If you go to Chilis, Wendy's, Applebees or any other chain you will, almost by definition, get bland food. Part of their strategy is to make the food as inoffensive to as many people as possible so of course it will be bland. I for one detest Chilis. Anyhoo, there are a ton of great places to eat in the US. I've had some great food in Long Beach, New York, D.C., Atlanta, Miami, Connecticut... Maui and Honolulu too:D.. The trick is to *never* go to a chain.
As for spicy, I'm a Jamaican living in Ft. Lauderdale, and have to agree that what counts as spicy over here is what I mix in with my daughter's bottle to calm her stomach.. That said, the hottest peppers I've had were from an Indian co-workers private stash... Left my mouth numb for hours...
Science, engineering and math *are* wonderful fun. I still get a kick out of loading up the R stats package and figuring out how much of my lawn is dirt and how much is grass based on counting pixels in a digital camera image. I love reading my daily electric usage and graphing it against the temperature. I have made penicillin in my kitchen and grown tomatoes in my bathroom.
The thing is that work is just work. It's a lie that your work should be fun and invigorating. It's just work. It's something you do so that you can do whatever the hell you want outside of work. In fact, if work became "fun" it could be disastrous... Your fun suffers and thus your work would sufffer.
I agree with you completely that requiring root or sudo access is a good thing but the beauty of Unix and Linux is that I can install software without root privileges rather easily. Whether I extract a tarball into a fakeroot directory in my home dir or specify the same with rpm (or an rpmmacros file), it's usually trivial to install packages. What's not so trivial is to change the configuration of the host system. And I agree with you completely that requiring root or sudo access is a good thing.
This means I can install my dev environment, scripts, etc.. But if I, say, install a torrent client then *on a properly configured system* I won't get it to work. I.e., I have freedom to use the system without breaking anything. And that's a pretty good feeling knowing that I can't harm anything if I don't su to root.
Sure, there are exceptions, but for the most part I prefer the Unix way than the Microsoft way.
I guess I'm one of the lucky AT&T customers. I live in S. Florida and it's one of their better coverage areas. Most of my travelling is within Florida and going up I95, the Florida Turnpike or the I-75 I can usually stay connected from Miami to Orlando or Tampa. I did have to call them recently because they kept on billing me for this useless Navigator feature. But the reps were courteous and spoke proper English.
I did try calling Verizon but their sales department was inept. They disconnected me at first and then couldn't explain their rate structure equivalent to my AT&T plan (one cell with 450 mins plus a 3g data card with "unlimited" usage).
Thank goodness for virtualization. I can keep the host system locked down and fairly pristine, yet inside the virtual environment I am a wild man with wild thoughts, eating my oatmeal without a spoon, cutting off mattress tags, and installing beta code wherever I see fit.
This is exactly what I've done for precisely those reasons. Performance is actually pretty decent (web browsing, email). In fact I use this same setup for some commercial clients. Their web servers are all vmware based and DR, backup, recovery and new feature rollouts are as simple as moving around some images.
It would be quite a brilliant move. I imagine that people would be more likely to look at Win7 now if there's a possibility that it was closer to Mac. That's like saying, "We tried to copy the Ferrari design cues. Ferrari engines still suck though, because they're, umm, unreliable."
I read that as "Bollywood Hacks Swedish Movie Streaming Site". Had this image of some programmer replacing documentaries about meatballs with clips of Aishwarya Rai dacing on a hilltop.
The idea was that your computer desktop would be like your physical desktop. This has likely done more to thwart usability in subsequent incarnations than any Frankensteinish idea from Microsoft ever could. Sure, maybe it made sense when files were very application specific. If I wanted to open up a letter, I'd open up my mailbox that's sitting on my desk. If I wanted to dispose of a page, I'd put it in the trashcan that I keep on my desk. The TV would be on my desk. As would the, uh, hi-fi system. And for almost every action I would need to check the junk desk drawer on the bottom left of my screen where I'd find everything else that I needed. Of course, I could start moving things from the drawer to my desktop but in a few days it would be so cluttered that it would be difficult to find anything, especially since the calculator would be the exact same size as my television and my notepad and my journal (that is to say, about 0.75" wide and tall). We might as well have chosen a steering wheel metaphor or a buggy whip metaphor.
Our interfaces seem to border on the ridiculous. On this laptop I'm using right now, there are a dozen extra buttons for media, wi/fi, hibernation, home (not sure what that one does, but it has an image of a house on it). They're all tiny buttons, less than a centimeter square. There are lots of LEDs too. There's no "Check Engine" light though, or a fuel gauge though. But that would be more useful than a hard drive busy light to me.
Why do I have to go to three menus to increase the font size in a document? Hell, I'd like to be able to messy select a line of text and pinch expand the font size. I want to be able to move text around by dragging (some apps can do this). I want consistent behaviour in my web browser as in my document editor. If I want to cut an image from my screen and save it to a file, I shouldn't have to launch two applications to do it (and I don't mean some Alt-PrtScr that saves a bitmap to my desktop but a way to lasso select almost *anything* in a vector format image).
The thing is, we have the hardware power but the interfaces are so clunky that using the power is difficult.
The process of creating a martian broadcast is actually quite simple. The technology is decidely low tech and can be put together in a short afternoon using some wire and a bit of electronic ingenuity. With a Linux PC, a CAT5 ethernet cable, a scissors, a few twists of some SEND/RECV pairs and you can soon detect Martian broadcasts. It's possibly to do it entirely in software also, perhaps with some creative use of the BOND0 adapter, the bonding module, and some misplaced balance-alb statements, but it's hardly worth mentioning.
I have a landline in my house. It has an answering machine [1] attached to it. Attached to the answering machine is a telephone [2] with a spiral cord [3] connecting the handset to the base. No seriously. On the side of the handset there's a volume knob [4] and a switch that selects between "Pulse" and "Tone" [5].
[1] An answering machine is an ancient device that records incoming messages onto a "cassette tape".
[2] A telephone is a device that connects via a "landline" to the switching station or the operator or something like that.
[3] A spiral cord is a strange cord that is perpetually tangled. Used to connect a telephone base to the handset.
[4] A volume knob is an analog electric device that increase or decreases the volume of the earpiece speaker.
[5] Pulse dialing used a series of pulses to generate the digits in a telephone number. Many phones had a place for a "label" where one could insert a written (or typed) phone number list.
I'm Jamaican and enjoy ackee:) The fruit is poisonous if eaten at the wrong time. You need to wait until it opens naturally on the tree before harvesting. Once prepared, it looks a like scrambled eggs and tastes somewhat acrid. Traditionally it's eaten with salt fish or bacon, biscuits similar to buttermilk biscuits, or with a vegetable called "breadfruit".
Grapefruit and starfruit are also very popular in the Caribbean. I never got the hang of durian fruit:D.
De-duping can and does work well on file, web and email servers. It doesn't work quite so well for SANs that present multiple LUNs to multiple servers:D
There is something similar for RAM -- called shared libraries:D. It also doesn't work so well across multiple OS instances..
But it's a good idea.. There have been attempts to do it, but you run into a lot of other problems when trying to do it across virtual machines.
A 3-5% overhead is possible under almost ideal circumstances (processor bound workload without significant context switching, very low i/o, etc.). In the real world we see more like an 18% hit on average (one web server we benchmarked had exactly 18% overhead). I agree that the advantages of virtualization are worth it in some circumstances (development, ease of recovery, etc..) but I also believe it is often a kludge to work around buggy applications and poor design.
You can do snapshots on the OS with logical volumes and containers or workload partitions.
I administer hundreds of virtual machines and virtualization has solved a few different problems while introducing others.
Virtualization is often sold as a means to completely utilize servers. Rather than having two or three applications on two or three servers, virtualization would allow condensing of those environments into one large server, saving power, data center floor space, plus allowing all the other benefits (virtual console, ease of backup, ease of recovery, etc..).
In one sense it did solve the under-utilization problem. Well, actually it worked around the problem. The actual problem was often that certain applications were buggy and did not play well with other applications. If the application crashed it could bring down the entire system. I'm not picking on Windows here, but in the past the Windows systems were notorious for this. Also, PCs were notoriously unreliable (but they were cheap, so we weighed the cost/reliability). To "solve" the problem, applications were segregated to separate servers. We used RAID, HA, clusters, etc., all to get around the problem of unreliability.
Fast forward a few years and PCs are a lot more reliable (and more powerful) but we still have this mentality that we need to segregate applications. So rather than fixing the OS we work around it by virtualizing. The problem is that virtualization can have significant overhead. On Power/AIX systems, the hypervisor and management required can eat up 10% or more of RAM and processing power. Terabytes of disk space across each virtual machine is eaten up in multiple copies of the OS, swap space, etc.. Even with dynamic CPU and memory allocation, systems have significant wasted resources. It's getting better, but still only partially addresses the problem of under-utilization.
So what's the solution? Maybe a big, highly reliable box with multiple applications running? Sound familiar?
I can also say that 100% of my software is legally installed. My main laptop is a CentOS 5 system. My servers run CentOS and OpenSolaris. The Windows machines use OpenOffice, VLC, CDBurnerXP. Most of the software is image editing related, but these are also free or open (qtpfsgui, hugin, Picasa, etc..). There are also packages that I've purchased mainly because I need them for my business, or in some cases, the software is so goddamn unstable that I need vendor support (e.g., Pinnacle/Avid Studio).
Interesting. I just spec'ed the Mac Pro with 2.66GhZ processor, 4G RAM, 320G HD (the 15" model on the Apple website) versus a Dell XPS (2.8GhZ, 8G, 500G HD, 15" 1080P display) and the Dell came in $100 less. I also added BluRay RW, Bluetooth and a 2 year warranty. When I bought an XPS some months ago, it didn't ship with AOL or Earthlink. There was some Dell online storage idiocy, but I disabled that the first time it popped up.
At first glance, mixing science fiction and fantasy seems like a good thing. After all, they both tend to occupy the same shelves at the Barnes & Noble or your fill-in-the-name-of-your-local-book-superstore.
Now I'm not going to say that there's such a thing as "true" science fiction, or "hard" science fiction. Clearly, there are elements of fantasy in science fiction and vice versa. But I will say that there is a type of science fiction and a type of fantasy that I do enjoy. IMHO, good science fiction presents issues, whether social or technological or whatever, and bends the story to highlight that issue. The issue is sometimes couched in metaphor, but more often, the issue is laid out bare.
For example, in the recent District 9, there is a clear social commentary about immigration. The commentary is not hidden beneath facades of poetry and metaphor, but quite obvious. Zelazny's "Damnation Alley" is about what happens when we mess with nature. In that story, the environment almost literally hits back. Under a fantasy author's treatment, maybe nature is instead a pissed-off woodland naiad that washes away someone's water mill. I'm not saying that either is better, but they are different approaches.
For example, think of T.H. White's _The Once and Future King_. There was this notion running throughout the story that the fate of the land was tied to the fate of the king. As the king suffered, so did the land. It was mystical in many ways. Contrast this to a SF story where perhaps a character is tied intimately into a spaceship's control systems and his/her fate is directly tied into the ship's (there are at least four similar stories that come to mind:) ).
I enjoy science fiction immensely (and some fantasy too). I would hate to lend credence to this notion that science fiction and fantasy are just stories about alternate worlds.
No kidding. I was watching an English comedian playing in Canada and he did the same, mixing a Texas drawl with a Georgia twang. And don't get me started on all those comedians doing Jamaican accents who mix up everything.
I'm the same way. In the past I've been given some bizarre direction. Sometimes it's the fault of IT management, but often the direction may come from the business side. There may be incentives to use a particular product. In some cases, the voodoo of corporate financing may dictate that they lease a product and a vendor may not have that option available so the company goes with a different and lesser product. I've even seen cases where a vendor gives huge incentives for buying a product suite that using a better product is difficult to justify.
But the attitude that you will work with what's given (up to a point:D ) I think is worthwhile.
Which brings up a very good point... If the store owners weigh the loss of the customers versus the potential loss from theft they may have decided it was worthwhile. It makes me wonder though -- we have so many retailers and companies that are evil in some fashion, yet people still do business with them. If we really started voting with our euros or dollars then we could very swiftly change the behaviour of these companies.
I find that if I turn up the amplifier and distortion all the way, I can get by with approximating the notes on my Peavey. I lost most of my hair in the past decade so can't do the hair swish anymore, but I've since discovered that the Spandex tights more than makes up for it.
There was actually a study about this.. Alas, I don't have a cite, but the gist of it was that people want to justify their particular madnesses. They save face by believing the hype, especially if they've shelled out significant money for something. E.g., if someone buys a car that is notoriously unreliable, but expensive, they will make up all sorts of excuses for why they paid the premium for a lousy car. Same for speaker cables, wine, bottled water, etc..
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If you go to Chilis, Wendy's, Applebees or any other chain you will, almost by definition, get bland food. Part of their strategy is to make the food as inoffensive to as many people as possible so of course it will be bland. I for one detest Chilis. Anyhoo, there are a ton of great places to eat in the US. I've had some great food in Long Beach, New York, D.C., Atlanta, Miami, Connecticut... Maui and Honolulu too :D.. The trick is to *never* go to a chain.
As for spicy, I'm a Jamaican living in Ft. Lauderdale, and have to agree that what counts as spicy over here is what I mix in with my daughter's bottle to calm her stomach.. That said, the hottest peppers I've had were from an Indian co-workers private stash... Left my mouth numb for hours...
Science, engineering and math *are* wonderful fun. I still get a kick out of loading up the R stats package and figuring out how much of my lawn is dirt and how much is grass based on counting pixels in a digital camera image. I love reading my daily electric usage and graphing it against the temperature. I have made penicillin in my kitchen and grown tomatoes in my bathroom.
The thing is that work is just work. It's a lie that your work should be fun and invigorating. It's just work. It's something you do so that you can do whatever the hell you want outside of work. In fact, if work became "fun" it could be disastrous... Your fun suffers and thus your work would sufffer.
I agree with you completely that requiring root or sudo access is a good thing but the beauty of Unix and Linux is that I can install software without root privileges rather easily. Whether I extract a tarball into a fakeroot directory in my home dir or specify the same with rpm (or an rpmmacros file), it's usually trivial to install packages. What's not so trivial is to change the configuration of the host system. And I agree with you completely that requiring root or sudo access is a good thing.
This means I can install my dev environment, scripts, etc.. But if I, say, install a torrent client then *on a properly configured system* I won't get it to work. I.e., I have freedom to use the system without breaking anything. And that's a pretty good feeling knowing that I can't harm anything if I don't su to root.
Sure, there are exceptions, but for the most part I prefer the Unix way than the Microsoft way.
I guess I'm one of the lucky AT&T customers. I live in S. Florida and it's one of their better coverage areas. Most of my travelling is within Florida and going up I95, the Florida Turnpike or the I-75 I can usually stay connected from Miami to Orlando or Tampa. I did have to call them recently because they kept on billing me for this useless Navigator feature. But the reps were courteous and spoke proper English.
I did try calling Verizon but their sales department was inept. They disconnected me at first and then couldn't explain their rate structure equivalent to my AT&T plan (one cell with 450 mins plus a 3g data card with "unlimited" usage).
Thank goodness for virtualization. I can keep the host system locked down and fairly pristine, yet inside the virtual environment I am a wild man with wild thoughts, eating my oatmeal without a spoon, cutting off mattress tags, and installing beta code wherever I see fit.
run for office and I will vote for you.
This is exactly what I've done for precisely those reasons. Performance is actually pretty decent (web browsing, email). In fact I use this same setup for some commercial clients. Their web servers are all vmware based and DR, backup, recovery and new feature rollouts are as simple as moving around some images.
It would be quite a brilliant move. I imagine that people would be more likely to look at Win7 now if there's a possibility that it was closer to Mac. That's like saying, "We tried to copy the Ferrari design cues. Ferrari engines still suck though, because they're, umm, unreliable."
I read that as "Bollywood Hacks Swedish Movie Streaming Site". Had this image of some programmer replacing documentaries about meatballs with clips of Aishwarya Rai dacing on a hilltop.
It was all a fractured metaphor.
The idea was that your computer desktop would be like your physical desktop. This has likely done more to thwart usability in subsequent incarnations than any Frankensteinish idea from Microsoft ever could. Sure, maybe it made sense when files were very application specific. If I wanted to open up a letter, I'd open up my mailbox that's sitting on my desk. If I wanted to dispose of a page, I'd put it in the trashcan that I keep on my desk. The TV would be on my desk. As would the, uh, hi-fi system. And for almost every action I would need to check the junk desk drawer on the bottom left of my screen where I'd find everything else that I needed. Of course, I could start moving things from the drawer to my desktop but in a few days it would be so cluttered that it would be difficult to find anything, especially since the calculator would be the exact same size as my television and my notepad and my journal (that is to say, about 0.75" wide and tall). We might as well have chosen a steering wheel metaphor or a buggy whip metaphor.
Our interfaces seem to border on the ridiculous. On this laptop I'm using right now, there are a dozen extra buttons for media, wi/fi, hibernation, home (not sure what that one does, but it has an image of a house on it). They're all tiny buttons, less than a centimeter square. There are lots of LEDs too. There's no "Check Engine" light though, or a fuel gauge though. But that would be more useful than a hard drive busy light to me.
Why do I have to go to three menus to increase the font size in a document? Hell, I'd like to be able to messy select a line of text and pinch expand the font size. I want to be able to move text around by dragging (some apps can do this). I want consistent behaviour in my web browser as in my document editor. If I want to cut an image from my screen and save it to a file, I shouldn't have to launch two applications to do it (and I don't mean some Alt-PrtScr that saves a bitmap to my desktop but a way to lasso select almost *anything* in a vector format image).
The thing is, we have the hardware power but the interfaces are so clunky that using the power is difficult.
The process of creating a martian broadcast is actually quite simple. The technology is decidely low tech and can be put together in a short afternoon using some wire and a bit of electronic ingenuity. With a Linux PC, a CAT5 ethernet cable, a scissors, a few twists of some SEND/RECV pairs and you can soon detect Martian broadcasts. It's possibly to do it entirely in software also, perhaps with some creative use of the BOND0 adapter, the bonding module, and some misplaced balance-alb statements, but it's hardly worth mentioning.
I have a landline in my house. It has an answering machine [1] attached to it. Attached to the answering machine is a telephone [2] with a spiral cord [3] connecting the handset to the base. No seriously. On the side of the handset there's a volume knob [4] and a switch that selects between "Pulse" and "Tone" [5].
[1] An answering machine is an ancient device that records incoming messages onto a "cassette tape".
[2] A telephone is a device that connects via a "landline" to the switching station or the operator or something like that.
[3] A spiral cord is a strange cord that is perpetually tangled. Used to connect a telephone base to the handset.
[4] A volume knob is an analog electric device that increase or decreases the volume of the earpiece speaker.
[5] Pulse dialing used a series of pulses to generate the digits in a telephone number. Many phones had a place for a "label" where one could insert a written (or typed) phone number list.
God. I feel old.
I'm Jamaican and enjoy ackee :) The fruit is poisonous if eaten at the wrong time. You need to wait until it opens naturally on the tree before harvesting. Once prepared, it looks a like scrambled eggs and tastes somewhat acrid. Traditionally it's eaten with salt fish or bacon, biscuits similar to buttermilk biscuits, or with a vegetable called "breadfruit".
Grapefruit and starfruit are also very popular in the Caribbean. I never got the hang of durian fruit :D.
De-duping can and does work well on file, web and email servers. It doesn't work quite so well for SANs that present multiple LUNs to multiple servers :D
There is something similar for RAM -- called shared libraries :D. It also doesn't work so well across multiple OS instances..
But it's a good idea.. There have been attempts to do it, but you run into a lot of other problems when trying to do it across virtual machines.
A 3-5% overhead is possible under almost ideal circumstances (processor bound workload without significant context switching, very low i/o, etc.). In the real world we see more like an 18% hit on average (one web server we benchmarked had exactly 18% overhead). I agree that the advantages of virtualization are worth it in some circumstances (development, ease of recovery, etc..) but I also believe it is often a kludge to work around buggy applications and poor design.
You can do snapshots on the OS with logical volumes and containers or workload partitions.
I administer hundreds of virtual machines and virtualization has solved a few different problems while introducing others.
Virtualization is often sold as a means to completely utilize servers. Rather than having two or three applications on two or three servers, virtualization would allow condensing of those environments into one large server, saving power, data center floor space, plus allowing all the other benefits (virtual console, ease of backup, ease of recovery, etc..).
In one sense it did solve the under-utilization problem. Well, actually it worked around the problem. The actual problem was often that certain applications were buggy and did not play well with other applications. If the application crashed it could bring down the entire system. I'm not picking on Windows here, but in the past the Windows systems were notorious for this. Also, PCs were notoriously unreliable (but they were cheap, so we weighed the cost/reliability). To "solve" the problem, applications were segregated to separate servers. We used RAID, HA, clusters, etc., all to get around the problem of unreliability.
Fast forward a few years and PCs are a lot more reliable (and more powerful) but we still have this mentality that we need to segregate applications. So rather than fixing the OS we work around it by virtualizing. The problem is that virtualization can have significant overhead. On Power/AIX systems, the hypervisor and management required can eat up 10% or more of RAM and processing power. Terabytes of disk space across each virtual machine is eaten up in multiple copies of the OS, swap space, etc.. Even with dynamic CPU and memory allocation, systems have significant wasted resources. It's getting better, but still only partially addresses the problem of under-utilization.
So what's the solution? Maybe a big, highly reliable box with multiple applications running? Sound familiar?
Right on.
I can also say that 100% of my software is legally installed. My main laptop is a CentOS 5 system. My servers run CentOS and OpenSolaris. The Windows machines use OpenOffice, VLC, CDBurnerXP. Most of the software is image editing related, but these are also free or open (qtpfsgui, hugin, Picasa, etc..). There are also packages that I've purchased mainly because I need them for my business, or in some cases, the software is so goddamn unstable that I need vendor support (e.g., Pinnacle/Avid Studio).
Interesting.
I just spec'ed the Mac Pro with 2.66GhZ processor, 4G RAM, 320G HD (the 15" model on the Apple website) versus a Dell XPS (2.8GhZ, 8G, 500G HD, 15" 1080P display) and the Dell came in $100 less. I also added BluRay RW, Bluetooth and a 2 year warranty. When I bought an XPS some months ago, it didn't ship with AOL or Earthlink. There was some Dell online storage idiocy, but I disabled that the first time it popped up.
Where did you spec your Mac versus your PC?
At first glance, mixing science fiction and fantasy seems like a good thing. After all, they both tend to occupy the same shelves at the Barnes & Noble or your fill-in-the-name-of-your-local-book-superstore.
Now I'm not going to say that there's such a thing as "true" science fiction, or "hard" science fiction. Clearly, there are elements of fantasy in science fiction and vice versa. But I will say that there is a type of science fiction and a type of fantasy that I do enjoy. IMHO, good science fiction presents issues, whether social or technological or whatever, and bends the story to highlight that issue. The issue is sometimes couched in metaphor, but more often, the issue is laid out bare.
For example, in the recent District 9, there is a clear social commentary about immigration. The commentary is not hidden beneath facades of poetry and metaphor, but quite obvious. Zelazny's "Damnation Alley" is about what happens when we mess with nature. In that story, the environment almost literally hits back. Under a fantasy author's treatment, maybe nature is instead a pissed-off woodland naiad that washes away someone's water mill. I'm not saying that either is better, but they are different approaches.
For example, think of T.H. White's _The Once and Future King_. There was this notion running throughout the story that the fate of the land was tied to the fate of the king. As the king suffered, so did the land. It was mystical in many ways. Contrast this to a SF story where perhaps a character is tied intimately into a spaceship's control systems and his/her fate is directly tied into the ship's (there are at least four similar stories that come to mind :) ).
I enjoy science fiction immensely (and some fantasy too). I would hate to lend credence to this notion that science fiction and fantasy are just stories about alternate worlds.
No kidding. I was watching an English comedian playing in Canada and he did the same, mixing a Texas drawl with a Georgia twang. And don't get me started on all those comedians doing Jamaican accents who mix up everything.
I understand that there is a species of lizard that feasts on this grass. Maybe that is an option.
It's a good attitude and would mod you up.
I'm the same way. In the past I've been given some bizarre direction. Sometimes it's the fault of IT management, but often the direction may come from the business side. There may be incentives to use a particular product. In some cases, the voodoo of corporate financing may dictate that they lease a product and a vendor may not have that option available so the company goes with a different and lesser product. I've even seen cases where a vendor gives huge incentives for buying a product suite that using a better product is difficult to justify.
But the attitude that you will work with what's given (up to a point :D ) I think is worthwhile.
Which brings up a very good point... If the store owners weigh the loss of the customers versus the potential loss from theft they may have decided it was worthwhile. It makes me wonder though -- we have so many retailers and companies that are evil in some fashion, yet people still do business with them. If we really started voting with our euros or dollars then we could very swiftly change the behaviour of these companies.
I find that if I turn up the amplifier and distortion all the way, I can get by with approximating the notes on my Peavey. I lost most of my hair in the past decade so can't do the hair swish anymore, but I've since discovered that the Spandex tights more than makes up for it.
There was actually a study about this.. Alas, I don't have a cite, but the gist of it was that people want to justify their particular madnesses. They save face by believing the hype, especially if they've shelled out significant money for something. E.g., if someone buys a car that is notoriously unreliable, but expensive, they will make up all sorts of excuses for why they paid the premium for a lousy car. Same for speaker cables, wine, bottled water, etc..