We're afraid we've got some bad news, people: faithful viewer David Poves alerted us to the fact that a British show called "The World's Most Powerful" evaluated Bill Gates versus our very own Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates "won." In other words, the British have decided that Bill is a big manly hunk o' power and Steve possesses no more than a mere shadow of the former's raw and vibrant potency. Or something. (Apparently the British just aren't happy unless they're actively provoking the Wrath of Steve-- but then again, since he's evidently such a meek lil' puppy dog, where's the harm?)

Now, we haven't seen the show, but it's clear that this Alvin Hall guy who hosts it is using a fairly limited set of criteria to judge who's more "powerful." The fact that he's a "financial guru" ought to lend a little insight into where he's coming from when he rates these people: he "weighs up their celebrity and influence" and "uses his financial and business skills to analyze their careers and to measure their economic power." Economic power. Right. Well, okay, considering that Billy-Boy's the richest man in the world and he flexes monopoly muscle over something like 90% of the computer industry, sure, we're going to have to concede that he does in fact have more "economic power" than our own Lil' Stevie.

But economic force is but one measure of how "powerful" someone is. What about the power to kick some serious tail? If you put Bill and Steve in Mexican wrestling masks and tossed 'em in a big steel cage, we can personally guarantee you Gates would be crying for his mommy inside of twenty seconds (at least, as best he could while being force-fed a folding chair). How about the power to command legions of unquestioningly loyal followers to go forth and do thy bidding? If Steve says the word, Mac fans the world over would grab the nearest blunt instrument, march on Redmond, and go caveman on the Microsoft campus until it was nothing more than a smoking hole in the ground, littered with the mangled bodies of Bill's minions.

What about Donkey Kong skills? Steve's a barrel-jumping master of the highest order, and Bill can't even get past that second level with the fireballs that look like ducks, for crying out loud. Now who's got the power? Huh? Huh?

So if you subscribe to a broader interpretation of what constitutes "power" and feel that Steve was robbed, faithful viewer Matthew Elton notes that you can vote for which of the geeks you feel is most powerful in the Beeb's online poll. When last we checked, Steve was winning with 80% of the vote. Gee, when discussing types of power, did we mention the power to skew Internet polls with the force of thousands of Mac users with way too much spare time on their hands?

This is it, folks: Macworld Expo is only a month away, the pre-show gossip season is officially underway, and we therefore find ourselves clinging to the only known active Stevenote rumor like grim death-- namely, that Power Macs are going to get jiggy with a dose of 90-nanometer Go Juice courtesy of the white coats at Big Blue sometime soon enough to give Steve something neat to point at while he's onstage. Sure, it's no Disney-cobranded Apple tablet running Mac OS X on a Pentium 4, but hey, it keeps the shakes at bay. Mostly.

For what it's worth, AppleInsider has "confirmed" that Apple will indeed start finding 90-nanometer G5 processors (apparently dubbed the "PowerPC 970FX" by IBM) on its loading dock sometime next month, and a revised "Power Mac 8,1" using said chips should become available to drooling Mac fans like yourselves sometime between "late January" and "early March." Consequently, AI's sources still figure there's a "high probability" that Steve will be showing off what 40 fewer nanometers can do when he's strutting his stuff onstage at the Moscone Center in a month.

On a vaguely related note, road warriors may be interested to hear that the 90-nanometer G5 running at its lowest supported clock speed reportedly chews 12 watts; in comparison, the 1 GHz G4 in the slowest current PowerBooks consumes 10. Sounds like a PowerBook G5 may not be so far off after all, especially since the new G5s also support some clever "rapid frequency and power scaling" tricks that the cool kids are calling "PowerTune," which ought to come in handy if Apple ever decides it wants to ship a portable G5 with a battery life longer than seven and a half minutes. Mac OS Rumors says the first round of G5 PowerBooks should touch down in "mid-year" at 1.6, 1.8, and 2.0 GHz, but we actually wouldn't be too surprised if they surfaced sooner.

As for those rumors that the new Power Macs might top out at clock speeds as high as 2.6 GHz, though, there's at least one dissenting voice urging a little restraint with the whole expectations-run-amuck thingy: MOSR cites "Apple sources" who insist that most models in the next round of Power Macs will actually still ship with fat ol' 130-nanometer chips. (So much for that New Year's resolution to drop 40 nanometers by Valentine's Day.) The line-up will allegedly go a little something like this: single 2.0 GHz 130-nanometer G5 at the low end, dual 2.2 GHz 130-nanometer G5s in the Peter Brady slot, and dual 2.4 GHz 90-nanometer G5s as the new weapon of choice. MOSR claims we'll have to wait until "mid-year" for 90-nanometer G5s at 2.6 and 2.8 GHz, and September for the PowerPC 980 topping 3.0 GHz.

Whatever happens, though, you can at least be thankful that at least we're not still relying on Motorola for high-end pro desktop chips-- those guys can't even get their cell phones out on time. Remember a couple of months ago, when we reported that Motorola was about to short-ship its customers for camera phones, thus potentially nuking the all-important holiday sales prospects of Verizon, Cingular and AT&T? Well, consider said prospects nuked; faithful viewer Martin forwarded us a CNET article which confirms that many of the promised phones never showed up. Motorola cites "parts shortages." Mm-hmm. Well, we're too giddy with the IBM situation to mention just which "parts" Motorola may actually be missing...

Just a quickie to close out the week, folks, because we're about to fall over backwards, sideways, and forwards simultaneously. (We'll try to capture the moment on video for you. It should be special.) You may have noticed a nice piece by David Pogue in yesterday's New York Times in which he shares a "Thanksgiving thought" that amounts to slobbering fanboy acclaim for iChat AV and its partner in crime, the iSight camera. It seems that David was in London a couple of weeks ago, and via the magic of iChat AV he was able to use his AirPort-enabled PowerBook and a borrowed iSight in a WiFi-equipped coffee shop to videoconference with his wife and kids back here in the states. He describes the event as "an almost overwhelming experience"-- an "emotional, powerful, simple, perfect example of how technology can change a moment, solve a problem, and despite the gulf of time and distance, bring you face to face with the people you love."

This is the part where Bart Simpson interjects with lots of gagging noises.

That said, we're certainly not going to contradict David, nor are we going to accuse him of unconscionable oversentimentality. We know all too well just how powerful a force iChat AV can be; sure, we were skeptical when it was introduced, but we've already told you in our own unconscionably oversentimental way how iChat enabled Anya's grandmother to see her granddaughter walking for the first time. And if you want another testimony of the power of iChat that isn't quite so Lifetime TV, it enabled one of us to give a guest talk to a UCLA communications class a few weeks ago, despite us being on one coast, them being on the other, and three thousand miles of stuff resting in between. In short, we're totally on board with the "iChat Rocks!" assessment-- even the weepy bits out of a Hallmark commercial.

No, the part that threw us was this: David describes how he was moping all homesick-like in that coffee shop in London when his new friend mentions that he uses iChat AV to videoconference with friends in the states, and David actually says "I had no idea you could use it across the Atlantic."

Which is just weird, when you think about it. This is David Pogue, after all, the author of a gazillion books on Macs and Windows, a frequent speaker at Macworld Expos, and just generally a very well-connected guy. Surely he understands that iChat does its thing via standard TCP/IP, so where on earth would he get the idea that it wouldn't work across the Atlantic? Did he think iChat's network packets are afraid of water, or something?

Or maybe he meant he expected Apple to have crippled the application to prevent it from working outside of the U.S. for some reason, sort of like how you have to be in the states to purchase songs from the iTunes Music Store or to order prints through iPhoto. But even if David thought there were some bizarre licensing reason for Apple to have done that, Steve has iChatted publicly with overseas buddies during at least two big media events-- with Jean-Marie Hullot in Paris during the original iChat AV intro at WWDC and with Bono in Dublin during the iTunes Music Event. So, what... David Pogue (Mega-Huge Mondo-Important Mac Journalist-Type) didn't see either of those? Inconceivable.

You do realize what this means, of course; David Pogue has been kidnapped and replaced with an exact double. Alert the feds.