Why, it's déjà vu all over again! No doubt you recognize this recurring scenario from your own tortured past: rumors fly that a Power Mac G5 speed bump will ship in, say, a week; a week passes; new rumors insist that the speed bumps will now ship in two weeks; two weeks fly by; still more rumors now figure the speed bumps for a month later; a month elapses and the only bumps you see are the ones on your head from banging it against a conveniently located wall. Sounds all too familiar, right? After all, we all lived through it for the first six months of the year, before the rumor mill finally decided that new Power Macs wouldn't surface until the Worldwide Developers Conference at the end of this month, thus ending the constant cycle of disappointment.

Or so we thought. Because guess what? It's baaaa-aaaaaack...

Yes, as you have certainly noticed by now, it's Tuesday, and despite yesterday's last-minute rumors of imminent speed bumps, as of broadcast time Apple's Power Macs hadn't changed one iota. Of course, if you got your hopes up after being burned this way multiple times in the past half-year, you have only yourself to blame. Well, and your parents, obviously. (You know the old saying: fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me; fool me 87 times in rapid succession, shame on natural selection for allowing my parents to spawn offspring this gullible in the first place.) But don't feel bad-- most of us probably felt at least some subconscious part of our minds embrace the Tuesday rumor, either because Think Secret usually has such a good track record with this stuff, or because MacRumors had claimed that "some Apple stores reportedly already have boxes of new products labeled for the 8th." Or simply because deep down inside we just want to believe, dagnabbit.

To be fair, of course, Think Secret wasn't technically wrong, since alongside its original prediction of a Tuesday intro it clearly stated that "dates for speed bumps can be subject to change." But here's where the Cycle o' Disappointment may be rearing its ugly head once again: now the site claims that the intro of these new systems has merely been "shifted to a later date in the week." Unfortunately, that's just plausible enough that a bunch of us are going to get our hopes up again-- and if new Power Macs don't surface by the weekend, we're just going to have to resign ourselves to believing the next rumor about when these systems will finally see the light of day. We're keeping our fingers crossed for something to do with a delay until next week because raucous monkeys have taken over the manufacturing plant. You know, just for a change of pace.

But what are we saying? They'll be here tomorrow, or maybe Thursday. Friday at the latest. And while we're familiar with the old saying "fool me 88 times, stick a rabid weasel down my pants," we're willing to risk it.

Boy, between the Power Mac rumors and the AirPort Express intro and, if not actually the announcement of Euro iTMS, then at least the announcement of the announcement, things sure were crazy yesterday. ("HOW CRAZY WERE THEY?") They were so crazy we never even had a chance to mention Uncle Steve's annual appearance at the D: All Things Digital conference. (Do we hear crickets chirping? Man, tough crowd.) No, that wasn't actually a joke, and no, D:Steve isn't actually a Stevenote per se, but in some ways it's even better; for the low, low price of just $2,995, starry-eyed Mac fans can show up to ask him questions and raise issues that he might otherwise never address in public. Remember last year's Q&A session, at which he revealed all sorts of candid little tidbits about where Apple would be headed in the future-- or, more to the point, where it wouldn't be headed? Good stuff.

As it turns out, we're slightly less flush with cash than would behoove us to drop a few grand apiece for the privilege of kickin' it inquisitive-style for a couple of hours with the Stevemeister. That's why we're so glad that AppleInsider has posted a few choice highlights from the show. It sounds to us like Steve continues to squeeze a lot of mileage out of the ever-popular Mysterious Silent Smile™; that was his response when asked when iPod prices will drop, and also his reaction when Walter Mossberg complained that AirTunes still requires people to get up and go to their computers when they want to change the music they're listening to. While most people will choose to interpret Steve's grins to mean "soon" and "just wait" respectively, we'd like to caution our viewers that we've had a fair amount of experience with mysterious smiles over the past two years, and it may have just been gas.

But let's get to the controversy: amid other little infogems (like how Apple is apparently working on some sort of iPod-in-the-car device and won't even consider supporting WMA until it has 50% of the market), Steve reportedly announced that he was "proud not only of the products Apple has shipped, but also the products Apple has decided not to ship," such as "an Apple PDA." Uh-oh-- heads up, Apple Handheld Obsessives, Steve's whistling your tune! Or refusing to, anyway; as far as we can tell, this is just Steve gloating about how he was right when he said years ago-- and repeated several times since-- that Apple should stay out of the PDA business. In other words, he's proud that Apple never devoted resources to working on a product that would probably have lost money and dragged Apple's stock price Palmward, especially when the iPod was almost certainly a much better investment.

The thing is, though, it seems to us that AI's headline for this delightful compendium of hot-off-the-press Jobsisms-- "Apple developed, but did not ship Apple PDA"-- wholly misses the point, and is just going to get the Apple Handheld Obsessives all riled up again. Based on AI's report, at least, it doesn't sound to us like Jobs ever said that Apple had created a PDA and then shelved it; we interpreted his statement to mean "See, I was right not to waste time on making PDAs, neener neener neener." We weren't there, so maybe the guy's exact words more clearly implied that Apple has a PDA locked up in a lab someone that will never make onto a store shelf, but we doubt it. (Maybe someone who was there can fill us in?) Granted, it was years ago, but even Phil Schiller went on the record to confirm that Apple had "nothing going on" in the handheld space, and have you ever seen a more honest face?

Of course, that hasn't stopped the Apple PDA diehards from reviving the rumor yet again-- despite the fact that it was at this very conference last year that Jobs reiterated for the umpteenth time that Apple was not working on a PDA, and that the company's market research had showed that Apple was far better off ensuring that Macs could sync data to iPods and third-party mobile phones. So unless Steve changed his mind since last year and then back again, all logic and reason dictates that we put this whole "Apple PDA" rumor to bed once and for all.

Then again, we were never huge fans of logic or reason. Plus, we know that if Steve really did mean that Apple had developed a post-Newton PDA and then decided not to ship it, the Apple Handheld Obsessives will surely liberate the prototypes from the company's underground bunkers and show the world what we're all missing. It's all good.

Speaking of Steve's fireside chat at D: All Things Digital (and other stuff we didn't get to mention yesterday), it was there that he broke the news that Apple would be posting another security patch before the day was through-- and sure enough, Security Update 2004-06-07 first started materializing in Software Update late yesterday afternoon. It's svelte (less than a megabyte) but powerful; according to Steve, this update will finally close those heinous holes which Apple's first attempt at a fix left wide open. "If at first you don't succeed," and all that crap.

Being both paranoid enough about Apple software updates to worry that the cure might be worse than the disease and too lazy to bother clicking a button ("oh... it's all the way over there"), we haven't yet installed the update, instead preferring to watch others go first just to see if they burst into flame or anything. It sounds like it takes the right approach to sew up those URI holes, though: "Mac OS X will now present an approval alert when an application is to be run for the first time either by opening a document or clicking on a URL related to the application." Meaning, it should be a lot tougher for technojerks with too much time on their hands to slap together web pages capable of automatically deleting all your iTMS purchases without even bothering to ask you if you'd mind.

Oh, and this is kind of cool, too: presumably in response to complaints that its communication about security issues was a little bit lacking (e.g. "There were problems; this fixes them"), there's some pretty detailed info about exactly what this latest security update does, including "Impact," "Discussion," "Further Information," and links to entries at Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures for each applicable fix. Plus there's a whole separate page that does a pretty nice job describing the problem with applications automatically being launched, and shows the new warning dialog intended to protect you. "You want communication? We gotcher communication right here, buddy."

You may recall that there was also some criticism that Apple took months 'n' months to patch the hole, having been told about it in February but not having worked on a fix until the guy who found the vulnerability went public with it last month. Well, at his D:chat Steve admitted that the company knew about part of the problem in February, but claimed it didn't realize the seriousness of the hole until it found out about the second part just three weeks ago. And three weeks isn't all that poor a turnaround time, right?

Assuming, of course, that this update actually fixes the problem. It's been twenty-four hours and we haven't seen any definitive reports to the contrary, but The Register claims that even after applying the update to a 10.3.4 test system, it was still susceptible to Unsanity's test exploits. Just an isolated fluke? Several people have told us (and several more have told The Reg) that the update blocked the exact same test exploits for them, so yeah, probably. But hey, if it wasn't, what's yet another security update between friends?