It's time to play everyone's favorite game, Update Your Firmware! Yes, firmer than software but softer than hardware, it's firmware-- that ball of code that sits in read-only memory and makes your Mac tick, at a very guts-level level. Without working firmware, your modern-day Mac would never get so far as the disk on which you keep your operating system; it'd be little more than a dead chunk of polycarbonate-- a startlingly attractive dead chunk of multitextured and immaculately sculpted polycarbonate, true, but nonfunctional nonetheless. So keeping your Mac fed with the proper firmware is the right thing to do and the tasty way to do it, and Apple's got the goods: a heaping helping of firmware updates designed to keep your Mac nice and regular.

According to MacWEEK, those happy lab gnomes in Cupertino have cranked out firmware updates to address all manner of esoteric "issues" that may plague one's Mac. And they didn't want to leave anybody out, so they've just released new firmware updates for everyone. (Well, everyone with Macs less than seven or eight months old, at any rate.) So if you've got an iBook, a FireWire PowerBook, an AGP-based Power Mac G4, or a Kihei iMac (350 MHz or faster), download and install the appropriate update today-- or else the three of you looking to boot from a FireWire hard disk will be out of luck. Out of curiosity, how many iBook owners do you suppose plan on adding 256 MB DIMMs to their consumer-targeted portables?

Now, those of you who were permanently emotionally scarred by the great Blue Blocker scandal of 1999 may well be suspicious of geeks bearing gifts of shiny new firmware. (For those who may have forgotten, last year it came to light that Apple had released a firmware update for blue and white G3 systems that "inadvertently" [cough] rendered those systems incapable of booting when upgraded to G4 processors.) We admit, it looks a little suspicious when Apple releases four arguably less-than-crucial firmware updates all at once, all numbered version 2.4, covering its entire current product line. It's probably just a healthy dose of paranoia, but let's just say that if it turns out that Macs with 2.4 firmware all mysteriously combust the day after their warranties expire (after prompting the owner to purchase a replacement, of course), we won't be too surprised.

Slowly but surely, Apple's making headway on its covert plan to take over the U.S. government. Until now, the most visible moves in Steve Jobs's master plan have been confined to the military; last year the Army moved its web site to a Mac running WebSTAR, and more recently rumors surfaced that Steve himself was involved in talks with the Navy to lift its ban on the purchase of Mac systems. These tactics are just the ones we know about, and they barely scratch the surface of Apple's long-term strategy to control every aspect of the government. But now that the military is slowly coming under Apple control, Steve's turned his attention to the real big game: the National Fish and Wildlife Service.

Faithful viewer Steve Pissocra whispered that we should take a look at a press release touting the purchase of many, many copies of FileMaker Pro by that particular wing of the government. See, while Apple's attempt to assimilate that division of the Department of the Interior has been cleverly masked as an initiative of FileMaker, Inc. (a wholly-owned subsidiary of you-know-who), it's not hard to guess at what's going on here. We may have slept through most of high school civics class, but we're pretty sure we remember the order of succession, and if the President is unable to perform her duties (or appears nude in a sleazy magazine), then the honor falls to the first runner-up the director of the National Fish and Wildlife Service. And you can bet that the 1700 copies of FileMaker Pro just purchased by that organization contain a little bit of "special" code that allows Apple to keep an eye on things in that Seat of Power.

As special operative Pissocra himself puts it, "Is there not a faster track to the Oval Office than through the Fish and Wildlife Reserve?" Well, if there is, we sure don't know about it...

Apple's marketing has historically been a very... bipolar experience. There have been some very successful campaigns over the years (the "Think Different" commercial, the legendary "1984" ad), but there's also been a lot of absolute dreck; that disturbing Performa infomercial in which Gramps uses the family Mac to get a girlfriend limps immediately to mind. There's no question that in the Second Steve Dynasty Apple has become consistently stronger on the marketing front, but there's always room for improvement. And that's why we're slightly concerned about how Apple's missing the boat when it comes to the last great frontier of "be everywhere" advertising: fruit stickers.

See, according to MacAddict, the same philosophy that gave the world "3Com Park" and the "Viagra Bowl" (well, if there isn't one, there will be) has led mind-share-hungry companies to start advertising on fruit. Specifically, Ask Jeeves-- a site, incidentally, using technology patented by my old artificial intelligence professor, who somehow apparently managed to secure a patent for "web stuff that doesn't work"-- is apparently now trying to get the brand visibility of Chiquita by slapping Ask.com stickers on bananas. Now, whether or not you consider the corruption of fruit stickers with capitalist propaganda to be the final sign that western civilization is about to collapse under the weight of its own greed, you have to admit that Apple's missing out on a golden opportunity, here.

Come on... what could be a better match than Apple stickers on apples? Just imagine: every schoolkid with a bag lunch would finish off the PB&J and pull out a shiny Granny Smith, and there's the Apple logo staring up at him from the sticker. Talk about reclaiming the education market! And what does one do with fruit stickers? Well, we don't know about you, but we stick them on whatever's handy. (There's a "Washington Certified Organic Red Delicious #94015" on our monitor right now.) So now you've got these schoolkids sticking Apple logos all over the lunch tables, their textbooks, and each other. Now that's the path to mind share, baby. Hey, maybe some of the more "issue-prone" Wintel manufacturers should start advertising on lemons...