Many of you know that the AtAT staff produces this little show from our lovely studios located in the Boston area. Boston's a great city that boasts lots of neat stuff, like baked beans and a professional baseball team whose typical frustration output is second only to the Chicago Cubs. (No flames, please; as a born Cubs fan, I'm allowed to say that.) One of the other things we have, though, is often not so pleasant to have around; his name is Hiawatha Bray, and he writes for the Boston Globe. Mr. Bray is one of those tech columnists who really seems to hold something personal against our beloved Apple, because whenever he mentions anything that came from Cupertino, the best he can manage is a backhanded compliment and the worst is a flat-out panning. We like to think of him as sort of a localized John Dvorak, only with more manners and, seemingly, more technical knowledge-- and some kind of intense burning grudge against Apple that he keeps bubbling just below the surface.

At least, that's the Hiawatha we know and love. Imagine our surprise, then, when we read his latest column and found him brimming with praise for an Apple technology: FireWire. There's plenty to like about FireWire, and Bray pretty much hits them all-- 400 Mbps, hot-swapping, plug-and-play, support for 63 devices per bus, those cool red-and-yellow VST hard drives that fit in your pocket and plug into a FireWire port to mount instantly on the desktop, etc. He goes on to say that Apple's (apparent) decision to include FireWire on all Macs over time is "their smartest move yet," and even points out that in order to try out this cool new technology from Apple, he "had to leave [his] Pentium II PC behind" and use a colleague's G3 instead.

It gets better. He even works in a little praise for the new G4s, calling it a "cool gadget" whose "hilarious" new commercial is "not just hype." (He actually contacted the U.S. Department of Commerce to confirm the G4's export status.) In fact, if it weren't for the single little dig at the Apple of the past, who had to put FireWire's development on the back burner while the company had "other things to worry about-- like meeting its payroll," we'd strongly suspect Mr. Bray had been bribed, or RDF'd, or killed and replaced with a more Apple-friendly double. Instead, it looks like he just calls them as he sees them, and sees FireWire as a huge winner.