Wheeeee! Okay, so it wasn't a roller-coaster death drop like last Tuesday's "Redmond Justice"-inspired free fall, but the sizeable NASDAQ losses for the past three days were still fun to watch, in a prolonged downhill luge-run sort of way. Ordinarily-cocky investors we know have been wandering around with a dark, haunted look in their eyes. Frankly, we're surprised we haven't heard any stories on the news about an unexplained global phenomenon of day-traders' heads exploding. But hey, the week's not over yet-- and the thing that's so cool about the stock market is that greed and fear rule those numbers, not rational behavior. You don't have to be a "money person" to enjoy the market; you just have to appreciate the drama of human frailty distilled into numbers on a ticker. It's a beautiful thing.

Of course, what we're really interested in around here is how those wacky numbers are affecting good ol' Apple. Truth be told, Apple stock's had better days. On Wednesday it plummeted ten full points as the rest of the market fell. A casual observer might think this was odd, considering that Apple won another analyst upgrade to throw on the pile; according to a Reuters report, Kurt King of Banc of America Securities upped his recommendation from "Buy" to "Strong Buy" in preparation for next week's earnings announcement. (By the way, you have entered this quarter's Beat The Analysts contest, right?) AtAT viewers shouldn't find the resulting price dip surprising, though, since we've noted over and over again that AAPL often spikes downward following an analyst upgrade. It's just one of those quirky little things that makes the company so lovable.

On the other hand, while AAPL's falling after garnering praise, Microsoft's stock did the boring, predictable thing-- it fell following bad news. And we're not talking about last week's governmental smackdown, though that sure was an entertaining little sell-off. No, this time we're talking about Goldman Sachs analyst Rick Sherlund's lowered expectations for the company's quarterly sales, as reported by CNNfn. Apparently Sherlund thinks Microsoft will "only" pull in $5.75 billion this quarter, instead of $5.95 billion. (Some people have a really warped idea of what constitutes "bad news.") That little statement was enough to keep the stampeding sell-off rolling, further cementing Microsoft's role as "the one that popped the bubble." But don't worry-- there's always another bubble forming. (At broadcast time on Thursday, AAPL had rebounded 9 points and the NASDAQ was up 63. Even MSFT was up a point or two. See? Nothing to worry about.)

Let's just state, right off the bat, here, that we're not interested in debating the relative merits and weaknesses of Mac OS Rumors. Yes, we're aware that some people think the site fabricates everything it posts-- heck, there's even a highly entertaining web site dedicated entirely to debunking MOSR and launching personal attacks on the site's proprietor. On the other hand, sometimes MOSR is right on the money-- we were digging through our own reruns the other day and found MOSR's iBook specs from eight months before it was unveiled, and other than the size predictions, they were pretty darn close. As far as we're concerned, though, accuracy isn't the most important factor anyway. From our perspective, MOSR is still entertaining, and therefore we continue to read it, and occasionally work its, um, "apocryphal" info into our show's plotline.

Which leads us right into all this talk about Mac OS X's startup times. See, according to MOSR, booting a blue-and-white G3/450 running Mac OS X DP3 with only "vital services" enabled takes a mere twenty-one seconds. (By "vital services only," MOSR means that all Internet servers and AppleTalk services are turned off.) Impressive, right? Well, don't move on just yet, because MOSR claims that Apple sources expect the final, optimized, consumer-friendly version of Mac OS X to start up in ten seconds on a G4/500. With minimal services only, of course.

Now maybe it's just us, but ten seconds? Our iBook can scarcely wake from sleep mode in ten seconds, let alone start up from power-off. And every UNIX/Linux system we've ever seen takes a lot longer than that to boot, so pardon us if we're skeptical that the UNIX-rooted Mac OS X will boot in ten seconds in any configuration. We only see three plausible possibilities here. The first is that MOSR (or its source) is completely wrong, and this "ten seconds" thing came from out of nowhere. The second is that "minimal services" mode means the system starts up, but all you get is a smiley face and a "Restart" button. The third is that Apple's managed to implement a time-dilation field purely as a software module, so when Mac OS X boots, it takes two minutes in its own reference frame, but only ten seconds to the rest of the universe. Take your pick. We're betting on option three, ourselves.

We have some good news and some so-so news. Which do you want first? The good news is that 3dfx Interactive has finally made a concrete commitment to its months-old vague promises to support the Mac platform; Mac-specific versions of its screamingly-fast, jaw-droppingly-beautiful Voodoo4 and Voodoo5 graphics accelerators are due this July, according to MacWEEK. The so-so news, however, is that these cards are PCI-based, and no Mac-specific AGP models are yet planned. So those of you with new G4 systems won't get to take advantage of your speedy AGP slot-- you'll have to sacrifice one of those three PCI slots instead.

But wait, there's more: apparently the Mac-specific cards are going to cost more than their PC counterparts, too. Granted, it's only about $30 more, compared to the double-the-price gouging we Mac folks used to take back in the Voodoo and Voodoo2 days, and the cards are only going to cost between $200 and $330, but still, we're a little confused as to what is so "Mac-specific" about these cards that they should cost more. The drivers will be different, of course, but the hardware is largely the same. Oh, wait; it's not. 3dfx doesn't make PCI versions of these particular cards for PCs-- they're AGP-only. So there's that. Plus, it sounds as though these Mac-specific cards will have Digital Visual Interface ports, meaning they'll be usable with Apple's LCD Studio Display and (more importantly) the Cinema Display. Imagine Unreal Tournament on a G4 with a Voodoo5 card output to a Cinema Display. Drool, drool, slobber...

Now, what would make that scenario even more droolworthy would be if the Voodoo5 in question were zipping along in that G4's AGP slot instead of in one of the three scarce PCI slots. Still, given that we don't own a G4, a Cinema Display, or any time to play Unreal Tournament, we're willing to let it slide... this time. So, gamers rejoice! Some serious speed is only a few months away.