Here at AtAT, we don't claim to possess any actual journalistic training, know-how, or ethics (particularly ethics), but we've picked up a few things about reporting over the years by watching reruns of "Murphy Brown" and the "Scoop" Brady episode of "The Brady Bunch." For one thing, we know that "Dog Bites Man" is not news. "Man Bites Dog," on the other hand, is news. By extension, we're pretty sure that "Dog Sues Man For Veterinary Expenses" also qualifies as news, as does "Man Gnaws Judge, Faces Battery Charges." What we're not sure about is this: is "Dog Bites Man 643 Times" news? In other words, if something fairly humdrum and ordinary happens an extraordinary number of times, at what point does that become newsworthy?

We merely ask because Motorola is at it again. No, it's not going around chewing on Labradors, nice break from the status quo that might be. Instead, according to a Reuters story, the company just issued another earnings warning and plans to deal with the shortfall the only way it seems to know how. You guessed it: more layoffs. Motorola's human resources department (or what's left of it, anyway) is now hard at work cranking out yet another 2000 pink slips to be doled out by the end of the year. As far as Motorola is concerned, layoffs are like the medieval leeches of the 21st Century Tech Downturn: there's no ill that a good bleeding can't fix.

For those of you keeping count, these latest 2000 job cuts reportedly bring Motorola's total to a whopping 32,000 layoffs since the company's Scary Times™ started last year. And if all Motorola made was cell phones, frankly, we wouldn't much care; for better or for worse, however, Motorola is still the main player in the production of those G4 processors that power Apple's professional Macs, and therefore, when Motorola hurts, it's not unlikely that eventually Mac users might feel the pain. You do recall Apple's September 1999 earnings warning and resulting overnight eleven-point stock drop, right? Then perhaps you recall that Apple blamed its shortfall on "lower than planned deliveries of G4 processor chips from Motorola."

Not that history necessarily repeats, mind you, and we've certainly heard nothing about a dearth of G4s so far. But as long as Apple is largely dependent on Motorola for its high-end PowerPCs, every round of job cuts is a potential brick wall for the Mac platform. Sleep tight!