Depressed about Virginia Tech's Terascale cluster-- aka "System X," aka "Big Mac," aka "the world's only Mac-based supercomputer"-- having dropped off the TOP500 list due to, of all things, a shipping delay? Well, soldier, turn that frown upside-down, or at the very least inside-out and sideways; it'll be back on the list come November, once again proving that Macs can chomp through numbers with the best of 'em. And when it returns, it'll apparently have some company-- company in uniform, no less. Tennnnn-HUT!!

Yes, faithful viewer Strongblade! was the first of many to point out that, as MacCentral reports, the U.S. Army has just commissioned its own G5-based supercomputing cluster, via a government contractor named Colsa. The Army, you may recall, is no stranger to using Macs in strategically appropriate situations, such as when it switched to Mac web servers for security reasons back in '99. (Hey, it looks like they even upgraded to Mac OS X!) This time around, the Army needs a supercomputer to "model the complex aero-thermodynamics of hypersonic flight," and when Colsa had completed its "year and a half of research" to find the best bang for the buck, the prospect of building a Virginia Tech-style G5 cluster came out on top: says a Colsa veep, "We did a best value competition and Apple won that competition," beating six other competitors. The names of the losers weren't disclosed, but we have a feeling that Mikey Dell is pouting a bit today.

So now Colsa's placed an order for 1,566 dual-2.0 GHz Xserve G5s (gee, what was that about Apple almost being caught up on backorders?) to out-cluster System X by a whopping 932 processors. The resulting supercluster-- which, even while still in conceptual form, is already pushing the limits of labored acronymity with its name: MACH 5, for "Multiple Advanced Computers for Hypersonic, G5"-- ought to stomp Virginia Tech's score by a good 40% or so. Scaling linearly, it sounds like MACH 5 should score maybe around 14.6 TFlops-- 15ish if they work out a few more kinks, less if the system is significantly hobbled by Colsa's decision to connect the nodes with standard gigabit Ethernet instead of InfiniBand like Virginia Tech used.

Colsa expects its cluster to be "online and working... by late fall," which implies that it might just be operational enough in time to qualify for the next TOP500 list, which, if the process is anything like last year's, requires systems to be working well enough to run its benchmarks by the beginning of October. That might be cutting it close, but with Colsa planning to receive and set up "300 Xserves a day" to get MACH 5 up and running, how could it not be ready in time?

Unfortunately, no matter what, the Macs will lose out to an Intel system this time around; MACH 5 will almost certainly finish well behind the new 19.9 TFlop Intel-based "Thunder" system currently in the number two spot. But hey, even a return to third place will be a major coup for the Mac platform, especially since MACH 5 is expected to cost only $5.8 million to build. So much for rampant government overspending, right?

Actually, wait a minute-- where is that rampant government overspending when you need it? Because if the Army would just spend, say, $10 million on its new cluster, it could capture the number two spot easily. And military budgets being what they are, why not blow $20 million and finally knock that snooty Earth Simulator out of the top spot? Sheesh, some people really need to take a good hard look at their priorities. What do we pay taxes for?

You know what they say, the downloadable music business is kind of like the weather in New England: if you don't like what you see, close your eyes and wait thirty seconds... and when you open them again, you'll find yourself knee-deep in a flash flood with frostbitten elbows, bugs in your teeth, and your hair on fire. The music situation in the U.S. is still pretty stable, actually; iTunes started on top and it stayed on top, despite the subsequent arrival of about eleventy-kajillion pretenders to the throne, several of which have since "refocused" (e.g. BuyMusic.com deflating into just more stuff on Buy.com) or gotten increasingly desperate (e.g. Napster's "we're losing money like crazy so we're giving away free hardware" strategy). But in Europe things are different. Apple was late to that party, and it's not at all certain which service will emerge from the fray with the biggest chunk of market share and its head still attached to its neck.

You're probably aware of the major players at this point: there's Apple, of course, whose iTunes Music Store just launched in the UK, Germany, and France a week ago and should reach the rest of Europe by October; there's Napster, who launched a UK-only service a month ago; there's Sony, whose Connect service will launch in Europe before the month is out; and then there's OD2, who's been selling downloadable music in Europe (both directly and indirectly) for two years running and therefore has a major head start.

So how does the competition stack up? Well, ignoring its subscription business (since everybody else seems to-- burn!!!), songs from Napster cost 38% more than they do from the iTMS in the single European market they currently share. Sony's still a wild card, since it hasn't launched yet, but it sells music in its own ATRAC format that's only compatible with Sony portable players; sure, that's equivalent to Apple's FairPlay AAC tracks only working on iPods, except that most people with players have iPods. And OD2? Well, considering that it both sells its music directly to the consumer and also provides all the behind-the-curtains stuff for anyone else who wants to launch an online music store, like MyCokeMusic.com, it should be in great shape, right?. Especially with the two-year head start and all.

Except that it just got the heck out of Dodge.

No really, it's true, mostly! Faithful viewer Martin tipped us off; a Reuters article confirms that OD2 has just sold out to Loudeye, who does a similar sort of thing here in the States, "allowing a business to launch their own branded music store and service for a fraction of the typical upfront financial and time investment." According to Reuters, "OD2's long-held position as Europe's primary digital download provider has evaporated" in the past month with all the new heavy-hitters invading its turf, so it's "bracing for a competitive onslaught" by exiting the direct sales market altogether. Instead, the new Loudeye-OD2 entity plans to "fend off well-capitalized rivals" by becoming solely a "back-end supplier to the big players, providing digitized music services to dozens of retail partners in Europe and North America."

Run! RUN SCREAMING, YOU COWARDS!! Mwaaaa-hahahahahahahaaaaaaa!!

But seriously, folks, it's not so much a chicken's way out as it is a smart chicken's way out; the peeps at OD2 knew full well that if anyone is to come out of the download wars on top, it won't be them. So given that every company now "needs" an online music store the way they all "needed" web sites in 1997, why shouldn't OD2 align themselves with a similar service provider and team up building the Lenscrafters Music Store, IHOP's International House of Downloads, Bounty's Quicker Loader-Downer, I Can't Believe It's Not iTunes™, etc.? Not that we aren't sorry to see them duck out before the real fun begins-- when it comes to all-out brawls like the European download market is about to become, the more the merrier. Sigh... One fewer body for the pile...

If you've been tuning in for any length of time, you probably know that, despite the fact that we last played a console game when the Atari 2600 reigned supreme, we here at the AtAT studios are somewhat obsessed with the Great Xbox 2 Processor Controversy. Well, okay, technically the Controversy isn't all that Great; generally speaking, the population of planet earth believes that Microsoft's upcoming Xbox 2 will built around a PowerPC-derived chip, whereas industry analyst and dizzy moon unit Rob Enderle is completely and 100% sure it won't be. And sure, this has some semi-direct relevance to the Mac-vs.-Wintel debate, since Microsoft switching from Intel's x86 architecture to the PowerPC would speak volumes about which way Redmond thinks the wind blows, processor-wise. But honestly, the real reason why we're so enthralled is because we just can't stop wondering if Enderle will miraculously be right for once in his life. After all, he claims that Microsoft itself told him flat-out that the Xbox 2 G5 rumors were false. We can't just write that off, can we?

Well, maybe he misheard what they said or something. Because now, on top of all the other (largely circumstantial) evidence that Enderle's vision of an AMD-based Xbox 2 is the product of some sort of severe mental disconnect, faithful viewer David Poves has another bone to toss on the heap: The Register is reporting that Microsoft has decided not to include backwards compatibility in the Xbox 2. That's right; assuming that "sources close to the company" are correct, people who shell out for an Xbox 2 won't be able to use them to play existing Xbox games.

This actually comes as quite a shock to us; isn't Microsoft the king of obsessive backwards compatibility? We were always under the impression that that's why Windows 9x tended to crash twice if you made anything that might be possibly construed as a sudden movement less than thirty feet away. And in the console market, we're guessing that this alleged decision may not sit well with the customers, who have PlayStation 2 units that can happily accept PlayStation discs and spit out a rollicking good time. (And the upcoming PlayStation 3 is said to be backwards-compatible with games for PlayStations 2 and 1.) Microsoft, however, cites market research indicating that "in the end only ten per cent of PlayStation 2 buyers factored backward compatibility into their purchasing decision," and figures that's a low enough count of customers to alienate to just chuck the whole prospect altogether.

And this all comes back to the Great Xbox 2 Processor Controversy, because if the Xbox 2 were sticking with an x86-based chip as Enderle claims, one would think that backwards compatibility would be a cakewalk; Microsoft presumably wouldn't risk losing 10% of its potential market by locking out Xbox 1 games unless there were a good reason to do so. And if you've ever tried to play a processor- and graphics-intensive Windows game in Virtual PC and subsequently felt like lashing out at the world before turning the gun on yourself, you've experienced the "good reason" right there.

As far as evidence goes, it's still just circumstantial-- and based on rumor, no less-- but the obvious inference is that Microsoft hasn't been able to wrangle acceptable x86 emulation performance from its PowerPC-based Xbox 2 to be able to tout backwards compatibility as a selling point. For what it's worth, The Reg notes that Microsoft has since denied the "no backwards compatibility" rumors, but only in that "Microsoft hasn't made any announcements" manner that always smacks more of damage control than an actual denial. (Remember, McDonalds issued one of those when there were rumors of a digital song giveaway-- which, despite a last-minute change of players, turned out to be real.) And yet, despite the overwhelming odds, we're still rooting for Enderle to have made this single correct prediction, just for once in his life.

Why, yes, we are Cubs fans. However could you tell?