Say what you will, but we're convinced that the fundamental conflict at Apple these days is the tag team of Steve Jobs' personality and ego vs. the implicit power and threat of whoever takes the CEO slot. Remember, Steve's trying to carve his place out in 20th century legend by being the guy who returned to save Apple when the company came crawling back for help. But if a strong CEO moves in and cuts Steve off, that's the end of the fairy tale, at least as far as Steve's concerned. So is it any wonder that Mac OS Rumors is reporting outbursts of violent conflict between Steve and the apparent top dog CEO candidate Jim Cannavino?

As the story goes, Steve's trying to guarantee his place at Apple long enough to be there when Apple makes it back on top. He's currently pushing for a three-year contract, and he's only asking for a buck a year. (That's right, one buck. Sound appropriate for a CEO with only one share of stock?) The board, however, isn't so thrilled about Steve insinuating himself into Apple's affairs for such a long period of time; they, and Cannavino, opposed the contract. Steve, in classic Steve form, is then rumored to have gone postal and screamed at Cannavino to leave immediately. Cannavino is apparently no fool, as he got the heck out of Dodge and left Jobs screaming at the other board members...

So if these rumors are true, this is a sad state of affairs; will Apple have to choose between Jobs and Cannavino? Torn between two leaders, feelin' like a fool. What can we say? Some days, this soap just seems to write itself...

Apparently we weren't the only ones peeved by the absence of Macs in the the Sunday color supplements; over 1700 people so far have signed our petition requesting that CompUSA start advertising Macs in its Sunday circulars. But despite our best intentions, several viewers have written in to mention that our efforts are misguided, as the ads we all see every week in the Sunday newspaper are actually prepared months in advance. Now, we at AtAT won't pretend to know anything at all about national retail advertising, so we'll have to take that information at face value-- though it does raise two questions: Why on earth would ads for computers (whose specs and prices change constantly) be prepared "months in advance," and given that the CompUSA deal was announced a few months ago, why aren't we seeing Apple systems advertised in CompUSA's circulars yet?

Well, it seems to us that we're blessed with a benevolent genie, because no sooner did these questions pop into our eager little heads then a faithful viewer with inside information dropped some answers right into our waiting inbox. This viewer confirms that newspaper circulars are indeed prepared months in advance, and this is possible because "all manufacture promotions, sale prices, etc. are usually scheduled the quarter before." (As unfathomable as that is to us, we're willing to accept this strange concept of "planning ahead.") Our informant goes on to state that the only reason we haven't seen Mac ads from CompUSA is because when the conversion process was started several months ago, neither they nor Apple could be completely sure that all of the store-within-a-store remodelings would be done by the scheduled date. Sure would look stupid if a great big Apple/CompUSA ad appeared in the Sunday paper and the local store still only had two broken 6500's a copy of Myst, right? So they added in a buffer zone.

So our anonymous viewer advises us to sit tight, because a huge Apple/CompUSA ad is scheduled to appear in Sunday newspapers across the country on March 15th-- a date that agrees with Mac OS Rumors' sources, incidentally. According to both sources, that weekend there will be a grand opening of the salon stores to the public, which should be an event worth attending. We're keeping our schedules clear. And we're still submitting the petition-- just in case.

Oy vey, the alternative operating system known as InfiniteOS continues to vex and perplex. We received third-hand word today of a "professional Macintosh developer with 14 years' experience" calling the whole thing a "Trojan Horse virus," and classifying it as "toxic." He claims that trying to run the InfiniteOS on his 7300/180 caused hard drive corruption so severe that his only recourse was to reformat the disk. (By the way, we have reason to suspect that the developer in question is an AtAT viewer-- sir, if you're out there and you'd like to discuss the matter, please contact us via the Feedback page.)

We consulted with our buddy John Farr over at AppleLinks, who emailed Cache Computing's Kevin Avila about the allegations. The response? Whoever is making the claims of hard disk corruption either "has something really wrong with his computer" or is "just trying to bash the OS." According to Kevin, "it is almost impossible for InfiniteOS to destroy a hard disk" in its current state because all of the OS's write code is disabled. (Hmmm, if all of the write code is disabled, why is it only "almost" impossible for it to cause disk corruption?)

So who's right? Is one side wrong, or deliberately lying? Granted, this single report of hard disk corruption is the only such report we've seen, and it's all just one man's experience, but it gave us enough of a wigguns to want to warn our viewers to try the InfiniteOS only at your own risk, and only on a backed-up hard disk. Better safe than sorry, after all. Given all of the twists and turns lately with this "alternate OS" business, we have to wonder what's next... COS shipping tomorrow, perhaps?