Simply put, the emphasis was intended to be on the word victimless, not the word crime.
The use of the word "victim" implies that someone else has caused you loss or injury. If you pick a business model that sucks or if you give stuff away, nobody else has caused you loss or injury.
Using the term "victim" to describe that situatoin already presupposes your conclusion, namely that someone other than the advertiser is responsible for their loss.
One again, with 1-syllable words:
Well, I'm sorry for you that you are having trouble with multisyllabic words. Maybe a good place for you to start would be to look up "victim" in the dictionary.
I'm surprised that someone who's ready to install Linux on a Box for "ease of use" hasn't learned just a touch more about OSX.
More than what? I dug into Netinfo, have written a bunch of small Cocoa apps, written some AppleScript, dealt with forked files, installed Fink, and all that. I still can't figure out how to make software update work on one of the machines or fix sporadic printing problems on the other.
(most linux geeks I know are computer geeks in general, and like to learn about everything they can).
I did, and I'm unimpressed.
I've set up numerous folks with both Windows machines and Macs. These are completely computer ignorant users. I've had far less trouble with the Mac users than the Windows users.
Probably. But the solution isn't to replace the Mac with a Windows box, the solution is to replace the Mac with a Linux box.
There's a neat song about it, the Swift Song by Padi Boyd:
We know that gamma ray explosions happen randomly all over the sky
(It's like a lottery: a ticket for each square degree) You see a FLASH! and then there's not another till about a day has gone by
(But that depends upon detector sensitivity) In just a moment they spew energy worth (That's pretty fast) A value we can't even fathom on Earth (It's really vast!) But just what's giving rise to gamma ray sparked skies? Is it the death cry of a massive star or black hole birth? (Or both, or both? or both!)
There are a bunch of MP3's of the song floating around; in the interest of not shutting down some server, please search for it yourself on the web, and don't pick the first link you find.
BUT: bypassing the networks sponsors is not QUITE a victimless crime,
It's not a crime at all. And we should work hard that it doesn't become a crime.
I mean, it's fine to point out that the revenue model is outdated and will no longer work, or say that the advertisements should be moved to placements in the shows, but calling it victimless and comparing it to smoking pot is, well...
It is "victimless" because it's not a crime.
By analogy, if you take a bucket of $100 bills and empty it out your window and scream "here, folks, take my money", you may be out of a lot of money, but you are not a victim and no crime has committed when people pick up your money.
Both of those were and still are rather questionable contributions from a usability point of view: they are exactly the areas where users have most problems with the mouse, and user interfaces are slowly abandoning both of them. The functionality itself, of course, existed prior to Apple anyway.
So, you have several decades of development of iconic user interfaces, object-oriented programming, constraint-based programming, and direct manipulation at other companies and labs, all of which Apple just copied. And then Apple comes up with a couple of questionable tweaks about when and people press the mouse button and you call that "innovation". I think that's roughly like putting fuzzy dice in a Ferrari and claiming you invented and built most of the car.
And-so-on.
Like WHAT?
[Microsoft Basic] Which is another thing Microsoft copied.
If there is one thing Microsoft really did by themselves, it's Microsoft Basic. Not that there would be anything wrong with Microsoft "copying" (i.e., independently reimplementing) things; that's how open systems and standards get created. In fact, the main problem with Microsoft is probably that they don't copy enough. Apple should copy even more as well, they should just stop making their incorrect claims that the stuff they copied is stuff they invented themselves.
how hard is it to go into System Preferences, click on Software Update and uncheck "Check for Updates"?
Well, it's hard in two ways. First, one one machine, the automatic updates are failing with no clear indication why. Second, Macintosh Software Update only updates Apple software; you yourself still have to worry about all the third party applications.
It sounds to me that the problem you have is not that your parents don't know enough about MacOS X, but that you know next to nothing about it.
Indeed, I do not know how to fix the OS X software update failure other than by reinstalling the entire OS. And I don't know how to fix the mysterious printer problems that keep cropping up. I'm sure a dedicated Macintosh geek like you would have no problem fixing those things. Which only goes to show: Macintosh has the same problems and requires the same kind of arcane knowledge and skills as other platforms; its claim that it "just works" are wrong, too.
In fact, numerous studies have shown that Macs are rather more intuitive than Windows for people who are new to the game
Maybe you can point to some of those "numerous studies"? In particular, "numerous studies" that apply to current versions of OS X? I bet you can't come up with any.
In any case, it doesn't matter whether it's intuitive to people who are "new to the game", because the pool of people who are "new to the game" is dwindling.
My parents have Macs, too. I bought them for them on the theory that they would be easier to use and require less effort to support.
Unfortunately, they still require a lot of work to support: printing has all sorts of problems, software tries to update itself and fails, Apple software tells you to buy the next version, etc. The Macintosh UI is remarkably unintuitive unless you are a Mac-head. Macs are a little better than Windows overall, but mostly just because they have bits and pieces of UNIX left in them.
A huge disadvantage of Macs is that they keep complaining that all their other friends have all this great Windows software that they can't run.
Linux is good enough now that their next machines are probably just going to be Linux machines: it's easier to maintain than either Macintosh or Windows, and Linux comes with huge amounts of software out of the box, software that, even if you have the money to buy for Macintosh or Windows, is a pain to install and maintain on those other platforms.
It is worth noting that in all likelihood heterosexual behavior evolved into existence in the first place as the "norm" because it maximized our potential for survival.
Things don't "evolve" as "norms". Norms are social conventions not the outcome of evolution.
On an evolutionary scale, homosexuality appears to be an behavorial aberation that can only continue to survive if we use some artificial means to keep it going. When all is said and done, however, it's an evolutionary dead end, unless it can be shown to be placing upper limits on our population so that the planet does not overcrowd.
Nothing survives this long in a population for a reason. Chances are that homosexuality is a tradeoff against something else important. Recent studies suggest that the lower number of offspring homosexuals may have is compensated for by a higher number of offspring by female relatives.
And the best way to perpetuate homosexuality is to force societal norms on people that force them to get married and have children. If you want to eliminate homosexuality, your best bet is to legalize gay marriage and encourage homosexual behavior.
Note that an advantage of electronic voting for Bush need not even be due to explicit fraud. In particular, electronic voting might hard Democrats also if it works perfectly. For example, electronic voting might be used preferentially in Bush-leaning precincts and might result in fewer lost votes overall, thereby giving Bush an advantage. A historical analog of that would be literacy requirements. Taken to the extreme, a state might put poorly maintained punch card ballot machines in Democratic areas and easy-to-use electronic voting machines in Republican areas.
But even if electronic voting machines are easier to use and do result in better counting, without an audit trail, they are still not acceptable.
The real problem is the lack of uniformity in how people vote. There needs to be a federal standard and a single, uniform system for how people vote, something that standardized the kind of ballots used, the procedures, and the audit trail.
I suppose this is another example of Microsoft getting credit for company's innovations [apple.com]?
I'm getting tired of just about every discussion about Microsoft being used as an opportunity by Apple fans to promote their favorite company. Keep that sort of stuff to the Apple groups, please. Whether or not Microsoft copied a feature from Lotus Improv has nothing to do with Apple.
Furthermore, it is stupid for Apple fans to point fingers when it comes to copying: without copying other companies' innovations, Apple wouldn't exist; they copied the very core of their platform from others (SRI, PARC, Alan Kay). Apple does have better taste than Microsoft in what they copy, but I hardly think they are more original.
These "enterprise P2P" efforts seem to be attempting to recreate Windows File Sharing or NFS and call it "P2P". It's not clear whether that's a good idea. Those attempts have some things going for them: self-administration by users, no requirements for a central server, and distributed search. On the other hand, it is quite likely that enterprise administrators don't want some of those features. And they have some disadvantages, too: no auditing, no backup, no direct integration with end-user software (although, I suppose, you will see MS Office plugins).
Obviously, Microsoft has become an ally in the crusade against patents and is just doing this sort of thing to demonstrate how ridiculous the patent system is and how ineffectively the USPTO works.
Re:Comparing UML to N1 Grid Containers? Ridiculous
on
Sun-isms Debunked
·
· Score: 1
Most ORGANIZATIONS consider real estate, power consumption and cooling when specifying an installation
Fortunately, they don't have to settle for inefficient 8 or 16 way machines, they can have 8 or 16 blades in about the same space.
Of course, I'm not saying that virtualization is useless. Quite to the contrary: it does have some important specialized uses. But Linux supports a wider spectrum of virtualization and partitioning options than Solaris.
The problem is that Sun is overselling virtualization and selling virtualization to people who don't need it, and they are overhyping what they have. When a Sun salesperson tries to sell you a big Solaris server plus virtualization, hold on to your wallet.
All that demonstrates is that there is another thing you know nothing about.
c) Have no clue what a wonderful thing Kernel threads are
I think kernel threads are wonderful; it's too bad that Sun is using their hokey N-M threading model instead.
b) Have never programmed or used a solaris machine
Sadly, I have to admit to having done both. But I'm recovering.
Re:Comparing UML to N1 Grid Containers? Ridiculous
on
Sun-isms Debunked
·
· Score: 1
While Linux may have counterparts to various Solaris features, in terms of maturity, feature set, and performance of these features Solaris has Linux trumped.
Linux has those features that its users want and need because those are the features its users invest in. Virtualization and "Fair Share Scheduling" make sense for Sun with its overpriced server hardware. For x86-based systems, it doesn't usually make sense to virtualize--you just deploy on multiple, individually cheaper systems.
You pay half a million for your box breaking to be SOMEBODY ELSE'S PROBLEM.
Yeah, that about sums it up: instead of trying to do your job and building an infrastructure that works, you spend your company's money so that you can say when your hardware breaks that it is "somebody else's problem".
I have news for you: when you are running the IT department and your server hardware breaks, it is your company's problem. No amount of money you waste on Sun or anybody else is going to make that problem go away.
> You're paying for a COMPANY to give you some LOVE. Not some snotnosed Admin whose first-line defense is an O'Reilly bookshelf. There's a definite market for this kind of service. Just because you're not in it doesn't mean it isn't there.
Sure there is a market. It's the Dilbert's-boss kind of market, where covering your ass matters more than helping your company succeed.
Sun's stock has steadily gone up over 60% since August
And Darl McBride has managed to increase SCO stock 10-fold at some point, which only shows that McNealy and Schwartz are not quite as good at lying and cheating as Darl McBride.
Solaris 10, Niagara, fighting off losers like Kodak, etc. Sun is going through another one of its re-invention cycles, and will have massively-multi-threaded systems in the next two years with Solaris 10, complete with super-fast TCP/IP and through-and-through checksums on ZFS
That kind of stuff matters to out-of-touch gearheads; it has little relevance to the real world. And despite all the marketing fluff coming out of Sun, Solaris is probably not all that it's cracked up to be. For example, their highly touted threading stuff in older versions of Solaris turned out to be a badly constructed kludge.
Yes, the computer may occasionally kill people because of bugs or limitations. But those bugs or limitations are measurable. As long as the rate of deaths from those bugs and limitations is lower than from other drivers, I prefer the computer.
Keep in mind that human drivers also have lots of malfunctions: you are just as dead when you get hit by drunk drivers, SUV-driving soccer moms, or a cellphone toting executives. And I suspect that it isn't hard to get a computer to be less of a threat to me behind the wheel than any of those categories of drivers.
Do you think people drive an hour or two each way every damned day FOR FUN?
Of course, they do it FOR FUN. In most professions, you can get a job in medium-sized town with decent housing prices and short commutes. If you choose a location, job, and home that forces long commutes on you, you make that choice FOR FUN. What's annoying is that you want other people to pay the price for your choices: the roads, the wasted gasoline, the pollution, the war in Iraq,...
Sounds like the problem is that your company has chosen to locate its offices in an expensive area but isn't currently paying you the necessary salary to allow you to live nearby. If their employees start having difficulties getting to work, they could move their offices to a location where employees could afford to live nearby at current salaries, they could pay you more so that you can afford to live nearby, or they and you could use your influence to create decent public transportation in your city. If change happens gradually, any of those measures doesn't have to be disruptive.
But the way it currently works is that the tax payer supports the consequences of your company's poor choice of location. I.e., we all pay for the unnecessary roads, gasoline, and pollution just so that you can live far away from work.
This shows some initiative and creativity in trying to develop new ways for people to find all kinds of information,
Well, in the case of Google Scholar, it's a late entry into the market. It also threatens to derail some significant public and free efforts at making scholarly information available on the web. Altogether, I'm not convinced that Google Scholar is something to be welcomed.
Slashdot Mirror
Simply put, the emphasis was intended to be on the word victimless, not the word crime.
The use of the word "victim" implies that someone else has caused you loss or injury. If you pick a business model that sucks or if you give stuff away, nobody else has caused you loss or injury.
Using the term "victim" to describe that situatoin already presupposes your conclusion, namely that someone other than the advertiser is responsible for their loss.
One again, with 1-syllable words:
Well, I'm sorry for you that you are having trouble with multisyllabic words. Maybe a good place for you to start would be to look up "victim" in the dictionary.
I'm surprised that someone who's ready to install Linux on a Box for "ease of use" hasn't learned just a touch more about OSX.
More than what? I dug into Netinfo, have written a bunch of small Cocoa apps, written some AppleScript, dealt with forked files, installed Fink, and all that. I still can't figure out how to make software update work on one of the machines or fix sporadic printing problems on the other.
(most linux geeks I know are computer geeks in general, and like to learn about everything they can).
I did, and I'm unimpressed.
I've set up numerous folks with both Windows machines and Macs. These are completely computer ignorant users. I've had far less trouble with the Mac users than the Windows users.
Probably. But the solution isn't to replace the Mac with a Windows box, the solution is to replace the Mac with a Linux box.
There are a bunch of MP3's of the song floating around; in the interest of not shutting down some server, please search for it yourself on the web, and don't pick the first link you find.
Does Windows Update do 3rd parties. I really have no idea never go near it myself.
Don't know about Windows. Linux does, and has had that capabilities for many years.
tiger will apparently have an API that will allow 3rd parties access to Software Update.
It's good that Apple is finally getting around copying this idea from other systems.
BUT: bypassing the networks sponsors is not QUITE a victimless crime,
It's not a crime at all. And we should work hard that it doesn't become a crime.
I mean, it's fine to point out that the revenue model is outdated and will no longer work, or say that the advertisements should be moved to placements in the shows, but calling it victimless and comparing it to smoking pot is, well...
It is "victimless" because it's not a crime.
By analogy, if you take a bucket of $100 bills and empty it out your window and scream "here, folks, take my money", you may be out of a lot of money, but you are not a victim and no crime has committed when people pick up your money.
Double-clicking. Drag'n'Drop.
Both of those were and still are rather questionable contributions from a usability point of view: they are exactly the areas where users have most problems with the mouse, and user interfaces are slowly abandoning both of them. The functionality itself, of course, existed prior to Apple anyway.
So, you have several decades of development of iconic user interfaces, object-oriented programming, constraint-based programming, and direct manipulation at other companies and labs, all of which Apple just copied. And then Apple comes up with a couple of questionable tweaks about when and people press the mouse button and you call that "innovation". I think that's roughly like putting fuzzy dice in a Ferrari and claiming you invented and built most of the car.
And-so-on.
Like WHAT?
[Microsoft Basic] Which is another thing Microsoft copied.
If there is one thing Microsoft really did by themselves, it's Microsoft Basic. Not that there would be anything wrong with Microsoft "copying" (i.e., independently reimplementing) things; that's how open systems and standards get created. In fact, the main problem with Microsoft is probably that they don't copy enough. Apple should copy even more as well, they should just stop making their incorrect claims that the stuff they copied is stuff they invented themselves.
how hard is it to go into System Preferences, click on Software Update and uncheck "Check for Updates"?
Well, it's hard in two ways. First, one one machine, the automatic updates are failing with no clear indication why. Second, Macintosh Software Update only updates Apple software; you yourself still have to worry about all the third party applications.
It sounds to me that the problem you have is not that your parents don't know enough about MacOS X, but that you know next to nothing about it.
Indeed, I do not know how to fix the OS X software update failure other than by reinstalling the entire OS. And I don't know how to fix the mysterious printer problems that keep cropping up. I'm sure a dedicated Macintosh geek like you would have no problem fixing those things. Which only goes to show: Macintosh has the same problems and requires the same kind of arcane knowledge and skills as other platforms; its claim that it "just works" are wrong, too.
In fact, numerous studies have shown that Macs are rather more intuitive than Windows for people who are new to the game
Maybe you can point to some of those "numerous studies"? In particular, "numerous studies" that apply to current versions of OS X? I bet you can't come up with any.
In any case, it doesn't matter whether it's intuitive to people who are "new to the game", because the pool of people who are "new to the game" is dwindling.
My parents have Macs, too. I bought them for them on the theory that they would be easier to use and require less effort to support.
Unfortunately, they still require a lot of work to support: printing has all sorts of problems, software tries to update itself and fails, Apple software tells you to buy the next version, etc. The Macintosh UI is remarkably unintuitive unless you are a Mac-head. Macs are a little better than Windows overall, but mostly just because they have bits and pieces of UNIX left in them.
A huge disadvantage of Macs is that they keep complaining that all their other friends have all this great Windows software that they can't run.
Linux is good enough now that their next machines are probably just going to be Linux machines: it's easier to maintain than either Macintosh or Windows, and Linux comes with huge amounts of software out of the box, software that, even if you have the money to buy for Macintosh or Windows, is a pain to install and maintain on those other platforms.
It is worth noting that in all likelihood heterosexual behavior evolved into existence in the first place as the "norm" because it maximized our potential for survival.
Things don't "evolve" as "norms". Norms are social conventions not the outcome of evolution.
On an evolutionary scale, homosexuality appears to be an behavorial aberation that can only continue to survive if we use some artificial means to keep it going. When all is said and done, however, it's an evolutionary dead end, unless it can be shown to be placing upper limits on our population so that the planet does not overcrowd.
Nothing survives this long in a population for a reason. Chances are that homosexuality is a tradeoff against something else important. Recent studies suggest that the lower number of offspring homosexuals may have is compensated for by a higher number of offspring by female relatives.
And the best way to perpetuate homosexuality is to force societal norms on people that force them to get married and have children. If you want to eliminate homosexuality, your best bet is to legalize gay marriage and encourage homosexual behavior.
Erototoxins? Is this an attempt to re-brand a need for sexual stimulationas a medical condition again?
Not all that different from trying to ban inconvenient but harmless free speech or behavior by labeling it as "terrorism".
Maybe we should start talking about Republitoxins and Republiterrorism.
Note that an advantage of electronic voting for Bush need not even be due to explicit fraud. In particular, electronic voting might hard Democrats also if it works perfectly. For example, electronic voting might be used preferentially in Bush-leaning precincts and might result in fewer lost votes overall, thereby giving Bush an advantage. A historical analog of that would be literacy requirements. Taken to the extreme, a state might put poorly maintained punch card ballot machines in Democratic areas and easy-to-use electronic voting machines in Republican areas.
But even if electronic voting machines are easier to use and do result in better counting, without an audit trail, they are still not acceptable.
The real problem is the lack of uniformity in how people vote. There needs to be a federal standard and a single, uniform system for how people vote, something that standardized the kind of ballots used, the procedures, and the audit trail.
I suppose this is another example of Microsoft getting credit for company's innovations [apple.com]?
I'm getting tired of just about every discussion about Microsoft being used as an opportunity by Apple fans to promote their favorite company. Keep that sort of stuff to the Apple groups, please. Whether or not Microsoft copied a feature from Lotus Improv has nothing to do with Apple.
Furthermore, it is stupid for Apple fans to point fingers when it comes to copying: without copying other companies' innovations, Apple wouldn't exist; they copied the very core of their platform from others (SRI, PARC, Alan Kay). Apple does have better taste than Microsoft in what they copy, but I hardly think they are more original.
These "enterprise P2P" efforts seem to be attempting to recreate Windows File Sharing or NFS and call it "P2P". It's not clear whether that's a good idea. Those attempts have some things going for them: self-administration by users, no requirements for a central server, and distributed search. On the other hand, it is quite likely that enterprise administrators don't want some of those features. And they have some disadvantages, too: no auditing, no backup, no direct integration with end-user software (although, I suppose, you will see MS Office plugins).
At least they are managing very efficient scaling with the number of CPUs (this requires both good hardware and kernel engineering).
Packing 32 people into a phone booth may also be an impressive feat, but that doesn't make it good engineering for phone booths.
Obviously, Microsoft has become an ally in the crusade against patents and is just doing this sort of thing to demonstrate how ridiculous the patent system is and how ineffectively the USPTO works.
Most ORGANIZATIONS consider real estate, power consumption and cooling when specifying an installation
Fortunately, they don't have to settle for inefficient 8 or 16 way machines, they can have 8 or 16 blades in about the same space.
Of course, I'm not saying that virtualization is useless. Quite to the contrary: it does have some important specialized uses. But Linux supports a wider spectrum of virtualization and partitioning options than Solaris.
The problem is that Sun is overselling virtualization and selling virtualization to people who don't need it, and they are overhyping what they have. When a Sun salesperson tries to sell you a big Solaris server plus virtualization, hold on to your wallet.
I take that you [...]
All that demonstrates is that there is another thing you know nothing about.
c) Have no clue what a wonderful thing Kernel threads are
I think kernel threads are wonderful; it's too bad that Sun is using their hokey N-M threading model instead.
b) Have never programmed or used a solaris machine
Sadly, I have to admit to having done both. But I'm recovering.
While Linux may have counterparts to various Solaris features, in terms of maturity, feature set, and performance of these features Solaris has Linux trumped.
Linux has those features that its users want and need because those are the features its users invest in. Virtualization and "Fair Share Scheduling" make sense for Sun with its overpriced server hardware. For x86-based systems, it doesn't usually make sense to virtualize--you just deploy on multiple, individually cheaper systems.
You pay half a million for your box breaking to be SOMEBODY ELSE'S PROBLEM.
Yeah, that about sums it up: instead of trying to do your job and building an infrastructure that works, you spend your company's money so that you can say when your hardware breaks that it is "somebody else's problem".
I have news for you: when you are running the IT department and your server hardware breaks, it is your company's problem. No amount of money you waste on Sun or anybody else is going to make that problem go away.
> You're paying for a COMPANY to give you some LOVE. Not some snotnosed Admin whose first-line defense is an O'Reilly bookshelf. There's a definite market for this kind of service. Just because you're not in it doesn't mean it isn't there.
Sure there is a market. It's the Dilbert's-boss kind of market, where covering your ass matters more than helping your company succeed.
Sun's stock has steadily gone up over 60% since August
And Darl McBride has managed to increase SCO stock 10-fold at some point, which only shows that McNealy and Schwartz are not quite as good at lying and cheating as Darl McBride.
Solaris 10, Niagara, fighting off losers like Kodak, etc. Sun is going through another one of its re-invention cycles, and will have massively-multi-threaded systems in the next two years with Solaris 10, complete with super-fast TCP/IP and through-and-through checksums on ZFS
That kind of stuff matters to out-of-touch gearheads; it has little relevance to the real world. And despite all the marketing fluff coming out of Sun, Solaris is probably not all that it's cracked up to be. For example, their highly touted threading stuff in older versions of Solaris turned out to be a badly constructed kludge.
Yes, the computer may occasionally kill people because of bugs or limitations. But those bugs or limitations are measurable. As long as the rate of deaths from those bugs and limitations is lower than from other drivers, I prefer the computer.
Keep in mind that human drivers also have lots of malfunctions: you are just as dead when you get hit by drunk drivers, SUV-driving soccer moms, or a cellphone toting executives. And I suspect that it isn't hard to get a computer to be less of a threat to me behind the wheel than any of those categories of drivers.
I thought only in Soviet Russia, the car drives you.
Do you think people drive an hour or two each way every damned day FOR FUN?
...
Of course, they do it FOR FUN. In most professions, you can get a job in medium-sized town with decent housing prices and short commutes. If you choose a location, job, and home that forces long commutes on you, you make that choice FOR FUN. What's annoying is that you want other people to pay the price for your choices: the roads, the wasted gasoline, the pollution, the war in Iraq,
Sounds like the problem is that your company has chosen to locate its offices in an expensive area but isn't currently paying you the necessary salary to allow you to live nearby. If their employees start having difficulties getting to work, they could move their offices to a location where employees could afford to live nearby at current salaries, they could pay you more so that you can afford to live nearby, or they and you could use your influence to create decent public transportation in your city. If change happens gradually, any of those measures doesn't have to be disruptive.
But the way it currently works is that the tax payer supports the consequences of your company's poor choice of location. I.e., we all pay for the unnecessary roads, gasoline, and pollution just so that you can live far away from work.
This shows some initiative and creativity in trying to develop new ways for people to find all kinds of information,
Well, in the case of Google Scholar, it's a late entry into the market. It also threatens to derail some significant public and free efforts at making scholarly information available on the web. Altogether, I'm not convinced that Google Scholar is something to be welcomed.