Okay, if Apple Recon is to be believed, things in Cupertino are getting too scary even for us (and that's saying something). They've posted a letter that seems to confirm yesterday's rumored shouting match between Steve Jobs, the rest of the Apple board, and CEO candidate Jim Cannavino. Recon's source claims that Jim's heading back to IBM to spread the word that "Apple is Jonestown after all," (ouch) "Heaven's Gate has been rebuilt" (owowow) and "Jobs is insane." (We'd classify that last one as an anticlimax.)

Will the rest of the Apple board accept Jobs' chasing away yet another CEO candidate? Things are probably reaching a fever pitch on that issue, so it's not inconceivable that the board will have to choose between Steve and Jim (or another CEO candidate) very soon. The Recon letter spirals off into an extended rant that covers Jobs' total incompetence, the mismanagement of Rhapsody, the destruction of Newton, the licensing renegotiations for QuickTime, and the potential buyout of Apple by Disney-- enough bile there to last anyone a couple of lifetimes. Wait a half-hour after eating before reading it.

Of course, the Recon letter was just that-- a letter. From one person. As such, it may not necessarily reflect what's really going on in the Apple board room, and Recon seems to love to post info that's, shall we say, "emotionally charged." Recall, for instance, their panic-stricken reaction to Steve Jobs' walkout during a CNBC interview, which actually had very little effect on anything afterwards. Still, that's an awful lot of smoke in that letter for there to be no fire at all. Steve! Jim! Simmer down or we'll turn this soap opera around and take you both home right now!

After yesterday's third-hand report of an experienced Mac developer who claims to have had his hard disk corrupted by trying to run the InfiniteOS, that developer (an AtAT viewer!) wrote in to clarify. Joseph McConnell does not wish to imply that the InfiniteOS is necessarily an intentional Trojan Horse virus, but that it "should be considered as dangerous as one," whether the authors' intentions are malicious or not. Joseph states that "it's been more than ten years" since he's had a an application "trash a hard drive by just running it."

As it turns out, Joseph's not the only AtAT viewer who's had problems that seem to have arisen from running the InfiniteOS. Jeff Bloxham writes in to say that he "wishes to confirm the damaging effects" of the operating system. He's experienced the same problem with disk corruption, and in fact had his system booted off an emergency Zip disk when he wrote to us. Says he, "I'm not saying the OS is directly to blame, just that it contributed to the mess." And Jeff Raden contacted us to say that he ran the InfiniteOS demo a few days ago with no immediate problems, but about a day later, his system would freeze solid every time he tried to boot, whether from his hard disk or from the Mac OS 8 CD-ROM. He's able to boot from the Norton Utilities CD-ROM, but even after Norton repairs his hard drive, he's still unable to boot from it. And while this could all just be a coincidence, he says, "If InfiniteOS is a virus, I feel like a complete f*&^%ing idiot for trying it."

As for InfiniteOS developer Kevin Avila's claim that the OS is "write-disabled," so it can't cause hard disk corruption? Says Joseph McConnell, "A single rogue memory write in seemingly unrelated code can damage the VCB or related in memory structures, which is then flushed (written) to disk. This is how MicroSoft File and Photoshop 2.05 used to corrupt harddrives." Waaaay over our heads, but we'll take that info at face value. For now, the bottom line is, three AtAT viewers have had hard disk troubles following the use of the InfiniteOS which may or may not have caused or contributed to the problems. Hmm... A Joseph and two Jeffs. I guess the moral is this: Don't run the InfiniteOS without a full backup of your boot drive, especially if your first name starts with a "J."

And for the sake of balance, we'd like to point you towards some news over at Mac OS Rumors that's both positive and relatively innocuous. It sounds like we've received the first public confirmation of "Allegro Lite," the version of the Mac OS for so-called "thin" clients like the eMate. Up to now, we've only heard rumors of this Mac OS for handhelds; several people have speculated that it may supplant the Newton OS in Apple's future handheld plans.

We're particularly happy that this public confirmation came from Avie Tevanian, once the whiz-kid wonder over at NeXT and now the Senior Vice President of Software Engineering at Apple; if it had reportedly come from a random marketing guy, we'd be significantly less likely to put any stock in it. During a question-and-answer period at the MacWorld Expo in Japan, someone asked if the Mac OS for eMate was real, and Avie replied, "Yessirree Bob." (Okay, we're paraphrasing. Sue us.) He confirmed that in the future, not only would a version of the Mac OS run on the eMate, but it would also include key technologies like QuickTime, which have since been missing from Apple's Newton-based line. (Actually, we recall reading about a private tech demo many months ago, in which a QuickTime movie was shown running on a prototype color eMate-style device, but nothing like that has seen the light of day yet.)

Keep in mind that Rumors obtained this info from a Japanese source, and something may have been lost in translation down the line. But if this is true, it's a good sign that Apple's serious about expanding the Mac OS into wider arenas. So, uh, what distiguishes a color eMate running Allegro Lite from a run-of-the-mill Powerbook? Hopefully, at least about a thousand dollars.