You know, if there's one day a year on which you probably shouldn't believe everything you read, this would be it. If you were the especially gullible type and you forgot to tear a page off the calendar this morning, you might have found yourself actually believing that Apple has jumped ship to Intel processors, Inside Mac Games is giving away a real rocket launcher, and Apple is gearing up to ship an iTiVo with an enclosure apparently made out of cardboard. Helpful tip: if you found yourself on the receiving end of a "ha ha, made you look" (virtual or otherwise) more than, say, three or four times this lovely April Fool's Day, we hear there's a simple medical procedure by which you can reduce your own credulity level by up to 30%. Best of all, it's so easy and painful, you can avoid those pesky doctor's bills by doing it yourself! All you need is an acetylene torch, a sharp garden spade, and a couple of cans of Bactine.

Nah, just kidding. But see how completely hopeless you are? Yeesh, if you don't wise up soon, you're going to wake up one morning and realize that nefarious con men have taken you for everything you had, and you might even have to sell your precious deed to the Brooklyn Bridge just to make the payments on your valuable swampland in Florida. But fear not, because we're here to help; right now you may be an April Fool, but by the time we're through with you, you'll be wondrously transformed into a street-savvy, no-nonsense April Not-Foolish-Guy. All we need from you is three credit card numbers and a signed blank check, and we'll begin right away.

No, no, no!! See, this is exactly what we're talking about, here. Put your checkbook away or set fire to it or something, or you'll go broke before we even get started. Look, how about we start slowly, with how to identify an April Fool's news story? We'll start with a really easy one: faithful viewer Brian Freeman tipped us off to a CNET article about how Microsoft and Unisys teamed up to launch a web site devoted to convincing people that running UNIX (you know, that wonky stuff that sits at the heart of Mac OS X) in a business environment "makes you feel boxed in," "ties you to an inflexible system," "requires you to pay for expensive experts," and "makes you struggle daily." Microsoft's solution, predictably enough, is that everyone should be running Windows instead (presumably because it boxes you in tighter and makes you struggle hourly, which is far better than UNIX can claim).

The idea that Microsoft would engage in such a strategy is totally believable, of course, and even predictable. But CNET goes on to report that this UNIX-bashing web site is "itself powered by UNIX software," as it's hosted on a FreeBSD box running Apache (the UNIX-based web server software that now serves as Mac OS X's Web Sharing engine) instead of Microsoft's own IIS under Windows. Now, here's where the lesson comes in; think about this for a second or two, and it's clear that even without the April 1st datestamp, anyone with even the most rudimentary capacity for critical thinking would immediately recognize this as a whimsical CNET hoax. Because even Microsoft couldn't possibly be both shameless and brick-stupid enough to launch a high-profile anti-UNIX site and then serve the thing from a UNIX system, when it's a trivial matter for anyone to check and see what kind of software a given web server is running.

Wait, what do you mean, "it's real"? WeHaveTheWayOut.com really exists? And it's provably running FreeBSD and Apache? Oh. Um... Never mind. Evidently the depths of Microsoft's stupidity transcend even the limits of our own skepticism. Maybe we should be a little more open-minded about that rocket launcher giveaway...

This scene was taken from the 4/1/2002 episode:

		Monday, 7:07 PM: Microsoft launches a whole web site devoted to telling businessfolk how they should be running Windows instead of UNIX-- and runs it on a UNIX server. Meanwhile, those wacky Henrico County students just can't seem to keep the porn off of their iBooks, and some mad genius builds a "caseless" PC that would send Jonathan Ive into fatal convulsions...

Other scenes from this episode include:

Missed It By Five Weeks: Remember two months ago, when we told you how every school-supplied iBook in Henrico County, Virginia was being confiscated by school officials to undergo a thorough de-funning process? See, it seems that the high school students had been using their iBooks for such "distracting" extracurricular activities as illegally swapping music and movies, instant messaging and playing games during class, hacking into the teachers' files, and, of course, downloading enough porn to make Larry Flynt blush and consider going into another line of work... Scene

Mmmmm, Who's Hungry?: Here at AtAT we have, on occasion, linked to some particularly horrific-looking PC enclosures over the years, for a few reasons. First of all, we think it's healthy to "cleanse the palate," as it were; Mac users spend their days steeped in excellent industrial design, and after a while it's easy to get a little jaded and forget just how good we have it... Scene

Click on one to see it. Or perhaps you'd like to see the whole episode as originally broadcast?

Bored? Take a trip down memory lane and see what happened One Year Ago, Two Years Ago, Three Years Ago, Four Years Ago, Five Years Ago, or even Six Years Ago today! Or leave your entertainment up to the fates, and see a Random Episode...

What disappoints you most about the video iPod 1.0?
	It doesn't get Cinemax
	It requires far too much physical effort to cram a DVD into the Dock connector
	You can't stick your face in the screen like with the TV in Videodrome
	Showing home movies on the iPod makes it too easy for viewers to escape
	I can fit 140 hours of TV in my pocket, but it sure is a hassle lugging this couch everywhere I go
(63157 votes)