Great jumpin' girls named Maude, our brains are all a-tangle with this latest plot twist in the ongoing Disney melodrama. Unless you've spent the day with your head stuck inside a large media-shielding ham and you didn't have anyone around like faithful viewer Jonas Rabbe to tap you the news in Braille, you're all too aware that the cable borg known as Comcast (well, there are usually a handful of creative adjectives preceding that name, too, but we've got a PG rating to preserve) just made a gloriously public $66 billion bid to assimilate Disney. Needless to say, this throws at least nine kinds of havoc at the story so far, because all the Eisner-Jobs sniping and intrigue in the world isn't going to pull anyone's attention away from that kind of moolah.

Just how big a merger would this be, you ask? Well, according to CNET, "the deal could create a media and distribution empire rivaling the size and influence of the post-America Online Time Warner." But, of course, all we really care about is the Jobs-Gold-Disney conspiracy and what the merger likely means to Disney CEO Michael Eisner: a one-way ticket to a small town called Oustville, where Gil Amelio spends his evenings out on the porch, whittling and playing the banjo. (Yes, both at the same time. He's actually quite talented.) See, apparently Comcast CEO Brian Roberts first went to Eisner with his offer of a Disney buyout, and Eisner told him to shove it right up his broadband. So Roberts drafted a letter to Eisner outlining the proposal-- and sent it to everyone else, instead. Media frenzy, anyone?

The upshot, of course, is that now Disney's board of directors knows about the offer, and knows that Eisner tried to kill it outright. What's more, the shareholders know it, too, and given that a Comcast buyout might get investors back some of the money they've lost over the past four or five years (Roberts notes that his offer "represents a premium of over $5 billion for your shareholders, based on yesterday's closing prices"), they might consider Eisner's attempt to sweep the deal under the rug to be yet another example of poor judgment, CEO-wise. Regardless of how Roy Disney and Stan Gold may feel about the prospect of a Comcast-owned Disney, they must at least appreciate how the news of Eisner's initial rejection of the offer helps them in their push to get Eisner voted off the Disney board and eventually yoinked from the CEO spot as well. (Disney's stock jumped almost 15% today; clearly investors aren't as dismissive of the buyout as Eisner was.)

So where's this leave Steve and Pixar? Well, if his plan was to kill contract negotiations with Disney in order to get Eisner fired and then come back and sign a new deal in a post-Eisner Disney wonderland, a Comcast buyout might actually help the process along-- and from a distribution perspective, a Disney with Comcast's bulk behind it could well push Pixar's flicks into hitherto unimagined corners of the planet. On the other hand, if Steve's goal was to get Eisner booted and then become CEO of Disney himself while officially folding Pixar into Disney as a wholly-owned subsidiary, well, this whole Comcast thing might put just a little dent in his plans. Then again, when life hands you lemons, grind them against the bloody bones of your enemies to make lemonade; after all, what's one more parent company to seize from within? You just know he's got to be seeing how the phrase "Comcast CEO Steve Jobs" rolls off the tongue.

Oh, and of course, Disney's going to buy Apple any day now. But you knew that.

We know, we know: shame on us. Look, we admit it, okay? We let our guard down, and analyst Rob Enderle said something really stupid a couple of weeks ago and we totally missed it. What can we say? We just got so used to his usual level of stupidity, which, you have to grant, is pretty darn consistent over time. So we took our eyes off him for a second or two (okay, two million-- but no more than that, we swear) and we remained blissfully unaware of his lyrical prose poem about the love of his life: his Acer-brand Wintel laptop.

We can hear you from here: "Love? A Wintel laptop? Surely you jest." Oh, but don't scoff, true believers, because this isn't just any Wintel: it's a Wintel with the Ferrari logo on it. It's "the only notebook in the world to sport the patented Ferrari-Red colour." It has, and we quote, a "classy strip of grey" bordering the keyboard. It is, in short, the middle-aged man's portable equivalent of the Hot Wheels PC from about half a decade back-- and Enderle's drooling all over it. As faithful viewer Kalel666 pointed out, the man actually devoted an entire article to gushing over it like it's the best thing since Viagra. (Little blue pill, shiny red laptop: anyone want to bet on the overlap between customer demographics?)

Says Rob, "When I walk into a room with this baby, even the Apple users join the throngs of admirers." Hrm, well, it's possible, we suppose. But we can't help wondering if maybe Rob, wearing his Ferrari-colored Spectacles O' Luv, might be seeing admiration where there is, in reality, only pity and the sort of fascination that draws eyes toward a car wreck. Or maybe people are just staring in utter disbelief: "One impressive piece of execution is that when you fire the machine up it plays a WAV file of a Ferrari race car revving its engine. That alone is worth the relatively low $1,899 price of admission."

Oy, vey... Rob Enderle has officially become Milhouse's dad: "I sleep in a race car! Do you?" Gee, Rob, the early Power Macs made a car sound at startup, too-- only it was a car crash, and it only happened when something was seriously wrong with the hardware. That should be a clue. Then again, if you like, we can spray-paint a malfunctioning 6100 bright red, stick a little horsey logo on it, and sell it to you for a mere $1,999. Let us know.

That said, we have to admit that it's sort of refreshing seeing a very visible Apple-hostile analyst bemoaning a Wintel's lackluster processing power and then saying "I take one look at the machine's lustrous coat, and somehow everything else seems trivial." So Rob's placing a computer's looks ahead of its performance? Geez, between that and his cult-like unquestioning devotion to what is, ultimately, "just a computer" (how many times have we Mac fans heard that?), he's practically a Mac user already! And since we all know why he really likes having that big, red Ferrari in his lap (his bio reveals a twenty-year career, greying temples, and a receding hairline; he's practically the midlife crisis poster boy), we'll just remind him that the screen in his love machine is only a 15-inch model. Maybe it's time to graduate to the 17-inch PowerBook before the guys start laughing at him in the health club locker room...

Ah, yesterday; another second Tuesday of the month, another batch of Microsoft security patches. But hey, this time around things were just a little bit different: one of those updates was deemed "critical." No, that's not the different part. The "critical" flaw "could allow a remote user to take control of a computer" if said computer isn't patched. No, that's not the different part, either. What's different is that this flaw is reportedly so buried in Windows's code and so vulnerable, it's on par with the hole that spawned the Blaster worm that wreaked billions of dollars' worth of havoc last summer. In fact, according to the Associated Press, this new flaw is so potentially heinous, the Department of Homeland Security is urging people to patch their systems before terrorists start to exploit it.

Just like they warned us about the hole that led to Blaster. So, uh, apparently that wasn't so different, either. Never mind.

But regardless, the new flaw is critical; Marc Maiffret of eEye Digital Security, the firm that first reported the flaw to Microsoft, says that "this is one of the most serious Microsoft vulnerabilities ever released" and that "some computer systems that control critically important power or water utilities were vulnerable." Furthermore, in a Reuters article, Maiffret notes that his firm "contacted Microsoft about these vulnerabilities 200 days ago, which is insane." Over six months to patch one of the biggest security holes ever? Well, that's a little different. Scary and not entirely unsurprising, but different nonetheless.

How about Microsoft spokespeople not making any sense? According to Stephen Toulouse of Microsoft's Security Response Center, the vulnerability "does affect all (current) versions of Windows. We're not aware of anyone affected by this at this time." Riiiight. Anybody want to complete the syllogism? Evidently Microsoft isn't aware of anyone using any current versions of Windows. You'd think the stock would plummet.

But when all's said and done, here's what was really different about yesterday's batch of Microsoftian security flaws: one of them was for Mac users. Granted, it was for Virtual PC, and anyone running Windows in emulation should be used to dealing with Microsoft security flaws anyway, but this time the problem is with the Mac Virtual PC software itself. Apparently someone with limited login access to a system running VPC can theoretically exploit the hole to give themselves full administrator access to the Mac; in other words, this is a bona fide, Mac-native security flaw.

Woo-hoo, three cheers for Microsoft! They may never give us Access or a reasonable version of Outlook, but at least they're sharing the security holes. That is different.