Win98 was the last version of Windows that could boot into a pure MS-DOS environment. From what I've seen in the field, there are still a few businesses that depend on creaky, old, but totally bulletproof DOS applications to run things like process control or point-of-sale systems. A lot of these systems are seven- to ten-year-old PCs from major vendors like IBM and HP, built before PC hardware became a commodity, low margin business. These are over-engineered systems that need only an occasional cleaning with compressed air. They'll last at least a decade, maybe two (think about all the mid-'90s HP LaserJet printers still churning out pages and you'll know what I mean).
Case in point: a sign company that has a DOS application that runs a plastic cutter. The app dates from 1995, the PC from 1998. Another datapoint: a chain of crafts stores that runs a POS system on a 1996-vintage HP Vectra running Win95 in DOS mode (the autoexec.bat bypasses Windows and starts the POS software). And another: a mortgage company whose principle runs a Win98 box out of sheer inertia, but whose major application (Genesis2000) won't run under emulation.
There are a lot of DOS applications that could run under 2K, XP, or under emulation but can't because they need direct access to hardware (a dongle or parallel printer port) that the NT Hardware Abstraction Layer won't allow. There are a few workarounds, but not for every application or peripheral.
Me, I hung on to a Win98 box until it died last year just to run Autodesk 3DStudio R4 for DOS. I'd been using 3DS since 1993, and I could create models and animate scenes quickly and efficiently, since I had internalized all of the keyboard shortcuts. Renders that needed features that weren't supported by 3DS for DOS would be imported into 3DSMax (which I never really liked). What I really liked is that with DOS and 3DS loaded, the memory footprint was about 3.5MB, leaving nearly 500MB free for meshes, textures, and procedurals/shaders. WinNT/2K/XP and Max alone would take up about 256MB of RAM right at startup. Yeah, memory is cheap now, but it wasn't a few years ago.
Bottom line: Linux is not a solution for any of the above problems. Yes, these businesses should get with the times and install state-of-the-art systems, but vendor inertia, corporate inertia, user resistance, cost control, and certification issues (does your plant produce a regulated item like food, drugs, cosmetics, or weapons?) stand in the way of an upgrade to 2K/XP, much less Linux.
Amazing. I am in exactly the same situation with my Opcode Midimac files and a "Fat Mac" 512E (circa 1985). Midimac was the first Opcode product, and eventually evolved into Vision/Studio Vision (which lacks a Midimac import function). The structure of the Midimac files -- sequences made of sub-sequences -- pre-dates the.MID format and doesn't really map well to a standard MIDI file. I've done the MIDI-to-MIDI transfer between two Macs, and have about 200 songs in standard.MID format.
But you lose the flexibility. It was great assembling songs from sub-sequences; it lent itself well to pop, with its verse-chorus-verse-bridge form.
The 21-year-old Mac still boots. I have a spare for parts, too. Not sure how much longer those 400K floppies will last, but the quality was better back then.
Since my first Windows box (WfW 3.11, 1993), I've used an awful lot of different startup sounds, from the sound of breaking glass to the Mac Quadra-era System 7 "CHUNG!", to funny outtakes from voiceover sessions I've engineered.
My current system at work, which I built around an MSI Athlon 64+ motherboard, is housed in a case that looks like a Soviet-era toaster: dull silver-grey plastic and louvers on the front that look like they belong on the hood of a tractor. I festooned the case with hammer-and-sickle symbols and the letters "CCCP" in red type bordered in yellow. That computer's name is "katyusha".
Its startup sound is the Red Army Chorus singing the Soviet National Anthem. Just one verse, though. It annoys my employer to no end, but he'll be the first one up against the wall when the Revolution happens. Fucking capitalist pig dog.
What really annoys me is the faux "click" sound of an unaltered XP install, the one that's bound to Windows Explorer "Start Navigation" events. It's never in sync with the mouse click. Second most annoying is the crumpled paper sound when the "Recycle Bin" is emptied (are those bits really recycled? Hmmm?). I turn those off immediately after an install.
Somewhat less annoying (but all too common) are users that bind the sound of a toilet flushing to the "Empty Recycle Bin" event. Invariably, they're the sort of person for whom a fart joke is the pinnacle of humor. But they bitch like hell when you bind the sound of a lusty wet ripping flatus to each mouse click. "My computer's been hacked!" they complain. "I was humiliated in front of a client!"
On a related note, did you hear that the Bush administration now says that bird flu is nothing to worry about? More to the point, for bird flu to be a threat to humans, it would have to evolve, and everyone knows evolution is just a theory!
No, no, no. The bird flu doesn't have to evolve, it just has to mutate, and since President Bush has seen all three X-Men movies, he acknowledges this possibility.
Thus, the Department of Homeland Security and Center for Disease Control have been directed to guard against a strain of the bird flu that has an adamantium endoskeleton and retractable claws.
You think Japan invaded China (1930s) because they didn't like the Chinese? They didn't care about the Chinese - they wanted oil.
No, not oil, but other important resource: raw materials, food, and labor. The known deposits of oil in Asia were mostly in the Dutch colonies in Indonesia. Japan was largely self-sufficient until the industrialization of the late 19th Century. Industrialization led to two things: a population boom and a movement from rural to urban areas. After 1900, Japan was hard pressed to feed itself (manifested in widespread malnutrition during the Allied blockade late in WWII) and did not have adequate supplies of coal and ore.
Japanese imperialism was apparent long before the 1930s: Japan forced China to cede Taiwan in 1895.
Japanese contempt for the Chinese made it all to easy to commit atrocities like the Rape of Nanking and the war crimes of Unit 714.
My company mainly did support for small- to medium-sized businesses, but we had an ad in the phone book so we'd get calls from residential customers. No more than one per week, though. So a call comes in on a quiet afternoon from a gentleman who said his computer wouldn't turn on. I try to do as much as I can on the phone first, for free, before trucking out to the house, because it was our company policy to charge $100/hr. with a 1 hour minimum.
So, I start by asking if he'd had a power outage recently. We're on Cape Cod, and the power here is terrible: dirty, prone to surges and outages, and served by a single plant (Mirant, on the Cape Cod Canal). "No, not recently," he said. "How old is the PC?" I asked. If it was recent enough to fall under warranty, the customer would have to deal with the company directly. If it was quite old, I'd bring a replacement power supply with me. If it fell within a certain time period (2001-2004), it may have been bad caps on the motherboard. "Two years old, and out of warranty," was the reply.
"Okay, I have to ask this," I said, "but is it plugged in?".
"Yes," he said.
"Are you sure?"
"Quite sure".
"I'll be there within the hour." I get in my car and drive out to the customer's house.
Now, I don't like doing residential calls. You see too much of peoples' lives when you're in their houses. They love to shoulder-surf, second-guess, and sometimes it's really unpleasant, like this one woman whose aging Doberman (a nice, gentle dog, really) laid down next to her PC and began emitting eye-watering farts while I was showing her how to burn a DVD. Or the B&B owners whose residential apartment looked like something out of Deliverence, complete with slow-witted children who stared at me the whole time like I was the first outsider to visit their enclave.
The customer's house was pleasant enough, a retiree's home filled with his wife's chachkas and knick-knacks: hundreds of Hummel figurines, collectable plates, Margaret Keene's paintings of wide-eyed children. I was relieved that I was not stepping into something out of Pink Flamingoes. The computer, a Gateway, was in a guest room. The first thing I did was check to see where the power cable went.
It was unplugged.
I plugged it in, booted it up. The customer began apologizing profusely, and his wife came in to say that she had unplugged the PC in order to vacuum the carpet. It was then that I noticed the plaques and certificates on the wall: he had retired from DEC, where he was employed as an engineer. This guy knew forgot more tech in his lifetime than I'll ever know.
I couldn't charge him the full $100 just to plug his computer back into the power strip, but I knew I'd have a fight with my employer if I left emptyhanded, so I split the difference and left with a check for $50. I assuaged my guilt at taking even that much by giving him my personal cell number and telling him to call me if he had any further problems. Surprisingly, my boss had no problem with this.
I'll add one more mini-anecdote: there's an ASP with a TLA (who shall remain nameless, but it's not EDS, though just as big...they're known for doing automated data processing) who serves one of our larger customers, a car dealership. The dealership runs maybe 75% of its business on their software, which is done with a terminal emulator via telnet over a dedicated T-1 to the ASP's datacenter. Whenever the ASP changes their software, numerous things break. Usually we fix things, but this time the ASP sent a tech to sort it all out.
The tech proceeds to take control of the Cisco 2610 router that connects to the datacenter, changing the passwords from the ones we had set. I inform the tech that we need access to the router in order to troubleshoot the connection problems that pop up from time to time. The tech tells me that he can't, because the ASP uses the same passwords for every router on their network. After I successfully supress a bout of hysteri
Maybe I'm mistaken in this assumption: there are two kinds of blank media, those that are meant for raw data, and those that are meant for audio CDs. That's what I see when I go to the local Staples: data CDs and audio CDs. I also assume that any tax would be levied on audio CDs only.
I'm assuming that this tax only applies to audio CDs (though I know from personal experience that audio recorded to data CDs works in CD players).
If this tax also applies to data-grade CDs, then all bets are off.
"I've got a fever, and the only cure is... more cowbell!"
Heh, you win the Spot The Ref prize. But I recall a time twenty years ago when I spent an afternoon getting some cowbell tracks perfect (two different pitched cowbells with stereo separation).
But seriously... you're reaching around looking for a way to make this ridiculous (and as you say, burdensome) sort of tax somehow more fair for starving artists. Here's a thought: drop it entirely. Let artistic merit, as measured by people's willingness to actually pay an artist what they ask for their work, solve the whole thing. I always find it ironic that people are so willing to rip off the work of an artist they claim to like and respect. I wonder if they'd do it while that person was sitting in the room with them, talking about the year they spent working on the album that's about to be ripped by the person who just loves their work, but is too cheap to cough a dollar for their new favorite recording.
I agree that the tax, in and of itself, is a burden, and that burning a mix CD for a friend or significant other should be covered by fair use. But "artistic merit" is too subjective. We may agree that Britney Spears has no artistic merit, but we'd be overruled by legions of teen, tween, and pre-teen girls. Tyranny of the majority. Where does that leave Cat Power, or Smog, or Hefner, or Deerhoof?
As for ripping off the artist, in my case I'm referring to CDs and iTunes tracks bought legitmately, tracks that get burned as playlist cuts, not tracks downloaded from P2P networks. My car has a CD player without a line input for an iPod. I have a Griffin iTrip, but when I do a Cape Cod to NYC run, some of the frequencies on the low end of the FM spectrum aren't open. So I burn a CD from an iTunes playlist, which gets me through the Connecticut shoreline.
But yes, drop the tax entirely. However, if it becomes inevitable, make it fair.
I've never been a fan of these blank media taxes, but there is a way that could make this more palatable, to me at least.
I'm do support strong copyrights, but also a strong defense of fair use. I was a songwriter who did manage to eke out a modest living from sales and royalties back in the day (and considered breaking even on tour a rare event). But I always saw these blank media taxes (along with early forms of DRM like Copy Code) as an unfair burden on musicians and songwriters who are at that difficult early phase of their career arcs. It may be a small percentage of the cost of media, but in the long run it adds up, and it's money that could be better spent on things like more media, guitar strings, drum sticks, software, hardware, and the all important elixirs: coffee and beer.
And I never liked that the taxes collected went to the top tier of artists. For every one of these, a Springsteen, a Madonna, a Bono, there are 10,000 strivers, sequestered in a home studio, trying to get that vocal or cowbell track perfect.
So, I'd feel more comfortable if half of the funds levied by these taxes could benefit the unsigned, the unheard. Start with public school music programs, which are woefully underfunded as it is, and often fall victim to budget cuts. That's how I started out, a nine-year-old trumpet player in a grade school orchestra. Maybe there could be some sort of indie label lottery, where some band's vanity label gets a $10,000 infusion of funds, maybe even a promotional campaign sponsored by Maxell, Imation, TDK, Sony, or some other producer of blank media ("The stars of tomorrow use our CD-RWs today...").
Sounds neat, but the guy in that photo looks incredibly stupid with that wing strapped to his back. He looks like he's going to a costume party dressed as an F-4 Phantom.
Fuck hazard pay, is there "OMG I look like a dork!" pay?
Some malware (Qologic, for example) gets around msconfig (or regedit for that matter) by using two processes that watch each other's registry keys. If you remove one, the other restores it. And in the case of Qologic, the built-in rootkit cloaks its processes from Task Mangler (though Sysinternals tools such as REGMON and FILEMON do detect these processes). These files are also completely hidden from Explorer.
Qologic also piggybacks registry values on HKLM/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Win dowsNT/Winlogon. If you use Adaware, Spybot, or Hijack This to remove these affected keys, you'll render your system unbootable.
The solution is to boot from a live Windows CD (BartPE, UBCD), use a remote registry editor to find and edit the affected keys, and delete the now-visible files (in user temp folders, the Windows and System32 directories, and sometimes even the root of C:\).
Of course, the real solution is to find the son of a bitch who wrote and unleashed Qologic and whack him in the head with a sack full of doorknobs.
My company provides support for small- to medium-sized businesses, companies that can't afford a full time admin. Most of the workstations we support are running XP Pro, and most are Dell, Compaq, or HP, though there are a few non-name beige boxes, and a number of Win2K systems.
But the median system, if you will, is a 3 year old Compaq Presario, 1.7GHz Celeron, 256MB RAM, 60GB HD, integrated graphics, 100Mbps NIC, running XP Pro. Now, this system may have been "snappy" when it was first booted up, but after dozens of patches and SP2, the OS memory footprint exceeds 200MB immediately after boot, with no applications running. Fire up IE and there's another 32MB committed. If Outlook has WINWORD set as its default editor, say goodbye to another 40-60 MB. And now we're swapping.
The solution we've been implementing is to throw another 256MB stick of RAM into the box, which costs anywhere from $20 to $40, depending on whether it's PC100 or PC2700 or whatever the mobo needs. No more swapping, and the OS loads faster and runs "snappier".
So, tell me about Vista after SP1, SP2, and 59 Windows...err, Microsoft Update critical patches down the road. Is that 1GB going to become 2GB to have a responsive, quick-loading system?
I'm currently building a new system at work to replace my old workstation, which died because of bad caps (damned capacitor cover blew off of the core and embedded itself in the side of the case). Athlon 64 at 2.4GHz, 2GB RAM, 2 x 80GB SATA, integrated graphics for now while I spec out a PCI-Express video card. It's going to be XP Pro for now (and dual boot with FC, I think) but I just know that I'm going to be the office Vista guinea pig, since I have the only PC that can run it.
First of all, I take it from the name "ServersCheck" that this piece of software is a remote administration tool. Since very few competent admins would rely on a cracked piece of software to monitor their equipment, it's got to be warez kiddies doing the cracking (and probably not even using the software). You know, 0-day oneupsmanship.
Now, do you see the inherent flaw in letting warez kiddies dictate the pricing structure of your product?
Photoshop must be the most widely cracked software out there, second only to Windows XP (just a guess). It's not terribly expensive - $700 or so, right? - and there are both low-cost and free alternatives (Photoshop Elements, the Gimp, etc.). Does that stop anyone from cracking Photoshop CS? Nope.
Supply and demand dictate the price of your product. ServersCheck and Photoshop CS are not high-demand mass-market consumer products. They're priced accordingly. And since they're used by professionals, there's a return on the investment. Theoretically, ServersCheck will maximize your uptime. My legit copy of Photoshop CS has allowed me to generate thousands of dollars of income for my company (not that I couldn't have done that with the Gimp, but I've been using Photoshop since version 2.51 and I'm pretty set in my ways).
While supply and demand controls pricing, you hope that your product sells enough to recoup your investment in development, distribution, and marketing, along with covering your recurring expenses and perhaps a bit of profit on top of that. If not, you cut expenses. Adobe is a publicly traded company; while cutting the price of Photoshop CS2 might push a few more units out the door, that would come at the expense of profits and perhaps result in a net loss. Cue the shareholder revolt in 3...2...1...
Finally, the whole warez culture is not about being able to use software that you can't afford. It's all about hoarding, the digital equivalent of those ladies who live with 50 cats. It's irrational. Why you would want to hitch the pricing of your product to that sort of thing is even crazier.
In 1985, I began putting together a MIDI-based recording studio. I had a choice between Mac and PC (ignoring lower-end stuff like Atari, etc.). I ended up with a 512K Mac because:
The street price (not list) was $1299, a couple of hundreds less than a clone PC (non-IBM branded).
The MIDI interface for the Mac was a passive $125 model from Opcode. The only MIDI interface for an IBM clone at that time was the Roland MPU-401, which was a combination ISA card and breakout box. It cost more than twice what the Opcode cost.
The Mac had a great looking GUI for its time (though crude compared to even System 7) on a clear paper-white screen. The PC had...MS-DOS on an amber-on-black monitor.
The Mac used convection cooling and was totally silent. The PC, not so much
The Mac had a much smaller footprint than the PC, an important consideration in a home studio where space was a premium.
That 21-year-old Mac still boots up and runs. An off-brand PC clone might work now, too. But I doubt it would.
So, cheaper, better, probably more reliable. Did I mention cheaper?
Got to work at 8:30. Pradesh, my cubicle-mate arrives ten minutes later, muttering Hindi obscenities. He's wearing plaid pants in a pattern so garish that it would make a Scotsman commit suicide.
"Yo, Prad. What's up with the slacks? You rent Braveheart IV last night?"
"Good gracious, no," he repies. "Someone hacked my pants on the No. 6 train."
We spent most of the morning doing a system restore on his trousers. Got them rolled back to pinstripes just before lunch.
I'm sorry to hear about your hardships. I know from personal experience how health and family problems can make concentrating on work difficult.
That said, you need a new business model. I work for a company that was once in the retail/VAR business and is now pretty much pure-play service. We specialize in small- to medium-sized businesses (the SME sector), but do some residential work as a sideline. Scraping spyware and viruses off of Wintel PCs is part of our business, but the core is preventative maintenance. Towards that end, we sell service contracts.
The terms of these contracts vary, from three hours per quarter for a graphic artist with a desktop and laptop computer, to an open-ended 25 to 32 hours per month contract for a car dealership with two locations and a total of 42 workstations. The walk-in rate is $100/hr. and the preferred rate for contract customers is $75/hr. beyond prepaid contracted hours.
In other words, if you have a three hour contract, one of my techs will come out and do three hours of preventative maintenance (scandisk, chkdsk, defrag, clear temp files, check logs, OS patches, blow the dust out of the case, check for leaky caps, software updates and installs, check for spyware and viruses, etc.). Any crises that arise after that are $75/hr.
You want to update a system? We'll spec one out for you. $75/hr.
You want to get broadband or install a VOIP phone? $75/hr.
You get hosed early in a quarter and we have to recover your data? We charge our hours against your contract and defer maintenance to the next quarter. Or not. We pretty much play it by ear, but all of our customers get their quarterly maintenance done in the first two months of the quarter.
Our contracts automatically renew every year. You want out? Notify us within thirty days of the renewal date. We'll still do service calls, but it's $100/hr., not $75/hr.
We're pretty happy with this, our customers are pretty happy with this (we get a lot of referral business), so it's all good.
I live year-round in Hyannis on the Cape, and I take issue with your statement that most Cape Codders are poor.
There is poverty and homelessness here, but only isolated pockets. Most year-round residents are solidly middle class. I'd challenge you to find actual poverty outside of Hyannis and Yarmouth.
Now, there is a housing crisis. Seasonal workers on the Cape and Islands have been known to sleep in tents in the woods, but that's more a function of summer housing rates averaging hundreds or thousands of dollars per week. Hard to afford on a $9/hr. dishwasher's wage.
Yesterday, my office gets a frantic call from one of our clients, a lawyer. She had a filing deadline and was trying to finish a document she needed for this filing. Word 2002 stopped responding to user input every time she tried to save her document. All of my techs were out in the field, so I had to respond to this one (I'm VP Operations).
True enough, saving a document in Word or trying to open a new one while another document was open would hourglass the cursor. Only Task Mangler could end WINWORD.EXE.
Sysinternals's PROCEXP showed that every time a document was saved, Word would spawn VERCLSID.EXE as a child process, an executable that was "patched" by KB908531, which was pushed through Windows...err, Microsoft Update the day before.
I googled "verclsid". Let me tell you that yesterday, this search string returned no results. This morning, it returned exactly one. Now, it comes up with 67 web hits and 21 Usenet results.
Also, because of this "patch", typing "www.google.com" would return the generic IE "Server Not Found" page. One had to prepend "http://" to the URL. VERCLSID.EXE checks the validity of COM objects, so the damage wasn't confined to Office applications; it affected EXPLORER.EXE and IEXPLORE.EXE.
The workaround was to rename the current version of VERCLSID.EXE and restore the file from the backup created by KB908531 (a System Restore would have sufficed as well). I expect a patch for the patch to be released by Microsoft Real Soon Now. I guess this one was rushed out the door without sufficient testing.
Our company policy for patches is this: updates for servers are tested in-house before being deployed on production machines. For workstations, however, Windows Update is set to automatically update, unless the client's workstations run legacy applications, like the Reflection terminal emulator, or if high-end esoteric applications are present, like DataCAD or Design 20-20. As with servers, they're tested on a non-production system first.
I'd say that 10% of our clients got burned by 908531. Rolling it back wasn't that hard once we identified the problem, but this costs money.
I don't want to single out MSFT; last year an Apple Mac OS X security update broke Samba for me for about a week until I could figure out a workaround. But let's put this in perspective: how many people using Mac OS X (2 to 5% of the workstation market) also use Samba? Contrast this with the percentage of Windows XP/2K users also using Word (must be in the high 80% range), Internet Explorer, and the GUI, all affected by a buggy 908531 patch.
I lament the dilution of the phrase "mission critical".
Once it was used to describe systems that were mission critical, where failure could lead to significant financial losses, property damage, injuries, or loss of life. Remember the part of the MS Windows EULA about Java?
JAVA TECHNOLOGY IS NOT FAULT TOLERANT AND IS NOT DESIGNED, MANUFACTURED, OR INTENDED FOR USE OR RESALE AS ON-LINE CONTROL EQUIPMENT IN HAZARDOUS ENVIRONMENTS REQUIRING FAIL-SAFE PERFORMANCE, SUCH AS IN THE OPERATION OF NUCLEAR FACILITIES, AIRCRAFT NAVIGATION OR COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS, AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL, DIRECT LIFE SUPPORT MACHINES, OR WEAPONS SYSTEMS, IN WHICH THE FAILURE OF JAVA TECHNOLOGY COULD LEAD DIRECTLY TO DEATH, PERSONAL INJURY, OR SEVERE PHYSICAL OR ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE.
That's what I call mission critical. Also, that's some world-class snark on Microsoft's part. Java-based weapons systems? Sounds reasonable to me.
But instead of being restricted to, say, the oxygen tanks on Apollo 13 or the software that controlled the Therac-25 radiation therapy machine, the definition of mission critical has been extended to corporate networks. True, there can be financial losses if a corporate network is down or its security is compromised, but significant financial losses?
No, what really happens when the network's down is this: the salesdroids have to work the phones instead of having their noses in Outlook all day (or Solitaire), the CEO is pissed because his niece can't e-mail him pictures of her new kitten, and everyone else is thrown off their routine of chatting on AIM or playing stupid Yahoo! games all day.
Okay, maybe a system whose failure ends up with the whole company massing with torches and pitchforks outside the door to the IT department counts as "mission critical". But I still lament the devaluing of these words.
My employer is fond of the phrase "...on a going-forward basis", as in "On a going-forward basis, I think we should use DHL for RMA returns".
I happen to loathe the phrase "...on a going-forward basis". It's an empty phrase, the semantic equivalent of styrofoam packing peanuts.
So, during a slow month at the office, when my employer delved into the most minute details of the business, issuing many "going-forward" proclamations (none of which made much sense or saved more than $20 annually), I devised a plan to wean him from this odious phrase.
First, I'd rephrase his suggestions: "So, from now until the heat death of the universe, we're using DHL for RMAs, right?". Then, I started using the phrase in inappropriate situations: "I think, on a going-forward basis, I'm going to grab some lunch.". Finally, I began responding like the Pharoah's scribe from the old Charlton Heston/Yul Brynner movie The Ten Commandments: "SO IT IS WRITTEN...SO IT SHALL BE DONE!". I would then write the pronouncement on one of the office whiteboards like so: "III - THOU SHALT USE DHL ABOVE ALL OTHER OVERNIGHT SHIPPERS".
Usage of "...on a going forward basis" tapered off from thrice daily to about once or twice a month, a tolerable level for me. Yeah, I could have just asked my boss not to say "...on a going-forward basis", but where's the fun in that? If I wasn't a manipulative bastard I wouldn't be VP Operations right now.
One of my old trumpet teachers used to tell me stories from when he played in the NBC Radio Symphony Orchestra, led by the maestro Arturo Toscanini, back in the Thirties and Forties.
The orchestra played in the space in Rockefeller Center currently used by Saturday Night Live. However, there was no audience present during the radio broadcasts, save for a handful of people not in the orchestra (radio engineers, NBC executives, perhaps a representative from the sponsors or two).
Despite this fact, every member of the orchestra wore a tuxedo, and Maestro Toscanini wore tails.
Radio. No audience. Formal dress.
The story has stuck with me ever since, and I'd often pondered the reason for this. Remember, this was back when even street dress for a professional musician was a suit, tie, and snazzy shoes. No "business casual" back then.
The best reasons I could determine for this were:
Dress uniform, play uniform: having everyone in tuxedoes fostered cohesion among the members of the orchestra, cohesion that would affect the performance.
Respect: formal dress would be considered a sign of respect for the repertoire and, by extension, the composers.
Tradition: back then, broadcasting and recording took a back seat to live performance. Orchestras wore formal dress onstage; why should a closed session be any different?
Professionalism: according to my old teacher, Toscanini was a stickler about things like this, and his sense of professionalism extended to how the orchestra looked, as well as their performance.
Attitude: street dress was acceptable for rehearsals, but wearing the tuxedo sent a signal that this was a performance, even if you couldn't see the millions of people listening nationwide.
Personally, I'm inclined to judge a person's performance rather than their appearance. But even I can't help but think about appearance sometimes: if a vendor showed up to pitch my company while wearing shorts and a UCSC Banana Slugs t-shirt, my first thought would be "Jeez, he just doesn't care, does he?". The product or service would live or die on its merits, but my opinion of the salesman would be tainted by that first thought.
I think the bottom line is finding the appropriate level of casual/formal dress for the situation. The owner of the surf/skate shop might not mind if I showed up in shorts and sandals to install a POS system, but the funeral director probably would.
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Win98 was the last version of Windows that could boot into a pure MS-DOS environment. From what I've seen in the field, there are still a few businesses that depend on creaky, old, but totally bulletproof DOS applications to run things like process control or point-of-sale systems. A lot of these systems are seven- to ten-year-old PCs from major vendors like IBM and HP, built before PC hardware became a commodity, low margin business. These are over-engineered systems that need only an occasional cleaning with compressed air. They'll last at least a decade, maybe two (think about all the mid-'90s HP LaserJet printers still churning out pages and you'll know what I mean).
Case in point: a sign company that has a DOS application that runs a plastic cutter. The app dates from 1995, the PC from 1998. Another datapoint: a chain of crafts stores that runs a POS system on a 1996-vintage HP Vectra running Win95 in DOS mode (the autoexec.bat bypasses Windows and starts the POS software). And another: a mortgage company whose principle runs a Win98 box out of sheer inertia, but whose major application (Genesis2000) won't run under emulation.
There are a lot of DOS applications that could run under 2K, XP, or under emulation but can't because they need direct access to hardware (a dongle or parallel printer port) that the NT Hardware Abstraction Layer won't allow. There are a few workarounds, but not for every application or peripheral.
Me, I hung on to a Win98 box until it died last year just to run Autodesk 3DStudio R4 for DOS. I'd been using 3DS since 1993, and I could create models and animate scenes quickly and efficiently, since I had internalized all of the keyboard shortcuts. Renders that needed features that weren't supported by 3DS for DOS would be imported into 3DSMax (which I never really liked). What I really liked is that with DOS and 3DS loaded, the memory footprint was about 3.5MB, leaving nearly 500MB free for meshes, textures, and procedurals/shaders. WinNT/2K/XP and Max alone would take up about 256MB of RAM right at startup. Yeah, memory is cheap now, but it wasn't a few years ago.
Bottom line: Linux is not a solution for any of the above problems. Yes, these businesses should get with the times and install state-of-the-art systems, but vendor inertia, corporate inertia, user resistance, cost control, and certification issues (does your plant produce a regulated item like food, drugs, cosmetics, or weapons?) stand in the way of an upgrade to 2K/XP, much less Linux.
k.
Is he required to change his name to Mozilla Snyder now?
Sorry.
k.
Amazing. I am in exactly the same situation with my Opcode Midimac files and a "Fat Mac" 512E (circa 1985). Midimac was the first Opcode product, and eventually evolved into Vision/Studio Vision (which lacks a Midimac import function). The structure of the Midimac files -- sequences made of sub-sequences -- pre-dates the .MID format and doesn't really map well to a standard MIDI file. I've done the MIDI-to-MIDI transfer between two Macs, and have about 200 songs in standard .MID format.
But you lose the flexibility. It was great assembling songs from sub-sequences; it lent itself well to pop, with its verse-chorus-verse-bridge form.
The 21-year-old Mac still boots. I have a spare for parts, too. Not sure how much longer those 400K floppies will last, but the quality was better back then.
k.
Since my first Windows box (WfW 3.11, 1993), I've used an awful lot of different startup sounds, from the sound of breaking glass to the Mac Quadra-era System 7 "CHUNG!", to funny outtakes from voiceover sessions I've engineered.
My current system at work, which I built around an MSI Athlon 64+ motherboard, is housed in a case that looks like a Soviet-era toaster: dull silver-grey plastic and louvers on the front that look like they belong on the hood of a tractor. I festooned the case with hammer-and-sickle symbols and the letters "CCCP" in red type bordered in yellow. That computer's name is "katyusha".
Its startup sound is the Red Army Chorus singing the Soviet National Anthem. Just one verse, though. It annoys my employer to no end, but he'll be the first one up against the wall when the Revolution happens. Fucking capitalist pig dog.
What really annoys me is the faux "click" sound of an unaltered XP install, the one that's bound to Windows Explorer "Start Navigation" events. It's never in sync with the mouse click. Second most annoying is the crumpled paper sound when the "Recycle Bin" is emptied (are those bits really recycled? Hmmm?). I turn those off immediately after an install.
Somewhat less annoying (but all too common) are users that bind the sound of a toilet flushing to the "Empty Recycle Bin" event. Invariably, they're the sort of person for whom a fart joke is the pinnacle of humor. But they bitch like hell when you bind the sound of a lusty wet ripping flatus to each mouse click. "My computer's been hacked!" they complain. "I was humiliated in front of a client!"
How d'you like me now, bitch?
k.
No, no, no. The bird flu doesn't have to evolve, it just has to mutate, and since President Bush has seen all three X-Men movies, he acknowledges this possibility.
Thus, the Department of Homeland Security and Center for Disease Control have been directed to guard against a strain of the bird flu that has an adamantium endoskeleton and retractable claws.
k.
No, not oil, but other important resource: raw materials, food, and labor. The known deposits of oil in Asia were mostly in the Dutch colonies in Indonesia. Japan was largely self-sufficient until the industrialization of the late 19th Century. Industrialization led to two things: a population boom and a movement from rural to urban areas. After 1900, Japan was hard pressed to feed itself (manifested in widespread malnutrition during the Allied blockade late in WWII) and did not have adequate supplies of coal and ore.
Japanese imperialism was apparent long before the 1930s: Japan forced China to cede Taiwan in 1895.
Japanese contempt for the Chinese made it all to easy to commit atrocities like the Rape of Nanking and the war crimes of Unit 714.
k.
My company mainly did support for small- to medium-sized businesses, but we had an ad in the phone book so we'd get calls from residential customers. No more than one per week, though. So a call comes in on a quiet afternoon from a gentleman who said his computer wouldn't turn on. I try to do as much as I can on the phone first, for free, before trucking out to the house, because it was our company policy to charge $100/hr. with a 1 hour minimum.
So, I start by asking if he'd had a power outage recently. We're on Cape Cod, and the power here is terrible: dirty, prone to surges and outages, and served by a single plant (Mirant, on the Cape Cod Canal). "No, not recently," he said. "How old is the PC?" I asked. If it was recent enough to fall under warranty, the customer would have to deal with the company directly. If it was quite old, I'd bring a replacement power supply with me. If it fell within a certain time period (2001-2004), it may have been bad caps on the motherboard. "Two years old, and out of warranty," was the reply.
"Okay, I have to ask this," I said, "but is it plugged in?".
"Yes," he said.
"Are you sure?"
"Quite sure".
"I'll be there within the hour." I get in my car and drive out to the customer's house.
Now, I don't like doing residential calls. You see too much of peoples' lives when you're in their houses. They love to shoulder-surf, second-guess, and sometimes it's really unpleasant, like this one woman whose aging Doberman (a nice, gentle dog, really) laid down next to her PC and began emitting eye-watering farts while I was showing her how to burn a DVD. Or the B&B owners whose residential apartment looked like something out of Deliverence, complete with slow-witted children who stared at me the whole time like I was the first outsider to visit their enclave.
The customer's house was pleasant enough, a retiree's home filled with his wife's chachkas and knick-knacks: hundreds of Hummel figurines, collectable plates, Margaret Keene's paintings of wide-eyed children. I was relieved that I was not stepping into something out of Pink Flamingoes. The computer, a Gateway, was in a guest room. The first thing I did was check to see where the power cable went.
It was unplugged.
I plugged it in, booted it up. The customer began apologizing profusely, and his wife came in to say that she had unplugged the PC in order to vacuum the carpet. It was then that I noticed the plaques and certificates on the wall: he had retired from DEC, where he was employed as an engineer. This guy knew forgot more tech in his lifetime than I'll ever know.
I couldn't charge him the full $100 just to plug his computer back into the power strip, but I knew I'd have a fight with my employer if I left emptyhanded, so I split the difference and left with a check for $50. I assuaged my guilt at taking even that much by giving him my personal cell number and telling him to call me if he had any further problems. Surprisingly, my boss had no problem with this.
I'll add one more mini-anecdote: there's an ASP with a TLA (who shall remain nameless, but it's not EDS, though just as big...they're known for doing automated data processing) who serves one of our larger customers, a car dealership. The dealership runs maybe 75% of its business on their software, which is done with a terminal emulator via telnet over a dedicated T-1 to the ASP's datacenter. Whenever the ASP changes their software, numerous things break. Usually we fix things, but this time the ASP sent a tech to sort it all out.
The tech proceeds to take control of the Cisco 2610 router that connects to the datacenter, changing the passwords from the ones we had set. I inform the tech that we need access to the router in order to troubleshoot the connection problems that pop up from time to time. The tech tells me that he can't, because the ASP uses the same passwords for every router on their network. After I successfully supress a bout of hysteri
Maybe I'm mistaken in this assumption: there are two kinds of blank media, those that are meant for raw data, and those that are meant for audio CDs. That's what I see when I go to the local Staples: data CDs and audio CDs. I also assume that any tax would be levied on audio CDs only.
I'm assuming that this tax only applies to audio CDs (though I know from personal experience that audio recorded to data CDs works in CD players).
If this tax also applies to data-grade CDs, then all bets are off.
Please enlighten me on this.
k.
Heh, you win the Spot The Ref prize. But I recall a time twenty years ago when I spent an afternoon getting some cowbell tracks perfect (two different pitched cowbells with stereo separation).
I agree that the tax, in and of itself, is a burden, and that burning a mix CD for a friend or significant other should be covered by fair use. But "artistic merit" is too subjective. We may agree that Britney Spears has no artistic merit, but we'd be overruled by legions of teen, tween, and pre-teen girls. Tyranny of the majority. Where does that leave Cat Power, or Smog, or Hefner, or Deerhoof?
As for ripping off the artist, in my case I'm referring to CDs and iTunes tracks bought legitmately, tracks that get burned as playlist cuts, not tracks downloaded from P2P networks. My car has a CD player without a line input for an iPod. I have a Griffin iTrip, but when I do a Cape Cod to NYC run, some of the frequencies on the low end of the FM spectrum aren't open. So I burn a CD from an iTunes playlist, which gets me through the Connecticut shoreline.
But yes, drop the tax entirely. However, if it becomes inevitable, make it fair.
k.
I've never been a fan of these blank media taxes, but there is a way that could make this more palatable, to me at least.
I'm do support strong copyrights, but also a strong defense of fair use. I was a songwriter who did manage to eke out a modest living from sales and royalties back in the day (and considered breaking even on tour a rare event). But I always saw these blank media taxes (along with early forms of DRM like Copy Code) as an unfair burden on musicians and songwriters who are at that difficult early phase of their career arcs. It may be a small percentage of the cost of media, but in the long run it adds up, and it's money that could be better spent on things like more media, guitar strings, drum sticks, software, hardware, and the all important elixirs: coffee and beer.
And I never liked that the taxes collected went to the top tier of artists. For every one of these, a Springsteen, a Madonna, a Bono, there are 10,000 strivers, sequestered in a home studio, trying to get that vocal or cowbell track perfect.
So, I'd feel more comfortable if half of the funds levied by these taxes could benefit the unsigned, the unheard. Start with public school music programs, which are woefully underfunded as it is, and often fall victim to budget cuts. That's how I started out, a nine-year-old trumpet player in a grade school orchestra. Maybe there could be some sort of indie label lottery, where some band's vanity label gets a $10,000 infusion of funds, maybe even a promotional campaign sponsored by Maxell, Imation, TDK, Sony, or some other producer of blank media ("The stars of tomorrow use our CD-RWs today...").
Idealistic, I know. But why the hell not?
k.
Sounds neat, but the guy in that photo looks incredibly stupid with that wing strapped to his back. He looks like he's going to a costume party dressed as an F-4 Phantom.
Fuck hazard pay, is there "OMG I look like a dork!" pay?
k.
Some malware (Qologic, for example) gets around msconfig (or regedit for that matter) by using two processes that watch each other's registry keys. If you remove one, the other restores it. And in the case of Qologic, the built-in rootkit cloaks its processes from Task Mangler (though Sysinternals tools such as REGMON and FILEMON do detect these processes). These files are also completely hidden from Explorer.
n dowsNT/Winlogon. If you use Adaware, Spybot, or Hijack This to remove these affected keys, you'll render your system unbootable.
Qologic also piggybacks registry values on HKLM/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Wi
The solution is to boot from a live Windows CD (BartPE, UBCD), use a remote registry editor to find and edit the affected keys, and delete the now-visible files (in user temp folders, the Windows and System32 directories, and sometimes even the root of C:\).
Of course, the real solution is to find the son of a bitch who wrote and unleashed Qologic and whack him in the head with a sack full of doorknobs.
k.
My company provides support for small- to medium-sized businesses, companies that can't afford a full time admin. Most of the workstations we support are running XP Pro, and most are Dell, Compaq, or HP, though there are a few non-name beige boxes, and a number of Win2K systems.
But the median system, if you will, is a 3 year old Compaq Presario, 1.7GHz Celeron, 256MB RAM, 60GB HD, integrated graphics, 100Mbps NIC, running XP Pro. Now, this system may have been "snappy" when it was first booted up, but after dozens of patches and SP2, the OS memory footprint exceeds 200MB immediately after boot, with no applications running. Fire up IE and there's another 32MB committed. If Outlook has WINWORD set as its default editor, say goodbye to another 40-60 MB. And now we're swapping.
The solution we've been implementing is to throw another 256MB stick of RAM into the box, which costs anywhere from $20 to $40, depending on whether it's PC100 or PC2700 or whatever the mobo needs. No more swapping, and the OS loads faster and runs "snappier".
So, tell me about Vista after SP1, SP2, and 59 Windows...err, Microsoft Update critical patches down the road. Is that 1GB going to become 2GB to have a responsive, quick-loading system?
I'm currently building a new system at work to replace my old workstation, which died because of bad caps (damned capacitor cover blew off of the core and embedded itself in the side of the case). Athlon 64 at 2.4GHz, 2GB RAM, 2 x 80GB SATA, integrated graphics for now while I spec out a PCI-Express video card. It's going to be XP Pro for now (and dual boot with FC, I think) but I just know that I'm going to be the office Vista guinea pig, since I have the only PC that can run it.
I'll keep you posted on my results.
k.
First of all, I take it from the name "ServersCheck" that this piece of software is a remote administration tool. Since very few competent admins would rely on a cracked piece of software to monitor their equipment, it's got to be warez kiddies doing the cracking (and probably not even using the software). You know, 0-day oneupsmanship.
Now, do you see the inherent flaw in letting warez kiddies dictate the pricing structure of your product?
Photoshop must be the most widely cracked software out there, second only to Windows XP (just a guess). It's not terribly expensive - $700 or so, right? - and there are both low-cost and free alternatives (Photoshop Elements, the Gimp, etc.). Does that stop anyone from cracking Photoshop CS? Nope.
Supply and demand dictate the price of your product. ServersCheck and Photoshop CS are not high-demand mass-market consumer products. They're priced accordingly. And since they're used by professionals, there's a return on the investment. Theoretically, ServersCheck will maximize your uptime. My legit copy of Photoshop CS has allowed me to generate thousands of dollars of income for my company (not that I couldn't have done that with the Gimp, but I've been using Photoshop since version 2.51 and I'm pretty set in my ways).
While supply and demand controls pricing, you hope that your product sells enough to recoup your investment in development, distribution, and marketing, along with covering your recurring expenses and perhaps a bit of profit on top of that. If not, you cut expenses. Adobe is a publicly traded company; while cutting the price of Photoshop CS2 might push a few more units out the door, that would come at the expense of profits and perhaps result in a net loss. Cue the shareholder revolt in 3...2...1...
Finally, the whole warez culture is not about being able to use software that you can't afford. It's all about hoarding, the digital equivalent of those ladies who live with 50 cats. It's irrational. Why you would want to hitch the pricing of your product to that sort of thing is even crazier.
k.
For a while.
In 1985, I began putting together a MIDI-based recording studio. I had a choice between Mac and PC (ignoring lower-end stuff like Atari, etc.). I ended up with a 512K Mac because:
So, cheaper, better, probably more reliable. Did I mention cheaper?
k.
Journal Entry - 8 August 2017
Got to work at 8:30. Pradesh, my cubicle-mate arrives ten minutes later, muttering Hindi obscenities. He's wearing plaid pants in a pattern so garish that it would make a Scotsman commit suicide.
"Yo, Prad. What's up with the slacks? You rent Braveheart IV last night?"
"Good gracious, no," he repies. "Someone hacked my pants on the No. 6 train."
We spent most of the morning doing a system restore on his trousers. Got them rolled back to pinstripes just before lunch.
k.
I'm sorry to hear about your hardships. I know from personal experience how health and family problems can make concentrating on work difficult.
That said, you need a new business model. I work for a company that was once in the retail/VAR business and is now pretty much pure-play service. We specialize in small- to medium-sized businesses (the SME sector), but do some residential work as a sideline. Scraping spyware and viruses off of Wintel PCs is part of our business, but the core is preventative maintenance. Towards that end, we sell service contracts.
The terms of these contracts vary, from three hours per quarter for a graphic artist with a desktop and laptop computer, to an open-ended 25 to 32 hours per month contract for a car dealership with two locations and a total of 42 workstations. The walk-in rate is $100/hr. and the preferred rate for contract customers is $75/hr. beyond prepaid contracted hours.
In other words, if you have a three hour contract, one of my techs will come out and do three hours of preventative maintenance (scandisk, chkdsk, defrag, clear temp files, check logs, OS patches, blow the dust out of the case, check for leaky caps, software updates and installs, check for spyware and viruses, etc.). Any crises that arise after that are $75/hr.
You want to update a system? We'll spec one out for you. $75/hr.
You want to get broadband or install a VOIP phone? $75/hr.
You get hosed early in a quarter and we have to recover your data? We charge our hours against your contract and defer maintenance to the next quarter. Or not. We pretty much play it by ear, but all of our customers get their quarterly maintenance done in the first two months of the quarter.
Our contracts automatically renew every year. You want out? Notify us within thirty days of the renewal date. We'll still do service calls, but it's $100/hr., not $75/hr.
We're pretty happy with this, our customers are pretty happy with this (we get a lot of referral business), so it's all good.
Your time is worth something. So charge for it.
k.
Once you go Mac you never go back.
k.
I live year-round in Hyannis on the Cape, and I take issue with your statement that most Cape Codders are poor.
There is poverty and homelessness here, but only isolated pockets. Most year-round residents are solidly middle class. I'd challenge you to find actual poverty outside of Hyannis and Yarmouth.
Now, there is a housing crisis. Seasonal workers on the Cape and Islands have been known to sleep in tents in the woods, but that's more a function of summer housing rates averaging hundreds or thousands of dollars per week. Hard to afford on a $9/hr. dishwasher's wage.
k.
Was it Clark AFB on Luzon?
k.
Yesterday, my office gets a frantic call from one of our clients, a lawyer. She had a filing deadline and was trying to finish a document she needed for this filing. Word 2002 stopped responding to user input every time she tried to save her document. All of my techs were out in the field, so I had to respond to this one (I'm VP Operations).
True enough, saving a document in Word or trying to open a new one while another document was open would hourglass the cursor. Only Task Mangler could end WINWORD.EXE.
Sysinternals's PROCEXP showed that every time a document was saved, Word would spawn VERCLSID.EXE as a child process, an executable that was "patched" by KB908531, which was pushed through Windows...err, Microsoft Update the day before.
I googled "verclsid". Let me tell you that yesterday, this search string returned no results. This morning, it returned exactly one. Now, it comes up with 67 web hits and 21 Usenet results.
Also, because of this "patch", typing "www.google.com" would return the generic IE "Server Not Found" page. One had to prepend "http://" to the URL. VERCLSID.EXE checks the validity of COM objects, so the damage wasn't confined to Office applications; it affected EXPLORER.EXE and IEXPLORE.EXE.
The workaround was to rename the current version of VERCLSID.EXE and restore the file from the backup created by KB908531 (a System Restore would have sufficed as well). I expect a patch for the patch to be released by Microsoft Real Soon Now. I guess this one was rushed out the door without sufficient testing.
Our company policy for patches is this: updates for servers are tested in-house before being deployed on production machines. For workstations, however, Windows Update is set to automatically update, unless the client's workstations run legacy applications, like the Reflection terminal emulator, or if high-end esoteric applications are present, like DataCAD or Design 20-20. As with servers, they're tested on a non-production system first.
I'd say that 10% of our clients got burned by 908531. Rolling it back wasn't that hard once we identified the problem, but this costs money.
I don't want to single out MSFT; last year an Apple Mac OS X security update broke Samba for me for about a week until I could figure out a workaround. But let's put this in perspective: how many people using Mac OS X (2 to 5% of the workstation market) also use Samba? Contrast this with the percentage of Windows XP/2K users also using Word (must be in the high 80% range), Internet Explorer, and the GUI, all affected by a buggy 908531 patch.
k.
Once it was used to describe systems that were mission critical, where failure could lead to significant financial losses, property damage, injuries, or loss of life. Remember the part of the MS Windows EULA about Java?
That's what I call mission critical. Also, that's some world-class snark on Microsoft's part. Java-based weapons systems? Sounds reasonable to me.
But instead of being restricted to, say, the oxygen tanks on Apollo 13 or the software that controlled the Therac-25 radiation therapy machine, the definition of mission critical has been extended to corporate networks. True, there can be financial losses if a corporate network is down or its security is compromised, but significant financial losses?
No, what really happens when the network's down is this: the salesdroids have to work the phones instead of having their noses in Outlook all day (or Solitaire), the CEO is pissed because his niece can't e-mail him pictures of her new kitten, and everyone else is thrown off their routine of chatting on AIM or playing stupid Yahoo! games all day.
Okay, maybe a system whose failure ends up with the whole company massing with torches and pitchforks outside the door to the IT department counts as "mission critical". But I still lament the devaluing of these words.
k.
My employer is fond of the phrase "...on a going-forward basis", as in "On a going-forward basis, I think we should use DHL for RMA returns".
I happen to loathe the phrase "...on a going-forward basis". It's an empty phrase, the semantic equivalent of styrofoam packing peanuts.
So, during a slow month at the office, when my employer delved into the most minute details of the business, issuing many "going-forward" proclamations (none of which made much sense or saved more than $20 annually), I devised a plan to wean him from this odious phrase.
First, I'd rephrase his suggestions: "So, from now until the heat death of the universe, we're using DHL for RMAs, right?". Then, I started using the phrase in inappropriate situations: "I think, on a going-forward basis, I'm going to grab some lunch.". Finally, I began responding like the Pharoah's scribe from the old Charlton Heston/Yul Brynner movie The Ten Commandments: "SO IT IS WRITTEN...SO IT SHALL BE DONE!". I would then write the pronouncement on one of the office whiteboards like so: "III - THOU SHALT USE DHL ABOVE ALL OTHER OVERNIGHT SHIPPERS".
Usage of "...on a going forward basis" tapered off from thrice daily to about once or twice a month, a tolerable level for me. Yeah, I could have just asked my boss not to say "...on a going-forward basis", but where's the fun in that? If I wasn't a manipulative bastard I wouldn't be VP Operations right now.
k.
The orchestra played in the space in Rockefeller Center currently used by Saturday Night Live. However, there was no audience present during the radio broadcasts, save for a handful of people not in the orchestra (radio engineers, NBC executives, perhaps a representative from the sponsors or two).
Despite this fact, every member of the orchestra wore a tuxedo, and Maestro Toscanini wore tails.
Radio. No audience. Formal dress.
The story has stuck with me ever since, and I'd often pondered the reason for this. Remember, this was back when even street dress for a professional musician was a suit, tie, and snazzy shoes. No "business casual" back then.
The best reasons I could determine for this were:
Personally, I'm inclined to judge a person's performance rather than their appearance. But even I can't help but think about appearance sometimes: if a vendor showed up to pitch my company while wearing shorts and a UCSC Banana Slugs t-shirt, my first thought would be "Jeez, he just doesn't care, does he?". The product or service would live or die on its merits, but my opinion of the salesman would be tainted by that first thought.
I think the bottom line is finding the appropriate level of casual/formal dress for the situation. The owner of the surf/skate shop might not mind if I showed up in shorts and sandals to install a POS system, but the funeral director probably would.
k.
Would you like help?
k.