The "ersatz mana" part reminds me a little bit of something Orson Scott Card had to say in his book on how to write SF... basically, he said that it's easy to be seduced by people who treat you as if everything you say is clever and fascinating... and your spouse and kids and closest friends can't really compete with that because they know you too well.:) And yet, without the support of people with whom you have substantive relationships, you can lose not only a lot of what provides a high quality of life, but even your ability to perform and relate to others. Mana, if you will, perhaps. (Sometimes I wonder if anyone knows what mana is).
I don't think this applies to Stephens (and I think it is Stephens with a ph, by the way) in the sense that I think he may have abused celebrity this way... but it might help explain why Stephens sister just saw him as her brother. Not such a bad thing, really. At least, for him to work at. Perhaps part of the "dangerous charge" that I've heard mana described as is the threat that those relationships will color yours with a new individual too much. This would fit with what Pirsig wrote in "Lila" (which is where I assume you're taking your info) about going straight to hell once you get famous. Ersatz mana (negative relationship vectors) discoloring relationships at the outset.
Tangentially, I think that community is a bigger part of hacker/open source culture than it is contemporary mainstream, which is why mana or egoboo or whatever you might want to term or call things would be more important within it, but not seen so much outside of it.
I think Card, what with all his talk of individual mystical talents in some of his fiction, would also be intruiged by the statement To everyone who knew him (Stephens), it seemd he cared about the things that mattered most to them. That's a very powerful way to build real relationships with people.
Keep a copy of all email sent, but make it clear that company policy is not to search it unless there's a complaint of abuse. Hopefully, the consequence would be that the employee realizes there's a record kept of everything they send, and that will make them more responsible.
I know this sounds a little bit like those stupid voluntary privacy policies that people like doubleClick have. But you're not them. You're a small business concerned about balancing privacy with responsibility. You might be able to handle it.
Also, I really think that with the number of ways that someone can send and receive email today on the net, use of a company account for personal business is really not a must.
Emulators, Console Makers, Use Value of PC
on
Salon on the XBox
·
· Score: 2
One thing that doesn't add up -- if everything this guy says is true -- is why console emulators are so popular. OK, lots of them are for _old_ games... my TI-99/4A just doesn't work anymore and I like Parsec, so rather than going to a thrift store and trying to find a working TI, I download an emulator and play (after hunting for ROMs for a week and a half).
But there's also new emulators, like Connectix's, and the N64 emulators, and the like. I don't know how much money Connectix is making, but they generally seem to be a solid company that knows what they're doing (perhaps their task was made easier by the fact that HW compatibility is easier on the Macintosh). If what this guy was saying is totally true, it would seem emulators wouldn't be popular at all.
I also don't see how Microsoft is just going to make all other console makers roll over and die. They couldn't do it with the handheld market, because they had determined competition that knew what they were doing. In the console industry, they've got entrenched competition that have been battling hard over the last 15 years. A Microsoft monopoly? Not likely.
And finally, from the article:
very time there's a new generation of consoles in the works," says game developer Greg Costikyan," there are stories about how consoles are going to kill the PC as a platform. The fact is, they never have, and never will. There's a larger base of PCs than there is of any console platform. People buy them for reasons other than playing games, but want games to play on them too."
Yep.
"Yes, a stable platform makes some aspects of
development easy. [But] a 'bigger market' will simply drive development budgets higher, driving increasing conservatism."
This is one reason why Mac gaming isn't bigger. The platform is much more predictable than the PC, because of its closed nature... but the audience is smaller.
As has already been pointed out in this discussion, vitalviewer's product already has some stiff competition (real books) that will probably edge them out, if there's no artificial restrictions made (say, laws or university policies forcing people to use vitalviewer).
Now, however, what if we added MORE competition? The idea I have in mind is a "just-in-time" publishing company that would sell textbooks to students in the format that they want (CD or print). By doing one offs, and perhaps foregoing huge profit margins that publishing companies think they need, you might be able to get pricing competetive enough that students would prefer buying from you. If you could also make it more renumerative to those actually writing the textbooks, then you'd see some success. As to potential copying problems with the electronic format, you could provide some limited copy protection -- enough that what with your lower prices and all, most students would rather just buy the book than mess with trying to crack it.
And then, when VitalViewer comes to your University and says: "Look! Electronic publishing!", the adminstration can frown and say "Hmmm. We already have that."
OK, it's true. The article doesn't call for banning of telnet or ftp. Just unsecure telnet and ftp.
But will college administrators (not technical administrators, organizational administrators) understand this? These are the same people who decided the best thing was to convert everything over to NT, at my school....
One thing I like about HTTP and POP3 (and some other protocols) is that I can just telnet into the appropriate port and type the commands if I want to. I actually check my mail this way fairly frequently.
I think I heard a variant on this story in my Genetic Algorithms class. That either means it's true or folklore. Anyone have a citation?
Interestingly enough, the instructor of the class recommended that "Genetic Programming" be done only in a functional or logical language... getting a program that has to be in order is just too hard. So the functional language people have something to hold over us all yet again.:)
Oh, that I had a moderation point to spend on this
on
Inferno Source Release
·
· Score: 2
Somewhere over a year ago, I remember seeing a discussion -- I think on slashdot, even -- where this was proposed. And yet, there were quite a number of people who said that developing such a codec couldn't be done in an open manner. The reasoning was that it took teams of Phd's months of full-time research to do such things.
Having just read Farenheit 451 (sat on my bookshelf for 5 years, but I was prodded to action by a recent slashdot review), I'd want what every good totalitarian state official would want -- one of them mechanical hounds. Of course, I'd only use it for good...
It's sortof lame to just put up a "good move, guys" post, but I'm so impressed, I feel compelled. I don't know who thought of this from the Offspring "camp", but it's just beautiful. Now if Offspring decides to sue/say bad things about/throw rotten tomatoes at Napster, really, who is going to blame them?
"Napster's all about freedom from greed through IP restrictions." Yeah. Right. I can hear the sound of any remaining illusions collapsing right now.
Broadvision is coming to my workplace soon. There's no choice. I'm interested in hearing more about it if anyone's got the time to elaborate. Also, if you have any tips that would be helpful in working with it, or becoming familiar with it (other than www.broadvision.com) would be welcome.
I'm disappointed they didn't include a reference to Bruce Perens' excellent comments on the matter. His essay not only weighs what's happening morally, but brings out an important insight: the less responsibly people behave with creations like Napster, the more ammo the greedy have to hit us with. Music Bootlegging with Napster Hurts Free Software. It's a bit frightening....
Of course some of us aren't all that happy when we see interoperability suffering, no matter who the culprit is. But when Microsoft does something like this, everyone becomes very wary, because they've shown they have the market clout and the disposition to try to force their stuff down everyone's throat. Sortof the difference between anyone worrying about lil' ol' ME buying a gun, vs. a violent criminal.
My third programming job was my first experience with software engineering. I'd had 4 years of experience at two other jobs -- one where I wrote code for a InterLibrary Loan book lending database, and one where I worked on an e-commerce package. There was not a thing at either place that would qualify as a spec, and there was no process in place for engineering. I didn't know anyone who used specs. I assumed that this was something that was taught by computer science professors, but wasn't actually practiced by anyone.
Then I got a job at the Waterford Institute. Their process wasn't probably as tight as the space shuttle, but there WAS a process, and there were specs. Nice specs. Nearly psuedo-code.
We were programming educational activites for kids learning math. Activities were created by design teams consisting of an educator, an artists, a tech writer, and a programmer. The tech writer would document everything that went on at the meetings, and distill it into spec. The design team would meet regularly over a period of several months, refining the spec until it was solid.
The spec described various states of the software. When a user did something, the state of the software changed, and did something accordingly. I'd never seen software described this way, but it made a big impression on me, and it made things easy to write and debug.
('course, the platform we were writting on was in Java, which kept changing, and in-house developers were writing our own object library, which kept changing too, so your code would work one day, and then wouldn't the next, so everything wasn't perfect. But hey. I was impressed with the specs:)
Orem Public Library, Local Video Stores
on
Can I Lend DVDs?
·
· Score: 2
The Orem (Utah) Public Library lends DVDs to anyone with a card -- free. A few of the local video stores rent them. Obviously, lending is OK under some circumstances.
It's true that the points raised by the questions are points to be reckoned with. It seems to this non-lawyer that Andover has a strong legal position. I expect that's the message that they were trying to send.
However, the letter is extremely cocky, and I have to say I was put off by that. Yes, to those of us who agree with Slashdot's position, it seems like a stinging rebuke. But their legal position isn't perfect, and even if it seemed that way, we all know that legal decisions don't always turn out reasonably.
I would have been happier if the cockiness of the letter was matched with a more explicit strength of exposition (No, I'm not talking about legalese or weasel words). I would be even happier still if Slashdot would actually remove the one post that they probably can still lose on (the direct posting of the spec). Even if it's LEGAL to keep that post up (and that really is the one area of this whole brouhuaha that I doubt), is it really ethical? Microsoft asked that people take steps to protect it. Everyone here knew that. Go ahead. Use any method you want to circumvent agreeing to the license. But redistributing the info is still a questionable action. If nothing else, trying to keep above reasonable reproach is good PR (ethics aside), even when up against an unscrupulous enemy. Slashdot could gain a lot of points by taking it down, and even avoid their biggest headache.
I do understand that this is being used as a battlefield for principles, and I uphold those principles. I'm very worried about our freedoms. But we need to fight wisely and make our cases tight. In the legal world, losing a battle doesn't just mean you don't gain the field, you also lose ground. I've noticed that in the computer industry, we almost seem to share certain battle chutzpah with Microsoft. Look at MP3.com throwing themselves into battle with the RIAA. It wasn't all that hard to predict that they might get caught on redistributing recordings they didn't hold the copyright too, even if they did have a fairly reasonable argument. The RecordTV.com people are doomed. Napster users who are redistributing music that they don't hold copyright on and don't have permission to redistribute don't have a legal leg to stand on, regardless of whether or not it benefits the bands (and let me insert here that I'm a musician and have freely released some of my music to be indiscriminatly copied because I beleive in the benefit). They're hurting the cause of freedom because of their irresponsible actions. If it seems to people that we are irresponsible, then the bad guys have that much more of a case for regulation. Unethical, irresponsible, and just plain bad-PR behavior provide a (not altogether) phantom menace for our greedy opposition to play with.
Bruce Perens has some insightful comments about this on technocrat.net. I highly recommend them. Open Source/Free software isn't about freedom to do anything you like without consequence. It's not about disrespecting for others, even when they're wrong. Let's make sure we are the good guys as well as fighting the bad.
(That said, I hope Andover knocks Microsoft on their unethical behind).
Release of Mac OS X Beta to Developers: 90% Although sources have been unusually noncomittal about specific ship dates on Beta, the timing is right and the release is by all appearances very nearly ready to go.
According to announcements, they ARE close to releasing a Beta to developers. At least, if you consider developers a subset of the public. "This summer" is indeed pretty vague, but it's approximately similar to "real soon."
Also, at least some folks in the the developer program have had previews in various incremental states for some time now. Developer updates happen every so often. The announcment did not exclude the possibility of releasing new stuff to developers, soon, or even today. It just may not have been announced as the public "beta".
Your post smacks simply of rancor towards Apple and the Mac Rumors press.
Alright, I'm going to look ignorant. But what DOES ++@_[0]; do?
As for the comment on trying to use traditional substring functions, all I have to say is that I love regular expressions. Several years ago, I was writing a web server log analysis program for a turnkey e-commerce package. I did not know regexps, and I was required to write in C. I ended up coming up with a half-brained conception of regexps and trying to write my own (buggy) module to handle them. When I later learned PERL and regexps and discovered there was a regular expressions package for C, I mourned for months of lost youth. Sigh...
I appreciate the thought. I've actually looked into it (studied composition at BYU for a bit), and was really intrigued by this stuff for a while. After a while, though, something began to bother me about it. Part of it was that the music didn't match my aesthetics (although I do like some of it, and I recognize these guys contributed an awful lot). But part of what I realized was twentieth century theory -- by throwing out traditional harmony -- was actually moving away from the ideal expressed in Dirk Gently (although, their formalization of ideas about form moves towards it, I think. The idea of basic transformations on a melody line is very useful). The stuff I've heard from Babbit and Webern was many things, but deeply satisfying wasn't one of them (for me), and I think the reason had to do with throwing out traditional harmony, which describes a subset of satisfying relationships between tones (and even, when combined with a discussion of the harmonic series, explains, sortof, why).
Slashdot Mirror
The "ersatz mana" part reminds me a little bit of something Orson Scott Card had to say in his book on how to write SF... basically, he said that it's easy to be seduced by people who treat you as if everything you say is clever and fascinating... and your spouse and kids and closest friends can't really compete with that because they know you too well. :) And yet, without the support of people with whom you have substantive relationships, you can lose not only a lot of what provides a high quality of life, but even your ability to perform and relate to others. Mana, if you will, perhaps. (Sometimes I wonder if anyone knows what mana is).
I don't think this applies to Stephens (and I think it is Stephens with a ph, by the way) in the sense that I think he may have abused celebrity this way... but it might help explain why Stephens sister just saw him as her brother. Not such a bad thing, really. At least, for him to work at. Perhaps part of the "dangerous charge" that I've heard mana described as is the threat that those relationships will color yours with a new individual too much. This would fit with what Pirsig wrote in "Lila" (which is where I assume you're taking your info) about going straight to hell once you get famous. Ersatz mana (negative relationship vectors) discoloring relationships at the outset.
Tangentially, I think that community is a bigger part of hacker/open source culture than it is contemporary mainstream, which is why mana or egoboo or whatever you might want to term or call things would be more important within it, but not seen so much outside of it.
I think Card, what with all his talk of individual mystical talents in some of his fiction, would also be intruiged by the statement To everyone who knew him (Stephens), it seemd he cared about the things that mattered most to them. That's a very powerful way to build real relationships with people.
I beleive the page you reference, but what I'm curious about is: if the phones use JavaOS, then why don't they run Java applets?
Never thought I'd say it, but here I am. That article is _very_ informative (if it's true).
Keep a copy of all email sent, but make it clear that company policy is not to search it unless there's a complaint of abuse. Hopefully, the consequence would be that the employee realizes there's a record kept of everything they send, and that will make them more responsible.
I know this sounds a little bit like those stupid voluntary privacy policies that people like doubleClick have. But you're not them. You're a small business concerned about balancing privacy with responsibility. You might be able to handle it.
Also, I really think that with the number of ways that someone can send and receive email today on the net, use of a company account for personal business is really not a must.
One thing that doesn't add up -- if everything this guy says is true -- is why console emulators are so popular. OK, lots of them are for _old_ games... my TI-99/4A just doesn't work anymore and I like Parsec, so rather than going to a thrift store and trying to find a working TI, I download an emulator and play (after hunting for ROMs for a week and a half).
But there's also new emulators, like Connectix's, and the N64 emulators, and the like. I don't know how much money Connectix is making, but they generally seem to be a solid company that knows what they're doing (perhaps their task was made easier by the fact that HW compatibility is easier on the Macintosh). If what this guy was saying is totally true, it would seem emulators wouldn't be popular at all.
I also don't see how Microsoft is just going to make all other console makers roll over and die. They couldn't do it with the handheld market, because they had determined competition that knew what they were doing. In the console industry, they've got entrenched competition that have been battling hard over the last 15 years. A Microsoft monopoly? Not likely.
And finally, from the article:
very time there's a new generation of consoles in the works," says game developer Greg Costikyan," there are stories about how consoles are going to kill the PC as a platform. The fact is, they never have, and never will. There's a larger base of PCs than there is of any console platform. People buy them for reasons other than playing games, but want games to play on them too."
Yep.
"Yes, a stable platform makes some aspects of
development easy. [But] a 'bigger market' will simply drive development budgets higher, driving increasing conservatism."
This is one reason why Mac gaming isn't bigger. The platform is much more predictable than the PC, because of its closed nature... but the audience is smaller.
Now, however, what if we added MORE competition? The idea I have in mind is a "just-in-time" publishing company that would sell textbooks to students in the format that they want (CD or print). By doing one offs, and perhaps foregoing huge profit margins that publishing companies think they need, you might be able to get pricing competetive enough that students would prefer buying from you. If you could also make it more renumerative to those actually writing the textbooks, then you'd see some success. As to potential copying problems with the electronic format, you could provide some limited copy protection -- enough that what with your lower prices and all, most students would rather just buy the book than mess with trying to crack it.
And then, when VitalViewer comes to your University and says: "Look! Electronic publishing!", the adminstration can frown and say "Hmmm. We already have that."
What is gravity pushing? What's the proof you have to pull off?
I've mentioned it before and I'll mention it again: Sheep...Sheep is a semi-natural programming language...
And it's also somewhat hard to track down on
the net. Do you have any URLs?
Here's the closest thing I've found
to a reference:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~wvo96r/proglang/
This is the weirdest programming language page
I've ever seen. Wow.
This reminds me of the silly question "If nothing sticks to teflon, how do they get it to stick to the pan?"
Surely you don't mean that friction tape literally sticks to nothing but itself...
Do you?
And where do we get this stuff?
OK, it's true. The article doesn't call for banning of telnet or ftp. Just unsecure telnet and ftp.
But will college administrators (not technical administrators, organizational administrators) understand this? These are the same people who decided the best thing was to convert everything over to NT, at my school....
One thing I like about HTTP and POP3 (and some
other protocols) is that I can just telnet into
the appropriate port and type the commands if I
want to. I actually check my mail this way fairly
frequently.
BXXP may complicate this.....
I think I heard a variant on this story in my Genetic Algorithms class. That either means it's true or folklore. Anyone have a citation?
... getting a program that has to be in order is just too hard. So the functional language people have something to hold over us all yet again. :)
Interestingly enough, the instructor of the class recommended that "Genetic Programming" be done only in a functional or logical language
subject says it all
So what I'm wondering is... why were they wrong?
Having just read Farenheit 451 (sat on my bookshelf for 5 years, but I was prodded to action by a recent slashdot review), I'd want what every good totalitarian state official would want -- one of them mechanical hounds. Of course, I'd only use it for good...
It's sortof lame to just put up a "good move, guys" post, but I'm so impressed, I feel compelled. I don't know who thought of this from the Offspring "camp", but it's just beautiful. Now if Offspring decides to sue/say bad things about/throw rotten tomatoes at Napster, really, who is going to blame them?
"Napster's all about freedom from greed through IP restrictions." Yeah. Right. I can hear the sound of any remaining illusions collapsing right now.
Broadvision is coming to my workplace soon. There's no choice. I'm interested in hearing more about it if anyone's got the time to elaborate. Also, if you have any tips that would be helpful in working with it, or becoming familiar with it (other than www.broadvision.com) would be welcome.
I'm disappointed they didn't include a reference to Bruce Perens' excellent comments on the matter. His essay not only weighs what's happening morally, but brings out an important insight: the less responsibly people behave with creations like Napster, the more ammo the greedy have to hit us with. Music Bootlegging with Napster Hurts Free Software. It's a bit frightening....
Of course some of us aren't all that happy when we see interoperability suffering, no matter who the culprit is. But when Microsoft does something like this, everyone becomes very wary, because they've shown they have the market clout and the disposition to try to force their stuff down everyone's throat. Sortof the difference between anyone worrying about lil' ol' ME buying a gun, vs. a violent criminal.
My third programming job was my first experience with software engineering. I'd had 4 years of experience at two other jobs -- one where I wrote code for a InterLibrary Loan book lending database, and one where I worked on an e-commerce package. There was not a thing at either place that would qualify as a spec, and there was no process in place for engineering. I didn't know anyone who used specs. I assumed that this was something that was taught by computer science professors, but wasn't actually practiced by anyone.
:)
Then I got a job at the Waterford Institute. Their process wasn't probably as tight as the space shuttle, but there WAS a process, and there were specs. Nice specs. Nearly psuedo-code.
We were programming educational activites for kids learning math. Activities were created by design teams consisting of an educator, an artists, a tech writer, and a programmer. The tech writer would document everything that went on at the meetings, and distill it into spec. The design team would meet regularly over a period of several months, refining the spec until it was solid.
The spec described various states of the software. When a user did something, the state of the software changed, and did something accordingly. I'd never seen software described this way, but it made a big impression on me, and it made things easy to write and debug.
('course, the platform we were writting on was in Java, which kept changing, and in-house developers were writing our own object library, which kept changing too, so your code would work one day, and then wouldn't the next, so everything wasn't perfect. But hey. I was impressed with the specs
The Orem (Utah) Public Library lends DVDs to anyone with a card -- free. A few of the local video stores rent them. Obviously, lending is OK under some circumstances.
Weston
It's true that the points raised by the questions are points to be reckoned with. It seems to this non-lawyer that Andover has a strong legal position. I expect that's the message that they were trying to send.
However, the letter is extremely cocky, and I have to say I was put off by that. Yes, to those of us who agree with Slashdot's position, it seems like a stinging rebuke. But their legal position isn't perfect, and even if it seemed that way, we all know that legal decisions don't always turn out reasonably.
I would have been happier if the cockiness of the letter was matched with a more explicit strength of exposition (No, I'm not talking about legalese or weasel words). I would be even happier still if Slashdot would actually remove the one post that they probably can still lose on (the direct posting of the spec). Even if it's LEGAL to keep that post up (and that really is the one area of this whole brouhuaha that I doubt), is it really ethical? Microsoft asked that people take steps to protect it. Everyone here knew that. Go ahead. Use any method you want to circumvent agreeing to the license. But redistributing the info is still a questionable action. If nothing else, trying to keep above reasonable reproach is good PR (ethics aside), even when up against an unscrupulous enemy. Slashdot could gain a lot of points by taking it down, and even avoid their biggest headache.
I do understand that this is being used as a battlefield for principles, and I uphold those principles. I'm very worried about our freedoms. But we need to fight wisely and make our cases tight. In the legal world, losing a battle doesn't just mean you don't gain the field, you also lose ground. I've noticed that in the computer industry, we almost seem to share certain battle chutzpah with Microsoft. Look at MP3.com throwing themselves into battle with the RIAA. It wasn't all that hard to predict that they might get caught on redistributing recordings they didn't hold the copyright too, even if they did have a fairly reasonable argument. The RecordTV.com people are doomed. Napster users who are redistributing music that they don't hold copyright on and don't have permission to redistribute don't have a legal leg to stand on, regardless of whether or not it benefits the bands (and let me insert here that I'm a musician and have freely released some of my music to be indiscriminatly copied because I beleive in the benefit). They're hurting the cause of freedom because of their irresponsible actions. If it seems to people that we are irresponsible, then the bad guys have that much more of a case for regulation. Unethical, irresponsible, and just plain bad-PR behavior provide a (not altogether) phantom menace for our greedy opposition to play with.
Bruce Perens has some insightful comments about this on technocrat.net. I highly recommend them. Open Source/Free software isn't about freedom to do anything you like without consequence. It's not about disrespecting for others, even when they're wrong. Let's make sure we are the good guys as well as fighting the bad.
(That said, I hope Andover knocks Microsoft on their unethical behind).
Release of Mac OS X Beta to Developers: 90% Although sources have been unusually noncomittal about specific ship dates on Beta, the timing is right and the release is by all appearances very nearly ready to go.
According to announcements, they ARE close to releasing a Beta to developers. At least, if you consider developers a subset of the public. "This summer" is indeed pretty vague, but it's approximately similar to "real soon."
Also, at least some folks in the the developer program have had previews in various incremental states for some time now. Developer updates happen every so often. The announcment did not exclude the possibility of releasing new stuff to developers, soon, or even today. It just may not have been announced as the public "beta".
Your post smacks simply of rancor towards Apple and the Mac Rumors press.
Alright, I'm going to look ignorant. But
what DOES ++@_[0]; do?
As for the comment on trying to use traditional substring functions, all I have to say is that I
love regular expressions. Several years ago, I was writing a web server log analysis program for a turnkey e-commerce package. I did not know regexps, and I was required to write in C. I ended up coming up with a half-brained conception of regexps and trying to write my own (buggy) module to handle them. When I later learned PERL and regexps and discovered there was a regular expressions package for C, I mourned for months of lost youth. Sigh...
I appreciate the thought. I've actually looked into it (studied composition at BYU for a bit), and was really intrigued by this stuff for a while. After a while, though, something began to bother me about it. Part of it was that the music didn't match my aesthetics (although I do like some of it, and I recognize these guys contributed an awful lot). But part of what I realized was twentieth century theory -- by throwing out traditional harmony -- was actually moving away from the ideal expressed in Dirk Gently (although, their formalization of ideas about form moves towards it, I think. The idea of basic transformations on a melody line is very useful). The stuff I've heard from Babbit and Webern was many things, but deeply satisfying wasn't one of them (for me), and I think the reason had to do with throwing out traditional harmony, which describes a subset of satisfying relationships between tones (and even, when combined with a discussion of the harmonic series, explains, sortof, why).