S3... well no one is going to go looking through your data because no one cares about it. If it were actually important I would recommend encrypting before putting something in a public web store. In truth, you would likely be using EBS for data storage inside of Ec2 because S3 is ridiculously slow. Since EBS is a block device you just run it through a crypto loop when mounting.
Ec2 instances are accessible by the person who actually spins up the instance. It's built with a private key that no one has access too and again if the disks are a concern they should be encrypted as well. If a public instance is too much of a external risk there is a VPC environment which spins up instances that have only access to an an ipsec tunnel for network connectivity.
Gmail... well you are absolutely right.
Me, I wouldn't put most of my business in the cloud, but they are for real reasons. There are certainly types of processes that function perfectly in an elastic environment and can be profitable. However, none of the numbers have ever indicated it is cheaper then a traditional environment performing traditional work loads in high availability.
It's not actually complicated until you start deciding what you really need in an authentication system. The setup I eventually settled on with the group was not quite traditional, but does everything we need it to do. In addition, local nodes will cache all the credentials in the event of a network failure. This was the alternate to just building system accounts locally or just pushing a password file around. (Which doesn't meet contractual obligations).
In retrospect, none of it is entirely complex, but there was some effort into researching and putting the pieces together. The same goes for an asterix box to host telephony. It's not overly complex, but it does take some effort.
Now, it's not an awful idea and I have some grid based appliances in the field. I actually hate them with a passion because they break mysteriously. It might be fine for an organization who employees someone to sit on the phone with support all day, but I could literally replace it with a few certs for synchronization and vanilla applications.
Essentially, if you want someone to build an appliance that can be easily replaced with standard services then go for it. It wouldn't be a bad project and it might make a few dollars in support fees. However, be prepared to create stable and tested releases because the individuals who really need the appliance won't be able to fix it.
There are a few other players in the field next to teradata, but when you move to that format there is nothing that would be associated with the word cheap.
However, generally when it gets to that level of field the amount of data in storage usually makes it very obvious.
In some scenarios, we have avoided going to those rather massive solutions by really digging down and seeing if we really needed to store everything.
Actually, originating from a tri-state area I can assure you that it is entirely possible for a tower to cross multiple counties.
Having dealt with EAS and depending on the configuration there can be several alerts.
At no point did I say a phone would receive 30 alerts, but it would generally be more then 5 for inclement weather.
Typically, there is a great deal of filtering that happens after a re-distributed signal is received. Depending on the configuration there can be a lot of clutter that isn't necessary required, but could be potentially passed on.
You can refute my claims all you want, but they are based actual experience in a real environment.
Actually, in an area with multiple counties you would see an alert for each county. The alerts can vary depending on if they are a watch or warning. Typically, a storm alert with heavy rains will also insight alerts for different types of alerts (such as hail, flooding, ice, etc). Now, toss in the required weekly alerts and this could generate a fairly large number of messages.
All in all, if you are a re-distribution point which covers multiple counties there can be upwards of 30 to 40 entries for a small storm which can keep the equipment buzzing for a while.
The cables frey and wear from being improperly stored.
I've seen many people tightly wind the cable around the brick and put a good deal of tension on the portion which is attached to the power brick. I've successfully trained several sales people to carefully wrap their cables up leaving a good deal of slack as to not stress the cable. That little nugget kept them from replacing their bricks until the end of life on the laptops. It had the secondary benefit of teaching them to take care of their equipment at home. Just one of the many benefits of bunking the engineer next to the sales team.
I had a similar incident some odd years ago when I was a systems engineer for a medium sized company. One of our users was trolling slashdot at all times and generally being a prick. This of course resulted in a slashdot ban of one of our address blocks.
My fellow admins and myself noticed this issue rather quickly as we were a quite the terminal jockeys at the time. I followed up with the website in question and requested information as to why we were banned. Now, a direct inquiry like that won't actually get someones information, but I did persuade someone to lift the ban. I requested an abuse report be sent to our abuse mail if such an abusive pattern happened again. The report should include the time and ip address of the incident.
Sure enough within a day the troll was back to trolling and an abuse report showed up in the local abuse inbox. It was fairly easy to get management approval to have the account suspended. When one user makes our services less desirable to our competitors its very easy to get management to agree. Had they not agreed I would have just banged his account or setup a null routed static on his account.
Eventually, the little bastard called up to the billing department and they had a notice to forward him to me immediately. I told him if he wants to troll he better get an account with our competitor. Apparently, they had already kicked him off their network and sent his little bastard ass to us. To the kids credit he never troll slashdot again after I re-enabled his account.
Surprisingly enough there is a bit of a varied, but largely misinformed population within the crowd. It's also a necessity to review the worst possible scenario because it will and can happen. Now, take that small percentage of morons who exist to torture the rest of us and amplify that by the success of the product. This is the mindset any person who does application or UI design should share.
A warranty sticker is actually not that large of a deterrent for myself. Typically, for the first year on any expensive phone purchase I take the everything and the kitchen sink warranty. After roughly a year I can remove the warranty program because the cost of replacing the phone is insignificant. The lovely thing about those warranties is the simple fact that I can simply lose the phone after voiding in the warranty. These things do happen after all...
A better example of the television crowd are those who actually purchase a wide screen set, but find a way to use all their standard definition devices and wonder why it doesn't look so great. Which is also a true story as I was listening to a couple complain about their brand new television to a k-mart employee.
Regardless, you completely missed the point of the reply and were completely oblivious to my mail pouch tobacco argument. You see there are actually no ad dollars because the trade off is they simply paint your barn for you. I had expected some sly retort on the subject, but I should not expect so much from someone in the slashdot crowd.
Let's not bother with "what ifs" because they are simply bound anywhere in reality. What if I had the ability to fly... what if toasters consumed flesh to operator... what if the sun burned out.?
Ignore the obviously flawed enhancement to your argument we can now focus on really what matters.
Here we have a phone that uses an SD connector and SD cards. It however requires a class of SD card that currently does not exist in the market today. Joe Blow doesn't really understand the details between random reads and throughput of a medium. To joe blow the SD card is an SD card and he is going to put the peg in the hole that matches. He is going to read the horse shit on the box because there are about fifty items of horse shit crammed into a tiny sarcophagus of a box.
Now let's also keep in mind that Joe Blow consumer (extraordinaire) has been conditioned through a life time of gadgets and whiz bangs that SD cards are quite removable. In fact, he might even so savy that he can remove the SD card from his mobile device and insert it into his PC or laptop. Remember, he has been conditioned to understand the peg board quite well.
To ignore any of these points regarding the consumer is just painting a big red failure sign on the barn. At least before you could get some free dollars out of the mail pouch tobacco sign, but no longer because your barn has failure written all over it.
Dunno how accurate it is, but they may just move you to a data plan.
Kinda like what ATT threatened to do if they found you had an iphone on their network without a data plan.
I'm going to suspect this is more due to deficiencies in their network setup rather then just being plain evil. (Well, it is verizon so likely they are just being plain evil).
Years back the way sprint managed network access was through a wap proxy. If you just swapped out your own wap proxy in the configs you could bypass the data charge and simply consume normal minutes. (Free on nights and weekends!).
I get the feeling someone is on the war path with video games lately. At least regarding the story trend and I'm not saying I disagree... just saying.
In any event, the issue isn't even as specific as DLC. Sure, there are plenty of awful examples and I would very much like to point the finger at Halo. Whole sections of multi-player simply disappear if you do not purchase the down-loadable map packs. This isn't even close to misrepresentation, but more like bandits along the highway. At some point, someone thought it would be a really good idea to cripple your current style of play unless you pay a few dollars. I believe someone's soul is headed toward damnation for that one.
Ignoring fire and brimstone, let's get back to the broader and real issue at hand. Bad game or bad content for purchase are not really the issues either. The fact is if we had more honest reviews floating around this would be a no brainer. The truth is we as gamers have been sold out countless times by these fan fiction writers who like to pretend they are writing a game review. In my personal experience, Red Dead Redemption was pretty much the worst multiplayer experience I have had in a while. It however managed to have a lot of good reviews. A more recent example of abuse of a good name is COD Black Ops. This is a good example of how to take something that wasn't terribly and just twist it into a hellish house of mirrors reflecting on a shadow of it's former self.
Having been in the broadcast world for a good while in the past there are important lessons I did learn there. What I happen to like or dislike may not necessarily be in tune with the populace at large. However, I would like to point out that the current early trend with user reviews seem to favor my opinion http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/call-of-duty-black-ops?rating_login=1.
I believe what has happened with both retail games and addon pay content is something very simple. It appears to be much easier to simply spend oodles on marketing and advertising rather then produce something original. (Well, original is probably a bad term... how about enjoyable). It cannot be argued these triple a titles have a fairly large budget, but in my horrid and unimportant opinion is that publishers have gone the McDonalds route. Seriously, how else would you sale poison the the people of our great nation.
AVG isn't bad if you need to build a PE stick to examine a box. It's pretty much behind the curve in technological achievements.
If you must use a free product (and against MSE) then I would recommend Avast which has many modern features. It has transparent proxy services for mail, web, instant messenger and a host of other protocols. It also actively scans the file as opposed to being an on demand scanner.
I recently switch to Avir in an attempt to save a few dollars and found it's protection capabilities somewhat lacking. While it did actually catch a trojan that was being executed it did not stop it. I was very disappointed and immediately reinstalled the host.
I've returned to my one true love, Nod32, which has all of the features I would expect and has never really let me down. In fairness, I do remember one incident in which they incorrectly flagged some system files. A patch was later released which undid the problems th at it had caused.
I'm afraid your conclusion regarding the cool kids was not quite right.
Occasionally, I get some juicy info from friends back home who explain me to me all the interesting things the "cool" kids are doing. Most of them turned out to be worthless or at least move on to mediocre positions. While I'm unsure of what the success rate in other areas might happen to be I can certain say that not many of them scored to high on the career chart. I'm applying the definition of cool kid rather liberally here because there were so many social niches in hs that there was little possibility of dominance by any one group.
Also, I tend to find the frat guys tend to veer towards the fluff sales jobs. Ya know, the guys who have to take me out and entertain me so that I might consider reviewing their products for purchase.
You don't have to defend or defame the product until you have tried it.
I'm waiting for a billion reviews to see if it's something worth acquiring. My main problem with the kinect is the use videos are all microsoft released and they have a lousy track record for being honest about their products. Point in case was the virtual friend for xbox 360/kinect demo. Completely scripted and a total wash, but it was later defended as a "what if" video and not a technology demo.
While they never solicited public feedback on the unit before shipping I do hope they did some earnest research. Then again you can of course make a good deal of money in this country if you rely solely on advertising.
In the end we just have to wait for user reviews from our peers or take the plunge ourselves if you feel like being a risk taker. However, what I will not do is praise a product on it's technological merits alone. That might get it some street cred or geek respect, but I'm not going to give someone money because they tried really hard. It has to have value for me (and a lot of other people) to be successful.
I have a bus that has no fees and the doors are open.
Passengers can get on and off the bus at various points around the city. There is a sign somewhere that probably says you should pay X dollars, but there is no enforcement of the payment policy. Passengers are free to go as they please without any constraint. Now, this bus is not the only service in town and there are quite literally thousands of different mass transit providers in the city. In fact, the streets get jammed up quite a bit because they are much like tubes. (Tubes have a limited number of units which may pass through them.)
Now, this might make sense to pay if all buses were paid ventures, but in this city of mass mass transit the common expectation is there are no fees. The fact is most of the these transit providers want you to get on their bus so they can beam advertising into your eyeballs. Some say those who use special sun glasses to block those specific rays of light are cheating the system, but that is really a question of ethics and not legality.
The fact is that some of us use special sunglasses to keep the harmful rays out of our eyes. The world is not a safe place with kids using laser pointers like madmen. The law enforcement agencies ignore these kids with their obviously dangerous light emitting devices and as such it's a virtual apocalyptic society.
As I was saying, the shades are important and they look cool.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently it ships Feb 1 2011....
Pre-orders are available now.
http://www.amazon.com/Duke-Nukem-Forever-Pc/dp/B002I0JAJ2/ref=sr_1_1?s=videogames&ie=UTF8&qid=1290407637&sr=1-1
S3... well no one is going to go looking through your data because no one cares about it. If it were actually important I would recommend encrypting before putting something in a public web store. In truth, you would likely be using EBS for data storage inside of Ec2 because S3 is ridiculously slow. Since EBS is a block device you just run it through a crypto loop when mounting.
Ec2 instances are accessible by the person who actually spins up the instance. It's built with a private key that no one has access too and again if the disks are a concern they should be encrypted as well. If a public instance is too much of a external risk there is a VPC environment which spins up instances that have only access to an an ipsec tunnel for network connectivity.
Gmail... well you are absolutely right.
Me, I wouldn't put most of my business in the cloud, but they are for real reasons. There are certainly types of processes that function perfectly in an elastic environment and can be profitable. However, none of the numbers have ever indicated it is cheaper then a traditional environment performing traditional work loads in high availability.
It's not actually complicated until you start deciding what you really need in an authentication system. The setup I eventually settled on with the group was not quite traditional, but does everything we need it to do. In addition, local nodes will cache all the credentials in the event of a network failure. This was the alternate to just building system accounts locally or just pushing a password file around. (Which doesn't meet contractual obligations).
In retrospect, none of it is entirely complex, but there was some effort into researching and putting the pieces together. The same goes for an asterix box to host telephony. It's not overly complex, but it does take some effort.
Now, it's not an awful idea and I have some grid based appliances in the field. I actually hate them with a passion because they break mysteriously. It might be fine for an organization who employees someone to sit on the phone with support all day, but I could literally replace it with a few certs for synchronization and vanilla applications.
Essentially, if you want someone to build an appliance that can be easily replaced with standard services then go for it. It wouldn't be a bad project and it might make a few dollars in support fees. However, be prepared to create stable and tested releases because the individuals who really need the appliance won't be able to fix it.
He posted to slashdot.... do you really think he can afford you?
There are a few other players in the field next to teradata, but when you move to that format there is nothing that would be associated with the word cheap.
However, generally when it gets to that level of field the amount of data in storage usually makes it very obvious.
In some scenarios, we have avoided going to those rather massive solutions by really digging down and seeing if we really needed to store everything.
I just select * from * and then sort it out with grep and cut.
Actually, originating from a tri-state area I can assure you that it is entirely possible for a tower to cross multiple counties.
Having dealt with EAS and depending on the configuration there can be several alerts.
At no point did I say a phone would receive 30 alerts, but it would generally be more then 5 for inclement weather.
Typically, there is a great deal of filtering that happens after a re-distributed signal is received. Depending on the configuration there can be a lot of clutter that isn't necessary required, but could be potentially passed on.
You can refute my claims all you want, but they are based actual experience in a real environment.
Actually, in an area with multiple counties you would see an alert for each county. The alerts can vary depending on if they are a watch or warning. Typically, a storm alert with heavy rains will also insight alerts for different types of alerts (such as hail, flooding, ice, etc). Now, toss in the required weekly alerts and this could generate a fairly large number of messages.
All in all, if you are a re-distribution point which covers multiple counties there can be upwards of 30 to 40 entries for a small storm which can keep the equipment buzzing for a while.
I do not miss dealing with EAS systems at all...
I use gummy bears for all my stylus needs...
The cables frey and wear from being improperly stored.
I've seen many people tightly wind the cable around the brick and put a good deal of tension on the portion which is attached to the power brick. I've successfully trained several sales people to carefully wrap their cables up leaving a good deal of slack as to not stress the cable. That little nugget kept them from replacing their bricks until the end of life on the laptops. It had the secondary benefit of teaching them to take care of their equipment at home. Just one of the many benefits of bunking the engineer next to the sales team.
I had a similar incident some odd years ago when I was a systems engineer for a medium sized company. One of our users was trolling slashdot at all times and generally being a prick. This of course resulted in a slashdot ban of one of our address blocks.
My fellow admins and myself noticed this issue rather quickly as we were a quite the terminal jockeys at the time. I followed up with the website in question and requested information as to why we were banned. Now, a direct inquiry like that won't actually get someones information, but I did persuade someone to lift the ban. I requested an abuse report be sent to our abuse mail if such an abusive pattern happened again. The report should include the time and ip address of the incident.
Sure enough within a day the troll was back to trolling and an abuse report showed up in the local abuse inbox. It was fairly easy to get management approval to have the account suspended. When one user makes our services less desirable to our competitors its very easy to get management to agree. Had they not agreed I would have just banged his account or setup a null routed static on his account.
Eventually, the little bastard called up to the billing department and they had a notice to forward him to me immediately. I told him if he wants to troll he better get an account with our competitor. Apparently, they had already kicked him off their network and sent his little bastard ass to us. To the kids credit he never troll slashdot again after I re-enabled his account.
Surprisingly enough there is a bit of a varied, but largely misinformed population within the crowd. It's also a necessity to review the worst possible scenario because it will and can happen. Now, take that small percentage of morons who exist to torture the rest of us and amplify that by the success of the product. This is the mindset any person who does application or UI design should share.
A warranty sticker is actually not that large of a deterrent for myself. Typically, for the first year on any expensive phone purchase I take the everything and the kitchen sink warranty. After roughly a year I can remove the warranty program because the cost of replacing the phone is insignificant. The lovely thing about those warranties is the simple fact that I can simply lose the phone after voiding in the warranty. These things do happen after all...
A better example of the television crowd are those who actually purchase a wide screen set, but find a way to use all their standard definition devices and wonder why it doesn't look so great. Which is also a true story as I was listening to a couple complain about their brand new television to a k-mart employee.
Regardless, you completely missed the point of the reply and were completely oblivious to my mail pouch tobacco argument. You see there are actually no ad dollars because the trade off is they simply paint your barn for you. I had expected some sly retort on the subject, but I should not expect so much from someone in the slashdot crowd.
Let's not bother with "what ifs" because they are simply bound anywhere in reality. What if I had the ability to fly... what if toasters consumed flesh to operator ... what if the sun burned out.?
Ignore the obviously flawed enhancement to your argument we can now focus on really what matters.
Here we have a phone that uses an SD connector and SD cards. It however requires a class of SD card that currently does not exist in the market today. Joe Blow doesn't really understand the details between random reads and throughput of a medium. To joe blow the SD card is an SD card and he is going to put the peg in the hole that matches. He is going to read the horse shit on the box because there are about fifty items of horse shit crammed into a tiny sarcophagus of a box.
Now let's also keep in mind that Joe Blow consumer (extraordinaire) has been conditioned through a life time of gadgets and whiz bangs that SD cards are quite removable. In fact, he might even so savy that he can remove the SD card from his mobile device and insert it into his PC or laptop. Remember, he has been conditioned to understand the peg board quite well.
To ignore any of these points regarding the consumer is just painting a big red failure sign on the barn. At least before you could get some free dollars out of the mail pouch tobacco sign, but no longer because your barn has failure written all over it.
If you move the sim it will eventually update.
Dunno how accurate it is, but they may just move you to a data plan.
Kinda like what ATT threatened to do if they found you had an iphone on their network without a data plan.
I'm going to suspect this is more due to deficiencies in their network setup rather then just being plain evil. (Well, it is verizon so likely they are just being plain evil).
Years back the way sprint managed network access was through a wap proxy. If you just swapped out your own wap proxy in the configs you could bypass the data charge and simply consume normal minutes. (Free on nights and weekends!).
I get the feeling someone is on the war path with video games lately. At least regarding the story trend and I'm not saying I disagree... just saying.
In any event, the issue isn't even as specific as DLC. Sure, there are plenty of awful examples and I would very much like to point the finger at Halo. Whole sections of multi-player simply disappear if you do not purchase the down-loadable map packs. This isn't even close to misrepresentation, but more like bandits along the highway. At some point, someone thought it would be a really good idea to cripple your current style of play unless you pay a few dollars. I believe someone's soul is headed toward damnation for that one.
Ignoring fire and brimstone, let's get back to the broader and real issue at hand. Bad game or bad content for purchase are not really the issues either. The fact is if we had more honest reviews floating around this would be a no brainer. The truth is we as gamers have been sold out countless times by these fan fiction writers who like to pretend they are writing a game review. In my personal experience, Red Dead Redemption was pretty much the worst multiplayer experience I have had in a while. It however managed to have a lot of good reviews. A more recent example of abuse of a good name is COD Black Ops. This is a good example of how to take something that wasn't terribly and just twist it into a hellish house of mirrors reflecting on a shadow of it's former self.
Having been in the broadcast world for a good while in the past there are important lessons I did learn there. What I happen to like or dislike may not necessarily be in tune with the populace at large. However, I would like to point out that the current early trend with user reviews seem to favor my opinion http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/call-of-duty-black-ops?rating_login=1.
I believe what has happened with both retail games and addon pay content is something very simple. It appears to be much easier to simply spend oodles on marketing and advertising rather then produce something original. (Well, original is probably a bad term... how about enjoyable). It cannot be argued these triple a titles have a fairly large budget, but in my horrid and unimportant opinion is that publishers have gone the McDonalds route. Seriously, how else would you sale poison the the people of our great nation.
Sometimes people ingest gold when they drink liquor...
I was never much of a fan of goldschlager mostly because of the gold flakes.
Tell that to the crack heads who destroy a $10,000 air conditioner for $20 in copper.
AVG isn't bad if you need to build a PE stick to examine a box. It's pretty much behind the curve in technological achievements.
If you must use a free product (and against MSE) then I would recommend Avast which has many modern features. It has transparent proxy services for mail, web, instant messenger and a host of other protocols. It also actively scans the file as opposed to being an on demand scanner.
I recently switch to Avir in an attempt to save a few dollars and found it's protection capabilities somewhat lacking. While it did actually catch a trojan that was being executed it did not stop it. I was very disappointed and immediately reinstalled the host.
I've returned to my one true love, Nod32, which has all of the features I would expect and has never really let me down. In fairness, I do remember one incident in which they incorrectly flagged some system files. A patch was later released which undid the problems th at it had caused.
I'm afraid your conclusion regarding the cool kids was not quite right.
Occasionally, I get some juicy info from friends back home who explain me to me all the interesting things the "cool" kids are doing. Most of them turned out to be worthless or at least move on to mediocre positions. While I'm unsure of what the success rate in other areas might happen to be I can certain say that not many of them scored to high on the career chart. I'm applying the definition of cool kid rather liberally here because there were so many social niches in hs that there was little possibility of dominance by any one group.
Also, I tend to find the frat guys tend to veer towards the fluff sales jobs. Ya know, the guys who have to take me out and entertain me so that I might consider reviewing their products for purchase.
You don't have to defend or defame the product until you have tried it.
I'm waiting for a billion reviews to see if it's something worth acquiring. My main problem with the kinect is the use videos are all microsoft released and they have a lousy track record for being honest about their products. Point in case was the virtual friend for xbox 360/kinect demo. Completely scripted and a total wash, but it was later defended as a "what if" video and not a technology demo.
While they never solicited public feedback on the unit before shipping I do hope they did some earnest research. Then again you can of course make a good deal of money in this country if you rely solely on advertising.
In the end we just have to wait for user reviews from our peers or take the plunge ourselves if you feel like being a risk taker. However, what I will not do is praise a product on it's technological merits alone. That might get it some street cred or geek respect, but I'm not going to give someone money because they tried really hard. It has to have value for me (and a lot of other people) to be successful.
My only complaint as a non-kinect user is the update introduces significant lag in the menu system.
It's not horrible, but it's not nearly as smooth as it was.
There was no gain for non-kinect users as well... unless you like the windows 3.1 menu look and feel.
It's not like anyone at amazon reads slashdot.....
Ah, very soon my super tanker mobile charging station of tesla coils will be realized.
Vehicles will merely pull along side one of the many banks of tesla coils for a quick charge and all without stopping their vehicles.
Who will charge the rechargers you might ask?
An even larger super tanker platform of tesla coils of course...
Not all of us....
I have a bus that has no fees and the doors are open.
Passengers can get on and off the bus at various points around the city. There is a sign somewhere that probably says you should pay X dollars, but there is no enforcement of the payment policy. Passengers are free to go as they please without any constraint. Now, this bus is not the only service in town and there are quite literally thousands of different mass transit providers in the city. In fact, the streets get jammed up quite a bit because they are much like tubes. (Tubes have a limited number of units which may pass through them.)
Now, this might make sense to pay if all buses were paid ventures, but in this city of mass mass transit the common expectation is there are no fees. The fact is most of the these transit providers want you to get on their bus so they can beam advertising into your eyeballs. Some say those who use special sun glasses to block those specific rays of light are cheating the system, but that is really a question of ethics and not legality.
The fact is that some of us use special sunglasses to keep the harmful rays out of our eyes. The world is not a safe place with kids using laser pointers like madmen. The law enforcement agencies ignore these kids with their obviously dangerous light emitting devices and as such it's a virtual apocalyptic society.
As I was saying, the shades are important and they look cool.