Is it just us, or is anyone else noticing a pattern emerging in Steve Jobs' request for "90 days" to get Apple back on track? First he talked to Macintouch's Ric Ford, and during the conversation he asked for "90 days" to bring about improvement. Then, a few days later, AtAT started our own 90-day countdown in response to a reader request. Then, in yesterday's Seybold keynote (especially obvious in MacWEEK's coverage) he once again asked for "90 days" to turn things around.

If we were to restart the countdown, we'd effectively give Steve until next year to straighten things out. Personally, we're sticking to our guns-- the 90 days ends on December 22nd, Steve. I mean, seriously-- those of you who hang out around comp.sys.mac.games.action or alt.games.marathon might agree that it's starting to sound like the standard release date for upcoming Mac games: "When will it be out?" "Two weeks."

Do you own a 5400/5500/6400/6500? Are you worried about the mysterious "flashing question mark" bug that has been plaguing small numbers of these Macs? Faithful viewer Ed Wojtowicz (Hmmm, shades of Wojo from Barney Miller...) pointed us to this interesting Philadelphia News article, in which Apple's apparent solution to the problem is simple: Never turn off your computer.

If only all of life's problems were solved so easily! Stop me if you've heard this one before: "Hey, Doc, it hurts when I go like this!" "Then don't go like that!" Ha ha, man, we slay ourselves! Okay, okay, so Apple's investigating a real solution... but in the meantime, keep those 603e's a-hummin'! May we recommend that you donate your spare CPU cycles to the Bovine RC5 encryption-cracking effort? Team Evangelist needs your help!

It's the pipe dream that just won't die! There appears to be more and more reason to believe that COS may really exist. Macintouch's COS page now lists even more information on the rumored Mac OS-compatible superOS, including a letter from Omega claiming that everything on their web page is true; a quote from a reader who reminds everyone that the Amiga OS did a lot of what COS claims to do, and ran in a small RAM footprint on 68K boxes; and most interesting to us, key points from a translation of a German interview with Omega, which we wanted to read, but none of us know German. (Well, one of us knows that "baumkopf" means "treehead," but that's about it.)

What will Apple do if this thing really exists? Our guess is, lawsuit, lawsuit, lawsuit. After all, it does use the Apple ROMs, so there must be some basis for legal action. If (and that's a big "If") everything's true, COS is a faster, leaner, more secure, more stable, more versatile version of the Mac OS, and it costs the same as Apple's Mac OS 8. Sparks are gonna fly.