One of the better newsletters out there for those of us who wind up supporting users on Windows XP, is WinXP News, by Sunbelt Software. In tomorrow’s edition, comes news that they’ll be starting up a separate newsletter called Vista News, which I’m thinking wouldn’t be a bad idea to get as well, because we’ll be supporting users on Windows Vista soon enough, if not already!
Here’s an interesting theory from Daniel Taylor (Spotted via Adam Gaffin): I think of it like hot dogs. Nobody wants to know what goes inside a hot dog. And once you do, it’s kind of hard to get excited about eating one. That’s the way it is with mobile devices. There are gadget heads in…
The in-laws are in town briefly today, and they brought down a laptop for a little tech support, because they, apparently, had been heavily infected with malware. Well, as it turns out, they did have malware, but it wasn’t quite as bad as they thought. They had told me Norton reported that they had over…
Saw this post over on Download Squad about an open-source knowledge base tool and thought, “wow, that would be an interesting tool for a small business or home business”. I think KBPublisher could have quite a few uses in that realm, don’t you? Unlimited Categories Glossary Terms Powerful WYSIWYG Instant Response Searching Add attachments Five different…
Ian Landsman tried to launch heldesktalk.com as a forum to discuss help desk issues, but when that proved to be too much of a challenge for the amount of time he had, he brought in his dad to turn it into a blog: The site will be original writing, but will also link to ongoings…
We’ve read about people selling their organs to get their hands on an iPhone, but I’ve never before heard of a couple willing to face-off with a live alligator for one. That’s the somewhat bizarre situation a Florida couple found themselves in recently, however, when 24-year-old Anthony Larrimore dropped his iPhone while snapping pictures of an alligator…
That seems to be what happens in the tech journalism space. We have a list of people who’ve created successful companies and made a ton of money doing it, and everyone is supposed to assume that they are so bright they can do it over and over again. Then we are surprised when Elon buys Twitter and runs it into the ground or when Meta can’t find a market for the Metaverse. Microsoft spends billions upon billions of dollars on AI without any hope of making a profit for years while conducting rounds of layoffs to offset those costs. We assume they know what they’re doing because they’ve succeeded in other markets before, and the press doesn’t challenge them when they say provably false things.
It’s the Halo Effect. We assume that successful people are smart and kind and live healthy lives, especially if they are white men. When they contradict this picture we’ve painted, we loathe to admit it, let alone call it out in an interview. It’s more cognitively comfortable for us to continue believing they are competent and will figure it out.