Yes, ofcourse Friendster cares about it, but I don't see why anyone else should. And that was my point -- the only reason this story is reported in media is that Friendster needs the attention to draw new members (hopefully "real" ones) to make money for their hardware.
Who cares about "fake" members? Friendster, probably. And some journalist who can't find a better story. Yahoo and others don't seem to. This is just what Friendster wants and needs: media coverage to get new members. Hopefully more "real" members and not as many "fakes".
I must say, I like your country's system of providing a REAL lawyer as opposed to some idiot who barely passed the bar exam and really doesn't care.
Since lawsuits don't pay off economically (damages above maybe $25000 are REALLY uncommon) and since lawyers don't take a percentage of any damages awarded (I don't know, but quite possibly the reason they don't is that it's illegal here) there aren't really any financial incentives in filing suit, not even for the lawyers. That in turn means that to a lawyer the pay is equal regardless of whether he/she is appointed to defend a client, hired to defend a client or appointed to prosecute.
In fact, lawyers are paid by the court according to fees that, as I've understood it, are set annually; whoever has to pay for the legal services actually pay the court. This also means that legal services cost about the same no matter who you choose to represent you in court. The differences in cost lie mainly in how much time your lawyer spends on your case (I expect that that means that lawyers like to spend lots of time on their cases, but that would be the same all over the world, I'm sure:-).
The downside to all of this is, ofcourse, that when a serious crime has been committed against someone, that person will not be compensated financially, at least not to any greater extent. In some cases the astronomical sums awarded to people in courts in the U.S. seem very fair and reasonable.
The thing is that lawyer skill isn't as much of a factor in winning a case as it seems to be in the U.S. Possibly because we don't have juries that are easily swayed (or, as you put it: stupid:-). All there is (in lawsuits, at least) is the judge. Judging from the low number of lawsuits we see here, the judges are not easily swayed in any direction. This is not exactly equal representation, but a jury that might place blame for emotional reasons is not a factor in swedish courts.
Possibly, my strongest argument for the fact that I think a kid in Sweden, under the same circumstances, should fight is this: You KNOW that loads of money will win you almost any case in the U.S. You KNOW that the RIAA would have won or at least ruined the kid in th U.S. What I KNOW is: a ton of money won't help much (if at all) in a court here in Sweden.
Weak, I know, but there it is. Microsoft could take me on in a law suit. If they charge me with being a criminal in some way, the prosecutor will be assigned by the court (they don't get to choose), while I can get the defense lawyer of my choice or accept the one appointed to me by the court (and that is not a second-rate lawyer, but one in the employ of any of the law firms in the country, assigned more or less by random). There we go, nearly equal counsel. If it is a normal law suit and I lose, my insurance will pay for my legal counsel. I will have to pay any damages (possibly including legal fees, depending on the judges descision) myself, but those are, as I've said, usually not very high.
Hmm, now that I think of it, in law suits, unless there are criminal charges, it is not certain that the loser pays all legal fees. That depends on the judges descision. Oh, well, IANAL, not even a swedish one:-)
Sweden also has a "loser pays" system. My answewr applies to swedish conditions.
There's no thing sure enough to risk the huge financial loss.
Exactly. And since the damages you can be awarded if you win are much smaller than the costs associated with the lawsuit, you have to have a very good case to file suit at all. Thus: less frivolous lawsuits. The largest sum ever awarded in damages in Sweden is about $1 million. This was paid to a person who was found guilty and imprisoned for eight years for a murder he did not commit. Lawsuits are not profitable here (except possibly for lawyers).
'Course, your insurances will pay most of your costs, but if you sue a lot no insurance company will want to have you as a customer. And all of this applies not only to "the little gyu" but to companies, too. If we ever get a "RIAA suit" here in Sweden, there will probably only ever be one suck suit. RIAA or the equivalent will probably lose, setting precedent for any similar cases, thus efficiently killing any interest in continuing to file suit in similar cases.
>I'm trying to figure out why Europe gets the robotic vacuum first.
Simple: because Electrolux is a European company aand the robotic vacuum cleaner was designed in Europe. Though it is annoying when one continent gets a product before another one, especially since it is unrealistic to think that the inhabitants of the other continent won't know about what they're missing.
Admittedly, I don't really know anything about what the weapon will do, or what kind of testing they have done that they think this will be a viable weapon, but how much call will there be for a weapon that causes small, cauterized holes in people? Isn't that what Lasers would do, or am I mistaken?
Actually, it is quite likely that the point of impact will be vaporized by the heat of the laser. The then-gaseous form of the material being hit will expand explosivley. Sort of like setting of a small explosion on the surface of the target. That might hurt...
The lack of an unsigned datatype is probably the most egregious flaw.
char is basically a 16 bit unsigned int. Though having the "unsigned" and "signed" modifiers would be nice. Specifically I would have loved it last year when I wrote an implementation of Karatsuba's algorithm and got my input (very large ints) as byte arrays. I would have loved to have been able to cast those to unsigned byte arrays...
A few months back there was a discussion about the speed of Mac OS X on the Cocoadev mailing list. One person had been investigating the has table used by manu classes in Appkit and Cocoa. Apparently search times in these hash tables scaled linearly (!!). Fix that one and a lot of slowness will probably go away.
Also, it seem that the mach kernel internally is big-endian, even though the PPC is little-endian (or the other way around). This might make the mach kernel faster on X86 processors than on PPC:s. Ouch.
I cannot quote any sources, but I recall being told that that piece of etymology is incorrect. Actually, I believe that the origin of "lagom" is unknown.
Oh, come on! Shouldn't you try to get just a few facts right before posting? Of course you are wrong! XP does NOT require you to have a Passport. And why (WHY?!?) should Real Jukebox be any better than XP with regards to DRM?
Another thing: when you shut down your computer, the OS stops running. It cannot sense that you take your PC apart. The WPA insanity doesn't start unless you change components in your PC, and several of them.
Running as root - no. It doesn't need any privileges. Why would it? It keeps all its shit in/Applications/Microsoft Office X/Office.
That would require root access or at least "staff" access, since/Applications is a system directory, not normally writeable by non-admin users. To behave like a good Un*x (and Mac OS X) app, Office X should keep its settings in/Users/yourname/Library/Preferences/Offixe X/ or some such.
MAC adresses can be changed. On a Sun workstation you do it from the boot prom, which is easily accessed at any time. You might have to do ifdown le0;ifup le0 before the MAC address change comes through, but that's not really a bother.
I don't know how to chage MAC addresses on a PC, but switching network cards would do the trick for sure. It is probably possible to set an adapter's MAC adress with software of some kind, too. You may have to write that piece of software yourself unless some hax0r beats you to it on the prospect of getting access to free wireless bandwidth.
i experience the same hell everytime i want to try out a new application. somehow i always need to download 300 MB of dependencies before i can build the app i want to try. why can't developers just stick to the libs that are present in the latest distribs? this is _The_ problem that keeps keeping me away from running linux for all my needs...
In Europe, a good freelance hardware consultant, willing to work as a complete independent, pulls in between US$800 and US$1500 per day. (Note, nobody uses hourly rates when contracting, just daily).
I beg to differ. In Sweden (which, incidentally, is part of Europe), consultants use hourly rates all the time. In fact, I haven't even heard of anyone in any line of business using daily rates. I'm not a hardware consultant myself, though. I charge SEK 650 per hour (about $67 per hour, or $541 per day). But then I'm one of the cheaper consultants; I study full time and do system design and programming on the side. When I get my degree I'll become much more expensive. Still, my effective salary (sek 45k/month) is higher than many of the bosses at the places I work for (not counting their stock option programs and fringe benefits).
I will get 10Mbps for about $20/month (SEK 200/month) sometime in the first half of next year. I have friends who already do. The ISP:s idea is not to make money from the Internet connection, but from peripheral services, such as video on demand, home security and other things.
Besides, a fiber connection doesn't cost much in itself. The nnn Mbps figure is probably only the bandwidth to the ISP:s own network. What connection(s) that network has to the rest of the Internet is an unknown (and keeping those connections scaled to give adequate performance for all customers at once is the expensive part).
Hmm. Preview didn't help, I forgot some stuff anyways:
I am swedish and I work in Sweden. Neither my employer nor I am affiliated with any union. My deal for taking customer calls on evenings and weekends is that if I get called at all I get one day off the next week for each call.
Oh, and I'm being payed for those days off. That means that I get 8 hours of salary for every call, plus normal salary for the time I spend taking the calls and handling the reported problems on nights and weekends.
I am swedish and I work in Sweden. Neither my employer nor I am affiliated with any union. My deal for taking customer calls on evenings and weekends is that if I get called at all I get one day off the next week for each call.
...only that the information Dreamland gives is not entirely correct.
When using a modem connection to the Internet in Sweden, you very much use a metered service. Ths ISP doesn't charge you for time or amount of downloaded bytes, but the phone bill keeps ticking. All the time. No exceptions (except for the toll-free modem pool of the ISP Telia, but then again, they do charge a minute rate equivalent to the phone rate anyways).
On the broadband market, there are no metered charges. But only two of the broadband ISP:s offer more than 1 Mbps connections: Bredbandsbolaget and Utfors. Both these ISP:s connect only groups of condo's, and require that a cat5 10baseT network is already installed in the building(s). Bredbandsbolaget offers 10 Mbps, while Utfors has several services with connection speeds between 256 kbps and 10 Mbps. Most broadband ISP:s have a service with around 512 kbps connections. Telias ADSL service (the only ADSL service in the country) is 512 kbps, too (mostly because they also own a Cable TV company that offers cable connections to the 'net at 512 kbps and they don't want to use one of their businesses to kill another).
So far, as far as I know, less than 10.000 swedish households can be connected to the 'net with a 10 Mbps connection. A few hundred thousands of households can be connected through their cable TV operators at 521 kbps. Most everyone can connect through ADSL, but the service was just rolled out and the expected deliverytime for ADSL is between 3 and 18 months.
2Mbps is not really whopping. given linear scaling, you would need a computer that is 77.5 times faster than a dx2/66 to handle routing for my companys 155Mbps. a pentium (1)@66MHz is almost twice as fast as a 486 dx2/66. so for 155 Mbps you would need a linux box that is about 38.75 times faster than a P66. a P3@700MHz is maybe barely 10x as fast as a P66 (though i doubt it), thanks to clock frequency, better cache, faster memory and better architecture. still, a p3@700MHz is certainly far from being 38.75x as fast. 1GHz won't cut it either. that's why we have routers and not linux+ipchains boxes; dedicated hardware fo a single job.
and 155 mbps isn't the fastest there is. my ex-employer had a 655Mbps connection (they are an isp, among other things). i don't think any pc could saturate that connection without _very_ fancy extra hardware.
On the contrary, I use the preview pane and it was not triggered on my system...
...or maybe they took the mail server down prior to me noticing it being on my system....that would suck....
the preview pane will trigger it, but seemingly only if you: a) have "reply with formated mail" (or whatever that setting is called) turned on as the default reply setting b) haven't already patched away this security hole (i expect this is the same bug that made melissa/"check this!" possible)
our sysadmins ripped out the internet connection as soon as i told them... we don't want our customers to catch this from us.
Then, there's the fact that they'd be printing the e-mails out. Ummm - that means they'd also get to read them. The reason I use an envelope is to stop that. This seems a very retrograde step.
the swedish post office tried this a couple of years ago. you paid them to get an email address and the post office printed your mail and snailmailed (or maybe faxed, i can't recall if that was an option) it to you.
an interesting defect in their system was that their software couldn't handle @ signs anywhere in the messages, so in the printed copies of your email, email addresses would appear as foo(a)bar.com...
needless to say, this service didn't catch on. it was cheaper to buy a modem and an account with an isp.
>Huh? Tax is less than 30 per cent till about USD >25k - 30k (the tax rate vavies slightly >depending on where you live).
The trick is that the ~30% income tax (and at higher salaries, 1+% federal income tax) are not the only taxes paid. I'm a freelancing consultant and I know more precisely how my income is taxed. My accountant has advised me to set aside to 3/4 of my income for taxes and fees.
That is a problem, since employers need to take all the taxes and fees into account. The taxes scale so that if you (as an employee) have a salary of sek 30k/month (a fair-to-good salary for an IT proffesional in Sweden) and get a raise of 3k, the employer needs to pay at least some sek 6k extra per month (to pay your raise plus taxes and fees). Then you pay federal and county taxes on the income raise and end up with at most sek 1.5k extra per month.
Stock options are not a viable alternative as a bonus in Sweden, due to the tax rules. They go something like this: first the value of the stock options are taxed as if they were salary. When you sell the vested stock you get the joy of paying another flat 30% tax on the yield (sell value minus initial value, before the first taxation).
Then we have the 25% VAT and extra taxes well above 50% on tobacco, alcohol, gasoline. And extra taxation of electricity, homes, you name it. Sigh.
For the salary comparison: I charge SEK 600/hour (about US$75), after I've paid _all_ taxes (which include, school for me and my children, a cheap pension plan, medical care for everyone I know and a few others, etc) this leaves me with some SEK 24k (US$ 3k) if i have full time work. My one room apartment costs about SEK 2.3k (US$288) per month (living downtown is usually more expensive, I inherited some money and got rid of about half of my loan for buying the apartment). I'm paid well by Swedish standards, am fluent in at least 5 computer languages and two human languages. No degree yet, but I'm still working on my Master of CS/Maths.
>You mean start the.freedom TLD?:) good idea. i think i'll do that. anyone wanna join? ckrakes.freedom is mine. i'll volounteer to set up a root.freedom with a 'freewhois' database of some kind, too.
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Yes, ofcourse Friendster cares about it, but I don't see why anyone else should. And that was my point -- the only reason this story is reported in media is that Friendster needs the attention to draw new members (hopefully "real" ones) to make money for their hardware.
Who cares about "fake" members? Friendster, probably. And some journalist who can't find a better story. Yahoo and others don't seem to. This is just what Friendster wants and needs: media coverage to get new members. Hopefully more "real" members and not as many "fakes".
I must say, I like your country's system of providing a REAL lawyer as opposed to some idiot who barely passed the bar exam and really doesn't care.
:-).
Since lawsuits don't pay off economically (damages above maybe $25000 are REALLY uncommon) and since lawyers don't take a percentage of any damages awarded (I don't know, but quite possibly the reason they don't is that it's illegal here) there aren't really any financial incentives in filing suit, not even for the lawyers. That in turn means that to a lawyer the pay is equal regardless of whether he/she is appointed to defend a client, hired to defend a client or appointed to prosecute.
In fact, lawyers are paid by the court according to fees that, as I've understood it, are set annually; whoever has to pay for the legal services actually pay the court. This also means that legal services cost about the same no matter who you choose to represent you in court. The differences in cost lie mainly in how much time your lawyer spends on your case (I expect that that means that lawyers like to spend lots of time on their cases, but that would be the same all over the world, I'm sure
The downside to all of this is, ofcourse, that when a serious crime has been committed against someone, that person will not be compensated financially, at least not to any greater extent. In some cases the astronomical sums awarded to people in courts in the U.S. seem very fair and reasonable.
Possibly, my strongest argument for the fact that I think a kid in Sweden, under the same circumstances, should fight is this: You KNOW that loads of money will win you almost any case in the U.S. You KNOW that the RIAA would have won or at least ruined the kid in th U.S. What I KNOW is: a ton of money won't help much (if at all) in a court here in Sweden.
Weak, I know, but there it is. Microsoft could take me on in a law suit. If they charge me with being a criminal in some way, the prosecutor will be assigned by the court (they don't get to choose), while I can get the defense lawyer of my choice or accept the one appointed to me by the court (and that is not a second-rate lawyer, but one in the employ of any of the law firms in the country, assigned more or less by random). There we go, nearly equal counsel. If it is a normal law suit and I lose, my insurance will pay for my legal counsel. I will have to pay any damages (possibly including legal fees, depending on the judges descision) myself, but those are, as I've said, usually not very high.
Hmm, now that I think of it, in law suits, unless there are criminal charges, it is not certain that the loser pays all legal fees. That depends on the judges descision. Oh, well, IANAL, not even a swedish one
There's no thing sure enough to risk the huge financial loss.
Exactly. And since the damages you can be awarded if you win are much smaller than the costs associated with the lawsuit, you have to have a very good case to file suit at all. Thus: less frivolous lawsuits. The largest sum ever awarded in damages in Sweden is about $1 million. This was paid to a person who was found guilty and imprisoned for eight years for a murder he did not commit. Lawsuits are not profitable here (except possibly for lawyers).
'Course, your insurances will pay most of your costs, but if you sue a lot no insurance company will want to have you as a customer. And all of this applies not only to "the little gyu" but to companies, too. If we ever get a "RIAA suit" here in Sweden, there will probably only ever be one suck suit. RIAA or the equivalent will probably lose, setting precedent for any similar cases, thus efficiently killing any interest in continuing to file suit in similar cases.
>I'm trying to figure out why Europe gets the robotic vacuum first.
Simple: because Electrolux is a European company aand the robotic vacuum cleaner was designed in Europe. Though it is annoying when one continent gets a product before another one, especially since it is unrealistic to think that the inhabitants of the other continent won't know about what they're missing.
Actually, it is quite likely that the point of impact will be vaporized by the heat of the laser. The then-gaseous form of the material being hit will expand explosivley. Sort of like setting of a small explosion on the surface of the target. That might hurt...
That should be "320 MByte/s" and "3 GByte/s", shouldn't it?
char is basically a 16 bit unsigned int. Though having the "unsigned" and "signed" modifiers would be nice. Specifically I would have loved it last year when I wrote an implementation of Karatsuba's algorithm and got my input (very large ints) as byte arrays. I would have loved to have been able to cast those to unsigned byte arrays...
A few months back there was a discussion about the speed of Mac OS X on the Cocoadev mailing list. One person had been investigating the has table used by manu classes in Appkit and Cocoa. Apparently search times in these hash tables scaled linearly (!!). Fix that one and a lot of slowness will probably go away.
Also, it seem that the mach kernel internally is big-endian, even though the PPC is little-endian (or the other way around). This might make the mach kernel faster on X86 processors than on PPC:s. Ouch.
I cannot quote any sources, but I recall being told that that piece of etymology is incorrect. Actually, I believe that the origin of "lagom" is unknown.
Oh, come on! Shouldn't you try to get just a few facts right before posting? Of course you are wrong! XP does NOT require you to have a Passport. And why (WHY?!?) should Real Jukebox be any better than XP with regards to DRM?
Another thing: when you shut down your computer, the OS stops running. It cannot sense that you take your PC apart. The WPA insanity doesn't start unless you change components in your PC, and several of them.
That would require root access or at least "staff" access, since
MAC adresses can be changed. On a Sun workstation you do it from the boot prom, which is easily accessed at any time. You might have to do ifdown le0;ifup le0 before the MAC address change comes through, but that's not really a bother.
I don't know how to chage MAC addresses on a PC, but switching network cards would do the trick for sure. It is probably possible to set an adapter's MAC adress with software of some kind, too. You may have to write that piece of software yourself unless some hax0r beats you to it on the prospect of getting access to free wireless bandwidth.
i experience the same hell everytime i want to try out a new application. somehow i always need to download 300 MB of dependencies before i can build the app i want to try. why can't developers just stick to the libs that are present in the latest distribs? this is _The_ problem that keeps keeping me away from running linux for all my needs...
In Europe, a good freelance hardware consultant, willing to work as a complete independent, pulls in between US$800 and US$1500 per day. (Note, nobody uses hourly rates when contracting, just daily).
I beg to differ. In Sweden (which, incidentally, is part of Europe), consultants use hourly rates all the time. In fact, I haven't even heard of anyone in any line of business using daily rates. I'm not a hardware consultant myself, though. I charge SEK 650 per hour (about $67 per hour, or $541 per day). But then I'm one of the cheaper consultants; I study full time and do system design and programming on the side. When I get my degree I'll become much more expensive. Still, my effective salary (sek 45k/month) is higher than many of the bosses at the places I work for (not counting their stock option programs and fringe benefits).
I will get 10Mbps for about $20/month (SEK 200/month) sometime in the first half of next year. I have friends who already do. The ISP:s idea is not to make money from the Internet connection, but from peripheral services, such as video on demand, home security and other things.
Besides, a fiber connection doesn't cost much in itself. The nnn Mbps figure is probably only the bandwidth to the ISP:s own network. What connection(s) that network has to the rest of the Internet is an unknown (and keeping those connections scaled to give adequate performance for all customers at once is the expensive part).
I am swedish and I work in Sweden. Neither my employer nor I am affiliated with any union. My deal for taking customer calls on evenings and weekends is that if I get called at all I get one day off the next week for each call.
Oh, and I'm being payed for those days off. That means that I get 8 hours of salary for every call, plus normal salary for the time I spend taking the calls and handling the reported problems on nights and weekends.
I am swedish and I work in Sweden. Neither my employer nor I am affiliated with any union. My deal for taking customer calls on evenings and weekends is that if I get called at all I get one day off the next week for each call.
When using a modem connection to the Internet in Sweden, you very much use a metered service. Ths ISP doesn't charge you for time or amount of downloaded bytes, but the phone bill keeps ticking. All the time. No exceptions (except for the toll-free modem pool of the ISP Telia, but then again, they do charge a minute rate equivalent to the phone rate anyways).
On the broadband market, there are no metered charges. But only two of the broadband ISP:s offer more than 1 Mbps connections: Bredbandsbolaget and Utfors. Both these ISP:s connect only groups of condo's, and require that a cat5 10baseT network is already installed in the building(s). Bredbandsbolaget offers 10 Mbps, while Utfors has several services with connection speeds between 256 kbps and 10 Mbps. Most broadband ISP:s have a service with around 512 kbps connections. Telias ADSL service (the only ADSL service in the country) is 512 kbps, too (mostly because they also own a Cable TV company that offers cable connections to the 'net at 512 kbps and they don't want to use one of their businesses to kill another).
So far, as far as I know, less than 10.000 swedish households can be connected to the 'net with a 10 Mbps connection. A few hundred thousands of households can be connected through their cable TV operators at 521 kbps. Most everyone can connect through ADSL, but the service was just rolled out and the expected deliverytime for ADSL is between 3 and 18 months.
and 155 mbps isn't the fastest there is. my ex-employer had a 655Mbps connection (they are an isp, among other things). i don't think any pc could saturate that connection without _very_ fancy extra hardware.
the preview pane will trigger it, but seemingly only if you:
a) have "reply with formated mail" (or whatever that setting is called) turned on as the default reply setting
b) haven't already patched away this security hole (i expect this is the same bug that made melissa/"check this!" possible)
our sysadmins ripped out the internet connection as soon as i told them... we don't want our customers to catch this from us.
the swedish post office tried this a couple of years ago. you paid them to get an email address and the post office printed your mail and snailmailed (or maybe faxed, i can't recall if that was an option) it to you.
an interesting defect in their system was that their software couldn't handle @ signs anywhere in the messages, so in the printed copies of your email, email addresses would appear as foo(a)bar.com...
needless to say, this service didn't catch on. it was cheaper to buy a modem and an account with an isp.
>Huh? Tax is less than 30 per cent till about USD
>25k - 30k (the tax rate vavies slightly
>depending on where you live).
The trick is that the ~30% income tax (and at higher salaries, 1+% federal income tax) are not the only taxes paid. I'm a freelancing consultant and I know more precisely how my income is taxed. My accountant has advised me to set aside to 3/4 of my income for taxes and fees.
That is a problem, since employers need to take all the taxes and fees into account. The taxes scale so that if you (as an employee) have a salary of sek 30k/month (a fair-to-good salary for an IT proffesional in Sweden) and get a raise of 3k, the employer needs to pay at least some sek 6k extra per month (to pay your raise plus taxes and fees). Then you pay federal and county taxes on the income raise and end up with at most sek 1.5k extra per month.
Stock options are not a viable alternative as a bonus in Sweden, due to the tax rules. They go something like this: first the value of the stock options are taxed as if they were salary. When you sell the vested stock you get the joy of paying another flat 30% tax on the yield (sell value minus initial value, before the first taxation).
Then we have the 25% VAT and extra taxes well above 50% on tobacco, alcohol, gasoline. And extra taxation of electricity, homes, you name it. Sigh.
For the salary comparison: I charge SEK 600/hour (about US$75), after I've paid _all_ taxes (which include, school for me and my children, a cheap pension plan, medical care for everyone I know and a few others, etc) this leaves me with some SEK 24k (US$ 3k) if i have full time work. My one room apartment costs about SEK 2.3k (US$288) per month (living downtown is usually more expensive, I inherited some money and got rid of about half of my loan for buying the apartment). I'm paid well by Swedish standards, am fluent in at least 5 computer languages and two human languages. No degree yet, but I'm still working on my Master of CS/Maths.
>You mean start the .freedom TLD? :)
/tage
good idea. i think i'll do that. anyone wanna join? ckrakes.freedom is mine. i'll volounteer to set up a root.freedom with a 'freewhois' database of some kind, too.