When the drama is at low tide like it is now, our thoughts often drift back to some of the times when the stuff flowed like running water. Remember the "we're suing someone but we don't know who" giddiness of the Worker Bee lawsuit? Or the rampant speculation over the top secret "Columbus" project? Or Cube cracks and phantom power buttons sending Apple's stock price plummeting 50% overnight? Ah, good times... in some respects, at least.

But the drama-drenched plot line we just may miss the most was also one of our longest-running, and at one point it even seemed to hold the potential for actual physical violence. Granted, a steel cage match between Steve "Beantown's a Dump" Jobs and then-IDG World Expo bigwig Charlie "Come Over HERE and Say That" Greco never actually transpired, but when IDG announced that it was moving Macworld Expo from New York back to its home town of Boston (allegedly with Apple's blessing) and then Apple issued a statement the very same day indicating that it'd rather coat itself in Jif and charge a starving elephant than set foot once more in such a backwater burg, the sparks really started to fly. You may recall that at one point things got so goofy that Greco was actually threatening to ban Apple from the San Francisco Expo if it didn't also promise to attend the Boston show. Testosterone all around, and make it a double!

When the dust had finally settled, Greco was out, IDG had moved the Expo to Boston anyway (without Apple), and since both attendees and vendors stayed away in droves once Apple bailed, the show was clearly the smallest one ever, at least exhibit-wise. Personally, we were stunned that IDG didn't cancel the show outright, and most of the attendees we met and talked to-- especially the ones who had come in from out of town-- were about six shades past disappointment when they realized just how little they'd come to see. The truly incomprehensible bit, at least to us, was seeing that IDG had already started advertising the 2005 show as being in Boston again.

Well, here's the latest on that front: faithful viewer Jen Griffin informs us that IDG has officially announced that next summer's show will stay in Boston as planned, but will move from the city's brand-spankin'-new Javits-class Boston Convention & Exhibition Center to the much smaller Hynes Convention Center. Why? Well, the "why" is obvious, although IDG apparently hopes everyone's too stupid to notice; as quoted in a MacCentral article pointed out by faithful viewer Brett Chaffer, IDG veep Warwick Davies first tosses what little credibility he had straight out the window by claiming that "the 2004 show was a huge success, which is why we are continuing next year." Then he downplays the significance of the move to Hynes, insisting that "it's not necessarily a smaller venue"; instead, the reason why the show will move is because "the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center hall was great, but we want to have a more intimate setting, which the new hall gives us." In other words, it's, um, A SMALLER VENUE. Sheesh.

How much smaller? Well, Hynes has just 193,000 square feet of exhibit space, compared to the BCEC's 516,000. Now, here's where your daily recommended dose of irony kicks in: the main reason why the Expo moved to New York in the first place was because Boston didn't have a venue big enough to hold it, and the logistical nightmare of splitting the show between Boston's Seaport/World Trade Center and the Bayside Expo Center (with shuttle buses running between the two) was too much of a hassle to bear. Prompted by losing one of the world's biggest trade shows due its lack of a big enough hall, Boston started building the BCEC, and Macworld Expo's return to Boston was, appropriately enough, the new center's inaugural event. Unfortunately, due to Apple's absence, the show was so tiny it probably would have fit entirely within the old Seaport/World Trade Center, which has 118,000 square feet of exhibit space. It certainly would fit entirely within Bayside, which has 240,000.

Not that we're complaining about the move to Hynes, mind you; it's in a much funkier part of town, right off the subway and just a few minutes' walk from classy Copley Square and Newbury Street's odd clash of upscale boutiques, art galleries, overpriced eateries, and used record and book stores-- which means we'll have a lot more to do once we finish checking out the Expo show floor in about twenty minutes flat. Assuming we decide to go at all, that is.

And thus does the wheel keep turning. Remember how thrilled you were when you heard that NEC's Earth Simulator was finally going to be knocked out of the top spot on the list of the world's 500 fastest supercomputers-- by a PowerPC-based system? Yep, IBM's BlueGene/L spat out a blinding 36.01 teraflops, just edging out the Earth Simulator's long-standing top score of 35.86. Of course, it was a short-lived sense of victory, since just three weeks later NEC struck back, announcing a sequel to the Earth Simulator called SX-8. SX-8 reportedly has a peak performance of 65 teraflops, although that's a theoretical maximum and not a real-world result. Still, assuming that SX-8 is roughly as efficient as the Earth Simulator, an estimated benchmark score for SX-8 would be somewhere around 57 teraflops, which, for those of you who haven't taken differential equations and multivariable calculus, is what the math geeks refer to as "way more than 36.01."

But keep those neck muscles loose, ladies and gentlemen, because this tennis match ain't over yet; faithful viewer jettfuel tipped us off to a NewScientist.com article which reports that IBM has just smacked the ball back into NEC's court so hard it burst into flame. You may recall that, when it broke the Earth Simulator's performance record, BlueGene/L hadn't yet been completed; it's not scheduled to be fully built and online until sometime next year. But there's clearly more of it in place than there once was, because the U.S. energy secretary just announced that the still-not-all-there BlueGene/L has now achieved an actual, recorded performance score of 70.72 teraflops. Don't look at that number too closely without a welder's mask.

By the way, there was also an intermediate scrapper vying for the throne; NASA had an Intel-based cluster named "Project Columbia" that has now reached 51.87 teraflops, but since that score was both lower than SX-8's likely numbers and way higher than BlueGene/L's PowerPCs had managed to crank out, we ignored it as irrelevant to the race for Numero Uno-- and really, really depressing for PowerPC fans. Of course, now that BlueGene/L has come back to smack those Itaniums (Itania?) upside-down, inside-out, and halfway into next March, the point is moot. And not nearly so upsetting, especially since when BlueGene/L is finally complete, IBM expects it to chew up a truly sick 360 teraflops, thus ushering in the age of petaflop-level scores and prompting all lesser supercomputers to commit ritual suicide in the face of their shame.

There is a dark cloud hiding somewhere under all this silver lining, though; while the PowerPC is way out in first place, the Mac is no longer even in the top five. The official TOP500 list won't be published until Monday, but if we're reading the latest Dongarra Report correctly, even with weeding out the multiple entries for the same clusters running with more or fewer processors, Virginia Tech's Xserve-based "System X" will fall to seventh place-- eighth, if the SX-8 manages to record a real score in time. But hey, a top ten score for a system that was originally thrown together by student volunteers in a matter of months using off-the-shelf Macs for under $6 million? There's still lots to be proud of, there. And the fact that's it's a cousin to Big Daddy BlueGene/L, well, it's nice to have family in high places.

Attention, viewers: this week's installment of Wildly Off-Topic Microsoft-Bashing Day has been canceled. Why, you ask? Well, mostly because there's been so precious little actual Apple-related plot fodder this week that anything even slightly off-topic would throw off the tenuous balance of the show. Indeed, a seemingly innocuous act as small as, say, linking to Floating Henry Rollins Head Haiku might well produce a shift of focus so catastrophic that millions would perish in a seismic event of biblical proportions.

Which means we, um, probably shouldn't have linked to that just now. Whoops. Well, nothing much bad seemed to happen this time. But trust us, we were lucky.

So instead of bagging on Microsoft in our typically facile yet breezy manner, we thought we'd stick to a slightly more on-topic, er, topic: bibles for iPods. This may be old hat to you, but it was news to us; according to CNET, there's an LA-based start-up named BiblePlayer that provides free downloads of the Holy Bible that you can upload to your iPod and read via the player's "Notes" feature. And lest you think this is just some typo-riddled public domain text file slapped onto the iPod with no added value, take another look; the entire King James version of both Old and New Testaments is carefully organized into books, chapters, and verses, there's a whole slew of devotionals and bible stories added in, and if you've always wanted to read the Bible but have an attention span that would only let you if it were presented in sitcom-length installments, BiblePlayer even has a built-in method of doling out just enough each day so you can finish in a year. And if you're willing to shell out $29 for the "Deluxe" version on CD, you also get the whole thing in audio format as well, linked right to the Notes text via convenient "PLAY" links.

Personally, this isn't exactly subject matter we feel we need to carry with us everywhere we go (call us when someone does this with Ulysses and we'll talk), but it does show how far the iPod's built-in features can be stretched-- in this case, to create what is essentially a hybrid e-text and audiobook format that knocks the standard "one big audio file" paradigm into a cocked hat. Trust us, we'd be a lot more likely to buy those Audible.com audiobooks offered in the iTunes Music Store if they were accompanied by the actual book text linked to the corresponding audio portions, and offered extras like interviews with the authors and notes on the text.

Unfortunately, it's not really doable quite yet. BiblePlayer's Pablo Mendigochea complains that the iPod "offers 20 GB of memory for music but less than 5 GB for text," which at first seems an odd thing to moan about, since 5 GB of textual storage could hold over 4600 copies of Moby Dick; indeed, the complete BiblePlayer set of textual data (including the new and old testaments, the devotionals, the stories, and the "Bible-in-a-year" feature) is only 8.3 MB on disk, meaning that, size-wise, at least, you could cram over 600 copies onto an iPod-- so just how many bibles does this guy want to carry around, anyway?

But what he's really getting at isn't the total storage available, but rather the limitations to Notes themselves, including a 4 KB-per-note limit (about 700 words-- this AtAT scene would just barely fit, but this episode's first scene wouldn't) and a 1000-note maximum. The 1000-note limit, in particular, means that you can't currently load all the BiblePlayer files at once; you have to pick which books of the Bible to carry with you at any given time. So before it could start hawking a new combo eBook/audiobook format at the iTMS, Apple would have to relax some of those constraints-- or better yet, create a new "Books" architecture and leave "Notes" alone. Suppose it could happen?