Alright, call off the dogs, people-- we get the point: Mac OS X is going to be a-okay. Yesterday we unleashed a torrent of angst about how Apple was new to a game that others have been playing for years, with varying degrees of success: namely, putting a smiley face on a scary-looking behemoth. Up through Mac OS 9, the Mac's simplicity comes from within, but with Mac OS X, Apple faces the enormous challenge of grafting a simple user interface onto the infamously unfriendly substructure of Unix. The good news is that just about everyone thinks Apple is easily up to the task.

And while we agree on many points, like the assertion that Aqua is, if anything, easier for novices to learn than Mac OS 9's interface, our one remaining concern is this: no matter how pretty the outside looks, when the inside breaks, things may well get ugly really fast. That's something that Windows users have been used to for years; when it works, it's (cough) decent, but when it doesn't, run for cover and make sure your will is up to date. Now, one solution to this problem is simple: make sure nothing ever breaks. That may sound a bit glib, but is a bug-free operating system really such an impossibility? Sure, Mac OS X's only in beta right now, and it's evidently still possible to throw the system into intensely anxiety-inducing kernel panics, but so far, we personally haven't experienced a single system-level crash while running the beta.

So here's what we're going to do: we're going to shelve our natural pessimism for a while, and have faith that Apple's strongest point-- its obsessive attention to detail-- will mean that Aqua's glitz and user-friendliness will extend to those situations when things go wrong. We're going to trust that somehow Apple's either going to make nasty crashes a complete impossibility, or come up with some way to present such a crash in a manner less scary than technical jargon on a black screen. Because while the bomb icon was never a welcome sight, at least we didn't watch our whole user interface get yanked away and replaced with a blue screen filled with cryptic white hex code. (Running MacsBug meant a crash would give us a white screen filled with cryptic black hex code, but hey, we chose to set it up that way.)

In the meantime, as faithful viewer Russell Maggio pointed out, Adam Gillitt has finished his exhaustive compendium of Mac OS X beta testers' opinions for ZDNet, and the buzz is good. Very good. It's important to keep in mind that most of these people enthusiastically praising Mac OS X to the skies are power users instead of the iMac's target audience of first-time buyers, but this kind of reaction to a beta release bodes extremely well for Apple-- and us, of course. So here's looking forward to a perfect future.

Imagine how cool this would be: you wake up after a restful night at a snazzy hotel, you go downstairs for breakfast, and your waiter brings you an iBook with your morning coffee. This iBook just happens to be tricked out with an AirPort card and Internet access, so you can surf your favorite sites and check your email while stuffing your face. Surfing and stuffing-- what better way to start the day? And the best news of all is that this is no glorious vision of a distant Utopian future; you can do this right now. It's not even that expensive... rooms start at a mere $47 a night, and the iBook-at-breakfast service is absolutely free.

There is, however, one little catch: you have to go to Malaysia to take advantage of this dream come true. According to MacCentral, the hotel that's pampering its guests with complementary iBook time during breakfast is the Hotel Equatorial in Kuala Lumpur. Now, some of you out there may be a mere hop, skip, and a jump away from that fine city (last month's ratings data indicate that twenty-four of you are in Malaysia-- howdy, folks!), but for the AtAT staff here in Boston, the first coach flight we found would put a four-thousand-dollar-sized dent in our wallets. Each. Kinda puts that $47-a-night hotel fare in perspective, doesn't it? For the price of those airline tickets, we could each buy our own high-end PowerBook to drop crumbs in during breakfast. Or a couple of iBooks apiece, so there's a spare when one gets all sticky.

Speaking of crumbs and stickiness, we're impressed that the Hotel Equatorial has apparently somehow solved the problem of keeping its iBooks clean. One would think that after a few weeks of use at the breakfast table (by patrons who don't even own the equipment, and who are thus less likely to take particularly good care of it), each iBook would be rendered virtually unusable after coming into contact with various and sundry foodstuffs. Orange juice in the keyboard, jelly all over the screen, cream cheese clogging the speaker-- it could be a real mess. Furthermore, the iBook is not dishwasher-safe-- not even on the top rack. Trust us. (Don't ask.)

So, one would hope that the Hotel Equatorial will share its secret with the world, so that we won't have to drop four large just to stay at a hotel that'll loan us an iBook during breakfast. If the idea catches on, then someday iBook service at breakfast might become as ubiquitous as the copy of USA Today outside each door in the morning. Why, we foresee a day when even the Motel 6 in scenic Piscataway, New Jersey will provide AirPort-equipped iBooks during its complimentary continental breakfast service. But then again, we're not exactly Nostradamus, here.

"Redmond Justice"? What's that? Ohhhh, you mean the long-running courtroom drama that once had the whole world on the edge of its collective seat, as Microsoft and the U.S. government squared off in a tense battle over antitrust issues in the digital age. The one in which Microsoft eventually lost big, was ordered to split into multiple companies, and then filed an appeal whose outcome could well shape the future of the high-tech world for decades to come. Sorry, never heard of it.

Nah, we're just yanking your chain-- of course we remember that show. It enthralled a whole generation of antitrust drama addicts, after all; no one would be likely to forget that so soon. It's just that we can hardly believe it's still on the air, what with how slowly the plot's been moving these days. The last thing we can remember happening was Microsoft filing its appeal, and the Justice Department trying to kick it upstairs to the Supreme Court, thus bypassing the Microsoft-friendly Appeals Court entirely. Since then, all we've heard is little snippets like "the Supreme Court has neither agreed nor declined to hear the case yet." Until now, that is.

According to faithful viewer Milo Auckerman (who pointed out a CNET article), the Supreme Court has finally spoken on the possibility of an end-run around the appellate court, and the answer is a resounding no. "The direct appeal is denied and the case is remanded to" a lower court-- so states the order from the highest court in the land. That's a big blow to the government, but we look at it this way: now we get to watch the drama unfold with the Justice Department cast as the underdogs for a change. And odds are, with the way things are going, this case is Supreme Court-bound sooner or later. Finally, action again!