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June 18, 2006
"By using accurate details to imply a misleading picture of the whole, the artful propagandist, it has been said, makes truth the principal form of falsehood."
I'm glad I got the 2.3 GHz model; some liquid-cooled PowerMac G5s are leaking. That possibility really was something I considered when I decided to go with the slower, air-cooled model.
I decided to do some more research and found a guy that had a unit 14 months old that leaked. He did not have AppleCare, but Apple agreed to fix it because it was less than 90-days out of warranty. A few months later, he had another unit leak. This time, the globs of glowing green goo got into his power supply and shorted it out. One of his co-workers described a bright flash and a loud buzzing crackle. Light-colored smoke poured out of the machine, and sizzling coolant dripped onto the aluminum handle. The “cheese grater” back grill had scorch marks. With both incidents, he said Apple was extremely cooperative and provided swift resolution by paying for the parts and labor required to restore the G5s back to working condition. He also noted that he did not lose any data on either machine.
So what’s going on here? It seems that the early 2.5 GHz liquid-cooled G5s shipped with Delphi radiators that were problematic. That may have been the reason Apple delayed shipment for three months after the liquid-cooled G5s were introduced. Apparently Apple may have been having problems with them from the beginning.
Time travel: best practices for thorough frauds.
Every moment people devote to arguing an obscure part of your story is a moment they're not thinking "wait a minute, why should I believe that a bozo on the Internet is a time traveller?". Be sure to pepper your story with verifiable details to help establish your credibility. If possible, allude to things in passing, so readers can do their own sleuth work and create an illusion of corroborated evidence.
Here again John Titor leads by example. To take one example, he alludes to a "problem with Unix in 2038", which a little investigation will show is real. All Unix clocks on 32-bit architectures roll over in 2038, when the number of seconds since 1970 (Year One for all Unix clocks) exceeds 2^32. Some of us estimate that this Y2K38 problem will cause global devastation of the same magnitude as Y2K.
Entire megabytes of Titor discussion thread are devoted to parsing out the plausibility of the Unix motive - is an ancient IBM computer really so hard to emulate in 2036? Is Titor lying about the real reason for his return? People get so caught up in the fine points that they forget to question the original premise. And someone out there is bound to think "This Unix thing checks out - so he MUST be telling the truth!".
Don't skimp on the details!
That's all for tonight. And, for some reason, I can't figure out where I found either of those links, so there are no [via] citations...
Posted by Jon Rubin at June 18, 2006 11:47 PM
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