If someone can come up with an even more hostile, alienating device for call centers, I'm rooting for them!
Microsoft did it for me.
This was about the fifth or sixth time I'd called Microsoft support, when we were upgrading our first Windows NT domain from an NT 3.1 server to 3.51... I got a nice helpful-sounding bloke who proceded to take me through a set of directions that, within minutes after hanging up, left our whole network down because of a licensing problem. I called them back and was told that I'd used up my three free support calls and I needed to set up a support contract... could I give them my credit card or purchase order number?
I'm afraid I got a bit ironic, not to say sarcastic, with them before I hung up and ran off to get purchasing to start the paperwork for a support contract. I then used Usenet (this was before google) to get the answer, fixed the problem, and a week later someone from Microsoft called me, apologised, gave me the same instructions I got from Usenet, and said they'd reset my three free support calls.
I don't think we used any of them.
Now I realise that this was atypical, and I've met some really good people at Microsoft more than willing to go the extra mile for the customer...
But you have to admit that taking a network down and asking for money to fix it is a mite more hostile than voice menus.:)
ISO9000 just means you have documented procedures and you track the steps you take when you follow those procedures.
You shouldn't even need to go to the lengths of merging the code bases.
Document the procedures for auditing and verifying external software to the standards of your internally written software, create an ISO9000 process for tracking those procedures, and follow them.
There's absolutely nothing that Linux, Microsoft, nor anyone else with a dog in the fight to get proprietary codecs bundled with Linux distros... which is what this comes down to... that will have any impact on "the iPod generation". It's certainly got nothing to do with any hostility of "open source" people towards binary modules.
Q: What will it take to get Linux to work as smoothly with something like an iPod as well as an iPod works with a Mac (or at least my Windows machine)?
A: It will take somebody who's prepared to buy the rights for those technologies on behalf of the Linux community and then distribute them as a product.
BZZT. Wrong. Apple doesn't sell the technology for "working with an iPod", except through ports of iTunes. And it couldn't be easier to run iTunes on Linux than it is today. iTunes is built on a platform-independant toolkit, already runs on UNIX (OS X) and Windows, and all the codecs are in it... but working with an iPod doesn't require any proprietary codecs. The native codecs on the iPod are all open standards... it's only the iTunes Music Store encryption that requires proprietary code... but even there, you don't need proprietary codecs to play AAC files.
Q: So it's not just a technical problem?
A: Well, no. The main problems are actually legal rather than technical. Reverse engineering these codecs is not really difficult; the real problem is that if you distribute them, you get sued.
However, reverse-engineering the tools to install MP3 and MP4 (AAC) music to play on the iPod and distributing them hasn't gotten anyone sued yet. You don't need to reverse-engineer any codecs at all to do that.
Q: So why do you suppose Steve Jobs resists this?
A: The reason is Steve Jobs has a fundamental obsession with good industrial design.
The reason is Linux' tiny desktop market share. There's no upside for Apple in porting iTunes to Linux. Look, it's hard enough to get software companies to port software to Apple's operating system, and it's way ahead of Linux on the desktop. If there's even a dozen commercial packages for Linux of use to the general public, I'd be amazed. The only ones I know of are video games...
Q: What kind of compromises did you mean?
A: I mean that we need to be prepared to go to the rights holders for these proprietary codecs and say, we'll give you money, give us a license. This is something that the Linux community has a huge antipathy to doing because we've got all this idealism about open source.
It's something the Linux community has an antipathy to doing because there's no benefit to the Linux community to being able to buy music from the "also ran" music stores, because that still won't let you play the music from them on your iPod... and because there's not a lot of money in the Linux community.
They'd do better financing licensed ports of business software, so that people could use Linux at work and have it filter down to the home. That was one of the big advantages Microsoft had, historically... run Windows at home, and take home your copy of Office from work. At different times Microsoft's winked at or even promoted this kind of "piracy"... because it spread both Windows and Office everywhere.
Q: And meanwhile, you hope to make someone like Apple or other device makers more comfortable with open source?
A: It's more like we need to gain lots of market share now so that we could put pressure on them more effectively later.
It's hard to imagine Apple as being "not comfortable with Open Source".
ESR's right, here, Linux needs to gain market share if it's going to be taken seriously enough to make ports of software like iTunes seem worthwhile. But ports of codecs that Windows-only media software uses isn't going to help anyone but Microsoft.
If you need virtualization to "unbundle" it into modules, then something's seriously wrong with the overall design... or you're not actually unbundling it.
I mean, when I think about "unbundling" Windows, I think about something like this:
* Windows NT "core" - NT kernel, the Win32 subsystem, Windows explorer and registry editor and the other associated utilities needed to boot to a desktop with no bundled applications or enhancements.
* Windows Network "core" - Windows firewall, Windows Networking, TCP/IP, and associated utilities. Depends on the Windows NT core.
* Windows Graphics "core" - DirectX 2d and desktop enhancements that use them, Aero, Windows XP effects and transitions, and utilities. Depends on the Windows NT core.
* Windows Web "core" - The HTML control, HTTP and other internet protocols, Internet Explorer and Outlook, and the associated utilities. Depends on the Windows Network core.
* Windows Media "core" - Windows Media Player, CD and DVD burning, and associated utilities. Depends on the Windows Web core and the Windows Graphics core.
* Windows Gaming "core" - DirectX 3d support, Windows 9x compatibility support, and associated utilities. Depends on the Windows Graphics and Network cores.
* Windows Access "core" - Interix, Remote Desktop, Telnet, FTP and other legacy protocols, User Switching. Depends on the Windows Graphics and Network cores.
* Windows Office "core" - Active Directory, RPC, SMS, all the "Pro" versus "Home" stuff. Depends on the Windows Networking core.
I mean, Windows is designed from the ground up to be divided this way. They sell embedded versions of Windows NT that work this way, and Windows CE uses the same basic API with a different set of libraries... you can even develop for CE on Windows and run CE applications under Windows with the right DLLs.
So I don't believe they need virtualization to make Windows "modular", the monolithic nature of desktop Windows is a marketing decision... not a technical one. By virtualizing, they get to sell you multiple copies of Windows for one computer. No wonder they want to go that way... it's more a wonder they took so long to catch on!
That's a familiar story - schools waste a lot of money on MS products around here because the one making the decisions either hasn't a clue there are alternatives, or because they don't WANT to look for them.
All kinds of organizations, public and private sector, educational, charitable, and commercial, do the same thing. Big businesses find themselves in nasty traps because they spend huge amounts of money on centralizing their office automation tools but don't bother considering what parts of the company are already using. At my last job our per-desktop costs went through the roof because we got billed for our shares of the "cheap" bulk licenses of Windows-based tools... but the alternative of enabling the open system back ends to the Lotus and other servers wasn't available, because the company had committed to a per-employee license fee whether they used them or not.
They say Pluto hasn't cleared its orbit. How do they know? Pluto's orbit doesn't actually intersect Neptune's, so the fact that it's eccentric enough to appear to cross on a plan view is irrelevant. Have they plotted enouh objects sharing Pluto's orbit to suggest that there are significantly more "Pluto Grazers" than there are "Earth grazers"?
And the argument about Charon and Pluto and Charon's center of gravity (a common one brought up by pundits) also applies to earth... because the Moon's orbit is concave to the Sun at every point the Earth and the Moon are equally accurately described as sharing an orbit in synchrony. There's no significance to the relation between the center of gravity and the surface... that's an accident of orbital distance and the density of the objects. The Earth and the Moon are as much a double-planet system as Pluto and Charon are a double-"pluton" system.
Not that astronomers have a monopoly over daft definitions. Zoological taxonomy is full of "if I call this a species I'll get tenure" decisions. Particularly among the entomologists.
You're right, that is screwed up. I thought the whole "copy in RAM" legal fiction had been shot down long since.
It definitely needs to be.
The site that transmitted the document is the one that made the copy. The copy in RAM is as meaningless as the copy stored temporarily in the phosphors of the television screen. Hell, they used to use the phosphors of picture tubes as main memory, back in the '50s and '60s.
Blame Sun. If they didn't require you to download Java from them every Linux distro would have it nicely packaged by default and it'd just work.
IMHO, if Sun's going to require people download and install Java by hand, Sun needs to have a team dedicated to nothing but making that process as easy as possible for EVERY platform. If they're not, they need to let third parties do it for them. If neither, then I say *don't* install Java and complain to every website *using* Java about their lack of civic responsibility.
While OS X isn't perfect by any means, and while most of the actual hardware sucks, the main advantage of the Mac is that it lets you get so much closer to treating it as a tool rather than a lifestyle...
It's not that Gecko is insecure, it's that the way Firefox extensions install and run mirrors (albeit at the application rather than the rendering engine level) the ghastly security hole that is ActiveX.
There must not be a mechanism in a web browser (or any other application that displays untrusted content) for a document to request privileges above and beyond those that are actually required for displaying untrusted content. Rather, the user must request privileges by installing a plugin or extension outside the encapsulated user interface.
If uploading isn't relevant, it should be easy enough to find a case involving someone downloading from Usenet, from an FTP server, or doing anything else that doesn't involve the use of a P2P client.
I've been asking for an example of a case like that since... hell, since before the Berne Convention came in force in the USA.
That's getting on for 20 years now. Not one case has come up that didn't involve someone distributing material as well as downloading it.
I'm not saying "OS X isn't worth paying 40% more". Quite the contrary.
I'm saying "There's a 40% premium on Macs... which means that's what OS X is worth".
Everything you listed, that's all down to OS X. It's not the hardware that's doing it, it's the software.
I built that machine before the Mini came out, then I bought a Mini. Because the software made the otherwise mediocre and (if you don't count the software) overpriced hardware worth it.
We bought a bunch of "secure" drives (unintentionally, I might add, we had no interest in the "security" features), and found that unlike regular flash drives anything that damaged the file system on the drive meant you had a dead device... because you couldn't reformat it without a special program... and getting a copy of that program was basically impossible. Oh, they claimed you could do it by sending a letter from the CEO on corporate letterhead requesting a copy... and jumping through additional hoops after that... but there was never a response from this "initial handshake".
Now, they're not terribly expensive... but they're no more secure than an encrypted file system in a regular file on the drive. You're paying more money for no better security than you can set up yourself, and dealing with the hidden costs of lost data... both directly, and because the guy in the field can't initialise a trashed file system himself so he doesn't have a device handy to get a copy of the customer's data when he needs it.
The whole technology seems to be implemented in the wrong place to me.
All you have to do is take a job in a Windows shop for about three months and see how the other half lives.
Which has bugger all to do with my comment, since the subject was all about the value of running OS X on generic hardware rather than Macs, but before I get into that let me say that I've been a UNIX and Windows system administrator for 20 years (so take your sob stories about having to deal with idiot Windows users ans shove them where the sun don't shine... I'm sure I can top them all). And of course I've had to support Mac users as well, being the token non-Windows guy (Mac, Amiga, UNIX, BeOS, you name it), so I know that your characterization of Mac users is overstating the case (at the least).
But to get back to the point, Apple's reputation for hardware quality rests on the wilingness of Apple's best users to put up with utter crap like the Powermac 6000 "series", or Rev A G3s and iMacs, or the Powermac 8100 case, or the many other "Road Apples" apple has strewn their way. To bring things up to the present day... Apple's current crop of laptops, including my own Macbook Pro, are horrible. There's nothing special about Apple hardware, and there's no reason to assume that installing Leopard on a Thinkpad instead of a Macbook, or a good-quality white-box clone instead of a Mac mini, will set the user up for a fall.
These citations are all in cases involving P2P technology where the software doesn't provide an easy way to download without uploading as well, so there was no class of defendants who were simply downloading without being redistributors as well.
Do you have any citations that don't involve P2P software, in which someone who merely recieved the copy was prosecuted successfully?
Stop reading dirk's message after this point. Arguments about copyright based on physical objects, trespassing, adverse posession, or other scenarios that involve an act that deprives the victim of the use of the object, land, and so on... these arguments are all invalid, irrelevant, pointless, and simply nonsensical.
You'd be better off arguing that someone had stolen something from you by taking a photograph of your house and garden.
As pointed out by the first-cousin-once-removed post, in some jurisdictions, such as the UK, copying to a transient medium like RAM is still a violation.
It's legal in the US to record music from the radio, to rip it from your CDs, to record it on a cassette tape from another cassette tape or CD or LP, to download it from the Internet (but not to upload it, and of course P2P filesharing technology makes everyone a redistributor), to stick a microphone out your window and record it from your neighbours stereo...
So, given that, the burden of proof is on the RIAA. And they know it, why do you think they go to such efforts to catch people actually using P2P software to get their music fix?
I've never been quite sure that there was a good technical argument for not simply calling the earth-moon system a double planet, so let the moon be a planet. Who does it hurt... it's just a name.
Slashdot Mirror
If someone can come up with an even more hostile, alienating device for call centers, I'm rooting for them!
:)
Microsoft did it for me.
This was about the fifth or sixth time I'd called Microsoft support, when we were upgrading our first Windows NT domain from an NT 3.1 server to 3.51... I got a nice helpful-sounding bloke who proceded to take me through a set of directions that, within minutes after hanging up, left our whole network down because of a licensing problem. I called them back and was told that I'd used up my three free support calls and I needed to set up a support contract... could I give them my credit card or purchase order number?
I'm afraid I got a bit ironic, not to say sarcastic, with them before I hung up and ran off to get purchasing to start the paperwork for a support contract. I then used Usenet (this was before google) to get the answer, fixed the problem, and a week later someone from Microsoft called me, apologised, gave me the same instructions I got from Usenet, and said they'd reset my three free support calls.
I don't think we used any of them.
Now I realise that this was atypical, and I've met some really good people at Microsoft more than willing to go the extra mile for the customer...
But you have to admit that taking a network down and asking for money to fix it is a mite more hostile than voice menus.
ISO9000 just means you have documented procedures and you track the steps you take when you follow those procedures.
You shouldn't even need to go to the lengths of merging the code bases.
Document the procedures for auditing and verifying external software to the standards of your internally written software, create an ISO9000 process for tracking those procedures, and follow them.
BZZT. Wrong. Apple doesn't sell the technology for "working with an iPod", except through ports of iTunes. And it couldn't be easier to run iTunes on Linux than it is today. iTunes is built on a platform-independant toolkit, already runs on UNIX (OS X) and Windows, and all the codecs are in it... but working with an iPod doesn't require any proprietary codecs. The native codecs on the iPod are all open standards... it's only the iTunes Music Store encryption that requires proprietary code... but even there, you don't need proprietary codecs to play AAC files.
However, reverse-engineering the tools to install MP3 and MP4 (AAC) music to play on the iPod and distributing them hasn't gotten anyone sued yet. You don't need to reverse-engineer any codecs at all to do that.
The reason is Linux' tiny desktop market share. There's no upside for Apple in porting iTunes to Linux. Look, it's hard enough to get software companies to port software to Apple's operating system, and it's way ahead of Linux on the desktop. If there's even a dozen commercial packages for Linux of use to the general public, I'd be amazed. The only ones I know of are video games...
It's something the Linux community has an antipathy to doing because there's no benefit to the Linux community to being able to buy music from the "also ran" music stores, because that still won't let you play the music from them on your iPod... and because there's not a lot of money in the Linux community.
They'd do better financing licensed ports of business software, so that people could use Linux at work and have it filter down to the home. That was one of the big advantages Microsoft had, historically... run Windows at home, and take home your copy of Office from work. At different times Microsoft's winked at or even promoted this kind of "piracy"... because it spread both Windows and Office everywhere.
It's hard to imagine Apple as being "not comfortable with Open Source".
ESR's right, here, Linux needs to gain market share if it's going to be taken seriously enough to make ports of software like iTunes seem worthwhile. But ports of codecs that Windows-only media software uses isn't going to help anyone but Microsoft.
If you need virtualization to "unbundle" it into modules, then something's seriously wrong with the overall design... or you're not actually unbundling it.
I mean, when I think about "unbundling" Windows, I think about something like this:
* Windows NT "core" - NT kernel, the Win32 subsystem, Windows explorer and registry editor and the other associated utilities needed to boot to a desktop with no bundled applications or enhancements.
* Windows Network "core" - Windows firewall, Windows Networking, TCP/IP, and associated utilities. Depends on the Windows NT core.
* Windows Graphics "core" - DirectX 2d and desktop enhancements that use them, Aero, Windows XP effects and transitions, and utilities. Depends on the Windows NT core.
* Windows Web "core" - The HTML control, HTTP and other internet protocols, Internet Explorer and Outlook, and the associated utilities. Depends on the Windows Network core.
* Windows Media "core" - Windows Media Player, CD and DVD burning, and associated utilities. Depends on the Windows Web core and the Windows Graphics core.
* Windows Gaming "core" - DirectX 3d support, Windows 9x compatibility support, and associated utilities. Depends on the Windows Graphics and Network cores.
* Windows Access "core" - Interix, Remote Desktop, Telnet, FTP and other legacy protocols, User Switching. Depends on the Windows Graphics and Network cores.
* Windows Office "core" - Active Directory, RPC, SMS, all the "Pro" versus "Home" stuff. Depends on the Windows Networking core.
I mean, Windows is designed from the ground up to be divided this way. They sell embedded versions of Windows NT that work this way, and Windows CE uses the same basic API with a different set of libraries... you can even develop for CE on Windows and run CE applications under Windows with the right DLLs.
So I don't believe they need virtualization to make Windows "modular", the monolithic nature of desktop Windows is a marketing decision... not a technical one. By virtualizing, they get to sell you multiple copies of Windows for one computer. No wonder they want to go that way... it's more a wonder they took so long to catch on!
That's a familiar story - schools waste a lot of money on MS products around here because
the one making the decisions either hasn't a clue there are alternatives, or because they don't WANT
to look for them.
All kinds of organizations, public and private sector, educational, charitable, and commercial, do the same thing. Big businesses find themselves in nasty traps because they spend huge amounts of money on centralizing their office automation tools but don't bother considering what parts of the company are already using. At my last job our per-desktop costs went through the roof because we got billed for our shares of the "cheap" bulk licenses of Windows-based tools... but the alternative of enabling the open system back ends to the Lotus and other servers wasn't available, because the company had committed to a per-employee license fee whether they used them or not.
So it's a big problem in big business as well.
They say Pluto hasn't cleared its orbit. How do they know? Pluto's orbit doesn't actually intersect Neptune's, so the fact that it's eccentric enough to appear to cross on a plan view is irrelevant. Have they plotted enouh objects sharing Pluto's orbit to suggest that there are significantly more "Pluto Grazers" than there are "Earth grazers"?
And the argument about Charon and Pluto and Charon's center of gravity (a common one brought up by pundits) also applies to earth... because the Moon's orbit is concave to the Sun at every point the Earth and the Moon are equally accurately described as sharing an orbit in synchrony. There's no significance to the relation between the center of gravity and the surface... that's an accident of orbital distance and the density of the objects. The Earth and the Moon are as much a double-planet system as Pluto and Charon are a double-"pluton" system.
Not that astronomers have a monopoly over daft definitions. Zoological taxonomy is full of "if I call this a species I'll get tenure" decisions. Particularly among the entomologists.
I've had google based Usenet posters tell me there's nothing wrong with them posting anything they want on "their" Google Groups.
They were downloading copies from the Internet, not leaking software they'd acquired in their jobs.
There's a difference between irony and sarcasm.
You're right, that is screwed up. I thought the whole "copy in RAM" legal fiction had been shot down long since.
It definitely needs to be.
The site that transmitted the document is the one that made the copy. The copy in RAM is as meaningless as the copy stored temporarily in the phosphors of the television screen. Hell, they used to use the phosphors of picture tubes as main memory, back in the '50s and '60s.
Blame Sun. If they didn't require you to download Java from them every Linux distro would have it nicely packaged by default and it'd just work.
IMHO, if Sun's going to require people download and install Java by hand, Sun needs to have a team dedicated to nothing but making that process as easy as possible for EVERY platform. If they're not, they need to let third parties do it for them. If neither, then I say *don't* install Java and complain to every website *using* Java about their lack of civic responsibility.
While OS X isn't perfect by any means, and while most of the actual hardware sucks, the main advantage of the Mac is that it lets you get so much closer to treating it as a tool rather than a lifestyle...
It's not that Gecko is insecure, it's that the way Firefox extensions install and run mirrors (albeit at the application rather than the rendering engine level) the ghastly security hole that is ActiveX.
There must not be a mechanism in a web browser (or any other application that displays untrusted content) for a document to request privileges above and beyond those that are actually required for displaying untrusted content. Rather, the user must request privileges by installing a plugin or extension outside the encapsulated user interface.
If uploading isn't relevant, it should be easy enough to find a case involving someone downloading from Usenet, from an FTP server, or doing anything else that doesn't involve the use of a P2P client.
I've been asking for an example of a case like that since... hell, since before the Berne Convention came in force in the USA.
That's getting on for 20 years now. Not one case has come up that didn't involve someone distributing material as well as downloading it.
I'm not saying "OS X isn't worth paying 40% more". Quite the contrary.
I'm saying "There's a 40% premium on Macs... which means that's what OS X is worth".
Everything you listed, that's all down to OS X. It's not the hardware that's doing it, it's the software.
I built that machine before the Mini came out, then I bought a Mini. Because the software made the otherwise mediocre and (if you don't count the software) overpriced hardware worth it.
We bought a bunch of "secure" drives (unintentionally, I might add, we had no interest in the "security" features), and found that unlike regular flash drives anything that damaged the file system on the drive meant you had a dead device... because you couldn't reformat it without a special program... and getting a copy of that program was basically impossible. Oh, they claimed you could do it by sending a letter from the CEO on corporate letterhead requesting a copy... and jumping through additional hoops after that... but there was never a response from this "initial handshake".
Now, they're not terribly expensive... but they're no more secure than an encrypted file system in a regular file on the drive. You're paying more money for no better security than you can set up yourself, and dealing with the hidden costs of lost data... both directly, and because the guy in the field can't initialise a trashed file system himself so he doesn't have a device handy to get a copy of the customer's data when he needs it.
The whole technology seems to be implemented in the wrong place to me.
All you have to do is take a job in a Windows shop for about three months and see how the other half lives.
Which has bugger all to do with my comment, since the subject was all about the value of running OS X on generic hardware rather than Macs, but before I get into that let me say that I've been a UNIX and Windows system administrator for 20 years (so take your sob stories about having to deal with idiot Windows users ans shove them where the sun don't shine... I'm sure I can top them all). And of course I've had to support Mac users as well, being the token non-Windows guy (Mac, Amiga, UNIX, BeOS, you name it), so I know that your characterization of Mac users is overstating the case (at the least).
But to get back to the point, Apple's reputation for hardware quality rests on the wilingness of Apple's best users to put up with utter crap like the Powermac 6000 "series", or Rev A G3s and iMacs, or the Powermac 8100 case, or the many other "Road Apples" apple has strewn their way. To bring things up to the present day... Apple's current crop of laptops, including my own Macbook Pro, are horrible. There's nothing special about Apple hardware, and there's no reason to assume that installing Leopard on a Thinkpad instead of a Macbook, or a good-quality white-box clone instead of a Mac mini, will set the user up for a fall.
It's legal in the US to record music from the radio
Sometimes. It depends. [etc...]
Can you provide an example where any of these things are illegal, in the USA which is where the RIAA operates?
And without examples of someone who was also distributing the material: for example, using P2P software, or playing the music at an event.
These citations are all in cases involving P2P technology where the software doesn't provide an easy way to download without uploading as well, so there was no class of defendants who were simply downloading without being redistributors as well.
Do you have any citations that don't involve P2P software, in which someone who merely recieved the copy was prosecuted successfully?
Transfer this theory to RL theft.
Stop reading dirk's message after this point. Arguments about copyright based on physical objects, trespassing, adverse posession, or other scenarios that involve an act that deprives the victim of the use of the object, land, and so on... these arguments are all invalid, irrelevant, pointless, and simply nonsensical.
You'd be better off arguing that someone had stolen something from you by taking a photograph of your house and garden.
As pointed out by the first-cousin-once-removed post, in some jurisdictions, such as the UK, copying to a transient medium like RAM is still a violation.
Not relevant, we're talking about the RIAA.
Possession is illegal.
In the US, at least, possession of illegally copied material is not illegal, except for the special case of US currency.
This isn't a DRM story or a P2P story, it's a software patent story.
Sony can use the tech, they just can't force other media companies to pay them for it.
It's legal in the US to record music from the radio, to rip it from your CDs, to record it on a cassette tape from another cassette tape or CD or LP, to download it from the Internet (but not to upload it, and of course P2P filesharing technology makes everyone a redistributor), to stick a microphone out your window and record it from your neighbours stereo...
So, given that, the burden of proof is on the RIAA. And they know it, why do you think they go to such efforts to catch people actually using P2P software to get their music fix?
I've never been quite sure that there was a good technical argument for not simply calling the earth-moon system a double planet, so let the moon be a planet. Who does it hurt... it's just a name.