As I've written about, I have a problem machine . I have recently had the opportunity to stopusing it as my office workstation and thus do some systematic testing onit, which has turned up some interesting yet mysterious results.

(It's remarkable but perhaps not surprising how much my mood has improved fromgetting a stable primary workstations and setting up these tests.)

The short summary is that the machine reliably crashes if I dosignificant disk activity and I am not running something thatburns up CPU.

I saw yet another story recently on how low-powernetbooks are finally going to lead to ARM -based machinessuccessfully challenging the x86 hegemony in general purpose computers.As the story goes, netbook makers don't need much CPU power or to runWindows, but they do need very low power consumption, and so they willturn to Linux-based ARM machines.

This is a fine theory and a fine story, but I don't think it's going towork out in practice.

Once upon a time, I started watching both Naruto and One Piece ;since they were both well regarded shonen fighting shows, I expected toenjoy them more or less equally. Instead and rather to my surprise, Isoon lost interest in One Piece but kept watching Naruto for muchlonger. Afterwards, I spent some time thinking about why and what thedifference between the two shows was, because it was not as simple asdisliking one set of characters while liking the other.

I eventually decided that the crucial difference was