It's Friday again, and you know what that means: you're all exhausted from a solid week of pretending to work every time your boss walks past your cubicle, so you need to think happy thoughts this weekend to recharge for next week's daily grind of avoidance and make-believe. Which means you don't want to mull over serious stuff like the possibility of future Expo cancellations or troubles with IBM's new fabrication plant; you want massively uncorroborated rumors about extremely unlikely future Mac hardware! Are we right? Huh? Huh? Yeah, we thought so. Macintosh pipe dreams: good for what ails ya.

Thank goodness, then, for MacBidouille-- and, of course, for MacRumors, who does an exceptional job of always keeping at least one eye on the French. Those wacky Gallic G5 rumor specialists are even now tossing around whispers about a top secret Apple project code-named "Dark Star," which is allegedly a gargantuan server that supports up to 64 individual G5 processors and a full terabyte of RAM. 64 parallel G5s? We've done the extremely scientific math, and we've come to the conclusion that if using, say, two G5s can blow you clear through three walls of your house and into a tree, then using 64 of them simultaneously would be roughly equivalent to being fed live to a ravenous mountain lion, regurgitated into a meatgrinder, slowly ground into a thin paste, fed to a smaller mountain lion, and then hit by a ten-megaton atomic bomb with superfluous spiky bits welded onto it just for spite. And then stuck with the cleaning bill.

Now, there are all sorts of reasons why this type of thing strikes us as kind of unlikely, not the least of which being that Apple had a hard enough time cooling two G5s in the new Power Mac, and had to get seriously funky with nine independently-controlled smartfans and all sorts of crazy airflow channeling to keep its new pro desktop from melting straight through tabletops and burrowing through the earth's crust. If "Dark Star" has, say, a hundred fans all spinning at once, it'll wind up airborne. Assuming it doesn't blow the city's power grid first.

Whatever. Word has it that the 64-processor version of this behemoth will cost fifty grand, and will ship with Panther Server "at the end of the year." Now, granted, MacRumors itself warns that "some new reports suggest that this rumor is not true," but all you need to get through the weekend is visions of 64 G5 processors dancing in your head. Just imagine what you could do with all that power! We bet Solitaire is whole new game on a rig like that, baby!