Brace yourself, 'cause everyone's favorite ultra-depressing doom-and-gloomer is back in action. After a week and a half of no posted updates (during which time they continued to show the now-infamous "Apple is Jonestown after all" letter), Apple Recon has finally completed their problematic move to bigger digs. And what's the first thing they post? A note from a source who claims that the whole city of Hollywood has "turned against Jobs" because of the recent Newton developments. "We all think he must be terminated," says the source.

Once you get past that little love note, you can go on to read about how Apple may be planning to "axe" several catalog resellers, similarly to how they just pulled out of all national retail stores except for CompUSA. Speculation abounds as to which companies may be cut. (MacConnection and MacWarehouse will most likely survive.) And just to make things even more fun, that's followed by talk about a group of investors planning a media-grabbing uprising at the upcoming shareholders meeting, with the primary purpose of ousting Steve Jobs; and the media attention this particular group would attract, we are assured, would be "seriously bad" for Apple.

Personally, we at AtAT don't recommend that you read Apple Recon if you're "sensitive" about hearing that Apple is headed straight towards dire, catastrophic debacle. But for those of you who can stomach the steady torrent of bad news, it can be kind of fun in a sick, twisted way if you take it with a big block of salt. We'd draw comparisons to country music, but that would just get tiresome. ;-)

But for positive rumors about Apple's prospects, look no further than the ever-awesome Mac OS Rumors. One of their sources at Apple reports that he's actually seen the upcoming Artemis all-in-one Mac, unfortunately dubbed the "Power Macintosh G3 Home," and its features are nothing to sneeze at. For those of you who are all-too-familiar with Apple's previous strategies when it came to home machines (build a box with an underpowered processor, a really slow bus, one or two RAM expansion slots, maybe an expansion card slot if they're feeling generous, then sell the whole thing for way too much money), you will be as happy as we are to see Apple's forthcoming attempt, expected to ship sometime in the next couple of months.

First of all, the chip in this thing is a G3, not yet another 603e. That's a good start right there. Granted, it "only" runs at a "measly" 200 MHz, so it won't touch today's Powermac G3's when it comes to performance, but we imagine it'll blow the current crop of 6500's out of the water. Especially since that 200 MHz G3 will include a backside cache, probably 512 KB running at 100 MHz. The system bus zips along at a respectable 66 MHz. The included 32 MB of RAM and 2MB of video SGRAM is decent for most home users. The ubiquitous 24x CD-ROM drive makes its regular appearance. And the system comes with three PCI slots and a 15" monitor that maxes out at 1024x768. Yowza!

Okay, the 2GB IDE hard drive is pathetically small by today's standards, but considering that the whole kit 'n' kaboodle is rumored to go for just $999, we think we can let that slide. If this system truly comes to pass, we're hard-pressed to think of ways that Apple might not sell a ton of them. Heck, we'll buy one to replace our backup machine. Where do we sign up?

Now that we've roller-coastered through today's dizzying highs and terrifying lows of Apple Computer, let's take a quicky peek at a completely different plot thread-- namely, Microsoft's ongoing anti-trust shenanigans. We mentioned yesterday that Microsoft was voluntarily reworking its agreements with dozens of internet service providers, which now allows the ISP's to promote other browsers alongside Internet Explorer. And while we mentioned that this announcement came after the Department of Justice was seen sniffing around the ISP's in a somewhat overt attempt to dig up more anti-trust dirt on Microsoft, what we didn't mention was that the announcement came only one day before the Senate Judiciary Committee was scheduled to hold a second hearing regarding Microsoft's "Redmond Justice" antics. Hmmm. The Austin American Statesman has more.

What we found most intriguing, however, was the fact that "attorneys general of 27 states" filed a joint brief supporting the DoJ's lawsuit against the software company. Twenty-seven states? We had no idea that the anti-Microsoft sentiment had gone so far. Representatives of 54% of the states in the union are backing the DoJ: that's a significant level of support. We sense a war coming on. Of course, given Microsoft's sheer power, we're not taking any bets on who would win...

Incidentally, the article refers to Bill Gates as the "world's richest man," but we're fairly certain that's not actually true. Isn't there some Saudi prince who's richer? True, Bill's the richest man who isn't royalty, but it's just as easy to get these things right. :)