"I've a 24" 2.4Ghz iMac _that's_ hard drive recently packed in."

[Laurence Horn]

At 3:26 PM -0500 2/17/11, Seán Fitzpatrick wrote:
>Latitudinarian codswallop.  <<"Any thing" go's.>>  And that's "final".
>
>I have encountered the supposed rule that "who-whose-whom" cannot be used
>with non-human antecedents several times in the past few decades.
>
>The programmers I work with often use non-neutral personal pronouns to refer
>to programs and modules:  "... If he can't find a match he throws an
>exception and dies".  I don't go that far, but I would say "whose hard
>drive".

It's actually pretty understandable if you grant
the confusion between the interrogative "whose"
and the relative "whose".  After all, the
standard English pattern is pretty weird:

Whose leg is broken?
Ken's
*The dining table's
vs.
the man/table whose leg is broken

So now for some it's

the man whose leg is broken (or perhaps "who's leg")
the table that's leg is broken

LH

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