Here we are at the end of another Macworld Expo week, and you know what that means: Info Drought. You've seen it time and time again; whenever Steve delivers one of his famous keynotes, the Mac media manages to swamp itself with about eleventy-kajillion stories covering the same exact info, and that leads to a couple of problems. First comes the glut. Really, how many different articles do we need to tell us that the iBook's RAM just doubled? We figure eight or nine should be sufficient to cover all the angles and capture the various subtle nuances of that complex announcement. Sixty, on the other hand, just might be overkill. The second problem is what happens when all the Mac journalists are spent, following that post-keynote reporting binge; there's no news, and even if there were, no one's got the energy to write about it. And that's where we are now. Welcome to the dust bowl.

So given the current slack pace of Apple's unfolding drama, you'll forgive us if we reach back a bit and talk about something we didn't get a chance to discuss before, due to our mad dash to read a dozen wildly different descriptions of the G4 speed bump. There's one rumor in the Apple world that's kept resurfacing even since Apple's stock price reached about $80 a share last September: that AAPL would split. We hadn't even seen any concrete evidence of such a move, though-- until Tuesday night. That was when, according to a Reuters story, Apple indicated that when the annual shareholders meeting rolls around in April, the company will ask the stockholders for permission to boost its number of shares from 320 million to 900 million. If the investors give the go-ahead, Apple could pull a two-for-one stock split as part of the expansion.

Being financial ignoramuses (ignorami?), we're not going to pretend to understand either the motives or the effects of such a move, but we're assured that, in the eyes of the stockholders, a split is commonly considered a Good Thing™, since it indicates that the company thinks the share price will continue to rise. As for motive, we figure that doubling the amount of shares is probably important since Apple's currently handing out stock options like they're cheap logo pens at a trade show. Remember, in an attempt to bring a "startup" feeling back to Apple, Uncle Steve gave stock options a hefty role in the whole employee compensation gig. And hey, don't forget that Steve himself was granted options for ten million shares back when the Board of Directors gave him that jet-- those gotta come from somewhere, right?

We know, we know-- things on "Redmond Justice" have slowed to a crawl recently. But don't tell us, tell the producers; most of the action is probably happening at the bargaining table, but ever since it was decreed that the settlement talks would not be televised, we poor drama fiends have been starving for the twists and turns of the good old days. You know, it happens: a show with a rabid fan base runs a couple of seasons too long, the original writers leave, the cast seems bored because they're all itching to pursue movie careers, and the overall quality of the whole project just tanks. Witness the last few years of Married... With Children for a textbook example. Heck, much as it pains us to say it, season 6 of The X-Files was pretty much a dog, too; luckily the current season is much improved.

That's not to say that nothing's happening on "Redmond Justice"; heck, there was a fun incident earlier this week in which Microsoft lobbied Congress not to break up the company-- according to The Register, Microsoft likened such a remedy to a "regulatory death sentence." See, that's the kind of drama and hyperbole we're looking for-- but given that even the email Microsoft sent to Congress likely constitutes a breach of the "no talking about the settlement negotiations" mandate, such nuggets are few and far between. Which is why everyone went all nutsy with antitrust glee when, for a brief moment, it appeared that Bill Gates himself was offering to open up the Windows source code to avoid seeing his company dismantled. Faithful viewer Jerry O'Neil, as always, has his finger on the pulse of the monopoly. He sent us to a Bloomberg News article which claimed that Big Bad Bill would open-source Windows if it'd get the government off his back once and for all.

Of course, Microsoft's spin doctors are denying that Gates made that offer-- and they're doing it so vehemently, they've discovered six new patentable methods of denial in the past twelve hours. But the speed with which the story wormed its way through the 'net was truly a wonder to behold. It's like we said; people are starving for "Redmond Justice" action, so any juicy rumor's going to spread like wildfire. In any case, if a settlement is in the stars, we'll know soon enough; final arguments in the trial are scheduled for this coming Tuesday. We're finally in the home stretch, and soon we'll see if Microsoft is really willing to release its death-grip on the Windows source code to avoid annihilation.

Everyone knows that software "minimum system requirements" are an industry joke, right? The requirements listed on the box typically describe a computer that could, in theory, launch the software without crashing; it may run so slowly that you'd rather jam straight pins under your fingernails than try to use it, but it'll run. Microsoft, however, turns the act of crafting "minimum system requirements" into high art. Take Windows 2000, for example, whose listed requirements apparently reflect life in a parallel universe, where the passage of time does not exist. That's pretty much the only circumstance in which we can imagine that running Windows 2000 on a (giggle) 133 MHz Pentium is going to be observable, let alone usable.

And it seems that the real world agrees. According to a CNET article, Intel just admitted that the company "underestimated" the amount of processing power that Windows 2000 demands for adequate performance. They had to pony up an additional $50 million on hardware upgrades-- an unplanned and unwelcome expense tacked onto their total Win2K migration cost. Yes, Intel claims that people who "upgrade" a Windows NT 4.0 system to Win2K are generally going to want "up to 250 more megahertz of chip power" to get equivalent performance. Such a deal! Pay to upgrade to Win2K, and then pay again for a new processor-- all to get the performance you already had with NT 4. Where do we sign up?

Okay, sure, Intel sells chips, and they'd love to see everybody upgrade their processors to run Win2K, so they're not exactly an impartial source. But the Gartner Group recommends at least a Pentium II and 128 MB of RAM-- far above Microsoft's Pentium 133 / 64 MB claims. And Competitive Systems Analysts claims their testing shows that "PCs will need the equivalent of a 200 MHz processor upgrade to run Windows 2000 at the same performance level as Windows NT 4." And what does Microsoft say about this? We quote Craig Bellinson, the Win2K product manager: "According to independent tests... Windows 2000 Professional is up to... 24 percent faster than Windows NT Workstation 4.0 using current hardware configured with 64 MB of memory or higher." Fraudulence, thy name is Bellinson...