Wasn't it Bruce Perens a while back got hold of some library of GIS datasets and was going to GPL them? What ever happened with that? Is there any sort of "matchup" between GRASS and that data? Could the two be combined to make a GPL "mapquest" type engine?
I know this is such a "niche" thing, but personally, I would *love* to have a CD of GIS data for my area that I could use along with a GPS and my laptop to track some of the data I "create" from my hobby as an amateur botanist. i.e. being able to do things like record GPS locations of plant ranges for certain species I've been able to find and recording and accurately mapping locations of sample collection sites and so forth. As it is, if I do record them, I have to wind up plotting them on a paper map of the "Rand McNally Road Atlas" type of thing. It would be nice to be able to regenerate new maps electronically any time I wanted.
I've turned down a contract or few because of various "non-compete" and "IP" clauses in them.
The main problem as I see it stems from the fact that most "older, more traditional" companies have not yet updated their contracts to reflect the fast-changing nature of the 'net. If the clause says something like "I will not compete in markets similar to the market this company operates in" that can be VAST if the company does something on the 'net, and most companies today at least have a 'net presence.
What if you've built an e-Commerce website for a car company and you've signed a non-compete agreement like this. Does that mean now you can't build an e-Commerce website for that electronics firm who would like to contract you? What's the marketplace, autos and electronics or e-Commerce and Web?
Another related problem comes from the sorts of "IP non-compete" clauses that has shown up in contracts I've read. The contract may say "I will not use knowledge acquired during the course of this project to assist other companies during similar projects."
That's understandable and even acceptable if you're doing genetic engineering where things you've learned on the job are legitimately unique and very likely can't be acquired elsewhere, but, again, what if you're building a website and during the term of the contract, say some new Java package that makes building servlets easier. Does that mean you are never allowed to use those new packages for other clients you may work for because you learned about them during the course of your building a website for the people who made you sign the contract?
Another scenario: What if you've used "Acmesoft sitebuilder" to build the site for Company A. Since you've signed this "IP non-compete" agreement, does that mean you can't use the skills with Acme Sitebuilder you've honed while building Company A's site to build more sites for other companies with Acme Sitebuilder?
With the speed at which technology advances in this industry and the amount of effort it takes for programmers and technicians and consultants to keep up with it, it's silly to expect that anything you might learn during the course of one job should not be applied to a subsequent job. In this industry you can't help but learn new stuff no matter what the job might be!
If nothing else, what you should learn from this sort of thing is: READ THOSE CONTRACTS CAREFULLY!
And don't just look for non-compete clauses! I had to refuse to put my name on a contract once because for whatever reason, everyone else involved in the process missed the clause that stated that any work I or anyone else in the company I represented produced would be wholly and solely owned by the company for whom we were contracting, even though I was the only person working on the contract!
Newcomers to contracting, naieve programmers and people who are simply too lazy to read their contracts carefully can get burned by any of this sort of thing. Having laws that make it illegal, or at least imply that they are unethical and unenforceable are nice, but ultimately it really falls onto the person signing the contract to make the decicion whether or not they can bide by the terms therein.
I think this has got the be the best interview/. has yet done. While brief and amusing answers are fun and keep one amused for a time while reading them (like the cDc interview) Bruce's long and thoughtful answers have much more brain food in them and will keep me thinking for quite some time.
I love all the links he's included in the text as well. It's not only long and well-thought-out but he even has more stuff to say about a lot of these topics!
I would like to know who holds copyright on this text (/., Bruce, Andover?) and if they would be willing to allow us to reproduce portions of this interview as long as we maintain the original source?
Specifically, I'd love to have Bruce's answer to Tet's question on privacy made up into a poster I could hang up above my computers and printed out in pamphlets I could just hand to people whenever I try to explain my views on privacy; Bruce just does it so much better than I've ever been able to and having a wonderfully detailed and well-argued statement like that might keep people from just seeing me as "one of those privacy kooks. He must have something to hide to be so pro-privacy. I bet he watches X-Files all the time and cheers for Mulder any time he proposes another government sponsored conspiracy theory." No, I just value my privacy and I'm more and more frightened every day at how industry and government continue to chip away at it and how the majority of the rest of the public just doesn't see a problem.
My workstation at home is named yog-sothoth. It's a dual-Celeron overclocked to 450Mhz that runs Linux, Windoze and BeOS at various times. Rather appropriate I thought.
(For those not familiar with Lovecraft's pantheon of Elder Gods, Yog-sothoth was one of the more powerful of the Elder and had many shapes in which he/it would appear.)
Although I personally haven't stuck to any specific grouping for machines on my home network. Although most come from some sort of literature or fiction, there's no set pattern: cydonia, binky, yog-sothoth, zorak, vargas.... If I try to keep in a particular "category" of naming, I always wind up running out of names.
I overwhelmingly agree that "real" names should be associated with computers rather than some sort of symbol. One of our clients decided to name all the machines in their office by what phone extension they were sitting next to. Needless to say that in the year or so I've been there, all machines have moved offices many times and new machines have replaced olf machines and I lose more hair and the B.P. goes up another ten points every time that happens. Can't convince them to change the naming scheme, though....
If this "Mosaic" software asks questions like "Do you spend more than 15 minutes a day on the Internet?", "Do you use IRC, MUDs, or chat rooms on a daily basis?" and uses the answers to those questions to judge whether or not a kid could be potential "trouble", that's a Very Bad Thing.
However, I've heard a little bit about these sorts of software before and from everything I've heard, they're the end result of years and years of reasonably well-designed and well-executed research and instead they ask questions like "Do you express your anger or frustration by torturing or killing small animals?", "Have you ever been physically abused by parents or family members?", "Do you feel more comfortable expressing your anger and frustration with violent acts?" These are questions that might legitimately be used to determine whether or not someone might "need help."
Even so, I'm still not convinced of the scientific validity of these tests because anyone of average intelligence can pretty well skew the results of the test by guessing what sorts of answers the test "wants to hear" since they are invariably of the "answer on a scale of one to ten whether you agree with this statement, with one being completely no and ten being completely yes." The "scoring" on these tests are simply average scores for the various answers from control groups and psychotic mass murderers (or whatever) and your tendency towards either "normalcy" or "psychotic mass murder" is simply based on who's scores yours most resembles.
(I've been forced to take these sorts of "Personality Assessment Tests" by annoying employers and potential employers in the past and at the very get-go make sure I inform them that I don't believe they are valid tests of ethics, morals or personality and that I *will* "fail" it and then proceed to answer in the most outrageous way possible. Employers who know me well then ignore the test; those who don't and rely on the test to judge me I don't want to work for anyway.
Some good skeptical analysis on these sorts of tests and links to more of same can be found here.)
Further, there is still the troublesome point that these "survey" answers are going to go into some Permanent Record someplace, which just emphasizes the fact that I feel this is a horrible invasion of privacy to begin with.
I've tried a few times to get/. to post this link to a KDEForum article on "Magellan" - KDE2's new information manager system. It's EMail, News and PIM all in one, something like a Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange/Outlook except will be GPL'd. If the article is in any way accurate and not a hoax (it looks horribly functional and I have to take with a grain of salt that a project this massive has been kept under wraps and done up by only a few people working on it...) it will be a Big Win for KDE2 and any *NIX in general that can run it.
Not related to the post, but Gaiman related, does anyone know if there is any way to get the BBC miniseries "Neverwhere" in NTSC format? Apparently it's been shown in some markets (San Fran area on KQED I think is at least one, maybe the only one) but certainly not in my area. Buy, beg or borrow I would love to see the series.
lsof - 'LS' Open Files. Shows you what files are opened by what processes on a UNIX box. Great for finding out why you can't unmount that partition because some zombie still has a file handle, who's trying to read/etc/passwd, why the hell you can't open/etc/passwd in (rw) mode because someone else has it locked, etc, etc...
Yeah, Zeus is *supposed* to be able to handle the load, in theory, but any time I've seen/. link to osOpionion, I get all sorts of errors from it.
To paraphrase someone's tagline here, "The difference between theory and practice is that in theory, they are the same, in practice, they are very different."
Simple, when the color models hit the market, the B&W version prices will drop and make them much more affordable to those of us who think color on a palmtop is just flash for weenies who are more concerned with being bleeding-edge than actually getting practical use out of the things.
I've avoided Palms up 'till now because I just can't imagine that I could get more than a hundred dollars or so of use out of one. (I admit I'm very tempted by the Handspring however, mainly because of the price point.) I don't give a wet slap about color on it, but if I could pick a B&W version for about a hundred bucks because the colors models have taken the high end of the price range, I probably would.
So since ATI claims to have some measure of DVD decoding hardware on most of their chips do you think this could have any impact on Linux getting DVD support via using the ATI chip as assisted hardware decoder?? That would be sweet.
I have mixed feelings about the way Neil ends this book. I'd heard all about "Oh, you'll love the book but hate the ending!" for a long time before reading it and found out that I thought the ending was just fine. A bit brief, but nowhere what I had been expecting.
Now, compare to the ending in "Diamond Age" in which the last chapter reads like it came from a different book and all of a sudden the ending to "Snow Crash" is excellent. Unfortunately, the way he ended "Diamond Age" pretty much ruined what had been a very enjoyable book because the whole plot just went to pieces. "Snow Crash" wasn't like that IMHO - everything wrapped up, as the reviewer said, the pieces had all been in place for some time and he just tied them all up nicely.
Except you are always programing for the lowest common denominator... you WANT to use all the neato performance tweaks that only SYSTEM PROGRAMMING can expose.
Such as... ? You are now going to list all the things you can only get from "SYSTEM PROGRAMMING" that Java doesn't offer, aren't you? Or are you?
Didn't think so...
Seems to me that multithreaded Java apps seem to scale pretty well just from throwing more and faster processors at them as long as you're actively using multiple threads, from a single-processor laptop for development to a dual-processor Linux box for testing to a multiprocessor Sun for deployment it's pretty linear.
Hmm, I've been successfully using the IBM JDK in places where both the Blackdown 1.1.7 and 1.2 JDKs barf thread dumps all over the place. This is even using the IBM JDK with native threads and the JIT on multiprocessor machines. The only thing I've seen it not do is be a Java2 JDK.
I know there are some serious problems with native threads on anything less than kernel 2.2 and glibc 2.1.
You've touched on the place that Java is developing quite a following. Not too many people that I personally know of are working on building full-screen interactive applications, we're all working on using Java as a back-end, middleware app, application server, servlet engine, database gateway, what-have-you, which is where it really shines.
Some of the things that I personally think make it ideal for server-side programming are: excellent database API (JDBC), native support for http and ftp xfers, multithreading, a very easy to use exception handling mechanism, and the object-oriented programming model can be mapped very well onto things like database and file objects. When you're not trying to do interactive graphical apps, speed is very good and only a few percent behind compiled apps with most things I've seen.
The cross-platform-ability also makes it easy to develop on Windows or Linux boxes, then take the same code and drop it on your Sun E10000 to deploy. You just have to make sure your Windows-based developers aren't using MS J++ and writing incompatible code...:)
Check out TowerJ at www.towerj.com. They've got a link to the latest Volanomark (?) Java benchmarks that show natively-compiled TowerJ on Linux is the fastest deployment platform for Java. Works on many other platforms as well. As far as compatibility, dunno, I've never used it, but it has a great reputation among those who go for that sort of thing.
Note that it is very much a commercial product and rather pricey IMHO.
I've been using IBM's JDK1.1.8 for some time now and have found it's extremely stable and extremely good performance - not what you'd expect at all from something labeled "Alpha version" - it hasn't crashed at all under some pretty severe situations, even using native threads and the JIT.
The IBM JDK does need a kernel 2.2/glibc-2.1-based machine, but if you're "into" Java, you're going to want to be on those versions anyway for the improved native thread support. (read: "working native thread support.")
We'll have to see how things turn out in a few months regarding a Java2 JDK, but I'd put my money on IBM. Sun's good at talking the talk, but IBM has proved themselves to also be good at walking the walk. (And it seems like the poor Blackdown guys have just been getting the shaft...)
Well, sort of, I guess. In the sense that Linus is competing with Sun, Microsoft, HP, IBM and all the other OS manufacturers out there.
The XFree project's goal is to produce "a freely redistributable implementation of the X Window System that runs on UNIX(R) and UNIX-like operating systems (and OS/2)." Slamming them in an ad campaign is kind of a cheap shot -- they're volunteers producing a product because they think it's "The Right Thing To Do", not to compete in a commercial marketplace...
I think the point of the submission is that XiG is slamming a product that's provided gratis, free-of-charge, fo' no money, etc, and representing it like some third-rate software package when, for all experiences and reports, it's actually quite stable and useful.
And keep in mind, the XFree project has almost certainly been a driving force behind Linux' acceptance and popularity. Think about it: would as many people have been so likely to start using Linux on a regular basis if the only X server available was commercial and cost at least $100? I know I wouldn't have.
I wonder if XiG is worried that XFree 4.0 will come out and give them a real run for their money, for no money.
WhatsHappenin.com must not have had much happenin' so they had to drum up some news to get visitors to their site. I can guarantee they're going to get a good percentage of all the hits their site has gotten up until now just from this news story.
Anyone else getting more and more curious over what exactly SCO's Linux "strategy" is? I mean, one the one hand, they seem to take lots of opportunities to bad-mouth it to the public in general and their customers in particular, then about-face and apologise that they "didn't mean it like that." They'll make statements that they don't see a future in Linux and then turn around and invest in Linux-based companies.
I'm starting to wonder if SCO might be more of a "threat" to Linux than Sun. I really don't like Sun's attitude towards Linux and I know they're scared of it on the low end. (Not the E10K sized servers, but the Ultra 5, Ultra 10, and that range.) Sun seems to be doing a lot to sidetrack, derail, and otherwise just sort of take whatever momentum they can from the growing popularity of Linux with stuff like their SCSL and their so-called "Open Sourcing" of Solaris and the purchase and "release of source code" for Star Office.
However, I'm starting to believe that SCO might actually be taking a more discrete approach to derailing Linux since it competes directly on exactly the same platform and in the same market.
Perhaps SCO will get itself entrenched in several of the larger Linux companies, then in a few months or a few years, make some sort of announcement to the effect, "Well, we tried this Linux thing by investing in all these Linux companies, but, as the world's leading supplier of UNIX operating systems for the PC platform, we feel qualified in stating unequivocably that 'Linux isn't working.' Everyone go home and buy SCO from now on."
Not that I think it would have a whole lot of effect, but it would probably shake things up at least.
In any case, SCO is starting to worry and confuse me.
Slashdot Mirror
I know this is such a "niche" thing, but personally, I would *love* to have a CD of GIS data for my area that I could use along with a GPS and my laptop to track some of the data I "create" from my hobby as an amateur botanist. i.e. being able to do things like record GPS locations of plant ranges for certain species I've been able to find and recording and accurately mapping locations of sample collection sites and so forth. As it is, if I do record them, I have to wind up plotting them on a paper map of the "Rand McNally Road Atlas" type of thing. It would be nice to be able to regenerate new maps electronically any time I wanted.
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The main problem as I see it stems from the fact that most "older, more traditional" companies have not yet updated their contracts to reflect the fast-changing nature of the 'net. If the clause says something like "I will not compete in markets similar to the market this company operates in" that can be VAST if the company does something on the 'net, and most companies today at least have a 'net presence.
What if you've built an e-Commerce website for a car company and you've signed a non-compete agreement like this. Does that mean now you can't build an e-Commerce website for that electronics firm who would like to contract you? What's the marketplace, autos and electronics or e-Commerce and Web?
Another related problem comes from the sorts of "IP non-compete" clauses that has shown up in contracts I've read. The contract may say "I will not use knowledge acquired during the course of this project to assist other companies during similar projects."
That's understandable and even acceptable if you're doing genetic engineering where things you've learned on the job are legitimately unique and very likely can't be acquired elsewhere, but, again, what if you're building a website and during the term of the contract, say some new Java package that makes building servlets easier. Does that mean you are never allowed to use those new packages for other clients you may work for because you learned about them during the course of your building a website for the people who made you sign the contract?
Another scenario: What if you've used "Acmesoft sitebuilder" to build the site for Company A. Since you've signed this "IP non-compete" agreement, does that mean you can't use the skills with Acme Sitebuilder you've honed while building Company A's site to build more sites for other companies with Acme Sitebuilder?
With the speed at which technology advances in this industry and the amount of effort it takes for programmers and technicians and consultants to keep up with it, it's silly to expect that anything you might learn during the course of one job should not be applied to a subsequent job. In this industry you can't help but learn new stuff no matter what the job might be!
If nothing else, what you should learn from this sort of thing is: READ THOSE CONTRACTS CAREFULLY !
And don't just look for non-compete clauses! I had to refuse to put my name on a contract once because for whatever reason, everyone else involved in the process missed the clause that stated that any work I or anyone else in the company I represented produced would be wholly and solely owned by the company for whom we were contracting, even though I was the only person working on the contract!
Newcomers to contracting, naieve programmers and people who are simply too lazy to read their contracts carefully can get burned by any of this sort of thing. Having laws that make it illegal, or at least imply that they are unethical and unenforceable are nice, but ultimately it really falls onto the person signing the contract to make the decicion whether or not they can bide by the terms therein.
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I love all the links he's included in the text as well. It's not only long and well-thought-out but he even has more stuff to say about a lot of these topics!
I would like to know who holds copyright on this text (/., Bruce, Andover?) and if they would be willing to allow us to reproduce portions of this interview as long as we maintain the original source?
Specifically, I'd love to have Bruce's answer to Tet's question on privacy made up into a poster I could hang up above my computers and printed out in pamphlets I could just hand to people whenever I try to explain my views on privacy; Bruce just does it so much better than I've ever been able to and having a wonderfully detailed and well-argued statement like that might keep people from just seeing me as "one of those privacy kooks. He must have something to hide to be so pro-privacy. I bet he watches X-Files all the time and cheers for Mulder any time he proposes another government sponsored conspiracy theory." No, I just value my privacy and I'm more and more frightened every day at how industry and government continue to chip away at it and how the majority of the rest of the public just doesn't see a problem.
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(For those not familiar with Lovecraft's pantheon of Elder Gods, Yog-sothoth was one of the more powerful of the Elder and had many shapes in which he/it would appear.)
Although I personally haven't stuck to any specific grouping for machines on my home network. Although most come from some sort of literature or fiction, there's no set pattern: cydonia, binky, yog-sothoth, zorak, vargas.... If I try to keep in a particular "category" of naming, I always wind up running out of names.
I overwhelmingly agree that "real" names should be associated with computers rather than some sort of symbol. One of our clients decided to name all the machines in their office by what phone extension they were sitting next to. Needless to say that in the year or so I've been there, all machines have moved offices many times and new machines have replaced olf machines and I lose more hair and the B.P. goes up another ten points every time that happens. Can't convince them to change the naming scheme, though....
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You know, just in case they find something in it.
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If this "Mosaic" software asks questions like "Do you spend more than 15 minutes a day on the Internet?", "Do you use IRC, MUDs, or chat rooms on a daily basis?" and uses the answers to those questions to judge whether or not a kid could be potential "trouble", that's a Very Bad Thing.
However, I've heard a little bit about these sorts of software before and from everything I've heard, they're the end result of years and years of reasonably well-designed and well-executed research and instead they ask questions like "Do you express your anger or frustration by torturing or killing small animals?", "Have you ever been physically abused by parents or family members?", "Do you feel more comfortable expressing your anger and frustration with violent acts?" These are questions that might legitimately be used to determine whether or not someone might "need help."
Even so, I'm still not convinced of the scientific validity of these tests because anyone of average intelligence can pretty well skew the results of the test by guessing what sorts of answers the test "wants to hear" since they are invariably of the "answer on a scale of one to ten whether you agree with this statement, with one being completely no and ten being completely yes." The "scoring" on these tests are simply average scores for the various answers from control groups and psychotic mass murderers (or whatever) and your tendency towards either "normalcy" or "psychotic mass murder" is simply based on who's scores yours most resembles.
(I've been forced to take these sorts of "Personality Assessment Tests" by annoying employers and potential employers in the past and at the very get-go make sure I inform them that I don't believe they are valid tests of ethics, morals or personality and that I *will* "fail" it and then proceed to answer in the most outrageous way possible. Employers who know me well then ignore the test; those who don't and rely on the test to judge me I don't want to work for anyway.
Some good skeptical analysis on these sorts of tests and links to more of same can be found here.)
Further, there is still the troublesome point that these "survey" answers are going to go into some Permanent Record someplace, which just emphasizes the fact that I feel this is a horrible invasion of privacy to begin with.
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Magellan Overview
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Find here: ftp://vic.cc.purdue.edu/pub/tools/unix
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To paraphrase someone's tagline here, "The difference between theory and practice is that in theory, they are the same, in practice, they are very different."
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I've avoided Palms up 'till now because I just can't imagine that I could get more than a hundred dollars or so of use out of one. (I admit I'm very tempted by the Handspring however, mainly because of the price point.) I don't give a wet slap about color on it, but if I could pick a B&W version for about a hundred bucks because the colors models have taken the high end of the price range, I probably would.
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"Teacher, I couldn't finish my homework because the cat swallowed my computer."
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Now, compare to the ending in "Diamond Age" in which the last chapter reads like it came from a different book and all of a sudden the ending to "Snow Crash" is excellent. Unfortunately, the way he ended "Diamond Age" pretty much ruined what had been a very enjoyable book because the whole plot just went to pieces. "Snow Crash" wasn't like that IMHO - everything wrapped up, as the reviewer said, the pieces had all been in place for some time and he just tied them all up nicely.
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End-of-Thread
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Such as
Didn't think so...
Seems to me that multithreaded Java apps seem to scale pretty well just from throwing more and faster processors at them as long as you're actively using multiple threads, from a single-processor laptop for development to a dual-processor Linux box for testing to a multiprocessor Sun for deployment it's pretty linear.
-=-=-=-=-
I know there are some serious problems with native threads on anything less than kernel 2.2 and glibc 2.1.
-=-=-=-=-
Some of the things that I personally think make it ideal for server-side programming are: excellent database API (JDBC), native support for http and ftp xfers, multithreading, a very easy to use exception handling mechanism, and the object-oriented programming model can be mapped very well onto things like database and file objects. When you're not trying to do interactive graphical apps, speed is very good and only a few percent behind compiled apps with most things I've seen.
The cross-platform-ability also makes it easy to develop on Windows or Linux boxes, then take the same code and drop it on your Sun E10000 to deploy. You just have to make sure your Windows-based developers aren't using MS J++ and writing incompatible code...
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Note that it is very much a commercial product and rather pricey IMHO.
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The IBM JDK does need a kernel 2.2/glibc-2.1-based machine, but if you're "into" Java, you're going to want to be on those versions anyway for the improved native thread support. (read: "working native thread support.")
We'll have to see how things turn out in a few months regarding a Java2 JDK, but I'd put my money on IBM. Sun's good at talking the talk, but IBM has proved themselves to also be good at walking the walk. (And it seems like the poor Blackdown guys have just been getting the shaft...)
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But we all know that there is a very low correspondance between marketing and reality...
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The XFree project's goal is to produce "a freely redistributable implementation of the X Window System that runs on UNIX(R) and UNIX-like operating systems (and OS/2)." Slamming them in an ad campaign is kind of a cheap shot -- they're volunteers producing a product because they think it's "The Right Thing To Do", not to compete in a commercial marketplace...
I think the point of the submission is that XiG is slamming a product that's provided gratis, free-of-charge, fo' no money, etc, and representing it like some third-rate software package when, for all experiences and reports, it's actually quite stable and useful.
And keep in mind, the XFree project has almost certainly been a driving force behind Linux' acceptance and popularity. Think about it: would as many people have been so likely to start using Linux on a regular basis if the only X server available was commercial and cost at least $100? I know I wouldn't have.
I wonder if XiG is worried that XFree 4.0 will come out and give them a real run for their money, for no money.
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I'm starting to wonder if SCO might be more of a "threat" to Linux than Sun. I really don't like Sun's attitude towards Linux and I know they're scared of it on the low end. (Not the E10K sized servers, but the Ultra 5, Ultra 10, and that range.) Sun seems to be doing a lot to sidetrack, derail, and otherwise just sort of take whatever momentum they can from the growing popularity of Linux with stuff like their SCSL and their so-called "Open Sourcing" of Solaris and the purchase and "release of source code" for Star Office.
However, I'm starting to believe that SCO might actually be taking a more discrete approach to derailing Linux since it competes directly on exactly the same platform and in the same market.
Perhaps SCO will get itself entrenched in several of the larger Linux companies, then in a few months or a few years, make some sort of announcement to the effect, "Well, we tried this Linux thing by investing in all these Linux companies, but, as the world's leading supplier of UNIX operating systems for the PC platform, we feel qualified in stating unequivocably that 'Linux isn't working.' Everyone go home and buy SCO from now on."
Not that I think it would have a whole lot of effect, but it would probably shake things up at least.
In any case, SCO is starting to worry and confuse me.
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