Scream, children-- scream like you've never screamed before, for if ever there were just cause for blind panic and the despair-drenched caterwauling of the damned, that curse is surely upon us! No, it's not the apocalypse-- at least, not in the "sun like sackcloth of hair, moon like blood, seas of wormwood and blood, earth pelted by hail and fire and, yes, yet more blood" sense of the word. It's worse. We're talking about (dunt-dunt-dunt-DUNNNNNNNNN!) a price hike at the iTunes Music Store. AIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!

Remember about a month ago when the Wall Street Journal was jawing about how the five major record labels-- Universal, Sony, BMG, EMI, and Warner Music (who, in Disney dwarf nomenclature, are known as Dopey, Stupid, Half-wit, Clueless, and Dumbass)-- were "discussing ways to boost the price of single-song downloads on hot releases" to as high as $2.49 apiece? Well, faithful viewer mrmgraphics notes that the New York Post now reports that the price hike is practically a fait accompli: "all five of the deals... have already been signed," and "prices for some of the most popular singles could rise to $1.25, according to source familiar with the negotiations." Can this really be happening? Must we truly kiss the 99-cent download goodbye?

Well, no-- at least, not yet, and probably not for the foreseeable future. Faithful viewer Mike Feeney was first to inform us that, according to a Reuters article, Apple has officially gone on the record to deny the Post's claims. Apple spokesperson Natalie Sequeira flat-out states that "these rumors aren't true. We have multiyear agreements with the labels and our prices remain 99 cents a track." While the whole "multiyear agreements" thing is perhaps slightly at odds with Apple's recently-filed 10-Q statement (which explains that "many of the Company's licensing arrangements with these third-party content providers are short-term in nature and do not guarantee the future renewal of these arrangements at commercially reasonable terms"), it's nice to hear Apple come right out and say that its 99 cents-per-track pricing isn't going to budge. For now.

And you can believe it, too, because as we all know, Apple has a policy of not commenting on rumors, and it only bends that rule when absolutely necessary-- such as, when the reports floating around are so stunningly wrong that they might seriously affect the company's stock price. Indeed, we're starting to think that the Post was really just echoing the same stuff about "negotiations" that the Journal said, only a month late. It reports, for example, just as the WSJ did before it, that N.E.R.D.'s Fly or Die album sells for $16.99 on the iTMS. That was true a month ago, but Apple lowered the price to $13.99 almost immediately after the WSJ story hit the streets, and it remains a $13.99 album today. (Memo to the Post: the window of time between fact-checking an article and actually publishing it should probably be less than a month. Especially for a daily paper.)

Oh, and you guys can stop screaming now. We can hear you from here, and frankly, it's getting a little annoying.

You know, the relationship between Apple and its resellers sounds pretty strained lately. During the Second Jobs Dynasty, Apple has really pumped up its direct sales initiative, first with the online Apple Store and then with its own chain of retail boutiques. Toss in rumors of an upcoming stretch into the catalog mail order area and reports of increasing direct sales to big business clients, and it's no wonder that several current and ex-Apple resellers blame Apple for their own declining sales, despite Apple claiming that, for instance, resellers do better when an Apple retail store moves in down the street. Heck, a bunch of those resellers got peeved enough to file a whole mess o' lawsuits against Apple, claiming that the company doesn't play fair. With its rapport with resellers apparently hanging in tattered and smoldering rags, what can Apple possibly do to heal the damage?

Well, for starters, it's telling its employees to knock it off with the smack talk.

No, really! AppleInsider claims that Apple has had an actual written policy of "positive speech guidelines" since early last year, which dictates how its employees who deal with the public-- specifically, "AppleCare, Telesales, and retail store personnel"-- should talk about third-party resellers and service providers. For instance, these personnel are told that they should "neutrally position the various channels through which customers can buy" Apple products and services and "not tell customers that buying directly from Apple is better than buying from a reseller." So, technically, if you walk into an Apple store and ask somebody why you should buy an iMac from them instead of ordering one from, say, MacMall or Amazon, the guy's supposed to tell you that those options are just as valid, no better and no worse. And if he doesn't, you can report him and get him yelled at, or maybe even fired. Ahhhh, good times.

And get this: apparently the guidelines were revised earlier this year "to remind employees that they must take care to speak positively about Apple and Apple products in public." We assume that's limited to a professional scope, and that off-hours employees aren't necessarily expected to stand up in the theater right in the middle of a screening of Scooby-Doo 2 to yell, "Apple is a kind and responsible employer, and its products are unparalleled in design and ease of use!" Although if you witness such a thing happening, tell us about it. And while you're at it, explain what the heck you were doing at a screening of Scooby-Doo 2 in the first place. (Any answer other than "Sarah Michelle Gellar is hot" or "I've always had kind of a thing for Velma" may result in much ridicule.)

Now, while the Free Speech Reflex in us automatically kicks in when corporations start telling their employees what they can and can't say, there really isn't anything all that outrageous about these guidelines. In fact, we doubt that Apple even enforces them in any serious way. More likely than not, they probably exist primarily to give the lawyers a way to cover Apple's butt, what with all the reseller lawsuits flying around; if the proprietor of MacOtherGuys somehow proves that an Apple employee badmouthed his store to a customer, Apple can simply testify that said employee acted against company policy and has been punished/fired/flogged/set fire to for his offenses. Everyone lives happily ever after. Well, except for the plaintiff. And the employee. But hey, Apple comes out smelling like a rose, and isn't that all that really matters?

Folks, we know that technically it's (sort of) Wildly Off-Topic Microsoft-Bashing Day, but we figured we'd give it a rest this week. It gets a little fatiguing engaging in all this mean-spirited defamation week in and week out, you know? Besides, badmouthing Microsoft is like enumerating the faults of a giant puppy-stomping, baby-eating robot that's fueled by the burning of human souls and is controlled by Hitler's brain in a glass bubble; perhaps just slightly redundant by nature. So we're not going to bag on Microsoft today.

But hey, did you hear the latest about those dorks over at Intel?

Ha! Just kidding! Intel, like Microsoft, actually has some very smart people working on some really nifty technology. Still, given the fact that Intel seems married to the aging x86 architecture and Apple has spent the last decade betting on PowerPC instead, it's only natural for Mac fans to take an adversarial stance. That's why, when faithful viewer Gary Brandt alerted us to a Reuters article about Intel cancelling a couple of upcoming processors, we couldn't help but grin an evil little grin. (Hey, we're not proud of it or anything. Well, okay, maybe just a little.)

Yes, Intel has formally cancelled development of "Tejas," its fourth-gen Pentium 4, originally slated to hit the market next year, and "Jayhawk," a revision of the company's Xeon chip-- and the reason shouldn't come as any particular surprise to any of you: the things would give off enough heat to melt a block of Velveeta at 100 paces. It's the same old story coming back to bite Intel in the kiester; after years and years of cranking up clock speeds, it's finally hit a point where the heat generated by its chips would incinerate any poor sucker foolish enough to sit down at a system labeled "Intel Inside."

So what's Intel going to do instead, you ask? Well, interestingly enough, with Tejas and Jayhawk on the chopping block, the company is going to deemphasize the whole crank-up-the-clock-speed thing and instead "combine two processors onto a single chip, allowing for lower power usage as well as doubling performance." Apparently this is a bit of a shocker, because analysts weren't originally expecting Intel to go the dual-core route for its mass-market chips for at least another year and a half. "It's kind of a matter of reprioritizing our resources and accelerating development of dual core," said an Intel spokesperson.

Hmmmm. Suppose this has anything to do with the fact that IBM has had dual-core POWER chips for servers for something like three years now, and is rumored to be working on a dual-core PowerPC G5 for desktop Macs scheduled for release sometime next year? After all, as things stand today, the G5 is arguably on par with or faster than Intel's desktop offerings; could it be that Intel didn't much care for the idea of a dual-core G5 wiping the floor with its Tejas Pentium 4? It's just speculation, mind you, but you just gotta love the timing. It couldn't possibly be a coincidence, could it?

Well, uh, okay, sure, it could. But isn't it a lot more satisfying to assume that it couldn't?