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Is the Software Renaissance Ending?
An anonymous reader writes Writer and former software engineer Matt Gemmell adds his voice to the recent rumblings about writing code as a profession. Gemmell worries that the latest "software Renaissance," which was precipitated by the explosion of mobile devices, is drawing to a close. "Small shops are closing. Three-person companies are dropping back to sole proprietorships all over the place. Products are being acquired every week, usually just for their development teams, and then discarded. The implacable, crushing wheels of industry, slow to move because of their size, have at last arrived on the frontier. Our frontier, or at least yours now. I've relinquished my claim." He also pointed out the cumulative and intractable harm being done by software patents, walled-garden app stores, an increasingly crowded market, and race-to-the-bottom pricing. He says that while the available tools make it a fantastic time to develop software, actually being an independent developer may be less sustainable than ever.
There is a slew of missing applications for industry verticals where there is no race to the bottom. I don't see any evidence that the mobile world is even close to saturated. It may be that general audience horizontal applications aren't the best place for small teams but that isn't the end of the world. How many general purpose task managers and tower defense games do we need?
I bet there will be apps for those as well
Since I never tied myself to being an iDeveloper, no, I have to concern or fear over the purported implosion of a pointless indie game market on a second-rate platform.
Could someone explain to me how a "walled garden App Store" is crushing small developers? Exactly what about a walled garden does this?
Everyone wants to make another Candy Crush or Flappy Birds game, and they'll be lucky to make minimum wage for the time they spend doing it. When I became a Mac developer in '84, and when I switched to NeXTSTEP in '89, both were moves decidedly out of the mainstream.
There's no shortage of unmet needs that can be addressed with an iOS app, but if you don't take the time to figure out what they are, then of course you'll fail.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
What I got from the article is that the flood of people that call themselves Software Engineers when all they actually know how to do is configure 3rd party tools and at best write a few scripts to run stuff on the internet are finally being called out.
If so I think that's actually a good thing for restoring some value to the job description and to the currently low perceived value of skilled Engineers that actually can/do develop complex software from scratch.
I'd say gemmell (or gem all, however it's pronounced) is out of ideas.
What "software renaissance"? The writer means the appcrap boom - millions of small bad programs, with a few good ones. Many, maybe most, "apps" could just as well be web pages.
The appcrap boom seems to be winding down. Developers realize that writing a quickie app has roughly the success percentage of starting a garage band. That's a good thing.
It's a great time to code, if you have a problem to solve. The tools are cheap if not free, the online resources are substantial, and there's vast amounts of cheap computing power available on every platform from wrist to data center. If you don't have a problem to solve, coding is sort of pointless.
Shamelessly begging the question.
The reports of the death of software development has been greatly exaggerated. That is, unless Netcraft says so too.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Seems like we need a more precise definition of renaissance. My pay hasn't suffered and I haven't had trouble finding jobs. Standard warnings about small sample size apply.
Everyone thinks this when their specific little niche goes away for whatever reason. Or even when it changes.
Opportunists who are just in it for easy money will bail out and find whatever the land rush is this month. The others will find a way. Remember when AAA gaming crushed all small budget games forever? Yeah.
(This can be 'bad' as well if you're one of those people who think income is the only thing that matters... some of those people could have done better financially elsewhere).
Well, once the current dark age of bloated web pages with delusions of grandeur masquerading as 'apps' is over, the renaissance can start, and then we'll talk about it ending.
I read Matt's blog posting and I do have to say it sounds like his underlying issue is less of a quandary with a code renaissance being over and more of the drowning complexy and exhaustion involved with today's changing technology world from a code slingers perspective. Reading his blurb touching on a few profound things I find myself doing more and more as I get older in the tech industry: enjoying the simplicity of hacking shell or automative code in a text editor without launching an IDE, still having algorithmic thought processes and approaches, documenting less and thinking more. It sounds like his interests have just shifted and probably for the better. There's tons of shit that I look at on my shelves: projects started, topics heavily bookmarked in myriad of O'reilly books, half-finished circuit design on breadboards, code lying around here or there. It's just that: what was important now isn't and you're trying to just simplify the black hole of tech that was once an intriguing and mind-blowing ordeal.
In the next (insert short time frame here I prefer 15 years) software will be creating new software, not humans.
All we will do is dictate our requirements. By the time we are done speaking, the software will have been "written".
Yup, the one thing that really pisses me off with a lot of apps is that it's shit that's easily done on a website thru a browser.
And what really fucks me off are apps that just duplicate a website with fuck all in the way of added functionality because the PHB mandated that the company must have an app because he read it in the latest edition of 'iManager Today' (thru it's own app, not the website obviously!)
For example, just a quick search on the Play Store reveals 3 Slashdot reader apps. What is so fucking hard about starting up your tablets browser and actually reading the website?
Maybe I should just write an app that prints out 'Breath in... now breath out" every 5 seconds. It could be a lifesaver for the terminally stupid app whores.
Scrub that, I'll just make it print "breath out" repeatedly.
The real worry is that his article is astonishingly short on numbers. In fact, he 1500 words and didn't include a single piece of data to indicate an end to a 'Software Renaissance." All he did was complain that he's tired of programming. That's it. Annoying.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Yes, the viability of mobile as a platform for indie development is now less. But bottom-grade shovelware has been a problem since the dawn of consumer computing. (Anybody remember when PC shovelware was literally sold by the foot at K-Mart? i.e. "Six Feet of Games!" as a chain of CD-ROMs.) It has nothing whatsoever to do with the viability of coding as a profession. The vast majority of developers making a living always have been, and always will be, IT drones coding database applications. Mobile is just another platform for those folks...
Does this mean that there might be some software that isn't completely terrible?
The community/industry that these bloggers exist within (at least, the first of the 3, Finkler) isn't real software development anyways. When I read Finkler's blog post, the key phrases that stand out to me are these:
"I used to be really excited about JavaScript"
"I have 15 years of PHP under my belt"
"[...] Python. I don’t feel like I really grok the module system. I definitely don’t understand the class system."
"Have you ever tried setting up something on AWS? There are a billion buttons and settings and new, invented words I don’t understand. I have no clue how any of that stuff works."
"Did you know I used to be a 'designer?'" [of web apps and such]
What I read from the amalgamation of these statements is: This is one of those guys who jumped on the "I want to be a web designer" bandwagon many years ago when the field was hot and it was easy to churn out crap and make money at it. He learned (by cargo cult copypasta and/or Whatever for Dummies books?) to get by in PHP and Javascript over the years. But he never really understood what he was doing.
For one that actually studies (not in a school, I mean really in the real world) computer science and the art of programming, by the time you've learned a language or three the rest come very easily. Such a person can write useful production code in a new programming language on the first day byt the time they get to language number 4 or 5. That simple, core aspects of a sane language like Python baffle Finkler after 15 years of experience and serious use of at least two languages is very telling in this regard.
For one that works professionally in the computer/internet industry, understanding how systems and networks work is critical. Can you build a server from components (at least in theory? Done it a few times years ago with a home PC or something?)? Can you spec out a 100 (or 100,000) -system network of machines for a production cluster of some kind, and understand all the issues involved with everything from cabling to traffic loadbalancing to data migration and scaling issues and fault tolerance tradeoffs and blah blah blah? Could you, at least in theory, go build it all out yourself and be successful and having a fairly optimal and well-designed system at the end of it? Configure the routers and set up peering/transit agreements with the rest of the internet and get your traffic flowing smoothly to a global customer base?
People put *way* too much emphasis on the "Learn a Programming Language" part of being a developer. A real developer who's worth his salt must do much more than that. You must understand the whole stack you're operating on. Just to touch the highlights of that stack for a typical web app: The client's browser, the browser's OS, the machine that OS runs on, the ethernet interface on that machine, the DSL router at the user's home, the ISP network the traffic traverses and how it peers with everything else that peers with you, important side-issues in the network like low-level details of the DNS and how the ISP resolves and caches it, the routers, switches, cabling, and configuration of the network in your datacenter, that whole production cluster mentioned in the previous paragraph, Linux kernel issues on the appserver machines related to interrupt routing and TCP socket features, how your HTTP server works and how to debug deep issues in it, and how it connects to whatever engine or VM runs your application code, and how *that* is scaled locally to utilize the hardware efficiently, etc.
You want a guaranteed job as a desirable developer for decades, without being subject to industry whims and immigration politics? Learn to be someone for whom everything I've said above is trivial. Those are the badasses. If all you can say is "I can write some PHP code that seems to be functionally correct most of the time; the user inputs X and it outputs Y", you're not even 5% of the way there on actually understanding what you *need* to understand to do the job well.
On
my* frontier got paved over 10 years ago and there is a wallmart sitting on top of it
Yeah, like ten years ago.
You are welcome on my lawn.
XCode, iOS, Swift... Much of that world is centered around "cool" stuff ie. it's less about making something that creates value/makes money or enables someone else to make money or be productive and much more about pass time. At the same time this cool world has attracted a huge number of developers -- so now there is little of importance left to do and plenty of volunteers. Kind of like the digital music making scene.
To test this theory, I'm firing up the App Store on my iPhone and here are the top paid apps:
1. Minecraft - Pocket edition ($6.99, Games)
2. Heads Up! ($0.99, Games)
3. Monument Valley ($1.99, Games)
4. Blek ($0.99, Games)
5. Afterlight ($1.99, Photo & Video)
6. 7. Minute Workout ($1.99, Health and Fitness)
7. PAW Patrol Rescue Run ($3.99, Education (?))
8. Magic Locks -- LockScre... ($1.99, Entertainment)
9. Dark Sky - Weather ($3.99, Weather)
10. Facetune ($2.99, Photo & Video)
And so on. Photo & Video on iPhone? The builtin app is perfectly fine, in honesty. Health and fitness? People have been fit before iPhones but OK, fine. And the rest? Entertainment, Games, Games, Games.
(The top free app are almost all Games, with some Photo & Video and occasional Entertainment. And of course, 15. Facebook (Social Networking).)
The world of Windows and Linux has much more going on for it IMO, new stuff creates opportunities for new stuff, so I don't think his reasoning applies to software in general.
speak for yourself, Matt Gemmell, oh and by the way, Get off my lawn.
The idea that a tiny team can always make something amazing isn't true. Big projects often need big teams. The model shouldn't be "all tiny shops, all the time." You wanna do a tiny shop, go for it. Just know there are things you can't compete in.
Also it is a waste of resources to have people keep creating the same thing over and over. We should want to see 100 groups creating 100 word processors. If you can legitimately make one that would be an advantage for some reason then great, go to it, but don't do it just to "have another one."
Bitter ex-programmer writes click-bait blog about how much he's bitter about it. Then he posts them anonymously to /.
Can't we mod articles troll?
Is that he can't seem to milk the mobile app gravy train, or at least the perceived gravy train. I know a surprising amount of people who thought "Gee great, I'll learn how to make mobile apps and then go off and make my own company and be RICH!" They are the reason why there's so much same shit in app stores.
However, turns out that most don't make any money. Producing the 4,593,928,192nd tower defense game just doesn't excite anyone, unless you happen to do a really good job in an unique way, and these people aren't. So, these money chasers don't make much, if anything. Hence, whining like this. This guy doesn't wanna have a real job at a programming company, he wants to work for himself or with his buddies and shovel out crap and get paid.
That has never worked great, and what is left is drying up.
Assuming it takes off, I'm calling virtual reality as the next "renaissance." Engines like Unreal and Unity are making it easier and easier for independent publishers to produce quality applications and VR really is a separate medium with a ton of unexplored territory.
My two big hobbies are computer games, and digital audio production. I spend easy that on either one of them. Like digital audio, I not long ago bought BFD3. $350 right there, and it is nothing more than a digital drumkit. I'll never make a cent on it, it is just a toy to me, but damn is it fun. That's just one set of tools I've bought, there were more in the past, and I'm sure more to come.
Or gaming, I buy new games whenever the mood strikes me, get new hardware when I need it and then of course there's MMOs. When I played WoW that was $130 or so for the game and all the expansions, plus $15/month for like 3-4 years. A bargain in my book, I got a tremendous amount of entertainment out of it.
For all that, my hobbies are cheaper than some I know. One of my coworkers is in to cars. Fuck me can you spend a lot on that shit.
Hobbies cost money. Everything costs money. That's just life.
And as you said in terms of a business cost? That's chicken shit. $40/month is hardly on the radar of a small business. When my parents ran their small business (about 4 employees) their PHONES cost more than that. Never mind power, heating, rent, payroll, taxes, etc, etc, etc. Just having the requisite number of phone lines (two) cost more than $40/month. Such a minor cost it was just inconsequential.
I predict the final implosion on mobile app-mania will occur much closer to the end of the decade. Sometime in 2019 at the absolute latest, but probably no sooner than 2017.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I have overwhelmingly observed that the majority of computer users, do not want a truly free, democratic, autonomous, or self-empowering scenario, where their use of a computer is concerned.
With computer use, we now essentially have two groups of people. A minority of specialised, elitist programmers who write software for an almost completely unskilled, disinterested, and technophobic majority; and said technophobic majority themselves.
It seems that the proverbial "owner driver," of computers (a group among whom I gladly self-identify) are becoming a dying breed. I sat up all night last night, until 7 am this morning, compiling and re-compiling sources for my new NetBSD/amd64 vm. I have found use of that system tricky; and the current install is my third attempt. It is uneven in some areas, and there are many jagged edges. Nevertheless, I am determined, and while it has been somewhat frustrating, I have enjoyed the process; to the point where I have since only had six hours' sleep, in part due to my level of enthusiasm to get back into it.
People need to understand that maintaining their freedom requires vigilance, personal initiative and responsibility, and active defense. The psychopaths are tireless in their attempts to take it away from us; and more, to convince us that we should actually want them to take it away.
Learn to program yourself; but when I say this, I do not merely mean the new languages that are popular, which will win you approval from a manager. I mean the old languages, like C, FORTH, Tcl/Tk, shell, awk, m4, and LaTeX. Learn simple HTML, and use RMS' own web site as a code example if you do not know how. Java might bring you money, but in my observation at least, it will not bring you joy.
Use the BSDs. Get comfortable with compiling something from source code. A lot of applications are designed much more smoothly than they used to be, so this is nowhere near as difficult as it once was. Get VMware Player, and install an Open or NetBSD guest. Use it to teach yourself the command line and shell scripting, and then realise that there is no reason for you to pay hundreds of dollars to Microsoft for Windows if you don't want to. You can buy a perfectly good computer from here, which has completely Free Software compatible hardware, and then run one of the BSDs natively, and dual boot it with Windows if you want. I don't hate Microsoft at all; I just think people should have that choice.
In addition to your use of Twitter, consider downloading XChat 2 and discovering Internet Relay Chat. Many open source software projects have IRC channels, so if you do start using *BSD, that will also be a good way of getting help if you need it.
In addition to your use of Reddit, get Forte Agent and find out if your service provider maintains a Usenet server. If they don't, Forte sells Usenet access at $3/month for 20GB.
I know many of you want the new, shiny thing; but voluntary simplicity is becoming a major movement in other areas of life as well, and truthfully I really think it's time we brought it to computer use as well. I am certified as a Permaculture designer, and I truthfully view use of the BSDs as being as close as I can get to using a computer in a Permacultural manner. The word Permaculture is short for "permanent culture," and UNIX is timeless.
The industry does not want independent software developers. The industry wants teams of full-time employees.
When I read what you typed I am perplexed
Exactly which industry that you are referring to?
I have had a string of successful investments in many starts-up and will invest more in the future and it is never my intention to change those starts-up into humongous monsters (although if they change by themselves I won't stop them) employing teams and teams of data monkeys
But TFA does contain a nugget a truth, that is, the so-called " Software Renaissance " is long dead - but not because of the mobile platform, rather, it was because of everybody and their granny's second cousin all chasing after the same pot of gold and copy-catting each others
Instead of exploring new fields, instead of coming up with something exciting, so many starts-up went bust trying to re-invent the wheel (and worse, trying to copy-cat the original shape of the wheel and then sell it as their own invention)
The starts-up that I invest in are those which are offering something that I simply do not see much in the marketplace, and yet, the things that they are doing (sometime it's the back-office thing that consumers don't get to see too often) prove to be essential and become de-facto in the respective niche that they have created
But if I were to take a step back, I reckon that what is happening to the mobile platform is a repeat of what had happened to the desktop (and related big-iron) scene --- which is, too many people (including geeks) are too lazy to explore a new field, rather than do something completely new, they tried to "do a better version" of what is already available in the marketplace
There are only so many improvements one can do to a spreadsheet program, for example - as there are only so many "re-invented angry bird" that the market can bare
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
A very fine article reflecting on what indie developers such as myself have been feeling in recent times. This was my favorite excerpt:
"If you attend an iOS/Mac dev meetup and hang around long enough, you’ll start to hear the whispers and the nervous laughter. There are people making merry in the midst of plenty, but each of them occasionally steps away to the edge of the room, straining to listen over the music, trying to hear the barbarians at the gates. There’s something wrong with the world, Neo."
Exactly.
"I really hope that I’m wrong about this, and that we haven’t entered the Second Sundering of indie software, the likes of which we haven’t seen since “shareware” was the word on everyone’s lips. I really do hope I’m mistaken."
Yep.
Every single computer program that exists will need to be ported -and ported well- to a touch interface. Kids these days have little interest in mice or keyboards (anyone under 5). They will grow up and want everything to be touch. If the older generations can't do it for them they will do it for themselves. Still a ton to be made in software.
Writer? Am I the only one who thought that saying "writer" is a great euphemism for unemployed? This might turn out to be a great vacation that ends when he runs out of money.
yet another fleshlight app
All joking aside - I think you've accidentally mentioned the type of app that WOULD sell. If someone out there makes a male masturbation app I'm pretty sure they'll make a killing
An app which combined male masturbation with fleshlight (not fl_a_shlight) out to outsell both any time of the day !
Why do we call it race top the bottom and we are sad when we are talking cost of software but we call it economies of scale when we buy hardware and we are happy ?
As long as people don't care about making money, there will always be software that needs development!
Yeah id like to see 1000000 phones die, on day 5 of a major weather event
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
He is complaining that there is little room for independence, that everything is becoming owned by large corporations who control everything through a combination of their power in the marketplace, use of the law.
I am struggling to understand how this is an issue with software development. The same is happening everywhere. Once he's been writing for a while, he'll discover that this is mostly owned by a few large corporations. The same is true with music, science, education and so on.
We are sinking back into a "free market" feudal hierarchy. Software development is just following the rest of society.
The walled garden infrastructure is too expensive. It costs USD $100/year + ca. USD $1000 for a new computer every five years, and ca. $600 for a new phone/tablet every three years, because the latest OS does not run on old hardware. That makes USD $500/year without taking into account any development costs or tools. Since the walled garden does not (realistically) allow you to use a shared code base for different platforms and cross-compile, but customers nevertheless expect you to deliver for PC, MAC, Linux, Android, iOS and possibly even Windows RT, you'll have to multiply this value by two or three (e.g. you'll need an android phone or tablet, and an iPhone, etc.) and also take into account the increased development time for working on at least 2-3 code bases at a time.
This results in ca. USD $80-$120 costs per month just for participating - add to this the costs for development tools and actual development time. For many small developers, particularly former shareware developers like me, that's simply too much.
The good news for Apple & Co is that many small developers still make cross-platform apps because they don't realize how much money they loose (until they stop their business and get a full daytime job).
I want a GPS app that when I follow a route it does not "FREAK the hell OUT" when I pull off for gas or lunch. It also should pull the current weather radar and allow it to be superimposed over my GPS map so I can see if I am going to be driving into rain. We have ALL this information right now all the technology is there. Yet programmers are too damned lazy to add real features that people will want.. Instead we get crap like Flappy Bird and oh a new redesigned User Interface!
Everyone wants their own secret sauce to be kept hidden, and I want to beat them with a sack of doorknobs.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I remember going to a local computer store that sold programs on floppy disks. Everything from simple games, to specific applications for business. Today, I am not even sure real open source exists or that a small operation can survive. They now have to meet certain agreements to sell on a certain locked app store and share the profits. Anymore, the end user thinks its great to have cheap or free apps and rarely donates anything to the cause. If we leave generosity up to the end user,nobody will care to develop anything. I myself tend to buy software and apps, rather then having to bear the effects of "free" by enduring ads and sharing personal data to marketers. I would prefer to own applications and thereby support the developer to properly update and fix bugs. This is why I continue to use Microsoft, Apple and
Adobe products. Or products like Parallels, Quicken and others. Its the support I want, and while I have in the past tried smaller developer products, they end up making little money and lose interest in providing updates and fixes. Eventually selling out, or simply stop doing anything with the app.
This is common for almost anything in technology, didn't this happen in the early 2000's with IT in general? Quite common. The good news is that good software developers are still needed and are paid well, but everyone in the market has to adjust. The independent developer probably will have to go back to working at IBM and still create their best work on the side. I'm grateful for the software explosion because it lead to a the development of huge communities of budding developers or people who just wanted to develop enough of a skillset to build useful things (myself included). Thank goodness for StackOverflow.
Seems like the place has become a voice for the "man".
Every article seems to be about H1B visas, how it's hard to find a job as a coder, how coders over the age of 30 are unemployable, or how independent developers will never make it.
Seems like Slashdot is becoming a propaganda platform for the captains of the software industry.
All the moaning and whining comes mainly from a vocal group of devs who over the years got used to doing 20/80 type of stuff and enjoyed the good life. Truth is, people will always find money for entertainment. Always. Make good apps, make GOOD games, price them reasonably, forget the "whatever the market can bear" bulls..t, and pepple will buy them. Did you see the crap outhere, on the app stores? Make a difference and stop complaining about the bad times.
Smartphone and tablet software were always destined to be a very small market. With the prevalence of social networking and simplified mass criticism of these truncated applications, it's extremely easy for a single superior application to completely a particular niche. Moreover, since the applications are so truncated and are not full-performance desktop applications, people do not feel as though they need to pay too much for an "app". Thus, subscription and micro-transaction models had to be introduced to keep the revenue rolling in. Even more people are unwilling to pay such fees, so the market for that revenue stream is smaller yet.
But that's beyond the point. There is still a MASSIVE market for in-house administrative applications within colleges, universities, municipal governments, and medium sized businesses. The key-term is "in-house". Most of these types of organizations either do not have the allocatable capital to pay for off-the-shelf software or have very specific needs that off-the-shelf software cannot meet. That's why so many of their employees rely upon storing everything in spreadsheets!
What a wise programmer could do is get a job in one of these organizations with the expectation that s/he would be able to interview departments regarding their computer and data usage needs. The wise programmer would then seek to organize, standardize, and automate as many processes as possible in as simple a UI as possible while keeping open the opportunity to add modules for additional functions in the future.
You won't get rich doing this, but you will definitely have a secure job developing, implementing, and maintaining such systems.
WARNING: This wise programmer must be a people person or else s/he will never find out what the users actually need.
This pattern of ebb and flow in the tech world is nothing new. Every decade brings a computing novelty which invites revolutionaries who rethink the user experience. The universe seems to expand. All the developers get excited, jump on the bandwagon, and revel in the myriad possibilities -- for as long as the high lasts. Now the latest bandwagon has slowed and the Next Next Big Thing seems far far away...
1977 brought us the personal computer. 1984 was GUIs and WYSIWYG computing. 1988 was the network (and email and AOL and Usenet). 1994 was the web. 2008 was smartphones. 2010 was social computing. 2012 was The Cloud.
But 2014 is... dullsville. Sherlock is bored. Get used to it. This is the game that never ends.
In your 20s you're fascinated by all the things you can do, and all of the tools that help you. The staggering possibilities are endless. You hate yard work. F that.
In your 30s, you're aware and thankful that you're passion allows you to provide for your family. It takes long hours and lots of work, but gives your loved ones a lifestyle that you're proud of. The neighbor kid mows your lawn for $20 per week.
In your 40s you start to relive these things vicariously through the new crowd, eager and energetic. Long nights, desperate deadlines and high pressure projects are tiring. You've racked up a lot of these at the expense of your personal life. Your kids are old enough now to mow the lawn for you.
In your 50s you wonder how much of you this company and these people deserve. The 20 somethings look at you like you've checked out. In reality, you're just trying to do better at balancing your effort against what really matters to you. This puts you in the slow lane on the running track. The endless possibilities are staggering, and no longer fun. You'd rather spend your time in the yard or doing something else relaxing.
Different things will be important to you 10 years from now. That doesn't mean you're wrong today, or then. It's just the way it works... for most.
Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!
ITT: apple dev bitching about competition
what else is new?