What's this? Yet another scene about those tardy G5 speed bumps? Yeah, yeah, we're well aware that we're starting to sound like the "No New G5s Yet" Network ("All Whining, All the Time!"), but we really just have to bring up the subject one last time and then we promise we'll shut up about it for at least fifteen minutes. Well, maybe ten.

Five, at least. Honestly. You have our word.

Really, we wouldn't raise the subject at all, but it's just that we hate to think of all you nice people, smacked down time and time again on the G5 expectations front, getting your hopes up for speed-bumped Power Macs surfacing later this month. We know, we know-- the rumor mill at large figured that NAB was a pretty good venue for a G5 roll-out, but you have to remember that the rumor mill consensus is a moving target. It's Slippy, Like the Wind™. A month ago the consensus expected the intro by the end of March. Back in December everyone was looking to the Stevenote in January. Generally speaking, you can create your own rumor mill ship dates by 1) picking an arbitrary date approximately three weeks in the future, 2) waiting until two weeks pass, and 3) adding three weeks to the original target date. Lather, rinse, repeat as necessary. It'd probably be just about as accurate, and just think of the time you'd save!

So anyway, you remember those first little rumblings about the possibility of Power Macs maybe not being upgraded until June or July? Well, while AppleInsider originally stated that Apple's latest G5 promos ending two days before WWDC was not an indication of G5 slippage until that event, apparently it just changed its mind: now AI claims that Apple has hinted to "top resellers" that "the company would be 'refreshing' many of its professional products" when WWDC rolls around. And just to crush the dream a teensy bit further, reportedly Apple retail stores are now receiving "large" shipments of existing G5 systems, whereas the inventory's been spread mighty thin for the past few weeks. That could certainly be interpreted as an inventory clearance gone wrong. (When you clear supplies of the old product, it sort of helps to ship the new one.)

AI's spin on things is that when Apple couldn't get 2.5ish GHz systems out the door by the middle of March, it decided to skip the speed bump altogether and just punt for an upgrade in June. Here's hoping that turns out to be the 3.0 GHz system Steve promised at last year's convention, because otherwise there'll be a whole lot of frowny-faced geeks moping around Moscone after the Stevenote.

Now, we're certainly not saying that this constitutes hard proof or anything, but we just didn't want you folks setting yourselves up for disappointment just in case the none-'til-WWDC thing turns out to be true. Just keep that optimism in check and you'll be fine. And that's the last we're going to say on the subject.

For at least three minutes. Or two. Whatever.

The party's over, but the fun is just beginning! Have you ever thought about how boring it must be to be a Mac virus specialist? Every day you see your Wintel counterparts scurrying hither and thither desperately fighting a dozen raging viral fires simultaneously, risking life and limb to secure people's data. When witnessing their incessant acts of courage, men gasp, women swoon, and little kids say "forget all this firefighter stuff-- I'm going to be a Windows virus expert when I grow up!" Meanwhile, the Mac virus guys are sitting around watching dust motes whirling gently in sunbeams and counting ticks from the clock on the wall, all while waiting for that red crisis phone to ring. Which it hasn't done in, well, just about forever, it seems. In other words, "Mac virus watchdog" ranks right up there on the not-much-to-do scale with "Maytag repairman."

Well, wake up, people, 'cause that hotline's finally a-ringin'! Faithful viewer Roberta De Gregorio was first to inform us that, after three whole years on the market (not counting the Public Beta), Mac OS X has finally contracted its first virus. Well, not really a virus, technically speaking, but close enough; the Maytag repairmen over at Intego have described a new Mac OS X Trojan called MP3Concept, which exploits a no-no in Mac OS X that could be used by naughty people to "delete all of a user's personal files," "send an email message containing a copy of itself to other users," and "infect other MP3, JPEG, GIF, or QuickTime files." Woo-hoo, our first virusy thing! We're finally in the big leagues! Now that Mac OS X has been proven susceptible to icky stuff like this, can Apple finally start counting on massive purchases by government and big business buyers?

Meanwhile, we have to say, this MP3Concept beast is pretty darn clever. Apparently the Trojan itself is really and truly an actual MP3 file, and even plays like one if opened in iTunes-- but there's a payload of arbitrary code in the file's ID3 tag, the chunk of data that's supposed to hold all that info about a song's title, artist, album, genre, favorite IHOP pancake syrup, etc. So the mechanism, if we understand it, is that if the MP3 file is double-clicked, the code gets executed-- and it can then do whatever evil stuff it wants (well, short of really screwing with the system software; at least Mac OS X prompts for admin passwords before letting anyone do any serious damage) and then send the file to iTunes, so that the user doesn't even notice anything wrong: he double-clicked an MP3, it opened in iTunes, and iTunes played it. And only much later does he notice that all of his files have been renamed after characters from '50s sitcoms. There's nothing worse than finding out your iPhoto library database no longer works because it's been renamed "Herb Dunkel."

So there you have it, folks; our humble platform has finally been ushered into the Virus Age. Apple's not kidding; Mac OS X really is getting more and more applications every day! But hey, at least the Mac virus folks will finally get to feel like they're earning their paychecks.

You know, as much as we love the iTunes Music Store (and trust us-- we do), it took us practically a whole year to work up the courage to buy an album we didn't already own in some form or another. We just had a really hard time working through some of the issues, you know? Like, iTMS albums don't come with lyric booklets. The "cover art" is just a low-res scan of the booklet's front page. Songs that were recorded to flow together from one track to the next wind up having little skips in between. At 128 kpbs AAC, the music sounds good, but we're still buying a lossily-encoded version of the actual CD track. And despite all that, at $9.99, downloading an album from the iTMS is only marginally cheaper than buying the actual CD and encoding it ourselves, especially if we buy it secondhand.

So it wasn't until just a few weeks ago that our need for instant gratification won out over our misgivings about owning a shadow of the recording instead of the recording itself. (For the curious, we finally took the plunge on the day that Guilt Show came out, because we were too lazy to drive to Newbury Comics.) We finally buckled and decided that ten bucks isn't that bad a price for a reasonable facsimile of the real thing, especially if we can start listening to it twenty seconds after clicking "BUY ALBUM" and we don't have to put on shoes or actually-- horrors of horrors-- leave the house.

But wouldja believe that, while the rest of us wrestle with the question of whether $9.99 is too much for an incomplete digital representation of a physical CD, the Big 5 major labels are all convinced that ten bucks is far too cheap? 'Strue! The Wall Street Journal reports that, caving to industry pressure, the iTMS has been selling Fly or Die by N.E.R.D. for $16.99-- although now it's $13.99, so we're not sure if that was an Apple "price adjustment" or a WSJ error, but in any event, it's still 50 cents more expensive than the actual, non-lossy, complete-with-booklet physical CD at Amazon.com. Instant gratification is one thing, but this is starting to look a little ridiculous.

Furthermore, reportedly the Big 5 are "discussing ways to boost the price of single-song downloads on hot releases" to as high as $2.49, which is the final and incontestable proof-- as if there were any doubt in your mind-- that the major labels are all the spawn of Satan. Geezers like ourselves may recall that when CDs were just starting to show up alongside vinyl records (yes, kids, we spun slabs of vinyl on a round flat thing and dragged a needle along their grooves, and that's how we made music by which we could paint stick figures on our cave walls), they cost more than records even though they were technically cheaper to produce; the recording industry said, "hey, don't worry-- once the format catches on and CDs become more popular, we'll lower the price to pass the manufacturing savings onto you." Remember how that, um, never happened? Because this whole price hike on song downloads, with their zero manufacturing costs, is like déjà vu all over again.

Personally, our favorite part of this whole thing is how the major labels are blaming the stores: "retailers, not record companies, ultimately set the prices consumers pay." Uh... rrrrright. Even if that were true, all that means is that the labels are raising download prices on purpose to encourage people to buy the physical CDs instead, presumably because the extra paper and plastic consumed hastens the demise of the planet. (It's the whole "spawn of Satan" thing, remember?) So anyway, try and enjoy the 99-cent songs and $9.99 albums while you can, folks, because it sounds like the major labels are doing everything they can to foment a bloody coup. Everybody grab something blunt and heavy!