the "friendly" buyout offer didn't actually contain many important details, including, say, a price. But Quark claims they're still interested, and we're going to be watching closely to see where this thing takes us.

Adobe's fallen on hard times lately, and they blame their slump on the Japanese recession and the Macintosh's dwindling market share. Blaming the Mac has been a wildly popular pastime these last few years, but it's certainly true that NT workstations are making some inroads into the previously Mac-locked graphics community. And don't look for the success of the iMac to make much of a direct impact on Adobe's fortunes, as they probably make almost all of their money from sales of high-end professional graphics packages like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Pagemaker-- all of which are much more than most consumers need or want to pay for. On the other hand, if Adobe refocuses its efforts and ships consumer-grade versions of that software for under $100 a title, maybe the iMac will help them out after all. As for Macs that can fight the pro-level NT insurgence, we won't see a real weapon until the release of the translucent "El Capitan" Macs early next year-- and Mac OS X several months later, of course.

Strange days indeed... A year ago if anyone had told us that Quark was going to try to buy Adobe, we'd have laughed uproariously. Of course, at the same time if anyone had told us that within a year Apple would have a best-selling G3-based consumer system and a stock price in the 40's, we'd probably have called the men in white coats; after all, twelve short months ago we were all sitting around wondering what would happen now that Steve was killing the clone market. Amazing how fast this stuff changes, isn't it?