We're kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place here at AtAT. All false modesty aside, we're the best Macintosh-centric soap opera on the tube these days. (For those of you saying to yourselves, "But they're the only Mac soap opera on the air," yeah, well, what's your point?) And when you're king of the hill, others are always trying to knock you off. So why should we boost the ratings of pretenders to the throne by mentioning their sub-par efforts on our own superior show? Well, perhaps we're just so secure in the quality of our own show that we're not afraid of the competition. Or maybe reality occasionally infringes upon our self-delusional fantasy world and for a brief moment we can make the distinction between a real TV show and a wannabe web site. Probably the former, though.

At any rate, we've decided to point out that Ted Turner's own televisual adaption of the eternal struggle between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, "The Pirates of Silicon Valley," has been officially announced. According to Mac OS World, the made-for-cable movie follows Steve and Bill's excellent adventures from college in the 70's through to the tumultuous shenanigans of the present day. You can bet that your friendly AtAT staff will be tuning in, and not just to check out the competition; we're very interested to see ER star Noah Wyle's portrayal of Mr. Jobs, seeing as he's a Mac fan himself. (Once he even turned down an offer to do a voiceover for an IBM commercial due to his platform fidelity.) To a lesser extent we're also intrigued by the decision to cast Hughes-era geek royale Anthony Michael Hall as Mr. Gates, especially since the Hallster recently commented that playing Big Bill was the most challenging role of his career...

So for the real TV fans among you who actually plan your viewing schedule several months in advance, "Pirates" is due to premiere on TNT on Sunday, May 23rd. If that doesn't fit into your schedule, don't worry; as TNT is wont to do, the movie's already slotted to run seven or eight times over the course of the following two weeks, so you shouldn't have any trouble finding time to squeeze it in. Heck, you won't even have to miss an episode of AtAT if you're careful.

Okay, so it's not "Redmond Justice," but it's still a lawsuit that affects Mac users-- and probably more immediately and directly. In the battle for Virtual Game Station, round one goes to Connectix. When word of the Macintosh-only PlayStation emulator got back to the bigwigs at Sony, it wasn't too long before they decided to sue. Sony claimed that they didn't believe Connectix's claims that VGS was the result of clean-room engineering, and instead alleged that the product arose from the illegal use of Sony intellectual property. They also claimed that VGS allows the playing of pirated PlayStation games, and that it's "not as good" as a real PlayStation in terms of performance and compatibility. Connectix's reaction to the lawsuit? They went ahead and shipped the product to the manufacturing plant, posted an updater to version 1.1 for the lucky customers who managed to buy VGS at Macworld Expo, and started taking pre-orders at their web site. In short, they evidently don't think much of their chances of losing-- or they wanted to sell as many copies as possible before they were legally ordered to stop.

But that order won't be coming anytime soon. According to a Connectix press release, the Federal District Court of San Francisco has "rejected Sony's request for a temporary restraining order" that was intended to prevent the sale of VGS during the lawsuit. This doesn't mean that Connectix has won, mind you, but it does mean that they are free to ship VGS until they lose the case-- if they lose at all. Personally, we see very little merit to Sony's suit, but regardless, it won't be resolved one way or the other for several weeks, if not several months. In the meantime, owners of G3 Macs who want to play a wide variety of PlayStation games should be able to find VGS on the shelves of their local software stores within the next week; people who pre-ordered the title from Connectix were reportedly shipped their software last Thursday.

The rejection of the temporary restraining order is the first step in what we hope to be a solid victory for Connectix, who continues to amaze us and the rest of the Macintosh world with products we wouldn't believe if we didn't see them with our own eyes. So for those of you who want to play Parasite Eve on your iMac, or maybe a few rounds of Crash Bandicoot on your PowerBook G3 while you're stuck at the airport, rejoice! You won't have to wait much longer.