Speaking of next month's Stevenote, some people are saying "G4" and some are saying "G5," but pretty much everybody agrees that there's a new Power Mac waiting in the wings. We'd hazard a guess that most Apple-watchers now expect that a souped-up G4 will be beating at the heart of those mighty new Macs, based on Motorola's own PowerPC timetable (which hints that gigahertz "Apollo" G4s are far closer to shipping than any G5). However, as we've seen time and time again, optimism and wishful thinking can grow some mighty hope from even the tiniest scraps of evidence.

That's why the G5 zealots have fallen slavering on what appears to be an otherwise innocuous software download page and elevated it to near-sacred status. VueScan is shareware scanner software, apparently, which runs under Windows, Linux, Mac OS 8.x/9.x, and Mac OS X. In and of itself, this isn't particularly thrilling, although it is nice to see that Mac OS X users have a native scanning option while the scanner companies drag their feet on porting their own software. The bit that has people all worked up, however, is this line from the download page: "Please note that the shareware version of VueScan is disabled on PowerPC G5 processors."

Typo? Not likely, as faithful viewer Scott downloaded the software and found further references to "disabling" the software on the G5 in the documentation. Meanwhile, faithful viewer Steven Newler reports that the same page quoted above used to say: "Please note that the shareware version of VueScan is disabled on PowerPC G5 processors, and updated product and pricing information for these processors will be announced at a future date." The developers of VueScan apparently know a thing or two about the mysterious G5, and didn't keep as quiet about it as they maybe should have.

But if you think that's a security leak, whoever's in charge of the Apple-Motorola Joint G5 Top Secret Hush-Hush ZipLip Operation must be about two blood pressure points short of popping an aneurysm over what's going on in Hollywood right now. According to faithful viewer bRaD, it seems that the new movie "Kate & Leopold" (whose trailer is posted right on Apple's own site) features Meg Ryan's character openly talking about the G5 (and Mac OS 9.6!) on the silver screen for all to see. So there you have it: even ignoring the VueScan evidence, this movie tie-in constitutes actual third-hand information from a big-screen fictional character. What more proof could you possibly need?