But didn't they both pretty much build their companies? (tho their backgrounds may explain some of the occasionally mystifying behaviour by what are supposed to be tech companies:)
That, in my observation, is a critical difference: whether someone was THERE from the ground up, and has the fundamental perception as to what their company is all about. Managers who come in after a company is fully established tend to only see the stock market and the bottom line, not the product or the customers or what makes a company tick. And chances are they've never actually built a company themselves.
Not only that, but WalMart after WalMart became one of the Bad Guys in the marketplace. Just what M$ needed!!
When I read down the list of People Now Or Soon To Be In Charge At M$, it was really apparent that it is no longer a software company at all, but rather, a chain of managers who happen to be marketing software. How many of them have actual *company-building* experinece, let alone software development experience?
joelonsoftware.com has an interesting article up, that points up how the M$ culture has changed, and contends that knowing how to run one business doesn't necessarily translate into knowing how to run a completely different type of business.
In fact, I've observed that here in California, the higher the turnout, the more likely the voters are to pick candidates who are essentially slime but have cleverly smeared their opponents (meaning most people don't look beyond the surface of campaign ads and interviews); likewise, the higher the turnout, the more likely they are to pass stupid initiatives that do little but raise taxes (free money from the gov't!!)
I think the problem is that most people, especially those with little education and/or poor command of English, tend to vote with their guts and emotions, rather than with their brains and reasoning power. In some districts, merely having a Hispanic name will get you elected, because that's a comfort zone to predominantly-immigrant residents.
And poor people consistently vote for whoever promises them a handout. Whether they get fucked over beyond that doesn't seem to be a concern.
"Democracy: that ultimate triumph of quantity over quality." -- Peter H. Peel
Nearly all the CDs I've bought have been a *direct* result of having previously downloaded a bunch of MP3s. MP3s serve the exact same function as radio, in that I can thereby hear new stuff, over and over if I want, and figure out which ones I like well enough to want to own in hardcopy.
The last 3 CDs I bought, I got directly from the artist, who had given a bunch of MP3s to the public. Same for the next two CDs that I plan to buy. I'd never have heard of ANY of these bands without their "free samples". And without the ability to replay the MP3s whenever the hell I want (ie. absolutely no DRM), I'd not have become sufficiently addicted to spend money, either.
Yep, we're the true definition of "just works":) Cuz that's the ultimate goal, to make it "just work" for *whoever* is using a given machine. Not for their neighbour, or some ivory-tower geek, or marketing's wet dream.
I think I dropped a couple replies to this Richard fellow too, as he seems a sensible guy.
I mostly stopped using the WinME side of that box after getting the XP side beaten into submission, but before that... when WinME was first installed, it couldn't run for 15 minutes without a crash, and it couldn't crash properly either -- it'd take 15 minutes to finish falling over. But once I'd discovered how to civilize it, WinME saw 5 years of regular use without one single crash -- not one!! Then again, that's pretty much how any Winbox I set up behaves, once it's trained.:)
The main ongoing problem with WinME is horrible resource and swapfile management. I disabled the swapfile entirely and that helped performance a lot, but it still uses 3x the resources, for the same apps, as any other Windows, and I think the root of the problem is IE5.5 (when TurboTax forcibly installed IE5.5 on my Win98 box, it did bad things to its resource management too). IE6.0 doesn't seem to have that issue.
At last count I had 19 legal copies of WordPerfect, from v4.1 thru 11 (have got to where I sorta collect the stuff), but my first was a bootleg of 5.1. Later on I picked up 5.1+ in the box, but never found a complete original 5.1 (did find books and box, tho).
BTW I just wandered over to Outpost BBS and did the signup thing, can't resist a BBS:) but it's stuck at the screen that says "You did not leave a real message! Try again... Press ENTER to continue" and won't let me do anything else. Might be it's trying to send ANSI even tho I told it my telnet client doesn't grok ANSI (displays it as raw codes). Finally gave up and closed the telnet session.:( -- Why is it being closed down? Telnettable BBSs are growing elsewhere. I use Techware BBS regularly, mostly for ILink. (telnet://techware.dynip.com) And I'm the co-sysop-at-large of EQCity BBS, which is still pure dialup, and mainly a Netware file repository.
Exactly so. And worse, the less a person knows about the Magic Box, the more they fear being "left behind". Sometimes it doesn't even help to demonstrate how their favourite guru (myself:) uses a great deal of older hardware and software, with optimal results.
On the other end, likewise I see no reason to coerce upgrades if the user is comfortable with an old setup -- in fact, the main result of talking 'em into upgrades is that they become so *uncomfortable* with their updated system, that now they get far LESS use from it than before. How is that beneficial to the person who OWNS the system??! our job is making the PC usable by its owner, not forcing it to fit some ideological ideal.
BTW contrary to popular belief, WinME can be made 100% stable -- turn off Restore, apply 98Lite in default mode, and (barring bogus drivers or shit hardware) it'll never crash again. Knowing that, why try to force a user to upgrade, when I can so-simply make their existing setup well-behaved?
And... M$ Works from 2001? that's mighty newfangled if you ask me:) I still use WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS in Everyday Life; it's now 15 years old and it still works as fine as ever. (Mainly it's my editor for BBS messaging... your sig is an ancient BBS tagline!)
You've nailed what I see squarely on the head, both in userland and app development. (I also do a fair bit of SOHO support.)
I've often said that developers should be forced to test and use their product on the oldest and most minimal setup possible, so they can experience firsthand what they're inflicting on their users when they succumb to feature creep rather than making what's already there work better.
Average Users are more often frustrated and confused by upgrades than helped by them, but they've been taught to fear being "left behind" even when what they've got not only still works fine, but works better than the update. And they don't understand that "dropped support" doesn't mean "stops working at all".
[laughing] My very fave machine is a lowly P233 that is now 8 years old. It runs DOS and Win95 and most importantly, DOOM.:) My everyday-work box is a P3-550 with Win98, and if you want to get historical it's now 12 years old, since it started life as a 486 in 1994. Its almost-identical twin (P3-500 now 7 yrs old, dual boots WinME/XP) is my multimedia box. They all run 24/7, they all do everything I expect of them, they crash seldom to never, and tho I probably should build something newer for the heavy lifting, I see no reason to rush out and replace absolutely-reliable machines just because they're "outdated".
Of course, it helps that I have much the same attitude about software.:)
Ah, thanks very much, saved for reference. It's probably in the same place, or close to it, on Win98, at least once one has used the ROUTE command. (My internet box being Win98.) I don't see anything there right now, but neither have I had any reason to try ROUTE on this box. (ROUTE does exist on W98, I checked that.)
My XP box isn't allowed online, and since it works very well as it is (it hasn't been restarted since August 2005), ain't no "updates" gonna touch it. Gods know what they'd do to it... or, as you say, who they'd cause it to want to socialize with!!
The one IE update I always install on Win9x is the IE version that the Win2K devteam made for their own internal use; they handed out CDs at the W2K roadshow. It's version 5.00.2314.1003c. It doesn't induce sluggishness in the shell like other versions do, and it fixes a lot of minor issues.
I don't use IE online unless forced to (I'm an older-Netscape kind of guy), but at least this 5.0 version doesn't misbehave like IE4/5.5 do. (5.5 is probably the single biggest reason why WinME is slow and why everything uses way more of WinME's resource heaps than should be. Uncouple IE5.5 from the desktop, and most of WinME's problems magically vanish.)
Win98's 512mb RAM limit is apparently a hardware bug, or at least requires a hardware bug to manifest.
I've noticed it's mainly a problem on motherboards with 3 DIMM slots; I've never seen it on one with 4 DIMM slots. Might be due to how with 3 slots, there's a sort of overlap in how memory is addressed. (As I vaguely understand it, it's not seen as 3 slots; it's seen as two sets of two slots where each set shares one slot.)
And as it happens, I'm writing this from a Win98 machine with 1 gig of RAM, and no, Win98 has NOT been tweaked to "don't see past 511mb". -- I've got other machines that also have NO problem with Win98 and more than 512mb RAM. (One of those does happen to be a 3-DIMM-slot mainboard, with 768mb. Another has 640mb.) And no, I haven't installed the fix M$ issued for the problem, either.
As to 137GB HD limit, that was a common BIOS limit of that era, not a Win98 limit. I know a number of folks running Win98 with much larger HDs than 137gb, with no tweaks or 3rd party controller cards.
The limit that IS a problem is that *FAT32* partitions should never be over 32GB; when they are, sooner or later they experience filesystem "wrapping" and data loss that exactly mimics HD failure. (Which IMO accounts for the rash of "failed" 40GB HDs when those first came out.) I've personally experienced this on a WinXP machine. The FAT32 bug IS documented in M$'s knowledge base, I found it there at the time I ran into it, tho hell if I could find it when I looked for it again later. (The bug does not affect NTFS.)
This evidently is why Win98's FDISK as shipped didn't support making partitions over 32GB, but later on that was "fixed"... and then we had that rash of "HD failures". Whoops! someone shoulda documented it better in the FDISK source!!
BTW the Win9x "47 day rollover" bug also evidently needs bogus hardware to manifest (probably in the system timer on the motherboard)... I've got several machines that have had Win9x uptimes well in excess of 47 days, without experiencing the bug; last time the subject came up here, other folks piped up saying the same. Turns out only about 50% of machines have the issue.
Otherwise, tho... I agree with you on the security and recoverability issues. Win98 is fairly secure in its default state; in fact, I've never seen it compromised unless the user did Something Stupid, like run a malware attachment, or download and run an infected file, and then only if it's something that doesn't need NT-style services to activate itself. And recovery from most disasters is as easy as restart in DOS and kill the malware while it's unconscious and helpless, or copy good files back from an archive. (A good reason for a Win98 dual boot with WinXP, BTW... gives you a real DOS to work from at need.)
As to why programmers drop support for Win9x, in my observation this tends to happen almost entirely with apps that *already* have memory issues (severe resource leaks, sucking system RAM like there's no tomorrow, etc.) and I have come to believe it's mainly because these programmers can't be bothered to clean up their app's resource and memory space when they can so much more easily let Win2K/XP do it for them.
So, yeah, certainly it's not worth *adding* support for a platform with a shrinking userbase, but IMO *removing* =existing= support for said userbase is an admission of incompetence.
Another point that just struck me: it assumes that whenever you listen to music, you are also staring at your PC's screen, with the player Always On Top. Explain to me how this matches ANYONE's work or leisure habits? Me, if I'm working on the PC the player is minimized to the system tray, and if I'm at leisure, I'm nowhere near the computer. Either way, I'm not going to see any of their ads.
Once the advertisers figure this out, that may be the end of it... unless they do something REALLY annoying like force the player to be Always On Top, plus require "click the player every 15 seconds to continue playing the song".
More likely they'll just make it illegal to NOT watch the ads.
Much as I'd love to hand 'em 10 cents or so for every song I want, reliably available when I want it, this sure ain't how they'll get my money.
Exactly what I keep saying. Why would I hunt for and wade thru piles of questionable P2P files, if for ten cents I could get a known-good file on the first try, from a known-reliable server... but if and only if the ten-cent download would behave the same as the free P2P copy, ie. is DRM-free and I can do whatever the hell I want with it.
But I don't care if the legal file is watermarked... in fact, they could use watermarks, P2P affiliates, and micropayments as a way of using P2P itself to broaden the *paying* customer base.
From the chart, it looks like the sweet spot for productivity is somewhere in the range of 25 vacation days.
But American used to be more productive in terms of hard-goods output (I have a hard time counting managerial positions as "productive"). And vacation time of two weeks for entry level workers, 3 weeks for upper tier, was the norm. Yet that's no longer enough, judging by the level of burnout we see today.
But back a couple generations, we didn't have Soccer Mom syndrome, where every moment of every day is planned and filled, lest we feel like we're not "doing enough". What happened to just vegetating (which is to say, taking downtime to regenerate) once you came home from work? hardly anyone does that anymore. It's no wonder we've become stressed, and in need of more vacation days.
That sounds familiar... more angle, more noise... the person who told me got the info from Davy Jones, who was the main pilot for Airwolf, and quite the expert on precision flying.
Likely so. I know that helicopter pilots can make a chopper whisper-quiet or bloody noisy (clearly audible at 10+ miles!) by varying the pitch of the main rotor blade.
And a helicopter is just a glorified ceiling fan.:)
Queued the PDF for later download.. my connection being too slow to read it right now. But I think I've seen a similar study at some point, involving smoke and airplane flaps.
Also depends on how many blades and their angles. More blades tends to be quieter than fewer blades. Also blades set at flatter angles tend to make less noise. You can run such fans at higher RPM without coming close to the noise of a fan with a different blade setup.
And sometimes you just gotta turn 'em on in a quiet place and see how much noise they make!
I've got a big fan in my living room that most people learn is there by discovering the flow of cold air toward the wall furnace (surprise! coldest place in the room is in front of the heat!) It's *that* quiet. Unfortunately, Lakewood doesn't make this model anymore:(
THANK YOU!!! I've been looking all over for a source for these RaidMax cases, and for whatever reason, NewEgg didn't spit 'em up (and I didn't find 'em elsewhere at any sane price). Used to get 'em at the computer show, but the show that was handy went away.:(
I've been using RaidMax cases for years, just as they come from the box. I want STEEL, NO damned windows or LEDs, cleanly made innards (no sharp edges), lots of drive bays, sanely-placed extra fan mounts, and easy workspace -- and they fit the bill admirably.
Their included fans are fairly quiet, but if you want a quieter fan, why not just buy one from pcpowerandcooling.com? they're about $10 each. Or find a $5 Evercool fan at a clone shop; they're very quiet too.
(Tho Sunon fans last the longest... and are the loudest. *sigh*)
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I don't know. But IBM was a very wide-ranging company, not just a tech or software company.
Good one [g]
:)
But didn't they both pretty much build their companies? (tho their backgrounds may explain some of the occasionally mystifying behaviour by what are supposed to be tech companies
That, in my observation, is a critical difference: whether someone was THERE from the ground up, and has the fundamental perception as to what their company is all about. Managers who come in after a company is fully established tend to only see the stock market and the bottom line, not the product or the customers or what makes a company tick. And chances are they've never actually built a company themselves.
So that's what happened to Sunbeam. They used to have good quality products with a great lifespan. Not any more... :(
Not only that, but WalMart after WalMart became one of the Bad Guys in the marketplace. Just what M$ needed!!
When I read down the list of People Now Or Soon To Be In Charge At M$, it was really apparent that it is no longer a software company at all, but rather, a chain of managers who happen to be marketing software. How many of them have actual *company-building* experinece, let alone software development experience?
joelonsoftware.com has an interesting article up, that points up how the M$ culture has changed, and contends that knowing how to run one business doesn't necessarily translate into knowing how to run a completely different type of business.
In fact, I've observed that here in California, the higher the turnout, the more likely the voters are to pick candidates who are essentially slime but have cleverly smeared their opponents (meaning most people don't look beyond the surface of campaign ads and interviews); likewise, the higher the turnout, the more likely they are to pass stupid initiatives that do little but raise taxes (free money from the gov't!!)
I think the problem is that most people, especially those with little education and/or poor command of English, tend to vote with their guts and emotions, rather than with their brains and reasoning power. In some districts, merely having a Hispanic name will get you elected, because that's a comfort zone to predominantly-immigrant residents.
And poor people consistently vote for whoever promises them a handout. Whether they get fucked over beyond that doesn't seem to be a concern.
"Democracy: that ultimate triumph of quantity over quality." -- Peter H. Peel
Maybe it's collecting IP addresses of people interested in spy gadgets... after all, if you're interested in spy gadgets, you must be a terrorist!!
Nearly all the CDs I've bought have been a *direct* result of having previously downloaded a bunch of MP3s. MP3s serve the exact same function as radio, in that I can thereby hear new stuff, over and over if I want, and figure out which ones I like well enough to want to own in hardcopy.
The last 3 CDs I bought, I got directly from the artist, who had given a bunch of MP3s to the public. Same for the next two CDs that I plan to buy. I'd never have heard of ANY of these bands without their "free samples". And without the ability to replay the MP3s whenever the hell I want (ie. absolutely no DRM), I'd not have become sufficiently addicted to spend money, either.
Yep, we're the true definition of "just works" :) Cuz that's the ultimate goal, to make it "just work" for *whoever* is using a given machine. Not for their neighbour, or some ivory-tower geek, or marketing's wet dream.
:)
:) but it's stuck at the screen that says "You did not leave a real message! Try again... Press ENTER to continue" and won't let me do anything else. Might be it's trying to send ANSI even tho I told it my telnet client doesn't grok ANSI (displays it as raw codes). Finally gave up and closed the telnet session. :( -- Why is it being closed down? Telnettable BBSs are growing elsewhere. I use Techware BBS regularly, mostly for ILink. (telnet://techware.dynip.com) And I'm the co-sysop-at-large of EQCity BBS, which is still pure dialup, and mainly a Netware file repository.
I think I dropped a couple replies to this Richard fellow too, as he seems a sensible guy.
I mostly stopped using the WinME side of that box after getting the XP side beaten into submission, but before that... when WinME was first installed, it couldn't run for 15 minutes without a crash, and it couldn't crash properly either -- it'd take 15 minutes to finish falling over. But once I'd discovered how to civilize it, WinME saw 5 years of regular use without one single crash -- not one!! Then again, that's pretty much how any Winbox I set up behaves, once it's trained.
The main ongoing problem with WinME is horrible resource and swapfile management. I disabled the swapfile entirely and that helped performance a lot, but it still uses 3x the resources, for the same apps, as any other Windows, and I think the root of the problem is IE5.5 (when TurboTax forcibly installed IE5.5 on my Win98 box, it did bad things to its resource management too). IE6.0 doesn't seem to have that issue.
At last count I had 19 legal copies of WordPerfect, from v4.1 thru 11 (have got to where I sorta collect the stuff), but my first was a bootleg of 5.1. Later on I picked up 5.1+ in the box, but never found a complete original 5.1 (did find books and box, tho).
BTW I just wandered over to Outpost BBS and did the signup thing, can't resist a BBS
Exactly so. And worse, the less a person knows about the Magic Box, the more they fear being "left behind". Sometimes it doesn't even help to demonstrate how their favourite guru (myself :) uses a great deal of older hardware and software, with optimal results.
:) I still use WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS in Everyday Life; it's now 15 years old and it still works as fine as ever. (Mainly it's my editor for BBS messaging... your sig is an ancient BBS tagline!)
On the other end, likewise I see no reason to coerce upgrades if the user is comfortable with an old setup -- in fact, the main result of talking 'em into upgrades is that they become so *uncomfortable* with their updated system, that now they get far LESS use from it than before. How is that beneficial to the person who OWNS the system??! our job is making the PC usable by its owner, not forcing it to fit some ideological ideal.
BTW contrary to popular belief, WinME can be made 100% stable -- turn off Restore, apply 98Lite in default mode, and (barring bogus drivers or shit hardware) it'll never crash again. Knowing that, why try to force a user to upgrade, when I can so-simply make their existing setup well-behaved?
And... M$ Works from 2001? that's mighty newfangled if you ask me
You've nailed what I see squarely on the head, both in userland and app development. (I also do a fair bit of SOHO support.)
I've often said that developers should be forced to test and use their product on the oldest and most minimal setup possible, so they can experience firsthand what they're inflicting on their users when they succumb to feature creep rather than making what's already there work better.
Average Users are more often frustrated and confused by upgrades than helped by them, but they've been taught to fear being "left behind" even when what they've got not only still works fine, but works better than the update. And they don't understand that "dropped support" doesn't mean "stops working at all".
[laughing] My very fave machine is a lowly P233 that is now 8 years old. It runs DOS and Win95 and most importantly, DOOM. :) My everyday-work box is a P3-550 with Win98, and if you want to get historical it's now 12 years old, since it started life as a 486 in 1994. Its almost-identical twin (P3-500 now 7 yrs old, dual boots WinME/XP) is my multimedia box. They all run 24/7, they all do everything I expect of them, they crash seldom to never, and tho I probably should build something newer for the heavy lifting, I see no reason to rush out and replace absolutely-reliable machines just because they're "outdated".
:)
Of course, it helps that I have much the same attitude about software.
Ah, thanks very much, saved for reference. It's probably in the same place, or close to it, on Win98, at least once one has used the ROUTE command. (My internet box being Win98.) I don't see anything there right now, but neither have I had any reason to try ROUTE on this box. (ROUTE does exist on W98, I checked that.)
My XP box isn't allowed online, and since it works very well as it is (it hasn't been restarted since August 2005), ain't no "updates" gonna touch it. Gods know what they'd do to it... or, as you say, who they'd cause it to want to socialize with!!
The one IE update I always install on Win9x is the IE version that the Win2K devteam made for their own internal use; they handed out CDs at the W2K roadshow. It's version 5.00.2314.1003c. It doesn't induce sluggishness in the shell like other versions do, and it fixes a lot of minor issues.
I don't use IE online unless forced to (I'm an older-Netscape kind of guy), but at least this 5.0 version doesn't misbehave like IE4/5.5 do. (5.5 is probably the single biggest reason why WinME is slow and why everything uses way more of WinME's resource heaps than should be. Uncouple IE5.5 from the desktop, and most of WinME's problems magically vanish.)
Win98's 512mb RAM limit is apparently a hardware bug, or at least requires a hardware bug to manifest.
... and then we had that rash of "HD failures". Whoops! someone shoulda documented it better in the FDISK source!!
I've noticed it's mainly a problem on motherboards with 3 DIMM slots; I've never seen it on one with 4 DIMM slots. Might be due to how with 3 slots, there's a sort of overlap in how memory is addressed. (As I vaguely understand it, it's not seen as 3 slots; it's seen as two sets of two slots where each set shares one slot.)
And as it happens, I'm writing this from a Win98 machine with 1 gig of RAM, and no, Win98 has NOT been tweaked to "don't see past 511mb". -- I've got other machines that also have NO problem with Win98 and more than 512mb RAM. (One of those does happen to be a 3-DIMM-slot mainboard, with 768mb. Another has 640mb.) And no, I haven't installed the fix M$ issued for the problem, either.
As to 137GB HD limit, that was a common BIOS limit of that era, not a Win98 limit. I know a number of folks running Win98 with much larger HDs than 137gb, with no tweaks or 3rd party controller cards.
The limit that IS a problem is that *FAT32* partitions should never be over 32GB; when they are, sooner or later they experience filesystem "wrapping" and data loss that exactly mimics HD failure. (Which IMO accounts for the rash of "failed" 40GB HDs when those first came out.) I've personally experienced this on a WinXP machine. The FAT32 bug IS documented in M$'s knowledge base, I found it there at the time I ran into it, tho hell if I could find it when I looked for it again later. (The bug does not affect NTFS.)
This evidently is why Win98's FDISK as shipped didn't support making partitions over 32GB, but later on that was "fixed"
BTW the Win9x "47 day rollover" bug also evidently needs bogus hardware to manifest (probably in the system timer on the motherboard)... I've got several machines that have had Win9x uptimes well in excess of 47 days, without experiencing the bug; last time the subject came up here, other folks piped up saying the same. Turns out only about 50% of machines have the issue.
Otherwise, tho... I agree with you on the security and recoverability issues. Win98 is fairly secure in its default state; in fact, I've never seen it compromised unless the user did Something Stupid, like run a malware attachment, or download and run an infected file, and then only if it's something that doesn't need NT-style services to activate itself. And recovery from most disasters is as easy as restart in DOS and kill the malware while it's unconscious and helpless, or copy good files back from an archive. (A good reason for a Win98 dual boot with WinXP, BTW... gives you a real DOS to work from at need.)
As to why programmers drop support for Win9x, in my observation this tends to happen almost entirely with apps that *already* have memory issues (severe resource leaks, sucking system RAM like there's no tomorrow, etc.) and I have come to believe it's mainly because these programmers can't be bothered to clean up their app's resource and memory space when they can so much more easily let Win2K/XP do it for them.
So, yeah, certainly it's not worth *adding* support for a platform with a shrinking userbase, but IMO *removing* =existing= support for said userbase is an admission of incompetence.
Where does ROUTE write the information so as to make it permanent? offhand I don't see an obvious place, and I like to hand-check such things. :)
I'm wondering why WGA needs to check in at all -- couldn't a "shut down, you're broken" message be included with the next normal Windows update?
That's *3006*... I'm from the future, you insensitive clod! ;)
Another point that just struck me: it assumes that whenever you listen to music, you are also staring at your PC's screen, with the player Always On Top. Explain to me how this matches ANYONE's work or leisure habits? Me, if I'm working on the PC the player is minimized to the system tray, and if I'm at leisure, I'm nowhere near the computer. Either way, I'm not going to see any of their ads.
Once the advertisers figure this out, that may be the end of it... unless they do something REALLY annoying like force the player to be Always On Top, plus require "click the player every 15 seconds to continue playing the song".
More likely they'll just make it illegal to NOT watch the ads.
Much as I'd love to hand 'em 10 cents or so for every song I want, reliably available when I want it, this sure ain't how they'll get my money.
Exactly what I keep saying. Why would I hunt for and wade thru piles of questionable P2P files, if for ten cents I could get a known-good file on the first try, from a known-reliable server... but if and only if the ten-cent download would behave the same as the free P2P copy, ie. is DRM-free and I can do whatever the hell I want with it.
But I don't care if the legal file is watermarked... in fact, they could use watermarks, P2P affiliates, and micropayments as a way of using P2P itself to broaden the *paying* customer base.
And my first thought was an incinerator where folks were expected to bring all their movies, Fahrenheit 451 style....!!
From the chart, it looks like the sweet spot for productivity is somewhere in the range of 25 vacation days.
But American used to be more productive in terms of hard-goods output (I have a hard time counting managerial positions as "productive"). And vacation time of two weeks for entry level workers, 3 weeks for upper tier, was the norm. Yet that's no longer enough, judging by the level of burnout we see today.
But back a couple generations, we didn't have Soccer Mom syndrome, where every moment of every day is planned and filled, lest we feel like we're not "doing enough". What happened to just vegetating (which is to say, taking downtime to regenerate) once you came home from work? hardly anyone does that anymore. It's no wonder we've become stressed, and in need of more vacation days.
That sounds familiar... more angle, more noise... the person who told me got the info from Davy Jones, who was the main pilot for Airwolf, and quite the expert on precision flying.
Likely so. I know that helicopter pilots can make a chopper whisper-quiet or bloody noisy (clearly audible at 10+ miles!) by varying the pitch of the main rotor blade.
:)
And a helicopter is just a glorified ceiling fan.
Queued the PDF for later download.. my connection being too slow to read it right now. But I think I've seen a similar study at some point, involving smoke and airplane flaps.
Also depends on how many blades and their angles. More blades tends to be quieter than fewer blades. Also blades set at flatter angles tend to make less noise. You can run such fans at higher RPM without coming close to the noise of a fan with a different blade setup.
:(
And sometimes you just gotta turn 'em on in a quiet place and see how much noise they make!
I've got a big fan in my living room that most people learn is there by discovering the flow of cold air toward the wall furnace (surprise! coldest place in the room is in front of the heat!) It's *that* quiet. Unfortunately, Lakewood doesn't make this model anymore
THANK YOU!!! I've been looking all over for a source for these RaidMax cases, and for whatever reason, NewEgg didn't spit 'em up (and I didn't find 'em elsewhere at any sane price). Used to get 'em at the computer show, but the show that was handy went away. :(
I've been using RaidMax cases for years, just as they come from the box. I want STEEL, NO damned windows or LEDs, cleanly made innards (no sharp edges), lots of drive bays, sanely-placed extra fan mounts, and easy workspace -- and they fit the bill admirably.
Their included fans are fairly quiet, but if you want a quieter fan, why not just buy one from pcpowerandcooling.com? they're about $10 each. Or find a $5 Evercool fan at a clone shop; they're very quiet too.
(Tho Sunon fans last the longest... and are the loudest. *sigh*)