While this is certainly their right, as they own the copyright to the music, I wonder why they will bother doing this. Lyric sites help to sell more music, which is the industry's primary source of income. Most of the current sites will just come down, because the ad revenue won't cover the cost of the servers, bandwidth, AND licensing. My only hope is that the one or two sites that will remain will stay free to visit and rely on ad revenue.
If I spend 3 billion dollars to map NYC to within a meter for a game I expect my data set to be legally protected. Really, that should be a no brainer. I'm not liscensing they layout - just liscensing the amount of work/money I have done. If you choose to donate time to *my* project that is your choice.
OTOH I don't own the layout of NYC - there is nothing to protect (nor should there be) someone else from doing the same thing. Even if it turns out to be 100% exactly what I have - as long as you came up with it one your own. I can't see how someone would think they can own that type of data.
The problem with this is that under most copyright laws, if your first database is copyrighted, then the second, 100%-identical-but-created-independently database is illegal because it is identical, even though not a derivative work.
What you really want is a trade secret. Keep your data hidden somehow. You agree that data on a public place is not yours in your post. Stay consistent.
Just head over to any article discussing a Japaan-Korea coflict, like the naming of the Sea of Japan or discussion of additional reparations for the Japanese empirical period. Wow! Racist hate trash talk for everyone to read between countries just across the sea from each other. For a launching place, take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disputes_between_Japa n_and_Korea.
You seem to have misread me. I never once thought that ODF should be the default file format for any particular office suite (since MS retains the right to make their own products / file formats / etc.), merely that not supporting it at all seems kind of like refusing to include a philips-head screwdriver in the tool sets you produce simply because your company also produces (possibly technically superior) non-philips screws. Certainly implementing the standard as a native export filter (instead of an unsupported plugin) would be cheaper and easier than the amount of lobbying that MS has done in attempting to avoid implementing it.
I'll restate my case -- There should be an office document exchange standard that covers the normal use cases of normal users, and right now the only standard is ODF. If another, better standard comes along and people want to use it, then great -- even if that standard was created at MS -- as long as people using different companies' programs can continue exchanging freely without royalties. What someone's program saves to by default is not really important to me or to the people that I read who talk about this. MS argues against setting ODF as their default file format, but that's their way of reframing the argument in their favor, since I don't know of anyone who actually wants it. That MS also continues to cry that they won't support ODF because it doesn't cover all the possible uses of MS Word is a straw man that they keep throwing up, and they must know that it is since they have no problem exporting in other formats. Your and their arguments end up being orthogonal to mine.
It's just annoying that a lot of people implicitly assume that ODF is better and is the format to use without looking at it closely.
I think that the problem people have with OpenXML is that they just don't trust MS to play fair with it, and assume that there's a catch in the deal somewhere down the line. They don't give OpenXML a good look-over in just the same way that I don't bother to check whether the three card monte hustler on the corner is legit or not: I just keep walking. Given the track record of MS, I can appreciate people's reluctance -- "Fool me once...," right?
Finally, I think that you are arguing from your heart, not your mind and letting the rhetoric get to you. If you discard the "M$ is teh sux0rs" idiots, the disingenuous "MS has the right to write their own programs" crowd, and the trolls who pose as either side, you'll come out with the government's argument for a standard -- ODF or otherwise -- which will allow free access to government documents and the consumer's argument for major office suites to handle this standard, both of which are reasonable positions. I don't want my government to publish important tax information in iPod's Protected AAC format (requiring me to buy an iPod even if I normally use another product) and I suspect that you don't, either. This despite the fact that iPods have about a 90% market share, comparable to MS Office's almost 95%.
give me a valid reason why chosing ODF over OpenXML is going to be a good business decision for anyone?
I don't think that choosing one over the other is necessarily a good business decision, but not supporting the only current office file standard while governments are moving to it is a silly move for anyone but Microsoft, who wants to continue to control 90+% of the market. Oddly enough, I'm not a real big fan of OpenOffice.org, but I live in a country where Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly on office suites (that honor goes to Hangul Office) and they are much more flexible here than in any other country I've been in except Thailand, where there was also enormous pressure on MS.
Ultimately, having a nice, free standard to exchange documents in would be in the customer's best interest, and competitive companies still try to sell their goods through emphasizing that interest (assuming that the customer is aware of it, of course). If that nice, free-to-read-AND-write-in-perpetuity standard ends up being OpenXML, I won't really care who wrote the standard -- I'll just care that we can all communicate.
Incidentally, I called you a troll because you used disinformation to start a discussion:
Every supporter of ODF sounds as if ODF is the most used format world-wide and the de facto standard
Microsoft providing an OpenXML-ODF translator is a stop-gag measure to prolong the eventual death of ODF.
You finish off your response with Hence ODF is advertised as the de facto standard, which no one in his or her right mind would say, since the current MS Office formats certainly fill that role.*
Looking back on it, though, I think it was probably better classed as flamebait.
*The problem being, of course, that's it's a standard which is difficult to write software for.
I need MS's "stop-gag measure" after reading your post. I have never read anyone say seriously that ODF is more prevalent or even significantly technically superor to OpenXML, but I have read plenty of voices which say that it's now an international standard which all office suites should support -- just the way they support ACSII -- natively, without a broken plugin. ODF is not the de facto standard: it's an ISO standard. Making a browser that doesn't support ISO-8859-1 is just stupid. Making an office suite and refusing to really support ISO 26300 is equally stupid.
I asked because tones are not normally counted that way, so I wanted him to clarify. A Mandarin syylable is usually described as having an initial consonant (optional), a vowel, a final consonant (optional), and a tonal value. In my example of 36 Thai vowels, for instance, they include "vowel length" because the short vowels are normally followed by a glottal, but the five tones are not included in the number, or you would count it as 180. The statement of "over fifty vowels" seemed really odd.
Trust me that American English grammar is much simpler thatn British English grammar. Remember that American English was simplified somewhat so that immigrants could learn it. The easiest dialect of English that I ever learned (simple past, not pres. perf. because I'm American not British) was the pidgin spoken in Hawaii. No tenses, only particles.
I also struggled with W-G, Yale and Pinyin in learning Mandarin. Now that I'm in Korea (and formerly Thailand) I have found real problems with romanization. In Thailand, for example, there wasn't a government approved system until ?1999? and it's still not really commonly used. Spellings are rather random there, with the San Saeb Canal Bridge being a great example -- both vowels a and ae are the same when written in Thai. Korea had a new system introduced in 2001, but it hasn't been received well, and a lot of words are "grandfathered" with the old system. Friggin' confusing in both countries.
Which Chinese dialects have over fifty different vowel sounds. Are you including tone differences in the count or not? The Tai languages have over 30 each, without tones, but I wasn't aware of any Chinese dialects that did. Enlighten me, please.
You think that English is hard? Look to Asia. Try learning Thai with its 46 (44) consonants and 36 vowels, plus diacritical marks. Sure, the Korean alphabet can be learned in a couple of days, but the Hanja that goes along with it can take years. Speaking of Hanja, learning Chinese can take a lifetime.
English spelling sucks, though, and that's why Noah Webster supported wholesale changing of English speeling to make it easier for children. He succeeded somewhat with re -> er, but larger changes like eliminating C and X were rejected by the general public.
Well, you're lucky. When I was first entered the US Army, I had never even used Win 3.11 or Win95 (just old Tandies and Apples). The officers that I supported, knowing this, still asked me support questions (mostly about Power Point). I guess that they figured that I came up with the answer every time and that my time was less valuable than theirs. It taught me a lot about "modern" software, though I haven't really used the skill since then, either.
Just go to the Ubuntu website and click on the "Download" link, which I'm sure is how he got Ubuntu in the first place. There at the bottom of the page, it reads (links deleted):
Source code
In accordance with our philosophy and licensing guidelines, source code is made available for all packages in Ubuntu. It can be browsed and downloaded from our archive. Alternatively, one can easily retrieve source code from an networked Ubuntu system by using a terminal to run the command "apt-get source " where is the name of the source package that you would like to download and unpack.
It's much easier finding out how to do that than how to get on the forums or IRC, which he did. The guy was obviously a troll from the very beginning. Anyone who wants source or who understands the GPL knows where to get it. I wish I had mod points for the guy, because he needs to be taken down to "troll."
I don't actually have a problem with the way the front page of Digg works. I visit it every day and get more interesting stories than Slash has. Digg's weakness in is the community -- I just can't even stand to read the comments section. I rarely even click on the discussion because, when I do, it disgusts me.
I still remember some 8 years ago probably -- when I first came to Slash -- how 5% of the level of conversation was amazing. You'd get people who had been working since the 70's who would be discussing how the unixy news of the day would affect them. There's even still a little of that left here sometimes. I wade through comments similar to what I've read a thousand times before in order to find that gem of one that truly edifies me. Digg's comment section just leaves me feeling dirty by comparison.
Yeah, Malda doesn't matter. I don't even know if he ever did. The editors could change the story submission method to more reflect Digg's model and I don't think that it would change the community here much, which might be a good plan. Years ago, when Slash started choking on the crap it was feeding itself, I hoped Bruce's site would attract some serious attention, but it never really did. I still visit it once in a while, though.
I will never leave Slash for Digg, unless it's community becomes better educated about tech, and that's not likely to happen since they are moving to a broader, not narrower, audience.
You are thoroughly confused, and have repeated this several times. The GGP says that IF the donator wants to make a large social impact, he / she shouldn't forget to donate SOME of the money to the program. Not the only way. Not even necessarily the best way. Just an important way in the mind of the GGP.
Use logic and then temper it with some common sense. Common sense is not required in this case, but it will help you avoid making and ass out of yourself.
Maybe he should've checked the ads for adds instead of the adds for adds, because they might've added the ads but failed to add the adds. Infact, from what I can tell, they mightn't be dead at all, but merely addled....
I can't talk about now, but when I lived in China twenty years ago, people were slotted for jobs. If you scored well on the tests, you went to a good university with a major decided for you and a job afterward, but if your scores were lower you went to a "normal" (teachers') college or just went straight to work. People then really didn't have any choice in the matter. Things may have changed some, but I doubt they turned 180 degrees.
Regardless of the reasons why Microsoft donated the software the end result is that the kids are the winners.... is that such a bad thing?
I don't know.... About three years ago I was living in Thailand and actively involved in the hot Linux uptake there. The government had a five year plan to move to Linux and was promoting it everywhere. The Thais in the gov't FLOSS program were even talking about "official government OS" for LinuxTLE (NECTEC's distro). People were talking about the empowerment of the local IT business and over half of the computers on display in Carrefour and Lotus were running locally produced Linux. Thailand even famously broke MS's "one price around the world" policy. It was like a revolution under colonial rule, I kid you not.
After a year of this, MS walked in and offered a "deal" which legitimized all the currently installed MS operating systems within the government and promised lots of software for schools. Since the schools were mostly without computers and the government had the same problem with copyright infringement that the rest of the country had / has. It cost MS nothing but the price of the plane ticket and maybe some money under the table -- I don't know about that.
The FLOSS movement died right there. Nobody talked about it anymore, and I can't even find Linux in the stores anymore. The revolutionaries were quieted and the unrest was quelled. Everyone went back to being the good little MS users they were "supposed" to be.
There's something truly evil about a deal like this. The kids in Thailand certainly didn't profit by losing their empowerment to a foreign company. The IT industry is again dependent on one.
Now that I'm in Korea, I keep hearing the same kind of talk here, but I've never even SEEN an installed Linux system outside my own.
bring us closer to stable content and civil discussions among editors.
Because you're ever going to get civil discussion about Korea vs. Corea? I don't think so. Just look at the discussion on that page.
The SF's major role is peacetime missions. These include training of foreign troops or humanitarian work such as the demining of Laos. If I remember correctly from my time working with them, two of the more common "real" missions was S&R and UW. Just my two cents. I suspect the HALO guys (in SF, not the game) will feel much better with this wing. Just my 2 Won
Beagle is the Mono answer to Spotlight (is that right?), and it'll allow you to do great things like full text, real-time searches on emails, PDFs, and ODF files, but it has had a memory leak for a long time, which means that you can't stay logged in for more than a day. Kind of sucks.
.. how can you complain about a prerelease version of an OS being unstable, when the idea is that of course it's going to be unstable until it's been tested and revised?
The post was in response to a praise of how great Dapper is going to be. I was pointing out that the beta (which I've been running with full knowledge in order to test and write about) has gone downhill recently and the major performance-shattering bugs have not yet been touched yet, especially the crazy Beagle memory leak. I'm not saying that it's going to suck -- I'm saying that it was unusable for about a week, to the point that I ditched Gnome on the machine in order to continue testing other parts of the system. I also said that I need to check back soon to see whether it's been fixed or not.
The release date is coming up quickly (and really should've happened already) though, and this extra period was declared as just "extra time" to really make it solid. I don't feel that it's working out that way and it scares me a little, honestly.
Slashdot Mirror
While this is certainly their right, as they own the copyright to the music, I wonder why they will bother doing this. Lyric sites help to sell more music, which is the industry's primary source of income. Most of the current sites will just come down, because the ad revenue won't cover the cost of the servers, bandwidth, AND licensing. My only hope is that the one or two sites that will remain will stay free to visit and rely on ad revenue.
If I spend 3 billion dollars to map NYC to within a meter for a game I expect my data set to be legally protected. Really, that should be a no brainer. I'm not liscensing they layout - just liscensing the amount of work/money I have done. If you choose to donate time to *my* project that is your choice.
OTOH I don't own the layout of NYC - there is nothing to protect (nor should there be) someone else from doing the same thing. Even if it turns out to be 100% exactly what I have - as long as you came up with it one your own. I can't see how someone would think they can own that type of data.
The problem with this is that under most copyright laws, if your first database is copyrighted, then the second, 100%-identical-but-created-independently database is illegal because it is identical, even though not a derivative work.
What you really want is a trade secret. Keep your data hidden somehow. You agree that data on a public place is not yours in your post. Stay consistent.
Just head over to any article discussing a Japaan-Korea coflict, like the naming of the Sea of Japan or discussion of additional reparations for the Japanese empirical period. Wow! Racist hate trash talk for everyone to read between countries just across the sea from each other. For a launching place, take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disputes_between_Japa n_and_Korea.
You seem to have misread me. I never once thought that ODF should be the default file format for any particular office suite (since MS retains the right to make their own products / file formats / etc.), merely that not supporting it at all seems kind of like refusing to include a philips-head screwdriver in the tool sets you produce simply because your company also produces (possibly technically superior) non-philips screws. Certainly implementing the standard as a native export filter (instead of an unsupported plugin) would be cheaper and easier than the amount of lobbying that MS has done in attempting to avoid implementing it.
...," right?
I'll restate my case -- There should be an office document exchange standard that covers the normal use cases of normal users, and right now the only standard is ODF. If another, better standard comes along and people want to use it, then great -- even if that standard was created at MS -- as long as people using different companies' programs can continue exchanging freely without royalties. What someone's program saves to by default is not really important to me or to the people that I read who talk about this. MS argues against setting ODF as their default file format, but that's their way of reframing the argument in their favor, since I don't know of anyone who actually wants it. That MS also continues to cry that they won't support ODF because it doesn't cover all the possible uses of MS Word is a straw man that they keep throwing up, and they must know that it is since they have no problem exporting in other formats. Your and their arguments end up being orthogonal to mine.
It's just annoying that a lot of people implicitly assume that ODF is better and is the format to use without looking at it closely.
I think that the problem people have with OpenXML is that they just don't trust MS to play fair with it, and assume that there's a catch in the deal somewhere down the line. They don't give OpenXML a good look-over in just the same way that I don't bother to check whether the three card monte hustler on the corner is legit or not: I just keep walking. Given the track record of MS, I can appreciate people's reluctance -- "Fool me once
Finally, I think that you are arguing from your heart, not your mind and letting the rhetoric get to you. If you discard the "M$ is teh sux0rs" idiots, the disingenuous "MS has the right to write their own programs" crowd, and the trolls who pose as either side, you'll come out with the government's argument for a standard -- ODF or otherwise -- which will allow free access to government documents and the consumer's argument for major office suites to handle this standard, both of which are reasonable positions. I don't want my government to publish important tax information in iPod's Protected AAC format (requiring me to buy an iPod even if I normally use another product) and I suspect that you don't, either. This despite the fact that iPods have about a 90% market share, comparable to MS Office's almost 95%.
I don't think that choosing one over the other is necessarily a good business decision, but not supporting the only current office file standard while governments are moving to it is a silly move for anyone but Microsoft, who wants to continue to control 90+% of the market. Oddly enough, I'm not a real big fan of OpenOffice.org, but I live in a country where Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly on office suites (that honor goes to Hangul Office) and they are much more flexible here than in any other country I've been in except Thailand, where there was also enormous pressure on MS.
Ultimately, having a nice, free standard to exchange documents in would be in the customer's best interest, and competitive companies still try to sell their goods through emphasizing that interest (assuming that the customer is aware of it, of course). If that nice, free-to-read-AND-write-in-perpetuity standard ends up being OpenXML, I won't really care who wrote the standard -- I'll just care that we can all communicate.
Incidentally, I called you a troll because you used disinformation to start a discussion: You finish off your response with Hence ODF is advertised as the de facto standard, which no one in his or her right mind would say, since the current MS Office formats certainly fill that role.*
Looking back on it, though, I think it was probably better classed as flamebait.
*The problem being, of course, that's it's a standard which is difficult to write software for.
I need MS's "stop-gag measure" after reading your post. I have never read anyone say seriously that ODF is more prevalent or even significantly technically superor to OpenXML, but I have read plenty of voices which say that it's now an international standard which all office suites should support -- just the way they support ACSII -- natively, without a broken plugin. ODF is not the de facto standard: it's an ISO standard. Making a browser that doesn't support ISO-8859-1 is just stupid. Making an office suite and refusing to really support ISO 26300 is equally stupid.
Troll.
That's when Crocop is laying unconscious under Fedor's massive fists ....
I asked because tones are not normally counted that way, so I wanted him to clarify. A Mandarin syylable is usually described as having an initial consonant (optional), a vowel, a final consonant (optional), and a tonal value. In my example of 36 Thai vowels, for instance, they include "vowel length" because the short vowels are normally followed by a glottal, but the five tones are not included in the number, or you would count it as 180. The statement of "over fifty vowels" seemed really odd.
Trust me that American English grammar is much simpler thatn British English grammar. Remember that American English was simplified somewhat so that immigrants could learn it. The easiest dialect of English that I ever learned (simple past, not pres. perf. because I'm American not British) was the pidgin spoken in Hawaii. No tenses, only particles.
I also struggled with W-G, Yale and Pinyin in learning Mandarin. Now that I'm in Korea (and formerly Thailand) I have found real problems with romanization. In Thailand, for example, there wasn't a government approved system until ?1999? and it's still not really commonly used. Spellings are rather random there, with the San Saeb Canal Bridge being a great example -- both vowels a and ae are the same when written in Thai. Korea had a new system introduced in 2001, but it hasn't been received well, and a lot of words are "grandfathered" with the old system. Friggin' confusing in both countries.
Which Chinese dialects have over fifty different vowel sounds. Are you including tone differences in the count or not? The Tai languages have over 30 each, without tones, but I wasn't aware of any Chinese dialects that did. Enlighten me, please.
You think that English is hard? Look to Asia. Try learning Thai with its 46 (44) consonants and 36 vowels, plus diacritical marks. Sure, the Korean alphabet can be learned in a couple of days, but the Hanja that goes along with it can take years. Speaking of Hanja, learning Chinese can take a lifetime.
English spelling sucks, though, and that's why Noah Webster supported wholesale changing of English speeling to make it easier for children. He succeeded somewhat with re -> er, but larger changes like eliminating C and X were rejected by the general public.
Well, you're lucky. When I was first entered the US Army, I had never even used Win 3.11 or Win95 (just old Tandies and Apples). The officers that I supported, knowing this, still asked me support questions (mostly about Power Point). I guess that they figured that I came up with the answer every time and that my time was less valuable than theirs. It taught me a lot about "modern" software, though I haven't really used the skill since then, either.
These days? A comment like this caused me to switch about eight years ago, when I first came here.
I don't actually have a problem with the way the front page of Digg works. I visit it every day and get more interesting stories than Slash has. Digg's weakness in is the community -- I just can't even stand to read the comments section. I rarely even click on the discussion because, when I do, it disgusts me.
I still remember some 8 years ago probably -- when I first came to Slash -- how 5% of the level of conversation was amazing. You'd get people who had been working since the 70's who would be discussing how the unixy news of the day would affect them. There's even still a little of that left here sometimes. I wade through comments similar to what I've read a thousand times before in order to find that gem of one that truly edifies me. Digg's comment section just leaves me feeling dirty by comparison.
Yeah, Malda doesn't matter. I don't even know if he ever did. The editors could change the story submission method to more reflect Digg's model and I don't think that it would change the community here much, which might be a good plan. Years ago, when Slash started choking on the crap it was feeding itself, I hoped Bruce's site would attract some serious attention, but it never really did. I still visit it once in a while, though.
I will never leave Slash for Digg, unless it's community becomes better educated about tech, and that's not likely to happen since they are moving to a broader, not narrower, audience.
You are thoroughly confused, and have repeated this several times. The GGP says that IF the donator wants to make a large social impact, he / she shouldn't forget to donate SOME of the money to the program. Not the only way. Not even necessarily the best way. Just an important way in the mind of the GGP.
Use logic and then temper it with some common sense. Common sense is not required in this case, but it will help you avoid making and ass out of yourself.
Maybe he should've checked the ads for adds instead of the adds for adds, because they might've added the ads but failed to add the adds. Infact, from what I can tell, they mightn't be dead at all, but merely addled ....
I can't talk about now, but when I lived in China twenty years ago, people were slotted for jobs. If you scored well on the tests, you went to a good university with a major decided for you and a job afterward, but if your scores were lower you went to a "normal" (teachers') college or just went straight to work. People then really didn't have any choice in the matter. Things may have changed some, but I doubt they turned 180 degrees.
Regardless of the reasons why Microsoft donated the software the end result is that the kids are the winners.... is that such a bad thing?
I don't know.... About three years ago I was living in Thailand and actively involved in the hot Linux uptake there. The government had a five year plan to move to Linux and was promoting it everywhere. The Thais in the gov't FLOSS program were even talking about "official government OS" for LinuxTLE (NECTEC's distro). People were talking about the empowerment of the local IT business and over half of the computers on display in Carrefour and Lotus were running locally produced Linux. Thailand even famously broke MS's "one price around the world" policy. It was like a revolution under colonial rule, I kid you not.
After a year of this, MS walked in and offered a "deal" which legitimized all the currently installed MS operating systems within the government and promised lots of software for schools. Since the schools were mostly without computers and the government had the same problem with copyright infringement that the rest of the country had / has. It cost MS nothing but the price of the plane ticket and maybe some money under the table -- I don't know about that.
The FLOSS movement died right there. Nobody talked about it anymore, and I can't even find Linux in the stores anymore. The revolutionaries were quieted and the unrest was quelled. Everyone went back to being the good little MS users they were "supposed" to be.
There's something truly evil about a deal like this. The kids in Thailand certainly didn't profit by losing their empowerment to a foreign company. The IT industry is again dependent on one.
Now that I'm in Korea, I keep hearing the same kind of talk here, but I've never even SEEN an installed Linux system outside my own.
Too much talking on my part.
bring us closer to stable content and civil discussions among editors.
Because you're ever going to get civil discussion about Korea vs. Corea? I don't think so. Just look at the discussion on that page.
The SF's major role is peacetime missions. These include training of foreign troops or humanitarian work such as the demining of Laos. If I remember correctly from my time working with them, two of the more common "real" missions was S&R and UW. Just my two cents. I suspect the HALO guys (in SF, not the game) will feel much better with this wing. Just my 2 Won
Can't comment about sentral auth or distributed, but just apt-get install ltsp-server-standalone and you'v got the PXE boot diskless terms.
Beagle is the Mono answer to Spotlight (is that right?), and it'll allow you to do great things like full text, real-time searches on emails, PDFs, and ODF files, but it has had a memory leak for a long time, which means that you can't stay logged in for more than a day. Kind of sucks.
.. how can you complain about a prerelease version of an OS being unstable, when the idea is that of course it's going to be unstable until it's been tested and revised?
The post was in response to a praise of how great Dapper is going to be. I was pointing out that the beta (which I've been running with full knowledge in order to test and write about) has gone downhill recently and the major performance-shattering bugs have not yet been touched yet, especially the crazy Beagle memory leak. I'm not saying that it's going to suck -- I'm saying that it was unusable for about a week, to the point that I ditched Gnome on the machine in order to continue testing other parts of the system. I also said that I need to check back soon to see whether it's been fixed or not.
The release date is coming up quickly (and really should've happened already) though, and this extra period was declared as just "extra time" to really make it solid. I don't feel that it's working out that way and it scares me a little, honestly.