That's not going to help. The reason FAT is so popular is because it's a universal format. I can take my FAT formatted thumb drive and use it on Windows, Linux, Macintosh, FreeBSD, etc. With Ext[2|3], I can only get full use of it under Linux. That's a serious impediment, no matter how well you think of Linux.
For me, thumb drives have become the new "sneakernet". If I can no longer transport my date between home, work and my friend's house, I'm going to be severly inconvenienced.
GUI everything: If it's not a system crash, the desktop PC should be able to handle everything in GUI.
As an interesting sidenote to the incessant mantra that Linux needs to out-GUI Windows and Mac, I ran across this recent review. The user was a long time Mac user who took a six week vacation with FreeBSD/KDE. Not once in the entire review did he even mention the curses-based installer. Maybe the 100% GUI isn't as important to the real world as the cloistered Linux community thinks it is.
does anyone remember the abomination that was gnome 1.0.0 (on any distro?)
[waving arm wildly so teacher will call on him] I do! I do!
A coworker and I were arguing over desktops at the time. We were both ex OS/2 users, so we had similar ideas as to the ideal desktop. I was using Mandrake and telling how great KDE was. He was using Redhat and saying how GNOME was clearly superior.
He had a Redhat desktop at work, so he kept showing me GNOME 1.0, and it didn't impress me at all. But I didn't have an equivalent Mandrake desktop at work, so I couldn't reciprocate. Eventually I told him to put up or shut up, and install KDE. I even found the RPMs for him to install. He relented, installed KDE, and he never once looked back. He admitted to me that what he liked best about GNOME wasn't GNOME at all, but the Enlightenment window manager. I showed him how to run Enlightenment with KDE and he was overjoyed. I haven't seen him in two years, but I suspect he's still a faithful KDE user.
GNOME has of course improved tremendously since then. I think it's biggest problem at the start was Redhat tagging it 1.0 long before it was ready.
What the fuck does my attitude have to do with getting a loan? Oh, I have to kiss ASS to get a loan, right?
Asking the loan officer if you're supposed to kiss his fucking ass is a guaranteed way not to get the loan. If you keep at it long enough, they might even bar you from entering the bank, giving you further evidence of their vileness.
You're right. Even though I am more than willing to pay a fee to check out books from a library, I should not do it, because it would end up decreasing services for all.
My father was a public school teacher for over thirty years. While he certainly was not well off, and had some rough financial straits at times, we most assuredly were not poor. Lower middle class is not poverty.
Where you will be stared at as if you had just landed from Neptune.
If you walk in without a proper business plan, no cosigners or references, wearing a ratty Slashdot teeshirt, then you might as well stay home and bitch about how unfair the world is.
But banks are in the business of loaning money. It won't be easy, but that's what they're there for. Don't go to a large national bank like BofA. Go to a local community bank instead. Yes, you're probably going to need collateral, but it will be on the order of your home, and not a half million dollar complex. Nothing worthwhile in this world is easy, and starting a business least of all, but most things are still possible.
I'm not talking hot air here, I've seen it done up close with some friends. Starting a business is very risky, and the banks know it. But they'll loan to you if you can lessen the risk to them. A quality business plan, collateral, cosigners, other sources of funding, etc., will help do that.
The old saying that "you can only get a loan if you don't need a loan" is true. So demonstrate to the bank that you don't need a loan. If you really *do* need a loan, then starting a business is not for you. This isn't a catch-22. If you can't sell yourself to at least one relative or friend to be a cosigner, how the heck are you going to sell your product once you're in business? If you can't manage to build up enough personal worth to own a home to use as collateral, how the heck can the bank trust you to build up the business to be able to pay them back?
Getting the loan is the easy part. The hard part is risking your entire future, working sixteen hour days for the next five years, earning less money than your employees, and going through aspirin and rolaids by the bushel. If you can't imagine doing that joyfully with a smile the entire time, don't bother to apply for the loan.
Wisdom of the day: If you think it's impossible, then it is... for you at least.
What's wrong with "good old-fashioned capitalism"?
Libraries need a free market solution to their funding. This is a tricky problem, given the expectation that libraries need to be "free beer" institutions.
Used book sales are just one tiny and insufficient step towards free market free libraries. But it's a step nonetheless. We also need a return to financial patronage of free libraries. I frequently hear of endowments to college libraries, but when was the last time you ever heard of someone endowing a local free library? When's the last time *you* donated even ten dollars to your local library?
Come to think of it, I would be more than willing to "rent" books from the library for fifty cents apiece. Not everyone can afford this, but I sure can. How's this suggestion: fifty cents for an adult to checkout a library book, no cost for children.
Reality might very well dictate that "free" libraries must always be funded by governments, but that's no reason not to seek to reduce the burden on the taxpayers, no matter how small it might be.
Even if your rebuttals were true, it's still better than under the typical communist regime of the last century.
I need a business license to start up a commercial newspaper. But this license is uniform for all businesses in a locality, and typically very small. It's the same fee if you're a newspaper or a carwash.
Most churches are indeed registered with the IRS as non-profit charitable organizations. But this still isn't licensing. If you want to start a church, you simply start one. Period. Indeed, there many churches that are not registered as charitable organizations at all, as a principle of their faith. They lose some of the tax perks, but they gain considerably in freedom and peace of mind.
The patriot act is indeed distressing, and it is indeed a huge step away from freedom and liberty. But I can still criticize the government in press and in speech without reprisal. I can write a letter to a newspaper harshly criticizing governement policies, and I will not fear any harassment by the state. I can set up a soapbox on the street corner and start ranting about Bush and I will not be arrested.
I'm not saying that the US is perfect. Far from it. But we've got a long ways to go before the US approaches the level of authoritarianism exhibited by the communist nations of twentieth century Europe.
How many of us thought that it can't be done due to costs, the need of big bucks and convincing some snotty VC? Well it didn't stop these guys.
Those with short attention spans are doomed to repeat recent history.
Unless your startup needs a factory, gobs of employees, or other extensive capital, you don't need megabucks, only kilobucks. No need for snotty VCs, selling off rights to future IP, etc. It's still hard, but 95% of existing businesses have done it.
You just have to start small. One of the worst legacies the dot.boom left us was the general perception that businesses have to be large to be successful. Nothing could be further from the truth. I don't have the current statistics, but last I heard them a few years ago, 80% of businesses in the US had 20 or fewer employees. In other words, small business is king.
I've worked closely with many individuals who have started businesses from scratch. It's not cheap, but it doesn't require millions from venture capitalists. Your credit cards, retirement savings, relatives and a trip to the local bank are often all that's needed to start out small. And small is all that you need. You'll be working your butt off eighteen hours a day, but you can do it.
If this is software, you've got a headstart over most other businesses, since you don't need to carry inventory, rent warehouses, or run factories. All you need are salesmen and developers. The developers may be expensive, but your salesmen will be cheap, since they'll be bringing in their own paychecks. As a bonus, your product is infinitely reproducible at no cost. Heck, you can even contract out development to bring in cash flow while your main product is getting ready.
Your hardware isn't going to be that expensive, if you stop thinking like a gamer. You can get away with old i386 or Sparc5 boxes for your servers. If the software is ultimately an end-user product, you'll need a variety of current hardware to test on, but otherwise it's a luxury you can't afford.
According to one Tolkien writer (forget who), Christopher made his fortune off of "his daddy's wastepaper basket scrapings." I thank him for getting the Silmarillion out, but most everything afterwards was pretty pointless. He should have donated all the wastepaper basket scrapings to a library, instead of trying to edit them into commercial books.
His problem is that he's still leeching off of dear old dead dad.
He single handedly put Iron Crown into bankrupcy by jacking up the licencing costs a couple of years ago
Iron Crown had a bit to do with it as well. I've talked with some of their authors, and to a one, they all blame ICE. The causes are numerous. Not focusing on new customers, issuing more regional background material than they did adventures, chasing the CCG fad while letting the RPG base deteriorate, etc. Tolkien Enterprises merely sunk an already sinking ship.
...in times of "communism", there was far more freedom than it gets to be in the US.
Gross hyperbole. Although this new bill is disgusting, it hardly approaches the infringements of freedom that communist nations imposed.
Yes, the US is travelling down the road to totalitarianism. If the direction or speed doesn't change, we may reach it in twenty years. But right now, today, I have more freedom that I would have ad in Poland twenty years ago. I can start an independent newspaper, just like any of the thousands now available, without asking the government's permission or subjecting it to any government censorship. I can go to a church that isn't licensed by the government. I can criticize the goverment without fear of reprisal. I can own handgun for personal defense. I get a trial by a jury of my peers. Etc, etc, etc. It's not perfect, but still much better than old world communism.
Unless I'm misunderstanding you, you're aggravated because your city/county/state has building codes (and other laws) and they're being a bunch of slack bastards about publishing them in an easily used format.
No, the parent was aggravated because this new bill will make it AGAINST THE LAW to republish the law. Not someone's interpretation of the law, or their handy concordance of the law, or their nice formatted book of the law, but the law itself!
If fixes are made which affect security, the ChangeLog should clearly spell out that it was a SECURITY fix.
That would cause nearly every bug fix to be marked as SECURITY, since nearly every non-documentation bug can introduce a security problem. With that much overexposure to the word "SECURITY", it loses its meaning. No one's going to rush out and patch their systems every time they see one, because they might be seeing several every day. It's better to reserve these high priority flags for known exploits and serious potential compromises, rather than to desensitize the admins to security notices.
The per-developer license, having no relationship with the value of the final product, introduces a lot of uncertainity in the economic calulation.
Virtually every commercial UNIX development tool I've ever used in the has been a per-user license. This is similar in some ways to a per-developer license, but more flexible. It's main drawback is that you need a license server. It still has the "uncertainty" factor you're talking about. Do we need licenses for 25 developers should we go with 50? On the other hand, most commercial Windows development tools have per-seat licenses. This ties the developer down to a specific workstation which can be quite annoying.
The uncertain economic calculations can be a problem for some things, but not for tools. Carpenters buy hammers at a fixed price. They don't send monthly royalty payments to the hammer manufacturers.
A royalties-based license, instead, is very clear: you make money, then you pay us. You don't, you owe us nothing.
Could you list some popular commercial tools that have this pricing? I can't think of any off the top of my head. I do know of some embedded operating systems that somewhat follow this model, but no develoment tools per se.
little by little, KDE is being marginalized, despite being by far the best desktop. IMHO, the QT license is the culprit.
In terms of KDE, the license is the dual QPL/GPL. You're right, the GPL is completely inappropriate for a Free Software desktop. What were they thinking?
The per developer license is confusing, and IMHO, self-defeating.
What's confusing about it? I buy it once, and I can install it on any workstation I use. No need for me to hire an accountant to keep track of required royalty payments.
Linux has an advantage in this area? Either you've been smoking crack, or I've been trolled. Go take another look at/etc/rc.conf. It doesn't need any special parsing, and reconfiguring network interfaces on the fly is simplicity.
Executive Summary: What's Wrong wtih the Open Source Community? Too much Freedom!
Too many developers "scratch the same itch."
Freedom of choice is bad. Force the developers to work on what you want, not what they want.
Open Source developers love a good feud.
Freedom of expression and opinion cannot be tolerated. Make everyone follow the party line, which, by the way, I get to make up.
In the Open Source Community, you're either "with us or against us"
The freedom of the developer to make his or her own decisions about the code that they created is stupid. I guess the author's motto is "you're either with me or against me."
The Open Source Community has a huge chip on its shoulder?called Microsoft
Okay, so he's not demanding a reduction of freedom for this one, but he's still wrong. This "chip on the shoulder" may be indicative of Slashdot and some of the more vocal advocates, but I simply don't see it among the developer community.
Do you upgrade to the cheap systems or do you continue dumping money into maintenance and repair of your old supercomputer?
It depends. What's the cost of porting all my existing software over? You're going to have completely different architectures, one of which assumes massive parallelism in your applications, which they might not have. It may simply be worth it to keep that old supercomputer around.
p.s. No supercomputer available to the public ever cost "BILLIONS".
Qt is not an IDE. You cannot compare the Visual Studio apple with the Qt orange.
If you want to make some relevant comparisons, then compare the VS dialog editor with Qt Designer, or the.NET framework with the Qt framework. In terms of the dialog editing, Qt Designer kicks butt. I haven't used the.NET framework, but having perused its documentation, it seems to me that the Qt framework is still superior, and is crossplatform to boot.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not going to help. The reason FAT is so popular is because it's a universal format. I can take my FAT formatted thumb drive and use it on Windows, Linux, Macintosh, FreeBSD, etc. With Ext[2|3], I can only get full use of it under Linux. That's a serious impediment, no matter how well you think of Linux.
For me, thumb drives have become the new "sneakernet". If I can no longer transport my date between home, work and my friend's house, I'm going to be severly inconvenienced.
GUI everything: If it's not a system crash, the desktop PC should be able to handle everything in GUI.
As an interesting sidenote to the incessant mantra that Linux needs to out-GUI Windows and Mac, I ran across this recent review. The user was a long time Mac user who took a six week vacation with FreeBSD/KDE. Not once in the entire review did he even mention the curses-based installer. Maybe the 100% GUI isn't as important to the real world as the cloistered Linux community thinks it is.
does anyone remember the abomination that was gnome 1.0.0 (on any distro?)
[waving arm wildly so teacher will call on him] I do! I do!
A coworker and I were arguing over desktops at the time. We were both ex OS/2 users, so we had similar ideas as to the ideal desktop. I was using Mandrake and telling how great KDE was. He was using Redhat and saying how GNOME was clearly superior.
He had a Redhat desktop at work, so he kept showing me GNOME 1.0, and it didn't impress me at all. But I didn't have an equivalent Mandrake desktop at work, so I couldn't reciprocate. Eventually I told him to put up or shut up, and install KDE. I even found the RPMs for him to install. He relented, installed KDE, and he never once looked back. He admitted to me that what he liked best about GNOME wasn't GNOME at all, but the Enlightenment window manager. I showed him how to run Enlightenment with KDE and he was overjoyed. I haven't seen him in two years, but I suspect he's still a faithful KDE user.
GNOME has of course improved tremendously since then. I think it's biggest problem at the start was Redhat tagging it 1.0 long before it was ready.
What the fuck does my attitude have to do with getting a loan? Oh, I have to kiss ASS to get a loan, right?
Asking the loan officer if you're supposed to kiss his fucking ass is a guaranteed way not to get the loan. If you keep at it long enough, they might even bar you from entering the bank, giving you further evidence of their vileness.
With that attitude, I can easily see why you never get a loan.
You're right. Even though I am more than willing to pay a fee to check out books from a library, I should not do it, because it would end up decreasing services for all.
My father was a public school teacher for over thirty years. While he certainly was not well off, and had some rough financial straits at times, we most assuredly were not poor. Lower middle class is not poverty.
Where you will be stared at as if you had just landed from Neptune.
If you walk in without a proper business plan, no cosigners or references, wearing a ratty Slashdot teeshirt, then you might as well stay home and bitch about how unfair the world is.
But banks are in the business of loaning money. It won't be easy, but that's what they're there for. Don't go to a large national bank like BofA. Go to a local community bank instead. Yes, you're probably going to need collateral, but it will be on the order of your home, and not a half million dollar complex. Nothing worthwhile in this world is easy, and starting a business least of all, but most things are still possible.
I'm not talking hot air here, I've seen it done up close with some friends. Starting a business is very risky, and the banks know it. But they'll loan to you if you can lessen the risk to them. A quality business plan, collateral, cosigners, other sources of funding, etc., will help do that.
The old saying that "you can only get a loan if you don't need a loan" is true. So demonstrate to the bank that you don't need a loan. If you really *do* need a loan, then starting a business is not for you. This isn't a catch-22. If you can't sell yourself to at least one relative or friend to be a cosigner, how the heck are you going to sell your product once you're in business? If you can't manage to build up enough personal worth to own a home to use as collateral, how the heck can the bank trust you to build up the business to be able to pay them back?
Getting the loan is the easy part. The hard part is risking your entire future, working sixteen hour days for the next five years, earning less money than your employees, and going through aspirin and rolaids by the bushel. If you can't imagine doing that joyfully with a smile the entire time, don't bother to apply for the loan.
Wisdom of the day: If you think it's impossible, then it is... for you at least.
What's wrong with "good old-fashioned capitalism"?
Libraries need a free market solution to their funding. This is a tricky problem, given the expectation that libraries need to be "free beer" institutions.
Used book sales are just one tiny and insufficient step towards free market free libraries. But it's a step nonetheless. We also need a return to financial patronage of free libraries. I frequently hear of endowments to college libraries, but when was the last time you ever heard of someone endowing a local free library? When's the last time *you* donated even ten dollars to your local library?
Come to think of it, I would be more than willing to "rent" books from the library for fifty cents apiece. Not everyone can afford this, but I sure can. How's this suggestion: fifty cents for an adult to checkout a library book, no cost for children.
Reality might very well dictate that "free" libraries must always be funded by governments, but that's no reason not to seek to reduce the burden on the taxpayers, no matter how small it might be.
Even if your rebuttals were true, it's still better than under the typical communist regime of the last century.
I need a business license to start up a commercial newspaper. But this license is uniform for all businesses in a locality, and typically very small. It's the same fee if you're a newspaper or a carwash.
Most churches are indeed registered with the IRS as non-profit charitable organizations. But this still isn't licensing. If you want to start a church, you simply start one. Period. Indeed, there many churches that are not registered as charitable organizations at all, as a principle of their faith. They lose some of the tax perks, but they gain considerably in freedom and peace of mind.
The patriot act is indeed distressing, and it is indeed a huge step away from freedom and liberty. But I can still criticize the government in press and in speech without reprisal. I can write a letter to a newspaper harshly criticizing governement policies, and I will not fear any harassment by the state. I can set up a soapbox on the street corner and start ranting about Bush and I will not be arrested.
I'm not saying that the US is perfect. Far from it. But we've got a long ways to go before the US approaches the level of authoritarianism exhibited by the communist nations of twentieth century Europe.
How many of us thought that it can't be done due to costs, the need of big bucks and convincing some snotty VC? Well it didn't stop these guys.
Those with short attention spans are doomed to repeat recent history.
Unless your startup needs a factory, gobs of employees, or other extensive capital, you don't need megabucks, only kilobucks. No need for snotty VCs, selling off rights to future IP, etc. It's still hard, but 95% of existing businesses have done it.
You just have to start small. One of the worst legacies the dot.boom left us was the general perception that businesses have to be large to be successful. Nothing could be further from the truth. I don't have the current statistics, but last I heard them a few years ago, 80% of businesses in the US had 20 or fewer employees. In other words, small business is king.
I've worked closely with many individuals who have started businesses from scratch. It's not cheap, but it doesn't require millions from venture capitalists. Your credit cards, retirement savings, relatives and a trip to the local bank are often all that's needed to start out small. And small is all that you need. You'll be working your butt off eighteen hours a day, but you can do it.
If this is software, you've got a headstart over most other businesses, since you don't need to carry inventory, rent warehouses, or run factories. All you need are salesmen and developers. The developers may be expensive, but your salesmen will be cheap, since they'll be bringing in their own paychecks. As a bonus, your product is infinitely reproducible at no cost. Heck, you can even contract out development to bring in cash flow while your main product is getting ready.
Your hardware isn't going to be that expensive, if you stop thinking like a gamer. You can get away with old i386 or Sparc5 boxes for your servers. If the software is ultimately an end-user product, you'll need a variety of current hardware to test on, but otherwise it's a luxury you can't afford.
I rented that about two weeks before FOTR premiered, and the guy at the video checkout said, "it's out on DVD already?"
Planet Hollywood failed because there were too damned many of them!
what exactly is Christopher Tolkien's problem?
According to one Tolkien writer (forget who), Christopher made his fortune off of "his daddy's wastepaper basket scrapings." I thank him for getting the Silmarillion out, but most everything afterwards was pretty pointless. He should have donated all the wastepaper basket scrapings to a library, instead of trying to edit them into commercial books.
His problem is that he's still leeching off of dear old dead dad.
He single handedly put Iron Crown into bankrupcy by jacking up the licencing costs a couple of years ago
Iron Crown had a bit to do with it as well. I've talked with some of their authors, and to a one, they all blame ICE. The causes are numerous. Not focusing on new customers, issuing more regional background material than they did adventures, chasing the CCG fad while letting the RPG base deteriorate, etc. Tolkien Enterprises merely sunk an already sinking ship.
...in times of "communism", there was far more freedom than it gets to be in the US.
Gross hyperbole. Although this new bill is disgusting, it hardly approaches the infringements of freedom that communist nations imposed.
Yes, the US is travelling down the road to totalitarianism. If the direction or speed doesn't change, we may reach it in twenty years. But right now, today, I have more freedom that I would have ad in Poland twenty years ago. I can start an independent newspaper, just like any of the thousands now available, without asking the government's permission or subjecting it to any government censorship. I can go to a church that isn't licensed by the government. I can criticize the goverment without fear of reprisal. I can own handgun for personal defense. I get a trial by a jury of my peers. Etc, etc, etc. It's not perfect, but still much better than old world communism.
Unless I'm misunderstanding you, you're aggravated because your city/county/state has building codes (and other laws) and they're being a bunch of slack bastards about publishing them in an easily used format.
No, the parent was aggravated because this new bill will make it AGAINST THE LAW to republish the law. Not someone's interpretation of the law, or their handy concordance of the law, or their nice formatted book of the law, but the law itself!
If fixes are made which affect security, the ChangeLog should clearly spell out that it was a SECURITY fix.
That would cause nearly every bug fix to be marked as SECURITY, since nearly every non-documentation bug can introduce a security problem. With that much overexposure to the word "SECURITY", it loses its meaning. No one's going to rush out and patch their systems every time they see one, because they might be seeing several every day. It's better to reserve these high priority flags for known exploits and serious potential compromises, rather than to desensitize the admins to security notices.
The per-developer license, having no relationship with the value of the final product, introduces a lot of uncertainity in the economic calulation.
Virtually every commercial UNIX development tool I've ever used in the has been a per-user license. This is similar in some ways to a per-developer license, but more flexible. It's main drawback is that you need a license server. It still has the "uncertainty" factor you're talking about. Do we need licenses for 25 developers should we go with 50? On the other hand, most commercial Windows development tools have per-seat licenses. This ties the developer down to a specific workstation which can be quite annoying.
The uncertain economic calculations can be a problem for some things, but not for tools. Carpenters buy hammers at a fixed price. They don't send monthly royalty payments to the hammer manufacturers.
A royalties-based license, instead, is very clear: you make money, then you pay us. You don't, you owe us nothing.
Could you list some popular commercial tools that have this pricing? I can't think of any off the top of my head. I do know of some embedded operating systems that somewhat follow this model, but no develoment tools per se.
little by little, KDE is being marginalized, despite being by far the best desktop. IMHO, the QT license is the culprit.
In terms of KDE, the license is the dual QPL/GPL. You're right, the GPL is completely inappropriate for a Free Software desktop. What were they thinking?
So if I put the Trolltech logo on my page, and claim it is one of my companies, it would be true?
The per developer license is confusing, and IMHO, self-defeating.
What's confusing about it? I buy it once, and I can install it on any workstation I use. No need for me to hire an accountant to keep track of required royalty payments.
Linux has an advantage in this area? Either you've been smoking crack, or I've been trolled. Go take another look at /etc/rc.conf. It doesn't need any special parsing, and reconfiguring network interfaces on the fly is simplicity.
Executive Summary: What's Wrong wtih the Open Source Community? Too much Freedom!
Too many developers "scratch the same itch."
Freedom of choice is bad. Force the developers to work on what you want, not what they want.
Open Source developers love a good feud.
Freedom of expression and opinion cannot be tolerated. Make everyone follow the party line, which, by the way, I get to make up.
In the Open Source Community, you're either "with us or against us"
The freedom of the developer to make his or her own decisions about the code that they created is stupid. I guess the author's motto is "you're either with me or against me."
The Open Source Community has a huge chip on its shoulder?called Microsoft
Okay, so he's not demanding a reduction of freedom for this one, but he's still wrong. This "chip on the shoulder" may be indicative of Slashdot and some of the more vocal advocates, but I simply don't see it among the developer community.
Do you upgrade to the cheap systems or do you continue dumping money into maintenance and repair of your old supercomputer?
It depends. What's the cost of porting all my existing software over? You're going to have completely different architectures, one of which assumes massive parallelism in your applications, which they might not have. It may simply be worth it to keep that old supercomputer around.
p.s. No supercomputer available to the public ever cost "BILLIONS".
Qt is not an IDE. You cannot compare the Visual Studio apple with the Qt orange.
.NET framework with the Qt framework. In terms of the dialog editing, Qt Designer kicks butt. I haven't used the .NET framework, but having perused its documentation, it seems to me that the Qt framework is still superior, and is crossplatform to boot.
If you want to make some relevant comparisons, then compare the VS dialog editor with Qt Designer, or the