Well, smack us with a rebar and call us an ambulance-- just when we had all but given up hope of this shindig dying a sad, lingering death, the Naked Mole Rat has finally arrived fashionably late! (Faithful viewer Mister T pities the fool who don't dig the Rat.) His latest appearance comes a solid month and a half after the last one, and that one occurred a month and a half after its predecessor, so either the Artist Formerly Known As The Knife is slowing down in his old age, or he's just on some kind of bizarre psychological and/or drug-induced six-week cycle. (We're betting on the latter.) Now that we know, we can plan accordingly. In any event, we're just glad to have him back.

As for what the Gay Blade brings to the party, it's a Fun-Pak™ of Mac OS X dirt for all to enjoy. Rumor has it that Apple has "officially frozen the feature set" for the lickable new operating system's 1.0 release, and is now hunkering down to implement those features in a relatively bug-free manner. In other words, Apple's decided on just what Mac OS X 1.0 will be, and any lingering ship-date-threatening feature-creep has been eradicated; all efforts are now targeted at getting the first commercial release out the door.

And when we say all efforts, we mean all efforts. According to the Rat, the long-rumored (and long-awaited) update to the public beta doesn't exist; "the current public beta will be both the first and last." That's a bit of a blow to those of us hoping to test-drive a more polished and feature-complete beta-- say, one that works with AirPort without requiring the tester to mess around with unsanctioned and potentially disastrous kernel extension hacks. So if the Rat's correct, public beta testers, what you bought is what you get-- and all you get.

So the first slice of news is sweet and the second one's slightly bitter-- but the third slice just seems stale. Brace yourselves, because according to the Rat, Mac OS X 1.0 will not ship at January's Expo, and won't surface until the "end of February" at the earliest. We know, we know, it's a shock... to anyone who's been living in a cave for the past three months. Anyone who's used, seen, or just read about the public beta since its release could see that Apple had a ton of work to do before the operating system would be "done" enough for a full commercial release. Personally, we even think the Rat's late February possibility is grossly optimistic. Hey, Your Nakedness! We love you, man, but step away from the crack pipe-- it's not that kind of party!

Speaking of mainstays on the Mac rumors scene, the granddaddy of the rumorological web has been kicking out some pretty thought-provoking stuff lately. Just yesterday we were huddled around the water cooler talking about that alleged "faster G4 release schedule" (well, that and Joyce's brain tumor on Buffy-- it's so sad!), and then Mac OS Rumors goes ahead and tops itself with these whispers of new PowerPC partners. Now that's fodder for a lunch discussion or two, right? Imagine Apple being free of Motorola's glacial grip.

Don't get too excited, though, because after all, it's just a rumor-- and the rumor just claims that "internal Apple documents" reveal that Steve's been giving his Reality Distortion Field a workout as he attempts to persuade Motorola and IBM to "support a program that would encourage new companies to join the alliance." The thrust here is that if Steve gets his way, then eventually there would be new companies developing and manufacturing PowerPC chips. In theory, more suppliers and competitive development would mean great things in store for Apple. But really, what are the odds that IBM and Motorola are going to say, "hey, sure, let's invite other companies to come in, take our intellectual property, produce competing chips, and deflate our own processor sales"? We doubt there's enough RDF in the universe.

In fact, even if Steve does somehow manage to get the other AIM partners to admit new members, for the short term, Apple's still tied to Motorola for its G4 processors since it's bet the bank on the company's Altivec technology (known in more swirly marketing terms as the "Velocity Engine"). And that's not the only reason why Apple's alleged scheme may not help the company much; for a healthy dose of skepticism and perspective, we recommend The Register's take on the idea. But even if you come to the conclusion that the whole scenario's bonkers, isn't it nice to take a moment and fantasize about a world in which we aren't sitting around for a year waiting for Motorola to do something clever? Mmmmm... it's like a balmy tropical vacation...

And you thought the PowerPC had problems! Well, okay, you're right-- the PowerPC does have problems, but that's not really directly germane to the point we're trying to make. What we're trying to imply is that something or someone else has bigger problems even than those of the manufacturers and purchasers of the PowerPC, so that by comparison, the PowerPC's problems are, hyperbolically speaking, practically nonexistent. Get it? Look, never mind... we'll start again.

Here's the skinny: faithful viewer Scott Pennington set us all a-flutter by pointing out a PC World article about that new-fangled Pentium 4's continuing woes. You already know that early performance reviews have shown that, despite being 500 MHz faster in terms of clock speed, for many office-style tasks, a 1.5 GHz Pentium 4 is actually slower than a 1 GHz Pentium III. That fact alone probably has the mucky-mucks at Intel reaching for the Advil. But now it seems that several Best Buy stores have yanked P4-based computers off of their shelves, due to "excessive heat and inadequate performance."

Now, even though it's apparently not Intel itself issuing the recall, that's still gotta hurt. Especially since it was only three months ago when Intel was forced to recall every single 1.13 GHz Pentium III due to an "erratum." Is it just us, or does it really seem like the rush to attain ever-increasing clock speeds is doing more harm than good? Maybe Motorola's got the right idea after all: take your time and make sure your products actually work before shipping them. Then again, in the time Motorola's spent working to get past 500 MHz, a roomful of monkeys could have hammered out the script to Hamlet. We can't help but figure that there must be a happy medium in there somewhere. Perhaps Intel should lay off the caffeine and Motorola could stop drinking NyQuil for breakfast or something. Just a friendly suggestion.