The only agreement they used to have with Microsoft is that they would not ship out OS-less systems unless they were commercial (say, you ordered X identical desktops because you needed identical installs customized to your enterprise). This is why an OS-less box from Dell back then come with a DOS CD (not MS, DR-DOS probably), so theoretically the box shipped out it was not OS-less.
This was back when MS was threatening to cancel their volume OS pricing for OEMs that sold OS-less boxes because many times they would end up running a pirated version of Windows.
If you are fresh out of college but walk into your interview with a couple years of active work in open source projects, you will make a good impression.
If I have to hire a guy right out of college I would love to find one that has helped run an open source project that is in wide distribution. This way at least I know the programmer has been exposed to real life situations like scope creep, managing user expectations, quality assurance, etc.
Internships don't hurt either, my own employer has hired people that started with us as interns.
Heh, that was probably a Freudian slip on my part. I did mean piracy.
The cost lost is opportunity cost. Just because the person is using the stolen copy of MS Office Microsoft is not extending its lock. What is doing is losing revenue for one full copy of Office and a couple upgrades down the road. This is not about the morality of the situation, if your friend (or what the hell, mine) is in need and that need can easily be solved by copying a CD, we'll both take care of the need first and worry about the moral issue later.
Microsoft also loses money every time somebody uses a free product, but that is just competition.
And you are correct, MS is not going to hunt down individual users. The legal costs of prosecuting one illegal copy of MS Office is easily many times the cost of the software itself. But businesses are a whole different deal: one lawyer can easily hit pay dirt just by uncovering a dozen or so illegal copies of Office, XP or one of the server products.
And why is the BSA a bad thing by itself? Microsoft is losing a hell of a lot more money to privacy than to Open Source, so it is only logical that they fund BSA. Remember, the mission of BSA has nothing to do with open source, their purpose is to keep you from using software you did not pay for.
10-15 hours/day working from my home office, with half-hour naps every 4 hours or so.
I got bored with my music really quick, and both the video music channels and the digital music channels in cable use a rotation that is so short that halfway thru the day I was seeing/listening to the exact same stuff. With Discovery Wings (plus Hitler Channel) at least I would have something more varied. Worst case scenario it provided good background noise, plus the british accents of most of the documentary narrators sort of put you in a trance.
Most of my employees did it too, they were happier working 12-15 hours from home than working 8 at the office.
But not exactly enough to lose sleep over, the cheapest piece of crap TV tuner card still looks as good as a $100 TV.
I had a Hauppaugge WinTV PCI back in my Windows days, which was also back when I telecommuted a lot. I would keep a small TV window with Discovery Wings blasting all day and that kept me awake for 10-15 hour days. On 9/11 that card helped me take screen captures for my friends that were stuck at work and while the news websites were saturated, so at least they could see stills from the news coverage.
Now I am on a mac, so if possible I would shoot for something with firewire or USB 2 instead of USB1.
I also switched from Safari to Firefox about a week ago. I am in shock with how easy it was for me to switch over and not look back. My favorite features so far are the custom search engines I can add and also the ability to hide images by host.
I also like how if you open a bunch of tabs it reports all the dead tabs one after the other instead of having to go to each dead tab to OK the error message. And it is very nice to have the "Open in Tabs" in each bookmark folder instead of as a toggle in the bookmarks manager.
If you are bright then you will know better that to be overt about it. There is a lot of people that are insecure about their intellectual level, and see people (real or imaginary) that are "smarter" than them as a real threat.
If you are in school, I would stick to the normal curriculum and feed the hunger for a challenge elsewhere. Either study extra stuff for pleasure, or find an outlet to burn that energy. If you try to show off in school (which does not mean having the top grades, you can score high and still not come out as a nerd) then you will be ostracized. Also, do not under any circumstance skip grades. Intelligence is just one aspec, you still need emotional development, and is hard as hell to mature when everybody around you is a year or two older. I was skipped one grade in elementary school and one in high school, which meant I was a college freshman at 16 years old. It sucked in social terms.
You also need to get used to the idea that if you are really *that* smart, then most of the people aren't, so start learning to be patient and tolearant when people can't grasp things you can undestand instantly. It is not that *they* are slow, it is that you are too fast. Everybody loves the smart guy that gives a helping hand to others, but you will be universally scorned if you don't share the wealth.
By the way, Franklyn Lloyd Wright once said that it is hard to be humble when you are great:-)
I use OS X as a workstation and as my personal computer (actually, I use my personal Powerbook at work). Our mail server is freeBSD but our web server and database server are Windows 2000 and SQL Server. This is a very small company (15 employees) and while we got all employees working from OS X, it is very hard and expensive to drop what we are doing to shift our web applications to something different.
I am always willing to try new stuff but I have to respect the boss' wishes to stay on a mainstream platform. Before I got hired he got gang-raped by dot com bandits that totally blew it and cost him a fortune. Because of this he is very wary of php and mySQL and insists we keep using asp 3.0 and SQL Server 2000.
We also got a couple Windows XP PCs, but these are sitting in a corner and nobody wants to touch them, we usually leave them for our temps and interns.
At home I got one windows PC left, a 4-yr old Dell that is terminally infected and not connected to the home network. My wife uses it to play games whenever she can't find a version that runs on OS X. I am dying to convert it into a home server with freeBSD but the kid jammed something into the CD and floppy drives, so until I have time to sit and RTFM on how to do a net install, the thing remains unplugged from the network.
Re:Why bother with this junk when Mac OS X is here
on
FreeBSD 4.10 Released
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I am a Mac OS X user too, but my servers run on freeBSD.
Why? Because freeBSD runs on very inexpensive hardware. I don't have the budget to get Xserves here, and all the Powermac G4s are tied up as workstations. Yet I have a nice PIII rackmount that was doing nothing and now is happily running our mail services with absolutely zero hassles.
My personal server is a freeBSD jail, something I cannot get for OS X at the price that I got it.
For the record, one of the things that sold me into switching from XP Pro to OS X was that freeBSD legacy, since I had been using freeBSD for years before I even saw OS X working. freeBSD is anything but primitive.
The problem is not with moppets using SQL Server, it is with muppets administering it. A muppet with sensible user restrictions in his/her account should be able to make good use of SQL Server without compromising it.
Security by obscurity is a myth, making user tools harder to use is totally counterproductive and does not add to your security. A harder to use tool only means less people will use and that defeats the purpose.
SQL Server has not had a default password since SQL Server 7.
In SQL Server 2000 you would have to explicitly request "sa" to have a blank password, there is no way you can do this by accident. It even warns you in the installer that it is not recommended to leave "sa" with a blank password.
BTW, this behavior is present from version 1.0, it is not the result of a service pack or last minute security update.
1. Is anyone except Apple trying to leverage the GPU for non-3D tasks? Apple has been doing Quartz Extreme for a while but I have not heard if anyone else is doing it.
2. Has anyone tried something similar to what Quartz Extreme does but for non-graphical tasks?
3. How come GPU makers are not trying to make a CPU by themselves?
We have a prankster in the office too. For April Fools she did the post it prank on our CEO because she is one of those people that put post its on every damn thing they do.
The MPAA is going out of their way to tell you that no, you are not entitled to use a camcorder to record the movie. I have been to movies where it actually shows a slide that says "unauthorized recording of any part of this feature presentation is explicitly forbidden" and then it goes to outline the penalties. I have also seen a new MPAA campaign in which they use low-wage working joes from the movie industry to make thieves feel guilty.
The one I saw went for the throat, said something like "sure, if you steal the movie, the big shots are not getting hurt, but we the little guys do."
If you sit thru these ads and walk by the posters that explain the penalties, and you still get arrested, then you deserve it.
Try the Defense Reutilization Marketing Office (DRMO), an agency that DoD uses to get rid of surplus equipment. All of the armed services use the standard 19" form factor and sometimes you can get lucky and find one at DRMO for very little money. You can probably refurbish one for the cost of a couple cans of paint, maybe a power strip and a couple fans.
What kind of powerbook is this? I got Panther running on both a 15" Titanium 867 and a 15" Aluminum 1.25 and in both it runs beautifully. Before that I had Jaguar running on an 12" iBook 600 and it ran great.
Have not had any OS X trash itself in over 18 months since I switched to Mac, and was never slow. Of course, I never had SuSe trash itself on my last PC, but I find the OS X experience much more enjoyable.
This is what I consider the worst of the worst, which I had to do for 6 months in 2000:
The civilian personnel arm of one of the US Armed Forces was converting all the paperwork for their 200K+ civilian employees into db-driven websites. My company was a classic Oracle shop that jumped on the web band wagon at the right time so it got to hit on some fat government contracts like this one.
The project was to be built in MS Active Server Pages and Oracle.
Problem #1: We were not allowed to run IIS because it was unsecure a hell. Solution: Chili ASP (before Cobalt bought them) running on Netscape Enterprise Server on NT 4 server. The back end was Oracle 7. Chili was never intended to do this kind of work, and it turned a bad project into pure hell for the programmers, project managers and clients involved. It was bloody.
Problem #2: The project was time plus materials. The "not to exceed" was a joke, it was moved up every month. Time plus materials equals eternal project.
Problem #3: The project was run by consensus. There were ZERO specs, just a vague agreement. The project manager on our side and the client rep on their side argued and squabbled over the stupidest crap. I remember 2-3 hour meetings arguing over the proper data type for a field, which was a waste since the client's DBA (who had godlike powers) was not sitting at the meeting so we could not do jack without his blessing.
Problem #4: The people at the client's side used the project to pad their performance reviews and never gave a crap about wrapping it up. We had our client primary contract promoted twice, so we had to start all over.
I hated that project so much that I found a better job elsewhere and gave a standard 2-week notice. Little by little every person (except the PM) involved in that project bailed too.
The only good thing that happened with this project was that there were only two of us writing code and the server sucked so hard that we learned a lot on how to write fast code for ASP. It was the one skill I took from that job that is still relevant to me after almost 4 years since I left that company.
The second worst was a project that should have never been a web-based application. A huge company (just this branch in particular has 20,000 employees) hired us to write a cost pricing tool to crunch thru quarterly sales aggregates. This is the biggest db-driven product I have written, and it took almost a year of nightly 3-way curse-a-thons between the PM, the client and myself. It got worse because the PM is a very good friend of mine and the client is a very good friend of the PM, so things were quite hectic and tense. We had zero specs, and we were working by picking the brain off the client, who is a walking encyclopedia of business practices for his company.
Eventually I got the monster written and validated, and next thing I know the thing goes live and the savings for the first year are at least $10 million. Just the first frickin year! Then they flew me to their headquarters somewhere in Connecticut where they had me walk thru the code to the Indian programmers that would take over phase two. Those two guys from their Indian branch have been the only two web programers I have ever been able to explain this project that actually understood it on the first try. It's been almost two years since the handoff and they haven't called me, so either they did fine or the project got scrapped.
I don't think you want to blow one kilo of C4 from 50 feet away!
TiVo died the day comcast gave me a PVR cable box
on
TiVo Will Die
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· Score: 0
I was dying to get a PVR, then maybe a month before I had planned to nab a TiVo, Comcast calls to tell me they were offering a version of my digital cable box that had a PVR built-in. It was nothing stellar, only holds 30 to 50 hours of programming, but it is all-in-one.
Comcast wins.
Plus the monthly fee for the box itself is less than what it would cost to keep TiVo service.
The box is a Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8000 (they also have a model that can take HDTV). Nothing to write home about but it *is* saving me a bundle because I can program my 5-yr old's favorite shows and not have to worry about wear and tear of a VCR and tapes. And now that I am about to take delivery of a Powerbook with DVR burner I might experiment a bit with moving some of that content out of the PVR.
You did not get my post. After 5 years spent keeping two SSDC satellites clicking and ticking, those 22,300 miles feel really damn close. That's why to me the rock zipping by at 26,500 miles is of an order of magnitude that I can grasp too well for my comfort.
Plus, if the trajectory is known then FMC can order a temporary relocation maneuver to push the bird in danger out enough so the probability of impact is null.
BTW, sorry for the acronyms. SSDC is Space and Strategic Defense Command (the former Army Space Command). For some reason I never figured out, DoD comm payloads are run by the Army, and the other onboard systems are run by the USAF. FMC is Falcon Mission Control in Colorado Springs, the guys who would do the actual orbital maneuvers.
Back in my Army SSDC days our main geosynchronous comms satellites were on a 22,300 mile orbit. This thing is going to pass just above. Suddenly these 26,500 miles don't look *that* far to me.
Slashdot Mirror
The only agreement they used to have with Microsoft is that they would not ship out OS-less systems unless they were commercial (say, you ordered X identical desktops because you needed identical installs customized to your enterprise). This is why an OS-less box from Dell back then come with a DOS CD (not MS, DR-DOS probably), so theoretically the box shipped out it was not OS-less.
This was back when MS was threatening to cancel their volume OS pricing for OEMs that sold OS-less boxes because many times they would end up running a pirated version of Windows.
This is very solid advice.
If you are fresh out of college but walk into your interview with a couple years of active work in open source projects, you will make a good impression.
If I have to hire a guy right out of college I would love to find one that has helped run an open source project that is in wide distribution. This way at least I know the programmer has been exposed to real life situations like scope creep, managing user expectations, quality assurance, etc.
Internships don't hurt either, my own employer has hired people that started with us as interns.
Heh, that was probably a Freudian slip on my part. I did mean piracy.
The cost lost is opportunity cost. Just because the person is using the stolen copy of MS Office Microsoft is not extending its lock. What is doing is losing revenue for one full copy of Office and a couple upgrades down the road. This is not about the morality of the situation, if your friend (or what the hell, mine) is in need and that need can easily be solved by copying a CD, we'll both take care of the need first and worry about the moral issue later.
Microsoft also loses money every time somebody uses a free product, but that is just competition.
And you are correct, MS is not going to hunt down individual users. The legal costs of prosecuting one illegal copy of MS Office is easily many times the cost of the software itself. But businesses are a whole different deal: one lawyer can easily hit pay dirt just by uncovering a dozen or so illegal copies of Office, XP or one of the server products.
And why is the BSA a bad thing by itself? Microsoft is losing a hell of a lot more money to privacy than to Open Source, so it is only logical that they fund BSA. Remember, the mission of BSA has nothing to do with open source, their purpose is to keep you from using software you did not pay for.
10-15 hours/day working from my home office, with half-hour naps every 4 hours or so.
I got bored with my music really quick, and both the video music channels and the digital music channels in cable use a rotation that is so short that halfway thru the day I was seeing/listening to the exact same stuff. With Discovery Wings (plus Hitler Channel) at least I would have something more varied. Worst case scenario it provided good background noise, plus the british accents of most of the documentary narrators sort of put you in a trance.
Most of my employees did it too, they were happier working 12-15 hours from home than working 8 at the office.
But not exactly enough to lose sleep over, the cheapest piece of crap TV tuner card still looks as good as a $100 TV.
I had a Hauppaugge WinTV PCI back in my Windows days, which was also back when I telecommuted a lot. I would keep a small TV window with Discovery Wings blasting all day and that kept me awake for 10-15 hour days. On 9/11 that card helped me take screen captures for my friends that were stuck at work and while the news websites were saturated, so at least they could see stills from the news coverage.
Now I am on a mac, so if possible I would shoot for something with firewire or USB 2 instead of USB1.
I actually discovered AdBlock before the built-in blocker. Really neat stuff.
I also switched from Safari to Firefox about a week ago. I am in shock with how easy it was for me to switch over and not look back. My favorite features so far are the custom search engines I can add and also the ability to hide images by host.
I also like how if you open a bunch of tabs it reports all the dead tabs one after the other instead of having to go to each dead tab to OK the error message. And it is very nice to have the "Open in Tabs" in each bookmark folder instead of as a toggle in the bookmarks manager.
If you are bright then you will know better that to be overt about it. There is a lot of people that are insecure about their intellectual level, and see people (real or imaginary) that are "smarter" than them as a real threat.
:-)
If you are in school, I would stick to the normal curriculum and feed the hunger for a challenge elsewhere. Either study extra stuff for pleasure, or find an outlet to burn that energy. If you try to show off in school (which does not mean having the top grades, you can score high and still not come out as a nerd) then you will be ostracized. Also, do not under any circumstance skip grades. Intelligence is just one aspec, you still need emotional development, and is hard as hell to mature when everybody around you is a year or two older. I was skipped one grade in elementary school and one in high school, which meant I was a college freshman at 16 years old. It sucked in social terms.
You also need to get used to the idea that if you are really *that* smart, then most of the people aren't, so start learning to be patient and tolearant when people can't grasp things you can undestand instantly. It is not that *they* are slow, it is that you are too fast. Everybody loves the smart guy that gives a helping hand to others, but you will be universally scorned if you don't share the wealth.
By the way, Franklyn Lloyd Wright once said that it is hard to be humble when you are great
I use OS X as a workstation and as my personal computer (actually, I use my personal Powerbook at work). Our mail server is freeBSD but our web server and database server are Windows 2000 and SQL Server. This is a very small company (15 employees) and while we got all employees working from OS X, it is very hard and expensive to drop what we are doing to shift our web applications to something different.
I am always willing to try new stuff but I have to respect the boss' wishes to stay on a mainstream platform. Before I got hired he got gang-raped by dot com bandits that totally blew it and cost him a fortune. Because of this he is very wary of php and mySQL and insists we keep using asp 3.0 and SQL Server 2000.
We also got a couple Windows XP PCs, but these are sitting in a corner and nobody wants to touch them, we usually leave them for our temps and interns.
At home I got one windows PC left, a 4-yr old Dell that is terminally infected and not connected to the home network. My wife uses it to play games whenever she can't find a version that runs on OS X. I am dying to convert it into a home server with freeBSD but the kid jammed something into the CD and floppy drives, so until I have time to sit and RTFM on how to do a net install, the thing remains unplugged from the network.
I am a Mac OS X user too, but my servers run on freeBSD.
Why? Because freeBSD runs on very inexpensive hardware. I don't have the budget to get Xserves here, and all the Powermac G4s are tied up as workstations. Yet I have a nice PIII rackmount that was doing nothing and now is happily running our mail services with absolutely zero hassles.
My personal server is a freeBSD jail, something I cannot get for OS X at the price that I got it.
For the record, one of the things that sold me into switching from XP Pro to OS X was that freeBSD legacy, since I had been using freeBSD for years before I even saw OS X working. freeBSD is anything but primitive.
The problem is not with moppets using SQL Server, it is with muppets administering it. A muppet with sensible user restrictions in his/her account should be able to make good use of SQL Server without compromising it.
Security by obscurity is a myth, making user tools harder to use is totally counterproductive and does not add to your security. A harder to use tool only means less people will use and that defeats the purpose.
Jesus, of all people I have to run into at frickin Slashdot :-)
BioInfo is fine, Bill and Karen had a baby:7.5 pounds, 21 inches, was born last week. Karen and the boy are doing fine.
SQL Server has not had a default password since SQL Server 7.
In SQL Server 2000 you would have to explicitly request "sa" to have a blank password, there is no way you can do this by accident. It even warns you in the installer that it is not recommended to leave "sa" with a blank password.
BTW, this behavior is present from version 1.0, it is not the result of a service pack or last minute security update.
1. Is anyone except Apple trying to leverage the GPU for non-3D tasks? Apple has been doing Quartz Extreme for a while but I have not heard if anyone else is doing it.
2. Has anyone tried something similar to what Quartz Extreme does but for non-graphical tasks?
3. How come GPU makers are not trying to make a CPU by themselves?
We have a prankster in the office too. For April Fools she did the post it prank on our CEO because she is one of those people that put post its on every damn thing they do.
Anywhere in *.ro !!!
The MPAA is going out of their way to tell you that no, you are not entitled to use a camcorder to record the movie. I have been to movies where it actually shows a slide that says "unauthorized recording of any part of this feature presentation is explicitly forbidden" and then it goes to outline the penalties. I have also seen a new MPAA campaign in which they use low-wage working joes from the movie industry to make thieves feel guilty.
The one I saw went for the throat, said something like "sure, if you steal the movie, the big shots are not getting hurt, but we the little guys do."
If you sit thru these ads and walk by the posters that explain the penalties, and you still get arrested, then you deserve it.
Try the Defense Reutilization Marketing Office (DRMO), an agency that DoD uses to get rid of surplus equipment. All of the armed services use the standard 19" form factor and sometimes you can get lucky and find one at DRMO for very little money. You can probably refurbish one for the cost of a couple cans of paint, maybe a power strip and a couple fans.
What kind of powerbook is this? I got Panther running on both a 15" Titanium 867 and a 15" Aluminum 1.25 and in both it runs beautifully. Before that I had Jaguar running on an 12" iBook 600 and it ran great.
Have not had any OS X trash itself in over 18 months since I switched to Mac, and was never slow. Of course, I never had SuSe trash itself on my last PC, but I find the OS X experience much more enjoyable.
This is what I consider the worst of the worst, which I had to do for 6 months in 2000:
The civilian personnel arm of one of the US Armed Forces was converting all the paperwork for their 200K+ civilian employees into db-driven websites. My company was a classic Oracle shop that jumped on the web band wagon at the right time so it got to hit on some fat government contracts like this one.
The project was to be built in MS Active Server Pages and Oracle.
Problem #1: We were not allowed to run IIS because it was unsecure a hell. Solution: Chili ASP (before Cobalt bought them) running on Netscape Enterprise Server on NT 4 server. The back end was Oracle 7. Chili was never intended to do this kind of work, and it turned a bad project into pure hell for the programmers, project managers and clients involved. It was bloody.
Problem #2: The project was time plus materials. The "not to exceed" was a joke, it was moved up every month. Time plus materials equals eternal project.
Problem #3: The project was run by consensus. There were ZERO specs, just a vague agreement. The project manager on our side and the client rep on their side argued and squabbled over the stupidest crap. I remember 2-3 hour meetings arguing over the proper data type for a field, which was a waste since the client's DBA (who had godlike powers) was not sitting at the meeting so we could not do jack without his blessing.
Problem #4: The people at the client's side used the project to pad their performance reviews and never gave a crap about wrapping it up. We had our client primary contract promoted twice, so we had to start all over.
I hated that project so much that I found a better job elsewhere and gave a standard 2-week notice. Little by little every person (except the PM) involved in that project bailed too.
The only good thing that happened with this project was that there were only two of us writing code and the server sucked so hard that we learned a lot on how to write fast code for ASP. It was the one skill I took from that job that is still relevant to me after almost 4 years since I left that company.
The second worst was a project that should have never been a web-based application. A huge company (just this branch in particular has 20,000 employees) hired us to write a cost pricing tool to crunch thru quarterly sales aggregates. This is the biggest db-driven product I have written, and it took almost a year of nightly 3-way curse-a-thons between the PM, the client and myself. It got worse because the PM is a very good friend of mine and the client is a very good friend of the PM, so things were quite hectic and tense. We had zero specs, and we were working by picking the brain off the client, who is a walking encyclopedia of business practices for his company.
Eventually I got the monster written and validated, and next thing I know the thing goes live and the savings for the first year are at least $10 million. Just the first frickin year! Then they flew me to their headquarters somewhere in Connecticut where they had me walk thru the code to the Indian programmers that would take over phase two. Those two guys from their Indian branch have been the only two web programers I have ever been able to explain this project that actually understood it on the first try. It's been almost two years since the handoff and they haven't called me, so either they did fine or the project got scrapped.
I don't think you want to blow one kilo of C4 from 50 feet away!
I was dying to get a PVR, then maybe a month before I had planned to nab a TiVo, Comcast calls to tell me they were offering a version of my digital cable box that had a PVR built-in. It was nothing stellar, only holds 30 to 50 hours of programming, but it is all-in-one.
Comcast wins.
Plus the monthly fee for the box itself is less than what it would cost to keep TiVo service.
The box is a Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8000 (they also have a model that can take HDTV). Nothing to write home about but it *is* saving me a bundle because I can program my 5-yr old's favorite shows and not have to worry about wear and tear of a VCR and tapes. And now that I am about to take delivery of a Powerbook with DVR burner I might experiment a bit with moving some of that content out of the PVR.
You did not get my post. After 5 years spent keeping two SSDC satellites clicking and ticking, those 22,300 miles feel really damn close. That's why to me the rock zipping by at 26,500 miles is of an order of magnitude that I can grasp too well for my comfort.
Plus, if the trajectory is known then FMC can order a temporary relocation maneuver to push the bird in danger out enough so the probability of impact is null.
BTW, sorry for the acronyms. SSDC is Space and Strategic Defense Command (the former Army Space Command). For some reason I never figured out, DoD comm payloads are run by the Army, and the other onboard systems are run by the USAF. FMC is Falcon Mission Control in Colorado Springs, the guys who would do the actual orbital maneuvers.
Back in my Army SSDC days our main geosynchronous comms satellites were on a 22,300 mile orbit. This thing is going to pass just above. Suddenly these 26,500 miles don't look *that* far to me.