Plenty of you out there in Television Land have long given up on watching Motorola for lack of action-- and we agree, it's got a painfully slow-moving plot. Instead, some of you are tuning into IBM for your PowerPC-themed entertainment, hoping that the action will be a little faster on the Big Blue channel. Well, we don't know about that, but we did stumble across a nifty little CNET story about a genetics firm who just rented a humongous supercomputer from IBM. According to the article, this thing contains five thousand processors and is apparently so large that it has to be installed in chunks over the course of a year-- into "one floor of a professional office building in downtown Atlanta." (The article doesn't mention what color the thing is.)

Now, if you're like us, you're probably thinking that Apple really dropped the ball on this one. After all, the company has its own supercomputers to sell-- ones that are a lot smaller and that, coincidentally, just happen to be overstocked in the retail channel right now. So why didn't Apple get in there and persuade this genetics company to buy a Cube instead? After all, the latest addition to Apple's board of directors is Art Levinson, a guy who just happens to be the CEO of Genentech, Inc. That, more than likely, qualifies as an "in" to the wild and wooly world of human genome mapping, right? Plus we all know that Art is a Cube fan, since he appeared in that promotional video months before he joined Apple's board. So couldn't he have gone in and won the sale?

Okay, sure, IBM's supercomputer is a little more powerful than Apple's brain-in-a-box. Reportedly Big Blue's Big Box can crank out up to 7.5 teraflops, which is over two thousand times more instructions per second than the G4's theoretical maximum 3.6 gigaflop performance. On the other hand, the Cube looks pretty sitting on a desk, so it pretty much all evens out. And if these guys really needed 7.5 teraflops, we're sure Apple could have sold them five or six thousand Cubes and solved its overstock problem at the same time. In fact, IBM's supercomputer cost "tens of millions of dollars" (which we interpret to mean at least $20 million), whereas six thousand Cubes would have run them a mere $10,794,000. And that's retail, for Pete's sake!

Still, that ship has sailed. Hopefully, at the very least, IBM's supercomputer has given Apple some more ideas about how to fight the Megahertz War via the magic of multiprocessing: 5000-processor Power Mac G4/500, anyone?

Goodness gracious, we certainly are mired in the throes of the holiday shopping season, aren't we? Throngs of stressed consumers are one missed discount sale away from painting their faces with pig's blood and running amuck in the mall with crudely-fashioned spears. Having been a member of that "community on the edge of a nervous breakdown" this past weekend, the AtAT staff is well aware how close some of these people are to cracking-- so we're glad we steered clear of our local Circuit City location, because it sounds like people looking to score a good deal on Macs may have had their frustration levels pushed to the limits of human endurance.

See, Circuit City had advertised several Macs at $100 off the retail price, and even listed some extremely tempting deals on discontinued models. Really, who wouldn't want to snap up an original 300 MHz iBook for a mere $799.99 after rebate? But according to MacCentral, many shoppers who ventured into Circuit City hoping to pick up a cheap Mac instead found themselves faced with the three most dreaded words in the English language at this time of year: "out of stock." MacCentral spot-checked twenty Circuit City locations in "major US metropolitan areas" and found that "the majority of stores didn't have the configurations in stock." The ones that did generally only had a couple of systems to sell.

Worse yet, there were Demo Days events scheduled at Circuit City this weekend-- meaning that Mac fanatics were extolling the virtues of Apple's products to frazzled holiday shoppers who then couldn't even buy the products being demonstrated. We can see the situation now:

Demo Days Rep: ...and that's iMovie 2. See? Editing your home movies couldn't be simpler. And all you need is a digital video camera and an iMac DV.

Stressed-Out Shopper: That's perfect! My husband will love that! Thank you so much-- he's so difficult to shop for, and I was at the end of my rope!

DDR: All you need to do is pick out a color...

SOS: Indigo. It'll go with the drapes. Here's my credit card.

DDR: ...and, er, go somewhere else to buy one.

SOS: Excuse me?

DDR: Well, we're sort of out of stock.

SOS: But I just spent twenty minutes of shopping time with you while you persuaded me to buy one.

DDR: Yeah. Fun, wasn't it?

SOS: Eat lead, you time-sucking (though obviously intelligent and tasteful) retail spawn of Satan!

(Nasty, ratings-boosting violence ensues.)

If you find Circuit City's lack of inventory somewhat askew, you're not alone. After all, Apple's about to post a quarterly loss of up to a quarter of a billion dollars because of a massively overstocked retail channel; if they're not at Circuit City, just where are all those undersold Macs? And why would Apple and Circuit City spend time, money, and energy promoting merchandise that they don't have to sell? We're not big Circuit City shoppers ourselves, but we've heard rumors about the chain using rampant bait-and-switch tactics in the past... we wonder how many extra Wintel systems were sold this weekend?

Individual consumers aren't the only ones cruising for bargains this holiday season; apparently at least one graphics card company is snapping up a great deal, too. We all knew that 3dfx was already in rough financial waters-- and then this accursed "worldwide PC sales slowdown" threatened to capsize it completely. In comes NVIDIA, who just happens to be shopping for a nice little gift for its stockholders. And so, as faithful viewer Dave kindly pointed out, last Friday NVIDIA acquired 3dfx's "core graphics assets" for roughly $112 million in cash and stock. The company's press release is essentially a thinly-veiled "hey, look at the great deal we found!" touchdown dance.

The deal isn't done yet; 3dfx's shareholders still have to approve the deal, but given that TDFX was last seen hovering around the $0.19 mark, the market may be thrilled to say "don't let the door whack you in the butt on the way out." Assuming the deal does go through, NVIDIA gets to swallow its longtime enemy whole, absorb a bunch of nifty 3D technology, and end some pesky patent infringement litigation all in one swell foop. We haven't the foggiest idea whether NVIDIA will continue to sell 3dfx's technology, or simply mount it on the wall like a trophy kill. If the company opts for the latter course, then that's one fewer option for us Mac users when we're shopping for graphics cards. However, NVIDIA has made noises about leaping into the Mac market in the past, so hopefully one way or the other the company will eventually represent some healthy competition for ATI.

Longtime chroniclers of the Macintosh story will note that this effectively concludes the "Voodoo Curse." Ever since the appearance of the first Mac-compatible graphics card featuring a 3dfx Voodoo chipset, almost every company that has produced Mac Voodoo cards has suffered a loathsome fate. The first was Techworks, who made the Voodoo-based Power3D; the company was bought out and its Mac business was summarily discontinued. MicroConversions tried to sell Mac-compatible Voodoo 2 cards, but production nightmares and astronomical prices shut the company down. Mactell made a Mac-specific Voodoo 3 card before closing its doors and blaming Apple for its fate. And then 3dfx made its own Mac-specific Voodoo 4 and Voodoo 5 products-- buh-bye, 3dfx. Hmmm... if the people at NVIDIA know what's good for them, maybe they shouldn't sell Mac Voodoo cards. That's okay. We'll settle for a GeForce2, instead.