Remember yesterday's episode, in which we told you about the meeting between Apple and the dealers? Well, the changes that Apple's making to the channel reseller program are pretty far-reaching. Luckily, MacCentral has a wonderful recap of these changes; if you have an attention span as short as ours, this is just the thing to help sum up the salient points in easily-digestible info chunklets.

Here's some quick points: Apple is lowering its requirement for direct purchases from $20 million to $2 million. This encourages more small dealers, and maybe fosters some healthy competition in the dealer market. Apple's also adding extra personnel to their channel force, to provide better support to the dealers.

Apple's reducing its AppleFund allowance from 1.5% to 0.5%, making less funding available to dealers for promotional use, but Apple feels that the funds have been used poorly in the past. Apple will take the extra money from this savings and funnel it into its own advertising efforts, which should help the dealers, too.

There's also a new returns policy, a revised price protection program, enforceable guidelines on how to display demo Macs in stores, and a statement that Apple will continue to sell direct to customers via Apple Club, but not to the detriment of the channel resellers. Whew! Still with us? Seriously, this is all important stuff. Sounds like Apple's taking real steps to improve the way that Macs get sold. Now let's bail on this subject before this show turns into Wall Street Week.

Rumors are flying that Steve Jobs has offered the Edinburgh-based Roslin Institute and pharmaceuticals company PPL Therapeutics $150 million for their clone license and all related technologies. When Ian Wilmut, an Institute member, bewilderedly replied that they had no license to sell, Jobs reportedly ordered Apple's legal department to force Roslin and PPL to cease and desist all cloning activities at once.

Wilmut, shaken by the threat of legal action, flew to Cupertino to meet with Jobs in a high-level meeting, where he insisted that the Roslin/PPL project deals only in genetic cloning (remember Dolly the sheep?), and has no interest in manufacturing Mac OS-compatible computer systems. Under intense questioning, he admitted that it was, in fact, genetically possible to create a sheep that CHRPs, at which point Jobs refused to certify any such animal.

Eventually the befuddled Wilmut assured Jobs that all clones resulting from the project would require Apple ROMs in order to run Mac OS 8, at which point Jobs was appeased and all threats of legal action were dropped.

(Many thanx to Larry Auerbach for the initial tip.)

You think the above story is outrageous? This one's even more so-- and this isn't a joke. Macintouch has posted a reader's "confirmation" of the existence of a Mac OS 8-compatible OS being developed by a German company called Omega. This new OS, called COS, is purported to look different from Mac OS 8, but will be completely compatible with our own beloved OS at the application level. Meaning, you can run Photoshop and Excel on it.

Now here's where it gets really interesting. COS only takes 10-15MB of hard disk space. Better yet, it only eats up 500K of RAM, includes memory protection, has full preemptive multitasking, networks better than OS 8, and runs about five times faster. (Gee, will Microsoft Word crash five times faster, too?) It'll be sold for $100 over the web; since COS is so small, you just pay, and download it.

Folks, we at AtAT like to think that we're more gullible than the average six-year-old, but we've held off on posting this rumor because, frankly, even we have a hard time swallowing this one. Since COS is rumored to be in late beta, I guess we'll find out soon. The one thread of hope that we cling to is QNX, an operating system for PC's that fits on a floppy-- including PPP software, a TCP/IP stack, and a web browser. Yes, QNX really exists, and it really works. So maybe COS isn't just a pipe dream?

Hey, look, we won an EMMY!! All right!!

Er, well, okay, it's not really an Emmy. It's actually the MacSites 100% Mac Award, given weekly to deserving sites entirely created on and served by Mac OS machines.

Our first award! Pretty cool, huh? Next up: The Pulitzer!