What a difference half a decade can make. Longtime viewers may recall an incident way back in 1997 in which a U.S. Navy "Smart Ship" wound up completely dead in the water following a total systems failure; it turns out that the onboard computers controlling the not-so-smart-after-all USS Yorktown were running Windows NT, an operating system so robust that when it encountered a divide-by-zero error it panicked and dove out the nearest porthole. The warship, then devoid of any control or power whatsoever, actually needed to be towed back to base. Embarrassing, no? But at least the Blue Screen of Death sort of matches the ocean. Ahhhh... soothing!

Fast forward to 2003, and the Navy's making some smarter choices these days. According to faithful viewer Daniel Blanken, Terra Soft Solutions just announced that it's inked a deal to provide a massive flock of Xserves to the Navy by way of defense contractor Lockheed Martin. How massive a flock? Try 260-- and 260 Xserves officially qualifies as "massive" in our book. (Have you seen the size of the boxes those things come in?) Terra Soft claims that this is the largest single sale of Xserves ever made by a value-added reseller; apparently the Navy plans to string 'em together into a "unique sonar imaging system" that will ostensibly be capable of discerning whether large undersea masses are whales, legendary sea serpents, or sunken Navy Smart Ships with screens blinking "Abort, Retry, Fail?"

This represents a huge win for Apple hardware-- although the software guys in Cupertino must be a little bummed. See, Terra Soft is the maker of Yellow Dog Linux, which runs on Apple hardware, and its VAR agreement enables it to resell Macs with Yellow Dog preloaded instead of Mac OS X. So those 260 whale-spotting Xserves will all be running Linux instead of everyone's favorite lickable operating system, which is a crying shame, really; Mac OS X could definitely have used the boost of street cred a Navy endorsement would have provided. But apparently Mac OS X was never in the running in the first place: Terra Soft's LinuXserve was chosen because it "meets the Navy's requirements for form-factor, density, performance, and use of Linux."

Still, like we said, Apple's hardware people should be throwing a little party, because what this means is that, since the Navy just wanted to run Linux, it had its pick of pretty much every server out there, including all the x86 stuff, and the Xserve was chosen as the best of the bunch: "twice as dense, less power consumptive, and higher performance" than the similarly-priced systems it'll replace. Plus, a sale is a sale-- and given recent reports that "Xserve sales are dead" and have been ever since Steve-O took the wraps off the G5 processor at WWDC, we bet Apple is actually thrilled to have cleared 260 G4-based Xserves out of its overflowing warehouses. Unless, of course, the "close of October" delivery date is somehow tied to those recent rumors of G5 Xserves surfacing sometime in September...