You've surely heard by now, but just in case you haven't and you're still foaming at the mouth over Microsoft shill Paul Thurrott's claim that Hewlett-Packard had succeeded in pushing Apple into supporting Redmond's "superior" (cough) Windows Media Audio (WMA) format in upcoming iPods, it's time to give those salivary glands a break. You must have lost a lot of foam, and the last thing you want is a severe foam deficiency. Enjoy a frosty mug of root beer and relax secure in the knowledge that Mr. Thurrott's facts apparently originate in the same alternate universe as his opinions.

Faithful viewer Rob Menke was the first to point out a WIRED article in which HP goes on the record to state quite clearly that Thurrott is off his meds, strung out on crack, and in need of immediate confinement because he's a danger to himself and others. Well, okay, not in so many words-- but HP spokesperson Muffi Ghadiali did clarify that his company is "not going to be supporting WMA for now," which is the same thing except with a certain amount of something we're told is called "tact," which we'll look up later if we get around to it. "We could have chosen another format," said Muffi, "but that would have created more confusion for our customers."

So apparently HP wants to support AAC over WMA, a fact which presumably has certain unnamed Microsoft-enamored pundits (Look! Tact!) crying into their Crazy Juice. Bravo for HP. But as incomprehensible as we find Thurrott's love affair with all things Gatesian, the guy does make a good point about logistical problems that will likely arise from HP's inconsistency in picking a format and sticking with it: since HP already sells devices that support WMA and not AAC, and the company has even pushed WMA-based music services in the past, it seems pretty likely that some HP customers are going to get miffed when they find that the songs they bought through that iTunes link on their Pavilion's desktop won't play on the iPaq handheld they bought from the very same company. Likewise, what about those folks who bought their songs at MusicMatch because of an HP endorsement who will eventually find that they can't use any of that music on their new bluePods, aka HP Digital Music Players?

Not that we care, mind you; as far as we're concerned, those folks bought Pavilions, they bought iPaqs, they bought songs from MusicMatch-- they should've known better, poor saps, and they can sleep in the crumb-filled beds of mediocrity they made for themselves. But Thurrott made a valid point and we figured we should toss him a bone, because he's probably having a pretty bad week, what with first being universally quoted as the sole source for a big news story and then being whacked repeatedly upside the head with the Discrediting Stick.

In the end, of course, this whole "WMA iPods" brouhaha turned out to be pretty much a non-event in the most dog-bites-man way possible: Paul Thurrott-- a guy whose most notable characteristic is that he honestly believes Windows to be the pinnacle of human achievement-- got something wrong. Oooo, pick your jaw up off the floor and alert the media. Er, more media.

So Apple's stock is still doing happy things, much to the surprise of veteran Apple-watchers everywhere; despite the overall market closing down today, AAPL was up another 39 cents, and earlier in the day it actually came within 17 cents of its 52-week high-- a week after an Expo Stevenote, mind you, which is traditionally a time when the market doesn't "get" the new announcements and drives the price down. Heck, with all the swirling speculation of a $99 miniPod, we would have sworn that AAPL was poised to take a tumble; instead, analysts liked GarageBand (it's well known that most Wall Street analysts only enter the job after their bands fail to score a recording contract), a lot of them were bullish on the iPod and even its new younger sibling, and that surprise HP iPod announcement two days later really kicked things into overdrive. And that's all with Janus dumping 13 million shares.

"Yeah, but all that Stevenote and HP stuff is so last week," you note. "What's with the price rise today?" Good question, Grasshopper. Well, it seems that some analysts are a little slow to come around, and are only just now upgrading their ratings on AAPL based on what they've seen in the past week. If you take a gander at the news headlines on the Yahoo! AAPL page, you'll notice that "Apple Computer [was] upgraded by Thomas Weisel" from Peer Perform to Outperform. (We have no idea what that means, but apparently it's good.) And you'll notice another link to a Forbes article in which Merrill Lynch declares that "Apple has gotten its act together" and is "innovating again." Again?! Whatever, we'll let that one slide. The important thing is that Merrill Lynch now rates AAPL a "buy" with a price target of $29, and that's exactly the sort of thing that keeps the numbers green when the rest of the market is a sea of red-- which is just fine by us.

Incidentally, we notice that there's another link there to a Forbes story titled "Microsoft's Lawyer Goes Back To His Roots." We haven't read it yet, but we assume it's about the guy's return to his previous gig poking damned souls with a pitchfork.

But we digress. What'll really be interesting to see is whether AAPL manages to cling to higher ground after tomorrow's earnings conference call, at which CFO Fred "We Can't Comment on Unannounced Products, So Quit Asking or I'll Go Caveman Upside Your Head With a Tire Iron" Anderson will reveal all sorts of fun facts regarding Apple's last quarter, provide guidance looking forward, and field questions from analysts desperate to get him to slip up and blab a little something about a video iPod and Mac OS X for Intel. What usually happens is that Apple's results come in better than the analysts expected and then the price of AAPL drops anyway. Tune in to the QuickTime webcast at 5 PM Eastern to hear history in the making-- and to get a sense of whether you might be in the running to win our Beat The Analysts contest. (You did enter, right? Because it closes at 4 PM Eastern, so you really don't want to put it off any longer.) Fingers crossed!

Say, what's the matter? A world in which analysts upgrade Apple and the company's stock keeps rising isn't alien enough for you? Well, then maybe you'd like to go with the total disorientation package and throw in a pinch of "Apple is a good choice for big business" and a dash or two of "Apple is cheaper than its Wintel-based competition." Are you game? Then buckle up, Chim-Chim, because ComputerWorld (of all sources) has just the media surrealism you're looking for.

Seriously, how goofy is this? At first you figure ComputerWorld's Mark Hall is setting Apple up for a hatchet job, because he declares that designing "a server with two 2-GHz G5 processors, 1 GB of memory, storage capacity of 80 to 750 GB and loads of other goodies all in a slim 1U package" doesn't qualify as "stunning." (Personally, we beg to differ; just glancing at a picture of the Xserve G5 requires that we then sit down, put our heads between our knees, and breathe into a paper bag for ten minutes.) Then comes the kicker: "what's stunning is that Apple's marketers will price the Xserve system at $3999"-- and he's got sticker shock in a good way. A $3999 price tag, notes Hall, makes Apple "the price leader for dual-CPU servers by a couple of bucks." Sounds good, right?

But then Hall conscientiously adds in the biggest up-front hidden cost of running a Windows server that Microsoft would like the press to forget: whereas the Xserve ships with Mac OS X Server and an unlimited client license at no extra charge, "a 25-user enterprise license for Windows adds $2,495 to the price of a dual-processor PowerEdge 1750 server from Dell." Suddenly that "couple of bucks" you saved by getting an Xserve just grew by over three orders of magnitude versus what you'd have spent on a Wintel server-- and that's assuming you have fewer than 25 users. That's why Jon Moog of RiskWise LLC (a company which "runs credit checks for large financial institutions") has more than 250 Xserves running in his racks. "Dollar for dollar, the systems are cheaper than Windows machines," and he plans to upgrade to the new G5 models "without a doubt."

Wow... ComputerWorld touting Apple as the cheapest option. A company in the business of supporting large financial institutions running Apple servers. And to top it all off, the use of the phrase "Apple's slavish support of industry standards"-- words that, had we encountered them as little as three or four years ago, would probably have broken our brains beyond all repair.

...Where'd we put that paper bag?...