On Feb 10, 2011, at 1:16 PM, John Martz wrote:

>> Conclusion: "cause = -122" is a general, non-specific, error message.
>> 
>> Comments anyone?
> 
> I believe that humans are "wired" to try to find correlations. It's
> not just the way our minds may be predisposed to work, I think it is
> also how we feel about the way the world should work. When we have an
> effect we look for a cause not only intellectually, but emotionally as
> well. We have a longing, a desire for an explanation.
> 
> So if we change something and the effect which was vexing us appears
> to have gone away then I think most of us are quite eager to view that
> change as causal, regardless of whether it was or was not.
> 
> I offer this as a possible rationalization for what you saw when you
> dug deeper into this. In my experience, this tendency can make trying
> to find a solution very frustrating. Folks seem to always be ready to
> claim that just giving their problem a good whack with whatever hammer
> they happen to have had at hand is what sorted things. (It sure would
> be nice if Google could come up with a search filter to weed out those
> posts. ;-)

Quite true.  I am convinced that back in the OS 9 many people would attribute 
many problems to PRAM Zaps and desktop rebuilds.  I remember seeing some rather 
ridiculous assertions.  What people tended to forget is that PRAM Zaps and 
desktop rebuilds included a reboot.  I suspect in many cases the reboot was all 
that was needed.  I personally found few things that a PRAM zap definitely 
fixed, and those that were fixed were most/all things actually related to what 
was stored in PRAM.  


Clark Martin
Redwood City, CA, USA
Macintosh / Internet Consulting

"I'm a designated driver on the Information Super Highway"

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