More importantly, the different Sony divisions (Movies, laptop, portable, camera etc) are really distinct and different business entities. That's how the rootkit got to be implemented in the first place: not much from-the-top controll.
So, yeah, screw the laptop division, but their phones and tablets are great and supporting them might mean more from that division get promoted up and bring along their values to the whole.
Whilst I do agree with the Sony hate due to the rootkits and erstwhile proprietary storage media... that is their laptop and storage division. Their phones and tablets are top-quality (after you uninstall the bloatware).
The hardware is topnotch: the z4 tablet? Wow. It weighs something like a thin square of plywood, yet feels sturdy. The one and only problem I have with it is that it feels so light that I want to break it over my knee, just to see what it would feel like:-) I'm not a violent person: you'll understand what I mean as soon as you hold one of these light wonders in your hands.
First of all, the iphone 4s (released quite late 2011, by the way) is very slow, to the point of unusability, especially if you upgraded to ios8. We support it because we must. However a measly cheapass Samsung SIII mini, released around the same time can be trivially (yeah, even for non-technical users) be upgraded to the latest android version on Cyonagen and runs surprisingly smoothly.
With minimal effort (yeah, yeah, 'most people can't/won't do that!'... actually, a surprisingly large group of people do have friends who do that for them, as I can tell from the various app figures the Google Play console gives) a crap phone released at the same time runs much better than the Apple flagship.
The ipad2? What. Are. You. Smoking? That one-time flagship device is un-usable except for single tabbed webbrowsing.
Recently got an Alienware 15 with the highest specs. At first I thought the battery life was a bit crap, but that was to be expected with the highest end i7 and a gtx980m.
Put it in low battery mode and I get 9 hours of internet/office/video use.
Come on. I have used this exact same method on a Windows Mobile 5 device (HTC Touch HD) waaaay back when, using the accelerometer and gravity to determine how my screen was moving and moving a virtual object in virtual space and showing that on my phone's screen.
Not only that, but it's a rather OBVIOUS solution to a problem. Whatever happened to the "non-obvious" requirement?
"The UI on phones and tablets aren't designed to help us find one app among dozens"
I agreed with that. So the first app I made was AppGrouper for Windows Mobile, back then. It's a single icon on your homescreen which launches a panel with categories of your favourite apps. You can swipe between your categories (favs, communications, graphics, whatever you want to call them) and launch the app. You make your own categories and add your own selection of apps to them. It makes for very easy and quick launching of your most used apps. It's also the first app I made for Android (look for AppGrouper by LifeBoatSoft on Google Play), and by far the most used app on my phone.
There's even a free, old version which you can find on the forums of XDA-Developers.
And that's why it's a good idea to research the bacteria/moulds etc which live in and near Chernobyl. Life 'finds' a way, and thanks to the random changes/evolution of the lifeforms there, some very interesting and potential mutations can have popped up there.
But can't you see, your 'simplified argument' is a damn near textbook example of hypocrisy itself!
Hypocrisy means you have a double standard.
What you might mean to say is that not all hypocrisy is a bad thing, which I'd agree with. I don't agree with your gun ownership (and anyway, are you a member of a militia? If not, re-read your second amendment, the part about being member of an armed militia), but I do think police should be armed. That is a hypocratic standard; police yes, populace no...but so be it.
Hell, all people are hypocrites in one way or another. But there are some things which are just obvious, like the nuclear cat being out of the bag and non-proliferation being just a holding action.
And this is why you should be wary of ANY data collection scheme...just like it used to be that any application would eventually evolve to a point where it incluided a webbrowser/IRC client/email reader, data collections like thses evolve until the government wants it.
And what happens when the database gets hacked (this is INEVITABLE) and your personal data is online, never to go away? Jack shit is what. The government won't reimburse you, the data will never dissappear (like they say, real men don't do backups, they archive to the internet!) and identity theives (including, you guessed it, terrorists) will have a field day with easily used personal data which can't be 'taken back'.
This is one of those cases where the certain (not potential, this shit is ionevitable) consequences are much worse than any 'problem' you are trying to solve.
Personal data will hit the net, identity thieves will have fun and you actually make tracing terrorists MORE DIFFICULT.
You should check out the quake3 engien modded to use raytracing. Quite nice, and the computer scientist also has some interesting points about the efficiencies of raytracing (ie those problems Portal had with it's portal rendering (which you didn't see, because they had to hack around it))? Not a problem with raytracing).
So, quake3 runs easily using raytracing, and that was just something to show how fast it can be...it's feasable in the latest games too. So why is raytacing so slow again?
Oh, you're thinking POVray or some such offline rendering engine.
Not really; when you create 3d, you do so specifically for realtime or offline rendering. Realtime uses polies, renderfarms usually operate on mathematical constructs (nurbs, subd), but which the renderer breaks down into polies anyway for rendering.
Raytracing is not anti poly...raytracing is a lighting system which operates on objects.
You know, I've always wanted to know how in the hell a nation could allow something like the KGB to form.
Now I still don't know, 'cause the spying-on-your-own-citizens has never been so thorough. Maybe China comes close, or even the Netherlands, but information systems like this...?
Appart from the fact that having 14 children is handy if you expect a number of them to die during infancy, and that having just a few offspring also means you can throw more energy into rearing them: your assumption is that DNA/organisms are somehow 'judged' by the number of offspring. By whom? Why only that? Why not the offspring's ability to change it's environment? Might not DNA want to change it's environment more than it wants to seed it? Might not the former be the reason for the latter? And if gravity or any other natural process does not have a goal, why assume life has one?
The Social Contract. Read up on it, you've signed it (because you're not a hermit, judging from your computer use).
The goal of society is a safe, stable, clean environment to work/live/find happiness in. One crawling with destitute, hungry people is none of that; thsoe peoople will at one point be forced to take from teh rich if they don't get from compassion. So for the rich to remain safe, they must pay. The other option for the rich is to hire guards and private armies. That might cost the same, but it is better to spend that money to give other people food, education, security and chances, so why NOT do that instead?
So how does mayopr infrastructure get built? Or large science projects, like atomic coliders, or quantum mechanical research (which few understand or would give money towards, but have made possibel the laser etc.)? And how about education? And if you're taxing people, then giving monies back, why not tax certain people less and give them no money back?
"Would you like the government to give your money away forcefully to someone else just so that it's "fair?""
Some people have a sense of justice. You might have heard of it.
"Why should the government be in charge of this?"
Because someone has to be, and it's in teh governments charter, so to speak, that they do it by certain rules, and do it with justice and fairness. And because, on the face of it, I really don't trust/you/ with it. I much prefer the checks and balances of government.
"And what's to stop them from becoming corrupt in this which is more than likely to happen?"
Those checks and balances...they create a nice sence of selfpreservation, even amongst teh selfish. Or at least they would, if they worked. With the breakdown of the media and the apathy of the american people (Prozac and Ritalin...no wonder they're over proscribed and No Child Left Behind means exactly what it doesn't), those checks and balances are broken down, and modernday US is what you get.
You really have no idea what capitalism and communism really entail. You only know communism from the perverted structure Stalin gave it, and probably think China is/was communist too (chinese communism...hehe:) ). As for capitalism...unbounded it's horrible, and allows companies to dump toxic waste wherever they want, and companies to murder citizens if they are in the way. See Nigeria, for example...unbounded capitalism/is/ corruption!
I think it's more the fact that you think you have a system that works, one whioch coulda, shoulda worked, and then pissed it away on high tech toys of destruction you really can't pay for, and then uses them on the rest of teh world.
Point being: you have thirdworld literacy/numeracy numbers (18% in one of the southern states...18%! Saw this on CNN (of course on a friday, when all the rest of the bad news gets put out) and couldn't believe it, so I went online to track the numbers from the source...holy shit! And some of the other southern states were just as bad. And then there's poverty and incomediscrepancy, which is also huge in the US, as is healthcare availability, or insurance, or employment (which you guys count in a really strange way...if you've beenunemployed for a certain amount of time, you suddenly aren't counted as being unemployed anymore! Clever!).
And then the US turns around and spreads it's system to wherever there's oil to be found. Like they're waiting for the US' brand of freedom, which basically entails the right to be wiretapped whenever, picked up and locked away without habeas corpus or due process and for politicians to baldfaced lie about whatever they feel like,/and not even get called out by the press/, be it about druguse, child molestation or reasons for going to war. And the US wants to spread/that/?
I live in one of the richest countries on earth, and I hate the US government too. And I'm starting to hate the US citizenry for letting it happen for 6 years...you didn't fix it or educate your fellow citizens, so it/is/ your fault too. You better back your newly elected houses, and set your media straight on what they should be doing (ie that whole extra estate business), 'cause it's gonna bite you in the ass if you don't. Hell, it already is, what with the corruption, the disedumacation and the wiping of the bottom with that old document you used to be so proud of.
There's one immense problem with all that; concentration of wealth. It's the endgame of pure capitalism: all the wealth in the hands of the few. Even Monopoly teaches this...'s actually scary how well Monopoly maps to real world economics, like a central axiom of capitalism being 'growth' and that if growth stops (or is unsustainable due to lets say a maximum supportable population on one planet with current food/water production techniques, or a finite energy source like oil), the whole system grinds to the endstate as mentioned above. Or how the rational consumer doesn't exist (how many people you play against have no idea that certain blocks shouldn't be built on except after you've filled up profitable streets? A hell of a lot.). Hell, we've reached that point already, really, and it kind of sucks for the poor people in the third world and in the US (just ask any ex-New Orleans resident). We really have reached the point where a rational being says: "OK, this system has very undesirable side-effects...maybe some other form is prefereable; maybe the government/should/ do some bailing?".
"however there are issues associated with running at less then 100% power for extended periods of time."
Didn't know that...what are they?
"but if you deplete the core with control rods in you create axial asymmetries."
Isn't that why we designed pebblebed reactors?
"Big nuke power plants are designed to be base load generating plants, running at 100% all the time."
Is 450 MW large enough for that to hold true? I know of one in that range (and one larger) for which that's just patently not true. It's specifically built for variable power output to account for changes in the continental powergrid and thus changs in demand. But then again, afaik most power stations (no matter their fuel source) pretty much have to do that, otherwise we couldn't ever have a stable frequency from our power lines.
Re:The rest of the launch lineup can go to hell...
on
Two Weeks with the Wii
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· Score: 1
The xbox also sold that amount. Microsoft did not win, Nintendo did not lose. They both sold damn near the same amount of Gamecubes and xbox'.
But Nintendo outsold all of those systems (including the ps and ps2) with it's gameboy and DS systems. And they make money off each system (console or handheld) sold. Nintendo hve not only won the console war, they'll win this round and have won all previous rounds too. At least, if making money and systems sold are your yardstick.
"They are also attempting to ensure that all relevant emergency information is available to a call center should the need arise"
Why is there a need to co-opt a system like that? We didn't have it before and we did fine. If I was paranoid, I'd say it had to do with the monitoring they're putting in place (location, remote turning on of microphones on mobiles in standby mode). Even not being paranoid I think it's strange...they want to add all these features which we don't really need/want but still have to pay for in our service contracts...and then they tax us on top of it?
Now I know VoIP and the mobile mesh are different systems...but I'm still miffed.
"...who decide that their console is a more fun way to do some things, without constant upgrades, costs, monitors etc - especially gaming."
Cute, but that's no longer a valid point. Consoles have ceased to be simple, plug the disc in and it just plays machines. Nowadays, consoles come in different configurations, have or don't have HD's, need expensive ass monitors (and all the differences in 480/1080/i/p isn't helping), the games need patches, the conoles get bricked (hard crashes) and you have to navigate an awkward menu system to just play a game.
Console manufacutrors have fucked up; their strongest point was the single configuration, absolutely no-hassle playing of games....but they've turned that experience into the exact same one as pc gaming...without the upgadability and flexibility of pc's.
I've always wondered, seeing as it's the only hardware survey I really have access to; how representative is the Valve hardware survey? Did the numbers you worked with compare or where there large differences?
Means there's a lot less variables to track, as well.
And it's cute that banks lose small amounts of money...but you can bet your arse that if an ATM was mistracking money, there'd be an investigation as large as neccessary to find where things fubar'd, and in the end someone will be fired.
Why isn't that done with votes?
And of course the real question is why are voting machines blackboxes? Democracy only works if it is seen to be practiced...ie, if it is open and transparent. The mechanism of democracy (voting) needs to be that, almost per definition.
Slashdot Mirror
More importantly, the different Sony divisions (Movies, laptop, portable, camera etc) are really distinct and different business entities. That's how the rootkit got to be implemented in the first place: not much from-the-top controll.
So, yeah, screw the laptop division, but their phones and tablets are great and supporting them might mean more from that division get promoted up and bring along their values to the whole.
Whilst I do agree with the Sony hate due to the rootkits and erstwhile proprietary storage media ... that is their laptop and storage division. Their phones and tablets are top-quality (after you uninstall the bloatware).
The hardware is topnotch: the z4 tablet? Wow. It weighs something like a thin square of plywood, yet feels sturdy. The one and only problem I have with it is that it feels so light that I want to break it over my knee, just to see what it would feel like :-) I'm not a violent person: you'll understand what I mean as soon as you hold one of these light wonders in your hands.
Sure, mate.
First of all, the iphone 4s (released quite late 2011, by the way) is very slow, to the point of unusability, especially if you upgraded to ios8. We support it because we must. However a measly cheapass Samsung SIII mini, released around the same time can be trivially (yeah, even for non-technical users) be upgraded to the latest android version on Cyonagen and runs surprisingly smoothly.
With minimal effort (yeah, yeah, 'most people can't/won't do that!' ... actually, a surprisingly large group of people do have friends who do that for them, as I can tell from the various app figures the Google Play console gives) a crap phone released at the same time runs much better than the Apple flagship.
The ipad2? What. Are. You. Smoking? That one-time flagship device is un-usable except for single tabbed webbrowsing.
Recently got an Alienware 15 with the highest specs. At first I thought the battery life was a bit crap, but that was to be expected with the highest end i7 and a gtx980m.
Put it in low battery mode and I get 9 hours of internet/office/video use.
And I get a great keyboard.
So, suck it, Lenovo, with your spyware.
Come on. I have used this exact same method on a Windows Mobile 5 device (HTC Touch HD) waaaay back when, using the accelerometer and gravity to determine how my screen was moving and moving a virtual object in virtual space and showing that on my phone's screen.
Not only that, but it's a rather OBVIOUS solution to a problem. Whatever happened to the "non-obvious" requirement?
"The UI on phones and tablets aren't designed to help us find one app among dozens"
I agreed with that. So the first app I made was AppGrouper for Windows Mobile, back then. It's a single icon on your homescreen which launches a panel with categories of your favourite apps. You can swipe between your categories (favs, communications, graphics, whatever you want to call them) and launch the app. You make your own categories and add your own selection of apps to them. It makes for very easy and quick launching of your most used apps.
It's also the first app I made for Android (look for AppGrouper by LifeBoatSoft on Google Play), and by far the most used app on my phone.
There's even a free, old version which you can find on the forums of XDA-Developers.
And that's why it's a good idea to research the bacteria/moulds etc which live in and near Chernobyl. Life 'finds' a way, and thanks to the random changes/evolution of the lifeforms there, some very interesting and potential mutations can have popped up there.
We'll have to go look, though.
But can't you see, your 'simplified argument' is a damn near textbook example of hypocrisy itself!
Hypocrisy means you have a double standard.
What you might mean to say is that not all hypocrisy is a bad thing, which I'd agree with. I don't agree with your gun ownership (and anyway, are you a member of a militia? If not, re-read your second amendment, the part about being member of an armed militia), but I do think police should be armed. That is a hypocratic standard; police yes, populace no...but so be it.
Hell, all people are hypocrites in one way or another. But there are some things which are just obvious, like the nuclear cat being out of the bag and non-proliferation being just a holding action.
And this is why you should be wary of ANY data collection scheme...just like it used to be that any application would eventually evolve to a point where it incluided a webbrowser/IRC client/email reader, data collections like thses evolve until the government wants it.
And what happens when the database gets hacked (this is INEVITABLE) and your personal data is online, never to go away? Jack shit is what. The government won't reimburse you, the data will never dissappear (like they say, real men don't do backups, they archive to the internet!) and identity theives (including, you guessed it, terrorists) will have a field day with easily used personal data which can't be 'taken back'.
This is one of those cases where the certain (not potential, this shit is ionevitable) consequences are much worse than any 'problem' you are trying to solve.
Personal data will hit the net, identity thieves will have fun and you actually make tracing terrorists MORE DIFFICULT.
God, people are dumb sometimes.
You should check out the quake3 engien modded to use raytracing. Quite nice, and the computer scientist also has some interesting points about the efficiencies of raytracing (ie those problems Portal had with it's portal rendering (which you didn't see, because they had to hack around it))? Not a problem with raytracing).
So, quake3 runs easily using raytracing, and that was just something to show how fast it can be...it's feasable in the latest games too. So why is raytacing so slow again?
Oh, you're thinking POVray or some such offline rendering engine.
Not really; when you create 3d, you do so specifically for realtime or offline rendering. Realtime uses polies, renderfarms usually operate on mathematical constructs (nurbs, subd), but which the renderer breaks down into polies anyway for rendering. Raytracing is not anti poly...raytracing is a lighting system which operates on objects.
You know, I've always wanted to know how in the hell a nation could allow something like the KGB to form. Now I still don't know, 'cause the spying-on-your-own-citizens has never been so thorough. Maybe China comes close, or even the Netherlands, but information systems like this...?
Appart from the fact that having 14 children is handy if you expect a number of them to die during infancy, and that having just a few offspring also means you can throw more energy into rearing them: your assumption is that DNA/organisms are somehow 'judged' by the number of offspring. By whom? Why only that? Why not the offspring's ability to change it's environment? Might not DNA want to change it's environment more than it wants to seed it? Might not the former be the reason for the latter? And if gravity or any other natural process does not have a goal, why assume life has one?
The Social Contract. Read up on it, you've signed it (because you're not a hermit, judging from your computer use).
The goal of society is a safe, stable, clean environment to work/live/find happiness in. One crawling with destitute, hungry people is none of that; thsoe peoople will at one point be forced to take from teh rich if they don't get from compassion. So for the rich to remain safe, they must pay. The other option for the rich is to hire guards and private armies. That might cost the same, but it is better to spend that money to give other people food, education, security and chances, so why NOT do that instead?
So how does mayopr infrastructure get built? Or large science projects, like atomic coliders, or quantum mechanical research (which few understand or would give money towards, but have made possibel the laser etc.)? And how about education? And if you're taxing people, then giving monies back, why not tax certain people less and give them no money back?
"you wouldn't have this attitude"
/you/ with it. I much prefer the checks and balances of government.
:) ). As for capitalism...unbounded it's horrible, and allows companies to dump toxic waste wherever they want, and companies to murder citizens if they are in the way. See Nigeria, for example...unbounded capitalism /is/ corruption!
Not everyone's a selfish bastard.
"Would you like the government to give your money away forcefully to someone else just so that it's "fair?""
Some people have a sense of justice. You might have heard of it.
"Why should the government be in charge of this?"
Because someone has to be, and it's in teh governments charter, so to speak, that they do it by certain rules, and do it with justice and fairness. And because, on the face of it, I really don't trust
"And what's to stop them from becoming corrupt in this which is more than likely to happen?"
Those checks and balances...they create a nice sence of selfpreservation, even amongst teh selfish. Or at least they would, if they worked. With the breakdown of the media and the apathy of the american people (Prozac and Ritalin...no wonder they're over proscribed and No Child Left Behind means exactly what it doesn't), those checks and balances are broken down, and modernday US is what you get.
You really have no idea what capitalism and communism really entail. You only know communism from the perverted structure Stalin gave it, and probably think China is/was communist too (chinese communism...hehe
I think it's more the fact that you think you have a system that works, one whioch coulda, shoulda worked, and then pissed it away on high tech toys of destruction you really can't pay for, and then uses them on the rest of teh world.
/and not even get called out by the press/, be it about druguse, child molestation or reasons for going to war. And the US wants to spread /that/?
/is/ your fault too. You better back your newly elected houses, and set your media straight on what they should be doing (ie that whole extra estate business), 'cause it's gonna bite you in the ass if you don't. Hell, it already is, what with the corruption, the disedumacation and the wiping of the bottom with that old document you used to be so proud of.
Point being: you have thirdworld literacy/numeracy numbers (18% in one of the southern states...18%! Saw this on CNN (of course on a friday, when all the rest of the bad news gets put out) and couldn't believe it, so I went online to track the numbers from the source...holy shit! And some of the other southern states were just as bad. And then there's poverty and incomediscrepancy, which is also huge in the US, as is healthcare availability, or insurance, or employment (which you guys count in a really strange way...if you've beenunemployed for a certain amount of time, you suddenly aren't counted as being unemployed anymore! Clever!).
And then the US turns around and spreads it's system to wherever there's oil to be found. Like they're waiting for the US' brand of freedom, which basically entails the right to be wiretapped whenever, picked up and locked away without habeas corpus or due process and for politicians to baldfaced lie about whatever they feel like,
I live in one of the richest countries on earth, and I hate the US government too. And I'm starting to hate the US citizenry for letting it happen for 6 years...you didn't fix it or educate your fellow citizens, so it
There's one immense problem with all that; concentration of wealth. It's the endgame of pure capitalism: all the wealth in the hands of the few. Even Monopoly teaches this...'s actually scary how well Monopoly maps to real world economics, like a central axiom of capitalism being 'growth' and that if growth stops (or is unsustainable due to lets say a maximum supportable population on one planet with current food/water production techniques, or a finite energy source like oil), the whole system grinds to the endstate as mentioned above. Or how the rational consumer doesn't exist (how many people you play against have no idea that certain blocks shouldn't be built on except after you've filled up profitable streets? A hell of a lot.). /should/ do some bailing?".
Hell, we've reached that point already, really, and it kind of sucks for the poor people in the third world and in the US (just ask any ex-New Orleans resident). We really have reached the point where a rational being says: "OK, this system has very undesirable side-effects...maybe some other form is prefereable; maybe the government
"however there are issues associated with running at less then 100% power for extended periods of time."
Didn't know that...what are they?
"but if you deplete the core with control rods in you create axial asymmetries."
Isn't that why we designed pebblebed reactors?
"Big nuke power plants are designed to be base load generating plants, running at 100% all the time."
Is 450 MW large enough for that to hold true? I know of one in that range (and one larger) for which that's just patently not true. It's specifically built for variable power output to account for changes in the continental powergrid and thus changs in demand. But then again, afaik most power stations (no matter their fuel source) pretty much have to do that, otherwise we couldn't ever have a stable frequency from our power lines.
The xbox also sold that amount. Microsoft did not win, Nintendo did not lose. They both sold damn near the same amount of Gamecubes and xbox'.
But Nintendo outsold all of those systems (including the ps and ps2) with it's gameboy and DS systems. And they make money off each system (console or handheld) sold. Nintendo hve not only won the console war, they'll win this round and have won all previous rounds too. At least, if making money and systems sold are your yardstick.
"They are also attempting to ensure that all relevant emergency information is available to a call center should the need arise"
Why is there a need to co-opt a system like that? We didn't have it before and we did fine. If I was paranoid, I'd say it had to do with the monitoring they're putting in place (location, remote turning on of microphones on mobiles in standby mode). Even not being paranoid I think it's strange...they want to add all these features which we don't really need/want but still have to pay for in our service contracts...and then they tax us on top of it?
Now I know VoIP and the mobile mesh are different systems...but I'm still miffed.
"Very few people use opengl for a variety of reasons"
Not true. Most people use OpenGL...it's just that it's the enterprise users who do. Big CAD/CAM/automotive/aerospace etc etc etc all use OpenGL.
"...who decide that their console is a more fun way to do some things, without constant upgrades, costs, monitors etc - especially gaming."
Cute, but that's no longer a valid point. Consoles have ceased to be simple, plug the disc in and it just plays machines.
Nowadays, consoles come in different configurations, have or don't have HD's, need expensive ass monitors (and all the differences in 480/1080/i/p isn't helping), the games need patches, the conoles get bricked (hard crashes) and you have to navigate an awkward menu system to just play a game.
Console manufacutrors have fucked up; their strongest point was the single configuration, absolutely no-hassle playing of games....but they've turned that experience into the exact same one as pc gaming...without the upgadability and flexibility of pc's.
I've always wondered, seeing as it's the only hardware survey I really have access to; how representative is the Valve hardware survey? Did the numbers you worked with compare or where there large differences?
Means there's a lot less variables to track, as well.
And it's cute that banks lose small amounts of money...but you can bet your arse that if an ATM was mistracking money, there'd be an investigation as large as neccessary to find where things fubar'd, and in the end someone will be fired.
Why isn't that done with votes?
And of course the real question is why are voting machines blackboxes? Democracy only works if it is seen to be practiced...ie, if it is open and transparent. The mechanism of democracy (voting) needs to be that, almost per definition.
You know what? Strike the 'almost'.