Why would anyone feel morally bound to pay/any/ attention to the nonsensical criteria of "substantial non-infrining use", especially when it comes to/information/ processing tools, for crying out loud?
It's guns we're talking about, you know. If the "substantial non-harmful use" of anything needs debate, it's guns, not anonymous free speech.
I still wonder how the U.S. is able to rationalize its decision that tools to disseminate information needs to be better controlled than tools to disseminate metal objects at deadly speeds. It doesn't strike me as particularly civilised, to be honest.
Contrary to popular American belief, The USA isn't the only country in the world, you know. It isn't even the only country in the world with a constitution.
I live in the Netherlands. A constitutional democracy since 1848.
The problem is that the rapid proliferation of new technologies, i.e., Internet, wireless, PCS, etc, is leaving law enforcement and national security agencies in the dust. Without new laws they simply cannot address new threats or criminal activity that use those new communication methods. Is this a threat to civil liberties? Hell yes, but a little thing happened last year in September that pushed civil liberties to the background for the "Free World".
And which of those new technologies were used for September 11th, exactly?
That this event has pushed civil liberties to the background is not something to base policy on, it's something to fight against.
Increased surveillance on citizens does *not* prevent terrorism by people determined enough to do it kamikaze-style. Period. See 9/11, see Israel every day, see Bali. Forget it. The idea that it would is tasteless, perverse propaganda from power-hungry politicians that are not ashamed to abuse 9/11 to further their existing agendas.
Yes, and have given the rest to the corporations for free. Because nobody bothers to limit the political power that comes with their wealth, they are virtually in complete control of what once was a democracy.
It's sad, considering the great way how it was started, but I'm glad that I was not speaking of the United States when I referred to my country.
This is why we should seriously consider abolishing the government and leaving everything to the market forces.
I don't know about you, but I'd sure miss the powers granted to me by the fact that I live in a democracy right now, and the rights granted to me by my country's constitution.
Go back to the jungle, or participate in a free fight, if you think that's best for humanity. But please allow the rest of us to strive for some civilization. Thanks.
I think there is a much more fundamental problem that is overlooked. Nobody is mentioning the fact that it/used/ to be the case that you needed to be under some suspicion before you were allowed to be spied on!
There is a fundamental problem that arises when you start to collect data without a directed suspicion: people will start to fear that merely their patterns of behaviour (which he knows to be be monitored) will raise some suspicion and cause subsequent trouble. This is has chilling effects on society, on peoples very perception of freedom. Look at the horrors of the USSR, the DDR with its Stasi.
I think the issue needs to be centered around this, and leave the exact criteria, which are completely irrelevant. Governments should not be allowed to spy on people without a clear suspicion, period. Collecting data may only start *after the suspicion is backed by a public court of law*, not when some police officer decides that it might be handy, and even less *by default*, for crying out loud!
Doesn't anybody realise what a *huge* step this is?
So what this means is that PC builders will purchse drives at a one-year-warranty from the manufacturer, then have to sell the whole system with a two-year-warranty to the end users. If anything breaks after the first year, the PC builder will have to pay for the new hard drive since they will not get a replacement from the manufacturer.
So, retailers will become financially motivated to get the best deal from manufacturers that sell the most reliable drives. That makes the customer lose how?
Also, keep in mind that retailers tend to have more negotiating power than Joe Hapless Consumer. In short, this is *good*.
I think you are missing the point of capitalism-everybody has a voice in the market economy. You vote with your dollars.
Which mean instead of a civilised democracy you go back to the right of the richest. The law of the jungle. Is that what we should be striving for in society?
It's nice that you mention window managers. Although generally not running on the X server side, they are an integral part of the X window system. Even though window managers are specified as an entity separate from the client application, we've seen lots of innovation in window managers.
If the X server would not mandate certain widgets, just as it does not mandate any specific window manager, but would simply allow a 'widget server', then client applications could still be relieved of the burden of managing their own widgets, just as clients are already relieved from the burden of drawing their own window decorations and moving windows around.
It would be great if applications wouldn't have to worry about drawing a check mark in check boxes when clicked, not even at the protocol level, and that a widget server would handle that.
We'd change themes (widget servers) as easy as we change window managers now, and have a well-defined protocol between client application, display server and widget server, just as we have for window managers.
I'm serious. We need a better X protocol. And it's not HTML/XML over HTTP, sorry. The ultimate test there is to get self hosting I guess, i.e. can you implement a web browser as a web application.
But until someone implements gecko in javascript, I'm sceptical;-).
Now X has problems. There really should be high-level graphics, at least similar to PostScript. Though also complex, it is far less complex than toolkit interfaces, and perhaps more importantly the set of graphics calls needed has been pretty stable for about 20 years. It may even make sense to add calls to "draw a nice raised box" or "clear this to the flat background color" which would do about 99% of what people want "themes" to do.
Well, that was about 99% of my point. Thanks for clearing that up;-)
Xt is just another toolkit. In fact, it is the mother of toolkits (t = toolkit, remember?). How does it suffer less from the problems I mentioned, other than that it's a little smaller and tries a little less hard to provide its own API to replace unix?
Sadly, there isn't even any such thing as OS native widgets on Unix. Every toolkit has its own, and every application gets to choose its own toolkit.
We need an X protocol that works at widget level instead of pixel level. It'd be great if we could design/that/, together with a good widget definition language, and to stop reinventing the OS in huge toolkits that even provide timers and I/O and mistreat X as a dumb framebuffer backend.
Client-side rendering, high-level application frameworks, *yuck*. Provide your high-level GUI stuff through an IPC channel and get out of the way. Let me have my own main loop back. Thank you.
There is every reason for a person to be criticised if he doesn't care/how/ he makes money, especially if he tries to do so by inventing contract clauses as opposed to selling good products.
I'm not trying to discredit you, but I really do think that users trying to fix 'spontaneous' problems at the OS level is generally a bad idea. It depends of course on the area of business you're in, but if you're working with bank employees instead of software engineers, there will be few extra problems that users will be able to solve themselves because of Window's extra user friendliness when it comes to systems administration.
It's a different matter of course with applications; I think that their settings should always be exposed to the user in a GUI, even more so because users can't do any harm to others by tweaking an application to hell and back. But in that respect there's no difference between Mozilla on Linux and Mozilla on Windows, or OpenOffice on Linux or OpenOffice on Windows.
I still say that a user has no business fiddling with things he doesn't understand, unless there's a/complete/ undo facility. When you're talking about the OS level, there's always inevitably a point where no undo exists anymore. Users should be kept out of that area, and the fact that Windows puts a GUI around it makes no difference whatsoever.
Right. And how do you propose to call the set of servers that implement these "standard paradigm-neutrual protocols" for applications to use?
A base set of software, no matter in what form, that gets reused among applications, for centralised resource management or code efficiency or both, *is* an OS. Your superduper protocol servers are too.
Windows + your superhyper layer is simply a new OS with a new API. Linux + your superhyper layer is exactly the same.
There's nothing fundamental about OS wars. We're simply battling over different APIs as well as over differnet implementations of the same API, or whether OS APIs should be data-oriented (what you want) or procedure-oriented (most common).
You're not ending the OS wars, you're simply contributing to them.
The real difference is personal freedom. Captialism is built on it, socialism is weakened by it.
This is nonsense. Capitalism ignores the freedom of the individual. It only upholds the freedom of the *wealthy* individual. All other individuals can go fuck themselves.
The only thing that promotes individual freedom is democracy coupled with a deeply entrenched system of individual rights. Without the latter, democracy will be just the right of the numeric strongest. Without such a democracy, capitalism is just the right of the economic strongest.
Capitalism does not even work *actively* to give everybody a *chance* of economic success. It's not in the best interests of your shareholders for you to help create a free market; it's in the best interests of your shareholders for you to be as dominant as you can, in every possible way you're allowed to.
In short, just promoting free enterprise isn't enough. You need a constitution, or another way of upholding basic human principles. You need democracy. You need a strong government that creates a level playing field for corporations and consumers. You need a government that enables people's solidarity for others who didn't grab their chance, for whatever reason, and that tries to minimize the harmful effects of people's greed instead of actively promoting it.
*Pure* capitalism doesn't build anything. It does not need a human society, the jungle is enough. It's sad that some Americans hardly know any better. It's even worse that since humanity have found to minimize the harmful effects of greed a bit, some people have switched from seeing greed as an inevitable problem to seeing it as a virtue. That's one of the most perverse, disgusting self delusions I've ever seen.
I have in my hand a CDMA phone that works. It's upward compatible with CDMA2000, which has been deployed, and working today. You're supporting the European standard UMTS, which is W-CDMA based, and hasn't been proven to work.
Deployed, yes, but only in certain states of a certain country.
I was referring to GSM in the above piece, not UMTS.
The problem is, the EU is doing this by specifying a winner.
Of course not. There *is* *no* *winner*. There's just *standards*. And what do you think, that the EU dreamed up GSM completely using in-house techs in an ivory tower and then told the companies, now you go and implement? Of couse not; the industry had lots of initiative there.
I'm pleased the EU promotes standards. Standards are *good* for the consumer. Perhaps UMTS is a bad one; then its lifetime will probably not be as long as that of GSM, and the next standard will come sooner. If there's a wide-backed proposal by the industry, and they can be made to agree, then that'll be the next standard the EU will support.
But there's nothing crafted in stone, and there's no definite winner. There's an ongoing process of innovation. If it's not in the best interests of the vendors to create some interoperability against such a background, then I think a democratic government does very well by asking 'ok guys, we know you're all able to make a good cellular phone system, but let's settle on one for the next few years, OK?', because that's good for the market and good for the consumer.
Of course the EU did not make any other means of RF communications illegal. They just allocated the part of the spectrum and formed the standards body for GSM. What's so bad about that???
The doctrine that world salvation is brought by putting as little as possible in the way of private enterprise. That the primary purpose of humanity is to have property. That survival of the fittest is the sole ethical concept we need. That 'greed is good'.
This doesn't even make any sense. I'm here in the US, and I have a cell phone that *works*. Just about everyone I know has a cell phone, and they all work reasonably well.
I used *works* in a slightly broader sense, as in a good system that's *widely deployed* and *non-vaporware*.
And this is another reason why the US model is better than the European one. In the US, a carrier can at any time implement whatever technology he considers best, subject to FCC limitations on interference and the like.
That's not a feature of the system, that's a bug, because it means that the US phone system is always fragmented, never interoperates properly, no roaming can exist, and as a customer you're highly dependend on isolated vendor groups.
In Europe, the EU has decided to pick a winner, and forbids spectrum from being used in any other way. A result is that they'll wind up being stuck a generation behind while the US and Japan deploy new technology whenever it's economically feasable.
I'd rather have a good working system every 10 years, and have it implemented throughout, than having to follow each technology trend slavishly as it comes out, in a thorougly fragmented fashion. Remember,/that's/ what companies such as Qualcomm want you to do, that's what keeps them in business. Not that you're able to use your phone coast to coast.
The misconception is that any 'winner' could be forever. You're completely ignoring the process aspect! Every new feature may create a new winner in the technological sense, however if we keep on chasing each, we all end up as losers.
I have no problems whatsover with the EU lengthening the technical generations a bit. It's better for interoperability, creates a bigger market, and avoids vendor lock-in.
The idea that the EU will use GSM till eternity is as stupid as saying that the US will universally adopt CDMA2K, and that is the last mobile technology ever to be invented.
What mr. Den Beste writes is nonsense at best, and capitalist fundamentalism otherwise. Of course it may take a little while longer for Europe to adopt the latest whizz-bang RF layer in their mobile communication systems. But in the mean time, we've been able for *years* to use an *implemented* system that *works*. The US didn't.
And the US situation won't improve, because what he seems to forget completely is that his lovely state of uncontrolled chaos isn't ended now that his fantastic top of the bill CDMA is available for licensing. Of course CDMA adoption will still be partial, with the next better transmission system (full-spectrum wavelets?) already appearing on the horizon. Technology is always in flux, and if you're always busy implementing the latest thing, you'll never be able to actually *enjoy using something*. Artur C. Clarke has a great story where a war was lost because the generals didn't know 'best' is the enemy of 'better'.
This guy actually has the hubris to say, "we're done. We've developed the last system ever needed in mobile communications. We'll get our first CDMA handset on the market before the Europeans, so that also means our development system works best". Excellent reasoning.
Well, mr. Den Beste, I don't define the best system for mobile communications as the one having the highest capacity or the most fancy features, but as the one that enables most people to communicate while enjoying their freedom to travel from country to country and from vendor to vendor, thank you very much.
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Of course I meant to say, it's not guns we're talking about, you know.
Why would anyone feel morally bound to pay /any/ attention to the nonsensical criteria of "substantial non-infrining use", especially when it comes to /information/ processing tools, for crying out loud?
It's guns we're talking about, you know. If the "substantial non-harmful use" of anything needs debate, it's guns, not anonymous free speech.
I still wonder how the U.S. is able to rationalize its decision that tools to disseminate information needs to be better controlled than tools to disseminate metal objects at deadly speeds. It doesn't strike me as particularly civilised, to be honest.
Contrary to popular American belief, The USA isn't the only country in the world, you know. It isn't even the only country in the world with a constitution.
I live in the Netherlands. A constitutional democracy since 1848.
To put my answer even shorter: the fact that human communication is used to plan terrorist attacks, does not mean we should fight human communication.
/any/ hijacked airplane or A-bomb.
We'd be trowing away civilization faster than can be done by
The problem is that the rapid proliferation of new technologies, i.e., Internet, wireless, PCS, etc, is leaving law enforcement and national security agencies in the dust. Without new laws they simply cannot address new threats or criminal activity that use those new communication methods. Is this a threat to civil liberties? Hell yes, but a little thing happened last year in September that pushed civil liberties to the background for the "Free World".
And which of those new technologies were used for September 11th, exactly?
That this event has pushed civil liberties to the background is not something to base policy on, it's something to fight against.
Increased surveillance on citizens does *not* prevent terrorism by people determined enough to do it kamikaze-style. Period. See 9/11, see Israel every day, see Bali. Forget it. The idea that it would is tasteless, perverse propaganda from power-hungry politicians that are not ashamed to abuse 9/11 to further their existing agendas.
Exactly. See "A Brave New World", by Aldous Huxley.
Yes, and have given the rest to the corporations for free. Because nobody bothers to limit the political power that comes with their wealth, they are virtually in complete control of what once was a democracy.
It's sad, considering the great way how it was started, but I'm glad that I was not speaking of the United States when I referred to my country.
This is why we should seriously consider abolishing the government and leaving everything to the market forces.
I don't know about you, but I'd sure miss the powers granted to me by the fact that I live in a democracy right now, and the rights granted to me by my country's constitution.
Go back to the jungle, or participate in a free fight, if you think that's best for humanity. But please allow the rest of us to strive for some civilization. Thanks.
I think there is a much more fundamental problem that is overlooked. Nobody is mentioning the fact that it /used/ to be the case that you needed to be under some suspicion before you were allowed to be spied on!
There is a fundamental problem that arises when you start to collect data without a directed suspicion: people will start to fear that merely their patterns of behaviour (which he knows to be be monitored) will raise some suspicion and cause subsequent trouble. This is has chilling effects on society, on peoples very perception of freedom. Look at the horrors of the USSR, the DDR with its Stasi.
I think the issue needs to be centered around this, and leave the exact criteria, which are completely irrelevant. Governments should not be allowed to spy on people without a clear suspicion, period. Collecting data may only start *after the suspicion is backed by a public court of law*, not when some police officer decides that it might be handy, and even less *by default*, for crying out loud!
Doesn't anybody realise what a *huge* step this is?
So what this means is that PC builders will purchse drives at a one-year-warranty from the manufacturer, then have to sell the whole system with a two-year-warranty to the end users. If anything breaks after the first year, the PC builder will have to pay for the new hard drive since they will not get a replacement from the manufacturer.
So, retailers will become financially motivated to get the best deal from manufacturers that sell the most reliable drives. That makes the customer lose how?
Also, keep in mind that retailers tend to have more negotiating power than Joe Hapless Consumer. In short, this is *good*.
I think you are missing the point of capitalism-everybody has a voice in the market economy. You vote with your dollars.
Which mean instead of a civilised democracy you go back to the right of the richest. The law of the jungle. Is that what we should be striving for in society?
It's nice that you mention window managers. Although generally not running on the X server side, they are an integral part of the X window system. Even though window managers are specified as an entity separate from the client application, we've seen lots of innovation in window managers.
;-).
If the X server would not mandate certain widgets, just as it does not mandate any specific window manager, but would simply allow a 'widget server', then client applications could still be relieved of the burden of managing their own widgets, just as clients are already relieved from the burden of drawing their own window decorations and moving windows around.
It would be great if applications wouldn't have to worry about drawing a check mark in check boxes when clicked, not even at the protocol level, and that a widget server would handle that.
We'd change themes (widget servers) as easy as we change window managers now, and have a well-defined protocol between client application, display server and widget server, just as we have for window managers.
I'm serious. We need a better X protocol. And it's not HTML/XML over HTTP, sorry. The ultimate test there is to get self hosting I guess, i.e. can you implement a web browser as a web application.
But until someone implements gecko in javascript, I'm sceptical
Well, that was about 99% of my point. Thanks for clearing that up
Xt is just another toolkit. In fact, it is the mother of toolkits (t = toolkit, remember?). How does it suffer less from the problems I mentioned, other than that it's a little smaller and tries a little less hard to provide its own API to replace unix?
Sadly, there isn't even any such thing as OS native widgets on Unix. Every toolkit has its own, and every application gets to choose its own toolkit.
/that/, together with a good widget definition language, and to stop reinventing the OS in huge toolkits that even provide timers and I/O and mistreat X as a dumb framebuffer backend.
We need an X protocol that works at widget level instead of pixel level. It'd be great if we could design
Client-side rendering, high-level application frameworks, *yuck*. Provide your high-level GUI stuff through an IPC channel and get out of the way. Let me have my own main loop back. Thank you.
There is every reason for a person to be criticised if he doesn't care /how/ he makes money, especially if he tries to do so by inventing contract clauses as opposed to selling good products.
I'm not trying to discredit you, but I really do think that users trying to fix 'spontaneous' problems at the OS level is generally a bad idea. It depends of course on the area of business you're in, but if you're working with bank employees instead of software engineers, there will be few extra problems that users will be able to solve themselves because of Window's extra user friendliness when it comes to systems administration.
/complete/ undo facility. When you're talking about the OS level, there's always inevitably a point where no undo exists anymore. Users should be kept out of that area, and the fact that Windows puts a GUI around it makes no difference whatsoever.
It's a different matter of course with applications; I think that their settings should always be exposed to the user in a GUI, even more so because users can't do any harm to others by tweaking an application to hell and back. But in that respect there's no difference between Mozilla on Linux and Mozilla on Windows, or OpenOffice on Linux or OpenOffice on Windows.
I still say that a user has no business fiddling with things he doesn't understand, unless there's a
(There, better now?)
Ugh. You're letting your *users* install drivers from websites? How many PCs do you manage???
Right. And how do you propose to call the set of servers that implement these "standard paradigm-neutrual protocols" for applications to use?
A base set of software, no matter in what form, that gets reused among applications, for centralised resource management or code efficiency or both, *is* an OS. Your superduper protocol servers are too.
Windows + your superhyper layer is simply a new OS with a new API.
Linux + your superhyper layer is exactly the same.
There's nothing fundamental about OS wars. We're simply battling over different APIs as well as over differnet implementations of the same API, or whether OS APIs should be data-oriented (what you want) or procedure-oriented (most common).
You're not ending the OS wars, you're simply contributing to them.
The real difference is personal freedom. Captialism is built on it, socialism is weakened by it.
This is nonsense. Capitalism ignores the freedom of the individual. It only upholds the freedom of the *wealthy* individual. All other individuals can go fuck themselves.
The only thing that promotes individual freedom is democracy coupled with a deeply entrenched system of individual rights. Without the latter, democracy will be just the right of the numeric strongest. Without such a democracy, capitalism is just the right of the economic strongest.
Capitalism does not even work *actively* to give everybody a *chance* of economic success. It's not in the best interests of your shareholders for you to help create a free market; it's in the best interests of your shareholders for you to be as dominant as you can, in every possible way you're allowed to.
In short, just promoting free enterprise isn't enough. You need a constitution, or another way of upholding basic human principles. You need democracy. You need a strong government that creates a level playing field for corporations and consumers. You need a government that enables people's solidarity for others who didn't grab their chance, for whatever reason, and that tries to minimize the harmful effects of people's greed instead of actively promoting it.
*Pure* capitalism doesn't build anything. It does not need a human society, the jungle is enough. It's sad that some Americans hardly know any better. It's even worse that since humanity have found to minimize the harmful effects of greed a bit, some people have switched from seeing greed as an inevitable problem to seeing it as a virtue. That's one of the most perverse, disgusting self delusions I've ever seen.
I have in my hand a CDMA phone that works. It's upward compatible with CDMA2000, which has been deployed, and working today. You're supporting the European standard UMTS, which is W-CDMA based, and hasn't been proven to work.
Deployed, yes, but only in certain states of a certain country.
I was referring to GSM in the above piece, not UMTS.
The problem is, the EU is doing this by specifying a winner.
Of course not. There *is* *no* *winner*. There's just *standards*. And what do you think, that the EU dreamed up GSM completely using in-house techs in an ivory tower and then told the companies, now you go and implement? Of couse not; the industry had lots of initiative there.
I'm pleased the EU promotes standards. Standards are *good* for the consumer. Perhaps UMTS is a bad one; then its lifetime will probably not be as long as that of GSM, and the next standard will come sooner. If there's a wide-backed proposal by the industry, and they can be made to agree, then that'll be the next standard the EU will support.
But there's nothing crafted in stone, and there's no definite winner. There's an ongoing process of innovation. If it's not in the best interests of the vendors to create some interoperability against such a background, then I think a democratic government does very well by asking 'ok guys, we know you're all able to make a good cellular phone system, but let's settle on one for the next few years, OK?', because that's good for the market and good for the consumer.
Of course the EU did not make any other means of RF communications illegal. They just allocated the part of the spectrum and formed the standards body for GSM. What's so bad about that???
The doctrine that world salvation is brought by putting as little as possible in the way of private enterprise. That the primary purpose of humanity is to have property. That survival of the fittest is the sole ethical concept we need. That 'greed is good'.
This doesn't even make any sense. I'm here in the US, and I have a cell phone that *works*. Just about everyone I know has a cell phone, and they all work reasonably well.
/that's/ what companies such as Qualcomm want you to do, that's what keeps them in business. Not that you're able to use your phone coast to coast.
I used *works* in a slightly broader sense, as in a good system that's *widely deployed* and *non-vaporware*.
And this is another reason why the US model is better than the European one. In the US, a carrier can at any time implement whatever technology he considers best, subject to FCC limitations on interference and the like.
That's not a feature of the system, that's a bug, because it means that the US phone system is always fragmented, never interoperates properly, no roaming can exist, and as a customer you're highly dependend on isolated vendor groups.
In Europe, the EU has decided to pick a winner, and forbids spectrum from being used in any other way. A result is that they'll wind up being stuck a generation behind while the US and Japan deploy new technology whenever it's economically feasable.
I'd rather have a good working system every 10 years, and have it implemented throughout, than having to follow each technology trend slavishly as it comes out, in a thorougly fragmented fashion. Remember,
The misconception is that any 'winner' could be forever. You're completely ignoring the process aspect! Every new feature may create a new winner in the technological sense, however if we keep on chasing each, we all end up as losers.
I have no problems whatsover with the EU lengthening the technical generations a bit. It's better for interoperability, creates a bigger market, and avoids vendor lock-in.
The idea that the EU will use GSM till eternity is as stupid as saying that the US will universally adopt CDMA2K, and that is the last mobile technology ever to be invented.
What mr. Den Beste writes is nonsense at best, and capitalist fundamentalism otherwise. Of course it may take a little while longer for Europe to adopt the latest whizz-bang RF layer in their mobile communication systems. But in the mean time, we've been able for *years* to use an *implemented* system that *works*. The US didn't.
And the US situation won't improve, because what he seems to forget completely is that his lovely state of uncontrolled chaos isn't ended now that his fantastic top of the bill CDMA is available for licensing. Of course CDMA adoption will still be partial, with the next better transmission system (full-spectrum wavelets?) already appearing on the horizon. Technology is always in flux, and if you're always busy implementing the latest thing, you'll never be able to actually *enjoy using something*. Artur C. Clarke has a great story where a war was lost because the generals didn't know 'best' is the enemy of 'better'.
This guy actually has the hubris to say, "we're done. We've developed the last system ever needed in mobile communications. We'll get our first CDMA handset on the market before the Europeans, so that also means our development system works best". Excellent reasoning.
Well, mr. Den Beste, I don't define the best system for mobile communications as the one having the highest capacity or the most fancy features, but as the one that enables most people to communicate while enjoying their freedom to travel from country to country and from vendor to vendor, thank you very much.