So as a Mac user, you're feeling pretty smug these days, right? The Power Mac G5 is slated to ship next month as the world's first 64-bit personal computer (because, as we all know, the Power Mac is a "personal computer" and not a "workstation"-- for some reason), and despite the peals of vehement denial ringing from the PC camp, you're confident that Apple's claim that it's the fastest personal computer ever will turn out to be completely and totally true. To what does the G5 owe its mighty Wintel-crushing power? Well, people who actually know something about technology will talk your ear off about frontside buses and in-flight instruction queues and quad-flangulating vobisculizers operating on independent telewopping pipelines, but that's all way over our heads, so we've decided it's all about bits.

Yup. 64 bits. Our calculator tells us that's twice as many bits as 32, so clearly the G5 is better than any of those piddly 32-bit chips being put into other, lesser personal computers. And lest you think that twice as many bits is only twice as good, make sure you check out this Macworld UK article that was published last Friday, apparently in an attempt to ensure that Americans were too boozed up on cheap, evil-smelling beer and preoccupied with pretty colored lights in the sky to notice. And it's a good thing, too, because in that article Apple product managers inform us that, due to the wonders of exponents, 64 bits is actually 4.3 billion times better than 32 bits-- a concept that would almost certainly put a less-than-sober person bearing fireworks straight into the burn ward.

Consider, here, the wonders of 64-bit technology: it supports up to 18 exabytes of RAM, which is an ungodly huge number of bytes-- roughly 18 billion gigabytes. According to this page, with 18 exabytes jammed into your Mac, you could take every single instance of every single word ever spoken by every single human being ever to exist, store it in RAM, and still have enough memory left over to run Microsoft PowerPoint without crashing. Maybe. And if you've ever been stymied by 32-bit computers' inability to express numbers greater than 4 billion (perhaps you have a really long enemies list), great news: now you can breathe freely all the way up to 18 billion billion. Carl Sagan would be proud.

But wait, disaster strikes! The Register just reported that Panther, the version of Mac OS X supposedly so darn optimized for the G5, is going to ship as a 32-bit operating system! That's right; apparently Apple did not opt to rewrite the entire OS from scratch to run only on the G5. (Go figure.) That means we're all being shortchanged by a full 32 bits! Scandal! Uproar! Murderous mobs descending upon Apple headquarters with torches and (for some reason) rakes demanding Steve Jobs's head on a stick!

Actually, apparently it's not as bad as all that. The Reg article is packed full of technospeak that, for us at least, makes slightly more sense once translated into Portuguese, but the one bit we're seizing on here is that "certain libraries and other elements have been recoded to allow applications-- and the OS itself-- to make use of the 64-bit addressing and datapaths." So while Panther itself won't be a 64-bit OS, it'll allow developers to access the full 64-bit goodness of the G5 processor should they need it. And hey, who doesn't need it? Our to-do list alone must be coming close to hitting that 4 billion ceiling by now.

Heads up, security mavens! If you're always feeling left out because your Windows-using buddies are off having oodles of fun trying to keep up with incessant patches and holes in Microsoft's Big Stinkin' Ball O' Code, you can now take solace in the fact that the Mac has a hole, too. (Finally, Windows users have no excuse not to switch!) The one that everyone's talking about right now is the buffer overflow in Screen Effects. Faithful viewer Anthony tipped us off to this doozy over the weekend: as described by SecuriTeam, if you're running Mac OS X 10.2.6 and leave your system "locked" by turning on Screen Effects and requiring a password, all anyone needs to do to access your Mac is wedge an eraser in your keyboard and come back five minutes later. D'oh!

See, it seems that Screen Effects is expecting people to enter a password that's maybe ten or twelve characters long; cram an extra thousand or so down its throat and it chokes something fierce. SecuriTeam claims that the overflow is triggered by entering "between 1280 and 1380 characters" into the password field and then pressing return, but we take that to mean at a minimum, and not that, say, 1400 characters is just fine and dandy. Although if it's the latter, that's pretty keen.

Now, it turns out that this could have been a real inconvenience here at the AtAT compound, since, paranoid dweebs that we are, our passwords tend to be sorta long. Like, for example, Act I, Scene iv of Hamlet. (We've always felt that the extra two or three hours we spend typing in lengthy passwords each day is more than offset by the feeling of security such a precaution imparts.) We don't actually use Screen Effects to lock our Macs, and now that we know it'd be less than thrilled with our impression of an infinite number of monkeys, we're not about to start. But what about the security implications for folks with sane passwords?

Well, basically, what this exploit means is that someone who has physical access to your Mac for five minutes can crash your screensaver and get at your stuff. Of course, if they only had three minutes, instead of dorking around with overflowing your screensaver they could always just restart your Mac in single-user mode-- and get at your stuff. And even if you set an Open Firmware password, with physical access to your Mac they could just remove some RAM and reset it-- to get at your stuff. Sensing a pattern, here, people? We're pretty sure that this all means that-- brace yourselves, folks-- if someone has physical access to your Mac, they can get at your stuff. (Dadadadummmmmmm!)

"Ah, but what if I set an Open Firmware password and physically locked the enclosure of my Power Mac to prevent the removal of RAM?" Well, then, genius, you're obviously not the type of person who would be relying on a frickin' screensaver for security in the first place, so the point's sort of moot. That said, the moral of the story is, physical access equals, well, access. If you're really worried about people getting at your private stuff, don't let them get near your Mac, especially if they're carrying erasers and five-minute egg timers.

Looks like the iTunes Music Store is really making an impact on the music industry, at least if the frequency of its recent appearances at Billboard.com is any indication. We found out about both of them via The Mac Observer, who noted that the iTMS isn't just distributing exclusive tracks anymore; now it's starting to sell exclusive albums. Specifically, the soundtrack to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (the summer blockbuster about such famous fictional characters as Dorian Gray, Tom Sawyer, and Sean Connery) is apparently only available via the iTMS; in the U.S., at least, you can't even walk into a record store and buy it on CD.

No offense, but how crazy is that? Not that we're against online digital music distribution, of course, but we always liked the idea of being able to buy a real CD if we wanted. The notion that someday commercial music might only be available as 128 kbps AAC files sans liner notes makes us a little nervous-- although, truth be told, we're far more wigged out by the thought that the LXG people agreed to have its movie soundtrack made available only to Mac users running Mac OS X, which clearly makes for a potential market that's just a teensy fraction of the audience it might have had through normal physical distribution channels. Somebody was smoking something illegal when he or she greenlit that deal.

And then there's the case of Ben Folds, who's using the iTMS as part of his master plan to release music he wants to release in the way he wants to release it, without all that tedious mucking about with the record labels. It seems that ol' Ben is working around his contractual obligations to produce albums for his label by instead recording three five-song EPs this year. "There is no escaping the way that we have to do business when I release an album," says he, but "the way to bypass that for me is just to not go though the normal channels." Hence, the EPs-- which will be sold only at concerts, via his web site, and at the iTMS. You'll be able to get them at stores, but only on vinyl, and they won't be played on the radio.

To Ben, this is ideal, because to him, releasing albums is just a "matter of formality" and a "contractual obligation." If you're wondering how his label (Epic) is letting him get away with this, apparently they're fine with it because they're "just barely getting by" as it is. Which may provide a little insight into how Steve Jobs was able to extract distribution rights from all the major labels; we always doubted that the Reality Distortion Field alone could coax such an unprecedented number of concessions from the recording industry, and now we're pretty sure it was a one-two punch of the RDF and empty pockets that pulled it off.

Whatever it was that led to the creation of the iTMS in its current form, we're glad it happened. We never expected that it would be more than a supplemental means of buying the same old music-- a faster method, and maybe cheaper, but no different content-wise. Now it looks like it really might be starting to affect the creation of the music itself, by giving musicians like Ben Folds who are down on the album format an alternate distribution channel. And if the entire LXG soundtrack can be released as download-only, what other albums will choose to go that route once Windows users can join in the party? Strange days, indeed.