It's taken us a while to say it, but gee, thanks, Gmail! Back when Google first announced that it was testing a new free email service that offered a full gigabyte of storage space, most people thought the company was either hatching an elaborate April Fool's joke or was totally stoned. But of course the company turned out to be dead serious (and only slightly stoned), and plenty of invitee beta testers are already blithely cramming their Gmail inboxes with attachments the size of Kansas, giddy with the sheer wantonness of it all.

Now, while we here at AtAT don't have any particular need for email accounts with such a gargantuan disk quota, it sure has been fun watching all the other email services scramble to upgrade their offerings to compete with the new free email storage yardstick (aka the "Gmail Gig")-- that is, all the other services not run by Apple. Because while Yahoo! upped its mail storage to 100 MB and Microsoft at least made sketchy promises (as yet unfulfilled-- surprise, surprise) to bump its Hotmail users up to 250 MB of breathing room, Apple has been almost suspiciously silent on the issue, as its .Mac customers watched their inboxes strain against those same old 15 MB confines. And remember, while Yahoo! and Hotmail have free offerings, .Mac costs its members at least a hundred bucks a year; granted, that fee gives users a lot more than an email account with Web access, but when it comes to playing the Who Gets What For How Much game, customers tend to ignore niceties like iLife integration and bookmark syncing-- and even accounting for 100 MB of iDisk storage, the price-vs.-capacity differential still looked pretty unfair.

Well, fear not, fellow .Mac members, because the Gmail Effect finally trickled down to us, too; faithful viewer Ken Drake was the first to inform us that .Mac mail storage has suddenly increased to a perfectly respectable 125 MB-- and iDisks have increased by 25% to the same. What's more, this "250 MB of combined iDisk and .Mac Mail storage" is user-assignable; simply visit your Account Settings and you can choose just how to divvy up that quarter-gig between Mail and your iDisk. Never use .Mac's included mail account? Throw most of that weight at your iDisk and post over twice as many iPhotos and iMovies as before. If you're a heavy email user instead and your iDisk is just "that sparkly blue icon in the Finder sidebar," give the lion's share to .Mac Mail and you can store more Windows worm attachments than you ever thought possible. Everybody wins!

Ah, but what about us poor saps who had just agreed to pay sixty extra clams per year to double our iDisk to 200 MB? Are we paying $160 a year for less storage than .Mac now includes for the basic $99.95 annual fee? Nope; when we peeked at our Account Settings, we were more than a little taken aback to see that we had 512 MB of space assigned to both our iDisk and our Mail account. (We got email from Apple saying that our total storage had been increased to 1.2 GB, but hey, close enough, we suppose.) Since that's a lot more storage than we need, we were able to downgrade back to standard service as of our renewal date in a week and a half, still get 35 MB more storage than we'd had previously, and save a wad of cash to boot. (For people who do want that "Gmail Gig" for their .Mac accounts, a combined and user-assignable gigabyte of storage is now available for a flat $49.95 annual surcharge.)

At least now we know why .Mac mail was screwed up with "quota overages" a couple of days ago, as noted by faithful viewer Drew: growing pains as Apple worked to implement the storage upgrade. Meanwhile, how about that timing, hmmm? Most original .Mac accounts are coming up for renewal within days, and the advent of Gmail had led to a lot of grumbling from members that they wouldn't re-up because of Apple's anemic storage limits. So will 250 MB of combined storage be enough to keep most .Mac members from jumping ship? We figure it'll help retain just about everyone except for the people who only use their accounts for .Mac email (who obviously can get a better deal elsewhere).

We'd say it kept us from bailing, but heck, we were going to stick around anyway; for our money, iDisk storage, iSync integration, and iPhoto-to-HomePage publishing are just too convenient to give up. And by the way, if .Mac's storage bump has persuaded any of you holdouts to sign up, tell us first so we can send you an invite, because if you join through us, we get a bribe kickback discount, dig?

So what's up with the iTunes Music Store in Europe? Because obviously Apple's having a tough time making the whole thing work the way it wants it to; first it took months longer for Apple to reach Europe than anybody had anticipated, and when it finally debuted on the other side of that big blue wet thing to our immediate east, it bore little resemblance to the Utopia of uniform continent-wide pricing and availability that the company had pitched to the press as its goal. Instead, Europe got three balkanized per-country stores, with separate song catalogs and pricing for each; what's worse, each store only allows purchases from residents of its target country, which means that everyone but Brits, Germans, and the French are shut out completely, and Brits are looking to stir up trouble because they have to pay more per track.

When Apple unveiled the three current European iTMS variants, it also announced the expected October launch of a pan-European store that would sell to all European Union countries for a uniform .99€ per song. We've previously speculated that the pan-Euro store is the "real" iTMS, and the current three are stopgap measures to get Apple into the biggest European music markets before Napster et al gets in there first and shuts Apple out. While Steve had originally announced that the pan-Euro store would be in English to start, what we suspect is that the eventual plan is to have localized iTMSes for every European country in the local language and promoting local content, but all being fed from the back-end by this holy grail of a unified European catalog, which would allow consistent pricing and availability from store to store and maybe even the ability (though not the necessity) of shopping at a specific European iTMS even if you're in a different European country. The only thing that should be holding up such a store would be licensing hassles with the European record labels, who are evidently terrified of the idea of (gasp!) selling more music.

Hopefully Apple's close to hammering out a deal, but we're far less confident about that than we could be. Faithful viewer JLo (no, not that JLo... probably) tipped us off to the fact that, according to Reuters, Apple's applications veep Eddie Cue is telling the press that his company is "well on pace to launch more EU stores... next month," which will "likely include more than five new countries" and "cover a good portion of Western Europe." (AppleInsider has previously reported that iTMSes are underway for "the Netherlands, Poland, and Denmark," with Switzerland now being added to the site's list.) Now, maybe it's just us, but this sounds a lot like Apple is scrambling to launch more individual and isolated stores because the pan-Euro thing just isn't coming together quickly enough. Notice that Eddie-Baby makes absolutely no mention whatsoever of an October launch of that all-Europe store that his boss had alluded to last spring.

So it sounds to us like the pan-Euro thing won't touch down for the foreseeable future, and Europeans (and Apple) will have to deal with the hassle of these separate independent and uninteroperable iTMSes for a while, yet. But hey, maybe in ten years or so the European store will be One Big Happy, and then Apple can start persuading the labels to license their music worldwide. Eventually our great grandkids might be able to beam tracks directly to their surgically-implanted skullPods from the planet's grand unified 1.2 billion-song catalog. Of course, by then they'll be complaining that they can't buy music from the iTMS Neptune without having a billing address there.

Virginia Tech may be souping up System X with special-order 2.3 GHz Xserves, and the U.S. Army and COLSA may be hitching up even more Xserves than Virginia Tech, but so far Mac-based supercomputers are a distinct minority in the field, and none of the Mac clusters even comes close to the current Big Daddy of the teraflop scene: Japan's $350 million Earth Simulator, which has held the title of "World's Fastest Supercomputer" for two full years, now-- practically forever in the fast-paced world of LINPACK benchmarks. Think of it this way: when System X was the third-fastest supercomputer on the planet, it was cranking out 10.28 teraflops of raw, crunchy power; the Earth Simulator, by comparison, spits out 35.86. Two words: Yee and ikes.

But while there isn't yet a Mac-based challenger to the Earth Simulator's superiority, faithful viewer RevMark informs us that there's something almost as good: IBM's BlueGene/L, a cooperative supercomputing project designed to scale to, frankly, totally ridiculous levels. In the current TOP500 list, BlueGene/L prototypes occupy the fourth and eighth spots, scoring 11.68 and 8.66 teraflops respectively-- not too shabby. But remember, those are just prototypes, using far fewer processors than IBM's final systems will employ-- and according to Reuters, a BlueGene/L system has now benched out at a face-melting 36.01 teraflops, which is just enough to steal the crown from Japan's Finest.

Why is this potentially good for Apple? Well, because while BlueGene/L isn't a Mac, its processors are PowerPCs, albeit ones that aren't quite the same as the G5s that IBM squeezes out for Apple. Still, the world's fastest supercomputer running PowerPC chips could well lend Macs more street cred for being the blazing speed demons they are, and slowly persuade the public that "Intel Inside" isn't all it's cracked up to be. If nothing else, science geeks (who are already being drawn to the Mac in ever-increasing numbers because of price/performance ratios and the UNIXy goodness of Mac OS X) ought to come a-runnin' with their grant checks ready to endorse.

Oh, and by the way, the 36.01 teraflop BlueGene/L unit isn't the full system, either. Remember that fourth-ranked prototype unit that scored 11.68 teraflops? Well, that represents one sixteenth of the primary BlueGene/L being built for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. What's more, that prototype uses 8,192 custom 500 MHz PowerPC 440s, which is an older chip; the eighth-ranked system used half as many processors running at 700 MHz to score 8.66 teraflops. Do a little naïve math, factor in the possibility of faster processors, and you find that the Livermore cluster ought to score at least 300 teraflops when it's done next year; IBM says it'll reach 360. Well, if you're going to outscore the world's fastest, why not do it by a factor of ten?