Well, smack us with a rebar and call us an ambulance-- just when we had all but given up hope of this shindig dying a sad, lingering death, the Naked Mole Rat has finally arrived fashionably late! (Faithful viewer Mister T pities the fool who don't dig the Rat.) His latest appearance comes a solid month and a half after the last one, and that one occurred a month and a half after its predecessor, so either the Artist Formerly Known As The Knife is slowing down in his old age, or he's just on some kind of bizarre psychological and/or drug-induced six-week cycle. (We're betting on the latter.) Now that we know, we can plan accordingly. In any event, we're just glad to have him back.

As for what the Gay Blade brings to the party, it's a Fun-Pak™ of Mac OS X dirt for all to enjoy. Rumor has it that Apple has "officially frozen the feature set" for the lickable new operating system's 1.0 release, and is now hunkering down to implement those features in a relatively bug-free manner. In other words, Apple's decided on just what Mac OS X 1.0 will be, and any lingering ship-date-threatening feature-creep has been eradicated; all efforts are now targeted at getting the first commercial release out the door.

And when we say all efforts, we mean all efforts. According to the Rat, the long-rumored (and long-awaited) update to the public beta doesn't exist; "the current public beta will be both the first and last." That's a bit of a blow to those of us hoping to test-drive a more polished and feature-complete beta-- say, one that works with AirPort without requiring the tester to mess around with unsanctioned and potentially disastrous kernel extension hacks. So if the Rat's correct, public beta testers, what you bought is what you get-- and all you get.

So the first slice of news is sweet and the second one's slightly bitter-- but the third slice just seems stale. Brace yourselves, because according to the Rat, Mac OS X 1.0 will not ship at January's Expo, and won't surface until the "end of February" at the earliest. We know, we know, it's a shock... to anyone who's been living in a cave for the past three months. Anyone who's used, seen, or just read about the public beta since its release could see that Apple had a ton of work to do before the operating system would be "done" enough for a full commercial release. Personally, we even think the Rat's late February possibility is grossly optimistic. Hey, Your Nakedness! We love you, man, but step away from the crack pipe-- it's not that kind of party!