Want to know how you can tell we've officially entered the consumer frenzy known as the Holiday Shopping Season™, which encompasses both pre-occasion thematic sales and post-holiday clearances? Clue number 1: look at the calendar and note that it's after Easter. Clue number 2: look at the calendar again and note that it's more than a week before next Easter. Clue number 3: Apple has apparently instructed its marketing department to stop being so gosh-darned subtle about the iPod and really start cramming it down people's throats-- figuratively speaking, of course. Not that Apple is averse to cramming iPods down people's throats in a sharply literal sense; it's just that they haven't quite figured out how to get people to pay $299 while said cramming is underway. But rest assured, Steve's got top people working on it right now.

Ranking among the most visible of gloves-off iPod saturation techniques is yet another new iPod commercial, once more starring the crowd-pleasing and oh-so-mysterious silhouette dancers-- who are, incidentally, shaping up to be the most successful product of the Apple Underground Genetic Labs since Greg Joswiak. The commercial itself is the same old same old, except that this time a handful of the shadowy little rumpshakers are gettin' down and fun-kay to a remix of "Rock Star" by N.E.R.D. as viewers are directed to iTunes.com.

And yet a new commercial is just the tip of the iPod hypeberg. Faithful viewer Mmmbop - ba dooba dop - ba doobop ("must... kill... parents...") notes a new web site launched by Apple at iPodRocks.com, which shamelessly pimps the player out to impressionable youngsters as the hip thing for which to pester the parents come gift-getting time. The site makes such brazen suggestions as persuading Mom and Dad by pointing out that the iPod can "record voice notes for class" and "includes a built-in calendar that makes it harder to explain missing biology." Oh, and then there's this little gem: "Comes with iTunes, the only way to connect to the iTunes Music Store-- the amazing new (and legal) way to buy and download music." In other words, "buy me an iPod or I'll keep using KaZaA and the RIAA will sue you blind." If that doesn't boost iPod sales, we don't know what will.

Of course, Apple isn't just targeting teens and the mass market in general for iPod ownership; the company is also hoping that customers with existing iPods will trade up to newer models. To that end, Apple probably isn't planning to hype its new official battery service program too hard, because they'd obviously rather that you spend at least $299 on a new iPod than a mere $99 on getting your bum battery replaced. Nevertheless, if your old iPod's battery is a mere shadow of its former 10-hour self, for 99 clams you can send Apple your 'Pod and they'll send you back "functionally equivalent new, used, or refurbished iPod equipment." For that reason, MacRumors notes that "engraved iPods may simply have a longer turnaround." Well, duh-- can you imagine how labor-intensive it must be for Apple to dig through piles of reconditioned iPods looking for another one that's engraved "Congrats on the nose job, Eunice"?

But if your iPod has sentimental value (and really, whose doesn't?) and you simply can't bear the thought of Apple replacing it with some random refurb just so you can listen to music for longer than seven minutes at a stretch, you can always replace your 'Pod's battery yourself by picking up a new one at ipodbattery.com-- and for half Apple's price. You'll have to dig around in your iPod's guts, however, which may make some owners a tad uncomfortable.

Ah, the heck with it-- just buy a new iPod and be done with it. C'mon. You know you want to. All the cool kids are doing it. Besides, what else would you get yourself for the holidays, a sweater vest and some thermal socks? Not with Apple's marketing machine pumping away at full blast you won't. Resistance is useless.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are thrilled to announce the latest endeavor by the folks who perfected the art of self-defeatingly esoteric wiseass tech drama and spewed it all over you for the past six years. Prepare yourselves for... the AtAT Music Store! That's right, people, we're going into the downloadable music business. We're going to have songs. Like, 200,000 of them or something. Maybe more, or possibly much, much fewer. The details on quantities haven't really been ironed out yet, but there will be songs, that much you can count on. Maybe. Oh, and they're going to be cheap-- less than 99 cents, we figure, unless something happens that makes them more than 99 cents. But we can state with all certainty that they won't cost exactly 99 cents, we can promise you that. But don't hold us to it.

In fact, you know what? Just forget about the details, because you can check it all out for yourselves when the AtAT Music Store launches in two weeks. Or next year sometime.

Maybe June. June's good.

Okay, fine, to be honest, we have no idea when it'll launch. It might be quite a while. In fact, we haven't done anything at all to prepare the AtAT Music Store short of making this announcement, and the only reason we're doing that is because we just didn't want to feel left out. Seriously, everyone's got a downloadable music service these days-- it's like the mid-to-late-2003 equivalent of the Rubik's Cube in terms of sheer ubiquity; we're pretty sure they're even giving them away down at the bank when you open a new checking account.

Actually, let us qualify that slightly: everyone's announced a downloadable music service, which is why we figured we should hop on the bandwagon before it ran us over. Oh, don't give us that look, we are not alone in this; a United Press International article confirms the buzz that's been circulating for weeks, reporting that even Walmart is getting into the iTunes Music Store cloning game with a new service launching "as soon as next week" and boasting 200,000 songs priced at "less than the customary 99 cents charged by competitors."

As for the very latest development in the "Everybody's Got A Music Service" saga, we were informed by email last night that MP3.com has sold "certain assets" to CNET, and consequently will "no longer be accessible in its current form" in less than three weeks. Why? Because, as MacMinute reports, CNET "plans to introduce a new online music service in the near future." Oh, goody-- CNET, too! Gee, this couldn't possibly be the reason why CNET has been so desperately down on the iPod and iTunes lately, could it? Nawwwww...

So, Walmart and CNET are the two latest me-toos in the race to lose oodles of cash selling downloadable music-- well, and us, of course. And don't worry about us falling into the trap of selling music and losing money on every song. Just as Apple sells money-losing songs at the iTMS in order to boost sales of money-making iPods, we're going to sell money-losing songs in order to promote our daily money-losing online Apple-flavored soap opera! See how that works?

Well, people, it looks like you can head into the weekend secure in the knowledge that the whole supercomputer race thingy has wound to a close for now. The Dongarra Report hasn't been updated in over a week, so Virginia Tech's "Big Mac" G5-based cluster is still sitting at 10.280 teraflops and will presumably keep that score in the new TOP500 rankings, which will be officially introduced during the Supercomputer Conference starting tomorrow. Considering that Big Mac is the first Macintosh-based supercomputer (Apple's G4 marketing dogma notwithstanding) and it only cost roughly as much as a Super Big Gulp and a pack of Trident gum, it's pretty darn impressive that the thing is apparently going to be ranked third-fastest on the planet. Major props to the big Hokie brains who pulled this off.

Mac users should enjoy Big Mac's third-place standing while we can, since it's probably not going to last for long. The TOP500 list is recalculated every six months, and new supercomputers are being built all the time; indeed, even the mighty 35-teraflop Earth Simulator might lose hold of its massive first-place lead in as little as a year and a half. Faithful viewer The Derekcat notes an Associated Press article about Blue Gene/L, a new supercomputer looking to go live in early 2005; reportedly a test node just cranked out 2 teraflops to rank 73rd on the latest list. And sure, that doesn't sound all that impressive-- until you realize that said node is only one of Blue Gene/L's eventual 128.

We're not kidding: Blue Gene/L will consist of 128 nodes with 1,024 processors each-- that's 131,072 processors for those of you too stunned to do the math-- and reportedly may reach speeds of 360 teraflops. In contrast, Big Mac starts looking like a White Castle slider that got hit with a shrinking ray. The only saving grace, of course, is that at least it's not an x86 cluster: Blue Gene/L is being built by IBM, the same geniuses who made Big Mac the current price/performance leader-- and whose continuing PowerPC development will no doubt make future Power Macs even better suited for use in cheap academic supercomputing clusters.

Indeed, with Virginia Tech reporting off-the-scale interest by other institutions looking to build similar cheap-but-zippy clusters and Power Macs slated to hit 3.0 GHz by the end of the summer, in coming years it'll be Big Mac's kids and grandkids populating the upper reaches of the supercomputing charts-- and for a while, at least, it sounds like Uncle Blue Gene/L will be keeping an eye on them from the top slot. Just one big happy family.