Wow, it seems like it's been days since we dredged up that old chestnut about imminent Power Mac G5 revisions, doesn't it? It wasn't that long ago when we raised the issue at least twice a day; of course, that was back in March or so when the rallying cry of "They'll Finally Get Here Next Week-- For Sure!" was so popular in Macville it was the number one slogan on t-shirts and bumper stickers, finally edging out the long-held favorite, "You Use Windows So We Mock Your Pain." Eventually, though, people got sick of waiting for these 2.5ish GHz G5s that never materialized, faith collapsed, and the chances of ever seeing a Mac running faster than 2 GHz before Pauly Shore wins a lifetime achievement award from his peers seemed remote at best.

Legislation always lags the zeitgeist, however, and we're pretty sure if we let another episode or two pass without tackling the subject, we'll be in violation of some sort of federal statute. It's a good thing, then, that faithful viewer Mike Scherer informed us of a new development, of sorts: AppleInsider has fresh dirt on the subject, claiming that Apple has not abandoned its 2.5ish GHz G5 speed bump, and still expects to ship the units "this spring." Reportedly that supply problem with 90-nanometer PowerPC 970 FX G5s (which IBM has been struggling like mad to squeeze out in any reasonable quantity) is finally showing signs of abating, and "an AppleInsider source claims that Apple has just recently received a full two shipments" of the chips in question-- which we're going to assume is great news, while we blithely ignore the fact that we haven't the slightest inkling whether a "shipment" contains eight chips or 80,000.

Regardless, it was enough processors for Apple to cobble together "several new test units" and quietly seed them to important developers for testing purposes. While there's no reason to believe that the test systems are configured anything at all like what will finally ship, the fact that they're all running dual processors at "speeds from 2.2 GHz to 2.6 GHz" makes us feel kinda sunny inside. But then again, the fact that the source claims these speed-bumped Power Macs will ship "by the end of June" changes our internal weather forecast back to overcast with scattered showers.

See, the end of June marks Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, which is arguably now Apple's single biggest event when it comes to Stevenotes and Announcements of Momentous Import™. Given that it'll be taking place one year after Steve-o promised us all 3.0 GHz G5s in one year's time, well, you do the math; we kind of figured that Apple would ditch the whole 2.5ish GHz speed bump as a lost cause and just make the promised jump to 3.0 GHz and the PowerPC 975 all at once. Now, though, with Apple seeding 2.6 GHz test Macs slated to ship in final form at the end of June, doesn't that imply that the 3.0 GHz update will be late, late, late?

Well, not necessarily. Mac OS Rumors now concurs that Apple will indeed introduce 2.0-2.6 GHz 970FX-based Power Macs at WWDC-- and claims that Apple will lump their intro together with that of the promised 3.0 GHz revision, which will debut at the same time. Apparently while Big Blue has had all kinds of trouble churning out those 970FX chips, the company "hasn't experienced the same ramp-up problems" with the 975, and is "still on schedule" to ship 3.0 GHz chips "by September." So it sounds like maybe we should expect an all-new Power Mac lineup, with 2.0 GHz or 2.2 GHz at the low end, 2.6 GHz in the middle, and 3.0 GHz for the biggest bucks, with immediate availability for the entry-level and midrange models and shipments starting in September for the big guns.

That's all assuming you believe any of this alleged insider info, of course. From our perspective it's irrelevant; we talked about upcoming G5s, thus fulfilling our legal obligations. Now we just have to check the calendar to make sure we don't violate the Compulsory Biannual Disney-Buys-Apple Rumors Act and we'll be steering well clear of Johnny Law. Well, as long as no one tips off the feds about the Noodle Incident. Sshhh!

Speaking of subjects that refuse to fall down dead and stay there, one of the most beloved of Zombie Rumors is that of Mac OS X for Intel. It takes a couple of different forms, of course; some variants claim that Apple aims to ship a boxed version of the operating system for Wintel owners to install on their x86 systems in place of Windows, which others simply insist that Apple will switch to x86 chips in its own Macs. And even when you can't find people swearing that one or both of these interesting situations is a done deal and a matter of weeks away from a formal Apple press release, you can't spit skyward these days without your loogie landing on somebody who contends that something like this should come to pass, for the benefit of Apple, its customers, and humankind at large.

Well, guess what? Mac OS X running publicly on Intel iron has finally happened-- although not quite in either of the aforementioned forms. Faithful viewer Josh Santangelo alerted us to the progress of the open source PearPC project, which aims to bring software emulation of the PowerPC architecture to other platforms-- including, unsurprisingly, Windows on x86. Think Virtual PC, only in reverse and not having been gobbled up by Microsoft. The upshot is that anyone with a suitably fast chunk of Wintel hardware would theoretically be able to download and install PearPC for free, and then install a regular boxed copy of Mac OS X in the emulation environment, just like Mac users can run Virtual PC and install just about any x86 operating system.

"But wait just a finger-lickin' moment," you protest. "What about the way that Apple always ties its operating system to a proprietary Mac ROM precisely so that third parties can't build cheap PowerPC-based clones that'll run off-the-shelf copies of the Mac OS?" Well, we don't know what to tell you, except that PearPC has several screenshots showing Mac OS X in various stages of installation and execution. A few foolhardy AtAT viewers claim to have tried installing Panther in PearPC running on some Windows and Linux systems and report success-- or, at least, something sort of like it. ("I Can't Believe It's Not Success!™") Sure, the screenshots could be faked and the reports fabricated, but if it's all a hoax it's a pretty dull and unimaginative one. Not that there aren't a slew of bored, dull, unimaginative people around to perpetrate such a scam, but frankly, it sounds like the real deal to us. Occam's Cutting Thing, and all that.

So if PearPC is a real, honest-to-goshness PowerPC emulator for x86 that's capable of running Panther, what's the catch? Well, for one thing, you might have to tweak your own personal definition of the word "run." Software emulation is always going to be slower than running native code on the same hardware; we doubt many people are buying Macs because they match the curtains and then just running Windows 100% of the time in Virtual PC; likewise, even the most patient Mac users aren't going to be too happy buying cheap Wintels with the aim of running Mac OS X in PearPC. Also, right now PearPC is at version 0.1, which is "an experimental program not meant for productive use" just brimming with "unimplemented instructions, mysterious bugs, and missing features"; indeed, it bears the following gleeful warning: "Don't use it on important data, it WILL destroy them sooner or later!" Since most of us usually try to avoid the whole data-destruction thing, there's clearly a ways to go, yet.

Regardless, if even this 0.1 release is capable of running the PowerPC version of Mac OS X to some degree, Apple is no doubt sitting up and paying rapt attention. If there's a chance that Apple will lose even one low-end Mac sale to someone who buys a Dell and a copy of Mac OS X, you can be sure that Apple's lawyers are already mulling their options. Stay tuned, because by version 0.3 this plotline just might pick up a happy dose of courtroom drama...

Speaking of open source projects that probably have Apple's lawyers gnashing their teeth and tugging at their leashes, wouldja believe that PlayFair has risen from its ashes once again? In case you haven't been following this particular saga, PlayFair is an application that exists solely to take songs purchased from the iTunes Music Store and strip out every last remnant of Apple's FairPlay Digital Rights Management code while leaving the music itself untouched and at full quality. So, armed with a copy of PlayFair, you could turn your purchased songs into unprotected AAC files that you could then play on non-iPod devices; on non-Mac, non-Windows computers; on unauthorized computers; and in non-iTunes jukebox applications. All those restrictions about "play only on five computers, burn playlists only seven times, avoid partially hydrogenated oils" vaporize like snow in a frying pan.

Apple, of course, was none too pleased, and had its lawyers send a nasty note to SourceForge, who distributed PlayFair. SourceForge caved and pulled the software. Seeking to avoid further legal tussles, PlayFair's developers moved it to Sarovar, a hosting site in India; Apple sent out another cease-and-desist letter via local counsel, and Sarovar soon buckled, too. And then iTunes 4.5 came along, which reportedly messed with the way that PlayFair did its thing. Could this have been the end of PlayFair?

Well, it could have been, but it wasn't. Faithful viewer frozen tundra informs us that PlayFair is now back on the 'net, reborn as hymn (a rather labored acronym for "hear your music anywhere"). Somebody named Anand Babu has "taken official ownership of the project," and plans to fight any possible Apple legal threats with support from FSF India. Anand insists that hymn's purpose is "for fair use" of iTMS songs under copyright law, e.g. playing legally purchased songs privately on a Linux system, "and not for 'piracy'"; to underscore this point, hymn strips out DRM code while leaving the Apple ID of the purchaser intact, apparently to allow Apple to trace any pirated songs back to their source.

Which is all well and good, but it seems to us that Apple's objection to hymn probably wouldn't have much to do with copyright law, but rather with the iTunes Music Store's license agreement. We're not going to dig it up right now, because legalese before noon sends us straight into a coma, but we have to assume there's something in there about agreeing not to bypass the DRM in any purchased song. And if hymn's custodians are planning to argue that terms-of-use software licenses are inherently void for some reason, they might want to get rid of the "This program is protected by the GNU General Public License" on hymn's home page notice before Apple gets a screenshot. Just in case.

While we're all for fair use of copyrighted material (our TiVo still can't play iTMS songs, for example), the crux of the hymn tussle really seems to come down to licensing. Like it or not, the labels have the legal right to restrict who sells their recordings; they granted Apple a license to sell those songs at the iTMS subject to certain conditions, one of which was no doubt that Apple would adequately protect the music from being pirated. So Apple may have to go after hymn, or else lose its license from the labels-- which would shut the iTMS down overnight, at which point there'd be nothing left for hymn users to Play Fair with, and nobody's happy. Granted, we're just guessing, here, but it's not exactly a far-fetched scenario.

Our ideal outcome is that Apple fights just enough to keep the labels from yanking their catalogs, but not enough to cause the hymn folks much grief. So much for the best of all possible worlds, hmmm?