After yesterday's little drama between Mac OS Rumors and Jim Carlton of the Wall Street Journal surfaced, it was only a matter of time before Carlton's side of the story came to light. Our buddies over at Mac-Mania have the scoop.

It seems that now the tables have turned; in Carlton's response to Rumors' public accusation of unethical behavior and implied blackmail, he paints himself the victim, expressing bewilderment at the charges, and citing his journalistic integrity as his drive to report both sides of the story-- "the good, as well as the bad." He very good-naturedly requested that several previously-omitted email messages be made public, in hopes that it become clear to the Mac-using public that his intentions were never dishonorable.

So who's right? There was no mention of Carlton's response at Mac OS Rumors today. The more suspicious among you might even suspect Rumors of starting a deliberate smear campaign, or of trying to rouse some publicity. Alas, we at AtAT are inclined to believe it's all just a misunderstanding. Sometimes life's just dull. Sigh.

Man, we'd love to tell you some good news about Clone War casualty Power Computing one of these days, but only the bad stuff keeps popping up. Amidst rumors of massive layoffs in their Wintel development section, they are now being sued for... well, basically for going out of business.

Okay, yeah, that sounds pretty goofy to us, too. But TCI Manufacturing, the company that provided Power with CPU enclosures and power supplies for their Mac OS clones, now claims that when Power sold out to Apple, they cancelled large pre-orders for parts for which TCI had no other market. The loss of Power's promised business has forced TCI to shut down, they charge. So they're demanding almost $43 million in damages. Techweb has the story.

Incidentally, the tower enclosure and power supply in our PowerTower Pro 200 are the parts we like least about the machine. Yours Truly cut his fingers on the sharp stamped-metal edges inside while trying to install some RAM. Yes, I literally bled into my computer. Eeeeewwww, that can't be good.

Okay, maybe not running scared-- call it a brisk walk, if Julia Angwin of the San Francisco Chronicle is to be believed. Take a gander at her article, "Microsoft Fears That It May Lose Its Dominance." Angwin's angle is pretty straightforward: Microsoft's fears are evident by their tactics and targets.

Netscape is one of Bill's big boogeymen, of course; Netscape has a percentage of the browser market almost as high as Microsoft's percentage of the desktop OS market, and the Web has the potential to make operating systems obsolete in some sectors. Enter MSIE, a direct competitor to Navigator-- and a free one, at that. And giving it away apparently wasn't working well enough at capturing browser percentages, since we've heard PC manufacturers testify that Microsoft forced them to ship MSIE with all Windows-loaded systems. And perhaps most telling of all is a 1995 internal Microsoft memo in which Bill Gates admitted that it was "scary" that Netscape Navigator had the potential of replacing Windows on net-based PC's.

Then there's Sun, whose platform-independent Java language is another lurking horror for Bill. Java's whole purpose is to run on any platform, thus making the operating system irrelevant. If I were Bill, that'd keep me up at night, too. So what to do? Why, sabotage it by shipping a Windows version that's incompatible with other systems.

Sadly (or happily, depending on your perspective), Apple is not mentioned as a threat alongside Netscape and Sun. But regardless, It's kind of fitting that on Halloween we're discussing the fears of Microsoft, who are themselves one of the most feared companies on earth. Now if only Elvira were here.