This just in: Virginia Tech's G5-based supercomputer, dubbed "Big Mac" by the quick wits of the tech community, has not officially improved in performance in the past two days-- and yes, given the rate at which that sucker's been boosting its score, that most certainly is news. For now it's holding steady at 9.555 teraflops, which firmly establishes it as the third-fastest supercomputer in the world. Sliding into second is pretty unlikely at this point, seeing as it would need to squeeze out another four teraflops or so over the course of the next couple of weeks-- but with more optimizations to come, Big Mac has a solid shot of making its mark on the charts with a double-digit score.

At least, that's what Dr. Srinidhi Varadarajan said at O'Reilly's Mac OS X Conference, and he's the Big Mac Daddy quickly finding himself thrust into the heady vapors of Tech Superstardom. Faithful viewer David Triska directed us to a fascinating MacDevCenter article about Varadarajan's appearance at the conference, and it's just jam-packed with nifty fun facts about the Big Mac cluster which kept the audience hanging on his every word. Wouldja believe that the project only really kicked off last March? And that Varadarajan was still trying to buy Dells when Apple announced the G5 on June 23rd? Yes, he found out about the G5 at the same time as the rest of us-- maybe even later, since we're all slavering Mac fans hanging all over the latest rumors like a cheap suit, whereas when Varadarajan placed his "fairly large order" at the Apple Store three days after the Stevenote, he had never actually even owned a Mac before.

By the way, if you want to be like Varadarajan, head on over to the Apple Store and toss 1,100 dual Power Macs in your cart. It's a rush. "Find out how to get your order for $70,808 per month!" (Just make sure One-Click is turned off, or you might have some 'splainin' to do when that credit card bill shows up.)

But back to the issue of that performance score: Varadarajan confirms that the "latest numbers are 9.555 tera" and the folks at Virginia Tech "still have more tricks left" to try to snake another 10% before the official score deadline to become "the first academic machine to cross 10 tera." No wonder Varadarajan was being treated like, in the words of WIRED, a "nerd superhero." Big brains in the field positively gushed over the man's prowess; Derek Bastille of the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center says he was "blindsided" by Varadarajan's "incredible" achievement. The audience gave him a standing ovation. Nerd groupies threw underwear on stage and then tailed him into the bar after the show. But what do you expect? The guy built the world's third-fastest supercomputer in seven months from a standing start, and did it for $5.2 million-- a mere pittance among the supercomputing set.

Sounds like it's time for the man to sign some endorsements, doesn't it? After all, it's either that or start wearing rhinestone jumpsuits and doing karate onstage. Since Varadarajan has "received calls from other supercomputing sites" asking for his secret, it's obvious what will come next: Varadarajan bought the Macs that comprise his cluster online at the Apple Store, so what could be more natural than ready-made clusters sold on Apple's site? One click gets you the 1,100 Power Macs, the Infiniband high-speed networking equipment, all the cooling gear you'll ever need, and 700 pizzas to feed the student volunteers who'll set it all up. Doc Varadarajan's Instant Big Mac: now available for just $5,200,000.00. (Add $19 for custom engraving.)

"Ladies and gentlemen, Srinidhi has left the building!" Thankyuhverruhmuch.

Halloween is nearly upon us, people, and what better way to get into a spooky mood than to tell scary stories by the glow of a Mac display? Okay, let's see, now... there's that one with the hook on the car door handle. And the one with the babysitter getting calls from inside the house. Um... oh, yeah-- there's the one with guy who gives a dead chick a lift and she leaves her sweater in the car or something. There was one about a rabbi, a priest, and a duck walking into a bar, but we never really found it to be all that scary. Maybe we're just jaded or something.

Ah, to heck with it; let's just drag out the big guns, shall we? How about the Tale of the Five Thousand Vanishing Macs? Faithful viewer David Poves pointed a blood-curdling finger at an Australian IT article which reports that Optus, some mega-huge communications company Down Under, is preparing to "dump Apple from about 5,000 desktops, ending 11 years of loyalty which began in 1992 with the rollout of the user-friendly machines across the company in the world's largest business deployment of the computers." Ooooh, we're going to have to sleep with the lights on tonight, boy howdy.

Dumping 5,000 Macs? What a silly thing to do! Don't those guys realize that they could cluster them instead and then get mobbed by starstruck young geeks asking them to autograph various body parts? Meanwhile, anyone at Apple working on that whole "Macs in Enterprise" project must be clutching desperately at a blankie right now and hiding under the bed, because hearing that the world's largest installation of Macs in big business is "now in the process of moving all its users to Windows-based machines" can't be a good omen.

It seems that the Mac-dumping comes as a result of "an acceleration of the move to bring Optus software platforms together with those of its parent SingTel." Ahhhh, yes... the old "Mac-using company gets bought out by Windows-using parent company who subsequently shovels the Macs out the door" scenario; we've seen it many times. Well, a few times. Okay, we've seen it once-- but we've seen it up close and personal, and trust us when we tell you that once was plenty enough. Ugly stuff. Evil stuff. Dare we say... scary stuff? Awoooooooooo!!!

Oh, goody, we love class action settlement terms! What's not to like? A whole slew of people who never asked to be included in the first place get their choice of either a coupon for a free appetizer when purchased with a full-price entree at Bennigan's or a check for $15 if they send in that washing machine that broke down three years ago due to what turned out to be a systemic manufacturing defect. So the company that screwed up is out a wad of cash (or a wad of valuable money-saving coupons), the customers get their conciliatory potato skins, and the lawyers get hundreds of thousands of dollars for championing the cause of downtrodden washing machine buyers everywhere. Justice is served and it's all bacony!

Okay, so we don't really love 'em all that much-- which is why we've kinda been avoiding telling you about the preliminary approval of one of Apple's latest class actions, namely, that one about how Mac OS X didn't support a handful of features on various "supported" Macs when it first shipped. The fact of the matter is, though, Apple flat-out admitted that it had no intention of supporting some of those technologies in Mac OS X (like the woefully slow ATI RAGE II+ video chip in the original Bondi Blue iMacs, for obvious reasons), so they couldn't have had much of a defense. The settlement, therefore, comes as no surprise, and if you're one of the lucky qualifying class members, just wait'll you hear what you're entitled to get:

• You can get your money back-- all you need to do is return that copy of Mac OS X you bought two years ago. Oh, and you have to "declare under penalty of perjury as follows: 'I have not regularly used Mac OS X on my Covered Product,'" etc. etc. etc. Because there are a ton of people out there who paid $129 for Mac OS X, discovered that it didn't play DVDs well, and therefore wiped it from their hard drives and kept the CD-ROMs in a drawer just waiting for the day when some class action lawsuit might let them claim a refund. Score!

• Or, if you somehow managed to survive the inability to watch Black Knight with the director's commentary on your Tangerine iBook and therefore did keep using Mac OS X, you can fill out a claim form on which you "declare under penalty of perjury that [your] ability to run certain graphics applications, games and/or to play DVDs was impaired while running Mac OS X on [your] Covered Product" and score a coupon for $25 off any purchase of $99 or more from the Apple Store. Sadly, they don't seem to sell DVDs anymore, and even when they did, they probably didn't carry much in the Martin Lawrence oeuvre. Sorry 'bout that.

So that's that. We don't expect a whole lot of folks to claim the full refund, but there are probably a bunch of customers out there with early iMacs, fruit-flavored iBooks, pre-FireWire PowerBooks, and beige G3s who really did limp along with Mac OS X since 10.0 and are therefore entitled to the $25 discount at the Apple Store, which isn't a bad score, if you think about it. Of course, it's no Bloomin' Onion, but hey, what is?