Please pardon any typos that may creep in today, but it's a little hard for us to see now that we seem to have picked up some sort of rare eye affliction; we took one look at Apple's stock price and our eyes immediately swelled to five times their usual size and our pupils turned into dollar signs. (Our jaws also hit the floor and our tongues popped out with a "ka-CHING!" sort of noise, but that's less incapacitating.) But really, isn't this all to be expected on any day that AAPL shoots up by over 13%? In addition to a raised price target of $49 from Merrill Lynch (who, according to faithful viewer wavedancer, thinks a whopping iPod-inspired Mac sales frenzy will commence as soon as IBM can supply the chips), the stock also received upgrades from both Bear Stearns and JPMorgan. The Bear Stearns one is particularly sweet, since it reverses the only downgrade that AAPL's received all year.

No doubt the price will recede a bit on Friday as end-of-week profit-takers cash out to go buy themselves yachts or whatever, but clearly there's all kinds of optimism for Apple's future right now. So forget for one moment all the rational reasons for the stock run-up, like Apple's massively increased profits and revenues, its soaring market share in the digital music arena, and its top secret formula of eleven herbs and spices that's often imitated but never matched, and let's talk about the real factor behind Apple's newfound level of support: the return of Steve Jobs. Granted, the stock was doing fine during his convalescence, but is it any coincidence that on the same day that Steve makes his first post-cancer public appearance in an Apple-running capacity, the company's stock price goes through the roof?

That's right, kiddies, according to the Associated Press, Phil Schiller's back on the bench; at today's official media unveiling of the new debigulated Apple retail stores, Uncle Steve did the honors of wrangling with the press. "Yes, I'm back," was reportedly his only comment on his return to health, but that was enough to send the stock skyward. Think we're nuts for saying so? Oh, sure, you can attribute part of Apple's current stock price to the company posting its best fourth quarter in nine years, we suppose, and you might even make a case for the unveiling of Apple's new mini-stores helping out a bit; as the photos at AppleInsider show, they really do look stunning, and hints that some of them might open in airports to sell iPods and Mac portables to the jet set officially qualify as "intriguing." But at the end of the day, it's all about The Man.

The moral of the story is this: if you ever find yourself in the position of being the shadowy mastermind pulling the strings behind the scenes of a multibillion-dollar international corporation, never underestimate the stock-pumping power of a CEO in a black mock turtleneck. Well, that and the uncanny ability to bend mere mortals to one's will. That's pretty useful, too.

Man, talk about bending over backwards for an analyst; during the earnings conference call on Wednesday evening, Kevin Hunt of Thomas Weisel Partners (that's "WISE-el," not "weasel", we promise) kicked off the Q&A session by asking how many songs the iTunes Music Store had sold to date, and Peter "Really, I Mean It, Stop Calling Me Fred" Oppenheimer only answered that "we'll from time to time release music sales as we cross major milestones." Sounded like a snub, right? Except that, as faithful viewer mrmgraphics points out, Apple went ahead and issued an iTMS song-count press release the very next morning. Clearly they aim to please.

Okay, fine, so it was just a coincidence; after all, Apple's been issuing these things like clockwork every 25 million downloads, so it's not like today's press release breaks startling new ground or anything. Still, Kevin Hunt gets his answer, albeit a day late: thanks to a Ms. Beth Santisteven of Ignacio, Colorado feeding her Lauryn Hill jones by plunking down her 99 cents for "Ex-Factor," the iTMS has now officially sold 150 million songs-- which, incidentally, would constitute a playlist roughly 856 years long but would require a 600 TB iPod (or a couple hundred Xserve RAIDs in your pocket) to tote along with you. (Well, okay, not really, since multiple instances of the same song in a playlist don't require multiple copies of the song on the iPod, but still, you catch our drift.)

So how's Apple doing? Well, back when the iTMS hit the 125 million song mark last month, calendularly obsessed faithful viewer Scott Naness pointed out that the time it's taken Apple to reach each subsequent 25 million song milestone dropped from 231 days to 91 to 73 to 62 to a mere 52 days; this time he notes that the interval has dropped to a new low of just 43 days to rack up 25 million purchased downloads. That breaks down to an average of 581,395 songs per day over the past six weeks, or, as Apple puts it, "more than 4 million songs per week" and "over 200 million songs per year." Assuming the acceleration keeps up, Apple's going to have to move to a bigger milestone interval pretty soon, or else by the time it gets to half a billion songs it'll have to issue a press release every twelve minutes and then sue itself for patent infringement in ColorSync.

All right, yes, that was obscure. But we provided a link, so it's okay.

Anyway, with a current sales rate of over 4 million songs per week and no slowdown in sight, it's not hard to understand why, according to CNET, Apple still held a 70 percent market share for legal downloadable song sales (compared to 11 percent for Napster and 6 percent each for Real, MusicMatch, and Walmart) through the end of July. And the numbers are just going to keep getting prettier, because Apple's not standing still; for example, the same press release briefly confirms that the "pan-EU music store" is coming "soon." So if you're a non-UK non-French non-German European, make sure you start saving your Euros, because you'll be helping to inflate that download count yourself any day now.

Hey, so how come no one's talking about Virginia Tech's newly-upgraded Mac-based supercomputer? We know that stabilization and benchmarking are still officially "in progress," but ongoing benchmarks have been available in the infamous and constantly-updated Dongarra Report for a while, now. And since the cluster was completely gutted to have every single one of its dual 2.0 GHz Power Mac G5s replaced with custom-order dual 2.3 GHz Xserves (by exceptionally well-attired volunteers, we might add), surely every man, woman, and child alive must be quivering in anticipation to see just how much faster System X is following its overhaul.

Well, good news: if you flip to page 54, you'll see that "Apple XServe platform (1080 dual 2.3 GHz IBM PowerPC 970 w/Mellanox Infiniband" currently scores 12.05 teraflops, a respectable 17 percent gain over the 10.28 teraflops scored by the cluster's original Power Mac-based incarnation. (That's especially nice considering that the clock speed increase is only 15 percent.) There's probably still time for that number to creep a bit higher before the official scores are published by the TOP500 list, but generally speaking, you're probably safe thinking of System X as a 12-teraflop cluster now.

"But what's this? System X's score is sixth! Now it won't get to bask in glory on the TOP500 home page as one of the world's five fastest supercomputers!" Calm down, Beavis; take a closer look at the third and fourth entries and you'll realize that they're the same exact cluster, before and after its owners added another 64 processors to it. In much the same way, System X is also listed in the seventh, ninth, and eleventh slots, with scores taken at various points along its journey to life as a complete 1,100-Xserve system. Factor out the doubles and, barring an "October Surprise," System X ought to sit in fifth place, under an Alpha cluster, a new Itanium2 system, the once-mighty Earth Simulator, and the new top dog, that chunk of IBM's unfinished BlueGene. Woo-hoo, PowerPCs in two of the top five! No other chip can say that.

In fact, none of chips can really say anything at all, but still.

So there you have it, folks; one Xserve upgrade later, System X breaks 12 teraflops and ought to capture fifth place. Considering that without the upgrade the cluster would have dropped to an ignominious eighth-place slot, we figure it was money, time, and frustration well spent. By the way, if you're looking at TOP500's October 1st deadline for submissions, ignore it-- that's apparently just the deadline by which you need to have your supercomputer up and running, because that was the deadline last year, too, and Virginia Tech continously improved its cluster's score throughout the entire month of October, bringing it from its initial anemic 7.41 teraflops all the way up to its official ranked benchmark of 10.28 teraflops. So don't worry, Macs shall represent. Yo.