Wha... wait, is it Monday already? Man, we... okay, give us just a sec, here. We have to put some coffee on.

(Laaa da da dum, la dya dya dya dum dum dummmm, la tya da da DUMMMM...)

Okay, we're back. Geez, Monday, huh? How crazy is that? The last thing we remember is being "ushered" (okay, fine, "hurled bodily") out of the Night of the Panther party at the Apple Store Cambridgeside after we failed to take the hint when the staff all changed into pajamas and started yawning conspicuously. Our buddy Nick, slightly the worse for wear after discovering that there was an Open Genius Bar and the Mac Genius in residence could sling a mean Manhattan, then announced that if we were on the west coast we probably wouldn't get thrown out for another three hours, and we hopped in a cab to the airport. The next thing we know, we're waking up at the primary AtAT production system two days later, completely naked except for a pair of commemorative Panther dog tags and a strategically placed IRREGULARLY SHAPED LUGGAGE sticker from Zracna Luka Zagreb.

Whoop, hang on again-- coffee's ready.

(...it's raining men, la da da da it's raining men... whoa-oa-oaaaaa...)

Mmmmm. Okay, much better. Anyway, so, yeah-- that was one crazy shindig (or, technically, 65 crazy shindigs) that Apple threw on Friday, and if you missed the experience, you really should be kicking yourself something fierce. But of course the party's really only just started, since we now have Panther to kick around for the next year or so. Our copy arrived Friday morning and we installed it on a single Mac here at the AtAT compound: Katie's 12-inch PowerBook, which is deemed "not mission-critical" for production purposes and therefore a good first test bed. First impressions: thumbs up, but with the slightest incline to the left. Here are a bunch of quick takes on Apple's latest operating system and vaguely related topics:

• Stability? Uhhhhh, well, less than a day after we upgraded this PowerBook to Panther, it experienced its first kernel panic ever. That doesn't bode terribly well. Here's hoping it was just a one-time thing.

• Faithful viewer Raffi Saltman was the first to note that someone was asleep at the switch as far as the Apple Canada home page was concerned. As of late Monday morning, the site was still counting down to Panther-- or rather, it was counting up since Panther. (It's fixed now.) Couple that with the New York Times reporting that Microsoft's "Longhorn" operating system "is not expected to be shipped until late 1995 or 1996," and it's pretty clear that time warp technology features heavily in all modern operating systems.

• Speed is good. Speed works. And Panther does have some speed to it; after Bare Feats originally reported that Panther offered no speed boost over Jaguar in their initial Power Mac G5 tests, we got a little edgy-- but Panther subjectively feels faster on this PowerBook, and Macs Only! confirms that the speed of many functions is vastly improved on G4 systems, and Bare Feats has since found some speed buried in there. And let's face it-- the G5 owners need more speed like they need an extra belly button. No one needs to carry that much lint.

• Slow is good. Slow works. Faithful viewer macMaestro notes that you can hold down the shift key while invoking Exposé to make it move in slo-mo, just like you always could with the Genie Effect. Cooooool. Now we're going to play with it for another three months.

• A new voice! Where the heck did that come from? Faithful viewer Allen Huffman noticed that the new default text-to-speech voice is "Vicki," which sounds basically like "Victoria" on decaf-- which is a good thing, because man that lady always sounded overwrought. Anyway, Vicki's nice. Give her a whirl.

• Faithful viewer mrmgraphics reports that Microsoft is prominently promoting Panther on its Mactopia web site. Duck and cover, kiddies, 'cause here comes the apocalypse!

So there you have it: life during Panther is at least as wild and crazy as the parties that launched it. And something tells us that it's only going to get crazier.

Meanwhile, this just in: we have no memory of the encounter, but apparently on Friday night we ran into Jeremiah Cohick of Switch fame, who has posted photographic evidence of the meeting. Interestingly enough, though, in the photo Jack is wearing a stylish AtAT mock turtleneck, which was conspicuously missing when we regained consciousness a little while ago. Hmmmmmm. Not that we're making unfounded accusations or anything, but if anyone in the greater Boston area happens to spot Mr. Cohick wearing a black mock turtleneck sporting a nifty red and white logo, you are advised to alert the authorities but not to approach the subject, lest you lose the shirt off your back, as well.

That guy always did have shifty eyes...

So Panther's finally here, and everyone's all giddy with the sheer niftiness of it all. But it's only a matter of time before Microsoft totally steamrolls us all with Longhorn, right? Granted, that next version of Windows isn't available yet like Panther is, but it's still right over there-- lurking in the shadows of development (or, since this is a Microsoft operating system we're talking about, lurking in the shadows of "development"), biding its time and preparing to pounce. And when it does, will we Mac users all look at it and think, "gee, that's so far ahead of Panther we should all switch to Windows right now"?

Well, no-- for one thing, longhorns are notoriously lousy at pouncing, and it's actually pretty comical to watch them try. For another thing, Longhorn isn't expected to ship until 2006, so unless Apple spends the next three years devoting 100% of its development resources to its long-awaited multithreaded, multiprocessor-aware, Altivec-enhanced Mac OS X port of the System 6 "Puzzle" desk accessory, we'll be long past Panther by then anyhow. But the main reason why we think most Mac users won't be impressed is this: so far Longhorn is ugly as sin.

Actually, it's uglier. As a matter of fact, it's uglier than sin is when it's just gotten up in the morning after two hours of sleep and is nursing a hangover. After a botched facelift.

Let's put it this way: in its current state, Longhorn is uglier than Ballmer. 'Nuff said.

Yes, according to IDG, Longhorn just made its first official public appearance today at Microsoft's Professional Developer's Conference, and as faithful viewer William Higgins III points out, based on screenshots of the latest development build (such as this one, just one of many linked at WindowsBeta.net), Longhorn's interface looks kind of like Microsoft hired a half-blind intern to try to copy the big, round, inset buttons and brushed metal look of iTunes, crank the whole thing a few shades darker, smooth it out, and then adorn it with color-clashing icons and the same crappy jagged text Windows users have put up with for millennia. (Note that they've even copied the "lighter in the center" gradient from Apple's brushed metal apps, except that on the Mac it's subtle enough where you may never even have noticed it before, whereas Longhorn beats you over the head with it until your eyes deflate.)

Seriously, can anyone look at this desktop and not be simultaneously baffled by its contents and assaulted by its visual design? We start getting short of breath when we try looking at it for more than a few seconds. Wasn't this supposed to be simpler?

Note that we're not lambasting Longhorn for any hardcore technical reasons (some of its announced features sound almost like innovation, amazingly enough), and we're certain that its look and feel will probably change drastically over the course of the next three years, but right now... well, let's just say that most Mac users wouldn't be able to use Longhorn's current user interface for longer than about ten minutes without taking anti-nausea medication or putting a paper bag over the monitor. Finally, something Mac users can agree on! Longhorn: whether you love "brushed metal" or hate it, you will definitely not like this.

You know, a lot of viewers have been asking why we haven't addressed Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's recent public insistence, as reported by Computer Reseller News, that Windows is more secure than Linux because open source software is inherently less secure than anything Microsoft's development team squeezes out. Likewise, just as many viewers are wondering why we never said anything about Intel CEO Craig Barrett's admission to ZDNet that his company has been courting Apple to switch to x86 for years, but now finds the prospect "less and less interesting" because of Apple's "2 percent of the market."

Well, the painful truth is that we found out about both statements within mere minutes of each other last Wednesday, and Jack sprained a frontal lobe trying to decide which massively incorrect statement to deride first. At least, we thought it was a sprain, but the x-rays showed that the lobe was actually fractured. That's right, people: the sheer incomprehensibility of Ballmer's and Barrett's blatant untruths-- whether intentional or simply ignorant-- actually broke Jack's brain. You try writing truculent commentary with part of your brain in a cast. Worse yet, try getting people to sign the cast. Trust us, neither is a walk in the park.

Anyway, Jack's healing up nicely, now, but he's still a little loagy and occasionally when writing he unknowingly uses the wrong kumquats, so we're just going to address this gently. First, we'll hit this Ballmerian statement: "We get a lot of questions. People say, 'We have a security problem; let's fix it. What's your road map for this? What about this? What about this? What about this?' There's no road map for Linux. There's nobody to hold accountable for security with Linux. There's nobody's rear end on the line."

Okay, um, well, nobody except the people who use it, Steve. Who often just happen to be-- surprise!-- the people who can fix it. There's something to be said for an operating system beloved by legions upon legions of geeks who can find obscure bugs, load up the source code, and fix the problems themselves, without having to submit a bug report to Microsoft and wait six months for a reply. Ballmer seems to think that people would rather have some freakin' "road map" than an actual fix. But the man also shaves with a crude sharpened stone tool and occasionally eats babies, so we suppose we'll just chalk that up to cultural differences.

Now, about that Barrett assertion that Apple only has 2% of the market-- that sounds rather lower than any numbers we've seen in recent quarters, so what gives? Could it be that someone's just a little bitter about trying to win Apple as a customer for all these years and finally getting totally spanked by IBM's G5, so now he's downplaying Apple's importance? Who's he trying to convince-- us, or himself? "Less and less interesting" indeed. Friendly suggestion to ol' Craig: you might want to seek out some tips on buying grapes before the next time you stop at the fruit stand, because it sounds to us like the last bunch you bought may have been a wee bit on the sour side.

Now if you'll excuse us, Jack has to rest his lobe.