Instead, we’ve got to think of wealth in relative terms.

You know what stuff costs you relative to your salary. What you don’t know is what stuff would cost you if you earned double (half), triple (1/3), ten times (10%), one hundred times (1%) your current salary.

So, I did the math for you.

If you earn $50,000 a year, gas costs you $4 a gallon. If you earn $5 million a year, gas costs just 4 cents a gallon. Relatively speaking, who cares if it goes up a dollar a gallon. To the wealthy, that’s a penny more.

That Harley you want? $20k. A $5M man pays just $200.

That $400,000 dream house you’re looking at? Super affordable at $32,000.

Why’d I pick $5M to compare? Because the CEOs of 171 publicly traded companies all earn at least $5M a year. The best-compensated CEO earned $84.5M. He pays 2/10ths of one cent per gallon of gas. Relative to your $50,000 salary, this guy will only start to feel your pain when gas reaches $2000/gallon. But of course, he’s an insider sitting on boards of directors and leveraging his obscene salary to build more, so his wealth has ballooned beyond imagination long before that’s happened. Meanwhile, you’re still waiting on that cost of living adjustment that adds $85/month to your takehome.

PS. You’re what we refer to as the middle class.

Every link is flagged as “This site may harm your computer” — even trusted pages on the topic, such as pages on Apple.com. Any attempt to visit the resulting links are intercepted by Google, in effect preventing me from visiting the site. Sounds like a good idea, except it isn’t, because Google can’t seem to get it right, and Google isn’t interested in fixing sites that are incorrectly flagged.

I searched using the term "site:apple.com garageband 09"

The impact of such as ruling by King Google is that those pages, linked from the search results, cannot be loaded into my browser.

Having been flagged as "harmful", even might Apple Inc. can avoid the overarching reach of Google's misstep.

A mistake on Google’s part? Probably, but as the owner of a site similarly flagged, I can testify that the behemoth that is Google rarely takes down such a notice. In my case, they caused a site of mine to lose nearly 90% of the traffic it was receiving after erroneously making the same determination. Now, I’m no fan of frivolous lawsuits, but I’m positive there are a number of businesses both large and small who are being irreparably harmed by Google’s service offering.

Undoubtedly, Apple has the clout to rectify Google’s “mistake”. Sadly, the little man, like you and me, does not.

Follow up: Google has officially posted a response, indicating that human error caused a 40 minute outage, whereby all search results were incorrectly marked as harmful. The overriding point, however, is that Google’s practice of editorializing in their search results can have massive consequences, even if well-intentioned.

This has wreaked havoc with communication in my workplace as well as social life.

The current workaround that is being proposed by, erm, helpful Mac addicts is to replace a kernel extension in 10.4.10 with the one from 10.4.10. Hardly a solution for production machines.

I, for one, expect a lot more from Apple. Apple’s left us stranded since June 20th! Perhaps this begs the question: Is Apple’s focus on becoming a consumer electronics firm causing it to overlook Mac OS X? If this is what we can expect from the new Apple Inc., I’d prefer to go back to Apple Computer, Inc.

Or maybe I should adjust my mindset and Think Different.

Even though the bug has been reported, I strongly encourage Mac users to file a bug report as it raises awareness within the company that this is an important issue.

Apple forum discussion on this bug.

• Email: add-free, IMAP, five aliases, integrated virus scanning
• Backup 3: An easy to use backup application that lets you backup files, folders and/or volumes to any media, including your iDisk.
• iDisk: a 1GB storage folder on a .Mac server connected to the internet, where you can save files, folders, etc. Includes a public folder where you can make downloads available to the public. iDisk is accessible from Mac or Windows.
• Sync: The most impressive feature of .Mac, Sync allows you to synchonize settings and information between multiple Macs. For example, I have an iMac at home and a MacBook Pro at work. All my bookmarks in Safari, email account settings, passwords, address book contacts, and calendars are sync’d between the two, making the transition between the two machines much less painful. How many times have you bookmarked something at home for work? No longer an issue. Bookmark away!
• One-Click iWeb Publishing: No more FTP. Just click Publish from iWeb.
• Photocasting: One-click publishing of photo albums, a la PodCasting.
• Shared Calendars: Use iCal to automatically publish and update your calendar online, which people can view with a web browser and/or subscribe and automatically import into their calendar app. For example, my wife and I both share each other’s calendar, which helps us keep track of busy kids’ schedules easily, regardless of which one of us enters in the information.

Sounds great, says me, because the notion of syncing my information between my home and work computers is just awesome, and for the most part, it is. But, in the immortal words of the man whose name no-one can utter, “I’m here to tell you, there’s something else.”

Recently, Apple updated the webmail interface. In a word, the new interface is exceptional. Users of the built-in Mail.app in OS X will immediately feel at ease, as the new webmail interface matches the interface closely. Features like autofill email addresses and spell checking blur the line between webmail’s typically clunky, uninspired interface, and the refined aspects of a stand-alone mail application. And like you’d expect, the address book from your local computer is used with webmail…regardless of which computer you’re using webmail on. Glaringly missing, though, is full address book integration; groups you’ve created in Address Book on your Mac aren’t available in webmail. That’s a serious oversight; the point of address book integration is making it all available. Further missing is a reliable server-based junk mail filter, placing the onus of filtering junk on the Mail.app program.

And now, on to the meat of this story. Dot-Mac represents the hope of half a million Macintosh users (representing $34.5 million in revenue for Apple, mind you) for streamlined, simple access to a valuable set of features. It comes close to nailing the experience, yet in a very un-Mac like way, it lets the user down, inevitably disappointing them at one time or another. Sync, while working 95% of the time, can suffer from a maddening series of circular references, where contact data changed on one machine doesn’t want to stick on another.

Worse, dot-Mac users are being victimized by a never-ending stream of outages that the service suffers from. That’s right: rarely a week goes by without some sort of outage affecting a substantial portion of users. Now, I worked as a systems administrator for a large telephone company; We managed to keep our service availability on five nines, yet Apple can’t. It’s really a black eye for Apple, raising the question “Is it the Apple hardware the service is running on, unreliable nature of Apple’s Webobjects upon which the service runs, incompetent system administrators, or has Apple adopted the attitude so prevalent in other software companies: ‘It’s good enough’?”

Well, I’m sorry to say, Apple, that it is good enough. Good enough to keep me subscribing, and just bad enough to keep me looking for a replacement. To remind Apple that someone, somewhere is working on a replacement is misguided, because the truth of the matter is that I’m not whining about needing a better feature set; I just want dot-Mac to work reliably. And that, my friends, is much easier to accomplish than you might think. It starts with admitting there’s a problem, and ends with a commitment to customers from Apple.

Editor’s Note: We’re adding a new features to GIGOBlog today. We’ve added a post to track and publicize every .Mac outtage reported by Apple to their users, in the hopes of shaming Apple into action. Apple’s most valuable asset is the commitment of their user base to the company’s products and services. We heartily recommend that .Mac subscribers and those considering subscribing contact Apple to voice dissatisfaction with the continuing service interruptions at http://www.apple.com/feedback/mac/tm.html

4/12/2007
Due to scheduled maintenance, some members might not have been able to access .Mac Mail for 20 minutes or less between 10PM and 12AM PST on 04/12/2007.

04/12/2007
5% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 2 hours. Normal service has been restored.

4/11/2007
8% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 4.5 hours. Normal service has been restored.

4/7/2007
2% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 40 minutes. Normal service has been restored.

4/3/2007
3% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 10 minutes. Normal service has been restored.

03/25/2007
1.5% of members were unable to access mail using an IMAP client. Normal service has been restored.

03/19/2007
2% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 10 minutes. Normal service has been restored.

03/15/2007
2% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 1.25 hours. Normal service has been restored.

3/14/2007
0.5% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 3.5 hours. Normal service has been restored.

DATA COLLECTION ERROR: Oops, I failed to update between 2/15 and 3/14. My bad!

2/15/2007
2% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 45 minutes. Normal service has been restored.

2/10/2007
1% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 1 hour. Normal service has been restored.

2/8/2007
.Mac members were unable to access any services. Duration: 1.5 hours. Some .Mac members were unable to access mail on the web. Duration: 1.5 hours. Normal services have been restored.

2/5/2007
1% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 2 hours. Normal service has been restored.

2/5/2007
2% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 1 hour. Normal service has been restored.

2/4/2007
2% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 1 hour. Normal service has been restored.

2/4/07
Due to scheduled maintenance, some members might not have been able to access .Mac Mail for 20 minutes or less between 10pm PST on 2/3/07 and 1am PST on 2/4/07.

1/22/2007
4% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 3.5 hours. Normal service has been restored.

01/21/2007
4% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 30 minutes. Normal service has been restored.

01/16/2007
3% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 10 hours. Normal service has been restored.

01/15/2007
3% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 45 minutes.

01/11/2007
2% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 2 hours.

01/10/2007
3% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 1 hour.

01/08/2007
Email was slow for 5 hours for some .Mac Members.

01/07/2007
2% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 4 hours.

01/05/2007
4% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 48 hours.

12/25/2006
3% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 30 minutes.

12/21/2006
3% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 30 minutes.

12/20/2006
3% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 40 minutes.

12/09/2006
email was slow for 1 hour to some .Mac Members.

12/07/06
4% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 12 hours.

12/03/2006
All Services were unavailable for 2 hours to all .Mac Members.

12/01/06
4% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 1 hour.

11/22/2006
4% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 2 hours.

11/21/2006
4% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 1.5 hours.

11/18/2006
4% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 30 minutes.

11/13/2006
1% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for one hour.

11/10/2006
1% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 2 hours.

11/09/06
1% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for one hour.

10/25/06
Some members were unable to send messages via .Mac Mail on the Web for 3 hours.