*grr* pressed the wrong button before I was finished...... All of the OSS tools do a reasonable job in interoperating with the proprietary ones. They even integrate with other OSS tools. In all cases no OSS tool supports 100% of the proprietary equivalent tool's features accurately; there are always features missing, or glitches.
The missing and broken features are usually guff - webcam and file transfer facilities in instant messaging tools and similar things in other software. There are other OSS ways to get file transfers and video conferencing so the developers usually start by getting the basics of the instant mesenger working reliably. The Gates-Spawn sees the missing features and presumes that it must be crap and goes back to the GatesOS.
To some extent Lucifer (Gates) is correct. Use OSS and lose compatibility. There are a lot of hard/software vendors out there that only release Winblows drivers or software. IF you want to move to OSS you may have difficulty getting a specific piece of hardware of software to work - if at all.
Sure, there are OSS drivers for hardware, but with the amount of new devices being released the OSS community cant be guaranteed to be keeping up; they will always be behind. Look at 802.11 support in Linux for an example. I have two "supported" cards and neither works under Linux. A BCM4306 card that apparantly works under ndiswrapper and an Intel ProWireless 2200 that has the ipw2200 driver, and is also fabled to work in ndiswrapper.
I haven't been able to make either of these cards work. The Broadcom one doesn't work at all - on any of the machines, kernels, distros I have tried. The IPW2200 card only works without WPA, and even then it's flakey. Windows is the only choice for either of these cards - even though I picked them based on a lot of Googling to find out what was "supported" in Linux. Posts to message boards and mailing lists asking for help from people who had made them work went unanswered...
Software is another classic example. Four or Five key pieces spring to mind. Internet Explorer/Outlook, M$ Orifice, MYOB and Adobe Photoshop.
There are dozens of web browser and mail clients in the OSS domain. Firefox and Thunderbird are the GUI versions of choice for me. I have shown a few Windows users Firefox when they have been whinging about spyware, popunders, and all the other crap they get by going to dodgy websites. They took one look at Firefox and decided they didn't know how to use it because there was no "Favourites" menu, and a number of other equally stupid reasons.
The same really goes for Outlook. I have shown Thunderbird to a few Windows users who have been having trouble with the virus magnet that is Outlook. They hate all the email viri that causes them problems, but they won't use Thunderbird simply because it's different to Outlook. I think it does things in a much more intuitive way, but MS has conditioned the user that it doesn't need to be intuitive - it only needs to be buggy, bloated and horrible.
There are a few OSS office replacements. Openoffice, KOffice, Abiword/Gnumeric/other tools, but none has 100% compatibility with the most common formats forced into play by M$. If you want others to be able to read documents you email then you have to use MS formats. You have to also remember that it is hard to get most users to use a different application than the one they are used to (Usually Office). Asking them to install OpenOffice or one of the other replacements is like asking them to amputate their arm, and in a lot of cases is met with the same response as asking them to amputate their arm!
Photoshop is replaced by The GIMP. I have used Gimp for a long time as my image manupulation tool of choice. I even start an X sesion to run it on a Windows box when I cannot be at my Linux machine. Most users that do a lot of graphics work are accustomed to Photoshop. There is a lot of inertia involved in getting them to change. Not because the programs do different things - Gimp is probably as powerful as Photoshop, but it does things in a different way to what they are used to, and all their photoshop plugins will stop working in the gimp...
As for MYOB. GnuCash is about the only thing I can think of that would even come close. I use that to run things, but once a business has MYOB it's locked into MYOB. Lots of businesses run MYOB. I know that accounting courses in TAFE (Australia) teach it as an integral part of the course. They actually require you to get a copy of it for completing assignments. This is straight from the mouth of an accounting student (and fellow Linux junkie).
Compatibility is not simply being about sharing data. It can be about the sorts
Reminds me of the part of HGTG when they Ford and Arthur stumble upon the crashed ship full of telephone booth sanitisers and advertising agency workers, etc.
Perhaps we should launch all these questionable people into orbit and crash them into the nearesy star?
Interestingly, they had RMS and Rusty Russel (of iptables fame) on Triple J here in Australia on Monday. They were both talking about the benefits of OSS software and how software patenting is being misued. There was even some discussion on the FTA that we have, and how that is going to change things.
http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/hack/default.htm If you hurry and click on the Monday link you'll be able to hear it. It's in the last 10 minutes of the program.
It's not URPMI that's the problem. Urpmi does a pretty good job at the end of the day. It manages the repositories of files and downloads what it needs to fix dependencies.
The problem with the latest batch of upgrades was kdebase was broken and kbebase-nsplugins was renamed as a part of the upgrade. On top of that, the nsplugins package depended on itself, so you couldn't install it with urpmi unless it was already installed...
And there was a problem with clamav (I don't use it so i didn't read the advisory in detail) where Mandrake broke it in the upgrade and it stopped working. It could probably have been averted with testing.
I have been using Mandrake for years, and I find it to be pretty good in most cases. It's just they're letting their guard down when testing their updates for compatibility.
Maybe everyone is busy redownloading the third stream of updates in 3 days to fix the fact that they broke the KDE RPMs when they released them the first time.
They have a pretty polished distro that is easy for the average n00b to install, but they have fscked up a couple of times, with the KDE updates and also clamav (updated 3 times in as many days because the upgrades broke more than they fixed).
The amount of money spent on (overpriced?) Windows and it's associated guff (Office, Visio, M$ Project, Exchange Server, etc, etc, etc) combined with the loss of productivity that everyone experiences daily when either their desktop or the Windows server crashes could add up to a lot more than $750M.
Of course it's not like companies that are saving money by going for cheaper (not necessarily Linux, or even free) options are going to donate all their savings to help those less fortunate, so let's be thankful that BillyG is making such large donations (of which there have been a few that I remember reading about), for whatever reason he is making them.
Buy a caching disk controller and fill it up with RAM. Then give it and the surplus RAM to me for my pitifully RAMless machine. 1G just doesn't cut it anymore:(
For those that have had email long enough... You would have seen this. For those that haven't had email long enough, click the link.
If the universe is full of an increasing amount of dark matter, we'd better install a lot more of these so-called "dark suckers" to suck up the dark matter and contain it safely - so that it can't make the universe explode.
Well... if she asked for the Mac she has to live with it.
(Disclaimer: yes, I know how women reserve the right to alter their version of the "facts" after the event to make them correct and their SO incorrect). In this case you would be forgiven if you loaded up some virtual PC software and stuck a copy of EvilOS inside it.
While hubby can enjoy the (relatively) trouble free world of Mac computing.
When my wife asks for the 'cute little Mac', what PC can I buy
It would be a marvellous feat that your wife does not want a PC with Windows installed. I would definately trust her judgement in asking for one... and go and but the 'cute little Mac'. You will be happy in the end.
I forgot to add that there are tools to automate doing this too - the Linux From Scratch book describes using this method and provides a few links to tools that can manage it.
It's possible to build and install a package into/opt/packages/packagename-1.2.3.4/[bin][lib][sbin]
And then symlink anything that it would have installed in/usr/[bin][lib][sbin] back to/usr/local/wherever. It makes removing the package pretty easy. Remove/opt/pacakage/packagename-1.2.3.4 and then check/usr/local for dangling links...
Then there is only one copy of programs, libraries, and everything else but its all symlinked so that the packages can be all contained within their own dir.
There is a port of mplayer to Windows - on the main mplayer site too. You could hack up your own timing program if you were bold enough. I'm sure there are (literally) hundreds of pre-existing scheduling programs for Windows.
mplayer has -ao and -vo (audio out and video out) redirection options so you can dump streams to files on your disk. It plays all of the streams I have thrown at it in the past.
I hadn't even thought of the VHDL Cookbook. The Designer's Guide is fantastic, but the cookbook presents a very hands-on way of doing things. There are literally lots of "recipies" to solve common problems. I heartily recommend it to anyone who works in VHDL.
This is a link to the VHDL Designer's Guide by Ashenden (from Adelaide if I remember correctly). Some of the hardware people I have worked with used it and considered it to be the bible. From memory you can find a pre-release downloadable as a PDF somewhere, or go and buy the book. It was expensive, but well worth it.
Another book to get hold of is one of the early student manuals that came with the Xilinx Foundation 1.5 tools. It was a beginner's introduction to the Foundation suite but it had a lot of useful snippets that helped me even through more advanced work in recent versions of the Xilinx ISE software. You should be able to find these in a university library if they have an electronic engineering course.
Blasted clouds... well, I'm off to invent some kind of cloud transparent making machine.
I haven't seen anything that says this baby should be seen in Adelaide (or the southern hemisphere at all). I wish it wasn't so cloudy... I'd head out and have a look.
Whatever you do, don't turn left just before Pt Wakefield (heading north).. there is some sort of army proving ground out there and we were hassled by police for even turning down that road to stop and look up late one night.
WEll if noise reducing/cancelling headphones or earplugs are not an option then your only choice is to confront the source of the noise and ask for it to be fixed...
You shouldn't have to consider the trend when the trend is blatantly wrong. The recording and movie industry is as bad as the oil industry. They are driven by dodgy contracts and extreme pressure on both artists and customers. They put a lot of undue force on and then restrict what the artist can do with their own work anyway; in most cases the recording company takes ownership of the work, so this "depriving the artists" crap doesn't cut it because the artist doesn't get squat.
Legislation that sells off the assets of offenders (especially in the drug case) is OK if the money is put to good use and not just squandered. There is similar legislation that gives the police powers in Aus to sell off your assets to pay any overdue fines. They still need to give you time to pay and an appropriate number of late notices but AFIK they don't need to take you to court to do it.
As for subtracting $150,000 for each copyrighted song on my computer... if they are trying to claim that the songs that I wrote and recorded are their property they will promptly be thrown out of court. Those songs are copyrighted by default, but I am allowed to do what I feel with them. I don't collect illegal music (well I download the occasional song to see if I want to buy the CDs) but if I don't like it it's deleted and if I do like it I go out and buy the CD.
Nobody is losing out as a result of my actions... if I'm not allowed to preview then I'll just stop buying CDs and listen to the radio; then they will lose out on my CD sale.
I will just put a massive value on the data on my computer. Nobody can prove otherwise; my data was a project that would put Microsoft out of business and make me $100 billion dollars and they destroyed it!
The new terrorism is not anybody bombs. It's the bloody recording industry - they inspire fear and hatred in the general public with their greed, constant stream of formula-generated shit and then they sue you when you don't want to pay their (illegally fixed) price for the shit they spew out.
He may not care, but when he (and thousands of others) is infected with viri and malware and spewing out thousands of hits that clutter up my firewall logs I care.
There is no good reason for anybody to continue to use Internet Exploited. There are now at least three great alternatives for Windows; Firefox, Mozilla Suite and Opera. Each has certain advantages and disadvantages, but they all outshine the Microsoft POS browser.
IE was added to Windows as an afterthought, and it really shows. M$ wanted to jump in on this Internet thing that Bill Gates, himself, said would never take off.
This makes absolutely no sense to my feeble mind: to prove that you are a non-profitable charity you must take all your large donations that make you profitable then ask for more, smaller, donations that will make you even more profitable... to prove that you are a non-profitable charity.
Why does the tax man make things so insanely convoluted.
Good on the FreeBSD team though - I haven't used it personally, but obviously it does so well that people feel the need to donate large sums of money to it.
I have an Acer Aspire 2010 notebook sitting in front of me. The colour accuracy isn't that great. I would never use the builtin screen for serious photo editing.
That said, I would never use a CRT for anything other than serious photo editing again. The LCD in this thing is crisp, sharp, always in focus and doesn't have any of the horrible flicker problems associated with CRTs, even good CRTs.
I have almost permanently relegated my (faster) desktop PC to doing nothing becuase I find the laptop screen so much easier on the eyes than the 19" CRT I have.
For almost all of the masses LCD screens have more advantages than disadvantages. Nearly everyone just browses the web, reads email and composes the occasional document, spreadsheet, etc. Why do they need perfect photo quality editing on their PC?
Better to save power and heat loading (which saves power in summer anyway; less work for the air con to do) and use a nice efficient LCD. It's too bad that good large LCDs that have a decent resolution are so damned expensive still. I call decent anything more than 1024x768. A 17" panel with that res is affordable, but if you want to go to 1280x960 or above then you're going to start breaking the bank.
*grr* pressed the wrong button before I was finished... ... All of the OSS tools do a reasonable job in interoperating with the proprietary ones. They even integrate with other OSS tools. In all cases no OSS tool supports 100% of the proprietary equivalent tool's features accurately; there are always features missing, or glitches.
The missing and broken features are usually guff - webcam and file transfer facilities in instant messaging tools and similar things in other software. There are other OSS ways to get file transfers and video conferencing so the developers usually start by getting the basics of the instant mesenger working reliably. The Gates-Spawn sees the missing features and presumes that it must be crap and goes back to the GatesOS.
It sucks, but it's the way it is!
It's really caused by a lot of factors...
To some extent Lucifer (Gates) is correct. Use OSS and lose compatibility. There are a lot of hard/software vendors out there that only release Winblows drivers or software. IF you want to move to OSS you may have difficulty getting a specific piece of hardware of software to work - if at all.
Sure, there are OSS drivers for hardware, but with the amount of new devices being released the OSS community cant be guaranteed to be keeping up; they will always be behind. Look at 802.11 support in Linux for an example. I have two "supported" cards and neither works under Linux. A BCM4306 card that apparantly works under ndiswrapper and an Intel ProWireless 2200 that has the ipw2200 driver, and is also fabled to work in ndiswrapper.
I haven't been able to make either of these cards work. The Broadcom one doesn't work at all - on any of the machines, kernels, distros I have tried. The IPW2200 card only works without WPA, and even then it's flakey. Windows is the only choice for either of these cards - even though I picked them based on a lot of Googling to find out what was "supported" in Linux. Posts to message boards and mailing lists asking for help from people who had made them work went unanswered...
Software is another classic example. Four or Five key pieces spring to mind. Internet Explorer/Outlook, M$ Orifice, MYOB and Adobe Photoshop.
There are dozens of web browser and mail clients in the OSS domain. Firefox and Thunderbird are the GUI versions of choice for me. I have shown a few Windows users Firefox when they have been whinging about spyware, popunders, and all the other crap they get by going to dodgy websites. They took one look at Firefox and decided they didn't know how to use it because there was no "Favourites" menu, and a number of other equally stupid reasons.
The same really goes for Outlook. I have shown Thunderbird to a few Windows users who have been having trouble with the virus magnet that is Outlook. They hate all the email viri that causes them problems, but they won't use Thunderbird simply because it's different to Outlook. I think it does things in a much more intuitive way, but MS has conditioned the user that it doesn't need to be intuitive - it only needs to be buggy, bloated and horrible.
There are a few OSS office replacements. Openoffice, KOffice, Abiword/Gnumeric/other tools, but none has 100% compatibility with the most common formats forced into play by M$. If you want others to be able to read documents you email then you have to use MS formats. You have to also remember that it is hard to get most users to use a different application than the one they are used to (Usually Office). Asking them to install OpenOffice or one of the other replacements is like asking them to amputate their arm, and in a lot of cases is met with the same response as asking them to amputate their arm!
Photoshop is replaced by The GIMP. I have used Gimp for a long time as my image manupulation tool of choice. I even start an X sesion to run it on a Windows box when I cannot be at my Linux machine. Most users that do a lot of graphics work are accustomed to Photoshop. There is a lot of inertia involved in getting them to change. Not because the programs do different things - Gimp is probably as powerful as Photoshop, but it does things in a different way to what they are used to, and all their photoshop plugins will stop working in the gimp...
As for MYOB. GnuCash is about the only thing I can think of that would even come close. I use that to run things, but once a business has MYOB it's locked into MYOB. Lots of businesses run MYOB. I know that accounting courses in TAFE (Australia) teach it as an integral part of the course. They actually require you to get a copy of it for completing assignments. This is straight from the mouth of an accounting student (and fellow Linux junkie).
Compatibility is not simply being about sharing data. It can be about the sorts
Reminds me of the part of HGTG when they Ford and Arthur stumble upon the crashed ship full of telephone booth sanitisers and advertising agency workers, etc.
Perhaps we should launch all these questionable people into orbit and crash them into the nearesy star?
Interestingly, they had RMS and Rusty Russel (of iptables fame) on Triple J here in Australia on Monday. They were both talking about the benefits of OSS software and how software patenting is being misued. There was even some discussion on the FTA that we have, and how that is going to change things.
http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/hack/default.htm
If you hurry and click on the Monday link you'll be able to hear it. It's in the last 10 minutes of the program.
It's not URPMI that's the problem. Urpmi does a pretty good job at the end of the day. It manages the repositories of files and downloads what it needs to fix dependencies.
The problem with the latest batch of upgrades was kdebase was broken and kbebase-nsplugins was renamed as a part of the upgrade. On top of that, the nsplugins package depended on itself, so you couldn't install it with urpmi unless it was already installed...
And there was a problem with clamav (I don't use it so i didn't read the advisory in detail) where Mandrake broke it in the upgrade and it stopped working. It could probably have been averted with testing.
I have been using Mandrake for years, and I find it to be pretty good in most cases. It's just they're letting their guard down when testing their updates for compatibility.
Maybe everyone is busy redownloading the third stream of updates in 3 days to fix the fact that they broke the KDE RPMs when they released them the first time.
They have a pretty polished distro that is easy for the average n00b to install, but they have fscked up a couple of times, with the KDE updates and also clamav (updated 3 times in as many days because the upgrades broke more than they fixed).
The amount of money spent on (overpriced?) Windows and it's associated guff (Office, Visio, M$ Project, Exchange Server, etc, etc, etc) combined with the loss of productivity that everyone experiences daily when either their desktop or the Windows server crashes could add up to a lot more than $750M.
Of course it's not like companies that are saving money by going for cheaper (not necessarily Linux, or even free) options are going to donate all their savings to help those less fortunate, so let's be thankful that BillyG is making such large donations (of which there have been a few that I remember reading about), for whatever reason he is making them.
Why would the CIA allow something that would be easy to crack on their property?!
Because it says "all of your earth are belong to US!"
And I'm not going to clarify whether there is a "the" in that sentence.
Buy a caching disk controller and fill it up with RAM. Then give it and the surplus RAM to me for my pitifully RAMless machine. 1G just doesn't cut it anymore :(
For those that have had email long enough... You would have seen this. For those that haven't had email long enough, click the link.
If the universe is full of an increasing amount of dark matter, we'd better install a lot more of these so-called "dark suckers" to suck up the dark matter and contain it safely - so that it can't make the universe explode.
Well... if she asked for the Mac she has to live with it.
(Disclaimer: yes, I know how women reserve the right to alter their version of the "facts" after the event to make them correct and their SO incorrect). In this case you would be forgiven if you loaded up some virtual PC software and stuck a copy of EvilOS inside it.
While hubby can enjoy the (relatively) trouble free world of Mac computing.
When my wife asks for the 'cute little Mac', what PC can I buy
It would be a marvellous feat that your wife does not want a PC with Windows installed. I would definately trust her judgement in asking for one... and go and but the 'cute little Mac'. You will be happy in the end.
I forgot to add that there are tools to automate doing this too - the Linux From Scratch book describes using this method and provides a few links to tools that can manage it.
It's possible to build and install a package into /opt/packages/packagename-1.2.3.4/[bin][lib][sbin]
/usr/[bin][lib][sbin] back to /usr/local/wherever. It makes removing the package pretty easy. Remove /opt/pacakage/packagename-1.2.3.4 and then check /usr/local for dangling links...
And then symlink anything that it would have installed in
Then there is only one copy of programs, libraries, and everything else but its all symlinked so that the packages can be all contained within their own dir.
Maybe they should focus on... oh I dont know... Osama Bin Laden?
Focus on another fitcional character in yet another game ;) No problems.
There is a port of mplayer to Windows - on the main mplayer site too. You could hack up your own timing program if you were bold enough. I'm sure there are (literally) hundreds of pre-existing scheduling programs for Windows.
mplayer has -ao and -vo (audio out and video out) redirection options so you can dump streams to files on your disk. It plays all of the streams I have thrown at it in the past.
Script it with cron?
I hadn't even thought of the VHDL Cookbook. The Designer's Guide is fantastic, but the cookbook presents a very hands-on way of doing things. There are literally lots of "recipies" to solve common problems. I heartily recommend it to anyone who works in VHDL.
http://www.ashenden.com.au/designers-guide/DG.html
This is a link to the VHDL Designer's Guide by Ashenden (from Adelaide if I remember correctly). Some of the hardware people I have worked with used it and considered it to be the bible. From memory you can find a pre-release downloadable as a PDF somewhere, or go and buy the book. It was expensive, but well worth it.
Another book to get hold of is one of the early student manuals that came with the Xilinx Foundation 1.5 tools. It was a beginner's introduction to the Foundation suite but it had a lot of useful snippets that helped me even through more advanced work in recent versions of the Xilinx ISE software. You should be able to find these in a university library if they have an electronic engineering course.
Blasted clouds... well, I'm off to invent some kind of cloud transparent making machine.
.. there is some sort of army proving ground out there and we were hassled by police for even turning down that road to stop and look up late one night.
I haven't seen anything that says this baby should be seen in Adelaide (or the southern hemisphere at all). I wish it wasn't so cloudy... I'd head out and have a look.
Whatever you do, don't turn left just before Pt Wakefield (heading north)
A.
WEll if noise reducing/cancelling headphones or earplugs are not an option then your only choice is to confront the source of the noise and ask for it to be fixed...
You shouldn't have to consider the trend when the trend is blatantly wrong. The recording and movie industry is as bad as the oil industry. They are driven by dodgy contracts and extreme pressure on both artists and customers. They put a lot of undue force on and then restrict what the artist can do with their own work anyway; in most cases the recording company takes ownership of the work, so this "depriving the artists" crap doesn't cut it because the artist doesn't get squat.
Legislation that sells off the assets of offenders (especially in the drug case) is OK if the money is put to good use and not just squandered. There is similar legislation that gives the police powers in Aus to sell off your assets to pay any overdue fines. They still need to give you time to pay and an appropriate number of late notices but AFIK they don't need to take you to court to do it.
As for subtracting $150,000 for each copyrighted song on my computer... if they are trying to claim that the songs that I wrote and recorded are their property they will promptly be thrown out of court. Those songs are copyrighted by default, but I am allowed to do what I feel with them. I don't collect illegal music (well I download the occasional song to see if I want to buy the CDs) but if I don't like it it's deleted and if I do like it I go out and buy the CD.
Nobody is losing out as a result of my actions... if I'm not allowed to preview then I'll just stop buying CDs and listen to the radio; then they will lose out on my CD sale.
I will just put a massive value on the data on my computer. Nobody can prove otherwise; my data was a project that would put Microsoft out of business and make me $100 billion dollars and they destroyed it!
The new terrorism is not anybody bombs. It's the bloody recording industry - they inspire fear and hatred in the general public with their greed, constant stream of formula-generated shit and then they sue you when you don't want to pay their (illegally fixed) price for the shit they spew out.
and he doesn't care about safety/privacy concerns
He may not care, but when he (and thousands of others) is infected with viri and malware and spewing out thousands of hits that clutter up my firewall logs I care.
There is no good reason for anybody to continue to use Internet Exploited. There are now at least three great alternatives for Windows; Firefox, Mozilla Suite and Opera. Each has certain advantages and disadvantages, but they all outshine the Microsoft POS browser.
IE was added to Windows as an afterthought, and it really shows. M$ wanted to jump in on this Internet thing that Bill Gates, himself, said would never take off.
This makes absolutely no sense to my feeble mind: to prove that you are a non-profitable charity you must take all your large donations that make you profitable then ask for more, smaller, donations that will make you even more profitable... to prove that you are a non-profitable charity.
Why does the tax man make things so insanely convoluted.
Good on the FreeBSD team though - I haven't used it personally, but obviously it does so well that people feel the need to donate large sums of money to it.
I have an Acer Aspire 2010 notebook sitting in front of me. The colour accuracy isn't that great. I would never use the builtin screen for serious photo editing.
That said, I would never use a CRT for anything other than serious photo editing again. The LCD in this thing is crisp, sharp, always in focus and doesn't have any of the horrible flicker problems associated with CRTs, even good CRTs.
I have almost permanently relegated my (faster) desktop PC to doing nothing becuase I find the laptop screen so much easier on the eyes than the 19" CRT I have.
For almost all of the masses LCD screens have more advantages than disadvantages. Nearly everyone just browses the web, reads email and composes the occasional document, spreadsheet, etc. Why do they need perfect photo quality editing on their PC?
Better to save power and heat loading (which saves power in summer anyway; less work for the air con to do) and use a nice efficient LCD. It's too bad that good large LCDs that have a decent resolution are so damned expensive still. I call decent anything more than 1024x768. A 17" panel with that res is affordable, but if you want to go to 1280x960 or above then you're going to start breaking the bank.