Well, after yesterday's spiel about vague and sketchy PowerPC 970 rumors, the equal time laws require that today we point you toward something a little more substantial. Isn't it a stroke of luck, then, that faithful viewer Joseph Rosmann just tipped us off to the latest compendium of solid, reasoned 970 analysis over at Ars Technica? The author notes that it's actually longer than his master's thesis, and this is only the second half. Zoinks. In addition, it's apparently all based on-- get this-- actual fact. Go figure.

Yes, somebody who knows a heckuva lot about chip design and performance pored through all available public data on the 970 and spent a few months working up this vast and detailed document describing the chip in excruciating detail, plus providing some (extremely well-) educated guesses about how it'll rate compared to the existing G4 and the Pentium 4. For us, however, there's just one little problem: long and detailed technical documents about processor design fall into a category of reading material we like to call "Verbal NyQuil." They may not alleviate our sniffling, sneezing, coughing, aching, stuffy head, or fever (more's the pity), but they sure can turn out our lights faster than a sock full of quarters to the base of the skull.

Luckily, the author understands that some of us poor uneducated slobs with attention spans measurable only in nanoseconds might still be interested in the big picture, and he was kind enough to post links to the good bits. As far as we could make out (in between some quality naps), any Mac fans expecting the 970 to wallop Intel's best into a bloody smear are likely to be disappointed-- but it should definitely make great strides in narrowing the Apple-Wintel performance gulf back into a mere performance gap. (Fear not, though; the 970 ought to provide Apple's marketing gurus with plenty of ways in which to make the Mac look faster. Maybe even much faster. Let the Photoshop bakeoffs begin!)

For us, though, the best bit in the entire article is the author's evidence that Apple will actually even use the 970 in the first place. Remember, neither Apple nor IBM have officially said that there'll ever be 970-based Macs at all-- we're all just assuming that Apple might want Macs to be fast again or something. But the fact that the Altivec unit was apparently grafted onto IBM's original POWER4 core like some kind of freakish second head does indeed hint that this chip was actually designed to Apple's order and destined to be used in Macs. Of course, now that we're feeling all smiley about the "if," we're antsier than ever about the "when." Hey, Apple-- are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?...

If there's anything more likely to knock us out cold than 11,000 words of which a high percentage are "latency," "throughput," and "frontside bus," it's a 10-Q filing. You know these things, right? Corporations file them every quarter with the SEC for the express purpose of advancing the worldwide battle against insomnia. To show you what we mean, here's an excerpt from Apple's most recent 10-Q, filed last Tuesday: "The Company has provided formal input to both the FASB and the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) regarding the IASB's exposure draft on stock-based compensation and the FASB's efforts to achieve maximum convergence on accounting for stock-based compensation between U.S. and international accounting standards."

Hello? Hello? Wake up, limey fish!! See, we told ya it was snoozeworthy stuff. And honestly, we can only make ourselves giggle with that "10-Q very much/you're welcome" gag about six or eight times before it starts to get stale. But the fact of the matter is that the 10-Q usually does bury a few nuggets of useful and/or interesting information within the slag heap of Accountingspeak. Usually your best bet is to let someone like MacMinute dive in and pry out the good bits. That way you can read about Apple's 93 pink slips without subjecting yourself to prose so dry it could out-absorb Bounty, the Quicker Picker-Upper.

But this quarter we've stumbled upon a rare and delightful surprise: instead of just mining the 10-Q for news, CNET has gone ahead and mined it for dirt! For instance, isn't it nice to know that, in the two and a half years since Apple's board of directors gave Uncle Steve his very own free jet, the Stevester will have been reimbursed for some $1.36 million in "company-related airplane expenses"? Say, whatever happened to board member Jerry York's claim that the jet would be "operated at Mr. Jobs's expense"? Apparently Steve still flies commercial first class when he's on the clock and only uses the Gulfstream for weekend outings to Kuala Lumpur. But still, $1.36 million? That's, like, $1500 a day, each and every day, for two and a half years. With that much alleged Apple-related air travel, let's hope he's earning the frequent flier miles. Then again, when could he possibly use them?

But even that isn't the real dirt. Get this: it seems that Apple's newest board member, Al Gore, amassed a total of 286.3 million votes from shareholders in the last board election, whereas Steve-o himself scored only 244.4 million. Waitaminnit, here... so Gore won more votes than Jobs? Unthinkable! It was the chads! The chads, we tell you!

If you've tuned in for more than two and a third episodes of this little soap, you know that we tend to play fast and loose with the whole "Apple-themed melodrama" kick, since roughly 40% of our content is actually just about the latest lame and/or evil stunt Microsoft just pulled. But it is thematically linked, after all, since a deep-seated incredulity that something as fundamentally icky as Windows can be the overwhelming market leader is a pretty fundamental aspect of the whole Mac fan experience. We weep for the death of the spirit and the soul. (Hey, who doesn't?)

And, of course, we also cackle uncontrollably every time Microsoft technology fails in a spectacular and highly visible manner. That's why faithful viewer SuperMatt breathlessly forwarded us a Daily Aardvark article about how Suchart Jaovisidha, the Finance Minister of Thailand, wound up trapped in his BMW "after the onboard computer crashed, leaving the vehicle immobilized." Reportedly the crash disabled the door locks, power windows, and air conditioning, leaving the minister and his driver baking in the sun and wondering whether heatstroke would kill them before they ran out of oxygen. Eventually they were rescued by a guard who smashed one of their windows with a sledgehammer he just, uh, happened to have lying around.

The article notes that BMW 7-series cars are running Windows CE, as confirmed by a Microsoft press release, which is presumably why the Mac community have pounced upon this story as a nifty new "Windows almost killed my Finance Minister" anecdote. Unfortunately, there's just one teensy little problem. Well, okay, two.

The first is that, according to CNET, the case of the oven-roasted Finance Minister was actually due to "an electronic fault" and not to "a system crash of the car's Windows-based central computer, as other reports have speculated." And the second is that the car in question was a ten-year-old BMW 520i, which doesn't have a Windows-based central computer in the first place.

But don't go all frowny-clown on us; we never let anything as inconsequential as mere facts stand in the way of a good ol'-fashioned Microsoft-bashing. Observe how deftly we dispense with these two minor contradictions: firstly, still reeling from its iLoo PR disaster, Microsoft clearly bribed CNET to report that the glitch was electronic in nature instead of a near-fatal Windows crash; secondly, Microsoft went back in time and saw to it that the BMW 520i never had a Windows-based central computer-- which it obviously did, before Redmond started messing with the fourth dimension. See? All fixed. Bash away!