The official results are in, folks, and it looks like we were right: faithful viewer Larry informs us that the official November TOP500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers is now available, and Virginia Tech's all-Mac-based System X has indeed slipped a few rungs down the ladder. You probably recall that when the cluster debuted, it blew minds from here to Neptune by somehow ranking as the third-fastest supercomputer on the planet despite having been built entirely from off-the-shelf Macs and bolted together by student volunteers at a total cost of roughly $5 million in cash and pizza. Well, it's a year later, and System X has been upgraded from 1,100 dual 2.0 GHz Power Mac G5s to 1,100 custom-built dual 2.3 GHz Xserves, boosting its performance by 19 percent-- but the advent of several new high-powered supercomputers still bumped it down to seventh place.

So, as Mac users, is it time to bow our heads in shame? Hardly. Seventh place is a darn impressive rank for such an inexpensive system, especially one that's listed as "self-made"; the next-highest-ranked "self-made" system on the list is at the University of Toronto, and it's way down there at number 201. Remember, too, that System X is running Mac OS X (well, maybe Mac OS X Server, since the upgrade to Xserves), so it's probably the fastest supercomputer running a mass-market commercial operating system instead of Linux or some proprietary supercomputer-only thingy. There's only one x86-based system ranked higher (the Thunder cluster at Lawrence Livermore), and if it's running Windows we'll eat our hats. (Gee, what tipped us off-- the penguin on Thunder's home page or the fact that it's hosted at the "Linux@Livermore" site?)

And what about sheer number of processors? As faithful viewer EJC points out, System X has only 2,200 chips-- the fewest processors of any supercomputer in the top ten, and barely a quarter of the 8,192 in use by the cluster that beat it out for sixth place. So there's still plenty to feel good about, Mac-based-supercomputing-wise. Meanwhile, let's expand the scope of the warm fuzzies vibe a little and consider how much kiester the PowerPC is kicking in the supercomputer world right now: in addition to powering the top-ranked system (which is currently in the lead by nearly 20 teraflops), the PowerPC runs four of the top ten systems-- five if you count the POWER4+, which is a close relative. In contrast, there are only two Intel-based entries in the top ten, at fifth and tenth. Ha! Losers.

That said, we're still a little bummed to see System X slide out of the top five, thus forfeiting its parking space on the TOP500 home page. But at least it's still a top ten supercomputer made entirely out of Macs-- and that snooty Earth Simulator finally got taken down a peg or two as well. (Okay, two.) Guess poor lil' NEC couldn't get that SX-8 up and running in time, hmmm?

All right, who snuck into Merrill Lynch's offices one night and spiked all their water coolers with mind-altering chemicals? C'mon, fess up; obviously someone's been getting creative with drugs that boost the biological effects of exposure to Reality Distortion Field energy, because the amount of love that Apple's been getting lately from the Lynch has been almost completely fair and reasonable given the company's excellent prospects-- in other words, way too high for your typical Wall Street analyst. Not that we're complaining, mind you, seeing as we're AAPL shareholders who certainly aren't above looking the other way while someone slips an analyst a mickey, as long as it scores us a paper gain.

Oh, come on, don't give us that look. Morals, shmorals-- these are Wall Street analysts, folks; it's like drugging a Brooks Brothers mannequin or something.

What we haven't figured out is if the entire firm was drugged, or just analyst Steven Milunovich, seeing as all the good press seems to come from him. In just the past month we've seen the guy raise his price target on AAPL based on predictions of strong iMac G5 sales, raise his estimate for this quarter's profit based on predictions of strong iPod sales, dish some seriously stock-boosting buzz by predicting a flash-based $149 iPod to arrive "early next year," and publicly estimate that Apple would sell 2.68 million iPods this holiday season, sending still more traders stumbling for the "Buy" button. And now CBS MarketWatch reports that Milunovich is at it once more, raising his revenue projections and target price again (this time to $3.2 billion and $61, respectively). Why? Because now he thinks that Apple will sell at least 3.5 million iPods this quarter, and he also believes that "the younger generation may consider Apple a core brand for their digital lifestyle," which "would allow the company to introduce successful new consumer products over time."

But wait, there's more! There must have been a double dose of Happy Juice in Milunovich's Poland Spring last night, because MacMinute reports that he's also upping his estimates on iMac G5 shipments for the quarter by another 10,000 units, in part because Best Buy is now selling them online. And as an added bonus, he also opines that "the major risk in the retail store strategy is past," meaning that all those naysayers who figured that within a few years Apple would be frantically shutting down all its stores à la Gateway are going to have to pretend that they never made such dire predictions in the first place. (No worries, though; Apple's naysayers are really good at doing that, since they've had so much practice.)

At broadcast time, Milunovich's latest comments hadn't had much of an effect on Apple's stock price, but overall they're clearly done wonders. Here's hoping that whoever's doping Milunovich et al at Merrill Lynch is doing so as a controlled test of the drug's effectiveness in boosting pro-Apple sentiment, because with results like these, we can only imagine that the next logical step is to introduce the agent into the water supplies of the world's larger metropolitan areas, thus propelling Apple headlong into a Golden Age of Market Saturation and Ensuing World Domination. Man, it's so much better than something like anthrax, isn't it? If we're really lucky, maybe it even tastes like cherry.

Relax, folks, we're all safe for now; you may recall that when Steve Jobs was up for Billboard's "Visionary of the Year" award against Rob Glaser of RealNetworks-- yes, the guy whose "vision" was to sell songs just like Apple does, try to license Apple's FairPlay DRM so his music would play on iPods, publicly liken Apple to communist Russia when the company refused, and then reverse-engineer iPod compatibility without permission-- we voiced concern that a Glaser win might prompt a global Jobsian rampage that'd make Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like minigolf and a day at the petting zoo. Well, according to faithful viewer Jay, the results have been posted, and Steve won. Feel free to heave a ragged sigh of relief. (And we hope you haven't literally been holding your breath, because the winners were actually announced last Friday night. Our bad.)

So, in addition to having been named "Leader in Innovation" by CNBC and the Wall Street Journal, now Steve is also officially the "Visionary of the Year," which is, of course, just as it should be. There's a little more good news, too, which is that Apple also won as "Brand of the Year," beating out EA Sports, Virgin Mobile, and XM Satellite Radio. It's not all puppy dogs and Slim Jims, though; while Apple had been nominated for "Innovator of the Year" for iTunes, it wound up losing the title to XM. Apparently commercial-free monthly-fee radio whose programming you still can't fully control is a bigger innovation than commercial-free music you buy and play exactly whenever and however you want. Good to know. We hate to be behind the times.

But if Apple is miffed about that, the company must be positively hypervolcanic over what was named "Digital Music Innovation of the Year": none other than Harmony, the very RealNetworks software that allows Real's songs to be played on iPods without the company having licensed FairPlay. While we can't condone it, truth be told, we can at least understand Billboard's reasoning behind assigning Harmony the win-- right now it looks like the only step anyone's taken to unify all these balkanized digital music formats and make all music work on all players. (Well, the only step other than Microsoft trying to ram Windows Media down everyone's throat, that is, which even Steve Ballmer on acid probably wouldn't dare call "innovation" for fear of finally being struck down by divine lightning.)

On top of that, we're not even sure that Apple's really all that upset that Harmony exists. Sure, it pitched the statement-to-the-press equivalent of a hissy fit when Harmony was first released, but if it really objected (and thought it had a case), surely we would have heard about a lawsuit by now. And while Apple warned that Harmony might break in future iPod firmware updates, there have been at least a couple since Harmony's release, and as far as we've heard Harmony still works fine. The company had to protest in public, if for no reason other than because of the way Real did its dirty work-- but behind closed doors, maybe it doesn't so much mind fewer people having a reason not to buy an iPod.

Whatever. Even if Apple silently allows Harmony's existence (and that's a big "if"), it's got to chafe a few hinders over at One Infinite Loop that Real's brute-force, legally-iffy forced entry into the iPod playground is being heralded as the "Digital Music Innovation of the Year" when Apple itself wasn't even nominated in the category. Perhaps Stevezilla will rampage after all? Keep one ear open for the air raid sirens...