Our six weeks out of from the wicked world of tip top tech has seemed to have spawned more Apple related “miracles” than the complete Ninfomania back archive put together.The long talked about G4 is now “out there”, but apparently has far more punch than expected ... cut to General MIPS at PlayStation HQ, “... fear the worst men ... we seemed to have underestimated to power of this processor ...” As with most things, it comes from the motherboard, which Apple have tweaked to brings dramatic performance improvements, especially in the area of image rendering. The processor remains 32 bit based, and is a close relative of the G3, butengineers from Motorola, IBM and Apple, the PowerPC partners, have come upwith additional tweaks and instructions sets that can triple graphic performance of optimised programs. The technology, also referred to as AltaVec, is being marketed as the Velocity Engine. Vroom, vroom.This is great news for all the CodeWorriors out there as well as the Photoshop freaks as the software upgrades ships with the computer - eventhose digidons reclining on their Linux Loungers will be able to squeeze a few more.  While the processor alone is way ahead of Intel’s Pentium III, the new “Swath” [isn’t that a Moog synth waveform?] motherboard in the twohigher end models brings even further performance enhancements.So, Apple’s PR company have done a great job in getting the US Governmentrunning scared [remember our NT 4.0 Sinks The US Navy story? No clever PR needed for that one] and their share price is rising like a silent cloud Stealth missiles in the dead of night. All good as far as we are concerned.