Cubic

Why do headphones have such lousy design? I have gone through about a half-dozen pairs of headphones in the past 8 years. They have to be replaced by equivalently lousy headphones. I'm not going to drop $200 for headphones because I know that it is just a waste of money and I don't need perfect sound. Here's how it goes: Purchase headphones. They work fine for about a year or two. Then strange things happen. The right earpiece flickers momentarily one day. Then the left earpiece. Then it starts alternating constantly. Then one earpiece goes out permanently. Or if there is an attached microphone, it flakes out. Or it loses its grip on the position I like it at and it drops...so I use a rubber band to hold it in place. The "adjustable" height for headband-based headphones is always off by half-a-notch. And accidentally smacking the cord tends to throw the headband completely out of whack - taking the next 10 minutes trying to fix it up. Also, most headba

I was just told a story about Lotus Notes (owned by IBM Corporation). Let's call the person who told me this 'John'. John was having problems with Lotus Notes about once a week where it would simply crash. Well, it didn't exactly crash crash. Apparently Lotus Notes utilizes WER (Windows Error Reporting) or an equivalent: https://winqual.microsoft.com/default.aspx So when the application crashes, it sends a crash dump of the program to John's IT Helpdesk (or IBM's Helpdesk - I'm not sure how the system works). John doesn't really care. Except John got curious because the application says to contact the corporate IT helpdesk about the issue. So, John calls the corporate IT helpdesk one day and describes the problem. Let's say the IT helpdesk person's name is Sue. Sue asks the following question, "Does Lotus Notes crash on Tuesdays right around lunch time?" Thinking for a moment, John says, "Not sure about the day, but that sounds lik