Well, this is an interesting development: eWeek is at LinuxWorld this week, hobnobbing with penguins and reporting on a demo by Sun's executive veep of software. (That's not the interesting bit.) Said veep, Jonathan "Bermuda" Schwartz, reportedly showed off something called "Mad Hatter," which is apparently a "unified desktop" composed of "a third-party Linux GUI such as GNOME, the Mozilla browser, Sun's StarOffice suite, the Evolution email server, the GAIM messaging client, and Java"; it intends to offer corporate customers an alternative to shackling themselves to Windows/Office/Exchange, and will be priced 50% to 90% lower than Microsoft's software. It's sort of a low-cost, GUI-driven, corporate-computing middle finger pointed straight at Redmond.

That, while somewhat interesting, still isn't "the" interesting bit. See, alongside Mad Hatter, Schwartz also showed off a "future 3D GUI" called "Looking Glass," which features "transparent, three-dimensional windows" and "a Mac OS X-like 'dock' containing thumbnail copies of recently viewed documents." Why the apparent resemblance to our own favorite operating system? Well, here, finally, is the interesting bit: Schwartz stated that "practically every Sun employee owns an Apple desktop at home," and he's quoted as saying that Sun would "love to partner with Apple" because "they're everyone's favorite company and iTunes is really cool."

Now, leaving aside the whole question of just what sort of partnership Sun and Apple might be able to forge, every Sun employee has a Mac? What's that about? Granted, Sun isn't exactly in the home computer business, but it still struck us as a little odd that every employee of one computer company would own computers made by someone else-- the same someone else. And given Sun's focus on Linux, it just seems kind of strange that the company's employees would be running Mac OS X instead. Chalk it all up to good taste, we suppose.

But we did a little digging, and it turns out that this is by no means an isolated phenomenon. A few well-placed phone calls to industry sources revealed that every employee of Hewlett-Packard has a computer made by Gateway. Meanwhile, everybody who works at Gateway owns an eMachines box. All eMachines employees have Dell laptops running Lindows. Everyone on the payroll at Sony's VAIO division has a high-end SGI workstation at home, while the folks at SGI all own iToasters. All Dell employees have, for some reason, Kaypros.

Every single Microsoft employee, from the guys in the mail room all the way up to Herr Ballmer himself, owns a Commodore VIC-20 and a Miner 2049er cartridge.

And Apple? Well, maybe it's just another example of thinking differently, but all Apple employees apparently own Macs-- although we did discover that over 85% of them also own Stir Crazy popcorn poppers, which we're pretty sure means something, although we're at a loss as to what. Whatever. Just be grateful that we had the self-control to refrain from saying that everyone at Dell has an outdated Wang.