Agonizing over the extended 45-day wait before you'll receive your brand new PowerBook G4? Well, have we got some great news for you: according to MacCentral, the factors delaying the arrival of your titanium sex machine are simply "minor shipping and distribution issues." That means that you're not actually enduring a grueling six-week delay caused by Apple's massive difficulty in overcoming technical issues; instead, you're just weathering a mere six-week shipping postponement caused by Apple's massive difficulty in moving objects from point A to point B. If that's not cause for celebration, we don't know what is!

Reportedly, those ever-mysterious "sources close to the company" indicate that demand for Apple's latest laptop is "good," but not so overwhelming that it's causing the holdup. What's happening instead is that unspecified "shipping and distribution delays" are postponing the delivery of units from Taiwan, where the stuff's actually being built. In order to get at least enough PowerBooks for demonstration use at the upcoming Demo Days events, Apple may be forced to ship "individual units" as they become available, instead of larger lots-- a practice that could put a nifty dent into the company's shipping budget.

The real mess, though, is in the communication. Customers who have called the Apple Store in a quixotic attempt to get straight answers on when they can expect their orders and why everything's delayed are generally hearing completely different stories depending upon who actually picks up the phone at Apple's end. If you're the optimistic type, you may want to take Apple's latest reported estimated ship time with a grain of salt; the general consensus at this point among dealers and customers alike seems to be that the announced "45 days" ship time is a worst-case scenario and that Apple's current operating mode is to underpromise and overdeliver. (It's too bad Steve didn't keep that strategy in mind when he announced that we'd be rubbing titanium by the end of January.) Some resellers are still expecting stock by the end of next week, while others are now predicting their first shipment as late as March.

In all seriousness, though, assuming that the reports of "shipping and distribution delays" are actually true, we really do consider this to be good news. After all, if you're going to have to wait forty-five days for your PowerBook anyway, isn't it much nicer knowing that it's just some unfortunate logistical issue, and not because Apple's engineers are frantically trying to find a way to keep its titanium beauty from bursting into flame after two hours of continuous use?

Three things in life are certain: death, taxes, and a never-ending progression of software upgrades. Just as Office 98 begat office:mac 2001 and the Mac OS wound its way from 8.6 to 9.0 to 9.0.4 to its current incarnation as 9.1, commercial software is constantly reincarnated in progressively more advanced (and/or more bloated) guises. Obviously the bizarrely static Mac version of WordPerfect is the exception that proves the rule, but Apple's consumer-targeted digital video editing application is just as bound to the karmic cycle of version upgrades as any other normal software package. That's why iMovie is currently available for purchase at version 2.

But have you ever stopped to wonder what happens to older versions of software when they die? We're starting to suspect that restless software versions who aren't ready to move on from this physical realm just sort of stick around and haunt the living. Yes, we're talking about software ghosts, boy and girls, so gather 'round the campfire and roast those marshmallows as we spin a tale that's sure to give you the willies when you settle down into your sleeping bags tonight.

Way back in April of last year, Apple shocked the Mac community when it announced that, instead of shipping iMovie as a $99 boxed product as the long-standing rumors had predicted, the then-current version 1.02 of the previously bundled-only-on-iMacs software was immediately available as a free download-- and there was much rejoicing. However, once iMovie 2 came out last summer, iMovie 1.02 promptly vanished from Apple's servers; personally, we were never surprised by this, since continuing to distribute the previous version for free would certainly have put a ding in sales of the newer $49 version. Hence, iMovie 1.02 kicked the bucket, and we mourned the passing of a great piece of free software and moved on with our lives.

Things got weird a few days ago, though, when iMovie 1.02 suddenly resurfaced in Apple's online software library. We're sure we didn't imagine its earlier disappearance, which meant that iMovie 1.02 was indeed back from the dead. We eventually arrived at the conclusion that Apple had decided to resurrect the software now that the company has racked up a certain number of iMovie 2 sales, but just as soon as we were getting used to that idea, the fine folks at Insanely Great Mac reported that iMovie 1.02 has once again mysteriously vanished from Apple's servers, leaving no trace that it had ever returned.

So was it a short-lived mistake on Apple's part, or the restless spirit of dead software popping in for a two-day haunt? Is iMovie 1.02 doomed to wander these silicon corridors until the end of time, occasionally manifesting itself as an anachronistic free download from Apple's web site? And just where are those intrepid investigators from Scooby Doo when you need them? Ah, well... sleep tight, kids. Mwwwaaaahaahahahaha!!

Not that Microsoft's web sites go down a lot, or anything, but when they do, we're always amazed by the sheer volume of mail we get from faithful viewers quick to point out a weak spot in the Redmond Giant's online presence. Heck, even when Hotmail goes down for a 30-minute service upgrade at 3AM on a Sunday morning we get two or three alerts-- so imagine what happened when most of Microsoft's high-profile sites, including the all-important microsoft.com, all stopped working for about twenty-four hours on Tuesday night. You guessed it; our mailboxes practically choked on schadenfreude overload.

And why not? Clearly someone should be embarrassed, since a day-long site outage is pretty big news when it comes to a major operation like Microsoft. Imagine the uproar if Apple's site went dead for a day, for example. Things are back to normal, though, and despite the fervent hopes of several ill-wishers, Microsoft wasn't the target of a hack or a denial-of-service attack or anything so malicious. (So don't go investigating what Steve Jobs was doing at about 5PM PST on Tuesday evening.) According to a TechWeb article, the company was merely the victim of its own personnel's incompetence... which is probably even better, from the Microsoft-bashers' perspective. Apparently some Redmond flunky just "made a mistake in configuring the company's DNS, or domain name server, architecture." The company was quick to insist that "this was an operational error, and not the result of any issue with Microsoft or third-party products nor the security of our networks."

Can you believe that people actually buy products made by this company? Or that entire businesses (and probably even entire governments) rely on software made by this corporation, whose employees plunged the Microsoft web site into darkness for almost a full day? It's positively shameful! After all, what kind of rinky-dink outfit can't even keep its domain names working properl-- uhhh, actually, now that we think about it, maybe we should cut Microsoft a little slack...