According to the a Bell System technical bulletin dated September 4, 1978 the volume wheel on the C4A ringer can be adjusted, if the subscriber requests, to provide full cut-off. The C4A ringer is the same ringer used in Bell System subscriber phones since the 50s.
Again it's quibbling about what "sending a message" means.
To most people "sending a message" implies two roles: the sender knows the content of the message before it is sent, but the recipient does not know the contents until it is received. So if you say "you can use this machine to send a message", that's what they'll picture, but it's not what is happening here.
And if you say message sending is "faster than light", they simply extend this model, picturing something like the Ansibles of science fiction.
Here we have a situation that is completely unlike those ansibles. The information carrier is transferred at sub-light speeds, and the only reason we might say the information travels FTL is that we regard that carrier as being in an indeterminate state during transit.
Well, users don't actually have the power to edit that; not without making their own ROM image. What a Linux user does is supply an alternate version of the DSDT to the operating system.
It is optional to supply different parameters to different operating systems in DSDT. You can simply supply parameters with no OS-specific instructions and that will work. So what the manufacturers did here wasn't a case of leaving the linux part blank -- it was creating a linux part of the table with the deliberate intention of ensuring linux wouldn't work properly.
Well, the fact that you installed your own operating system means they're off the hook for support. Support can't be the reason. Maybe it has something to do with wanting to make sure you use their bloatware.
Manufacturers have a long history of semi-deliberately screwing up linux support on laptops.
For example part of ACPI is a table in NVRAM called the Differentiated System Description Table; manufacturers put information in the DSDT that tell the operating system about devices that need switching on and off when going into various power states. One of the features of ACPI is that the DSDT can give different operating systems different instructions -- a feature I can think of no justification for, at least as far as the user's benefit is concerned.
Some manufacturers (Toshiba) on some models simply detect the Linux case and turn off a bunch of stuff at boot time, like the sound card and the network cards. This is why I had to learn about that DSDT shit in the first place. The hardware is all supported by Linux, and if you boot with ACPI turned off they work flawlessly, but of course you have no power management. The fix is a dynamic replacement of DSDT and Linux boot time, which makes kernel upgrades a chore, but in principle the fix is simple: copy the stuff the manufacturer says to do under "Windows" and paste it into the "Linux" section. Then everything works perfectly, but the rigamarole is way beyond what the average user can tolerate, and it's purely the manufacturer being a prick to customers who want Linux.
In a sense you could interpret it that way. But that's quibbling about terminology; it doesn't mean you can send messages that way, which is the important point.
Why, though? At this point it seems just as likely that we'll find a miracle cure to cure all cancers as it is that we'll just figure out treatments for every kind one by one.
Which isn't saying much; it'll take a us a long, long time to take them all on one by one. I guess the reason is that cancer is a kind of process that occurs in many different kinds of cells. Tumors are tough to beat too because they're abnormal tissues that are tough to get medicine into, which is why so many promising in vitro treatments fail in vivo.
I think both the incremental and breakthrough approaches are about equally likely to work, and someday we'll get there. But if I were a betting man I wouldn't put money on any particular upcoming breakthrough paying out. Those have gone bust many, many times before, broken by the complexity of cancer.
As much as this explanation appears to make sense, like anything in a social study, the results are likely virtually meaningless at the individual level. How any one person reacts to a tracker will not be predictable.
This is true. As someone who successfully used an activity logger as part of a self-designed program in which I lost about 100 pounds, I have some perspective on the matter. That doesn't have the same value as data from a controlled study of course, but which is nonetheless useful in curtailing premature generalizations one would make from such a study.
My success puts me in a tiny minority of people, which has always been the problem all along: almost any rationally plausible program of weight loss works, but when you put the white-hot light of science on it most people don't lose much. And what they do lose they quickly gain back. Sustainable weight loss is an atypical result because it requires the indefinite sustenance of an unnatural behavior pattern. So what this study shows is that activity trackers do not by themselves modify patient behavior, which does not surprise me in the least. Given the low level of success it's almost a foregone conclusion that in a study like this you'll get negative results, or positive results that don't stand up to scrutiny. We need to study the outliers more first.
My doctor says the reason I have had success where others have not is that I am the most data-oriented patient she's ever had. Which I should be; data has been my life work. And that gives me another perspective, which is this: the vast majority of people do not understand how to interpret data and use it effectively to achieve their goals.
For example, I weigh myself daily. This would discourage most people and make them give up, because even when you're on a successful weight loss trajectory your weight goes up over the prior day almost half the time. But I also take an electronic body fat percentage. The body fat numbers are very imprecise, but together with the weight measurement they show me that when my weight goes up dramatically in one day, my body fat percentage goes down. This in turn correlates pretty closely to variations in my salt intake (I log everything I eat) over the past 24 hours. What my data says is that daily swings in my weight are almost 100% due to hydration.
For me this kind of data-intensive approach works, and I don't have any problem carrying on with it for the rest of my life. It would be intolerable for the average person I suppose, but I suspect many people here might be more like me than average. This is body composition hacking.
Here's a pro tip for using your activity tracker: find something you do every day by habit; something that's easy and rewarding to do. Maybe it's going on Facebook or Slashdot. Make a pact with yourself never to do that thing until your activity tracker shows you've reached a certain percentage of your daily goal. Why does this work? Because our lives our governed by unconscious habit. To establish a new habit, you need to find a behavioral trigger, ideally something which naturally happens. This is the point at which you can hack the new behavior into your automatic daily routine.
Another pro tip: weight loss is like steering a supertanker; you can't make it turn on a dime one way or the other. This is a lifetime process, so don't get discouraged by a week or even a month of fat gain. Just make sure you see it happening, which will come out in the numbers before you're forced to buy new clothes.
There's a longstanding history of that kind of thing. Marketers having been data mining to detect when women are pregnant for years now and their methods are creepily accurate.
The thing is, though, that pregnancy is one thing. Pancreatic cancer is one thing. Cancer *in general* is more like a mixed bag of similar phenomena. We've pretty much converted many individual types of cancers that were a death sentence twenty years ago into curable illnesses. But others remain intractable. So saying "curing cancer" is a bit like saying "curing infection". Curing *the whole category* will require a truly fundamental progress in biology.
In fact it may require multidisciplinary breakthroughs. There's lots of things that kill tumor cells, but don't work on tumors.
Which is kind of contingent upon being part of Europe, economically and administratively speaking.
Life is about tradeoffs, and of course nobody can decide for other people whether the tradeoff is worth it. So if Britons want Brexit, fine. But rejecting one tradeoff means accepting another one; in return for being freed from all the annoying EU stuff, they'll have to pay a price. Insofar as they don't pay that price, then the substance of all that annoying stuff is likely not to go away. So suppose you're a US company interested in the Continental market, not just the UK. The best you could hope for would be the reestablishment of a more complicated version of the status quo.
The uncertainty is such that only a fool would bank on London maintaining its role in the EU. That might happen, or it might not. But either way if you're an American company, well, educated Germans usually speak very good English, often better than the average American does. The central location is also a little more convenient for operations, so locating in Munich is like putting your US HQ in Chicago.
There used to be a time when you could walk to your corner pharmacy and get a bottle of laudanum, or some cocaine. This did not work out well.
We've returned to that state, with one proviso: it can't be something that's been shown to work. I can get all the herbal nostrum and "supplements" I want, and they can (with a few ineffective limitations) promise me they work as well for cancer or impotence as laudanum does for pain.
I have. And this is what I concluded: this is a case of zebras vs. horses. That fully explains the motives of the actors in this case.
Medical students are famously taught that when it comes to diagnosis, "When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras." In other words avoid making a diagnosis of a rare condition when a commonplace one will do.
There are obvious epistemological problems with this rule of thumb; one is that zebras do, in fact, exist, and in certain parts of the world are more common than horses. The second is that what is a "zebra" is dependent upon your clinical practice. For a clinical geneticist specializing in mitochondrial diseases Munchhausen-by-proxy is a zebra. For a doctor who specializes in detecting child abuse, a severe mitochondrial DNA mutation is a zebra.
Now consider a court that regularly deals with child abuse cases. Which specialist is the judge (who has his own epistemological biases) going to believe? The specialist in obscure genetic diseases, or the one who's been nailing abusers for years?
Dr. Newton, the Children's Hospital lead in this case, is admired by children's advocates in Massachusetts, and is described by some of them in one news story as "a highly respected physician who fearlessly speaks the truth as she sees it." And maybe that's the problem. Maybe playing the heroic role for too long is bad for your judgment, makes you see disagreement as unwillingness to listen.
What I am suggesting is that the error on the part of Children's Hospital here may have come out of the same mindset under which Anonymous operates, one suffused with the warm, affirming glow of self-righteousness. As I've grown older I have learned to recognize that feeling for what it is: a corrupting influence on judgment.
Again I never said entrepreneurs do it on their own. I don't know where you get that.
Most startups fail. Most survivors are mediocre. Having some vision beyond beating normal profit is a powerful asset, although like anything else in excess it is a liability.
Well, obvious answers have non-obvious consequences.
I remember when Windows Vista came out. It was roundly reviled for many things, performance being one of them. But in fact its average performance wasn't that bad. The real problem was premature optimization; Microsoft pulled every trick they could imagine to tweak the behemoth's average performance but the result was the speed at which the UI responded was inconsistent. Users adapt to a UI having a certain rhythm; and if that rhythm is inconsistent the system is perceived as slow, no matter what the average looks like. Back in the day text coming off a teleprinter on a 300 baud modem seemed fast. But today a hiccup in a web page loading is intolerable.
The problem with smartphones is that they stay on for weeks. If you let background tasks accumulate, even on the user's say-so, performance may get uneven, which in its way is worse than slow.
Now you can say that it's a useful tradeoff to accept that possibility in return for having more control, and that's certainly a valid position. This gets to the part of user interfaces that is quite tricky: people have different opinions about things and those opinions are valid for them. For example you could also say that it's better to condition the user to certain limitations in background processes in return for having a consistent response to starting a new tasks or continuing the present one.
I'd say given Android's success, Google's choice was a reasonable starting point, but starting points are never ideal. The next step when you've achieved a basic level of success it to build on that by incorporating the things you consciously avoided doing at the outset.
Well, everyone has projects that fail; even more people have dreams that they never even start work on.
But you can see here why Musk is a successful and important tech entrepreneur. He didn't set out to make an electric car because it made economic or technical sense; he set out to do that because he wanted one.
Pure engineers and MBA types don't advance the state of technology. Most engineers by temperament are conservative; give them a choice of a clearly feasible and doubtful project and they'll go with the feasible. Most management types are just the financial and organizational equivalent of an engineer. Take Mitt Romney; a very able individual in his field. Yet despite the political rhetoric about risk taking if you look at the specifics of his career, he made money by finding opportunities for high but relatively predictable returns that others have overlooked.
People like that don't advance the state of the art. Nor do pure dreamers. What you need is someone who by nature is focused on stuff just past the line of what is financially and technically feasible.
Now it's very possible that we're looking at financial hubris setting in here, but I think what this signals is that Musk thinks that given what he has on the boards right now Mars is clearly technically feasible. So of course he's thinking now about beyond Mars. And he doesn't have the funding yet, but that's not going to stop him from focusing there.
Sure but 1.3 KW is not "tremendous" power -- it's amateur range stuff. Broadcast AM stations go up to around 50kw, which is a "normal" for that application.
In the 30s and 40s, WLW in Nashville broadcast at 500KW. Radio Monte Carlo's transmitters currently put out 2x700KW in long wave and an even 1MW in medium wave. Russia's Taldom transmitter pumps out 2.5MW in long wave.
So I'd say anything over 10^8 watts is tremendous.
There are tubes that individually are rated in the MW range, like the 8974 power tetrode, which weighs 80kg and is water cooled. It is rated for 1.2MW (a.k.a. 700 horsepower); in class C it can peak at 2.1MW. That's what I'd call "stupendous" power.
Sure, but that may be because it wasn't worth the bother. But now that they've got Manning's conviction, what are the chances they couldn't get him on some kind of conspiracy charge?
As a crusty old, old programmer myself, often it's the old eyeballs that let me down. My brain is willing to keep working by the eyestrain tells me I have to take a break.
So better rendering is a good thing, unless it's an attempt at rendering that makes things pretty but harder to read.
Slashdot Mirror
According to the a Bell System technical bulletin dated September 4, 1978 the volume wheel on the C4A ringer can be adjusted, if the subscriber requests, to provide full cut-off. The C4A ringer is the same ringer used in Bell System subscriber phones since the 50s.
Google "ringers c type maintenance 501-250-303".
Again it's quibbling about what "sending a message" means.
To most people "sending a message" implies two roles: the sender knows the content of the message before it is sent, but the recipient does not know the contents until it is received. So if you say "you can use this machine to send a message", that's what they'll picture, but it's not what is happening here.
And if you say message sending is "faster than light", they simply extend this model, picturing something like the Ansibles of science fiction.
Here we have a situation that is completely unlike those ansibles. The information carrier is transferred at sub-light speeds, and the only reason we might say the information travels FTL is that we regard that carrier as being in an indeterminate state during transit.
This may be so, but there is no reason not to provide the same instructions to all operating systems in that case.
Well, users don't actually have the power to edit that; not without making their own ROM image. What a Linux user does is supply an alternate version of the DSDT to the operating system.
It is optional to supply different parameters to different operating systems in DSDT. You can simply supply parameters with no OS-specific instructions and that will work. So what the manufacturers did here wasn't a case of leaving the linux part blank -- it was creating a linux part of the table with the deliberate intention of ensuring linux wouldn't work properly.
Well, the fact that you installed your own operating system means they're off the hook for support. Support can't be the reason. Maybe it has something to do with wanting to make sure you use their bloatware.
Manufacturers have a long history of semi-deliberately screwing up linux support on laptops.
For example part of ACPI is a table in NVRAM called the Differentiated System Description Table; manufacturers put information in the DSDT that tell the operating system about devices that need switching on and off when going into various power states. One of the features of ACPI is that the DSDT can give different operating systems different instructions -- a feature I can think of no justification for, at least as far as the user's benefit is concerned.
Some manufacturers (Toshiba) on some models simply detect the Linux case and turn off a bunch of stuff at boot time, like the sound card and the network cards. This is why I had to learn about that DSDT shit in the first place. The hardware is all supported by Linux, and if you boot with ACPI turned off they work flawlessly, but of course you have no power management. The fix is a dynamic replacement of DSDT and Linux boot time, which makes kernel upgrades a chore, but in principle the fix is simple: copy the stuff the manufacturer says to do under "Windows" and paste it into the "Linux" section. Then everything works perfectly, but the rigamarole is way beyond what the average user can tolerate, and it's purely the manufacturer being a prick to customers who want Linux.
In a sense you could interpret it that way. But that's quibbling about terminology; it doesn't mean you can send messages that way, which is the important point.
Good for you. Slow weight loss is easier to maintain, not the least because the new habits have longer to become ingrained.
Why, though? At this point it seems just as likely that we'll find a miracle cure to cure all cancers as it is that we'll just figure out treatments for every kind one by one.
Which isn't saying much; it'll take a us a long, long time to take them all on one by one. I guess the reason is that cancer is a kind of process that occurs in many different kinds of cells. Tumors are tough to beat too because they're abnormal tissues that are tough to get medicine into, which is why so many promising in vitro treatments fail in vivo.
I think both the incremental and breakthrough approaches are about equally likely to work, and someday we'll get there. But if I were a betting man I wouldn't put money on any particular upcoming breakthrough paying out. Those have gone bust many, many times before, broken by the complexity of cancer.
As much as this explanation appears to make sense, like anything in a social study, the results are likely virtually meaningless at the individual level. How any one person reacts to a tracker will not be predictable.
This is true. As someone who successfully used an activity logger as part of a self-designed program in which I lost about 100 pounds, I have some perspective on the matter. That doesn't have the same value as data from a controlled study of course, but which is nonetheless useful in curtailing premature generalizations one would make from such a study.
My success puts me in a tiny minority of people, which has always been the problem all along: almost any rationally plausible program of weight loss works, but when you put the white-hot light of science on it most people don't lose much. And what they do lose they quickly gain back. Sustainable weight loss is an atypical result because it requires the indefinite sustenance of an unnatural behavior pattern. So what this study shows is that activity trackers do not by themselves modify patient behavior, which does not surprise me in the least. Given the low level of success it's almost a foregone conclusion that in a study like this you'll get negative results, or positive results that don't stand up to scrutiny. We need to study the outliers more first.
My doctor says the reason I have had success where others have not is that I am the most data-oriented patient she's ever had. Which I should be; data has been my life work. And that gives me another perspective, which is this: the vast majority of people do not understand how to interpret data and use it effectively to achieve their goals.
For example, I weigh myself daily. This would discourage most people and make them give up, because even when you're on a successful weight loss trajectory your weight goes up over the prior day almost half the time. But I also take an electronic body fat percentage. The body fat numbers are very imprecise, but together with the weight measurement they show me that when my weight goes up dramatically in one day, my body fat percentage goes down. This in turn correlates pretty closely to variations in my salt intake (I log everything I eat) over the past 24 hours. What my data says is that daily swings in my weight are almost 100% due to hydration.
For me this kind of data-intensive approach works, and I don't have any problem carrying on with it for the rest of my life. It would be intolerable for the average person I suppose, but I suspect many people here might be more like me than average. This is body composition hacking.
Here's a pro tip for using your activity tracker: find something you do every day by habit; something that's easy and rewarding to do. Maybe it's going on Facebook or Slashdot. Make a pact with yourself never to do that thing until your activity tracker shows you've reached a certain percentage of your daily goal. Why does this work? Because our lives our governed by unconscious habit. To establish a new habit, you need to find a behavioral trigger, ideally something which naturally happens. This is the point at which you can hack the new behavior into your automatic daily routine.
Another pro tip: weight loss is like steering a supertanker; you can't make it turn on a dime one way or the other. This is a lifetime process, so don't get discouraged by a week or even a month of fat gain. Just make sure you see it happening, which will come out in the numbers before you're forced to buy new clothes.
There's a longstanding history of that kind of thing. Marketers having been data mining to detect when women are pregnant for years now and their methods are creepily accurate.
The thing is, though, that pregnancy is one thing. Pancreatic cancer is one thing. Cancer *in general* is more like a mixed bag of similar phenomena. We've pretty much converted many individual types of cancers that were a death sentence twenty years ago into curable illnesses. But others remain intractable. So saying "curing cancer" is a bit like saying "curing infection". Curing *the whole category* will require a truly fundamental progress in biology.
In fact it may require multidisciplinary breakthroughs. There's lots of things that kill tumor cells, but don't work on tumors.
Which is kind of contingent upon being part of Europe, economically and administratively speaking.
Life is about tradeoffs, and of course nobody can decide for other people whether the tradeoff is worth it. So if Britons want Brexit, fine. But rejecting one tradeoff means accepting another one; in return for being freed from all the annoying EU stuff, they'll have to pay a price. Insofar as they don't pay that price, then the substance of all that annoying stuff is likely not to go away. So suppose you're a US company interested in the Continental market, not just the UK. The best you could hope for would be the reestablishment of a more complicated version of the status quo.
The uncertainty is such that only a fool would bank on London maintaining its role in the EU. That might happen, or it might not. But either way if you're an American company, well, educated Germans usually speak very good English, often better than the average American does. The central location is also a little more convenient for operations, so locating in Munich is like putting your US HQ in Chicago.
There used to be a time when you could walk to your corner pharmacy and get a bottle of laudanum, or some cocaine. This did not work out well.
We've returned to that state, with one proviso: it can't be something that's been shown to work. I can get all the herbal nostrum and "supplements" I want, and they can (with a few ineffective limitations) promise me they work as well for cancer or impotence as laudanum does for pain.
Technically what you are describing isn't socialized medicine; it's socialized health insurance.
Do some research on the case
I have. And this is what I concluded: this is a case of zebras vs. horses. That fully explains the motives of the actors in this case.
Medical students are famously taught that when it comes to diagnosis, "When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras." In other words avoid making a diagnosis of a rare condition when a commonplace one will do.
There are obvious epistemological problems with this rule of thumb; one is that zebras do, in fact, exist, and in certain parts of the world are more common than horses. The second is that what is a "zebra" is dependent upon your clinical practice. For a clinical geneticist specializing in mitochondrial diseases Munchhausen-by-proxy is a zebra. For a doctor who specializes in detecting child abuse, a severe mitochondrial DNA mutation is a zebra.
Now consider a court that regularly deals with child abuse cases. Which specialist is the judge (who has his own epistemological biases) going to believe? The specialist in obscure genetic diseases, or the one who's been nailing abusers for years?
Dr. Newton, the Children's Hospital lead in this case, is admired by children's advocates in Massachusetts, and is described by some of them in one news story as "a highly respected physician who fearlessly speaks the truth as she sees it." And maybe that's the problem. Maybe playing the heroic role for too long is bad for your judgment, makes you see disagreement as unwillingness to listen.
What I am suggesting is that the error on the part of Children's Hospital here may have come out of the same mindset under which Anonymous operates, one suffused with the warm, affirming glow of self-righteousness. As I've grown older I have learned to recognize that feeling for what it is: a corrupting influence on judgment.
Oh, for Pete's sake.
Again I never said entrepreneurs do it on their own. I don't know where you get that.
Most startups fail. Most survivors are mediocre. Having some vision beyond beating normal profit is a powerful asset, although like anything else in excess it is a liability.
Well, obvious answers have non-obvious consequences.
I remember when Windows Vista came out. It was roundly reviled for many things, performance being one of them. But in fact its average performance wasn't that bad. The real problem was premature optimization; Microsoft pulled every trick they could imagine to tweak the behemoth's average performance but the result was the speed at which the UI responded was inconsistent. Users adapt to a UI having a certain rhythm; and if that rhythm is inconsistent the system is perceived as slow, no matter what the average looks like. Back in the day text coming off a teleprinter on a 300 baud modem seemed fast. But today a hiccup in a web page loading is intolerable.
The problem with smartphones is that they stay on for weeks. If you let background tasks accumulate, even on the user's say-so, performance may get uneven, which in its way is worse than slow.
Now you can say that it's a useful tradeoff to accept that possibility in return for having more control, and that's certainly a valid position. This gets to the part of user interfaces that is quite tricky: people have different opinions about things and those opinions are valid for them. For example you could also say that it's better to condition the user to certain limitations in background processes in return for having a consistent response to starting a new tasks or continuing the present one.
I'd say given Android's success, Google's choice was a reasonable starting point, but starting points are never ideal. The next step when you've achieved a basic level of success it to build on that by incorporating the things you consciously avoided doing at the outset.
Or will they circle the wagons?
You're attacking a strawman; I never said Musk did it alone, mad scientist style.
Well, everyone has projects that fail; even more people have dreams that they never even start work on.
But you can see here why Musk is a successful and important tech entrepreneur. He didn't set out to make an electric car because it made economic or technical sense; he set out to do that because he wanted one.
Pure engineers and MBA types don't advance the state of technology. Most engineers by temperament are conservative; give them a choice of a clearly feasible and doubtful project and they'll go with the feasible. Most management types are just the financial and organizational equivalent of an engineer. Take Mitt Romney; a very able individual in his field. Yet despite the political rhetoric about risk taking if you look at the specifics of his career, he made money by finding opportunities for high but relatively predictable returns that others have overlooked.
People like that don't advance the state of the art. Nor do pure dreamers. What you need is someone who by nature is focused on stuff just past the line of what is financially and technically feasible.
Now it's very possible that we're looking at financial hubris setting in here, but I think what this signals is that Musk thinks that given what he has on the boards right now Mars is clearly technically feasible. So of course he's thinking now about beyond Mars. And he doesn't have the funding yet, but that's not going to stop him from focusing there.
Sure but 1.3 KW is not "tremendous" power -- it's amateur range stuff. Broadcast AM stations go up to around 50kw, which is a "normal" for that application.
In the 30s and 40s, WLW in Nashville broadcast at 500KW. Radio Monte Carlo's transmitters currently put out 2x700KW in long wave and an even 1MW in medium wave. Russia's Taldom transmitter pumps out 2.5MW in long wave.
So I'd say anything over 10^8 watts is tremendous.
There are tubes that individually are rated in the MW range, like the 8974 power tetrode, which weighs 80kg and is water cooled. It is rated for 1.2MW (a.k.a. 700 horsepower); in class C it can peak at 2.1MW. That's what I'd call "stupendous" power.
Sure, but that may be because it wasn't worth the bother. But now that they've got Manning's conviction, what are the chances they couldn't get him on some kind of conspiracy charge?
As a crusty old, old programmer myself, often it's the old eyeballs that let me down. My brain is willing to keep working by the eyestrain tells me I have to take a break.
So better rendering is a good thing, unless it's an attempt at rendering that makes things pretty but harder to read.
The set decoration reminds me vaguely of the old German expressionist films, where a very obviously stagey set was gussied up with striking design.