Wouldn't you know it? A scant two days after we tell you about the InfiniteOS project, our buddy John Farr at AppleLinks writes to tell us that InfiniteOS is no less vaporous than COS. Let's make that clearer: On an existence scale of 1 to 10, InfiniteOS rates a 0. Meaning, of course, that it's a hoax.

"Waitaminnit," you exclaim; "I downloaded the early version from their site, and it works as advertised." Well, yes, there's a 115K download at the Cache Computing site, and it does in fact let you eject floppies, restart, and play audio CD's-- but that doesn't make it an operating system. The fact that you don't have to install it to run it may have been a tip-off. But the biggest clue, according to John's source, is the fact that Kevin Avila is heading up the "development team." Apparently Kevin is well-known for running this exact same scam several times in the past, beginning with OpenOS in 1996, and followed by LimeOS a few months after OpenOS was debunked.

What exactly is it about the Macintosh that attracts OS hoaxes? What a bizarre phenomenon. I suppose it's just one of those things we have to live with, kind of like how some Windows users have to deal with registry corruption. (If you don't know what that is, count yourself among the lucky and don't ask-- believe us, you don't want to know.)

Add another lawsuit to the pile that's making Microsoft's twelve gazillion lawyers richer by the second. This time, though, it's not a government agency suing the Redmond software company, as in the Department of Justice's current litigation; nor is a big computer tech company like Sun hauling their butts to court for something like contract violation in corrupting Java. It's not even a class-action suit representing millions of frustrated Windows 95 users. In this particular case, it's just one guy suing for patent infringement.

According to Wired News, a man named Martin Gardiner Reiffin claims to hold a U.S. patent for the software technique known as multithreading, which allows more than one set of instructions in a single application to run at the same time. For instance, in Mac OS 8, you can have six copy processes running at once and still empty the trash and launch Netscape; that's because the OS 8 Finder is multithreaded. Gardiner claims that since he owns the patent for the technique, Microsoft owes him royalties for every product they ship that uses it-- which, of course, if paid, would probably transfer a hefty chunk of Bill Gates' billions over to Gardiner's Swiss bank account. Microsoft's lawyers will probably argue that the patent never should have been granted to Gardiner and that it is therefore not valid.

Given that Apple (and just about every other software vendor out there) uses multithreading in their products, why is Gardiner only suing Microsoft for royalties? "Because they have 90 percent of the market," he says. Hmmm, guess there is a benefit to having only 2.6% market share after all...

Yesterday we mentioned the disparity between the "Allegro Lite" descriptions posted by Mac OS Rumors and MacWEEK. MacWEEK claims that Allegro Lite is a feature-reduced version of the next Mac OS revision, which has some functions removed in order to meet the summer ship date. Rumors, on the other hand, talks about Allegro Lite as a "thin-client" version of the Mac OS that is tailored to run on handhelds and NC's, similar to Windows CE in concept (though hopefully about a million times better in execution). So who's right? Well, we won't know for sure until it ships, but Reality sides with Rumors on this one.

In an update to this week's edition, Reality claims that MacWEEK's report of Apple scaling down Allegro's feature set is false, or at best, based on old descriptions of what Allegro would have to offer. Way back at the dawn of time (or a year ago, at least), Allegro was planned to include pre-emptive multitasking, protected memory, and other modern OS niceties that are now planned for Rhapsody, as well as for a forthcoming Mac OS release code named Sonata. Sonata sounds like it'll be similar enough to Rhapsody on the surface to allow the entire Mac user base to migrate to Rhapsody without missing a beat. And finally the creaky underpinnings of our 1984 operating system will be gone, replaced by the actually-pretty-nearly-as-old yet "looking great for its age" underpinnings of Rhapsody.

And, of course, we spend so much time talking about Mac OS releases that won't be out for a year yet that we haven't had time to upgrade to Mac OS 8.1. One of these days we'll have to get our priorities straight. ;-)