OK, now I'm curious, and you probably know: isn't it technically alliteration anyway, because of the glottal stop at the start of each "a", no matter which vowel sound follows? (Pretend I talk like Tony Danza.)
Re:I already have one, its called an iPhone ...
on
Mobile Wi-Fi Hot Spot
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The iPhone is a neat device, but until you can link it with a PC and share the wide-area connection (without jailbreaking, that is), it won't do what people buy these things for.
Good point - and I too "have one and it's called an iPhone".
What I think this really means is that Apple can do what it's done repeatedly this decade: Create something versatile and potentially disruptive, but hold off on the disruption as long as is profitable.
F'rinstance: Everyone else sold MP3-based music players with no DRM. Apple made an iPod that could play DRM-free music - but, instead, they turned around and partnered with every major music label to provide a locked-down but fully-stocked catalog. Gah! Where's my free music?
In retrospect, it was pretty damned smart. Guess what they could do just as soon as "pent-up consumer demand profit" became greater than "become best buds with the RIAA profit"? Remove all the DRM.
They did it again with the iPhone App store. Every other smartphone allowed independent development, but Apple told us we'd get nothing but WebKit-based apps, and we'd like it. Meanwhile, that let them ship the first iPhone without worrying about the public API - and create visible, vocal demand from the development community. By the following year, programmers everywhere were screaming: "Please! Let us write programs for your platform!" And what do you know... the App Store appeared, and Apple gets a cut.
I don't know if it was truly planned this way, but it does seem to be a pattern, doesn't it? Most companies either court the rebellious-hacker base with an open API (early TiVo, some Google, Twitter), hoping to Be The Platform, or build a fortress (late TiVo, Facebook), hoping to Be The Gatekeeper. Apple seems to have a knack for being the gatekeeper as long as it possibly can - and then amazing us with the new power of the platform.
The jailbroken apps, as well as the 3.0 betas, prove that Apple could offer iPhone tethering next week - or next year. But they'd have to annoy AT&T to do it, and probably renegotiate. Why do that before they have to?
My hope: The MeFi will be a huge success, and there will be clamoring for Apple to offer something nearly as good. And then, one day, they'll send out a firmware update... and behold: the iPhone tethers. "It's amazing. I'm really proud of this capability, which is the first in a capacitive-touchscreen smartphone." etc.
"Heart attacks claimed more lives this year than ever before, scientists say. Not that you care. No, fine, it's not important, it's only what killed your cousin Stanley. No biggie. Don't exercise on my account."
If the system's granularity is too high then I can never produce smooth motion no matter how many times a second you want to capture a frame.
Is video too complex to allow the sort of math we do on audio? In the audio realm, most ADCs are natively 1-bit converters with a ridiculously high sampling rate (MHz). That turns out to be mathematically equivalent to, say, 24-bit audio at 192KHz.
But audio's a single waveform, and video's a collection of pixels, so I guess it's all different.
While AOL saw opportunities in the Internet, it was so tied to its own version of online services, a glorified dialup bulletin board service, that it never saw where the rest of the world had suddenly detoured.
Yup. Everyone had their well-worn copies of Crossing the Chasm, and once we hit the mainstream, we never wanted to go back to early adopters again. In fact, the quickest way to kill any project at AOL was to say "That's really a power-user feature". It never seemed to occur to those folks that at some point, the user base would grow up, and they'd no longer need training wheels.
To be fair to them, computers in the 1980s and 1990s were so underpowered that it was hard to imagine any novice having a pleasant online experience without the help of our trademark cartoon-like simplicity. UI design hadn't become a Proper Discipline yet (Innovation circa 1995: drop shadows!), 9600 baud was fast, nothing was compatible with anything else, and the idea of a responsive, graphical web page was in Engelbart-dreamland. And if there's one thing AOL did well, it was deliver a palatable experience on an unpalatably-slow infrastructure. Why worry?
By the time that started changing, we were too entrenched to notice, and years of seemingly-inconsequential architecture decisions made it hard to adapt. Until then, the idea of there no longer being any "Internet novices", period, was so ridiculous I never even heard it argued.
And, of course: You can't display ads to IMAP and XMPP clients, so that's a non-starter. (Oops.)
Hubris - thinking that flash-in-the-pan AOL could take the leadership role from well-established and dependable multimedia Time-Warner.
Here I disagree. In retrospect, sure. But at the time, AOL had been wildly successful in getting the masses online. We were the McDonald's of the Internet, and not just in the "ubiquitously palatable" sense, but in the "we had to invent new potato agriculture" sense. Meanwhile, Time-Warner had tried - and failed - twice to have any online presence at all. (Remember Path Finder?)
The hope was that Time Warner could teach us how to create impeccable content - HBO, anyone? - and we could teach them how to put it online for the masses. I think that was a reasonable belief, and if processing power and network bandwidth hadn't hit such a tipping point at the turn of the century, AOL had a good shot at being the most capable of doing that.
But the world did tip, and even if AOL had avoided their many strategic mistakes, I don't think they could have lasted. Disruptive innovation meant we were stuck with legacy architecture and legacy mindsets. Our mission statement, "Build a global medium as central to people's lives as the telephone or television - and even more valuable", had gone from idealistic and hubristic to antediluvian. Mission Accomplished. Now what?
Or GPS in-dash navigation units. I have an Alpine with "second-generation touch feedback", which basically means it can buzz at one of two frequencies when you press a button. Still doesn't make it easy to use.
Automotive touch screens need buttons that you can not only feel, but feel FOR. Just like the radio knob. If pneumatics is a way to do that, I'm all for it - and I don't much care about battery life, since it's presumably only active when the car is on.
Touchscreens aren't just for your phone, people. (cue side light, look into middle distance) They're for your life.
You guys remember that cool new technology that was going to revolutionize the way we store data? The one that was just 11 years away? Well we could be one year closer to that realization today perhaps maybe.
I think, with all that weasel-wording, you actually pushed yourself into the "definitely wrong" category:) However far away the technology is, we're absolutely positively 11 years closer than we were before.
Unless it's never coming, in which case we're arguably no closer than we were before. (But not one year.)
Unless you interpret "realization" to mean "I realized that this technology was coming", in which case we're 11 years further than before. (Still not one year!)
Making sure your users are able to get copies of their data in a useful format that are complete enough for them to walk away from you is an obvious one.
Why just their data, though? If your Service aggregates a user's data with third-party data, don't you now have to include that third-party data too to be truly Free(RMS)?
I would like to see RMS demand that Google provide a non-network-reliant copy of their database (including page caches and DNS caches) to anyone who requests it in writing.
After a long spell away from project management, I bought a few books to catch up on what I'd missed. I did read the Art of Project Management, but I wasn't that mesmerized by it (though I did start following Scott Berkun's blog). It felt too sterile and academic as a starting point. Maybe it's better if you're already in the thick of it, and maybe the new edition is cleaner.
What did mesmerize me was Agile Estimating and Planning, by Mike Cohn, who also has a good blog. It's quick reading, in an appropriately lightweight style, and it introduces all the concepts of agile planning (independent of Scrum, XP, etc) in a way that... that...
Well, remember that one professor you had, who taught you biology by deriving it from chemistry from physics from mathematics? Cohn explains agile planning from first principles, in a way that made me wonder how we spent two decades not realizing how obvious it was. My forehead hurt from all the slapping. Of course! Why are we forcing humans to estimate time and to calibrate their estimates? All we know is "hard" and "easy"; estimate in points, track your velocity, and let a smart computer figure out what that means in weeks. Of course! We don't need to plan hour-by-hour for dates 18 months away; we don't even know what we'll consider important than.
If you're considering agile methodologies, you must buy this book. If you're considering traditional top-down/waterfall planning, do yourself a favor - just slap your forehead every day. It'll build up calluses for when you buy the book later.
Re:Postgres is looking better than ever
on
Oracle Buys Sun
·
· Score: 1
What good is a copy of a table file with no context, no foreign key integrity, no transactional integrity, nothing?
Listening to music coming straight out of a computer with no real amp is like listening to AM radio a la 1920.
Yes, if the radio could play any song you wanted it to at any moment.
Come visit Berklee School of Music some time, and hang around the recording studios. 500 top-performing students in a highly-competitive music production program, at a school that's generated a hell of a lot of the music you probably listen to. Eight full-size recording studios, plus countless smaller synth labs.
Your Indigo sound card is... cute. We've got a few SSLs, a jillion Pro Tools HD3 Accel rigs, dozens of vintage outboard pieces, studio monitors the size of your bicycle, etc. And any second-semester production student could explain the Nyquist theorem, quantization error, jitter, etc., and do bit-rate calculations in their heads. One two-semester class is nothing but listening to white noise and writing down which single band on the graphic equalizer is up or down 3dB. If there's ever been a building full of people who know why the iPod is not good music, this is that building.
You know what the most popular addition to the studios has been? A few years ago, they made up some 1/8"-to-TT cables for the SSL patch bays. Now, we can plug our iPods into the SSL.
The purpose of leetspeak was to evade search and censorship efforts
Nope. I remember Commodore versions of leetspeak on BBS's in the 1980s. Pound signs in place of L's were popular. And a surprising number of people were willing to put up with a shift-lock key - not a caps-lock key, but a SHIFT-lock key - to type in all-caps. That's the real origin of !!11!1 exclamation points.
There was no such thing as search yet, let alone censorship. We did it because, when we were 13, we thought it was cool.
At minimum wage, and a 20-30 minute round trip each day
They made the exact same point at the presentation - playing up how that 20 minutes "turns into an hour", because of course there's a 10-minute line at the bank, and they stop for coffee on the way back, and what business can afford an hour of lost productivity each day?
Maybe it's because my only retail job was working in a mall, but I assumed that most businesses did what we did - they used a nearby bank, and people swung by the night depository on their way home. Total time: three minutes, including deceleration and activating the hazard flashers.
One of the banks I go to still requires filled out deposit slips, ink signatures, and still has a "next business day before 2" in regards to processing your deposits.
I recently saw a presentation from a Rhode Island bank. They were going to allow their business customers to install on-site check scanners, the same kind you see in the banks. One of the touted features was that these scanned deposits would be credited instantly, instead of on the next business day.
In exchange for saving them manual labor (their tellers currently have to scan the checks), they would charge you only $75/month for having the scanner! And just think of the extra interest from that day of deposit. They genuinely believed that this was a financial technology revolution, on par with the ATM.
(I did the math; assuming 5% APR, which nobody gets anymore, you'd have to be doing about $550,000 in daily deposits to make back the $75/month.)
At which point we'll observe that the hard drive failed. Then I'll pull out one of the several other copies of it which I was able to make thanks to the large amount of money I saved by not using tape.
Don't sell yourself short! Because it's stored on a hard drive, which can be continuously online without suffering wear or stretching, you were already automatically verifying the backup's integrity every week. So you already knew that the hard drive failed - the day that it failed. You were able to use the other copies long before the tape guy got his tape mounted.
I think FUSE's killer app is instant APIs for legacy code.
Think about ad-blocking proxies; you can use them with any browser, because they insert themselves into the data stream and rewrite it on the fly. FUSE lets you write proxies for the file system. You can now insert yourself into the data stream for any disk-based application.
Example: iTunes doesn't support FLAC files. But TwistedFLAC is a MacFUSE file system that lets you mount a directory of FLAC files, and display them to iTunes as WAVs.
Inefficient, compared to rewriting the main application? Sure. But far more extensible. Decades ago, we realized that if you could
access an arbitrary amount of virtual memory, and have the OS persist it to disk, and
access an arbitrary amount of disk space, and have the OS cache the data, and
if the system were fast enough
then your choice between RAM and disk is merely: "What's the most convenient design metaphor?"
So if you happen to have six unused lines lying around
I built a suburban house in VA in 1996, and in MA in 2000. Both times I asked Verizon to run a new 5- or 10-pair cable (roommates, faxes, spares, all that stuff we no longer need), and both times they were happy to oblige. Sounds like that's an unusual experience?
if someone attempts to squash your freedom of speech, they have violated the spirit of the law, if not technically successful. and they are therefore wrong, morally, and legally
Which law is that?
Only askin' cause you seem to know a lot about legal validity and all.
As I said, if (as you claim -- see above) the average at which they arrive is "fresh out of college", then approximately half must arrive on H1-B visas before graduating.
No.
Hint: The vast majority of people have an above-average number of legs.
More importantly, it sounds like a lot more work than recording the audio. What's the advantage of the TTS method?
You no longer need voiceover artists. Instead, you need a voiceover programmer. You still need someone with all the skills of a voiceover producer to make multiple listen-and-tweak passes. I suspect that it takes more producer time to tweak the TTS than it takes to tweak human talent - and producers are more expensive than talent. You'll also have the TTS equivalent of "browser compatibility testing". So your labor costs probably go up with TTS.
The real advantage of text is bandwidth and storage - and even today, the resource requirements of audio speech are already far more comparable to those of text than those of video. By the time we develop sufficiently advanced TTS workflows, why wouldn't TTS be as quaint a concept as recompressed-for-modem-download JPEGs on web proxies, or SID/MIDI files for popular music? Both were technical solutions that brought media to the masses before the masses were ready. Both disappeared as soon as we could feasibly transmit the real thing.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, now I'm curious, and you probably know: isn't it technically alliteration anyway, because of the glottal stop at the start of each "a", no matter which vowel sound follows? (Pretend I talk like Tony Danza.)
Good point - and I too "have one and it's called an iPhone".
What I think this really means is that Apple can do what it's done repeatedly this decade: Create something versatile and potentially disruptive, but hold off on the disruption as long as is profitable.
F'rinstance: Everyone else sold MP3-based music players with no DRM. Apple made an iPod that could play DRM-free music - but, instead, they turned around and partnered with every major music label to provide a locked-down but fully-stocked catalog. Gah! Where's my free music?
In retrospect, it was pretty damned smart. Guess what they could do just as soon as "pent-up consumer demand profit" became greater than "become best buds with the RIAA profit"? Remove all the DRM.
They did it again with the iPhone App store. Every other smartphone allowed independent development, but Apple told us we'd get nothing but WebKit-based apps, and we'd like it. Meanwhile, that let them ship the first iPhone without worrying about the public API - and create visible, vocal demand from the development community. By the following year, programmers everywhere were screaming: "Please! Let us write programs for your platform!" And what do you know... the App Store appeared, and Apple gets a cut.
I don't know if it was truly planned this way, but it does seem to be a pattern, doesn't it? Most companies either court the rebellious-hacker base with an open API (early TiVo, some Google, Twitter), hoping to Be The Platform, or build a fortress (late TiVo, Facebook), hoping to Be The Gatekeeper. Apple seems to have a knack for being the gatekeeper as long as it possibly can - and then amazing us with the new power of the platform.
The jailbroken apps, as well as the 3.0 betas, prove that Apple could offer iPhone tethering next week - or next year. But they'd have to annoy AT&T to do it, and probably renegotiate. Why do that before they have to?
My hope: The MeFi will be a huge success, and there will be clamoring for Apple to offer something nearly as good. And then, one day, they'll send out a firmware update... and behold: the iPhone tethers. "It's amazing. I'm really proud of this capability, which is the first in a capacitive-touchscreen smartphone." etc.
Oh... duh. This is why I'm no good at math. Thanks for the explanation.
Next, they'll serve news passive-aggressively:
"Heart attacks claimed more lives this year than ever before, scientists say. Not that you care. No, fine, it's not important, it's only what killed your cousin Stanley. No biggie. Don't exercise on my account."
Is video too complex to allow the sort of math we do on audio? In the audio realm, most ADCs are natively 1-bit converters with a ridiculously high sampling rate (MHz). That turns out to be mathematically equivalent to, say, 24-bit audio at 192KHz.
But audio's a single waveform, and video's a collection of pixels, so I guess it's all different.
Yup. Everyone had their well-worn copies of Crossing the Chasm, and once we hit the mainstream, we never wanted to go back to early adopters again. In fact, the quickest way to kill any project at AOL was to say "That's really a power-user feature". It never seemed to occur to those folks that at some point, the user base would grow up, and they'd no longer need training wheels.
To be fair to them, computers in the 1980s and 1990s were so underpowered that it was hard to imagine any novice having a pleasant online experience without the help of our trademark cartoon-like simplicity. UI design hadn't become a Proper Discipline yet (Innovation circa 1995: drop shadows!), 9600 baud was fast, nothing was compatible with anything else, and the idea of a responsive, graphical web page was in Engelbart-dreamland. And if there's one thing AOL did well, it was deliver a palatable experience on an unpalatably-slow infrastructure. Why worry?
By the time that started changing, we were too entrenched to notice, and years of seemingly-inconsequential architecture decisions made it hard to adapt. Until then, the idea of there no longer being any "Internet novices", period, was so ridiculous I never even heard it argued.
And, of course: You can't display ads to IMAP and XMPP clients, so that's a non-starter. (Oops.)
Here I disagree. In retrospect, sure. But at the time, AOL had been wildly successful in getting the masses online. We were the McDonald's of the Internet, and not just in the "ubiquitously palatable" sense, but in the "we had to invent new potato agriculture" sense. Meanwhile, Time-Warner had tried - and failed - twice to have any online presence at all. (Remember Path Finder?)
The hope was that Time Warner could teach us how to create impeccable content - HBO, anyone? - and we could teach them how to put it online for the masses. I think that was a reasonable belief, and if processing power and network bandwidth hadn't hit such a tipping point at the turn of the century, AOL had a good shot at being the most capable of doing that.
But the world did tip, and even if AOL had avoided their many strategic mistakes, I don't think they could have lasted. Disruptive innovation meant we were stuck with legacy architecture and legacy mindsets. Our mission statement, "Build a global medium as central to people's lives as the telephone or television - and even more valuable", had gone from idealistic and hubristic to antediluvian. Mission Accomplished. Now what?
Or GPS in-dash navigation units. I have an Alpine with "second-generation touch feedback", which basically means it can buzz at one of two frequencies when you press a button. Still doesn't make it easy to use.
Automotive touch screens need buttons that you can not only feel, but feel FOR. Just like the radio knob. If pneumatics is a way to do that, I'm all for it - and I don't much care about battery life, since it's presumably only active when the car is on.
Touchscreens aren't just for your phone, people. (cue side light, look into middle distance) They're for your life.
I think, with all that weasel-wording, you actually pushed yourself into the "definitely wrong" category :) However far away the technology is, we're absolutely positively 11 years closer than we were before.
Unless it's never coming, in which case we're arguably no closer than we were before. (But not one year.)
Unless you interpret "realization" to mean "I realized that this technology was coming", in which case we're 11 years further than before. (Still not one year!)
Why just their data, though? If your Service aggregates a user's data with third-party data, don't you now have to include that third-party data too to be truly Free(RMS)?
I would like to see RMS demand that Google provide a non-network-reliant copy of their database (including page caches and DNS caches) to anyone who requests it in writing.
After a long spell away from project management, I bought a few books to catch up on what I'd missed. I did read the Art of Project Management, but I wasn't that mesmerized by it (though I did start following Scott Berkun's blog). It felt too sterile and academic as a starting point. Maybe it's better if you're already in the thick of it, and maybe the new edition is cleaner.
What did mesmerize me was Agile Estimating and Planning, by Mike Cohn, who also has a good blog. It's quick reading, in an appropriately lightweight style, and it introduces all the concepts of agile planning (independent of Scrum, XP, etc) in a way that... that...
Well, remember that one professor you had, who taught you biology by deriving it from chemistry from physics from mathematics? Cohn explains agile planning from first principles, in a way that made me wonder how we spent two decades not realizing how obvious it was. My forehead hurt from all the slapping. Of course! Why are we forcing humans to estimate time and to calibrate their estimates? All we know is "hard" and "easy"; estimate in points, track your velocity, and let a smart computer figure out what that means in weeks. Of course! We don't need to plan hour-by-hour for dates 18 months away; we don't even know what we'll consider important than.
If you're considering agile methodologies, you must buy this book. If you're considering traditional top-down/waterfall planning, do yourself a favor - just slap your forehead every day. It'll build up calluses for when you buy the book later.
It's now ready to import into MySQL!
[Premise shamelessly stolen from rackserverdeals]
Yes, if the radio could play any song you wanted it to at any moment.
Come visit Berklee School of Music some time, and hang around the recording studios. 500 top-performing students in a highly-competitive music production program, at a school that's generated a hell of a lot of the music you probably listen to. Eight full-size recording studios, plus countless smaller synth labs.
Your Indigo sound card is... cute. We've got a few SSLs, a jillion Pro Tools HD3 Accel rigs, dozens of vintage outboard pieces, studio monitors the size of your bicycle, etc. And any second-semester production student could explain the Nyquist theorem, quantization error, jitter, etc., and do bit-rate calculations in their heads. One two-semester class is nothing but listening to white noise and writing down which single band on the graphic equalizer is up or down 3dB. If there's ever been a building full of people who know why the iPod is not good music, this is that building.
You know what the most popular addition to the studios has been? A few years ago, they made up some 1/8"-to-TT cables for the SSL patch bays. Now, we can plug our iPods into the SSL.
Yeah, I think the stereo's dead.
Nope. I remember Commodore versions of leetspeak on BBS's in the 1980s. Pound signs in place of L's were popular. And a surprising number of people were willing to put up with a shift-lock key - not a caps-lock key, but a SHIFT-lock key - to type in all-caps. That's the real origin of !!11!1 exclamation points.
There was no such thing as search yet, let alone censorship. We did it because, when we were 13, we thought it was cool.
They made the exact same point at the presentation - playing up how that 20 minutes "turns into an hour", because of course there's a 10-minute line at the bank, and they stop for coffee on the way back, and what business can afford an hour of lost productivity each day?
Maybe it's because my only retail job was working in a mall, but I assumed that most businesses did what we did - they used a nearby bank, and people swung by the night depository on their way home. Total time: three minutes, including deceleration and activating the hazard flashers.
I recently saw a presentation from a Rhode Island bank. They were going to allow their business customers to install on-site check scanners, the same kind you see in the banks. One of the touted features was that these scanned deposits would be credited instantly, instead of on the next business day.
In exchange for saving them manual labor (their tellers currently have to scan the checks), they would charge you only $75/month for having the scanner! And just think of the extra interest from that day of deposit. They genuinely believed that this was a financial technology revolution, on par with the ATM.
(I did the math; assuming 5% APR, which nobody gets anymore, you'd have to be doing about $550,000 in daily deposits to make back the $75/month.)
People who listen to music and receive IMs?
Glenn Beck's show?
Ya know... I think you're on to something here.
Why can't we start a craze for granite-look cars? Granite and quartz counters NEVER have to be cleaned. I mean, unless you care about cleanliness.
Don't sell yourself short! Because it's stored on a hard drive, which can be continuously online without suffering wear or stretching, you were already automatically verifying the backup's integrity every week. So you already knew that the hard drive failed - the day that it failed. You were able to use the other copies long before the tape guy got his tape mounted.
I'd like to take a moment here to emphasize that I don't necessarily agree with ALL his philosophies, per se.
I think FUSE's killer app is instant APIs for legacy code.
Think about ad-blocking proxies; you can use them with any browser, because they insert themselves into the data stream and rewrite it on the fly. FUSE lets you write proxies for the file system. You can now insert yourself into the data stream for any disk-based application.
Example: iTunes doesn't support FLAC files. But TwistedFLAC is a MacFUSE file system that lets you mount a directory of FLAC files, and display them to iTunes as WAVs.
Inefficient, compared to rewriting the main application? Sure. But far more extensible. Decades ago, we realized that if you could
then your choice between RAM and disk is merely: "What's the most convenient design metaphor?"
FUSE can do the same for APIs and middleware.
I built a suburban house in VA in 1996, and in MA in 2000. Both times I asked Verizon to run a new 5- or 10-pair cable (roommates, faxes, spares, all that stuff we no longer need), and both times they were happy to oblige. Sounds like that's an unusual experience?
Which law is that?
Only askin' cause you seem to know a lot about legal validity and all.
No.
Hint: The vast majority of people have an above-average number of legs.
Answer: You're assuming a normal distribution.
More importantly, it sounds like a lot more work than recording the audio. What's the advantage of the TTS method?
You no longer need voiceover artists. Instead, you need a voiceover programmer. You still need someone with all the skills of a voiceover producer to make multiple listen-and-tweak passes. I suspect that it takes more producer time to tweak the TTS than it takes to tweak human talent - and producers are more expensive than talent. You'll also have the TTS equivalent of "browser compatibility testing". So your labor costs probably go up with TTS.
The real advantage of text is bandwidth and storage - and even today, the resource requirements of audio speech are already far more comparable to those of text than those of video. By the time we develop sufficiently advanced TTS workflows, why wouldn't TTS be as quaint a concept as recompressed-for-modem-download JPEGs on web proxies, or SID/MIDI files for popular music? Both were technical solutions that brought media to the masses before the masses were ready. Both disappeared as soon as we could feasibly transmit the real thing.