Following the rumors at Apple Recon about a possible version of Windows 98 for Macintosh, Reality leaps into the fray with musings on the possibility of Mac OS 9 for Intel. Rumors are flying that Apple has resurrected the spirit of its "Star Trek" project from yesteryear (which succeeded in running System 7 on a 486), in order that it may kick ass over on the Intel side of the fence like a cloned Sigourney Weaver run amok.

And let's stretch that simile a little further: just as the Ripley clone in the latest Alien killfest gains her superhuman strength from the alien DNA fused with her own, it's said that Mac OS 9 will gain its platform-hopping ability from a big fat dose of Windows NT at its core. Holy Brundlefly, Batman! The rumors sprout from the seed that is Microsoft's $150 million investment in Apple this past August, and grow rampant from there.

While it's fun to speculate about the truly horrible, AtAT feels that the chances of Mac OS 9 using an NT kernel are terribly slim. As we told Reality earlier today, our bet's on Mach. Mach already powers Rhapsody and already runs on Intel; between it and NuKernel, Apple's already done a ton of kernel work. Why move to the NT kernel?

Little did we all know that MacOS Rumors is actually run by Woodward and Bernstein-- or at least we have to assume so, given the scope of the scandal they are on the verge of uncovering.

Recently, Rumors reported on some strangeness with Internet Explorer not letting people download competing Netscape products, and mentioned in passing a formerly reported suspicion that Microsoft's IIS web server gave preference to MSIE over any other browsers. The Rumors staff has since accumulated over 1200 email messages from readers who confirm the "shady" behavior of Microsoft's internet products, which looks suspiciously like cleverly disguised anticompetitive conduct.

About 850 people wrote in to confirm that they, too, had trouble downloading Netscape Navigator or Communicator via IE, with some even suspecting IE of corrupting their already-installed versions of Netscape. And a report from a developer who ran tests connecting to IIS with multiple browsers seems to confirm that IIS accepts connections from IE before any others, thus making the other browsers seem slower. Still more disturbing is the quote from anonymous Microsoft employees who state that while they've "noticed the same things," they've had to "learn to ignore that kind of thing and keep [their] eyes on [their] own monitor[s]."

If the above is true, then that's the kind of stuff about which the DoJ should really be leaping all over Microsoft. We wish the best of luck to Rumors if they attempt to follow this through to its logical conclusion. And we hope they watch their backs...

Boy howdy, will wonders never cease? The era of free Mac support ended not with a bang, but with a lawsuit-- but suddenly, from out of the shadows, its spectre rises again to continue its unfinished mission in this bug-plagued world. (Okay, so it sounds like an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, so sue us-- we're fans.)

That's right: as with other times that Apple's dropped the ball, somebody in the Mac community has picked it right back up again. Mac Home Journal and No Wonder have teamed up to provide their own free Mac tech support page. You just fill in their web form with your question or problem, hit "Submit," and in a day or so an answer is waiting in your inbox. Okay, so it's not quite the same as being able to dial an 800 number when your Mac won't even boot, but if you are operational enough to get to the web site and you can wait 24 hours for an answer, this seems like a pretty darn good deal to us.

Of course, the real question is, when will someone in the Mac community provide a Mac OS-compatible operating system with memory protection, pre-emptive multitasking, and symmetric multiprocessing? Oh, wait, that's right-- Omega did that with the COS back on November 12th. Never mind.