And the Apple Parade of Shame continues! If you're just tuning in now, you already missed a couple of the more spectacular sights: the local high school marching band's spirited rendition of "Burning Down the House" during its synchronized "Salute to FireWire Data Loss in Panther" had the crowd on its feet, and the Leprous PowerBook Display float making its way through the streets of Cupertino-- with over 10,000 fabulous carnations forming the mysterious white spots-- was nothing short of breathtaking.

But don't worry, because you certainly haven't missed all the fun. Clearly at some point in the none-too-distant past Apple's quality control department was secretly replaced with instant Folgers Crystals, because faithful viewer Chris McDevitt informs us that, according to The Register, Apple has officially owned up to that "FileVault nuking preference settings" bug to which we alluded ever so briefly last week. FileVault, of course, is Panther's integrated and transparent data encryption technology which the company has billed as "safe, secure, and speedy." Given Apple's reported acknowledgement that when FileVault "reclaims lost disk space" it can corrupt the bejeezus out of Keychain data and possibly other stuff, we expect that the "safe" part of that description may soon be edited slightly.

Then again, even if FileVault weren't buggy, we've always felt that anything bearing a bright red, all-caps WARNING containing the ominous phrase "lost forever" is probably stretching the definition of the word "safe" a little in the first place. And now that problems reported from FileVault data corruption include the aforementioned lost preference settings, missing Mail messages, deleted Safari bookmarks, and car keys down the garbage disposal, a substitution of the word "dicey" might be more in line with truth-in-advertising laws.

Worse yet, faithful viewer Eric Beyer informs us that Macworld UK claims that the problem can also lead to "OS instability" and that "some reports claim that this data-loss has extended to other Macs, when users have synchronized plural machines using their .Mac account." Did we say "dicey"? Maybe "unsound" would be a better fit. Or possibly "Encryption Software of the Damned."

Interestingly enough, even though Apple now admits that the problem exists, it still doesn't suggest that people actually turn FileVault off; apparently if FileVault asks for permission to reclaim space and you simply tell it not to, there's no problem. Still, though, there's no denying that this bug deserves representation in the Apple Parade of Shame. If it's deemed not big enough of an embarrassment to warrant its own float, then maybe it can be represented by those Shriners in the tiny cars.

(sniff... sniff...) Hey, does it smell a little... Redmondy in here to you? Weird, right? We know-- we always use Glade PlugIns Scented Oil in Cupertino fragrance (it's kinda like oranges and soy lattes), but something here has definitely got a distinct Gatesian twang to its whiff.

Check behind the fridge.

Oh, wait-- never mind, faithful viewer Lunar Obverse just found it. Turns out that it's Apple's vaguely Microsoftian iTunes installer for Windows. He just got email from MusicMatch, the folks whose software the Windows iPod used to ship with, and they state in no uncertain terms that installing iTunes on a Wintel that's already running their own jukebox software will somehow result in that software becoming totally unable to sync with the iPod any longer. It's the sort of thing that Microsoft's lawyers might have referred to during the federal antitrust trial as an "eerie coincidence."

Says the email, "DO NOT install iTunes for Window on your PC if you are using Musicmatch Jukebox and wish to continue using Musicmatch Jukebox with your iPod." Simple, right? But what if their email came too late? After all, there were a million downloads of iTunes for Windows as of two weeks ago, so MusicMatch is clearly more than fashionably late to the party with its dire preventative warnings. Well, things get a little hairier if you've already installed iTunes and now you want to go back to using MusicMatch to sync your iPod for some reason (like, say, you ate some bad fish and the toxins are clouding your judgment). To re-enable iPod syncing in MusicMatch, just follow the following eleventy-seventy simple steps! (This is verbatim from the email, mind you.)

• Disconnect the iPod from your computer if it is still connected.
• Double click on 'My Computer'
• Double click on 'Control Panel'
• Open "Add or Remove Programs'
• Select and uninstall 'iTunes'
• Select and uninstall the 'iPod for Windows' item
• Select and uninstall the 'Musicmatch iPod Plugin' item
• Select and uninstall the 'iPod System Software Update' or any other iPod related items that might be listed
• Select and uninstall 'Musicmatch Jukebox'
• Close the "Add or Remove Programs" control panel
• Restart your computer
• Navigate to the '\Program Files\iPod' directory
• Delete the contents of the iPod directory by dragging the files to the Recycle Bin and then emptying the Recycle Bin
• Navigate to the '\program files\Musicmatch\ Musicmatch Jukebox\' folder
• Delete the files, but not the folder, in the Musicmatch Jukebox folder
• Reinstall Musicmatch Jukebox from the installation CD that came with your iPod or download the iPod software from the following URL: http://newsletter.musicmatch.com/rdr/ ?Rn187230301,1872303,38861847,287230301
• When finished, reboot your computer
• When the computer finishes rebooting, connect the iPod to your system
• Open Musicmatch Jukebox

Could it possibly be any easier? Where's the challenge? Indeed, we're a little disappointed there are only two restarts involved-- surely it could have been at least four, with a little more effort thrown in. Which is, of course, why we love Windows so much in the first place.

So, yeah, it does seem a little slimy that installing iTunes de-iPodifies MusicMatch, doesn't it? Especially if Apple's installer doesn't warn you about it beforehand, and we've seen no indication that it does. Granted, you'd have to be one seriously twisted iPod owner to try iTunes and then decide that MusicMatch is a better companion for your little white-'n'-silver buddy, but who knows what goes through the minds of Wintellians? Maybe they're always walking around in Bad Fish Shock. It would explain a lot.

And before you start lambasting Apple for pulling a stunt like this, c'mon... the people affected by this are Windows users-- they're used to this kind of treatment. Obviously they thrive on it, or they'd have ditched Microsoft years ago. Heck, crippling a competing product was probably the only way Apple could have gotten an ounce of respect from these folks in the first place. In fact, we think Apple probably missed a golden opportunity to win some serious admiration from the Windows community; instead of simply removing MusicMatch's ability to sync with the iPod, iTunes should also have deleted MusicMatch entirely, installed spyware, inexplicably disabled a random piece of system hardware, reformatted any writable volumes not containing iTunes itself, and then emailed itself to everyone in the user's Outlook address book. Oh, and it should have cost thirty bucks. More, with technical support.

Still hopping up and down on one leg in intense anticipation of the PowerBook G5? Well, just because IBM seems to be on track to squeeze things down to 90 nanometers by New Year's doesn't necessarily mean that those rumors of a portable G5 shipping in the first calendar quarter are true, you know. Don't get us wrong: they might be. But if you need to decide whether to keep hopping incessantly or to curl up on the couch with a bag of Fritos for another year or so, we suggest you go by official Apple statements at least as much as by unsubstantiated rumors. But that's just us.

Take, for example, the recent comments to ComputerWorld by Dave Russell, Apple's director of product marketing for all things portable (as noted by MacRumors). When questioned about the timeframe for wedging a G5 into a Mac that qualifies as portable without its own hand-truck, Dave flatly admits that "it's going to be a while. We think the G4 has a very long life in the PowerBook." A very long life for the G4, hmmmm? Live slow, die old, leave an incompetent-looking corpse.

Okay, so that was a little harsh; the G4 is actually a fine chip, it's just that in Motorola's fumbling hands it never lived up to its real potential. And while a PowerBook is certainly a lot more than just its raw speed, lots of buyers might not see it that way; Apple's portables are getting pummelled mercilessly performance-wise by Centrino laptops over there in Wintel country. And now we've got yet another Apple representative telling the press that the PowerBook isn't likely to see a big leap in processor performance for "a while."

That's right, we said "yet another"; it's easy to block these things out when you get blinded by unconfirmed rumors of dual-processor G5 PowerBooks shipping next Thursday, but ol' Dave is just the most recent of Apple bigwigs to state in no uncertain terms that the G5 is going to be strictly desktop for a fair chunk of time. Back in June, Greg Joswiak said that the G5 is "not going in a PowerBook anytime soon," and Steve Jobs helped quantify that statement slightly in September when he announced that Apple is "working on [the PowerBook G5] and what we'd like is to have it by the end of next year."

They'd like to have it by the end of next year-- and that's from no less an authority than Steve himself. So keep hopping if you must, but it's not likely to make G5 PowerBooks surface any earlier-- say, at January's Expo. Of course, if it does, we'll send you a bundt cake for your trouble.