Nice diatribe, you have a lot of energy - it's apathy that is the real curse of this country, and I congratulate you for caring. I was a college student in the 60's, and sometimes I despair at the lack of idealism that I see in today's youth. I won't comment on the content other than to say that I think you should go to the library and get some books on economic theory to help flesh out your background.
One weakness is that you haven't provided any facts and figures to back up your argument that CD sales are in fact being affect by a more conservative consumer. When you engage in such discussions it really is much better if you do a little research and have some sources to back up your point of view. Maybe next time.
In actuality your idea that consumers weren't buying CD's becasue they were spending more conservatively as a result of the weaker economy is not borne out by any data that I am aware of. The actual cunsumer spending numbers show that your thesis is probably wrong. What some people erroneously called a recession was in fact due to a decline in business spending, not consumer spending. In fact, the increase last year in consumer spending is what prevented us from going into recession.
So is Daddy buying his daughter the latest Britney Spears CD? Probably not, because her boyfriend downloaded it from Limewire and burned it to a CD. But Daddy did go out and buy her lots of other stuff.
Apple announces that it is licensing all of it's patents, trademarks, it's entire code base and any look-and-feel design patents to Microsoft.
Apple also announces that IE 5.1 will be installed on all new machines as the default browser, all Mac buyers will be signed up for Passport and the Mac will come out of the box configured with Windows Media Player as the default Multimedia Player, and MSN as the default ISP. Also Apple announces that it will discontinue development of Quicktime after version 5.0.
without hearing that we've been in a moderately serious recession?
Recession? Not according to any real economic data. The technical definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters of declining GDP. Didn't happen. The economy actually grew by 2% last year.
http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.c gi ?dbname=economic_indicators&docid=01ja02.txt
So, was the decline in auto sales last year due to piracy? How about decline in real estate sales? Piracy? Durable goods? Airline travel? Must have been piracy!
Actually real estate sales were up last year, and auto sales were just about equal to the all time record set in 2000.
http://www.nahb.com/news/sales_dec2001.htm
http://www.jsonline.com/bym/news/jan02/9896.asp
A 10% dip sounds like their business did really well, in comparison to other areas of the economy
I hate to say this because a lot of people on this site have such strong feelings about CD music, but the fact is that the overall economy was up 2% last year. Strictly speaking, by all traditional economic measures the economy did not experience a recession (2 consecutive quarters of negative growth), Sure, some segments of the economy were hit by the bursting of the internet bubble, but the fact is that a 10% decline in CD music sales cannot easily be explained by whatever was happening in the overall economy.
A friend made an intersting point about patents the other day: "Imagine where we would be now if people had patented buble sorts etc."
One of the things that I find horrific about slashdot and it's readers attitude towards software patents is that idea that this is some how a new practice, and in 'the good old days' nobody patented software.
Well, to coin a phrase, that is BULLSHIT.
SOFTWARE PATENTS GO BACK TO THE EARLY DAYS OF THE COMPUTER INDUSTRY AND HAVEN'T SEEMED TO HAVE CAUSED ANY LONG-TERM HARM.
Patents exist of old concepts like the UNIX SUID bit, various types of regular expression implementations, the use of XOR in bitmaps for XWindows and any number of similar things.
We still have wide use of languages like C, FORTRAN, RPG, APL and Cobol, and Java has a very large, and rapidly growing code base, surely larger than FORTRAN, APL and RPG, and maybe even as large as C or Cobol. With the near universal use of Java as an instructional language, and the reams of Java code being produced every day for commercial use it is very hard to imagine the day when Java will be 'dead'.
To suggest that C# will replace Java is at the very best a great extrapolation.
Remember that Microsoft is first a great marketing engine, and most of it's initiatives do not live up to the hype. Like Hailstorm.
While this looks nice in a sort of consumer way, I won't be buying one of these. 1 CPU, 4 memory slots and 3 PCI slots are about 1/2 of what I want for each of these key expansion busses.
If you're in a mixed environment, I don't understand why you don't use X, use your favorite client on UNIX, and farm out that mail client you like to your other systems using X-Windows.
1. I like Mulberry better than the rest of the email clients I have seen, X or not.
2. Sometimes I need my email client when network connectivity doesn't permit an X connection. Like in an airplane.
I have to admit that its user preferences management is rather obtuse. However I have found it no worse (and in many cases better) than Eudora. From your support desk point of view I can see where this would be a big issue.
Having said that, how often does an average user need to muck with these settings? Far more important is the UI that the user is presented with when managing mail. To me, especially in the case of dealing with IMAP accounts, Mulberry is the best I have seen.
In addition, since I have to work on Macs/Win/UNIX systems in a mixed environment having a single email client that maintains a constant UI (even with some warts) is greatly preferable to having to use a raft of different clients, each with its own idiosyncracies.
I am surprised to not see Mulberry suggested. It's one of the few email clients (if not the only email client) specifically designed from the ground up for use with IMAP. It's fast, reliable. It doesn't fully support HTML mail (a good thing). It has versions for almost every platform - Win, Mac OS 9, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris.
I've been using Mulberry for a year and a half now, and there is no way I would go back to Exchange or Eudora (whose crappy behavior started me looking for an alternative).
Re:Keep tech workers happy?! Not in this job marke
on
Managing Einsteins
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· Score: 2
When the pendulum swings the other way, people will remember this sort of behaviour and run out the door.
The fact of the matter is that people feel betrayed when a company behaves like this, and that feeling will manifest itself as a high turnover rate some time in the future.
Because of its existence as a legal entity a Corporate Citizen is different from the employees and investors that produce and direct the Corporation's resources.
So you are telling me that a 'Corporate Citizen' is not made up of it's investors and and employees, and these people are not affected by the actions of other citizens that choose to break these laws?
Interesting to note that these laws place a large segment of otherwise lawful citizens in breach of the law to the benefit, generally, of Corporate Citizens
And 'Corporate Citizens' are exactly what? They are the employees, stockholders and other people who are the basic constituants of a corporation. In fact a 'Corporate Citizen' is in fact just a perjorative label for a group of ordinary citizens. When a citizen breaks one of these laws he is in fact depriving another group of ordinary citizens their legal rights.
Perhaps you don't agree that these legal rights are reasonable. Fine. But don't try to beat around the issue by trying to pin some sort of stupid label on somebody.
Should be called 'Mass Market Motherboards'
on
Mass Motherboard Review
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I was a little dissapointed that the article didn't mention some of the higher end motherbard manufacturers like SuperMicro. If you want to build a really stable and reliable system most of these Tiawanese specials are a little lacking.
The fact is that Microsoft never innovated anything
The fact is that you are so passionate about this personal conviction, that you could care less about any facts. Try to remain objective about this stuff - it's just technology!
Oh baloney. The FACT is that C# and Java are closer than any other two languages I have ever seen, in fact C# is closer to Java than versions of the SAME language in many cases (say FORTRAN 77 and FORTRAN 90 for example).
The FACT is also that if you take a close, hard look at Microsoft products, you are going to have a HELL of a time finding any single product feature that wasn't done somewhere else first.
[The CLR] "... like the JVM, is based on an abstract stack machine. Apart from this superficial level of commonality, the design of the two virtual machines is quite different."
And the point of this is exactly what? The author of this statement is biased? How can you can possibly state the fact that underlying structure of both the JVM and CLR is an abstract state machine 'superficial'? This is in fact the most FUNDAMENTAL commonality that you could possibly have in such implementations. How can you not realize that?
How many web pages do you go to that give you the warning "this page blah blah unsafe..." Yet you still enter that credit card number. Marking code as "safe" or "unsafe" is irrelevant.
Sure, you are not going to see this issue listed on a web page. But it is a big issue when people choose how they are going to implement a project. Some of the corporations I deal with are rejecting C# right now because, and this is a direct quote, "C# is just Java except it's not portable and it's not secure".
: people will write unsafe code, and it will be common enough so that end users will have to use it. The same thing happens with ActiveX controls. How many people honesty won't run an unsafe ActiveX control?
A lot of the corporations I deal with won't let Active X controls through their firewalls.
Or a program that uses unsafe Word macros? The other day I had to change my security level in word so I could use a documentation tool - and I went right ahead and did it, and so will everyone else!
Two months ago I installed a mail filter for one of my clients that bounces any email with an attached Word macro.
The fact is this is a real issue, and it is going to become more important over time.
While I am certainly biased against anything Microsoft tries to cram down my throat, I don't think this article is any better than the crap we usually see from Microsoft flacks.
Slashdot should really try to find some better quality articles if they want to have a content rich site.
+ C# is completely OO - even an Int32 is an Object. Java uses primitive types.
That is flat out silly. Java provides object wrappers for it's primitive types.
If you want to talk about non-OOP features, C# is full of them. Like structs for example. Who came up with that idea? And how about pointers? WTF? As far as Indexers go (and pretty much all the differences between Java and C#), they are just syntactic sugar that really just makes code confusing to read compared to Java.
The C# Abstract or "Virtual Machine" (CLR) is not designed for C#, rather for language neutrality (to an extent). Java and the JVM, however, are closely tied.
That's a hoot! The fact is that CLR doesn't support anything that can't be accessed from C#. That's why implementations of other languages have had to drop features like multiple inheritance before CLR implementations. All CLR does is provide a Procrustian cot for other languages to lie on. Head over the top? Lop it off!
There are many programming languages available for the JavaVM, including Lisp, Scheme, JavaScript, JPython, Prolog, and Eiffel. The fact is that the JVN is very little, if at all more language centric than is the CLR.
Although there may have been some inspiration from Java, I'd be hard pressed to call it a "Java Ripoff".
If it isn't a Java ripoff, then why is everyone comparing it to Java?
The fact is that Microsoft never innovated anything - and C# is just another Microsoft clone of somebody else's real innovation, plus marketing spin.
For example, I think the trend of patenting human genome sequences is a bad idea. I don't think you should be able to patent things that exist in nature, nor should you be able to patent mathematical or physical laws.
There are some very serious problems with this viewpoint. The first is factual - it is not possible to patent a human genome sequence in the US. http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/com/sol/notices/u tilexmguide.pdf.
The second aspect is that patenting of naturally occurring materials is a long established and important incentive for invention - for example most antibiotics are naturally occuring materials.
What is key is that much of R&D is based on finding new uses for materials that already exist in nature - and in reality this is highly beneficial because otherwise we would be rewarding the development of only new materials that do not exist in nature - and as we well know through hard lessons the introduction of new materials into our biosphere often results in very undesirable unexpected effects.
It would be very bad public policy indeed if we were to ban patents on naturally occurring materials as it would incentivize only the development new synthetic materials.
This about it this way: the sales people at Microsoft are out there every day selling their product. They are out there telling your PHB every day that Exchange is better, that SAMBA won't do the half of what Windows 2000 Server will do, and that an all-Windows infrastructure is the way to go.
The real question is: what can you tell your PHB to dispute that?
The small company I work for had to do a server upgrade recently. We had a NT 4 server with insufficient licenses running in a multiplatform environment (Linux/Mac/Win) with a technical staff comfortable in all platforms.
After a review Linux won because of the following reasons:
1. Netatalk is much more stable than MFS for W2K. 2. W2K doesn't provide NFS shares. 3. W2K license cost was $4000. Antivirus software for the W2K box was another $1000. Backup software was another significant cost. 4. Performance benchmarks we ran showed Samba 2x faster than W2K on the same piece of hardware. 5. Samba provides all the services we need. 6. Applying patches to the Linux box is less intrusive (fewer required reboots). 7. We also don't have to keep track of license documentation for the Linux box. 8. We will never be forced to migrate because of Microsoft's planned forced obsolescensce program.
Initially the PHB was dead set against using Linux for this application. When we showed him the real story, he changed his mind.
When we were done we also found we had a system where many of the bugs and glitches that annoyed the users mysteriously disappeared.
Slashdot Mirror
Nice diatribe, you have a lot of energy - it's apathy that is the real curse of this country, and I congratulate you for caring. I was a college student in the 60's, and sometimes I despair at the lack of idealism that I see in today's youth. I won't comment on the content other than to say that I think you should go to the library and get some books on economic theory to help flesh out your background.
m e= article&node=&contentId=A17587-2002Feb28¬Found= true
One weakness is that you haven't provided any facts and figures to back up your argument that CD sales are in fact being affect by a more conservative consumer. When you engage in such discussions it really is much better if you do a little research and have some sources to back up your point of view. Maybe next time.
In actuality your idea that consumers weren't buying CD's becasue they were spending more conservatively as a result of the weaker economy is not borne out by any data that I am aware of. The actual cunsumer spending numbers show that your thesis is probably wrong. What some people erroneously called a recession was in fact due to a decline in business spending, not consumer spending. In fact, the increase last year in consumer spending is what prevented us from going into recession.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagena
So is Daddy buying his daughter the latest Britney Spears CD? Probably not, because her boyfriend downloaded it from Limewire and burned it to a CD. But Daddy did go out and buy her lots of other stuff.
It is well documented that Apple has had to give up a lot of it's technology to Microsoft in the past to get Microsoft to write for the Mac.
Examples:
Excel - bye bye the much superior MacBasic.
MS Word 1.0 - Microsoft gets original look and feel license that eventually provides grounds to torpedo the famous lawsuit.
The mentioned 5 year agreement - Apple licenses a crapload of patents to Microsoft.
Now we have this. What will we see as a result? Apple drpping Quicktime in favor of Windows Media Player?
I am SURE that Microsft would not miss the opportunity to extract it's pound of flesh.
Apple announces that it is licensing all of it's patents, trademarks, it's entire code base and any look-and-feel design patents to Microsoft.
Apple also announces that IE 5.1 will be installed on all new machines as the default browser, all Mac buyers will be signed up for Passport and the Mac will come out of the box configured with Windows Media Player as the default Multimedia Player, and MSN as the default ISP. Also Apple announces that it will discontinue development of Quicktime after version 5.0.
without hearing that we've been in a moderately serious recession?
c gi ?dbname=economic_indicators&docid=01ja02.txt
Recession? Not according to any real economic data. The technical definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters of declining GDP. Didn't happen. The economy actually grew by 2% last year.
http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.
So, was the decline in auto sales last year due to piracy? How about decline in real estate sales? Piracy? Durable goods? Airline travel? Must have been piracy!
Actually real estate sales were up last year, and auto sales were just about equal to the all time record set in 2000.
http://www.nahb.com/news/sales_dec2001.htm
http://www.jsonline.com/bym/news/jan02/9896.asp
A 10% dip sounds like their business did really well, in comparison to other areas of the economy
I hate to say this because a lot of people on this site have such strong feelings about CD music, but the fact is that the overall economy was up 2% last year. Strictly speaking, by all traditional economic measures the economy did not experience a recession (2 consecutive quarters of negative growth), Sure, some segments of the economy were hit by the bursting of the internet bubble, but the fact is that a 10% decline in CD music sales cannot easily be explained by whatever was happening in the overall economy.
Maybe it was actually, in fact, due to piracy.
A friend made an intersting point about patents the other day: "Imagine where we would be now if people had patented buble sorts etc."
One of the things that I find horrific about slashdot and it's readers attitude towards software patents is that idea that this is some how a new practice, and in 'the good old days' nobody patented software.
Well, to coin a phrase, that is BULLSHIT.
SOFTWARE PATENTS GO BACK TO THE EARLY DAYS OF THE COMPUTER INDUSTRY AND HAVEN'T SEEMED TO HAVE CAUSED ANY LONG-TERM HARM.
Patents exist of old concepts like the UNIX SUID bit, various types of regular expression implementations, the use of XOR in bitmaps for XWindows and any number of similar things.
Languages are nearly immortal.
We still have wide use of languages like C, FORTRAN, RPG, APL and Cobol, and Java has a very large, and rapidly growing code base, surely larger than FORTRAN, APL and RPG, and maybe even as large as C or Cobol. With the near universal use of Java as an instructional language, and the reams of Java code being produced every day for commercial use it is very hard to imagine the day when Java will be 'dead'.
To suggest that C# will replace Java is at the very best a great extrapolation.
Remember that Microsoft is first a great marketing engine, and most of it's initiatives do not live up to the hype. Like Hailstorm.
While this looks nice in a sort of consumer way, I won't be buying one of these. 1 CPU, 4 memory slots and 3 PCI slots are about 1/2 of what I want for each of these key expansion busses.
Instead, give me something like THIS.
allowed to come into your business and snoop around for no reason
Somebody ratting them out clearly provides a reason.
If this was the governement doing this sort of thing it would be illegal.
The government is the one issuing the search warrants.
Everyone here has some form of mp3 repository at their office
No, they don't. Some companies try to run a clean operation.
Yes, but will this let me produce a film of a 3-d rubber band wrapped around a 4-d sphere shrinking to a point???
Maybe we should give these problems to the people at the next ACM International Programming Contest.
If you're in a mixed environment, I don't understand why you don't use X, use your favorite client on UNIX, and farm out that mail client you like to your other systems using X-Windows.
1. I like Mulberry better than the rest of the email clients I have seen, X or not.
2. Sometimes I need my email client when network connectivity doesn't permit an X connection. Like in an airplane.
I mean, have you seen the preferences dialog box?
I have to admit that its user preferences management is rather obtuse. However I have found it no worse (and in many cases better) than Eudora. From your support desk point of view I can see where this would be a big issue.
Having said that, how often does an average user need to muck with these settings? Far more important is the UI that the user is presented with when managing mail. To me, especially in the case of dealing with IMAP accounts, Mulberry is the best I have seen.
In addition, since I have to work on Macs/Win/UNIX systems in a mixed environment having a single email client that maintains a constant UI (even with some warts) is greatly preferable to having to use a raft of different clients, each with its own idiosyncracies.
I am surprised to not see Mulberry suggested. It's one of the few email clients (if not the only email client) specifically designed from the ground up for use with IMAP. It's fast, reliable. It doesn't fully support HTML mail (a good thing). It has versions for almost every platform - Win, Mac OS 9, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris.
I've been using Mulberry for a year and a half now, and there is no way I would go back to Exchange or Eudora (whose crappy behavior started me looking for an alternative).
When the pendulum swings the other way, people will remember this sort of behaviour and run out the door.
The fact of the matter is that people feel betrayed when a company behaves like this, and that feeling will manifest itself as a high turnover rate some time in the future.
Because of its existence as a legal entity a Corporate Citizen is different from the employees and investors that produce and direct the Corporation's resources.
So you are telling me that a 'Corporate Citizen' is not made up of it's investors and and employees, and these people are not affected by the actions of other citizens that choose to break these laws?
So far you seem to be spouting nonsense.
Interesting to note that these laws place a large segment of otherwise lawful citizens in breach of the law to the benefit, generally, of Corporate Citizens
And 'Corporate Citizens' are exactly what? They are the employees, stockholders and other people who are the basic constituants of a corporation. In fact a 'Corporate Citizen' is in fact just a perjorative label for a group of ordinary citizens. When a citizen breaks one of these laws he is in fact depriving another group of ordinary citizens their legal rights.
Perhaps you don't agree that these legal rights are reasonable. Fine. But don't try to beat around the issue by trying to pin some sort of stupid label on somebody.
I was a little dissapointed that the article didn't mention some of the higher end motherbard manufacturers like SuperMicro. If you want to build a really stable and reliable system most of these Tiawanese specials are a little lacking.
The fact is that Microsoft never innovated anything
The fact is that you are so passionate about this personal conviction, that you could care less about any facts. Try to remain objective about this stuff - it's just technology!
Oh baloney. The FACT is that C# and Java are closer than any other two languages I have ever seen, in fact C# is closer to Java than versions of the SAME language in many cases (say FORTRAN 77 and FORTRAN 90 for example).
The FACT is also that if you take a close, hard look at Microsoft products, you are going to have a HELL of a time finding any single product feature that wasn't done somewhere else first.
[The CLR] "... like the JVM, is based on an abstract stack machine. Apart from this superficial level of commonality, the design of the two virtual machines is quite different."
And the point of this is exactly what? The author of this statement is biased? How can you can possibly state the fact that underlying structure of both the JVM and CLR is an abstract state machine 'superficial'? This is in fact the most FUNDAMENTAL commonality that you could possibly have in such implementations. How can you not realize that?
How many web pages do you go to that give you the warning "this page blah blah unsafe..." Yet you still enter that credit card number. Marking code as "safe" or "unsafe" is irrelevant.
Sure, you are not going to see this issue listed on a web page. But it is a big issue when people choose how they are going to implement a project. Some of the corporations I deal with are rejecting C# right now because, and this is a direct quote, "C# is just Java except it's not portable and it's not secure".
: people will write unsafe code, and it will be common enough so that end users will have to use it. The same thing happens with ActiveX controls. How many people honesty won't run an unsafe ActiveX control?
A lot of the corporations I deal with won't let Active X controls through their firewalls.
Or a program that uses unsafe Word macros? The other day I had to change my security level in word so I could use a documentation tool - and I went right ahead and did it, and so will everyone else!
Two months ago I installed a mail filter for one of my clients that bounces any email with an attached Word macro.
The fact is this is a real issue, and it is going to become more important over time.
While I am certainly biased against anything Microsoft tries to cram down my throat, I don't think this article is any better than the crap we usually see from Microsoft flacks.
Slashdot should really try to find some better quality articles if they want to have a content rich site.
+ C# is completely OO - even an Int32 is an Object. Java uses primitive types.
That is flat out silly. Java provides object wrappers for it's primitive types.
If you want to talk about non-OOP features, C# is full of them. Like structs for example. Who came up with that idea? And how about pointers? WTF? As far as Indexers go (and pretty much all the differences between Java and C#), they are just syntactic sugar that really just makes code confusing to read compared to Java.
The C# Abstract or "Virtual Machine" (CLR) is not designed for C#, rather for language neutrality (to an extent). Java and the JVM, however, are closely tied.
That's a hoot! The fact is that CLR doesn't support anything that can't be accessed from C#. That's why implementations of other languages have had to drop features like multiple inheritance before CLR implementations. All CLR does is provide a Procrustian cot for other languages to lie on. Head over the top? Lop it off!
There are many programming languages available for the JavaVM, including Lisp, Scheme, JavaScript, JPython, Prolog, and Eiffel. The fact is that the JVN is very little, if at all more language centric than is the CLR.
Although there may have been some inspiration from Java, I'd be hard pressed to call it a "Java Ripoff".
If it isn't a Java ripoff, then why is everyone comparing it to Java?
The fact is that Microsoft never innovated anything - and C# is just another Microsoft clone of somebody else's real innovation, plus marketing spin.
I want a wearable computer with face recognition software so that I will never have to worry about remembering names again!
For example, I think the trend of patenting human genome sequences is a bad idea. I don't think you should be able to patent things that exist in nature, nor should you be able to patent mathematical or physical laws.
u tilexmguide.pdf.
There are some very serious problems with this viewpoint. The first is factual - it is not possible to patent a human genome sequence in the US. http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/com/sol/notices/
The second aspect is that patenting of naturally occurring materials is a long established and important incentive for invention - for example most antibiotics are naturally occuring materials.
What is key is that much of R&D is based on finding new uses for materials that already exist in nature - and in reality this is highly beneficial because otherwise we would be rewarding the development of only new materials that do not exist in nature - and as we well know through hard lessons the introduction of new materials into our biosphere often results in very undesirable unexpected effects.
It would be very bad public policy indeed if we were to ban patents on naturally occurring materials as it would incentivize only the development new synthetic materials.
This about it this way: the sales people at Microsoft are out there every day selling their product. They are out there telling your PHB every day that Exchange is better, that SAMBA won't do the half of what Windows 2000 Server will do, and that an all-Windows infrastructure is the way to go.
The real question is: what can you tell your PHB to dispute that?
The small company I work for had to do a server upgrade recently. We had a NT 4 server with insufficient licenses running in a multiplatform environment (Linux/Mac/Win) with a technical staff comfortable in all platforms.
After a review Linux won because of the following reasons:
1. Netatalk is much more stable than MFS for W2K.
2. W2K doesn't provide NFS shares.
3. W2K license cost was $4000. Antivirus software for the W2K box was another $1000. Backup software was another significant cost.
4. Performance benchmarks we ran showed Samba 2x faster than W2K on the same piece of hardware.
5. Samba provides all the services we need.
6. Applying patches to the Linux box is less intrusive (fewer required reboots).
7. We also don't have to keep track of license documentation for the Linux box.
8. We will never be forced to migrate because of Microsoft's planned forced obsolescensce program.
Initially the PHB was dead set against using Linux for this application. When we showed him the real story, he changed his mind.
When we were done we also found we had a system where many of the bugs and glitches that annoyed the users mysteriously disappeared.