I said that I *think* that might be the case. I'm not in the least sure. The issue of active and passive interference has come up on Slashdot before, and I remember people talking about establishments that used them.
An alphanum pager isn't *enough*? A code for "report to the hospital immediately, emergency", "report to the fire station immediately, emergency", or "report to the NOC immediately, emergency" isn't sufficient?
Finally, even assuming there is some kind of emergency notification that requires more data than a pager can handle (and I'm dubious as to whether that is the case), a pager/cell combination *still* solves the problem. You get the page and have the opportunity to go find somewhere that you *aren't* going to disturb people to call the person, where jamming isn't going to be necessary.
Not only is this (a) rude and (b) probably illegal (it is in the US, but (c) dangerous.
Oh, bullshit.
If you have life-and-death notification requirements, you shouldn't be relying on a cell anyway. It's not like coverage is perfect. As somsone else pointed out, a pager is a much better choice.
Somehow the human race managed to get along just fine in '95 without cell phone users yakking all over the place. It damn well does not *need* cells.
I realize that jammers are disruptive -- they interrupt the electromagnetic spectrum around themselves. However, cell phone users are also disruptive -- they produce audio interference around themselves. Frankly, I find the needs of the person aggravated by the cell more compelling than the needs of the person who wants to talk on his new toy.
I wish every third person carried a jammer, and that the moment some jackass started being inconsiderate, he got jammed by all the people around him.
We need jammers to be widely available. Something that sends out random garbage on the right frequency range on demand. Someone's annoying everyone around them, people start hitting jammer buttons, and the problem goes away.
Close. The problem is that your system requires the users to actively make an effort to do things properly. I don't see that ever working, simply because people are lazy, and social pressure should only be used as a last ditch problem.
The issue is that of the protocol.
When a cell phone is called, it should enter the ringing state. At that point, one of two buttons can be hit -- "accept -- pending talking" and "reject". Currently, I believe that people usually just turn off their phone to do a "reject", so that much functionality is in place. The protocol should allow a "accepted, but cannot talk yet state". At that point, the person with the cell can extricate themselves from whatever situation they're in, and can find a quiet place to handle the call. They'd then hit the "ready to talk" button.
This could interoperate with older, non-compliant phones by sending a text message (or brief audio clip saying "hold on") and then either terminating the call and calling back when "ready to talk" is hit, or simply opening the connection and leaving the phone speakers muted after the initial clip) until "ready to talk" is hit.
About those ringtones... Actually, I find them annoying when the thing goes on bleeping for 30 seconds or more while its (invariably female) owner is busy digging it out from the bottom of a purse, at maximum volume no less, because the sound gets muffled by said purse (doh!).
Also, purses prevent the use of vibrators, which really should be mandatory -- I have a hard time thinking of a legitimate reason for cell phones to have audible ringers.
I believe that passive shielding deliberately designed to block cells may not be legal, but both it and (definitely not legal) active jamming of cells does take place at a small number of locations (fancy restauraunts, theaters).
I'd carry a personal jammer, if they were legal, and flip it on when I was at a theater.
The bad part is the loud speakers that really dont need a phone in the first place.
I disagree -- I think I buy into the article pretty strongly, which says that volume is a minimal issue. I've tried paying attention to what irritates me about cell phones when someone is conversing on one, and my feelings click with what the study says.
The problem is that normally, we respond when someone says something to us. Our brain is cued by it.
The request-for-attention pattern this follows is someone saying something near us, followed by a period of silence as they wait for our response. As the period of silence increases, the likelihood that the message was directed at us (and we should respond and haven't) increases (hence the common pattern of someone saying something, stopping, and two seconds later someone looking up and saying "uh, did you say something to me" -- the "request for attention" sequence was sent).
We are pretty good about ignoring conversation -- sitting in a crowded lunchroom, it's easy to let background noise fade into the background.
The problem is that cell phone speakers follow our brain's "I am requesting your attention" almost exactly. So we're sitting here uncomfortably having someone grab our attention every two seconds or so. It's extremely disruptive when you're trying to think about something else. The only real fix is to start ignoring people that *are* trying to get our attention, which isn't great either.
I would say that the primary issue is that we need a sensory input that would allow us to determine when someone is talking on the phone. Then our brain can learn to distinguish between "cell phone speaker -- ignorable" and "someone trying to get your attention".
I think that a good solution would be to provide (surprise, more noise) a buzz, a sort of masked noise from the phone. When the person on the other end of the phone is talking, we get an unintelligable but audible buzz. It would be crucial that (a) the buzz not be an annoying annoying, (b) the buzz not be easily picked up by microphones (especially cell phones, so that feedback doesn't occur -- a filter is necessary), (c) that cell phone manufacturers standardize on such a buzz sound, so that people talking near each other on different cell phones don't interfere -- this would also allow people to more quickly learn to identify cell phones. I think that cell phone disruptiveness is largely a technical problem, not a social problem (though people talking in movie theaters still require a swift kick to the nuts).
Also, the hype from the U.S. travels and that helps sales in Japan. If the game is big in the U.S., it will do better in Japan. And I do not think that the hype works for you the other way around."
"Earth to Squaresoft...Squaresoft, come in. Square, *listen* to the man!"
If I feel that a law preventing me from drinking and driving is a bad law, does that entitle me the ability to just break it on a whim? No.
Hard to say what you mean by "entitle" -- clearly not some sort of legal statement.
I wouldn't have a moral problem with breaking a law if I think that the law has no point, is unlikely to soon be reappealed, and is unlikely to be enforced. Take, for instance, public anti-profanity laws. I don't think that these are good laws. It is unlikely that they will be repealed in many locations, just because there isn't much PR in doing so. They're almost never enforced. So, sure, I'll swear without being concerned.
The reason the "drinking and driving" law comes off diferently is because most people *do* think that a law preventing drinking and driving *is* a good law, not because the law inherently has some kind of moral value.
It's not about engaging a fight, or even a debate, on fair use vs. the DMCA. If that were the case, the person or persons responsible for this would have stood their ground and made an argument.
I can't agree. Let us take the oft-cited example of people posting anti-Chinese government material on Freenet, where they are free from being thrown in jail for years (or worse). Are they not "engaging in a fight, or even a debate" by not wanting to march up in front of their local police station, giving it the finger and saying "repressive government must end"? Of course not -- that's absurd.
These people are not interested in taking it in the ass from Apple, a rather large and monopolistic company. That hardly seems unreasonable to me. In their shoes, I wouldn't want to be getting screwed over by Apple.
Jobs phrased it best -- Apple cannot expect to rely on the lack of DRM-removing tools. It's just not going to happen from a technological standpoint, no way no how. Media DRM is a tool used (at least on the PC platform) to extract money from media companies into the pockets of "security" companies. In Apple's case, it was a useful concession (since they viewed it as valueless anyway to whoever's content it was protecting) to allow them to get an early deal with the labels.
Now Apple comes out with a service that addresses many of these issues.
Apple charges $1 per track for a lossily-compressed file.
That would be $11 for a typical Britney Spears CD, according to a quick look at a Britney Spears discography.
When the RIAA was bitterly complaining about piracy justified by "expense of CD", they put out a cost breakdown -- here's one of the news articles mentioning it.
Let's take a look at this:
Retail Markup is $6.23. Apple says that they're breaking even on iTune audio sales, and only making money on the iPod. Their server hardware and the software backend is a constant cost, and already sunk. Bandwidth is a couple of cents a gig -- let's be generous and say 20 cents/GB. Let's say each AAC is five megs -- that'd be 55 megs. That's about a penny in retail markup to cover those costs that Apple says they're only breaking even on. So far, the price should decrease by $6.22.
Company overhead, distribution and shipping is effectively nil, aside from constant-cost B2B negtiation. The price should decrease by another $3.34, in total $9.56.
Marketing and promotion costs. These should stay the same. Personally, I think that radio (and netradio) stations should be free to play whatever they want, sans royalties, since it's effectively nothing but marketing. But we'll leave the cost, $2.15, in place.
The artist and songwriter recieve $1.99. No decrease.
The signing act and producing record get $1.08. No decrease.
Co-op advertising and discounts to retailers don't really apply in the online world -- a banner ad on Apple's site when buying your music is of negligable bandwidth cost to Apple compared to the bandwidth cost of the audio file -- $.85 decrease.
Pressing album and printing booklet -- doesn't exist in the online world. $.75 decrease.
Profit to label -- $.59, stays the same.
Okay, let's do the math: $.59 + $1.08 + $1.99 + $2.15 + $.01 = 5.82. The price for that Britney Spears CD that used to cost $16 and Apple is selling for $11 should be $5.82 in the online world.
There are numerous other benefits to labels to online music purchases, including the fact that CD audio is lossless and Apple is selling lossy data that is likely to eventually be behind the times in compression algorithm, meaning resales sooner. Cheaper online purchases mean more sales -- and my numbers (unless, of course, the RIAA is lying about their costs and hiding additional profit in per-unit distribution costs or similar) mean that the RIAA makes *more* money in such a scenerio. Returns don't exist -- CDs can be defective, but a bunch of bits is the same bunch of bits when anyone obtains it. Unique per-copy watermarking is easy to do, and watermarking seems to make the RIAA absoutely giggle in delight, so they should like online sales.
Want lossless FLAC quality? It should require about five times the bandwidth -- it should be about four cents more in cost to Apple, or $5.86, for that Britney Spears album.
Now, a couple of assumptions here should probably change, to be realistic. First, the RIAA should probably expect to be making less per-unit, since there's simply less money involved. Second, most retailers aren't going to be happy with just breaking even, and probably are going to want more money (plus, I ignored constant costs, and big business is usually incapable of setting up any computer systems without flushing masses of money down the toilet -- even if data transfer costs should be the dominant expense for a company that makes money by selling data in an automated fashion). That album in lossless FLAC still shouldn't be costing more than $6, which is *half* what Apple charges and provides much better quality.
So you are saying that freedom in linux means proprietary companies can write proprietary closed source code, and sell it on Linux. That is not about free software. Linux is about free software, which the LGPL disregards.
Which is why Qt is more about free software than GTK will ever be.
I don't buy it.
At all.
If you feel that companies being able to release non-free (or just non-GPL) software on Linux is unacceptable, and that it's acceptable to attack those companies, then why would you even want Linux to be GPL? It'd be much better for it to be under a license refusing to let anyone use closed-source software on it. Or even better, it could be under a license saying that anyone using Linux could not use or develop closed-source software ever again, for any platform.
Surely this is even more "about free software"?
This is probably unacceptable to you. It trades some of the appeal and usability of Linux in favor of trying to beat people about the head legally into being forced to work only on "free" software, rather than trying to convince people that Open Source is better because it just plain works better. This is *exactly* the difference between LGPL and GPL software when it comes to fundamental libraries like the standard widget set. For people that use Qt, some of the usability and appeal of Linux is being traded off for two things -- (a) theoretically more people using the GPL and (b) enriching TrollTech, giving them a permanent tax that they can levy on vast numbers of developers.
If you find that someone forcing you to pay a fee (or having control of your license) for writing any software using the (as TrollTech would have it) "standard" widget set for your platform is appealing and acceptable, then Qt may be your thing. Frankly, even Microsoft isn't this obtrusive on their own platform, and I find the idea of someone trying to make me pay a toll or control my license to produce software that interoperates cleanly from a user standpoint with the rest of my platform to be extremely distasteful.
Qt has significant grottiness that gtkmm doesn't -- it requires a special preprocessor, has duplication of basic functionality like string, and lacks STL support. It has license issues both on Linux and Windows.
When people talk about API cleanliness, they're generally talking about GNOME (which has a lot of oddball components like bonobo that people don't like much) vs KDE, not Qt vs GTK.
Ultimately, Qt is another Motif. If you don't have a problem paying the TrollTech tax, just like you once paid the Motif tax, then Qt may be an acceptable choice.
QT being commercial/GPL is a hinderance to commercial software for Linux. It provides a "toll booth" by forcing all non-free applications to pay a fee to distribute these applications....and this is why a number of hard-working people have produced a toolkit based on volunteer work that isn't dragging a tollbooth along with it -- GTK.
Slashdot Mirror
I said that I *think* that might be the case. I'm not in the least sure. The issue of active and passive interference has come up on Slashdot before, and I remember people talking about establishments that used them.
An alphanum pager isn't *enough*? A code for "report to the hospital immediately, emergency", "report to the fire station immediately, emergency", or "report to the NOC immediately, emergency" isn't sufficient?
Finally, even assuming there is some kind of emergency notification that requires more data than a pager can handle (and I'm dubious as to whether that is the case), a pager/cell combination *still* solves the problem. You get the page and have the opportunity to go find somewhere that you *aren't* going to disturb people to call the person, where jamming isn't going to be necessary.
Air horns aren't annoying either.
Assholes are annoying.
However, air horns are a tremendous asshole facilitator.
Yes. All games designed by men should contain only male characters, and all games designed by women should contain only female characters.
More seriously, the article is right. Can we have some non-awful female characters already?
No.
...who haven't the guts to go up to someone and say "Excuse me, could you speak more quietly please? You're disturbing everyone."
That's one way of looking at it.
I'd say that it's a good way of dealing with people who haven't got the good manners to avoid creating the problem in the first place.
I'd suggest every other car, instead.
This way, it's easier to reach a quiet car if you so desire.
Not only is this (a) rude and (b) probably illegal (it is in the US, but (c) dangerous.
Oh, bullshit.
If you have life-and-death notification requirements, you shouldn't be relying on a cell anyway. It's not like coverage is perfect. As somsone else pointed out, a pager is a much better choice.
Somehow the human race managed to get along just fine in '95 without cell phone users yakking all over the place. It damn well does not *need* cells.
I realize that jammers are disruptive -- they interrupt the electromagnetic spectrum around themselves. However, cell phone users are also disruptive -- they produce audio interference around themselves. Frankly, I find the needs of the person aggravated by the cell more compelling than the needs of the person who wants to talk on his new toy.
I wish every third person carried a jammer, and that the moment some jackass started being inconsiderate, he got jammed by all the people around him.
We need jammers to be widely available. Something that sends out random garbage on the right frequency range on demand. Someone's annoying everyone around them, people start hitting jammer buttons, and the problem goes away.
Close. The problem is that your system requires the users to actively make an effort to do things properly. I don't see that ever working, simply because people are lazy, and social pressure should only be used as a last ditch problem.
The issue is that of the protocol.
When a cell phone is called, it should enter the ringing state. At that point, one of two buttons can be hit -- "accept -- pending talking" and "reject". Currently, I believe that people usually just turn off their phone to do a "reject", so that much functionality is in place. The protocol should allow a "accepted, but cannot talk yet state". At that point, the person with the cell can extricate themselves from whatever situation they're in, and can find a quiet place to handle the call. They'd then hit the "ready to talk" button.
This could interoperate with older, non-compliant phones by sending a text message (or brief audio clip saying "hold on") and then either terminating the call and calling back when "ready to talk" is hit, or simply opening the connection and leaving the phone speakers muted after the initial clip) until "ready to talk" is hit.
You know what I don't like? People that are asses with their cell phones and then complain about people that complain about them.
About those ringtones... Actually, I find them annoying when the thing goes on bleeping for 30 seconds or more while its (invariably female) owner is busy digging it out from the bottom of a purse, at maximum volume no less, because the sound gets muffled by said purse (doh!).
Also, purses prevent the use of vibrators, which really should be mandatory -- I have a hard time thinking of a legitimate reason for cell phones to have audible ringers.
I believe that passive shielding deliberately designed to block cells may not be legal, but both it and (definitely not legal) active jamming of cells does take place at a small number of locations (fancy restauraunts, theaters).
I'd carry a personal jammer, if they were legal, and flip it on when I was at a theater.
The bad part is the loud speakers that really dont need a phone in the first place.
I disagree -- I think I buy into the article pretty strongly, which says that volume is a minimal issue. I've tried paying attention to what irritates me about cell phones when someone is conversing on one, and my feelings click with what the study says.
The problem is that normally, we respond when someone says something to us. Our brain is cued by it.
The request-for-attention pattern this follows is someone saying something near us, followed by a period of silence as they wait for our response. As the period of silence increases, the likelihood that the message was directed at us (and we should respond and haven't) increases (hence the common pattern of someone saying something, stopping, and two seconds later someone looking up and saying "uh, did you say something to me" -- the "request for attention" sequence was sent).
We are pretty good about ignoring conversation -- sitting in a crowded lunchroom, it's easy to let background noise fade into the background.
The problem is that cell phone speakers follow our brain's "I am requesting your attention" almost exactly. So we're sitting here uncomfortably having someone grab our attention every two seconds or so. It's extremely disruptive when you're trying to think about something else. The only real fix is to start ignoring people that *are* trying to get our attention, which isn't great either.
I would say that the primary issue is that we need a sensory input that would allow us to determine when someone is talking on the phone. Then our brain can learn to distinguish between "cell phone speaker -- ignorable" and "someone trying to get your attention".
I think that a good solution would be to provide (surprise, more noise) a buzz, a sort of masked noise from the phone. When the person on the other end of the phone is talking, we get an unintelligable but audible buzz. It would be crucial that (a) the buzz not be an annoying annoying, (b) the buzz not be easily picked up by microphones (especially cell phones, so that feedback doesn't occur -- a filter is necessary), (c) that cell phone manufacturers standardize on such a buzz sound, so that people talking near each other on different cell phones don't interfere -- this would also allow people to more quickly learn to identify cell phones. I think that cell phone disruptiveness is largely a technical problem, not a social problem (though people talking in movie theaters still require a swift kick to the nuts).
Also, the hype from the U.S. travels and that helps sales in Japan. If the game is big in the U.S., it will do better in Japan. And I do not think that the hype works for you the other way around."
"Earth to Squaresoft...Squaresoft, come in. Square, *listen* to the man!"
If I feel that a law preventing me from drinking and driving is a bad law, does that entitle me the ability to just break it on a whim? No.
Hard to say what you mean by "entitle" -- clearly not some sort of legal statement.
I wouldn't have a moral problem with breaking a law if I think that the law has no point, is unlikely to soon be reappealed, and is unlikely to be enforced. Take, for instance, public anti-profanity laws. I don't think that these are good laws. It is unlikely that they will be repealed in many locations, just because there isn't much PR in doing so. They're almost never enforced. So, sure, I'll swear without being concerned.
The reason the "drinking and driving" law comes off diferently is because most people *do* think that a law preventing drinking and driving *is* a good law, not because the law inherently has some kind of moral value.
It's not about engaging a fight, or even a debate, on fair use vs. the DMCA. If that were the case, the person or persons responsible for this would have stood their ground and made an argument.
I can't agree. Let us take the oft-cited example of people posting anti-Chinese government material on Freenet, where they are free from being thrown in jail for years (or worse). Are they not "engaging in a fight, or even a debate" by not wanting to march up in front of their local police station, giving it the finger and saying "repressive government must end"? Of course not -- that's absurd.
These people are not interested in taking it in the ass from Apple, a rather large and monopolistic company. That hardly seems unreasonable to me. In their shoes, I wouldn't want to be getting screwed over by Apple.
Jobs phrased it best -- Apple cannot expect to rely on the lack of DRM-removing tools. It's just not going to happen from a technological standpoint, no way no how. Media DRM is a tool used (at least on the PC platform) to extract money from media companies into the pockets of "security" companies. In Apple's case, it was a useful concession (since they viewed it as valueless anyway to whoever's content it was protecting) to allow them to get an early deal with the labels.
For that effort, Apple should be commended and supported.
The cynic in me says that s/Apple/Microsoft/ doing exactly the same thing would result in you not caring in the least about said efforts.
Now Apple comes out with a service that addresses many of these issues.
Apple charges $1 per track for a lossily-compressed file.
That would be $11 for a typical Britney Spears CD, according to a quick look at a Britney Spears discography.
When the RIAA was bitterly complaining about piracy justified by "expense of CD", they put out a cost breakdown -- here's one of the news articles mentioning it.
Let's take a look at this:
Retail Markup is $6.23. Apple says that they're breaking even on iTune audio sales, and only making money on the iPod. Their server hardware and the software backend is a constant cost, and already sunk. Bandwidth is a couple of cents a gig -- let's be generous and say 20 cents/GB. Let's say each AAC is five megs -- that'd be 55 megs. That's about a penny in retail markup to cover those costs that Apple says they're only breaking even on. So far, the price should decrease by $6.22.
Company overhead, distribution and shipping is effectively nil, aside from constant-cost B2B negtiation. The price should decrease by another $3.34, in total $9.56.
Marketing and promotion costs. These should stay the same. Personally, I think that radio (and netradio) stations should be free to play whatever they want, sans royalties, since it's effectively nothing but marketing. But we'll leave the cost, $2.15, in place.
The artist and songwriter recieve $1.99. No decrease.
The signing act and producing record get $1.08. No decrease.
Co-op advertising and discounts to retailers don't really apply in the online world -- a banner ad on Apple's site when buying your music is of negligable bandwidth cost to Apple compared to the bandwidth cost of the audio file -- $.85 decrease.
Pressing album and printing booklet -- doesn't exist in the online world. $.75 decrease.
Profit to label -- $.59, stays the same.
Okay, let's do the math: $.59 + $1.08 + $1.99 + $2.15 + $.01 = 5.82. The price for that Britney Spears CD that used to cost $16 and Apple is selling for $11 should be $5.82 in the online world.
There are numerous other benefits to labels to online music purchases, including the fact that CD audio is lossless and Apple is selling lossy data that is likely to eventually be behind the times in compression algorithm, meaning resales sooner. Cheaper online purchases mean more sales -- and my numbers (unless, of course, the RIAA is lying about their costs and hiding additional profit in per-unit distribution costs or similar) mean that the RIAA makes *more* money in such a scenerio. Returns don't exist -- CDs can be defective, but a bunch of bits is the same bunch of bits when anyone obtains it. Unique per-copy watermarking is easy to do, and watermarking seems to make the RIAA absoutely giggle in delight, so they should like online sales.
Want lossless FLAC quality? It should require about five times the bandwidth -- it should be about four cents more in cost to Apple, or $5.86, for that Britney Spears album.
Now, a couple of assumptions here should probably change, to be realistic. First, the RIAA should probably expect to be making less per-unit, since there's simply less money involved. Second, most retailers aren't going to be happy with just breaking even, and probably are going to want more money (plus, I ignored constant costs, and big business is usually incapable of setting up any computer systems without flushing masses of money down the toilet -- even if data transfer costs should be the dominant expense for a company that makes money by selling data in an automated fashion). That album in lossless FLAC still shouldn't be costing more than $6, which is *half* what Apple charges and provides much better quality.
So you are saying that freedom in linux means proprietary companies can write proprietary closed source code, and sell it on Linux. That is not about free software. Linux is about free software, which the LGPL disregards.
Which is why Qt is more about free software than GTK will ever be.
I don't buy it.
At all.
If you feel that companies being able to release non-free (or just non-GPL) software on Linux is unacceptable, and that it's acceptable to attack those companies, then why would you even want Linux to be GPL? It'd be much better for it to be under a license refusing to let anyone use closed-source software on it. Or even better, it could be under a license saying that anyone using Linux could not use or develop closed-source software ever again, for any platform.
Surely this is even more "about free software"?
This is probably unacceptable to you. It trades some of the appeal and usability of Linux in favor of trying to beat people about the head legally into being forced to work only on "free" software, rather than trying to convince people that Open Source is better because it just plain works better. This is *exactly* the difference between LGPL and GPL software when it comes to fundamental libraries like the standard widget set. For people that use Qt, some of the usability and appeal of Linux is being traded off for two things -- (a) theoretically more people using the GPL and (b) enriching TrollTech, giving them a permanent tax that they can levy on vast numbers of developers.
If you find that someone forcing you to pay a fee (or having control of your license) for writing any software using the (as TrollTech would have it) "standard" widget set for your platform is appealing and acceptable, then Qt may be your thing. Frankly, even Microsoft isn't this obtrusive on their own platform, and I find the idea of someone trying to make me pay a toll or control my license to produce software that interoperates cleanly from a user standpoint with the rest of my platform to be extremely distasteful.
QT is far superior to GTK
I wouldn't say so.
Qt has significant grottiness that gtkmm doesn't -- it requires a special preprocessor, has duplication of basic functionality like string, and lacks STL support. It has license issues both on Linux and Windows.
When people talk about API cleanliness, they're generally talking about GNOME (which has a lot of oddball components like bonobo that people don't like much) vs KDE, not Qt vs GTK.
Ultimately, Qt is another Motif. If you don't have a problem paying the TrollTech tax, just like you once paid the Motif tax, then Qt may be an acceptable choice.
How do you feel that the license infighting regarding the GPL and QPL has effected open source's inroads into the corporation?
Not only has the license infighting not effected inroads into the corporation, it may have negatively affected their emergence.
QT being commercial/GPL is a hinderance to commercial software for Linux. It provides a "toll booth" by forcing all non-free applications to pay a fee to distribute these applications. ...and this is why a number of hard-working people have produced a toolkit based on volunteer work that isn't dragging a tollbooth along with it -- GTK.
He said "orders" not "an order".
He's talking about at least 9000 years. Sweet potatoes will keep you going for a looong time...
At least they aren't as bad as the people that take a useful, important post and mod it as "offtopic".