Okay, so this has just gotten flat-out sick. Remember a few weeks back when we told you about Foster High School in Tukwila, Washington (just a stone's throw from Bill Gates's house, by an astounding coinkidink) being forced by the school board to turn down $43,000 worth of free Macs because the district's current policy only allows Windows? Well, if you thought that depriving already underprivileged schoolkids of $43 grand's worth of free Macs was boneheaded in the extreme, just wait 'til you hear the latest in this mess; your head will deflate. Seriously. Keep a bicycle pump handy.

See, faithful viewer David Poves pointed us towards another King County Journal article, and this one informs us that Superintendent "Dimbulb" Silver has come up with what he apparently feels is a brilliant solution to the whole problem: instead of accepting those thirty free Macs and six laser printers that Foster High won as a grant, he'll get the school 30 used Wintels through Boeing, who regularly casts off PCs that it deems too old for its business and donates them to local school districts. Because, as you all know, 30 free computers are 30 free computers, whether they're brand new Macs or antiquated Wintels that have been beaten all to hell by disgruntled Boeing office workers over the course of the past seven years. See? Problem solved.

Oh, but wait-- what about the six free laser printers that were to come with the Macs? Well, apparently Boeing doesn't give away laser printers, so Superintendent Dimbulb figures he'll just buy six printers... with $3000 of the cash-strapped school district's funds. So let's see if we've got this straight: to "save money" by sticking with Windows, instead of getting 30 new Macs and six laser printers at absolutely no cost to the school, Dimbulb is opting to get 30 used and outdated Wintel PCs and six laser printers at a cost of three grand.

Seems like a pretty desperate course of action just to keep Microsoft happy, doesn't it? Especially since, for the same cost to the school, he could have it all: 30 brand new Macs, 30 crappy second-hand Wintels, and twelve new laser printers, still for the same $3000 he's proposing to spend anyway. You know, in AtAT's nearly six-year history, we have cranked out over 1,650,000 words (that's over seven and a half times as many words as there are in Moby Dick), and yet we have never once found the need to call someone "asinine"-- until now. We knew the man was in Bill Gates's back pocket, but it wasn't absolutely clear until now that he's so far down there he's actually scanning for polyps.

[The management would like to apologize for the previous joke, which was in extremely poor taste. In future we will endeavor to label scenes likely to contain similar off-color gags with a large "CAUTION: POSSIBLE POLYP HUMOR" warning.]

Seriously, if it's not the influence of Big Bad Bill living nearby, what possible reason could there be to keep these kids away from the Mac? Is it because the students at Foster High are "underprivileged," and Dimbulb Silver figures they should get used to owning crappy outdated Wintels all their lives? Unless local parents get this brainstem tossed out on his ear, we figure Tukwila's a lost cause. (Sorry, kids.) On the plus side, though, the Kinston Free Press reports that the four-year lease agreement for the Greene County deal (roughly 1850 iBooks for middle and high school students and teachers) has officially been approved by the Board of Education and county commissioners. And according to the Knoxville News-Sentinel, another four-year lease for 425 iBooks was just approved for elementary schools in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. So not all the nation's schools are at the mercy of dimbulbs...

It never fails: Captain Steve announces a whole slew of crazy new products at some keynote address somewhere, the Mac-centric media goes rabid with coverage of all the spiffy new stuff, and then a week later even if there were anything to say that hasn't already been said a dozen times over, anyone who could actually say it is practically comatose with fatigue anyway. Which means, as expected, we've sailed right into the Post-Stevenote Doldrums, and you can expect some really slow news days for a while-- at least until everyone recovers from the G5 unveiling. There just really isn't anything left to say.

And that's presumably why MacCentral has resorted to posting articles about what products are listed in the Top Ten over at the Apple Store-- something that normally wouldn't qualify as "news" unless six of the top ten products sold were, say, household cleansers and pet deworming pills. But actually, even without deer and rabbit repellent taking the top spot, the list is at least marginally interesting; it's pretty encouraging to see Apple's online store selling almost as many top-of-the-line Power Mac G5s (number 3) as iPods (all models, number 2). Clearly the pent-up demand for some serious speed has plenty of people reaching for the plastic, which bodes extremely well for Apple's finances next quarter when the Power Macs actually ship. Lackluster Power Mac sales has been one of the perennial reasons why Wall Street is so down on AAPL, and that reason may have just evaporated.

But the bit that surprised us even more is that the number one product sold at the Apple Store is (drum roll, please...) the iSight. And here we were, worried that nobody would want to shell out $149 for a videoconferencing gadget; apparently there really are a lot of people out there with Jaguar and broadband looking to log a little face time with distant (and not-so-distant) acquaintances. Go figure. If we ever again doubt Apple's ability to gauge a market, throw something sharp at our heads. Well, unless the company releases the Cube 2.

By the way, this is just slightly off-topic, but it's a handy tip (and news is slower right now than a documentary on the history of paste), so we'll mention it anyway: as long as you have a compatible camera (such as an iSight, a FireWire webcam, or a MiniDV camcorder), you can initiate one-way video chats with other users of iChat AV, even if they are Without Benefit of Lens. Control-click on their name in your Buddy List and you'll see the option right there; maybe this was obvious to everyone else, but we were delighted to find it. It's a nifty way to let cameraless relatives see and hear how big your baby's getting, for example-- or to play everyone's favorite game, "Does This Mole Look Abnormal To You?"

The votes are in, and we have to say, there really doesn't seem to be a cohesive community opinion on whether or not the Power Mac G5 qualifies as "attractive." We got a whole lotta mail telling us it's the most beautiful Mac Apple has ever made, and even more mail telling us it's the ugliest Mac on record-- but we can't even say that the G5's look is polarizing Mac users into one of two camps, because we're also getting a buncha mail from people saying "eh," or, in faithful viewer Timo Reger's case, "meh." The best we can say is, you either like it or you don't, except if you don't really care one way or the other. Now that's definitive, baby!

Guess we'll just have to wait and see how many awards it rakes in. That's not likely to start until Apple actually manages to ship the thing, however, so in the meantime we're going to have to be content watching Apple's other products score some more design accolades. Hot on the heels of Jonathan Ive's recent Designer of the Year award comes word that two of his Apple creations have garnered Industrial Design Excellence Awards, which honor those products that "use design to push traditional brands into new markets, extend well-known brands into new products, and invent something totally new, cool, and useful." (You've heard this all before.)

So what won? Well, in the "Computer Equipment" category, the 12- and 17-inch PowerBook G4s together snagged a Gold award. (Interestingly enough, the only other Gold award went to the Palm Zire-- which is sort of an award for Apple, too, since we've always thought it was obvious that the Zire's industrial design was "borrowed" from the iBook.) Meanwhile, the Xserve managed to land a Silver, alongside the SanDisk Cruzer USB flash storage device and the SAMSUNG SyncMaster 152T LCD display. And it looks to us like Apple's the only company who won more than one IDEA this year. Congratulations, folks!

Of course, the fact that even (shudder) Gateway managed to limp away with a Bronze sort of cheapens the deal a little, but hey, at least it won primarily by copying design elements of the Power Mac G4: "a flip-up door for easy service and upgrade access" and "high-contrast silver and charcoal" for the new color scheme. And since IDEA awards seem to focus on functional design more than looks, we'd feel pretty comfortable betting on a Gold for the G5 next year, no matter how the judges might think it looks. Any takers?