Dan from Netflap.com has an article describing a problem that he calls the “related blame syndrome.” I think the problem can be best explained by an example. The other day, I helped someone import their photos into iPhoto. A few days later, the person I helped says, “you helped me with iPhoto but you broke my Internet Connection!” Dan says,

Why is it that when it comes to computers and technology, people want to immediately relate one problem with another. Even if there is virtually no correlation, users decide to create one.

He goes on to posit that there is some strange aspect of technology that causes people to make correlations between unrelated problems, driving “computer experts” nuts.

While I’m glad to see I’m not the only person who’s noticed related-blame syndrome, I disagree with the idea that it is a mysterious affliction limited to technical problems. Read More »

When you go crazy, do you loose your mind, or lose it? For many people these days, they loose it. How long it will be before “loose” becomes an acceptable spelling for “lose.” I’ve seen this misspelling so often, and yet each time it irks me. Call it a pet peeve. The distinction, according to the OED, is considerable:

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Just a quick thought on the relative performance of PowerPC Macs vs. Intel Macs. Recently, I had the opportunity to “acquire” a PowerPC-based iMac 17″ Flat-screen. For those who don’t have Apple’s iMac naming down cold (including yours truly), that is the G4-based iMac with the hemisphere base and the super-cool screen on the swivel arm (picture is available at the prior link). After installing an Airport Extreme card, I had the machine up and running on the home network. I promptly installed Firefox (since I’m not a Safari fan), and voila, I had a good-looking casual web browsing and email terminal functioning. Aesthetically, the machine is great. I especially love how easily the monitor can be moved on the swivel arm. However, I couldn’t help but notice how slow the machine is (it is a 1GHz PowerPC G4 box with 1 GB of memory).

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I’ve often wondered why it is that the computer industry can get away with releasing such shoddy products. In other fields, critical failures are taken far more seriously. Still, in these fields, management sometimes allows dangerous products to ship even when engineers know of a defect. Management typically decides (with some actuarial assistance) that it is better to leave the defect in place because the cost of fixing the problem exceeds the expected cost (in the probabilistic sense) of liability incurred due to the defect.

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It appears that my wife purchased a MacBook with the dreaded random shutoff problem. The other night, I was trying to figure out why Safari mis-renders the heading of this blog (the i and Morphous should appear on the same line, but don’t in Safari), when suddenly, the MacBook just turned off. I quickly checked the Magsafe connector and the battery. Connected, and the battery showed a full charge (via the nifty little battery test button on the bottom of the laptop). My heart sank. I gulped, and pressed the power button to restart the Mac, but to no avail. The computer spun up the hard disk but before it could power on the screen, it shut itself off. There I was holding a useless MacBook that wouldn’t turn on, just after I had posted an article on how Apple was one of few manufacturers that could compete with IBM’s Thinkpad in terms of quality and that I was going to switch. After reading posts by other users with this problem, I feared that my wife would be without her machine for weeks. Would Apple and Apple Support let us down like it had the others who posted their stories online?

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I’ll admit that the title of this post is a bit deceptive. The article really presents the analysis I used to decide to switch to a Macbook (not a pro) from my IBM Thinkpad T42. For the record, the last time I could be called an Apple user was when I was relegated to using a Mac Plus as a terminal to a VAX and IRIX machine during a high-school internship. For the past 8 years I’ve exclusively used IBM Thinkpads (an i1300, T32p, and T42), except for a few months when I used a year old Dell Latitude (which I obtained for free) in place of my stolen IBM Thinkpad T32p. So, I’m no Apple fanboy and yet I’ve decided to switch. Below I explain why; I think my reasoning will apply to lots of other users as well.

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Recently, Don MacAskill, the CEO of smugmug, wrote a review of Sun’s SunFire ‘CoolThreads’ T1000 Niagra based server. As someone who likes to keep up with interesting new processor designs, I was eager to see the results. Unfortunately, after reading the article, I had to ask, was it even worth doing the review?

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Picking a half-decent domain name for this site was a pain. Almost everything I could think of was taken. In fact, I came up with the following rules of thumb for .com domains:

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