Still begrudging us those three extra days off the air last week? C'mon, don't be such a lightweight; we weren't even in reruns for a fortnight, and at least we told you we'd be MIA before we took off this time. If less than two weeks between new episodes bothers you, clearly you're a relative newbie 'round these parts, because the Infuriating AtAT Hiatus of 2003 lasted over five times as long, and we didn't even have the courtesy (okay, technically we didn't have the time) to bother actually telling anyone we were going to fall off the face of the earth before we disappeared for almost three months. Indeed, we're the undisputed Kings of Unscheduled Downtime.

Undisputed, that is, until now. Wouldja believe someone's actually challenging our claim to the title? If you habitually hang around the seedier and/or more speculative corners of the Mac-centric 'net, you're all too aware that Mac OS Rumors, one of the very first pioneers to discover that web sites and Apple-flavored dirt-dishing are two great tastes that taste great together, had been off the air for ages. Indeed, at one point we were so concerned about the site's unannounced vanishing act (we're not just talking about lack of fresh content, here-- this was a full-blown site outage) that we put out a call for MOSR staff to contact us and let us know what was up. We never heard from MOSR, but a kind viewer informed us that while macosrumors.com was dead, the site itself was still running at its server's raw IP address... but then just days later, even the raw IP stopped responding completely.

So here's the thing: just when we'd finally given up MOSR for dead, faithful viewer Jim Palmer informed us that the site is back up again at its raw IP address and reporting that "macosrumors.com is now restored at Network Solutions," so its domain name should be functional again for everyone within another day or two. (It was working for us again at broadcast time; if it's still broken for you, give your DNS servers another day or so to catch up.) But since the site's original disappearance took place in mid-May, as of right now, MOSR has been more or less off the air for eleven full weeks-- the same length of time as our own masterpiece of slackery last year. So is this it? Have we been dethroned?

Depends on how you look at it, really. MOSR's eleven-week outage was primarily a domain name issue, plus some true downtime during which the server wasn't serving at all, but there were a few updates scattered around in there-- and not just of the "here's why we're gone" variety, but also of an actual on-topic rumoric nature-- even when most people would never know what IP address to type in to access it. Does that really count as a full eleven weeks MIA? Meanwhile, technically, our own eleven-week absence didn't consist of any dead air, since we kept broadcasting the same sorry episode nonstop the whole time: zero content change without even the slightest hint as to why, which we personally figure qualifies for slacker style points.

So it's a close call, but we figure we still retain the crown. Nevertheless, MOSR put up a good fight, and if it had been able to resist the urge to tell its fans what was going on, it really might have given us a run for our money, hiatally speaking. In any case, we're thrilled to see that MOSR is back online; whether you love the site or hate it, you have to admit that there's a lot more to kick around at the water cooler when MOSR is doing its Funk-ay Rumah Thang.

By the way, none of you was actually fooled by this thing, right?...