It's no secret that just about everyone and their mothers want Steve Jobs to take the position as permanent CEO of Apple, but last quarter's profit seems to have stoked the fires a bit. Larry "Blabbermouth" Ellison was his usual unguarded self when he spoke about the subject at last week's MacWorld Expo. According to InfoWorld Electric, Larry says the entire board of directors has tried "begging, bribing, everything" to get Jobs to stay, because he is the only person with the "knowledge, experience, compassion, intellect, and metabolism" to do the job right.

Okay, Larry, but how do you really feel about Steve? "Steve Jobs is better than a first-rate CEO. There is no one who can fill Steve's shoes. There is no one." We guess that about says it all, doesn't it? (I wonder why Steve wanted Larry on the board?) Seriously, though, it's no wonder people want Steve to stay on as CEO, given all he's accomplished since he returned to Apple. Wired has a pretty nice timeline if you'd like to refresh your memory. Don't let its "rebellious" chronology put you off.

"We have gotten on our knees collectively on this," says Larry, but so far, Steve's just not interested enough to take the job. Larry says the board's efforts to cajole Steve into accepting the position have not been "subtle." Aw, c'mon, Larry, quit pulling our leg-- you know you're always subtle.

Several sources, including MacInTouch and MacOS Rumors, are reporting that Mac OS 8.1 has gone "golden master," meaning that it has reached the point where it is ready for release. We should expect to see the CD-ROM version within a few weeks, and an internet-downloadable version sooner than that. So warm those modems...

The 8.1 update contains a number of bug fixes and new features, most notably support for the HFS Plus file system-- the first overhaul of the Mac's file system since inception, we think. HFS Plus increases the maximum length of file names and the maximum size of files (though we'll have to wait for future versions of the Mac OS to actually use those capabilities), but most importantly, it fixes that irritating "minimum block size" limitation with HFS, which wastes a ton of space on large hard disks, especially when one stores a lot of small files. For instance, under HFS, a measly 2 KB of data in a text clipping is actually gobbling up 33 KB of our 2 GB hard disk. To see what a difference HFS Plus can make on your storage space, take a look at the before-and-after numbers posted by Reality.

Unfortunately, the version of Mac OS 8.1 that will ship on CD-ROM will also contain a huge collection of bugs. Fortunately, they'll be easy to find-- they're collectively referred to as Microsoft Internet Explorer. (Okay, okay, that was catty. Sorry, we're a little cranky tonight. Besides, Apple's reportedly still considering shipping 8.1 with MSIE 3.0, given the huge number of problems reported with the just-released 4.0.)

Every Claris Emailer user heaved a sign of relief today when Claris officially denied the widespread rumors that the company's versatile mail client was being "retired." According to a short-but-sweet MacWEEK article, a company spokesperson says that "Claris has not ceased development of Emailer." The rumor apparently started with a quote by a developer in MacUser UK, who may have been misunderstood.

AtAT is happy to hear that development of Emailer continues. Those of you who use Emailer understand why; those of you who don't should give it a try. Emailer grabs our mail from five POP mail accounts and three AOL accounts, color-codes AtAT feedback and advertising requests, automatically files listserv mail in appropriate folders, labels obvious spam bright pink, sorts by date, and allows us to read all of our mail from these various and sundry accounts in a single inbox. The thought of living without Emailer makes us shudder; indeed, the notion of actually having to use the AOL client software again just to retrieve our email from those accounts makes us break out in a cold sweat. (We used to wake up screaming from nightmares in which faceless men crawling with bugs merrily chirped, "You've Got Mail!")

Of course, this news would become moot if the rumors about Netscape possibly buying Home Page and Emailer are true, but obviously if Netscape were to buy Emailer it wouldn't do so just to let it die. So regardless, we're happy to see that Emailer's here to stay.