Let's just state, right off the bat, here, that we're not interested in debating the relative merits and weaknesses of Mac OS Rumors. Yes, we're aware that some people think the site fabricates everything it posts-- heck, there's even a highly entertaining web site dedicated entirely to debunking MOSR and launching personal attacks on the site's proprietor. On the other hand, sometimes MOSR is right on the money-- we were digging through our own reruns the other day and found MOSR's iBook specs from eight months before it was unveiled, and other than the size predictions, they were pretty darn close. As far as we're concerned, though, accuracy isn't the most important factor anyway. From our perspective, MOSR is still entertaining, and therefore we continue to read it, and occasionally work its, um, "apocryphal" info into our show's plotline.

Which leads us right into all this talk about Mac OS X's startup times. See, according to MOSR, booting a blue-and-white G3/450 running Mac OS X DP3 with only "vital services" enabled takes a mere twenty-one seconds. (By "vital services only," MOSR means that all Internet servers and AppleTalk services are turned off.) Impressive, right? Well, don't move on just yet, because MOSR claims that Apple sources expect the final, optimized, consumer-friendly version of Mac OS X to start up in ten seconds on a G4/500. With minimal services only, of course.

Now maybe it's just us, but ten seconds? Our iBook can scarcely wake from sleep mode in ten seconds, let alone start up from power-off. And every UNIX/Linux system we've ever seen takes a lot longer than that to boot, so pardon us if we're skeptical that the UNIX-rooted Mac OS X will boot in ten seconds in any configuration. We only see three plausible possibilities here. The first is that MOSR (or its source) is completely wrong, and this "ten seconds" thing came from out of nowhere. The second is that "minimal services" mode means the system starts up, but all you get is a smiley face and a "Restart" button. The third is that Apple's managed to implement a time-dilation field purely as a software module, so when Mac OS X boots, it takes two minutes in its own reference frame, but only ten seconds to the rest of the universe. Take your pick. We're betting on option three, ourselves.