Don't get us wrong-- we think Panther is swell. The Pantherfication of the AtAT compound is largely complete, and it's the little things in Apple's latest operating system that make all the difference; for example, raw and blinding speed. Panther's Mail, Preview, and overall interface are so much faster than the equivalents in 10.1 and 10.2 that we occasionally have to brush away an errant tear of joy. (Of course, spending all that time wiping away tears more than offsets any time we would have saved because of Panther's speed boost, but that's beside the point.)

And Exposé is far more than just a must-have window management tool: it's also the best baby toy we've come across in ages. Just keep a photo of the baby's smiling mug as your Desktop picture (or, if your 18-month-old just happens to be desperately in love with Homer Simpson despite your repeated attempts to convince her that 1. he's fictional, and 2. he'd never leave Marge in a million years, go ahead and use a picture of him instead), cover it up with a slew of windows, and the F11 key yields instant "Peek-A-Boo" gratification. It's a surefire giggle every time. The only drawback we've experienced is saliva on the LCD and keyboard because Anya keeps kissing the screen.

Now that we think about it, between the tears and the drool, Panther seems to have necessitated a lot of wiping things up. They don't warn you about that on the box.

But the minor inconvenience of constantly reaching for the paper towels isn't the only Panther drawback we've encountered; despite all its little niceties (TextEdit reads Word documents! The Finder creates ZIP archives! Font Book is... well, it's, um, Font Book. But still!), we've installed Panther on three Macs so far and we're having at least minor problems on all of them. Our Pantherized Pismo is as stable as they come, but we've mentioned our every-other-day kernel panics on a formerly rock-solid 12-inch PowerBook before-- and interestingly enough, even a new Archive & Install didn't clear up the problem. And no, it's not bad third-party RAM; the poor crashy thing's still running with only its original Apple-supplied 256 MB.

While we haven't had any Panther kernel panics on the dual-800 MHz G4 yet, we did have a crash where everything on the screen froze, including the menubar clock, requiring a hard restart. Presumably because of the new journaled file system, when we were back up and running again we found several files that we had saved with extensive changes had reverted to earlier states. Frankly, we'd almost rather risk disk corruption than lose changes we'd definitely saved to disk. (An entire folder full of mail had reverted to an unread and unfiled state as well.)

Meanwhile, even though it hasn't actually crashed, the Pismo has had some definite weirdness with Panther, specifically with networking. Occasionally Classic apps can't see any network volumes mounted through the "Connect to Server..." command, which was never a problem prior to Panther. And how's this for excitement and adventure and really wild things? Dragging a network-mounted folder to the Finder Toolbar (not the sidebar) seemed to work fine and was more convenient than putting the same thing in the sidebar, since clicking Toolbar icons allows you to scroll back up the disk hierarchy in Column View. (Clicking sidebar icons does not, which is our single biggest gripe about that.) Anyway, upon restart the Finder immediately presented the "Connect to Server..." dialog and then would hang with an infinitely spinning rainbow cursor after the password was entered.

Forcing the Finder to relaunch just started the whole problem over again; clicking "Cancel" yielded the rainbow cursor, too. Eventually we figured out that we could launch a Classic app from the Dock (thank goodness we had one in there), launch the trusty old Chooser from the Classic Apple menu, mount the server that way, and then the Panther Finder started properly and allowed us to drag that folder icon back out of the Finder Toolbar, thus restoring the universe to a state of peace and harmony. Fun times.

And so we finally come to the point of this extended gripefest: not even a week has passed since Apple's release of 10.3.1 (which fixed the two nastiest Panther bugs, involving data loss on FireWire drives and FileVault file corruption), and now reports of an imminent 10.3.2 update are already showing up at The Register and (for some reason) Microsoft Watch. According to release notes provided with developer seeds, 10.3.2 includes "changes to networking code, graphics drivers, USB drivers, webDAV, international text support and AppleShare server software." Sounds like we may get some relief from at least some of our Panther problems, although we'd feel a lot more confident if there was something in there about how it "fixes every issue ever encountered by the AtAT staff, past, present, and future." But we'll take whatever we can get.

All we can say is, if Ronald McDonald is as touchy about people leaking corporate secrets as Steve Jobs is, he's probably giving the Hamburglar orders to whack the CEO of EMI even as you read this. You probably recall that a couple of weeks ago the New York Post reported that McDonald's was in talks to out-Pepsi Pepsi by launching a promotion wherein it would give away one billion free song downloads from the iTunes Music Store; almost immediately, McDonald's issued a statement to the press denying that such a deal existed and stating in no uncertain terms that "there are no agreements to announce, so anything else is pure speculation." (Notice how it doesn't deny that an iTMS deal might be in negotiations. Clever.)

Well, MacRumors somehow managed to dig up a webcast from EMI's Group Interim Results presentation this morning, and reportedly 38 minutes in, CEO Martin Bandier discusses legal music download services and then serves up this doozy of a quote: "There is real potential for the future, especially when Pepsi Cola makes a commitment to give away up to 100 million downloads and McDonald's commits to 1 billion in download giveaways as part of a promotional campaign." To which we can only reply, hmmmmmm.

Okay, we lied-- we can actually reply a lot more than that. It's just that now we've got this vivid mental image of an enraged Ronald McDonald swearing a blue streak as he puts a hit on Bandier and the Hamburglar saying "Robble Robble" as he gleefully pours acid on the brake line in Bandier's car.

It's a little distracting, to say the least.

So what do you think? Is Bandier in on the deal, or is he just a guy who happens to read the New York Post? Considering he heads up one of the Big Five music labels, there's every chance that he's hep to massive special deals brewing secretly in iTMS County-- so maybe the deal is real and Bandier just slipped and blabbed it to the world. On the other hand, any such promotional deal would probably be negotiated entirely between McDonald's and Apple, so there's no particular reason EMI would need to be involved in the slightest. Basically, it can go either way, and we won't know for sure until either this McDonald's deal comes to pass or we all grow old and die without ever seeing a commercial for "McTunes."

Actually, we suppose there might be one more way to tell what's what: we could listen to the actual webcast in hopes of unearthing more clues. We're currently far too lazy to bother, however, but if you're game to give it a try, we like you so much we'll even tell you what to listen for: right after Bandier mentions the McDonald's deal, if he pauses and then says, "wait, did I just say that last part out loud?" then it's a pretty good bet that there's a mighty miffed clown out there putting a price on his head.

Remember on Monday when we mentioned a couple of recent awards that had been chucked in Uncle Steve's general direction? Well, faithful viewer Ricardo Salvador chased down one more to toss on the pile: the 2003 Scientific American 50 List of Winners has been published, and Steve wins in the Business category of Communications. Why? Because he "started an online music service that serves as a model for the rest of the record industry."

He did? Man, you learn something new every day! Say, now we know where Apple got the idea for the iTunes Music Store! And here we thought it was so gosh-darned original...

Okay, so we're being just a wee bit of a collective wiseass, here, but it's to raise an interesting point. (We promise.) If you look at the other winners in the list, you'll notice that they tend to be organizations, not individuals, unless the listing was indeed celebrating the accomplishment of a specific individual-- for example, Fernando de Castro Reinach, who "started biotechnology companies that are trying to improve Brazilian crops." The companies are working on the crop issue, but Scientific American credits Reinach for having started said companies in the first place. In contrast, Intel wins in the Computing category. Not Craig Barrett-- Intel. So why is Steve getting all the credit for starting the iTMS?

The way we see it, there are two ways to interpret this development. The first is to assume that Scientific American is being exceptionally insightful in recognizing that the real challenge in creating the iTMS was not in clearing the technical hurdles (which were substantial), but rather in persuading the Luddite and piracy-paranoid recording industry to license out its music in downloadable form, which it had previously resisted like grim death itself. In other words, Scientific American realizes that any big tech company could probably have come up with something approximating the iTMS's actual store (only, you know, suckier), but it was Steve's communication skills and Reality Distortion Field that actually gave the store something to sell.

The other interpretation is that Scientific American has stumbled upon one of the best-kept secrets in all of high-tech and inadvertently blabbed it to the whole world: Steve Jobs is Apple Computer. And not in a synecdochic sense-- literally, Steve is it. All those other 10,210 employees? Nothing but hired actors, paid to prop up the illusion of a vibrant, churning tech company alive with the blood of thousands of talented and enthusiastic individuals all contributing to the greater good; in reality, Steve is all and all is Steve. He runs the whole show. He's the CEO, sure, but he also writes all the software, designs all the hardware, answers all the tech support calls, makes the coffee, sweeps the floors, and does security patrols at night.

Now, it just so happens that we know which of the two above scenarios is true, but we promised not to tell, so you're on your own from here on out. Don't bother asking; we're sworn to secrecy.

Oh, all right, here's a hint: we hear that once he even fired himself in the elevator.