It's a magical day in MacWebLand. We woke up to find the sun shining, the birds singing, and two major insider-news sites back from the brink of extinction.

That's right-- MacInsider, recently thought "whacked" by an Apple-Asia-funded Ninja Hit Squad, suddenly resurfaced as if nothing had happened. In fact, the only clues that they had been gone at all are the gap in their coverage, and the short note thanking the readers who helped in their write-in campaign. (No word as to how/why they were forced off the air, though.) And MacOS Rumors, recently down for the last nine days due to "ISP troubles," sprang back into life, albeit temporarily sans DNS support.

There are a few possibilities that could explain these events. Perhaps the entire hit squad was exterminated by an underground elite fighting force, thus liberating the oppressed websites. Or maybe there was never a hit squad at all. (Nah...) The most likely answer for AtAT? Last season never happened-- it all took place only in Victoria Principal's dream.

So yes, kiddies, Mac OS Rumors is back and dishing dirt with a vengeance to make up for lost time. While their new DNS info filters through the net, you can reach them at their IP address, 209.100.58.71. Don't miss their first installment, which is jam-packed with sneaky goodness.

According to their sources, what we've all known as Rhapsody may end up shipping as "Unity," as a result of brainstorming sessions headed up by Captain Steve himself. Now, it's always been known that "Rhapsody" was only a development name, but I have to say, "Unity" just doesn't have the same ring to it. It certainly makes sense for the PPC version, since it will include both the modern "Yellow Box" and the compatibility "Blue Box," but what may end up being "Unity for Intel" will be Yellow only. So why "Unity?" Call it a vain hope, but we at AtAT always harbored a secret desire that the name "Rhapsody" would remain.

Rumors also mentions that while the Apple-Oracle merger proposition is still slated to be presented to the board at the end of this month, the prospects of a joint UMAX-Motorola Apple buyout are shrinking every day. Score one for Apple.

Just for the record, if Rumors wasn't taken out by Apple's Ninja Hit Squad, they'd better start packing heat after posting those super-secret spy photos of upcoming Apple products, straight from the ad shoots... It's great to have them back, in any case.

So have you noticed that whenever something sensational yet tawdry happens in the news, a book about the event shows up in the local Barnes & Noble in about three and a half minutes? Well, when the tawdry-yet-sensational event draws out over twenty years and doesn't involve an ex-sports-star-turned-actor, sometimes it takes a little longer. But you need wait no longer! Jim Carlton's new tell-all, Apple: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania and Business Blunders, is reportedly well worth the wait for people looking for some cheap (and timely) dirt. We're told it covers events all the way up through Jobs' return.

Within its pages, Carlton reveals (based on interviews with 160 people, including Bill Gates and Apple's former top execs) the management errors of biblical proportions that prevented Apple from becoming the biggest player in the personal computer industry. To take one particularly galling example, Macintouch claims that the book includes a memo from Bill Gates to John Sculley and Jean-Louis Gassée, in which he urges Apple to license the Mac OS. Reportedly, Bill even offered to help, since, at the time, Microsoft made ten times higher profits from its applications than from its operating systems. (Imagine what the computing landscape would look like today if Mac OS and Windows marketshares were reversed!) It was Gassée who nixed the deal, which some might consider suspicious, given that he's now heading up the Apple-competitor Be...

We plan to read it as soon as we can; sounds kind of like a prequel to our own little show, here. And for the EvangeListas among our faithful viewers who are wondering if it's kosher, fear not-- Carlton's book is Kawasaki-approved.