We've said it before, and no doubt we'll say it again: these are trying times for Macintosh "traditionalists." We know, it's human nature to be resistant to change-- and so we've always tried to keep an open mind about the vast departures from the past that we Mac users have been force-fed from above. When faced with a massive paradigm shift, we try not to condemn it simply because it's different. Instead, we try to evaluate it objectively on its own merits, and then condemn it because it sucks. Okay, okay, they haven't all been negative; some changes, like the abrupt shift to USB, were slightly painful at first but ultimately a Good Thing™. Others, like the seemingly egregious elimination of the Apple Menu in Mac OS X, are a bit more... questionable.

What really has us concerned, however, is Apple's apparent strategy of forging new trails into the future at the expense of the comfortable, well-walked paths of the past. Mac OS X represents a gargantuan change to those of us who have been happily using our Macs for years; its interface is no more like the current Mac's than, say, Windows's is (with the notable exception that at least it isn't butt-ugly). Now, given that Apple's future essentially hinges on whether or not Mac OS X is a hit, we'd have expected that Apple would want to assuage our anxieties of the unknown by including as many familiar elements as possible. Not so. As Go2Mac pointed out a while back, the ultimate Mac mascot is apparently completely absent from Apple's new operating system. Yes, people, Clarus the Dogcow has been put out to pasture. May we please have a moment of silence, followed by a hearty "Moof!"?

Now, a farewell may be premature, since Mac OS X is still in beta and there's time yet for Clarus to sneak into the release version. But given the overall vibe from Apple in recent years, we're not holding our breath; Clarus represents the Old Apple, and as such it seems that Uncle Steve feels there's no room for her down-home mammalian warmth in Mac OS X's glitzy, lickable Aqua world. If Clarus indeed loses her gig helping end-users through the Page Setup process, here's hoping she finds gainful employment elsewhere. Gateway would seem an obvious, though unfortunate, choice.

Skeptical that a long-standing Apple mascot would be forced to seek employment elsewhere? Perhaps the Mac "smiley" logo will change your mind. While he's lucky enough to have been retained in Mac OS X as the leftmost icon in the Dock, evidently he had to accept a pay cut to stay on staff. As faithful viewer Thomas notes, a very familiar face appears to be moonlighting at USSEARCH.com, working part-time as the site's new logo. Sure, his colors are a bit different, he's holding a rounder, more relaxed pose, and he's looking to the right instead of giving us a hint of his left profile, but make no mistake-- that's him, all right. Just another sign of the times, we suppose.

The Mike Dell PsychoWatch Team has been on full alert recently, forwarding us every little move that might be construed as further evidence that Dell's fearless leader is in fact so obsessed with Steve Jobs that he faces the possibility of total personality breakdown as he continues to copy Steve's every move. The last major example of this self-destructive behavior surfaced a couple of weeks ago as Dell issued a recall of 27,000 laptop batteries because one had caused a Dell notebook to burst into flames-- a move eerily similar to Apple's infamous PowerBook 5300 Flambé recall some five years earlier. The question now isn't if Mike will eventually suffer a total mental collapse and retire to a clock tower to start picking off bystanders with a high-powered rifle, but when. We just want to know so we can be far, far away when he finally snaps.

Meanwhile, however, dozens of faithful viewers (the first of which was Thomas Diehl) noted another puzzling twist in this plotline a few days ago. Not two weeks after Dell's 5300-ish battery recall, rival Wintel manufacturer Compaq upped the ante; according to a CNET report, Compaq has recalled 55,000 of its own laptop batteries, thus more than doubling Dell's numbers. And lest any of you think that Compaq's recall is simply a consequence of using the same batteries as Dell, Compaq's flammable batteries are made by Sony, while Dell's were made by Sanyo. Two completely different battery manufacturers making dangerously combustible laptop batteries and prompting recalls from two completely different PC manufacturers within the same two-week time frame-- if you think that's a coincidence, you need a nap and a purer grade of the crack you've been smoking.

What's interesting, though, is that most viewers who have pointed out this so-called "coincidence" feel that Compaq (or, more specifically, its CEO Mike Capellas) is infected with a lesser strain of the Steve-itis that afflicts Mike Dell. Not so, true believers. Look at the timing-- Mr. Dell has worked long and hard to bring his psychosis to such an advanced and dangerous phase. He started out just harmlessly aping the iMac and iBook, remember? So what are the odds that Compaq's Capellas launched right in at such an advanced degree of the syndrome-- and a mere two weeks after Mike Dell pulled his flammable laptop stunt?

No, the answer is obvious: Capellas isn't obsessed with Steve, he's obsessed with Mike Dell. Ladies and gentlemen, we have layers upon layers here! So now Mike Dell will continue to copy Steve's moves, good and bad, until he runs his company into the ground and his head implodes, while Mike Capellas will copy Dell until Compaq suffers the same fate. It's a terrible tragedy, to be sure, to see so much sickness running rampant-- but hey, at least the competition's going to get a lot thinner pretty soon. See? There's an upside to everything.

Last week we introduced the "Microsoft Invasion" plot twist, in which cunning malfeasants unknown (COUGHstevejobsCOUGH) reportedly gained access to the Redmond Giant's corporate network for up to three months and managed to slink away with the ultimate booty: Microsoft's source code to Windows and Office. Since then, Microsoft spokespersons have been backpedalling at a furious pace, downplaying the seriousness of the breach, revising the numbers previously reported, and spinning the whole snafu as a fully-monitored event in which Microsoft operatives were in total control at all times. (Well, what did you expect Microsoft to do, issue a press release that said "the government's splitting us up, some cyberthug's stolen our source code, and we're totally boned, so we're closing up shop-- screw you all"?)

So, courtesy of an Associated Press article kindly forwarded to us by faithful viewer Ryan Ritchey, here's Microsoft's revised take on the incident: first of all, the intruder (for convenience's sake, let's just call him "Steve") didn't have three months of access, as the Wall Street Journal had reported. Instead, he "only" had high-level access for twelve days. Moreover, Microsoft now claims that it knew about "Steve" the whole time, and monitored his actions to ensure that he didn't manage to do anything too nasty, while also collecting information that would let the company learn "Steve"'s real identity. (AtAT sources tell us that among the profiling data that Microsoft has collected is the fact that the intruder changed several high-ranking executives' passwords to "IAMABOZO," though investigators are at a loss as to what this fact implies.)

Now, if you're a little suspicious of Microsoft's all-too-rosy picture of the events that unfolded, The Register has an enjoyable little article that compares the company's current story with the story it reported last week-- and examines how each of those accounts compares to what the Wall Street Journal first reported. Personally, we find Microsoft's revised sunshine-and-lollipops "we knew it all along" version to be more than a bit shifty, but hey, what's a daring corporate break-in without a Rashomon-like series of conflicting reports to raise the tension? We just hope that "Steve" covered his tracks well enough to give us a nice, long chase scene.