Sadly, we didn't get to this in time to let you bask in the full glory of the moment, but we're going to mention it now anyway. You are aware, perhaps, that Microsoft's latest operating system for consumers is named "Windows Millennium Edition," or "Windows Me" for short? That's funny enough in itself, but what you may not know is that Microsoft has been running a massive Windows Me promotion, in which it vowed to give away fifty copies of the software each day for the length of the contest. (It's the least the company could do, since most reports of what Me actually is seem to imply that Microsoft has a lot of gall not to release it as a free update.) There's more info at the contest page.

Or, at least, there should be, although at production time all attempts to visit the page yielded "Socket is not connected" network errors. Earlier today, the page was functional-- mostly-- but yesterday it was a whole different story. People who surfed over hoping to win a free copy of Me were instead greeted with the following message: "Due to technical difficulties with the WinMe Sweepstakes site, we are currently not accepting registrations. Please check back often as we are working to remedy the issue. Registrations will resume once the issue is resolved."

So much for stability and ease of use. We're not sure which is worse: the explicit admission of failure that was posted yesterday, or today's 100% complete dead air. Not that AtAT doesn't experience more than its share of server problems-- but Microsoft is a huge corporation with billions of dollars at its disposal, presumably hosting a site with some massive server sitting on a fat pipe and running Windows 2000, that crash-proof server OS that's the envy of the industry. (Cough.) Whereas AtAT is hosted by a couple of couch potatoes running a second-hand Power Mac 7500 with Mac OS 9 sitting on the floor of our study. And which of those two sites is up and running right now?