Welp, tomorrow's the big day for Omega, the German developers who claim that sometime in the next 24 hours they will ship COS-- their Mac OS 8-compatible, high-security, low-RAM-footprint, low-disk-space, high-performance "alternative OS" for Macs and Mac compatibles. We've long held the belief that Omega's claims are bogus (since they include such features as four times the speed of Mac OS 8 while using 4MB of RAM, zero system crashes, support for 68030's on up, preemptive multitasking, etc.), though we have no idea why they would foist such a ruse on the Mac-using public.

So tomorrow we'll find out if we were correct in our world-weary cynicism, or if we should eat our collective hat, bite the bullet, download the sucker, shell out the $99, and zip along on our newly COS-powered supermachines. Since it's purported to be downloadable as a 20-day free trial, we're game.

By the way, if COS turns out to be a sick joke and you want a real alternative modern OS for your Powermac, MacWEEK reports that you can now download the second preview release of the BeOS for free. The stripped-down version of the super-threaded wonder OS is just 9 MB or so, and includes support for email, web surfing, ftp, etc. If you haven't yet tried the BeOS, we recommend you take it for a spin. Visit Be's site for details.

We aren't the only ones who noticed that Apple's two-and-a-half-hour media event wound up being just about an hour long, and wondered if some deal fell through at the last minute. Apple Recon has been murmuring about the possibility, and today, a MacOS Rumors source provides further evidence that all was not right at the Flint Center.

It seems that Apple broke from their traditional method of informing European journalists about Apple news at afternoon press conferences, and instead invited them to watch the event live at 8PM local time, indicating something huge. It's unlikely that the Apple Store and build-to-order systems constitute "huge news" in the "live evening overseas teleconference" sense. Moreover, the president of Apple Europe had been flown to Cupertino to see the event live. And according to Rumors' source, the dinner for the journalists--originally scheduled for 10:30PM--began over an hour earlier, due to the announcement being so short.

If there was supposed to be really big news, but it wasn't quite ready for announcing by showtime on Monday, does that mean we can expect a bombshell from Apple sometime in the near future? Perhaps the Apple/Oracle partnership is still to come. In the meantime, we'll bask in the continued success of the Apple Store; Webintosh is reporting that the direct sales department at Apple has logged $1.4 million in sales in the two days it's been open. Not bad...

Just a quickie, here... Macintouch included a link to an interesting Microsoft sales pitch the other day. This page is a targeted hard-sell of Windows NT servers to K-12 schools who are running Macintosh clients, whether in a mixed-platform environment, or in a Mac-exclusive setting.

The ad copy really makes a strong case for buying an NT server for your school network, even though it contains some half-truths and even some outright lies (they're still claiming that NT is certified for C-2 security? Yeah... until you plug it into a network!), but hey, it's marketing material, and that's to be expected. The one thing that's missing from the list of features, though, is technical support.

And that's why the lure seems particularly evil to us. K-12 schools, as a general rule, do not have tons of cash sitting around, ready to be poured into hidden costs like technical support. Many teachers we know double as makeshift network administrators, with no formal training, and often very little idea of what they're doing. On a Mac network, that kind of scenario (while less than optimal) can work out fine. But throw an NT server in there, and the same fifth-grade Social Studies teacher who managed the Appleshare server may run into a few problems. And as far as we know, Microsoft still charges $195 per incident for NT Server support. (If there's a special price for education customrs, please let us know.)

The K-12 teachers have enough on their hands without having to learn yet another job. If this little NT marketing scheme starts to consume even more time from the schedules of those teachers (who, despite having to support the computers, rarely seem to have any choice in which ones actually get purchased), and the kids suffer as a result, well, that's pretty low in our book.