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Them Pirates Are Sneaky (5/24/99)
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See?! See what happens when you go to bed early instead of staying up late channel-surfing? Here we are, anxiously counting down the days until the June 20th premiere of TNT's special made-for-cable original movie "The Pirates of Silicon Valley," which tells the story of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs in their respective rises to fortune in a decidedly soap-operatic light-- when faithful viewer Matthew Younce writes in to tell us that he saw it on TNT late last night: "I wasn't sleeping, and was flipping channels about 2:45 when I saw Noah Wyle sitting barefoot with his feet on the table. I thought 'that's gotta be Steve!'"
Now, lest you think Mr. Younce is pulling our collective leg, he's not the only one fortunate enough (or insomniac enough) to have ventured across the surprise screening; while our TV Guide claims that what should have been on TNT was some movie about Mount St. Helens, a Mac Observer article includes eyewitness accounts from others who encountered the sneak preview in the wee hours. This long-awaited historical romp really did air about a month before its official premiere date, and where were we? Sleeping. What a tragic waste of time.
So was the late-night early airing a mistake, or was it deliberate? To Matthew, the unannounced premiere evokes memories of the way Apple aired the famous 1984 commercial once before its Super Bowl showing, late at night in a small town in order to qualify for the Clio awards cut-off date-- TNT could have been doing something similar. We suppose it's also possible that someone just got some tapes mixed up. As for more nefarious explanations, well, we're at a loss to determine just what anyone could gain by bribing TNT underlings to put the show on the air a month early-- but reports of a TNT intern leaving Larry Ellison's stately mansion a couple of weeks ago and making several large bank deposits over the course of the next few days have raised a few eyebrows...
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SceneLink (1557)
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 5/24/99 episode: May 24, 1999: AppleShare IP customers may think the feature set of the latest version is the cat's pyjamas, but the price tag ain't no blue light special. Meanwhile, TNT's "Pirates of Silicon Valley" makes a surprise debut in the middle of the night, a month ahead of schedule, and Sony claims that their new VAIO portables are the only laptops with dual-battery support...
Other scenes from that episode: 1556: The OTHER Server Tax (5/24/99) Guess what? AppleShare IP 6.2 is out. For the uninitiated, AppleShare IP is a nifty product that serves files to any computer, whether it's a Mac, a PC, or a Unix system. It boasts a slick users-and-groups management interface, excellent performance, and (perhaps best of all) to Windows users, it just looks like another Windows fileserver, which means you can run it in Mac-hostile environments for a few months before casually mentioning to the head of finance that all those spreadsheets he's been storing and retrieving are being served from a Mac... 1558: Credit Where Credit's Due (5/24/99) Sometimes the tritest of expressions fits perfectly (there's a reason they're trite, after all), so we have no particular problem with saying, "when it rains, it pours." Just yesterday we pointed out a CNET article which discusses Gateway's "innovative" new all-in-one computer system, which integrates an active-matrix LCD display into the same case as its other Wintel guts...
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