I don't mind music for work, as long as it is without lyrics. But i can't filter out the lyrics while trying to process some kind of writing in from of me.
For anyone who's first computer interaction was a microcomp like the C64, sure. But i suspect that for anyone that had spent time with mainframe/minicomp terminals, particularly those attached to the Arpanet, it may not have seemed as such a far fetched claim.
Never mind that France rolled out Minitel back then, and similar systems were also deployed elsewhere in the world.
Yeah i think things have gotten more "professional" these days. I think it was happening back when blogging was the new buzzword, and MSM had taken to referring to sites in their news reports (complete with a screengrab of the article in a corner).
I was only really checking out the site because of Doctorow's stuff, and was even turned away from that as he had the annoying habit of posting random horror articles alongside his tech stuff (and the rest of the writers seemed like the typical SXSW bunch).
Wish i could relocate the comment on a Boingboing story where one of their admins mentioned having tracked comments on a certain topic to a online PR company.
His attention was drawn to the comments because they were heavily reported when made, and would be largely of the same structure but with a new user name each time. So he pulled up the IP they came from and all of them was made from the company owned address.
I remember seeing something similar when one or more devices used the serial profile, or related ones (PPP for instance).
When those where in use, it would basically block all other traffic for the duration.
I noticed this back in the day when i really pushed my bluetooth usage.
My setup was a SonyEricsson featurephone, a Nokia N800, some Jabra headphones, and a white box folding keyboard.
As long as i used the "LAN" connection between the N800 and the phone to get online, it all worked fine. But switch it to PPP and the music would stutter whenever there was network activity.