Every so often we can't help thinking that maybe, just maybe, Apple really is serious about a slow push into the enterprise market. After all, Apple is cranking out stuff that big business should be drooling over, if it can get over its allergy to the Apple logo. First you've got Mac OS X Server, which is UNIX-based, serves up a whole mess of standards to just about any platform under the sun, and is far cheaper per client than Windows NT/2000/XP Server/whatever the heck they're calling it these days. Then there's the Xserve, a seriously sexy and reasonably-priced rack-mountable server on which to run it. Sheesh, what's next? A return to beige? A pink slip printer than can churn out 60 professional and personalized layoff notices per minute? A real, honest-to-goodness journaled file system?

Aw, bummer-- it's the journaling one. (Pity; the pink slip thing sounded neat.) Oh, sure, a journaled file system may not mean navel fuzz to you, us, and Johnny AppleWorks out there, but trust us when we say that the UNIX wonks and the big business IT trolls might just sit up and take notice. See, apparently journaled file systems continually log every little change to every little bit on every little disk, which allows for quicker rebuilding of data following a system failure. UNIX generally has it, Windows doesn't (at least, not fully), and the Mac will soon-- according to an eWEEK article pointed out by faithful viewer Rooser.

Reportedly, the upcoming 10.2.2 update includes technology code-named "Elvis" (thankyuhverruhmuch), which sticks a full-fledged journaling implementation right on top of HFS+, Mac OS X's primary native file system. And while Elvis will slow down system performance by ten to fifteen percent (apparently this is mid-'70s gettin'-pudgy Karate Elvis, not swivel-hipped Pre-Army Elvis), fear not-- it'll be disabled by default. But folks that want their systems scribbling down every teensy little thing they do can enable it via a quick trip to the command line, after which Mac OS X will grab a pen and start logging entries like "Dear Diary, today that dreamy Johnny S. smiled at me in the hallway while I was wearing my new pink sweater and /var/log/system.log grew by 83 bytes at 3:20 AM when a cron-scheduled backup started."

It's also worth noting that Elvis will be a real boon to those of you who find your new Macs to be just too darn fast. Simply wait for 10.2.2 to pop up in Software Update, install it, turn on journaling, and bickety-bam: instant 10-15% reduction in performance. Keep that in mind the next time you're lamenting that running Photoshop filters just isn't taking long enough to let you go for a cup of coffee and a danish. Or a fried peanut butter and banana sandwich.