Super-Fun Well-Known Jobsian Personality Quirk #54: Uncle Steve hates fans. By all accounts, the very notion of using a computer spitting out any unnecessary white noise drives the man into a frenzy. Indeed, even if you're not personally privy to Steve's frothing-at-the-mouth tantrums when faced with extraneous computer fan noise, you could probably deduce this particular mania just by looking at Apple's product history during the First and Second Jobs Dynasties. The original Mac was engineered to run smoothly sans fan. When Apple had the chance to yank the fan out of its redesigned CRT iMac, Steve never looked back. And don't forget the ultimate incarnation of Jobsy computer fetishism, the fanless Cube.

All of that flashed through our mind about a year ago when we first powered up our brand-spankin'-new dual 800 MHz Power Mac G4-- which, we discovered, throws off so much fan noise that OSHA regulations probably require us to wear ear protection when working within 100 feet of the thing. To this day we can't sit down at it without quoting Troy McClure and Dr. Nick Riviera: "ARE YOU SURE IT'S ON?!! IT'S WHISPER QUIET!!!"

But guess what? As loud as our dual-800 MHz system is, reports from the field are that it's probably nothing next to the latest Power Macs, which Apple refers to as the "Mirrored Drive Door" models, and which the rest of the planet calls the "G4 Windtunnel" systems. We can only surmise that Steve's love of fanless computing silence has been eclipsed by his love of the Gulfstream Jet he received as a gift from Apple's board of directors a few years back, because we're told that the current crop of Power Macs sound like large aircraft gearing up for takeoff. It's bad enough that some owners are so batty after a constant assault of white noise that they've taken to voiding their warranties and soldering stuff to their motherboards in order to keep the fans under control.

But is it all just due to a bug? It's recently come to light over at MacFixIt that Apple has now determined that "loud G4 fan noise is due to a motherboard problem" which causes the Power Mac's variable speed fan to spin at the setting tagged in the manufacturer's documentation as "Deafen Me With Your Whirling Blades Of Colossal Cooling Power," whether or not the processors in the system are actually warm enough to need that kind of action. So if you're suffering from hearing loss because your G4 Windtunnel seems a little overzealous with the whole spinning thing, you might want to consider contacting Apple about a motherboard replacement while you're still under warranty.

Interestingly enough, though, most people seem to be reporting that the truly obnoxious fan noise only occurs under Mac OS 9, and not when running Mac OS X; moreover, a MacInTouch reader recently confirmed that Apple tech support considers loud fan noise "normal behavior" under Mac OS 9 because that operating system "does not have 'drivers' to control the fans." Hmmmm, so if you boot into Mac OS X the problem mostly goes away? Why are we sensing that this while stunt is just Apple's diabolical plot to coax holdout pro users into switching to Mac OS X? Pretty sneaky, sis...

Okay, we know, we should be used to this by now, but we just can't help it: it still really chaps our hinders when we see articles that make it look like Dell is doing anything the least bit innovative outside of its great strides in the field of Dumb-As-A-Post But Inexplicably Effective Pitchmen research. If you're a regular viewer to this little show, you might recall us going off the deep end a couple of years ago when CNET made a big thing about how Dell was the first to ship notebooks with "fully integrated wireless networking and internal antennas." Never mind that, at the time, Apple's entire product line included integrated antennas and could be ordered with AirPort cards pre-installed. Fume, fume...

Well, it's happened again, only this time it's perhaps less egregious from a factual perspective; the latest is more of a sin of omission on CNET's part, rather than out-and-out wrongness. Faithful viewer Kevin Marks notes a new CNET article which casts Dell as the different-thinking innovator making great strides in moving away from everyone's favorite antiquated storage device, the floppy drive. It seems that yesterday Dell started offering customers the option of forgoing a floppy drive in some of its laptops in exchange for a USB Memory Key-- you know, one of those doohickeys that stores data in flash RAM and mounts as a disk when plugged into a computer's USB port. Those things have been around for ages and are sold by a zillion different vendors, but CNET's article makes it sound like Dell just invented the device after years of toil in its R&D lab (assuming it has one, which we tend to doubt) desperately searching for a way to rid the world of the accursed floppy drive.

So there's Dell for you: it may be four years late to the party, but at least it's moving really slowly. But what's so flippin' galling about this article, of course, is the way in which Apple is never mentioned once. Considering that Apple a) was the first company daring enough to sign the floppy drive's death warrant four and a half years ago with the introduction of the original iMac, and b) hasn't had a single product in its lineup with a floppy drive as even an option since mid-1999, you'd think the company would rate at least a sentence or two near the end of any article about the industry's attempts to ditch that slow, noisy, error-prone medium.

Meanwhile, Hewlett-Packard gets props from CNET for having "eliminated the floppy altogether on some of its newest Presario 900 notebooks," though it still "includes a coupon with these machines that will allow customers to mail in for the floppy if they desire one." Oooooo. Bold move, that. Fer cryin' out Pete's sake, aside from being the first PC manufacturer to purge all vestiges of the device from its products, Apple was the first company to ship a personal computer with a 3.5-inch floppy drive in the first place! Does this not warrant a mention? Where's the love? Answer: not at CNET. But then, we knew that.

Seeing as absolutely nothing at all is happening in Macville right now (no, seriously-- NOTHING IS HAPPENING. There are tumbleweeds rolling through the streets. It's actually kinda eerie), we may as well take this opportunity to announce to the world that Anya, AtAT's resident intern and goddess-in-training, has been with us for exactly six months today. And by "with us," we mean both "with us" here on the staff and "with us" in the broader sense of having finally spent half a year on this planet ex utero. So hearty congratulations to her from the rest of the staff on both her half-birthday and her half-year anniversary on the AtAT team. We plan to get her drunk tonight after work and see if she'll dance on any tables for money.

Many of you scoffed when we hired a newborn to help out with AtAT's day-to-day production, but in retrospect, we can state quite emphatically that we made the right decision. For one thing, since she lacks any and all real-world experience, we get to pay her practically nothing, which is excellent for our budget. (Granted, there's been a rather sharp uptick in the monthly office Huggies bill since her arrival, but as far as we know, that's just a coincidence.) For another, she takes up surprisingly little space and remains relatively portable, which is all very convenient, at least in theory.

Meanwhile, she's performed her duties with the utmost diligence-- although we senior staff take partial credit for that, since we showed remarkable perspicacity and insight in assigning her to the "Doing Everything Humanly Possible To Prevent The Show's Daily Broadcast" department, where she excelled in such tasks as staving off all forms of sleep by any means necessary, crying and/or pooping at remarkably inopportune moments, and pummelling multiple production-floor keyboards into states of extreme disrepair with the flailing of tiny but powerful fists and feet. She's also distractingly cute. As our spotty broadcast schedule over the past six months indicates, truly, the child is a prodigy when it comes to the field of productivity negation. Someday she's going to have a government job.

While we'd love to sing "Happy Birthday To You" for her on the show today (with significant unsanctioned liberties with the lyrics due to the half-birthday nature of the occasion), frankly, we can't afford the licensing fees. So instead we're opting for a rousing chorus of the public domain "Yo-Ho-Ho and a Bottle of Rum." If you listen really carefully, you may just hear us. But probably not.