Ah nostalgia!
on
FreeDOS
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
You know, I can still remember getting my sweaty paws on my first 486dx33 with 4MB RAM, 1MB graphic card and huge 40MB hard-drive. This was a real "power-user" machine when I spent almost 3000 quid on it:-) Since I used to write in nothing but assembler, it was astonishingly fast after my little sinclair ZX spectrum (which did me proud for many years). I remember saving up to double the RAM so that Doom would run better.
I think my machine came with Win3.1 installed too, but I only ever started it up to laugh at it and watch it crash:-)
It might seem redundant to re-develop DOS, but for games use, it's an excellent OS, since a game will have 100% of the CPU time, all the time! For realtime use too, it beats most modern OS'. I'd imagine it would make a great OS for a SOHO router/firewall, as no-one could login to it from the outside...
Microsoft being a Monopoly is not a bad thing. It just proves that being the most successful in your field will set you above the rest.
I'm not sure what your definition of successful is, with relation to MS. It's certainly not creating particularly efficient or reliable software, or, as you say, innovating. The only areas in which the company appear to excel are stealing ideas, bullying "partners" and spreading downright lies. Their only goal is making money. The only way they're above the rest is if the rest are Mafia crime families.
Obviously they're never going to innovate; after all they've made all their money by stealing ideas and arm-twisting. Why bother innovating when you can just wait for someone else to do it for you?
BTW, it was a joke, I haven't really been pulled over thousands of times for speeding...
Are you the sort of person who tells a police officer giving you a traffic ticket that he should be out solving murders rather than worrying about your broken taillight?
Yes I am, in fact I've told the 3 traffic cops on my route to/from work words to that effect thousands of times as they've pulled me over during the last 6 years. One day they'll learn!
Seriously though, these IP and patent cases are all to the detriment of the consumer. Imagine if the same enforcements had been in place for the last couple of hundred years. We'd all be driving one make of car, there would be only one manufacturer of TVs and computer displays, one supermarket, and a single shop chain making shoes. We've already seen the problems one monopoly has caused in the world of computer software, yet governments and patent offices constantly strive to give others the power to create yet more monopolies and cartels... <Sigh>
Let's try an experiment. I am going to give you $1m.
Thanks.
Now, do you think I might, just possibly, want something in return...?
I'm sorry, I don't believe I know you...
Re:The kicker's in the tail
on
SuSE 7.3 vs XP
·
· Score: 1
Anyone who has ever made the switch from 98 to NT or whatever would probably agree that once you learn where the settings are, they are much easier to maintain.
Well I've moved from NT->2000->XP (what can I say, I need it for graphics/animation apps), and I agree with the original poster, I found it more difficult to set up than either of the previous 2 (and harder than RH7.2, but then I spend more time fiddling there I guess).
The ****ing "idiot messages" popping up all over the place, constant nagging from the taskbar about any trivial thing and needing to reboot when changing a simple network setting all succeed in raising my blood pressure a few degrees every day. Yes, I KNOW I just installed a new program, no need to state the ****ing obvious! Adding a new user, I was somewhat surprised to have to go through the network setup "wizard" to add an email account to a machine already connected to the LAN!? Speaking of which, it always picks up its address via dhcp even though I've set it up with a fixed address about 20 times now.
I hate its dumbed down "My First Windows" style of interface, and having to activate the thing. On the plus side, it does have good hardware support - certainly better than 2000. I still prefer KDE though...
As a Brit, I find the "Call 0800-ambulance-chasers now!" adverts repulsive. They air the adverts mostly during the working day, obviously to target the unemployed or unemployable since they're most likely to need some quick and easy money.
The companies providing these "services" have been the subject of numerous documentaries and consumer affairs programs on UK TV, and regularly exposed for the rogue outfits they so obviously are. Most of the "victims" only recieve a tiny amount of compensation, while the law firms reap the real rewards.
It is absolutely pathetic; people seem to want to take no responsibility for their own lives any more. I still don't believe the UK has decended to the level of litigeousness of the States as yet, but some of the bottom feeders are slowly but surely crawling their way there...
I have no other problems with America, by the way, just its legal system, patent system and Bill Gates:-)
It's this kind of clunkiness that makes me wonder how people can use themes like this [snipped]
Well, I don't know about anyone else, but I like to know I'm getting my money's worth from my CPU. I've paid out my hard earned cash for my P90 and 16mb of fast EDO RAM, and it's going to damned well work for me - if the openGL 3D spinning CPU usage meter drops below 100% I'm wasting electricity! I want translucent menus, gradients everywhere, and 32bit colour depth on my xterm whether I need it or not. The chicks love it too... probably...
What if it were required by law that every company must track WHERE and WHEN they obtained any e-mail address that they send bulk messages to.
Yeah but... Spammers are crooks. Crooks don't tend to worry too much about the law. Our government had a similar idea regarding gun crime. They decided to outlaw handguns (outside clubs I think) - brilliant! Obviously crime is almost non-existant in the UK now, as all the would-be bank robbers, muggers and drug-dealers naturally handed in their "gats", and thus can no longer "pop caps" in people's asses...
I just took a look at that - it's all very good, but I'd imagine some harvesters will be configured to either not follow cgi-bin links, or ignore empty href tags (that is, nothing between the open and close tags they suggest you use. If flat html pages were generated, then linked to, it might help trick the harvesters...
Thanks for the link to wpoison though, I hadn't seen it befores...
The only way to stop spammers is to make spamming unprofitable.
Their profit depends upon harvesting usable email lists, so there's a chance some idiot will buy something after reading their garbage.
Solution(?):
Dilute their mailing lists with so much garbage they'll only actually send out one or two emails to real addresses for every X thousand mails sent to fake addresses.
Method idea:
What if I put together a quick CGI to generate pages with fake text (just paragraphs full of random picks from a dictionary + punctuation) plus randomly created email addresses. Then linked to the chain of 1000's of fake pages from one of the real pages of my sites? What if I allowed anyone to use this tool for their own sites, to generate 1000's more, or made an online tool to generate pages and email them on to people to upload for their websites?
Anyone think this is a good idea? Obviously it's a trivial piece of scripting, but I think if major sites used something like this, it would seriously piss off a lot of these lowlifes...
Given that the company announced its 75 millionth seat just this past October, that's a lot of new seats. There's a joke here waiting to happen, but I don't know what it is.
I think it's something along the lines of "Microsoft consider their customers to be assholes". Reading the laughably inacurate reporting plastered across the site, it would seem they're not far wrong...
This plugin might have had legs a year or so ago, when any new internet technology could garner support for no other reason than it was a new internet technology. Now that Macromedia'sshockwave has a pretty impressive 3D engine, with hardware acceleration, the Blender plugin might not see that much attention. Flash has the 2D animation market pretty much sewn up, and I'm expecting SW to do the same for 3D...
Since you can now pick up old Compaq Internet Appliances for as little as $39 dollars (233/266mhz, 32MB RAM, 32MB Flash, 800x600 TFT screen), I'm sure QNX could be hacked into one of these to make a very usable and cool looking little browser/terminal! I believe it was also used in the original iopener devices, which had similar specs.
It's a pity Be crashed out of the embedded market really; their BeIA operating system was amazingly efficient. We were developing a system using the Compaq devices as shop terminals, (the versions we had included ethernet ports) and even when running telnetd, ftpd, the desktop (tracker) and the Opera browser, they were using like 18-20MB of their 32MB RAM! Pretty fast too, they could play Flash 4 animations at a decent speed even with pretty slow processors. An interesting thing about the Opera browser on the BeIA platform was that it gradually leaked memory, losing a little every time a new page was loaded. Once the device was over 90-92% memory usage, the browser was killed, and respawned. However, the user wouldn't notice this, as when the browser was killed, it left its image on the screen, then reloaded the last page visited so it was just a slight delay!
What does IE 6 have that Mozilla lacks (other than market share, which can change once the next version of Concept Virus hits)?
I'm not sure how you have your system set up, but on all the machines I've worked with, Mozilla starts up noticably more slowly than IE5/6. In fact, it's sometimes so slow I've seen people click repeatedly on the desktop icon to start it up! IE starts up instantly, which is not surprising as it's practically running from the point the desktop appears.
This isn't the main problem though; what IE6 has over Moz is speed. Any sort of animated content is slower under Mozilla - in fact dHTML performance is absolutely abysmal (interestingly, NS4 is faster than either for most dHTML animations, but its numerous other problems more than offset this)!
If you monitor CPU usage when using IE and NS/Moz, you'll notice the latter can often hit 100% when handling animated content, whereas it's rare to see IE over 40-50%, even on low spec machines.
I'd like to see Moz improve - a LOT - but as a web developer, I have to be realistic in my assesment, and NS6/Moz is no-where near IE on the Windows platform. I don't even use it with Linux any more; Konqueror seems much faster for animation, renders pages quicker, and is more resource efficient.
My question is, why did it take so long to break a 40bit key? After all, EFF's "Deep Crack" (now there's an unfortunate name!) broke 56bit DES in 56 hours, almost exactly 3 years ago!
And another thing, what on Earth is an al-Qa'ida terrorist doing with a laptop? I understood their position to be totally anti-technology - apart from guns and bombs of course...
I happened to be standing next to an ATM during a brief power outage in Cambridge (UK) a while ago, and as the machines in the wall of the bank rebooted, they all displayed the OS2 logo:-)
Mind you, I also happened to see them reboot the machine(s) that run the display boards in the railway station there - not that CPU intensive you'd think - so I was surprised it takes a P3 866 with 640MB RAM per screen! Oh yeah, they're running NT4. Might as well be consistent I suppose, our railway network is after all, one of the most unreliable running jokes of all time:-)
...thats right.. their intended equipment was actually TOO GOOD...
Well, after having used a 320 at work for over 2 years, the phrase "TOO GOOD" hardly springs to mind. Sure, the OpenGL performance is quite good (though nothing close to a GF2, never mind more recent gfx cards) but given the extortionate prices charged for the machines, it's no wonder they couldn't compete with standard PC boxes.
SGI took the idea of a PC, decided to mess with the voltages in the PCI slots for no apparent reason, rendering it virtually impossible to upgrade with confidence. They then added slightly non-standard USB ports (can damage equipment and anyone wishing to use USB devices other than the mouse+keyboard supplied should buy a new USB card). Added prohibitively expensive proprietory RAM, (shared memory) and topped this off with a seriously wierd boot sequence that makes installing anything other than Microsoft NT/2000 extremely difficult.
Hmm, can't see how that failed, can you? If you're going to build a PC, build a PC! Don't screw people over with some half-hearted attempt to break into an established market by depending upon your name alone.
Dude, if you lived next door to me and were playing Quake with the sound up, blasting through a subwoofer at 3AM, it wouldn't just be the game scaring the hell out of you...
If Macromedia moved their tools across to Linux, I'd happily pay for them (again), and would from that point onward only upgrade the Linux side. I'd still need Windows to check web pages (which is also the only reason I have an Apple machine - it does nothing except run the chronically bad IE5.1 under OSX) but it would be nice to use Linux for graphic development rather than just coding. I mail MM every so often to pester them for versions of Flash, Fireworks etc etc under Linux, hoping others do the same. Maybe with enough voices they, and other companies would listen?
Very true. I used to use Gnome exclusively, in preference to KDE (probably due to RedHat favoring Gnome to some extent). Then a few months ago I bought and installed the Ximian desktop. Sure it looks really nice, but runs about as well as OS-X on my old iMac (really, really bad). So I decided to take another look at KDE and unless the KDE team do something unbelievably stupid in V3, I'll be staying with it! Even with all the bells and whistles enabled, and the Acqua theme in use, it's a joy to use on both my Vaio and Athlon desktops.
I'll keep checking out Gnome's development, but for the moment, it can't touch KDE in terms of speed or usability, in my view...
It's difficult to find a happy medium really. My personal site is not commercial, and was never designed to pay its own way - however its popularity has meant I have to pay out more and more of my own cash to keep it online (bandwidth charges). It's nice at first to see hundreds, and then thousands of page requests per day, but now I actually wish it WASN'T quite so popular! I guess I'll have to add a few fake popup ads to drive some people away:-))
Hmm, actually I've just been made redundant from my dot.bomb job (man/that/ was a shock:-) and I'm looking forward to a nice loooong Christmas break.
Doesn't look like it'll happen though, as all the local firms and "friends" who I've been able to blow off with my "I'm too busy to do your site" excuse are now have gotten wind of this. So I'm keeping my head down and not answering phone calls:-)))))
Slashdot Mirror
You know, I can still remember getting my sweaty paws on my first 486dx33 with 4MB RAM, 1MB graphic card and huge 40MB hard-drive. This was a real "power-user" machine when I spent almost 3000 quid on it :-) Since I used to write in nothing but assembler, it was astonishingly fast after my little sinclair ZX spectrum (which did me proud for many years). I remember saving up to double the RAM so that Doom would run better.
:-)
I think my machine came with Win3.1 installed too, but I only ever started it up to laugh at it and watch it crash
It might seem redundant to re-develop DOS, but for games use, it's an excellent OS, since a game will have 100% of the CPU time, all the time! For realtime use too, it beats most modern OS'. I'd imagine it would make a great OS for a SOHO router/firewall, as no-one could login to it from the outside...
Microsoft being a Monopoly is not a bad thing. It just proves that being the most successful in your field will set you above the rest.
I'm not sure what your definition of successful is, with relation to MS. It's certainly not creating particularly efficient or reliable software, or, as you say, innovating. The only areas in which the company appear to excel are stealing ideas, bullying "partners" and spreading downright lies. Their only goal is making money. The only way they're above the rest is if the rest are Mafia crime families.
Obviously they're never going to innovate; after all they've made all their money by stealing ideas and arm-twisting. Why bother innovating when you can just wait for someone else to do it for you?
BTW, it was a joke, I haven't really been pulled over thousands of times for speeding...
Are you the sort of person who tells a police officer giving you a traffic ticket that he should be out solving murders rather than worrying about your broken taillight?
Yes I am, in fact I've told the 3 traffic cops on my route to/from work words to that effect thousands of times as they've pulled me over during the last 6 years. One day they'll learn!
Seriously though, these IP and patent cases are all to the detriment of the consumer. Imagine if the same enforcements had been in place for the last couple of hundred years. We'd all be driving one make of car, there would be only one manufacturer of TVs and computer displays, one supermarket, and a single shop chain making shoes. We've already seen the problems one monopoly has caused in the world of computer software, yet governments and patent offices constantly strive to give others the power to create yet more monopolies and cartels... <Sigh>
Let's try an experiment. I am going to give you $1m.
Thanks.
Now, do you think I might, just possibly, want something in return...?
I'm sorry, I don't believe I know you...
Anyone who has ever made the switch from 98 to NT or whatever would probably agree that once you learn where the settings are, they are much easier to maintain.
Well I've moved from NT->2000->XP (what can I say, I need it for graphics/animation apps), and I agree with the original poster, I found it more difficult to set up than either of the previous 2 (and harder than RH7.2, but then I spend more time fiddling there I guess).
The ****ing "idiot messages" popping up all over the place, constant nagging from the taskbar about any trivial thing and needing to reboot when changing a simple network setting all succeed in raising my blood pressure a few degrees every day. Yes, I KNOW I just installed a new program, no need to state the ****ing obvious! Adding a new user, I was somewhat surprised to have to go through the network setup "wizard" to add an email account to a machine already connected to the LAN!? Speaking of which, it always picks up its address via dhcp even though I've set it up with a fixed address about 20 times now.
I hate its dumbed down "My First Windows" style of interface, and having to activate the thing. On the plus side, it does have good hardware support - certainly better than 2000. I still prefer KDE though...
As a Brit, I find the "Call 0800-ambulance-chasers now!" adverts repulsive. They air the adverts mostly during the working day, obviously to target the unemployed or unemployable since they're most likely to need some quick and easy money.
:-)
The companies providing these "services" have been the subject of numerous documentaries and consumer affairs programs on UK TV, and regularly exposed for the rogue outfits they so obviously are. Most of the "victims" only recieve a tiny amount of compensation, while the law firms reap the real rewards.
It is absolutely pathetic; people seem to want to take no responsibility for their own lives any more. I still don't believe the UK has decended to the level of litigeousness of the States as yet, but some of the bottom feeders are slowly but surely crawling their way there...
I have no other problems with America, by the way, just its legal system, patent system and Bill Gates
It's this kind of clunkiness that makes me wonder how people can use themes like this [snipped]
Well, I don't know about anyone else, but I like to know I'm getting my money's worth from my CPU. I've paid out my hard earned cash for my P90 and 16mb of fast EDO RAM, and it's going to damned well work for me - if the openGL 3D spinning CPU usage meter drops below 100% I'm wasting electricity! I want translucent menus, gradients everywhere, and 32bit colour depth on my xterm whether I need it or not. The chicks love it too... probably...
What if it were required by law that every company must track WHERE and WHEN they obtained any e-mail address that they send bulk messages to.
Yeah but... Spammers are crooks. Crooks don't tend to worry too much about the law. Our government had a similar idea regarding gun crime. They decided to outlaw handguns (outside clubs I think) - brilliant! Obviously crime is almost non-existant in the UK now, as all the would-be bank robbers, muggers and drug-dealers naturally handed in their "gats", and thus can no longer "pop caps" in people's asses...
I just took a look at that - it's all very good, but I'd imagine some harvesters will be configured to either not follow cgi-bin links, or ignore empty href tags (that is, nothing between the open and close tags they suggest you use. If flat html pages were generated, then linked to, it might help trick the harvesters...
Thanks for the link to wpoison though, I hadn't seen it befores...
I've been thinking about this...
Facts:
The only way to stop spammers is to make spamming unprofitable.
Their profit depends upon harvesting usable email lists, so there's a chance some idiot will buy something after reading their garbage.
Solution(?):
Dilute their mailing lists with so much garbage they'll only actually send out one or two emails to real addresses for every X thousand mails sent to fake addresses.
Method idea:
What if I put together a quick CGI to generate pages with fake text (just paragraphs full of random picks from a dictionary + punctuation) plus randomly created email addresses. Then linked to the chain of 1000's of fake pages from one of the real pages of my sites? What if I allowed anyone to use this tool for their own sites, to generate 1000's more, or made an online tool to generate pages and email them on to people to upload for their websites?
Anyone think this is a good idea? Obviously it's a trivial piece of scripting, but I think if major sites used something like this, it would seriously piss off a lot of these lowlifes...
Exchange Server Hits 100 Million Users
Given that the company announced its 75 millionth seat just this past October, that's a lot of new seats. There's a joke here waiting to happen, but I don't know what it is.
I think it's something along the lines of "Microsoft consider their customers to be assholes". Reading the laughably inacurate reporting plastered across the site, it would seem they're not far wrong...
This plugin might have had legs a year or so ago, when any new internet technology could garner support for no other reason than it was a new internet technology. Now that Macromedia's shockwave has a pretty impressive 3D engine, with hardware acceleration, the Blender plugin might not see that much attention. Flash has the 2D animation market pretty much sewn up, and I'm expecting SW to do the same for 3D...
Since you can now pick up old Compaq Internet Appliances for as little as $39 dollars (233/266mhz, 32MB RAM, 32MB Flash, 800x600 TFT screen), I'm sure QNX could be hacked into one of these to make a very usable and cool looking little browser/terminal! I believe it was also used in the original iopener devices, which had similar specs.
It's a pity Be crashed out of the embedded market really; their BeIA operating system was amazingly efficient. We were developing a system using the Compaq devices as shop terminals, (the versions we had included ethernet ports) and even when running telnetd, ftpd, the desktop (tracker) and the Opera browser, they were using like 18-20MB of their 32MB RAM! Pretty fast too, they could play Flash 4 animations at a decent speed even with pretty slow processors. An interesting thing about the Opera browser on the BeIA platform was that it gradually leaked memory, losing a little every time a new page was loaded. Once the device was over 90-92% memory usage, the browser was killed, and respawned. However, the user wouldn't notice this, as when the browser was killed, it left its image on the screen, then reloaded the last page visited so it was just a slight delay!
What does IE 6 have that Mozilla lacks (other than market share, which can change once the next version of Concept Virus hits)?
I'm not sure how you have your system set up, but on all the machines I've worked with, Mozilla starts up noticably more slowly than IE5/6. In fact, it's sometimes so slow I've seen people click repeatedly on the desktop icon to start it up! IE starts up instantly, which is not surprising as it's practically running from the point the desktop appears.
This isn't the main problem though; what IE6 has over Moz is speed. Any sort of animated content is slower under Mozilla - in fact dHTML performance is absolutely abysmal (interestingly, NS4 is faster than either for most dHTML animations, but its numerous other problems more than offset this)!
If you monitor CPU usage when using IE and NS/Moz, you'll notice the latter can often hit 100% when handling animated content, whereas it's rare to see IE over 40-50%, even on low spec machines.
I'd like to see Moz improve - a LOT - but as a web developer, I have to be realistic in my assesment, and NS6/Moz is no-where near IE on the Windows platform. I don't even use it with Linux any more; Konqueror seems much faster for animation, renders pages quicker, and is more resource efficient.
My question is, why did it take so long to break a 40bit key? After all, EFF's "Deep Crack" (now there's an unfortunate name!) broke 56bit DES in 56 hours, almost exactly 3 years ago!
And another thing, what on Earth is an al-Qa'ida terrorist doing with a laptop? I understood their position to be totally anti-technology - apart from guns and bombs of course...
I happened to be standing next to an ATM during a brief power outage in Cambridge (UK) a while ago, and as the machines in the wall of the bank rebooted, they all displayed the OS2 logo :-)
:-)
Mind you, I also happened to see them reboot the machine(s) that run the display boards in the railway station there - not that CPU intensive you'd think - so I was surprised it takes a P3 866 with 640MB RAM per screen! Oh yeah, they're running NT4. Might as well be consistent I suppose, our railway network is after all, one of the most unreliable running jokes of all time
...thats right.. their intended equipment was actually TOO GOOD...
Well, after having used a 320 at work for over 2 years, the phrase "TOO GOOD" hardly springs to mind. Sure, the OpenGL performance is quite good (though nothing close to a GF2, never mind more recent gfx cards) but given the extortionate prices charged for the machines, it's no wonder they couldn't compete with standard PC boxes.
SGI took the idea of a PC, decided to mess with the voltages in the PCI slots for no apparent reason, rendering it virtually impossible to upgrade with confidence. They then added slightly non-standard USB ports (can damage equipment and anyone wishing to use USB devices other than the mouse+keyboard supplied should buy a new USB card). Added prohibitively expensive proprietory RAM, (shared memory) and topped this off with a seriously wierd boot sequence that makes installing anything other than Microsoft NT/2000 extremely difficult.
Hmm, can't see how that failed, can you? If you're going to build a PC, build a PC! Don't screw people over with some half-hearted attempt to break into an established market by depending upon your name alone.
I think the free criminal record wouldn't do much to help future job prospects...
How about "Disable scripted pop-ups (adverts)"?
Dude, if you lived next door to me and were playing Quake with the sound up, blasting through a subwoofer at 3AM, it wouldn't just be the game scaring the hell out of you...
If Macromedia moved their tools across to Linux, I'd happily pay for them (again), and would from that point onward only upgrade the Linux side. I'd still need Windows to check web pages (which is also the only reason I have an Apple machine - it does nothing except run the chronically bad IE5.1 under OSX) but it would be nice to use Linux for graphic development rather than just coding. I mail MM every so often to pester them for versions of Flash, Fireworks etc etc under Linux, hoping others do the same. Maybe with enough voices they, and other companies would listen?
I can't believe Razorfish created that site! Most of their work kicks ass - maybe it was RF who asked KPMG to stop people linking to it...
Very true. I used to use Gnome exclusively, in preference to KDE (probably due to RedHat favoring Gnome to some extent). Then a few months ago I bought and installed the Ximian desktop. Sure it looks really nice, but runs about as well as OS-X on my old iMac (really, really bad). So I decided to take another look at KDE and unless the KDE team do something unbelievably stupid in V3, I'll be staying with it! Even with all the bells and whistles enabled, and the Acqua theme in use, it's a joy to use on both my Vaio and Athlon desktops.
I'll keep checking out Gnome's development, but for the moment, it can't touch KDE in terms of speed or usability, in my view...
It's difficult to find a happy medium really. My personal site is not commercial, and was never designed to pay its own way - however its popularity has meant I have to pay out more and more of my own cash to keep it online (bandwidth charges). It's nice at first to see hundreds, and then thousands of page requests per day, but now I actually wish it WASN'T quite so popular! I guess I'll have to add a few fake popup ads to drive some people away :-))
:-)
BTW, please don't visit my site
Hmm, actually I've just been made redundant from my dot.bomb job (man /that/ was a shock :-) and I'm looking forward to a nice loooong Christmas break.
:-)))))
Doesn't look like it'll happen though, as all the local firms and "friends" who I've been able to blow off with my "I'm too busy to do your site" excuse are now have gotten wind of this. So I'm keeping my head down and not answering phone calls