So we spent the last week skulking around in a bitter funk, because reports continued to roll in from people who had pre-ordered Mac OS X and had watched Apple upgrade their FedEx shipping to Saturday delivery at no extra charge. Yes, Christmas came early for those impatient whelps who had decided to spare no expense for the fastest delivery possible; since Mac OS X is officially being released this Saturday, most had assumed that overnight delivery really meant an arrival the following Tuesday-- Monday at the very earliest. Instead, Santa Steve will be dispatching clipboard-bearing elves to the homes of those impatient boys and girls to ensure that they get their Aqua fix on the very same day the product hits store shelves.

And why were we upset at Steve's thoughtful little delivery upgrade? We'll tell you why; because after our decidedly Kafkaesque experience with FedEx delivery for the Mac OS X public beta (which wound up not getting us our goods any faster than UPS Ground probably would have anyway), when we pre-ordered the full version of Mac OS X, we opted for standard ground shipping. So while all those people who paid extra for FedEx this time around will actually be licking their screens come Saturday, the AtAT staff will be forced to wait another "3-7 business days" before joining in the revolution. Or so we thought.

That's when faithful viewer David Rogers turned our frowns upside-down, by telling us that his Mac OS X pre-order had been upgraded to Saturday delivery... but from UPS Ground, not from FedEx Overnight! Many's the time we had checked on our order status this past week, hoping against hope that our standard shipping had been replaced with the magical Saturday deal, to no avail. But after David's email rekindled a spark of faith, we checked once more-- and praise the Dock Genie and all the Aqua gods and goddesses, there it was, plain as day: Requested Carrier: FED EX SATURDAY DELIVERY. Thanks, Steve!

While a pre-order from Apple still isn't the absolute fastest way to get a copy of Mac OS X-- visit a reseller holding a "midnight madness" celebration or fly to Australia to get it sooner-- it suddenly just got a whole lot better. We suppose we'd better clear our jam-packed social schedules for this Saturday, because suddenly we're going to have an awful lot to do. Gee, guess that means we'll be missing the XFL. What a shame...

Wouldn't you know it? Mere hours after we stated that "at least we haven't heard of any Cupertino pink slips" last week, someone had to go and prove us wrong. C'mon, folks, we appreciate the effort, but we don't need anyone's help to make us look bad; we can manage that just fine all by ourselves. Really! We do it all the time, so don't put yourselves out on our account.

See, we had been revelling in the fact that other high-tech companies (most recently Compaq) were weathering this darn "economic downturn" in part by laying off thousands of workers, while Apple had so far managed to avoid showing a few thousand employees the door. That's when faithful viewer Alan Carr wrote in to mention that Mac OS Rumors had since been updated with a report about how Apple has indeed been shedding itself of paycheck-drawing employees-- but in such a quiet manner that most outside observers would never suspect. Uh-oh! Was it us? Did we jinx things?

While the official explanation for Apple's reduced headcount is "attrition," rumor has it that the company has actually been sneakily laying off a few people here and a few people there... always under the radar, and certainly never enough to warrant one of those "Corporation X Announces 5,000 Job Cuts" headlines we find all too familiar these days. One such group that experienced scattered layoffs was the group inhabiting Apple's Austin, TX digs. Another was the Cube development team-- but then, we knew that already. In any event, okay, fine, maybe Apple is cutting jobs... but it's just a few pink slips fluttering by here and there, and nothing at all like the storms of jobs cuts pummelling Compaq and Motorola these days.

Hopefully this is just an incident of poor timing, because we'd hate to think that we somehow caused the alleged layoffs-- either by tempting the fates, or by giving Steve Jobs an easy way to prove us wrong. In a "big picture" sense, though, if they've managed to stay out of the mainstream press, Apple's stealth layoffs must be few and far between. And in fact, Apple can't be in too bad a shape, since we know of at least one individual who was just hired at One Infinite Loop-- hiring freeze, shmiring freeze. So if Apple is still adding the occasional Steveketeer to the line-up, any layoffs are probably more about refocusing than opening a vein in a desperate attempt to return to profitability. (How's that for positive thinking?)

We've always found it a tad inconsistent that the U.S. government is locked in a tooth-and-nail antitrust cage match with Microsoft and yet still standardizes on Microsoft software across the organization. Gosh, can you imagine what would happen if the government put its money where its mouth is and banned the use of Bill's wares entirely? Despite the fact that such a move would pretty much flush the whole "Microsoft has a monopoly" argument down the toilet, it'd still be like some sort of beautiful dream. Well, wake up, Sparky, because this is one dream that just came true. Sort of.

Yes, a government has banned the use of Microsoft software for a fair chunk of official government business-- but no, it's not the U.S. government. Still, it's not some rinky-dink island nation you've never heard of, either; it's Germany. According to an article in The Register kindly forwarded to us by faithful viewer Russell Maggio, the Federal Republic has apparently decided that Microsoft is in cahoots with the U.S. National Security Agency, and thus all Billware contains super-secret "back doors" that would grant the NSA access to sensitive German data. (And you thought that whole "_NSAkey" thing was a simple misunderstanding.) Thus, it's "auf wiedersehen" to Windows.

But before you start jumping up and down for Apple Germany to step in and close a lucrative contract deal, there's one small catch: Apple's in league with Big Brother, too. So is Sun and Oracle. It seems that Germany's ban extends to all software made by American companies, presumably because all American companies are mere government puppets and the White House pulls the strings. Not that that's actually untrue, or anything, but we're still impressed that any large government could adopt such a well-developed sense of paranoia as official policy across its entire organization. Heck, it took us years of watching The X-Files reruns, sleeping no more than twenty minutes a night, and drinking lots of fluoridated water before we started seeing the NSA lurking behind every lamp post...