Well, isn't this a fine pickle of a fish; here we thought that if only we could somehow squeeze just enough juice out of the flat, barren stone that was last week's batch of Apple-related non-happenings (honestly, if the news week had been any slower it'd have been traveling backwards in time), surely the following week would provide hot and cold running drama at the merest glance in every direction, right? Well, uh, no. Instead, we find the tap just as dry as it was last week, only now our stockpile of all-purpose space-padding witticisms is running dangerously low as well. If this drought keeps up and nothing interesting happens tout de suite, pretty soon all our scenes are going to consist entirely of a Steve-Ballmer-as-sweaty-ape-thing one-liner, the words "granted" and "truth be told," and some variant of the "something-y goodness" phrase construction.

Which, come to think of it, wouldn't be much different at all from every other scene we've ever produced over the course of the past seven years-- so hey, why not bring a list of alleged upcoming IBM processor numbers and specs into the plot? Sure, we usually try to avoid that sort of thing, because from the perspective of a drama-starved viewing audience, the jargony nature of someone rattling off part numbers and transistor counts is practically a one-way ticket on the express train to Snoozeville, but hey-- boredom's just another word for nothin' left to lose.

So away we go: faithful viewer frozen tundra hepped us to a recent Think Secret article which indicates that IBM's current bestest G5 processor, officially known as the PowerPC 970FX, will be followed sometime in the first half of 2005 by-- ready for this?-- the PowerPC 970GX, which, as its name so clearly implies, is a full letter better. Specifically, it'll ship "at speeds around 3 GHz" (thus finally fulfilling Steve Jobs's clock speed promise-- the "3 GHz" part, at least, not that "in one year" malarkey) and will come with a whopping 1 MB of L2 cache. That's twice the L2 cache of the 970FX; we hear an international holiday will be declared.

Still with us? If you are, that's pretty impressive, because we checked out about five minutes ago. Your attention span should be bronzed. Things do get better, though; apparently the 970GX will be a single-core version of the long-rumored two-two-two-chips-in-one dual-core 970MP processor, code-named "Antares." Of course, we've all been waiting for multi-core PowerPCs since Nixon was in short pants, and "expected availability of the 970MP remains unknown at this point," but it's still something to look forward to.

Oh, and speaking of chips in the "long-anticipated" category, PowerBook-friendly G5s (i.e. ones that suck down less power than the average toaster oven) are reportedly "in development at speeds between 1.6 GHz and 1.8 GHz," but there isn't even a vague release date mentioned, so "long" may well turn into "longer." If Apple intros new PowerBooks in January like the rumor mill says it will, the smart money's on a new G4 from Motorola-oops-we-mean-Freescale: the "almost-finished" PowerPC 7448, a 90-nanometer improvement of the current 7447A line that'll top 1.5 GHz and have twice the L2 cache. (Apparently doubling cache is all the rage with the kids these days. It's like Fonzie or something.)

Okay, so it's not exactly car-chase, shark-attack, running-away-from-a-fireball material, but we take what we can get. So keep dreaming about multi-core PowerBook G5s, and in the meantime we'll keep our fingers crossed for Apple-related sordid lawsuits, boardroom upheaval, and/or allegations of gross impropriety to rescue us from this chasm of nothingness. It's all happening any minute now, we swear.

All we can say is, Jobs bless the speed of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office-- or, rather, the glacial lack thereof, since it gives us "new" material which is actually stuff that happened a few years ago. Woo-hoo! What better way to pass the time during an extended Drama Lull™ than to dissect further evidence of that holiest of holy grails, the wirelessly-transmitting iPod? See, faithful viewer Dinosaurius tipped us off to the fact that AppleInsider has the skinny on an Apple application filed way back in April of last year that seeks a patent for a "media player system," and, well, it beats workin', anyway.

The filing describes, along with other components of the system, a "hand held media player that includes a transmitter for transmitting information over a wireless connection"; said player can be used to transmit a selected "media item" from the handheld to "one or more remote recipients," or to "at least transmit a continuous music feed to one or more personal tuning devices." The language is necessarily vague, of course, but anyone who isn't thinking "wireless iPod" should at least take a gander at the included diagram, which clearly shows an iPod with a big, honkin' zigzaggy antenna (or is that a resistor that escaped from an electrical schematic?) jutting out the top, beaming what are apparently Media Rays™ to another iPod, a PowerBook, a G3 iMac connected to an AirPort Base Station-looking "docking station," and a variety of little handheld receivers apparently equipped with speakers and screens.

This obviously ties in nicely with the whole AirPort Express thing, since the one huge omission from the whole AirTunes setup is a simple way to control music playback without having to trudge back to your keyboard and mouse every time you want to skip a song or two. (Sure, now you can use a Keyspan Express Remote or a Bluetooth phone and Salling Clicker, but we're talking about an out-of-the-box Apple solution, here.) Why not just play music over AirTunes directly from an AirPort-equipped iPod? Don't forget, a few months back Apple was advertising for a couple of "iPod Hardware System Integrators" and specified experience with GSM, Bluetooth, and 802.11 wireless communications technologies as a requirement, so there was already at least some indication that iPods will be gaining some sort of wireless transmission capabilities-- and this patent application may offer a glimpse into Apple's intended extension of the Digital Hub.

Of course, just to keep you from getting too happy (we can't have that!), we feel compelled to remind you all that the filing of a patent in no way indicates that the technology described within is necessarily being incorporated into an active-development product-- or that it ever will be. Heck, you don't even need a working prototype to patent an invention, so the application isn't proof of anything more than Apple having put some thought into the idea a couple of years ago. That said, adding AirTunes capability is a pretty obvious improvement to the iPod line-up, and short-range 'Pod-to-'Pod broadcasting could be the killer app that gets 90 percent of existing owners to trade up to the latest models overnight. Here's hoping that if and when AirPods finally show up, the antennas are on the inside.

Generally speaking, we're not crazy about the idea of extending Wildly Off-Topic Microsoft-Bashing Day outside of its rigidly-defined boundaries; we just feel that gratuitous smackdowns that otherwise have little to nothing to do with the subject matter at hand work best when apportioned out in regular doses. But c'mon, it's not like anything else much is happening, right? So when it came to light that Microsoft, one of the industry's biggest and most vocal opponents of software piracy, may itself be using unlicensed and illegally obtained software to produce its own products, well, that probably warrants a mention now instead of being sat on until Friday.

See, faithful viewer DeeKay told us that the folks at PC Welt went poking around in the bowels of Windows Media Player's program files (well, maybe not "bowels," exactly; considering it was just an easily browsable folder in the Help directory, it was more like the esophagus) and discovered nine WAV sound files that contain background music for the Windows Media Player Tour-- and something else, too. When opened in Notepad, after the binary-file gibberish that appears when you do such things, there's a mention of "Sound Forge 4.5" and something called "Deepz0ne." A little digging revealed that "Deepz0ne" is a cofounder of Radium, a warez group that specializes in, ahem, "liberating" music software from its copy protection schemes-- software like Sound Forge, whose 4.5 version was cracked by Deepz0ne and illegally distributed for free.

The obvious conclusion, of course, is that the music for the Windows Media Player Tour was produced with pirated software that normally sells for $400 a pop. That's in the same ballpark as the price of Microsoft Office, and considering how many times Microsoft has had the Business Software Alliance raid corporate offices looking for pirated copies of Word and Excel, there's a definite "Piracy Is Evil Unless We're Doing It" vibe emanating from Redmond. It's funny, but when we think of Microsoft stealing intellectual property, we think more along the lines of them imitating a user interface for inclusion in their own inferior products, not trolling the P2P trackers for a free cracked copy of Doom 3 or whatever.

As The Register points out, it's just as likely that Microsoft got the sounds out of a royalty-free sound effects library, or outsourced the work to someone else who used the pirated software-- of course, that's not nearly as entertaining as concluding that computers all across Microsoft's campus are crawling with billions of dollars of pirated software, so that's what we're going to do. Heck, we bet they've also got terabytes of illegally downloaded music and Hollywood movies sitting on the company file servers. And porn! Tons of porn! Including the seriously dodgy stuff that gets people tossed into jail. Attention, lawyers and law enforcement authorities: you know what to do. Faster, pussycat! Kill! KILL!