Well, the AtAT staff is still fighting a wicked head cold that's plagued us since the Expo. (Evidently New York cold germs are a tough breed.) This particular illness has passed from one staff member to the next, leaving a thousand sneezes and a thousand used tissues in its wake, but we like to look on the bright side: we may be stuffy, we may be fatigued, and we may feel like we rode the Tilt-A-Whirl one or two times too many, but at least we're not seeing purple llamas crawling on the walls. And as an added bonus, neither are we seeing Fortune 100 CEOs posting to web site "talkback" pages. Let's hear it for keeping the obvious visual hallucinations at bay! Woo-hoo!!

Oh, wait-- scratch that last bit. Let's back up for a second. Remember TechTV's G4 vs. P4 Photoshop shootout last week? Basically, TechTV was so skeptical of Steve Jobs's onstage bake-off at the last Stevenote that its staff decided to try it themselves, apparently in an attempt to prove that Apple's demo was rigged. Yet despite TechTV's own claim that with "benchmarketing" any system could be shown to be faster than any other, the station's own lab tests (which pitted the now-low-end 733 MHz G4 against a 1.8 GHz Pentium 4, the fastest and most expensive Pentium available) showed the G4 winning in three of the six Photoshop-based speed tests. Of course, what DreckTV failed to mention was that if you actually add up the total times taken by each system to complete all six tasks, the G4 beat the P4 by 16.2 seconds, or a 16.5% margin. Saith TechTV, "Did the sub-gigahertz G4 win out over the 1.8-GHz Intel behemoth? Well, yes and no." In other words, "yes, but since this test totally blew up in our faces, let's not add up the times and just call it a tie."

That brings us to an article at MacUnlimited, which notes that after TechTV published the results of its little "test," Mac fans came out of the proverbial woodwork to note that, rather than refuting Steve's onstage test, the new results showed it to be completely and absolutely legit. (At this point we can only surmise that TechTV's Jim Loudermouth is pursing his lips in consternation.) The bit that has us wondering about our cold medicine, though, is MacUnlimited's mention that one of those Talkback participants claims to be the CEO of an unspecified "Fortune 100 company," who "was just about to command a rollout of 10,000 P4 machines (Dells)" but is now going to "purchase all Apples" instead. It's not just us, it is? You see it too, right?

So does this cold have us loopy enough to believe for a second that the CEO of a Fortune 100 company likes to take time out from his busy schedule of buying tens of thousands of desktop computers to post to Talkback pages? Thankfully, no-- because otherwise we'd probably be beyond saving. Still, it's a nice little fantasy. Pipe dreams from fake CEOs aside, clearly TechTV has proved two things: 1) the G4 is just as much faster than the P4 as Steve said it was, at least as far as Photoshop is concerned, and 2) TechTV won't admit it was wrong without a thermonuclear device aimed at its families, household pets, and private parts. "Comparing the performance of a Mac to the performance of a PC is difficult at best," they say. Well, here's a hint, TechTV-- try adding up the numbers. Now pardon us, as we've got to grab a broom and knock some llamas off the walls.