Not much confidence, but still a good player.
on
Rio Karma User Review
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Regarding the lockups, this is a pretty well known issue, and my Karma itself has locked up a few times, but the whack-and-smack solution is just as well known and is surprisingly effective. It's mentioned here:
Basically, you have to whack the unit hard enough that it turns itself off and restarts. Sure, it's unsettling and even embarassing if you have to sit there in a rush-hour subway train spanking a lump of plastic for ten minutes, but it works. And the strangest part of it all: each time you spank it into submission, it will be a significantly longer period of time before it crashes again. After the fourth and last spanking session, it hasn't locked up once in the past five months.
As for the upside, it has several nice features. The author of the review failed to mention one of the highlights of the Karma-dock's ethernet jack - that it can be used to communicate with any computer that can run Java apps. This turns out to be great, because while the management software can only be installed on windows machines, the Java applet that the Karma serves up via HTTP can be run on Linux and OSX machines. When I get into the office (which is a primarily Mac environment), I just drop it into its cradle, have it DHCP-obtain an IP address (an automatic procedure), fire up the applet from my Power Mac, and I'm free to manage it.
On the usability side, I've been extremely pleased with the Karma. I never quite understood why all of the manufacturers have banded behind Apple's design of placing the display above the main control cluster. It results in the center of gravity being above your hand, making the device much more likely to slip or be knocked out of your grasp. On the Karma, the controls are placed above the display, so that your thumb wraps around the Karma's upper edge and the entirety of its mass is cradled in the palm of your hand. It might look counterintuitive, but I think that's largely because all of the other players out there have the scheme reversed.
The firmware is nice, with three user-adjustable 3-band EQ settings slots that you can flip through to best suit the genre of music you're listening to at the time. The main "menu" button on its face can be customized to drop you at one of several menu levels. For example, if you tend to select music by genre, the main menu button can be set to take you right there instead of to the root level menu. The GUI is consistently themed throughout, and while not as minimal as the iPod's, is not aesthetically offensive. One feature I found very cute was the ability to set the play screen (which you'll be looking at 90% of the time) to be dominated by a pair of mostly useless but amusingly retro-styled VU meters. Unlike the iPod, the Karma *IS* capable of gapless playback, which is great if you listen to a lot of mixed compilations or live performances.
I have only two gripes personally with the unit:
1) The setting for "shuffle"/"normal" playback is buried several levels deep in the menu system.
2) The unit has a 4pin jack next to its headphone jack which is obviously intended for an in-line remote control, but no such item exists. Pooh.
HTH in your buying decisions.
I know this is a little trite, but I have to ask.
on
Home Defense, Geek Style?
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
Where the hell do people get the idea that a warning shot is EVER a good idea. Too much TV or movies perhaps?
I know this is a little off-topic, but with regards to common behavior involving firearms and self-defense as portrayed in movies and television, why is it that people will point a gun at someone's torso, and then hesitate long enough to find themselves in serious trouble? Does this actually happen in real life?
What's always come to mind is that were I in possession of a firearm in a situation in which I was being threatened, I could easily fire the weapon with no intent to kill. Aim for shoulders, arms, or legs. Small target? Miss your mark? Fire again. Immobilize the aggressor. Yes, they could bleed to death, but is it really inconceivable to use a firearm in a nonlethal/non-deadly manner?
Seriously, in the not-too-distant future, I imagine the first thing I do after I buy a new game is to go download the pirated version.
It's kinda sad, and it really annoyed me. Being not too much of a gamer but a bit of a WWII buff, I went and purchased Call of Duty the day it came out. Now, I have a homebrew system with no internal optical drive (I'm a bit of a pc-modder too), and so I installed it from an external firewire DVDR drive. I'm not sure what form of copy protection CoD has, but get this: It installed, but refused to run. Upon further investigation, I learned that it wouldn't run from external drives. In fact, it won't even run if you have any virtual drives set up on your system either. In order to play the game, I would have to uninstall Nero, get an IDE CD-device, and perform some frustrating driver juggling tasks because I also have an NVidia NForce2 chipset based motherboard.
That was just unacceptable, so I did the only thing I could do to play the game I purchased: pirate it.
I see some parallelism here between Hollywood and Microsoft. Both are too big for their own good and it's about time they realize it and start acting like they have something to lose if they don't change their tactics
The picture that keeps popping into mind as I'm reading this is that of two obese bears locked in a wheel-like formation with each biting the other's ass, rolling down a hill towards a cliff.
Dubbed the GeForce 6600 and 6600 GT, they differ from their higher-end brethren by having only 8 pixel pipes (unlike the 12 & 16 of the 6800 line)
...how long do you guys think it will it be before someone releases a driver mod/patch or hardware howto for unlocking the other pipelines? Or are they actually going to use chips that don't physically have them?
Won't there be problems with predicting what will happen, then acting on the predictions? Almost to the point of being self-fulling prophecy?
Also, I remember very vagually that there are laws about getting a computer buying and selling automatically, to try to curb this?
I agree. It'd be funny to think that should such patterns become visible, either they'd be designed with the ability to take into account the effect of their own predictions, or they'd only be able to make predictions on the state had they not interfered. In once scenario it'd be self-fulfillment and in the other, it'd be moot since the moment people reacted to the predictions, the outcomes would inevitably be altered to the point where you'd never know whether or not they were right to begin with... right? This all seems like the kind of thing that would make a plot for an episode of Star Trek : The Next Generation...
...sure, Bethesda has made *good* games, but they focus on entirely different aspects of role-playing. Troika and its veterans put out games that focused on meticulously detailed interactions with the game-world and its inhabitants, with thousands of lines of written dialogue that branched out depending on the player's decisions. Bethesda's were more of an MMORPG randomly-generated randomly-distributed game mechanic. I shudder to think of what Bethesda's rendition of a Fallout game might turn out like. Maybe conversations in this next Fallout game would be like this:
"Hello, Wanderer! I am Andrewbeard Johnsonstein." "Tell me about yourself."
"I am Andrewbeard Johnsonstein, I am a waste dweller and I earn caps by collecting desert cacti and selling them to the herbalist." *End conversation*
"Hello Wanderer! I am Jenniferbeard Smithjones" "Tell me about yourself."
"I am jenniferbeard Smithjones. I live in this community and earn caps by raising brahmin. *end conversation*
"Wanderer, you must aid me. I am being persecuted by the moneylender Aarondan Axelschmidt. I need 500 caps, but my donkey is broken. Will you give me 500 caps so I can pay Aarondan Axelschmidt?" "No"
"Very well then. There is also a large engine I need, it is outside the town and I can show you on your map where it is. Aarondan Axelschmidt has said that he would be willing to absolve my debt if I bring him this large engine. Will you bring me this large engine so that I might repay Aarondan Axelschmidt?" "No" *uninstall*
Now seriously, the one thing that turned me off of the otherwise techincally impressive Morrowind was the idiotic lack of depth in the randomly generated characters. I might as well have been playing NetHack.
I think they let members of society get out thier frustrations without physically acting them out.
...I love violent games too, don't get me wrong. The problem I see is a pre-existing problem that might be exacerbated: That of lack of respect for law enforcement officials. Seriously. The amount of flak and disrespect that police officers get for what is an essential and dangerous function in society is likely to only reduce their sense of job-satisfaction. We've complained enough about the effects of job-dissatisfaction and disgruntlement to know what it does.
It's not the idea that someone is getting shot that bothers me, it's that it undermines before children respect for what should appear as figures of authority. It's the disrespect, people. The disrespect. Doesn't anybody understand that?
and who is compensated at the rate of $1,150 a month.
I may be reading these multiple negations incorrectly, but am I to understand that this person whose primary work requires knowledge of an advanced type in a field of science or learning customarily acquired through a prolonged course of intellectual instruction and study, as distinguished from a general academic education and from training is not qualified for overtime pay if he/she earns more than $1,150 per month?! When was this written, 1970? Where are you going to find people who meet those criteria and earn less than $13,000/year?
So I guess this might ultimately allow the transfer of data literally through a handshake...
If this becomes a standard, there will have to eventually be upgrade paths... right? I keep imagining things like subdermal conduits for improved bandwidth or current-carrying capacity. Geeks flaunting their gear with brightly colored stripes running down their arms, just beneath the skin.
Imagine being able to simply brush up against someone in order to access all the information available on their "personal network".
...still much better than a wireless personal-area-network, a la Bluetooth. At least physical contact is an event which you are generally able to detect and react to. If a stranger brushes up against you or places their hand on your thigh (possibly up your pantleg), you're more than likely to think something of it.
Even if you scratch build equipment yourself (which I've done) its still going to cost you, and try convincing peer reveiw or god forbid, Mr. FDA that your findings on non-validated equipment is worth anything...
Fortunately, it won't be very difficult at all to convince the local teens that your home-engineered ultraweed and hypercrack are worth a month's allowance.
On a more serious note though, although the research itself may be cost/circumstance prohibitive, I can see potential in open-source projects for producing tools for data analysis and potentially for the analysis of public domain data itself. The projects being open sourced don't necessarily need to be the *source* of the data, y'know.
Even the high budget North American fare uses animation studios in Korea; as many already know, the Simpson's is animated in South Korea.
A lot of our favorite toon-shows were animated in Korea. If I'm correct, these included the original G.I. Joe series, Gem, He-Man, the Snorks, and pretty much most of what was aired on Saturdays in the 80's. When I was in elementary school, I recall having wondered why there were goofy names sporadically mentioned in the credits of such cartoons. Then I realized I was Korean and that my name was goofy too.
...sorry, I can't provide links, on my way out the door, but I do recall reading that one of the reasons why a Radeon 9800SE can be softmodded to perform at 9800Pro levels is that some of the GPUs which roll off of the chipfabs do so with one or more of the eight rendering pipelines damaged. These chips fail QA for the "Pro" designation, but instead of them being a complete wash, ATi is able to disable the damaged pipelines and sell the chips as members of a lower-range-model.
I personally find it both fair and clever. It's also fortuitous for me because as most junk-hunters know, just because something has failed QA doesn't mean it's useless. I can live with five dead pixels, occasional rendering errors, paper jams, and imperfect audio because I don't rely on these things for work, just for pleasure.
I'm all for artificially imposed limitations, owning both a Minidisc player and a Radeon 9800SE. Let's all keep this nice and quiet and pretend we know nothing about the disabled functionality. If we're lucky, they'll keep putting more of said functionality in without charging us for it.
Am I missing something? They've replaced the standard ATA-IDE connectors with Serial ATA connectors, gotten rid of all of the PCI slots, but for some reason kept the FDD drive connector and the parallel port? Most newer motherboards support booting from USB flash device. As for the parallel port, there aren't many devices being sold today that use them and there are parallel-USB adapters available for those who want to use their old printers.
I know this is a pico-ATX board so it's understandable that the PCI slots were removed for space-saving purposes, but if a pico-ATX enclosure can't fit an extra PCI card, why leave room for a floppy drive?
Terrorist 1: "We have done it! We have infiltrated the missile silos! Death to the [insert appropriate derrogatory term for American]s! Victory is ours!"
Terrorist 2: "Mua-ha-ha-ha-ha! Let us hurry and launch the missiles! Wh... what is this?"
Terrorist 1: "It... it appears to be some sort of security mechanism... What do we do?!?"
Terrorist 2: "We have no choice. We must try every combination and hope to find the correct sequence before we are captured. We will start from '00000000' and count upwards."
Terrorist 1: "Are you insane? Even if we could test one sequence per second, it would take us tens of thousands of hours to find the code! Our fingers would be worn into nubs so short that we wouldn't be able to depress the launch button! We could even die of starvation first!"
...the one I had an experience with wasn't exactly bright.
I had bought a retail-packaged CPU there and the OEM fan/heatsink that it had come with seized a few days of use later. So I bring it back to the MicroCenter, flag down one of the fellers, and said to him:
Me: "Hi, I bought a CPU here the other day, and while the CPU is fine, the sink it came with looks a little buggy".
Employee: [stares at me blankly]
Me: "Is it possible to just get the sink replaced? I don't need a new processor."
Employee: [continues to stare at me blankly]
Me: "Hello?"
Employee: [very slowly and seriously] "This is a computer store, we don't sell sinks here. You want the Home Depot in the next plaza."
Me: [stares at employee blankly]
Scary scary consequences...
on
Nano Body Building
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
And your central nervous system, with its pattern of connections being your personality, will not be that easy to maintain. You could end up more demented than Ronald Reagan but still looking like J Lo
Imagine that, a scenario where people are physically healthy and youthful well into their late one-hundred-eighties. Who can say what psychological state such people would be in? If that state isn't a good one, what would we do with such people? Allow them to continue on indefinitely, youth and health frozen, as their mental degradation progresses?
We might even have to start euthanizing people, which would then necessitate a standard for determining which people are no longer fit for participation in society...
...what's to prevent us from putting one of these methane burning tanks in the basement of a large apartment building? Would the dilution by... um... tampons, water, leftover soups, vomit, and such reduce the efficiency too much?
Actually, I have to admit that the first thought that came to mind when you mentioned hair in the context of growing teeth was that of a dermoidcyst, which then led me to thinking about what might happen if, say, the programming of the stem cell were to have been a little "buggy". I mean really - tinkering with totipotential cells and having them implanted in your mouth? What if it turns into some kind of giant tumorous megatooth? You'd have to drink thousands of litres of cola to kill it...
...this type of thing tends to slip by fairly often.
From the process flow as I've experienced it over the past few years, the graphic artists tend to focus on "make it good" and "make it engaging" - which is fine since they are graphic artists and not lawyers. Their output goes to whatever client-party is holding the checkbook. The checkbook-holders who determine whether or not the artists have done their job may not themselves be conscious of legal issues pertaining to marketing materials. They might simply pound their fists on the table and exclaim, "wow! That looks great! I love it! Let's go live!".
It is either the client's responsibility or the responsibility of the uppers at the design/technology firm to at some point pass it onto legal folks to ensure that the material contained within does not violate any copyright/usage restrictions. Of course, this isn't an excuse for artists to go pillaging stock photography and materials belonging to others, but it does signify a need (especially in high-profile projects) for someone to explicitly take trademarks and such into consideration, and not expect the designers themselves to be completely responsible.
It might be seemingly infinite in three dimensions, but imagine two-dimenional topology mapped onto a ball. You could go seemingly infinitely in a single direction. Yet the ball has a finite volume. Now apply this to dimension over three....
As for what's outside the universe, there can be only one answer:
Lost socks.
...which leads me to ponder the possibility of exploiting this to create a new form of propulsion-technology: The Uncertain Sock Differential Drive.
By creating a sealed habitat for a large (100+) number of people within a spherical structure of sufficient complexity, with nooks and crannies, and extremely poorly designed shelving and cabinetry, and insufficiently illuminated laundry facilities, we'd be able to produce a negative-sock-pressure gradient via the escape of socks from our known universe into the void. This would tug the sphere long towards the point of greatest-sock-escape-density, which we could engineer to be at the fore-end of the craft.
Slashdot Mirror
http://forums-riovolution.com/index.php?showtopic= 4109
Basically, you have to whack the unit hard enough that it turns itself off and restarts. Sure, it's unsettling and even embarassing if you have to sit there in a rush-hour subway train spanking a lump of plastic for ten minutes, but it works. And the strangest part of it all: each time you spank it into submission, it will be a significantly longer period of time before it crashes again. After the fourth and last spanking session, it hasn't locked up once in the past five months.
As for the upside, it has several nice features. The author of the review failed to mention one of the highlights of the Karma-dock's ethernet jack - that it can be used to communicate with any computer that can run Java apps. This turns out to be great, because while the management software can only be installed on windows machines, the Java applet that the Karma serves up via HTTP can be run on Linux and OSX machines. When I get into the office (which is a primarily Mac environment), I just drop it into its cradle, have it DHCP-obtain an IP address (an automatic procedure), fire up the applet from my Power Mac, and I'm free to manage it.
On the usability side, I've been extremely pleased with the Karma. I never quite understood why all of the manufacturers have banded behind Apple's design of placing the display above the main control cluster. It results in the center of gravity being above your hand, making the device much more likely to slip or be knocked out of your grasp. On the Karma, the controls are placed above the display, so that your thumb wraps around the Karma's upper edge and the entirety of its mass is cradled in the palm of your hand. It might look counterintuitive, but I think that's largely because all of the other players out there have the scheme reversed.
The firmware is nice, with three user-adjustable 3-band EQ settings slots that you can flip through to best suit the genre of music you're listening to at the time. The main "menu" button on its face can be customized to drop you at one of several menu levels. For example, if you tend to select music by genre, the main menu button can be set to take you right there instead of to the root level menu. The GUI is consistently themed throughout, and while not as minimal as the iPod's, is not aesthetically offensive. One feature I found very cute was the ability to set the play screen (which you'll be looking at 90% of the time) to be dominated by a pair of mostly useless but amusingly retro-styled VU meters. Unlike the iPod, the Karma *IS* capable of gapless playback, which is great if you listen to a lot of mixed compilations or live performances.
I have only two gripes personally with the unit:
1) The setting for "shuffle"/"normal" playback is buried several levels deep in the menu system.
2) The unit has a 4pin jack next to its headphone jack which is obviously intended for an in-line remote control, but no such item exists. Pooh.
HTH in your buying decisions.
What's always come to mind is that were I in possession of a firearm in a situation in which I was being threatened, I could easily fire the weapon with no intent to kill. Aim for shoulders, arms, or legs. Small target? Miss your mark? Fire again. Immobilize the aggressor. Yes, they could bleed to death, but is it really inconceivable to use a firearm in a nonlethal/non-deadly manner?
I'm either pretty sure, or about to feel really dumb. :)
That was just unacceptable, so I did the only thing I could do to play the game I purchased: pirate it.
I agree. It'd be funny to think that should such patterns become visible, either they'd be designed with the ability to take into account the effect of their own predictions, or they'd only be able to make predictions on the state had they not interfered. In once scenario it'd be self-fulfillment and in the other, it'd be moot since the moment people reacted to the predictions, the outcomes would inevitably be altered to the point where you'd never know whether or not they were right to begin with... right? This all seems like the kind of thing that would make a plot for an episode of Star Trek : The Next Generation...
Now seriously, the one thing that turned me off of the otherwise techincally impressive Morrowind was the idiotic lack of depth in the randomly generated characters. I might as well have been playing NetHack.
...I love violent games too, don't get me wrong. The problem I see is a pre-existing problem that might be exacerbated: That of lack of respect for law enforcement officials. Seriously. The amount of flak and disrespect that police officers get for what is an essential and dangerous function in society is likely to only reduce their sense of job-satisfaction. We've complained enough about the effects of job-dissatisfaction and disgruntlement to know what it does.
It's not the idea that someone is getting shot that bothers me, it's that it undermines before children respect for what should appear as figures of authority. It's the disrespect, people. The disrespect. Doesn't anybody understand that?
I may be reading these multiple negations incorrectly, but am I to understand that this person whose primary work requires knowledge of an advanced type in a field of science or learning customarily acquired through a prolonged course of intellectual instruction and study, as distinguished from a general academic education and from training is not qualified for overtime pay if he/she earns more than $1,150 per month?! When was this written, 1970? Where are you going to find people who meet those criteria and earn less than $13,000/year?
If this becomes a standard, there will have to eventually be upgrade paths... right? I keep imagining things like subdermal conduits for improved bandwidth or current-carrying capacity. Geeks flaunting their gear with brightly colored stripes running down their arms, just beneath the skin.
...still much better than a wireless personal-area-network, a la Bluetooth. At least physical contact is an event which you are generally able to detect and react to. If a stranger brushes up against you or places their hand on your thigh (possibly up your pantleg), you're more than likely to think something of it.
Just out of curiosity, how does this compare to the capabilities of an entry level PDA?
Fortunately, it won't be very difficult at all to convince the local teens that your home-engineered ultraweed and hypercrack are worth a month's allowance.
On a more serious note though, although the research itself may be cost/circumstance prohibitive, I can see potential in open-source projects for producing tools for data analysis and potentially for the analysis of public domain data itself. The projects being open sourced don't necessarily need to be the *source* of the data, y'know.
A lot of our favorite toon-shows were animated in Korea. If I'm correct, these included the original G.I. Joe series, Gem, He-Man, the Snorks, and pretty much most of what was aired on Saturdays in the 80's. When I was in elementary school, I recall having wondered why there were goofy names sporadically mentioned in the credits of such cartoons. Then I realized I was Korean and that my name was goofy too.
I personally find it both fair and clever. It's also fortuitous for me because as most junk-hunters know, just because something has failed QA doesn't mean it's useless. I can live with five dead pixels, occasional rendering errors, paper jams, and imperfect audio because I don't rely on these things for work, just for pleasure.
I'm all for artificially imposed limitations, owning both a Minidisc player and a Radeon 9800SE. Let's all keep this nice and quiet and pretend we know nothing about the disabled functionality. If we're lucky, they'll keep putting more of said functionality in without charging us for it.
Am I missing something? They've replaced the standard ATA-IDE connectors with Serial ATA connectors, gotten rid of all of the PCI slots, but for some reason kept the FDD drive connector and the parallel port? Most newer motherboards support booting from USB flash device. As for the parallel port, there aren't many devices being sold today that use them and there are parallel-USB adapters available for those who want to use their old printers.
I know this is a pico-ATX board so it's understandable that the PCI slots were removed for space-saving purposes, but if a pico-ATX enclosure can't fit an extra PCI card, why leave room for a floppy drive?
Terrorist 1: "We have done it! We have infiltrated the missile silos! Death to the [insert appropriate derrogatory term for American]s! Victory is ours!"
Terrorist 2: "Mua-ha-ha-ha-ha! Let us hurry and launch the missiles! Wh... what is this?"
Terrorist 1: "It... it appears to be some sort of security mechanism... What do we do?!?"
Terrorist 2: "We have no choice. We must try every combination and hope to find the correct sequence before we are captured. We will start from '00000000' and count upwards."
Terrorist 1: "Are you insane? Even if we could test one sequence per second, it would take us tens of thousands of hours to find the code! Our fingers would be worn into nubs so short that we wouldn't be able to depress the launch button! We could even die of starvation first!"
Terrorist 2: "You're right. We've failed."
I had bought a retail-packaged CPU there and the OEM fan/heatsink that it had come with seized a few days of use later. So I bring it back to the MicroCenter, flag down one of the fellers, and said to him:
Me: "Hi, I bought a CPU here the other day, and while the CPU is fine, the sink it came with looks a little buggy".
Employee: [stares at me blankly]
Me: "Is it possible to just get the sink replaced? I don't need a new processor."
Employee: [continues to stare at me blankly]
Me: "Hello?"
Employee: [very slowly and seriously] "This is a computer store, we don't sell sinks here. You want the Home Depot in the next plaza."
Me: [stares at employee blankly]
Imagine that, a scenario where people are physically healthy and youthful well into their late one-hundred-eighties. Who can say what psychological state such people would be in? If that state isn't a good one, what would we do with such people? Allow them to continue on indefinitely, youth and health frozen, as their mental degradation progresses?
We might even have to start euthanizing people, which would then necessitate a standard for determining which people are no longer fit for participation in society...
...what's to prevent us from putting one of these methane burning tanks in the basement of a large apartment building? Would the dilution by... um... tampons, water, leftover soups, vomit, and such reduce the efficiency too much?
Actually, I have to admit that the first thought that came to mind when you mentioned hair in the context of growing teeth was that of a dermoid cyst, which then led me to thinking about what might happen if, say, the programming of the stem cell were to have been a little "buggy". I mean really - tinkering with totipotential cells and having them implanted in your mouth? What if it turns into some kind of giant tumorous megatooth? You'd have to drink thousands of litres of cola to kill it...
From the process flow as I've experienced it over the past few years, the graphic artists tend to focus on "make it good" and "make it engaging" - which is fine since they are graphic artists and not lawyers. Their output goes to whatever client-party is holding the checkbook. The checkbook-holders who determine whether or not the artists have done their job may not themselves be conscious of legal issues pertaining to marketing materials. They might simply pound their fists on the table and exclaim, "wow! That looks great! I love it! Let's go live!".
It is either the client's responsibility or the responsibility of the uppers at the design/technology firm to at some point pass it onto legal folks to ensure that the material contained within does not violate any copyright/usage restrictions. Of course, this isn't an excuse for artists to go pillaging stock photography and materials belonging to others, but it does signify a need (especially in high-profile projects) for someone to explicitly take trademarks and such into consideration, and not expect the designers themselves to be completely responsible.
By creating a sealed habitat for a large (100+) number of people within a spherical structure of sufficient complexity, with nooks and crannies, and extremely poorly designed shelving and cabinetry, and insufficiently illuminated laundry facilities, we'd be able to produce a negative-sock-pressure gradient via the escape of socks from our known universe into the void. This would tug the sphere long towards the point of greatest-sock-escape-density, which we could engineer to be at the fore-end of the craft.
Is that a great idea, or what?