As Alice said, "Curiouser and curiouser..." Either German developers Omega have no idea when a joke's gone too far, or they really are working on this legendary COS. It's now a solid two and a half weeks overdue, though the Omega website claims it will ship "as quickly as is possible. But without any doubt: COS IS COMING!" (Run for the hills!)

But what's really creepy is that Macintouch says COS had earlier posted an urgent request on their website for a copy of a late developmental build of Copland, Apple's own personal money pit of an OS which swallowed years of development time before being ditched as simply unworkable. That request no longer appears there; does that mean they got a copy from a helpful fan, or that they found their Zip disk behind a desk? Or is this just a prank that they refuse to let die?

By the way: We at AtAT assume that if the COS is real, if it's at all based on Copland, Apple will have something to say about that. Warm up the lawyers, boys...

Macintouch also pointed us to a Washington Post article about Al Gore's wiredness. All in all, it's nice to see that Number Two not only knows what a computer is, but actually likes to use them. It may, however, be a minor problem that Gore would appear to be addicted to email, sending and receiving over a hundred messages a day... Yes, it's better than a drug problem or an overwhelming penchant for cheap blondes in spike heels, but it's still a tad unhealthy. (An addiction to White House Marathon net games, however, we could forgive completely-- "Eat my SPNKR, Tipper!")

The real tragedy, though, is that Mr. Gore doesn't have the option to play Marathon Infinity anymore-- he's succumbed to the dreaded "forced migration" syndrome, which made him sadly replace his desktop Macs and his Duo with a "souped-up" Compaq and a couple of ThinkPad 560's. (166 MHz Pentium one of the "fastest laptops on the market today?" What are they smoking? Somebody send Al a Powerbook G3, quick...) Gore himself says he loves the Mac and believes it's a "superior format," but had to switch because of software availability problems.

Daunting! If Al Gore can't hold onto his Mac at his job, what chance do the rest of us have? Seriously, does anyone here have a highly-placed contact that can send Al a PowerBook G3 250 running Virtual PC? We bet it'd be a fine replacement for the P166 he's running, running DOS and Windows apps at about the same speed. And he'd get to stick with his favorite platform. Somebody get Steve on the horn!

Now that the Alpha's out of the way, Intel doesn't have much competition in the processor arena. In fact, the PowerPC is the only serious contender in the desktop market (and many contend that it's not very serious). So it's slightly troubling to read the San Francisco Chronicle describe the PPC's likely slow withering death, following Apple's killing of the clone market.

The Chronicle's take on the whole thing is that Rhapsody, which will run on Intel chips as well as on PPC's, will shrink the chip's demand, while the elimination of Motorola and Power Computing as Mac OS clonemakers futher limits the arena. (We have to take this with a grain of salt: Yes, Rhapsody will run on Intel-- and it'll show everyone just how much faster the PPC's are, when they're not hobbled with a thirteen-year-old OS; and Motorola and Power Computing didn't really add to the number of PPC Mac systems sold, they just spread them around a little bit.)

IBM and Motorola firmly deny the rumors of an imminent shutdown of the Somerset Design Center, where PPC's are designed; they claim they are "very committed to the PowerPC." Time will tell.