Folks, collectively we're as big a fan of the "Wide-Eyed Naïf" look as anybody, but honestly, all the kerfuffle over this alleged leak of the Tiger release date is taking it a little over the top. In case you haven't encountered it yet (which implies that you spent the last couple of days with your eyes closed and your head in a cement mixer at the bottom of the Atlantic, because it was slathered all over the Mac-centric 'net like gravy on a dry biscuit), there's been a bit of a to-do over the fact that, as faithful viewer Sam first alerted us, Amazon.com had started taking Mac OS X 10.4 preorders-- and was quoting a ship date of March 31st, 2005. Since Apple's only public commitment to a release date of its next major operating system upgrade has been "first half of 2005," a bunch of people assumed that Amazon was privy to extra-super-special-secret insider information and had accidently blabbed it to the world.

But before you go buying a 2005 calendar just to circle that magical date in red Sharpie and then decorate it with colored glue, glitter, and prismatic tiger stickers (why, yes, we are currently enrolled in a parent-toddler art class-- why do you ask?), you should probably go talk to anyone who spent the early-mid-'90s preordering what few Mac games were slated to grace our platform. See, back before Internet commerce was all the rage, you had a better chance of striking oil while digging in your Mr. T Chia Pet than you had of finding Mac games on retail shelves, so we generally bought our software by mail order from catalogs-- actual paper ones-- like MacWarehouse and MacConnection. And it was back then that we learned the number one rule of software mail order: release dates in those catalogs didn't mean squat. Heck, they didn't even mean squa.

We're not sure if this is actually true, but we'd heard it widely reported that mail order companies weren't legally allowed to accept preorders for merchandise unless they provided at least a tentative ship date. So what would they do when they wanted scads of slavering Mac gamers on the hook for a copy of, say, Marathon 2 when the developers (Bungie-- you know, before the most egregious sellout in the history of the known universe) had a strict policy against ever announcing release dates until the product was actually in boxes and out the door? Well, duh-- they made their "tentative release dates" up out of thin air, or pulled them out of a convenient body cavity or whatever. See, those release dates just had to be there, they didn't have to be accurate. But people new to the scene would get a new catalog and then breathlessly post to the 'net that "WoozleWuzzle is shipping next month!!!!" only to be shot down when the guy who was writing WoozleWuzzle would calmly post that, no, it wouldn't be.

So we consider it more than likely that Amazon's March 31st ship date for Tiger is just another one of those "tentative" dates provided to allow the acceptance of preorders. Consider that March 31st is smack-dab in the very middle of the "first half of 2005" and you might get an idea of how Amazon came up with the date. And anyone who honestly thinks that even Apple could have narrowed Tiger's projected ship date down to a specific day nearly six months in advance probably isn't too familiar with the development process of large software projects. If anything, Apple's probably narrowed things down to which of the two quarters it's shooting for, but we doubt it's gotten as far as targeting a month, let alone a day.

The point's kind of moot now, anyway, since Amazon has since pulled the release date and the ability to preorder Tiger; the page now just says that "this item is not stocked or has been discontinued." (And no, we don't think Apple made them do that because the March 31st date was real. Just a hunch.) Regardless, though, Amazon must have booked a fair number of preorders before it pulled the date, because when last we checked, Tiger had a sales ranking of 39. Interestingly enough, there were also seven customer reviews of a product that's at least two and a half months from shipping; some are based on the developer preview, some just list features that Apple's made public, and one claims to be from the future and declares Tiger to be "well worth the $11." Which is good to know, and all, but we wish the time-travelling reviewer had mentioned when the product actually shipped, so we'd know whose "tentative ship dates" to believe from now on.

We admit it: we were wrong. We fully expected Apple's stock price to drop a little on Friday as giddy investors cashed out after AAPL's 17-ish percent increase over the previous two trading days; after all, investing in stocks doesn't make you a dime until you actually sell them, and surely there had to be a number of investors who would see the meteoric rise of Apple's stock price as a fine opportunity to buy that life-size Spider-Man sculpture to keep the Batman one company. So we were fully prepared to see a little red after that two-day flood of green.

But the red never came, AAPL went up another 52 cents on Friday, and when last we checked, it was up yet another nickel in after-hours trading. Clearly investors have a lot of faith in Apple's ability to deliver right now-- so of course this is the perfect time for pundits to start telling everyone why they're wrong. Want to check out one such opinion? Faithful viewer mrmgraphics tipped us off to a great one over at Forbes, in which Arik Hesseldahl puts "the iPod in perspective." Basically, his take on Apple's rosy quarterly results and the subsequent skyrocketing of its stock price is this: "Take the iPod away, and what's left? A company that sold... in its fiscal 2004... less than 2 percent of the 176.5 million computers" that people are expected to buy in 2005.

Now, first of all, we had no idea that anyone was about to "take the iPod away," so we have to thank Arik for warning us about that. He doesn't provide any earthly explanation about who or what might erase the iPod from Apple's product line any day now, so we have to assume that it's aliens. And now that we're aware of this looming extraterrestrial threat to Apple's financial well-being, we suppose we should take a closer look at what will be left of Apple once those cosmic green-skinned bastards zap the earth with their iPod Nullification Ray and the human race is doomed to a pathetic future of using cheap knock-offs until Windows Media is ubiquitous, becomes self-aware, detonates the planet's nuclear warheads, and the tattered remnants of humanity are forced to battle machines for their very survival until the governor of California goes back in time to make a few action films about the whole thing.

Wait, what were we talking about again?

Oh, right-- Apple without the iPod. Well, gee, this might be a stretch, but we suppose there's the slimmest of chances that the company might be sort of like, oh, we don't know... Apple before the iPod. Sure, Wall Street wasn't always necessarily giving up as much love, but Apple's overall business had actually been, with few exceptions, pretty darn profitable in the three or four years prior to the iPod's arrival. And the Mac's market share may have shrunk overall, but it appears to be growing again in places where it counts, like higher education, scientific communities, and content creation-- a lot of that's due more to kick-ass hardware and an operating system to die for than any iPod "halo effect." Remember, kids, these 2-ish percent market share numbers that get tossed around so blithely never bother to take into account that Apple purposely does not compete in all markets; to take a page from Arik's playbook, take away all the sub-$799 computers from the Wintel manufacturers and what's left? An Apple with a far higher market share than the 2 percent it gets credit for.

That's not to say that we shouldn't panic, people. Arik does make some decent points about how Apple's refusal to allow the iPod to work with non-iTunes music stores could lead to a shakeup-- because as we all know, Apple certainly couldn't be using its current advantage to bolster the iPod and iTMS only for as long as it can enjoy the benefits of a closed feedback loop, and the company couldn't possibly license FairPlay or support Windows Media later on if the market makes it wise. No, Apple would have to make those changes RIGHT NOW while the iPod and iTMS are both the market leaders, thus giving away free money, which is of course the only reasonable way to run a business.

And since Apple is permanently locked into never licensing FairPlay to others or licensing Window Media from Microsoft, well, the company is clearly doomed. After all, take the iPod away, and Apple's portable products, its desktop Macs, its servers, all of its software titles, its raft of patents, its retail business, its online store, its $5.46 billion in cash, Steve Jobs, Jon Ive, the rest of Apple's 10,910 talented and inventive employees, its brand power, and its customer base with a loyalty any company would kill or die for, and what's left?

Stay tuned for Arik's next article, which no doubt will contain a scathing analysis of how Microsoft will be going under any day now, because it's nothing without Windows and Office. We can't wait. Here's hoping Apple manages to stay afloat until then.

Jonesing for another late edition of Wildly Off-Topic Microsoft-Bashing Day? Well, never fear, true believers, because as you all know, the question is never "Is there anything to bash?" but rather "Can we narrow the options down to a manageable level without reserving time on the Virginia Tech supercomputer to help us?" Today we thought we'd take a little gander at something that faithful viewer John Haytol tossed onto the pile: a USA Today interview with Bill "Could God Make So Much Money That Even He Couldn't Spend It?" Gates. So strap yourselves in, kiddies, because as anyone who's listened to the Billmeister wax eloquent about, well, just about anything already knows, mentally speaking, the man doesn't occupy the same plane of existence as the rest of us; his brain flickers wildly between this world and some freakish Bizarro dimension in which antitrust laws mean nothing, security is a four-letter word, and haircuts are performed by blind hermit crabs with degenerative muscular diseases.

Now, we could go on about Billy-Boy's comments about how Microsoft has a "more ambitious view of software" than Apple does (we suppose they'd have to be ambitious to cram that many bugs through so many holes). We could also go to town on his answer to the question, "What's your take on making Windows Media compatible with Apple?" His response: "We're big believers in interoperability. We've stated very clearly that if Apple wanted to support interoperability, we'd make that super easy for them." Now, if that sounds like the kind of non-answer better suited to a Presidential Debate, you're just not reading between the lines. What Bill actually said was this: "Windows Media Player 10 for Macintosh? Sure, just as soon as the iTunes Music Store switches to WMA and the iPod follows suit. And stop staring at my hair."

The thing is, since they deal specifically with Apple, those subjects are on-topic, and far be it from us to mess with the sanctity of what will one day no doubt become a national drinking holiday. So instead, let's focus on when the interviewer brings up the issue of Internet Explorer's "well-publicized holes." Because, see, Gates's only response is this: "Understand those are cases where you are downloading third-party software."

Yes, that's what he said. Really.

Now, this leaves us in a sticky situation, here, because the only English-language response that can possibly convey the appropriate level of utter disbelief consists of a simple three-word question which is unfit for broadcast on a PG-rated show like ours. But we suppose we'll make do by replacing the offending third of the phrase with the name of everyone's favorite unfinished never-published 3D frog-hopping video game: What the Flonk?!

Are we reading this right? Did Bill Gates actually claim that security holes in Internet Explorer either only exist or only come into play when users have the gall to download something that isn't made by Microsoft? Maybe he's forgotten about that little "JPEG of Death" episode (given the constant tidal wave of Microsoft security flaws, it's certainly possible), which is the most recent "well-publicized hole" in IE that springs to our minds. You know the one we're talking about-- that one in which the simple act of viewing a tainted JPEG can cause malware to launch immediately on the user's system.

Okay, technically we suppose that is "downloading third-party software," but somehow we doubt Bill really meant it that way.

Or geez, maybe he did, and this is Microsoft's latest strategy to fix its seemingly insurmountable security problem: simply redefine the rules so that there is no problem. From this day forth, all Microsoft products are 100% secure, provided you never violate the new end-user license agreement. May we hazard a guess at Paragraph 16f, Clause iv? "Products are warranted secure provided licensee does not download third-party software, e.g. visit a non-Microsoft web site, read non-Microsoft-originated email, install non-Microsoft applications, etc." There, everything's fixed! Now go about your business.