Good news, campers! Yesterday's call-out to the staff of Mac OS Rumors hasn't yet produced a response from anyone actually affiliated with the site (thus failing to dispel vague concerns that they may have been "silenced" by hired shadow warriors of the East), but faithful viewer Dan Farmer was the first of many to inform us that MOSR's technical problem is, indeed, with its DNS entries, and thus its server is at least still accessible at its raw IP address of 199.105.116.92. So if you were suffering MOSR withdrawal symptoms, this here's your methadone.

Better news still, despite the DNS snafu which has prevented most of the Mac community from visiting its site for about ten or eleven days now, the MOSR staff had updated the server's content as recently as a week ago-- so if they have been whacked, at least there's a couple of final reports available by which we can remember them. In particular, there's an intriguing resurrection of those carbon fiber PowerBook rumors that have been floating around on and off for a bunch o' months now: assuming the worst, MOSR's final contribution to the rumormongering community is a mention of a "virtually indestructible" PowerBook, building on earlier reports that hinted at a high-end portable with a G5 at its heart protected by a "largely carbon-fiber enclosure" made of "'thermoplastic' high-resin CF material."

The thing is, though, the carbon fiber PowerBook rumors were vociferously denied by Jason O'Grady of O'Grady's PowerPage, who insisted that such a beast was unlikely to claw its way out of Apple's labs because carbon fiber is a pretty expensive material; O'Grady estimates that a PowerBook made with the stuff would cost over five grand. Based on O'Grady's debunking, MOSR had "mostly let the specific issue of carbon fiber drop," stating that "when Jason O'Grady speaks, we tend to listen."

Which is all well and good, of course, but the thing is, O'Grady's debunking seems to be based entirely on price, and Apple has never shied away from offering some pretty pricey laptops in the past. In addition, O'Grady himself admits that Sony has a carbon fiber laptop that sells for $4,000; okay, sure, the thing is teensy-tiny, but at least it proves that a carbon fiber PowerBook isn't completely out of the question. Top that all off with the fact that O'Grady has had a bit of a spotty track record when it comes to Apple portable predictions occasionally in the past, and we're not entirely sure why MOSR puts so much stock in the "strength of Jason O'Grady's statements on the issue" when it admits that its own sources for the carbon fiber rumors have "strong track records."

Now, our sources, on the other hand, clearly suck. We asked them what the PowerBook G5 enclosure would be made of, and they said "love." What is that all about?

Anyway, the question of whether or not carbon fiber is the magic material is largely moot; as long as Apple can ship an "indestructible PowerBook," we won't care what it's made out of. Reportedly Apple wants it to have a "scratch-tolerant black appearance" (Yay! Back to black!) and be capable of surviving "most typical laptop-lifetime accidents involving a less than 20-foot drop." Yikes! If this all turns out to be true, we envision some really fun Stevenote demos involving sledgehammers and possibly some sort of vice. And heck, even if the IndestructoBook costs five large, we're sure there are people who'd pay that much for a portable they can chuck out of a second-story window whenever the mood strikes them. Heck, our own PowerBooks don't feel like they'd survive a twenty-foot drop onto a pile of goose feathers and magical fairy dust, so there's got to be a market, right?