There are those who say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Of course, there are also those who say that it's the sincerest form of being a cheap-ass copycat with a sense of aesthetics that runs shallower than your average Slip 'N' Slide, so it all comes down to perspective. Remember about a week and a half ago when we noted that one of Microsoft's directors of Windows platform evangelism killed a few minutes during an eight-hour conference call by dressing up his Wintel laptop to look a little more like it was running Mac OS X? You just gotta love it when even Redmond's platform evangelists look at XP's interface and realize that something's drastically amiss.

However, irony with the job title aside, it turns out that what he did to his VAIO wasn't so far out of the ordinary after all. Faithful viewer andrü noticed a WIRED article about the practice of making Windows look as much like Mac OS X as possible, also known as the process of shining a big, steaming pile of... well, whatever. The point is, WIRED uncovered several instances of Windows's Aquafication far more complete and obsessive than that one we saw a couple of weeks back. We wouldn't go so far as to call any of them "indistinguishable," but the amount of time and effort collectively devoted to making Windows look like Mac OS X is, frankly, staggering.

"A dozen or more" web sites are dedicated to the challenge; AquaXP has 9,500 members, while Aqua-Soft.org has over 16,000. A Windows XP theme that looks like Jaguar-era Aqua was reportedly downloaded 50,000 times. The theme's creator notes that "the community is healthier and stronger than ever." Hear that, folks? There's a whole community working on this. Kinda makes you wonder how much they could accomplish if, well, they actually bought and used Macs instead of spending countless hours dorking around with counterfeiting the surface level of its interface.

For end users, the process isn't necessarily all that time-intensive, since "the community" has done a lot of the heavy lifting; download and install a few Aquafied XP themes, an icon pack or two, a dock emulator, skinnable apps like Trillian for instant messaging and Thunderbird for email, and voilà: "a Windows box is transformed into a Mac." Except, of course, for the fact that spray-painting a lemon to look like an orange doesn't actually make it taste any sweeter.

Well, unless the paint is syrup-based. Then we suppose it might work. But otherwise, no.

The entire phenomenon is both baffling and the most understandable thing in the world. Who wouldn't prefer Aqua to that mess of circus colors Microsoft squirted out for the Windows XP interface? But if so many Windows users think the Mac's look and feel is superior enough to spend hours emulating it, why, in this era of $799 eMacs, aren't more of them switching? We fully understand how major a step a platform jump can be, but with tens of thousands of Wintellians expending all this energy to ape Aqua, you'd think more of them would have the time, money, and guts to make the leap to the real thing. Then again, we suppose the fact that they chose Windows to begin with speaks volumes about why, so never mind.

There is, of course, one obvious computer candidate for a righteous Aquafication, and that is the Wintel forced on a Mac user in the workplace. For the Aqua-on-XP crowd who are actually Mac users just trying to make life easier with the systems they're forced to use at work, we can get behind that completely; after all, if you're forced to endure an eight-hour savage beating with a crowbar five days out of each seven, the least you can do is spray-paint the crowbar your favorite color.

And actually, now that we think about it, if Wintel users can develop even a primitive appreciation of Aqua by slapping a new coat of paint on their interface, that may conceivably lead to openmindedness about Apple the next time they need a new computer. At the very least it's probably boosting the world's average Taste Quotient by a few millionths of a point. So what the heck, folks; Aquafy to your hearts' desires. But for the full-time Wintellians among you, just try to check out the real thing once or twice to see what you're missing, okay?

You know, if you're starting to harbor some lurking doubts about this whole IBM-making-G5s thing, it's okay to admit that. Sure, back when the G5 was first announced, Big Blue came across as the Mac platform's knight in silicon armor; it was only natural, seeing as we'd all just slogged through years of Motorolan chip stagnation (for about a year and a half, there, the company's rallying cry appeared to be "half a gigahertz is plenty for everybody") and processor supply droughts, some of which resulted in Mac shortages and ensuing earnings warnings that smacked Apple's stock price down so fast most of us got nosebleeds from the sudden pressure change. And then along comes IBM, twirling a 2.0 GHz PowerPC that spanks the G4 in every conceivable way (well, except maybe for power consumption), and there's Steve, promising a 3.0 GHz Mac within twelve months. Of course we all hoisted IBM on our virtual shoulders and dunked its proverbial head in the metaphorical Gatorade. Figuratively speaking, of course.

But let's face it: while the G5 is clearly one spankin' chip, IBM's delivery of it hasn't exactly been stellar. The original G5s shipped late (okay, we can partially blame Virginia Tech for that), 2.0 GHz processors were scarce enough that Apple eventually introduced a dual 1.8 GHz model to stem some of the demand, and the new 90-nanometer chips were late enough to postpone the Xserve G5's ship date by a month and possibly torpedo those 2.5ish GHz Power Macs the rumor mill has been expecting since the beginning of the year. None of this has exactly bolstered confidence in the prospect of hitting 3.0 GHz within the next three to five months. Indeed, bits of the saga sound almost Motorolesque, lending credence to the theory that a curse dogs whatever company dares to manufacture chips for Apple's highest-end systems.

To tell you the truth, the Curse Theory is starting to make more and more sense to us these days. IBM is definitely not shipping as many G5s as it's supposed to-- Apple confirmed that in its last quarterly earnings conference call-- and yet Motorola (or, to be perfectly accurate, Freescale, who wanted to call itself "The Chip Company Formerly Known as Motorola's Semiconductor Division" before it discovered that Prince already has the trademark registered) seems to be recovering somewhat. Faithful viewer Jef Van der Voort dished us a recent MacRumors blurb which noted that Freescale's PowerPC roadmap now includes a mention of the G4's non-IBM successor, the e700, which will run both 32- and 64-bit software and will scale "to 3 GHz and beyond in next-generation process technologies."

So, keeping The Curse in mind, any bets on which company will make it to 3.0 GHz first? Answer: presumably whichever company isn't making them for Apple's Power Macs. It's like lines at the supermarket; whichever checkout lane you move to winds up becoming the slowest. Seriously, folks, we need to find someone who can lift this curse before we're all looking longingly at 3.2 GHz Freescale e700s next year and IBM is still saying "3.0 GHz coming up any minute now." Anyone here adept at the black arts? Anyone? Bueller?

Lastly, we close with a quick little brain-teaser to occupy your thoughts this weekend. You are, of course, familiar with Robert X. Cringely, the pundit who expounds upon any number of technicalish topics in his weekly column for PBS? He was one of Apple's earliest employees and created the appallingly famous and excellent Triumph of the Nerds, which is basically the PBS nonfiction version of Pirates of Silicon Valley, only, you know, without Farmer Ted as Bill Gates. And despite having predicted a Mac OS X tablet computer "as early as January" (last January, that is), there are probably few people bouncing around out there in a better position to toss out pithy snap judgments of the biggest players in the high tech biz.

And that's just what he did: faithful viewer neopod came across an email interview with Cringely in the Sydney Morning Herald in which he's asked whether Steve Jobs ever gave him "something less than a kindly look" (we think that's Australian for "smack upside the head with a blunt instrument") for having publicly referred to the man as "a sociopath." Now, here's where the brain teaser comes in: Cringely replies that, no, Steve has never gone medieval on his nether regions for the sociopath comment because Steve is "proud of being an a***hole."

So our question is: what the heck is an a***hole?

At first, given Cringely's thorough knowledge of Steve's origins, we figured that perhaps it's a word in the native language of Steve's home planet, and the asterisks represent alien letters not appropriately represented in the Roman alphabet. You know, like the first asterisk could be a letter whose sound is a guttural wheezing sort of noise, the second might represent one that requires whistling loudly across three outstretched tentacles, etc.

Then we got to thinking that maybe, just maybe, those asterisks are sort of like wildcards, in that they each represent a plain vanilla Roman letter which was replaced to obfuscate the actual word for some reason-- possibly for purposes of national security. (We know that, technically speaking, an asterisk is typically a "zero or more characters" wildcard, while a question mark is "one character exactly," but since the former definition would make three consecutive asterisks redundant, we're assuming a slightly less traditional usage here.) So then the question becomes, what three letters are those asterisks hiding, and why?

We've been at it for the better part of a day, now, and we feel we're no closer to the truth. Is Steve proud to be an adzehole? If so, what does that mean, and why is someone trying to suppress the info from appearing in the press? Or was Cringely trying to express that Steve's real name is Anathole? Is Steve's home planet Gallic in nature? We can at least understand why that information might need to be kept under wraps.

What about Alu Chole? Is Steve proud of being a northern Indian chickpeas-and-potatoes entree? And just like Steve, it's vegan-- could this be a clue?

Well, we'll never figure it all out in one night. Ammo hole? Army hole? Atom hole? It's a mystery, all right, and likely one that will never be solved. Chew on that one over the weekend. Suckers.