He's playing to the image of the barefoot, overweight UNIX nerd. Technical crowds will recognize his street cred when he looks like that. If he looked like a politician, people wouldn't pay very much attention to his message -- he'd look like yet another hair-slicked marketing type in corporate.
IMO, he just needed a pair of suspenders and a quarter.
Oh, I'm not saying it's a good idea, necessarily. Oblivion drove me crazy with its sized-for-a-TV UI.
But that was just a case of the developer not taking the time necessary to do platform specific interfaces correct, which are really the only thing you need to do when writing to different platforms.
Nothing drives me more insane than when they try to map a console controller directly to mouse and keyboard.
But then you end up writing to the lowest common denominator. That's not good.
Have you ever played a PC game? There's graphics detail options that you can turn up or down. Let's say you're writing Vice City using middleware (which it was). You know the capability of the Xbox is X, the PS2 is Y, and the PC is all over the place. You set LOD settings, view distance, texture detail settings, etc., that best match X and Y, and you give the players the options to set their own on the PC.
There's still platform differences, don't get me wrong, but when you've got a game that runs on middleware already running on the PS3 and PC, adding the Xbox360 is about a thousand times easier than writing the whole game from scratch on the Xbox, if the middleware platform supports the Xbox360.
That's the advantage of being able to write code to higher level APIs.
Sure, you might not be able to do something like Okami (which heavy relied on deep magic on the PS2's EE to get it to work), but it has worked for a LOT of games.
If ultimatly everybody is limited to the same set of capabilities, there's no value of having a middle layer written by a "middle-man".
There is a value. It's the same reason we use DirectX or OpenGL -- an API hides away the dirty details of a specific hardware platform. If they can optimize the middleware (which they might be able to do a better job than you, depending), then there's no real penalty to it.
it would be purely a legacy strategy that allowed game developers to write games that target "worst of breed"
GTA: Vice City, Tony Hawk Underground, Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows were all written to different platforms by using middleware. It's hardly a controversial topic. Middleware is very, very common.
You don't need one console. You need one target platform. You have have 5 different consoles, or 50, and still write to a single common platform. It's called middleware. The middleware vendor figures out all the idiosynchracies of the different consoles, and then writes an API which sits above it. The game developer (EA or whoever) pays a license to the middleware developer, and then writes to the middleare API, and things more or less work like magic on all the different consoles. All you have to do to 'port' it to a new console, or the PC, is really deal with the input issues. A Wii is not the same as an XBox360, but when a friend of mine did the port of "Cars" to the Wii, it was really just a matter of revising the input routines, and some other tweaking.
Think you can shoot down supersonic missile flying below the horizon? No. They let the computer guided robots do that. You're not nearly good enough at it. Ok, maybe you get lucky and nail it. Now try thirty in five seconds all coming from different bearings. Didn't think so.
You just need a trackball and a good supply of quarters
I intentionally edit anonymously, and I have seen edits, just like you, reverted without reason, even when they were 100% constructive edits, like adding ISBN numbers to book references. If I'd been a registered user, I'm sure it wouldn't have happened.
I've noticed some of the same editors, like Jayzg or whatever his name is, doing a number of these drive-by reverts across a wide swath of articles. Looking at his edit history, he'd do hundreds of these in an hour, meaning that he probably didn't even look at the edit in question before reverting them, basing his opinion solely on the fact that an anonymous editor made the change.
Just for the hell of it, I put a warning on his user page about it, and he got very upset and had one of his admin buddies remove it within an hour. It *is* against wikipedia policy, though, what he's doing.
Sigh, from the same article which you didn't bother to read:
" *... women- who after all make up half the population- should be treated as equals...[32]
* I have never believed that women were diabolical creatures if they showed their faces or arms, or went swimming, or skied or played basketball. If some women wish to live veiled, then it is their choice, but why deprive half of our youth of the healthy pleasure of sports?"
It's true, and why I've by and large given up on Wikipedia. Page Ownership, while against the rules, is annoyingly annoyingly common. Try adding an important fact, and the guy that "owns" the page comes through and reverts it because he doesn't think it's important. Add it again, he reverts it again. Etc., until one side gets tired first, which is usually me.
Omnedon took an article which had contributions from 5 or 10 different authors, and essentially took it upon himself to rewrite the whole article, and would revert edits made by other people. It's annoying, as I wrote the original Belts section for the article (replacing the stub section there was there before), but he just comes through like a bulldozer and tries to own the whole article.
Oh, lord, did he just say TF2 is like Counterstrike?
Ugh....
As the author of CustomTF (www.customtf.com) -- where you have money to build your own Team Fortress class and equip your character -- it galls me to hear people say, "Hey, that's just like Counterstrike!"
If you use upscaling, then you're using the software emulation. The hardware emulation only turns on if you disable the improved imaging features.
Personally, I've only found one game that didn't run on the 80GB PS3 at all. Singstar -- their flagship title, which is very odd. I don't own it (a friend brought it over), so it's not really a big deal to me.
I agree though, the 60GB model is the sweet spot for price and features... if you can find one.
Obviously we need to transition to a hydrogen economy. Not only will it save the environment, but if you carry enough lighter-than-air money on board, the spaceships could just float themselves into orbit.
I am disappointed they didn't call it the quatloo though, too.
At Best Buy the other day (hate the store, but no Fry's around here), saw that they were selling "Alzheimer" brand memory sticks.
While I understand (upon doing a double take and inspecting the package) that it is meant to support an Alzheimer association, I can't help but think that it's not a good marketing combination.
That said, I have diabetes from one grandfather and Alzheimers from my grandma, both of my dad's parents... crap.
why aren't we using it on all the coal we are exporting, considering oil is double the price point at which you say it becomes profitable?
Two reasons. One: High oil prices are actually a very new development, and may or may not be the new stable price point. Energy companies have been worried about the high oil prices crashing back down. Nobody wants to dump literally billions of dollars in an infrastructure development that is only profitable at $35 or above. Look at the price history over the last 20 years: http://www.oilcrash.com/images/simmons1/simmons1.gif. (Ignore the fearmongering site, it was the first hit I got on google for a 20 year price history of oil). You see why they're leery to hop into it. While Peak Oil may be popular on Slashdot, Energy Execs look at a price history like that and want to wait a while longer to see if the prices stabilize at their current high prices.
Two: The Oil Weapon. Their worst nightmare is dumping billions into coal liquefaction and then having oil prices unintentionally or intentionally fall below $35 and make them lose it all. Intentional manipulation and price dumping in this fashion (called the Oil Weapon) has been one of the major reasons why investors have been scared out of the market, and prices remain high. Eventually though, especially if Peak Oil is true, alternative oil sources will come online, and help drop oil prices.
Plus, what makes you think people aren't pushing for it? You have the senior senator in America heavily lobbying for FT coal conversion, as well as the governor of Montana. It takes a long time for huge shifts in energy infrastructure to take place. They were monkeying around in the Oil Sands of Alberta for years, and now Albertan oil sand production is the main reason the Loony is trading at par with the US Dollar. The senators arguing which voted against Byrd basically had by and large wrong data, which was kind of aggravating. Watching Feinstein say that FT was an unproven novel technology was just... yeah. You can call a 70 year old technology that ran two countries entirely by itself a lot of things, but unproven is not one of them.
Back to the issue of greenhouse gasses, let's be honest -- we have a built infrastructure of billions of dollars of cars out there. Americans will not give up their cars, they'll very rarely carpool or bike to work, and they won't switch to electric or hydrogen cars unless a gun is put to their heads. Hybrids caught on because they use the existing infrastructure. It's possible to build effectively zero emission vehicle cars, but you're looking at a 20 or 30 year process until all cars are zero emission. It's not something you can wave your hand and solve overnight. Emissions from power plants are a lot more controllable. Build a new coal plant or build a nuclear plant? That's something the government can actually make happen. Coal and nuclear have roughly the same cost per kilowatt, but zero emission coal plants have double or treble the cost, and retrofitting plants is not a cheap endeavor either. If we switch to nuclear power, we take advantage of the only cheap clean power source besides Hydro, and the environmental movement is largely and ironically blocking new dam construction. Wind and solar are somewhere between 2x and 6x the cost per kilowatt of nuclear, and are usually not actually zero emission, as they usually have coal power plant backstops that come online when its not windy or sunny. Plus, if we turn off our coal power plants, it will cause coal prices to come down, which will further drop gas prices.
If the FT process was such a magic bullet, I'd like to propose we'd already be using it on those 19.4 million short tons of coal we're exporting.
And we can close down the patent office? Because if anything new could have been invented, it would have been invented already.
Fact: SASOL (FT) supplies South Africa with 40% of it's fuel needs. It developed coal as a source of gas due to the apartheid embargo. Nazi Germany did the same thing in WWII. Fact: FT may very well become our major source of oil. As you perhaps didn't understand, this is an issue that was debated in congress this year. Fact: Above $35 a barrel it becomes profitable. Oil is above double that. Fact: Like with oil sands and oil shale, it takes large infrastructure investments to ramp up a new gasoline source. They were looking at the Albertan oil sands
So they pollute a lot more than using oil.
The important point you missed is that the conversion is being done in a closed loop, and so the byproducts from the process can much more easily captured and sequestered (at a higher price, but still well below the current prices for crude). And yes, I know what I'm talking about, as my company has talked with SASOL about the FT process. The cost of adding carbon sequestration to a coal power plant, by comparison, adds +50% to +100% the cost per kilowatt hour, which is why, as you said, it's not very popular.
It doesn't matter if you lump them together or not. Quite literally, the rotten apples spoil the barrel. If the threat of lawsuits grows large enough, investors will back away from putting money into wind farms, just like with what happened to nuclear plants.
Want more examples? Wind power actually does kill thousands of birds every year (many of which are endangered). Not that I think the outrage against wind farms is pretty ridiculous -- a stable and cheap energy supply is a necessary requirement of modern society. Even the most atavistic of greens will be as lost as the rest of us when their local REI store can't open because there's no power in the city.
Please explain how this is the case, considering that we get around 3% of our electricity from oil?
Simple. Replace coal power plants with nuclear, convert the coal to oil, voila, America's oil problems are solved. I don't blame you for not knowing this, the Fischer-Tropsch process isn't especially well known among the general populace (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer-Tropsch_process). But, even 90 year old senators are debating Fischer-Tropsch (http://byrd.senate.gov/newsroom/news_nov/coal_to_liquids.html), so you don't get *that* big a free pass for your ignorance.
On the related issue of emissions, switching to nuclear power would do more to reduce CO2 emissions than other proposals, and is quite possibly the only realistic plan that could do so (most plans just try to slow the growth rate). It galls me when I hear people complaining about global warming and nuclear power in the same breath. According to Free Speech Radio News (it's a very unintentionally amusing radio program), last month some global warming activists very shackled themselves to the front door of a nuclear power plant. Without a single scrap of awareness of the absurdity of their own actions.
Can you cite your source please? This sounds interesting.
There's a lot of debate over this issue. Here's a reasonably good comparison of cost of different forms of energy (though it's provided by a tidal energy interest, so the tidal numbers should be regarded with some suspicion): http://www.des.state.nh.us/coastal/documents/EnergyCostComparisons.pdf
The threat of lawsuits adds so much uncertainty to a project that people will tend to choose to not build a plant at all rather than risk a lawsuit. In fact, that's exactly what we've seen in the last 30 years, and what has helped lead to our current energy problems.
FFVII was a tale about evil businesses. Almost all FFs have evil churches. Tragic or doomed romances. Etc., etc. etc. They recycle the same themes throughout all the games.
Mainly, though, I just find the stories uninteresting.
I don't believe that the method of telling the story is so significant. You do.
Only insofar as I don't count backstory. What the player/character *does* in the game, what story it tells, is the important thing. That's why space invaders could never have a great story, even though a person could write a novel as a backstory for it. The mode of the game isn't that important -- you can tell a story in a FPS. There's a difference between Halo and Bioshock in storytelling, but even Bioshock is more about discovering what already happened than what unfolds from your characters actions. There's one big surprise twist, which is very cool, plotwise, but that's about it.
Slashdot Mirror
He's playing to the image of the barefoot, overweight UNIX nerd. Technical crowds will recognize his street cred when he looks like that. If he looked like a politician, people wouldn't pay very much attention to his message -- he'd look like yet another hair-slicked marketing type in corporate.
IMO, he just needed a pair of suspenders and a quarter.
Oh, I'm not saying it's a good idea, necessarily. Oblivion drove me crazy with its sized-for-a-TV UI.
But that was just a case of the developer not taking the time necessary to do platform specific interfaces correct, which are really the only thing you need to do when writing to different platforms.
Nothing drives me more insane than when they try to map a console controller directly to mouse and keyboard.
But then you end up writing to the lowest common denominator. That's not good.
Have you ever played a PC game? There's graphics detail options that you can turn up or down. Let's say you're writing Vice City using middleware (which it was). You know the capability of the Xbox is X, the PS2 is Y, and the PC is all over the place. You set LOD settings, view distance, texture detail settings, etc., that best match X and Y, and you give the players the options to set their own on the PC.
There's still platform differences, don't get me wrong, but when you've got a game that runs on middleware already running on the PS3 and PC, adding the Xbox360 is about a thousand times easier than writing the whole game from scratch on the Xbox, if the middleware platform supports the Xbox360.
That's the advantage of being able to write code to higher level APIs.
Sure, you might not be able to do something like Okami (which heavy relied on deep magic on the PS2's EE to get it to work), but it has worked for a LOT of games.
If ultimatly everybody is limited to the same set of capabilities, there's no value of having a middle layer written by a "middle-man".
There is a value. It's the same reason we use DirectX or OpenGL -- an API hides away the dirty details of a specific hardware platform. If they can optimize the middleware (which they might be able to do a better job than you, depending), then there's no real penalty to it.
it would be purely a legacy strategy that allowed game developers to write games that target "worst of breed"
GTA: Vice City, Tony Hawk Underground, Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows were all written to different platforms by using middleware. It's hardly a controversial topic. Middleware is very, very common.
You don't need one console. You need one target platform. You have have 5 different consoles, or 50, and still write to a single common platform. It's called middleware. The middleware vendor figures out all the idiosynchracies of the different consoles, and then writes an API which sits above it. The game developer (EA or whoever) pays a license to the middleware developer, and then writes to the middleare API, and things more or less work like magic on all the different consoles. All you have to do to 'port' it to a new console, or the PC, is really deal with the input issues. A Wii is not the same as an XBox360, but when a friend of mine did the port of "Cars" to the Wii, it was really just a matter of revising the input routines, and some other tweaking.
Think you can shoot down supersonic missile flying below the horizon? No. They let the computer guided robots do that. You're not nearly good enough at it. Ok, maybe you get lucky and nail it. Now try thirty in five seconds all coming from different bearings. Didn't think so.
You just need a trackball and a good supply of quarters
I intentionally edit anonymously, and I have seen edits, just like you, reverted without reason, even when they were 100% constructive edits, like adding ISBN numbers to book references. If I'd been a registered user, I'm sure it wouldn't have happened.
I've noticed some of the same editors, like Jayzg or whatever his name is, doing a number of these drive-by reverts across a wide swath of articles. Looking at his edit history, he'd do hundreds of these in an hour, meaning that he probably didn't even look at the edit in question before reverting them, basing his opinion solely on the fact that an anonymous editor made the change.
Just for the hell of it, I put a warning on his user page about it, and he got very upset and had one of his admin buddies remove it within an hour. It *is* against wikipedia policy, though, what he's doing.
Sigh, from the same article which you didn't bother to read:
... women- who after all make up half the population- should be treated as equals...[32]
" *
* I have never believed that women were diabolical creatures if they showed their faces or arms, or went swimming, or skied or played basketball. If some women wish to live veiled, then it is their choice, but why deprive half of our youth of the healthy pleasure of sports?"
Iran was better off under the Shah in many respects (woman's rights, etc.) than under the nutso government they've had for the last 30 some odd years.
It's true, and why I've by and large given up on Wikipedia. Page Ownership, while against the rules, is annoyingly annoyingly common. Try adding an important fact, and the guy that "owns" the page comes through and reverts it because he doesn't think it's important. Add it again, he reverts it again. Etc., until one side gets tired first, which is usually me.
Look at the edits for Tae Kwon Do, for example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Taekwondo&offset=20070914204351&action=history
Omnedon took an article which had contributions from 5 or 10 different authors, and essentially took it upon himself to rewrite the whole article, and would revert edits made by other people. It's annoying, as I wrote the original Belts section for the article (replacing the stub section there was there before), but he just comes through like a bulldozer and tries to own the whole article.
Oh, lord, did he just say TF2 is like Counterstrike?
Ugh....
As the author of CustomTF (www.customtf.com) -- where you have money to build your own Team Fortress class and equip your character -- it galls me to hear people say, "Hey, that's just like Counterstrike!"
Heh, funny, just downloaded your newest release two days ago.
Yeah, Minerva is awesome.
If you use upscaling, then you're using the software emulation. The hardware emulation only turns on if you disable the improved imaging features.
Personally, I've only found one game that didn't run on the 80GB PS3 at all. Singstar -- their flagship title, which is very odd. I don't own it (a friend brought it over), so it's not really a big deal to me.
I agree though, the 60GB model is the sweet spot for price and features... if you can find one.
Obviously we need to transition to a hydrogen economy. Not only will it save the environment, but if you carry enough lighter-than-air money on board, the spaceships could just float themselves into orbit.
I am disappointed they didn't call it the quatloo though, too.
At Best Buy the other day (hate the store, but no Fry's around here), saw that they were selling "Alzheimer" brand memory sticks.
While I understand (upon doing a double take and inspecting the package) that it is meant to support an Alzheimer association, I can't help but think that it's not a good marketing combination.
That said, I have diabetes from one grandfather and Alzheimers from my grandma, both of my dad's parents... crap.
why aren't we using it on all the coal we are exporting, considering oil is double the price point at which you say it becomes profitable?
Two reasons. One: High oil prices are actually a very new development, and may or may not be the new stable price point. Energy companies have been worried about the high oil prices crashing back down. Nobody wants to dump literally billions of dollars in an infrastructure development that is only profitable at $35 or above. Look at the price history over the last 20 years: http://www.oilcrash.com/images/simmons1/simmons1.gif. (Ignore the fearmongering site, it was the first hit I got on google for a 20 year price history of oil). You see why they're leery to hop into it. While Peak Oil may be popular on Slashdot, Energy Execs look at a price history like that and want to wait a while longer to see if the prices stabilize at their current high prices.
Two: The Oil Weapon. Their worst nightmare is dumping billions into coal liquefaction and then having oil prices unintentionally or intentionally fall below $35 and make them lose it all. Intentional manipulation and price dumping in this fashion (called the Oil Weapon) has been one of the major reasons why investors have been scared out of the market, and prices remain high. Eventually though, especially if Peak Oil is true, alternative oil sources will come online, and help drop oil prices.
Plus, what makes you think people aren't pushing for it? You have the senior senator in America heavily lobbying for FT coal conversion, as well as the governor of Montana. It takes a long time for huge shifts in energy infrastructure to take place. They were monkeying around in the Oil Sands of Alberta for years, and now Albertan oil sand production is the main reason the Loony is trading at par with the US Dollar. The senators arguing which voted against Byrd basically had by and large wrong data, which was kind of aggravating. Watching Feinstein say that FT was an unproven novel technology was just... yeah. You can call a 70 year old technology that ran two countries entirely by itself a lot of things, but unproven is not one of them.
Back to the issue of greenhouse gasses, let's be honest -- we have a built infrastructure of billions of dollars of cars out there. Americans will not give up their cars, they'll very rarely carpool or bike to work, and they won't switch to electric or hydrogen cars unless a gun is put to their heads. Hybrids caught on because they use the existing infrastructure. It's possible to build effectively zero emission vehicle cars, but you're looking at a 20 or 30 year process until all cars are zero emission. It's not something you can wave your hand and solve overnight. Emissions from power plants are a lot more controllable. Build a new coal plant or build a nuclear plant? That's something the government can actually make happen. Coal and nuclear have roughly the same cost per kilowatt, but zero emission coal plants have double or treble the cost, and retrofitting plants is not a cheap endeavor either. If we switch to nuclear power, we take advantage of the only cheap clean power source besides Hydro, and the environmental movement is largely and ironically blocking new dam construction. Wind and solar are somewhere between 2x and 6x the cost per kilowatt of nuclear, and are usually not actually zero emission, as they usually have coal power plant backstops that come online when its not windy or sunny. Plus, if we turn off our coal power plants, it will cause coal prices to come down, which will further drop gas prices.
Don't understand? This lolcat will explain everything: http://www.thecheezburgerfactory.com/completestore/128351432363906250OHHAIIcollap.jpg
They did a lot of uranium mining at Chernobyl then?
If the FT process was such a magic bullet, I'd like to propose we'd already be using it on those 19.4 million short tons of coal we're exporting.
And we can close down the patent office? Because if anything new could have been invented, it would have been invented already.
Fact: SASOL (FT) supplies South Africa with 40% of it's fuel needs. It developed coal as a source of gas due to the apartheid embargo. Nazi Germany did the same thing in WWII.
Fact: FT may very well become our major source of oil. As you perhaps didn't understand, this is an issue that was debated in congress this year.
Fact: Above $35 a barrel it becomes profitable. Oil is above double that.
Fact: Like with oil sands and oil shale, it takes large infrastructure investments to ramp up a new gasoline source. They were looking at the Albertan oil sands
So they pollute a lot more than using oil.
The important point you missed is that the conversion is being done in a closed loop, and so the byproducts from the process can much more easily captured and sequestered (at a higher price, but still well below the current prices for crude). And yes, I know what I'm talking about, as my company has talked with SASOL about the FT process. The cost of adding carbon sequestration to a coal power plant, by comparison, adds +50% to +100% the cost per kilowatt hour, which is why, as you said, it's not very popular.
It doesn't matter if you lump them together or not. Quite literally, the rotten apples spoil the barrel. If the threat of lawsuits grows large enough, investors will back away from putting money into wind farms, just like with what happened to nuclear plants.
http://www.windaction.org/
http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/news/2005/10/69177
http://www.pennlive.com/editorials/patriotnews/index.ssf?/base/opinion/1189201220164870.xml&coll=1
http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/story.php?id=135298&ac=PHnws
Want more examples? Wind power actually does kill thousands of birds every year (many of which are endangered). Not that I think the outrage against wind farms is pretty ridiculous -- a stable and cheap energy supply is a necessary requirement of modern society. Even the most atavistic of greens will be as lost as the rest of us when their local REI store can't open because there's no power in the city.
Please explain how this is the case, considering that we get around 3% of our electricity from oil?
Simple. Replace coal power plants with nuclear, convert the coal to oil, voila, America's oil problems are solved. I don't blame you for not knowing this, the Fischer-Tropsch process isn't especially well known among the general populace (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer-Tropsch_process). But, even 90 year old senators are debating Fischer-Tropsch (http://byrd.senate.gov/newsroom/news_nov/coal_to_liquids.html), so you don't get *that* big a free pass for your ignorance.
On the related issue of emissions, switching to nuclear power would do more to reduce CO2 emissions than other proposals, and is quite possibly the only realistic plan that could do so (most plans just try to slow the growth rate). It galls me when I hear people complaining about global warming and nuclear power in the same breath. According to Free Speech Radio News (it's a very unintentionally amusing radio program), last month some global warming activists very shackled themselves to the front door of a nuclear power plant. Without a single scrap of awareness of the absurdity of their own actions.
Can you cite your source please? This sounds interesting.
There's a lot of debate over this issue. Here's a reasonably good comparison of cost of different forms of energy (though it's provided by a tidal energy interest, so the tidal numbers should be regarded with some suspicion):
http://www.des.state.nh.us/coastal/documents/EnergyCostComparisons.pdf
Because we don't have tort reform.
The threat of lawsuits adds so much uncertainty to a project that people will tend to choose to not build a plant at all rather than risk a lawsuit. In fact, that's exactly what we've seen in the last 30 years, and what has helped lead to our current energy problems.
FFVII was a tale about evil businesses. Almost all FFs have evil churches. Tragic or doomed romances. Etc., etc. etc. They recycle the same themes throughout all the games.
Mainly, though, I just find the stories uninteresting.
I don't believe that the method of telling the story is so significant. You do.
Only insofar as I don't count backstory. What the player/character *does* in the game, what story it tells, is the important thing. That's why space invaders could never have a great story, even though a person could write a novel as a backstory for it. The mode of the game isn't that important -- you can tell a story in a FPS. There's a difference between Halo and Bioshock in storytelling, but even Bioshock is more about discovering what already happened than what unfolds from your characters actions. There's one big surprise twist, which is very cool, plotwise, but that's about it.