The folks at Reality and the Macintosh Conspiracy have teamed up to debunk the supposed COS screenshots floating around the web. You may recall that COS is the "Dream OS" from Omega, a relatively unknown German development company who claims to have reverse-engineered a Mac OS 8-compatible, totally memory-protected, symmetrically multiprocessing, pre-emptively multitasking, B2-security certified clone of the Mac OS that is four times faster, runs in 4MB of RAM, only takes up 12MB of hard disk space, and will be downloadable over the web for $99-- written in under a year, with no development help from Apple, and ready to ship by November 13th.

Done laughing yet? Well, the faked screenshots had been circulating for at least a week or so and hadn't seemed to fool anybody-- until Mac the Knife posted one as the real McCoy. Appalled by the world-weary Knife's sudden and complete gullibility, Reality has posted a detailed dissection of the screenshots, pointing out nine or ten fairly serious clues that the pictures were hacked together in Photoshop by somebody with waaaaay too much time on their hands (but not nearly as much attention to detail).

The Knife has posted his embarrassment at being taken in by such a puerile prank in his current online column, which, on a completely unrelated topic, also mentions Steve Jobs' rather unfortunate parking habits. Definitely worth a read.

MacOS Rumors has some nice little tidbits on Apple's new high-end line of computers, code-named PowerExpress and slated for release in early 1998 (hopefully at the January MacWorld Expo). They sound like some serious machines.

Somewhat surprisingly to us, these new speed demons will not use the PPC 750 (commonly called the "Arthur") chip that will ship in next month's midrange Power Macintosh G3 series. Instead, they will use the Mach 5 variation of the 604e chip, running between 300 and 400 MHz. We're not sure, but we think the slowest of these systems may therefore be a little slower on integer performance than the fastest G3 systems. However, because the Mach 5's rock the Arthur's world when it comes to floating-point performance, the PowerExpress series should totally kick butt for Photoshop use and other high-end graphics and 3D applications. Also, the Mach 5's can be used in multiprocessing systems (and there will be at least dual-processor Power Express boxes, and maybe even a quad-processor box), while the Arthur cannot.

The really interesting bit, though, is the rumor that Steve Jobs intends to name the computers "PowerMac G3 Extreme." We at AtAT think that, in addition to being too long and slightly misleading (sounds like it's packing an Arthur chip), Steve's proposed moniker sounds more like a sport utility vehicle than a Macintosh.

Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy once again took time to pursue his favorite hobby-- that of publicly blasting Microsoft for its various crimes against humanity. Apparently unsatisfied with only having sued Microsoft for breach of contract (you know, that whole "incompatible Java" hullabaloo), Scott threw in little oblique jabs while addressing a crowd of Sun customers, says a New.com story. "We aren't interested in global domination," he quipped.

Scott went on to denigrate both Microsoft's and Intel's partnering abilities, saying that they still "don't get it," while Sun can provide customers with everything they could ever need. More importantly, he warned listeners that Microsoft is a "dangerous partner," and that if they partnered with Microsoft by using Windows CE in their consumer electronics, eventually Microsoft would enter their market and steal their customers.

And, just for consistency's sake (he does this a lot, you know), he topped things off with the obligatory remarks about Microsoft products being difficult to use: "Anything more aggressive than changing a file name requires a reboot in Windows." Glad to see he's staying the course!