If you really want your code to be free, abandon licenses altogether. All you're doing is increasing the probability that some lawyer will get a new Porsche. Instead, say that you're giving the code away, no restrictions, no rights reserved, no credit required, period — and then have the stones to stick to your word.
Trying to avoid legal entanglements by simply ignoring the fact that we actually have a legal system is terrible, terrible advice. No one cares about "your stones" - they want stronger guarantees than that.
If you want your software to remain legally protected and as free as possible for all types of use, use an MIT or BSD style permissive license. If you wish your software to remain open source only, use GPL. And like AC said, there's Creative Commons Zero for an unconditional giveaway. By not choosing a license, you're simply choosing legal ambiguity.
If VVC is controlled by the MPEG group, then why should we expect it to be any less of a licensing clusterfuck than H.265? That's the entire reason these companies are getting behind AV1, not some nefarious scheme to increase encoding costs - and I'm pretty sure you know that as well.
The fact that this was publicly announced just means it's a PR stunt by the Beijing Institute of Technology. If you think about it, all it says is "we've recruited our first class for a new four-year program that will likely be relevant in the future weapons development industry."
For many years, I didn't enjoy black coffee. But I was honest enough to call what I drank "liquid coffee candy". As I got older, I found that I enjoyed black coffee more. It allows you to enjoy more subtle flavors which cream, sugar, and flavorings cover up.
This minimalism is why I don't find modern Gnome usable without installing a bunch of tweak tools and add-ons that I shouldn't even need. Seriously, the cruisade to minimal'ize the Gnome environment has made it far more featureless than Windows or macOS to the point that it pisses me off.
The problem with minimalism is that no one can really disagree on what particular features are candidates for removal - except for the developers who simply make executive decisions, of course. It reminds me of a story/article I remember reading about some MS developers explaining why their company didn't release a simpler version of MS Word that cut out the 90% few people use. After all the "common wisdom" is that most of Word is simply bloat that's little used. Everyone who used it claims to only use about 10% of it's features.
Microsoft actually has a significant amount of metrics on what features people actually use in Word. As it turns out, beyond the core set of common features nearly everyone uses, it turns out that the bulk of the "unnecessary" features are used by a small percentage of people, but the distribution of who uses those features is spread out very broadly. Some people rely on mail-merge features, some require the review features, while others need support for more advanced page layout features. But they're typically not the same customers. So in reality, there's no mythical "90% of unneeded features" they can cut without making the software nearly useless to a very high percentage of their customers.
I think desktop UIs and layouts are probably somewhat similar, in that when removing some "little used" options, you're going to annoy a small percentage of people with each option you remove. No one uses ALL of those options, but many people probably used one or two of them.
At least for Facebook, one approach suggested is to force Facebook to split off their subsidiaries to create rivals and reduce the broad range of data they can collect. So that would mean re-establishing Instagram, WhatsApp, and other large brands as separate entities. It's not perfect, but it would break up the sheer scale they've achieved through those acquisitions.
I think the problem with FB is that the relative power and value between the parent company and those acquisitions you mentioned is so asymmetrical that it wouldn't have much effect. There's a reason FB acquired those companies and not the other way around. Google has the same issue. There are lots of companies you could split away, but most of them would probably die out without the revenue from search.
Breaking apart Amazon or Microsoft would be easier, because they both have more effectively diversified, and now have more than one cash cow.
One problem with breaking up Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc, is that often these companies have ONE service which dominates their revenue. It's not like the old Standard Oil or AT&T in which you can break them up into smaller regional interests which are roughly equivalent. In Google's case, there's no point in breaking up search and advertising, because search is what drives eyeballs, while advertising is what funds damn near everything else they do.
And how the heck would you split up Facebook or Twitter? Nothing they do is really all that significant outside of their ONE primary product. How would breaking up Facebook even work? Facebook1 and Facebook2? Randomly split up accounts? Duplicate them and make people choose? You can't really make a case for splitting apart their advertising and social media platform, as one drives the revenue for the other. And everything else they do is a sideshow by comparison. Even moreso with Twitter.
To say nothing of the risks of the finished product not being suitable for purpose.
Like perhaps an "autopilot" feature that doesn't seem to always work as it should in avoiding obvious obstacles.
I remain in the "mixed feelings" category. Musk has led his companies to do some pretty amazing things, but he's clearly not the most stable of personalities, and not a person I'd likely enjoy working under.
This is why I've never understood some of the arguments by some people against permissive open source licenses, such as "it could be forked and kept closed" by some corporation. If an organization uses a piece of open source software, it's actually in their own interest to push fixes and improvements back to the mainline, because otherwise, maintenance becomes a pain, as they've now taken on responsibility for maintaining an entire fork on their own.
Well, some childish folks do, I suppose, but that's nothing new or unique with polarizing figures. Some people like me simply disagree with his fundamental philosophy, while still respecting his opinion and what he and his contemporaries did for the state of computing decades ago. It seems like these days he's more advocate and software philosopher. I think he's definitely worth listening to, even if you don't necessarily agree with all the points he makes, because if nothing else, what he says often makes you think about how things are and how they could be better.
One problem is that his philosophy simply brushes aside any arguments one might have that inconveniently points out situations in which free software is not a practical solution. Let's take videogames, for example. No one has really figured out how to combine a popular consumer-goods-type product like that with the philosophy of free software. The common advice when asked how to make a living writing free software of "provide a service for hire to support your product" only works with some very narrow types of products, and never really with consumer-level products. So, essentially, videogames simply don't exist in Stallman's universe.
I do consider myself a proponent of "open source", but not necessarily "free software" as defined by Stallman. I use the MIT license, not GPL, because I feel that works better for the open source libraries I've released. I don't mind if people use them in open or closed source products. That's none of my concern. But I've made a contribution that other people can make use of if they choose.
After all, the person is dead and the government has better uses for the money than giving it needlessly to the spouse, children or other family members who didnt make it.
Note the presumption here that it's the government's money to give in the first place. And nevermind that the now-deceased has already paid taxes on those earnings or properties over his or her entire working life.
There are just so many things that are morally wrong with this argument. You seriously just argued that a widow should not inherit his or her spouses assets? What about children who's parents die young? Kick the kids into the streets, because screw you kiddies, the government deserves whatever savings or property they have? Note that this would have little effect on the rich, who can afford all the lawyers and accountants in the world to set up legal mechanisms that would avoid these problems. But it would definitely cause problems lower and middle class family wealth, and make it all that much harder to climb the economic ladder over successive generations.
Beware unintentional consequences to simplistic feel-good solutions. This is the same shallow thinking which launched the luxury tax in the early 90's, then saw it repealed as the disastrous unintended consequences came to light.
SourceSafe suffers random database corruption. They might not be able to move off it.
MS never used SourceSafe internally. They used an internal licensed fork of Perforce.
They'd never cope with Git, totally alien to their mindset.
They've been using git to manage Windows for over a year now, as well as many other projects, and they've contributed back some of the work they did to support extremely large repositories (~300GB). git support is even directly integrated into Visual Studio now.
I agree, cars are so much safer its not even funny. People under 40 have no idea how much the industry has improved in safety, mileage, HP and comfort.
I had no idea cars have more hit points than they used to. But I've definitely seen improved reliability. I seem to remember when cars used to be nearly worthless at 100K miles. It's pretty much expected they'll last that long these days, plus quite a bit longer. And they spend far less time in the shop being tweaked and tuned than I remember as a kid. Granted, I'm a data point of one, but from what I hear, that's the general experience as well. On occasion people get stuck with a lemon, but that's always been the case.
Yep, this has been my experience as well. It's not systemic across the industry, but varies greatly from company to company.
I've been in the videogame industry for quite a while, and have worked at a number of videogame companies. The best companies I've worked for had very good work-life balance, and actively discouraged crunching. They wanted their employees to be happy and productive over the long haul, not to burn out and leave. The companies who tried to push employees into working longer... well, I found better jobs, simple as that. I think the younger the workers, the easier it is to exploit them, because they don't have as much leverage or confidence in their ability to get a different job. People who have a lot of shipped titles and industry experience are a bit harder to push around, I guess.
It's frustrating to hear about people still being taken advantage of, because I really do enjoy the industry I'm in, and feel lucky to be making a good living doing what I love. Not too many people can really say that. I'm hopeful that more employers eventually realize that mistreating your employees is a terrible long-term way to do business, as you'll eventually lose your best people after they get burnt out, and take all their hard-won real-world experience with them.
Everyone is making it sound like PHP 5.6 is some ancient piece of cruft that everyone has had PLENTY of time to upgrade. In fact, after looking it up, it's only about four years old. That surprised me. It's at end of life already?
Since when is "move fast and break things" a winning strategy for a server-side scripting language which runs much of the world's internet infrastructure? Shouldn't the "deadline will not be extended" attitude perhaps be re-evaluated in light of reality?
We've seen this happen before, of course. Language developers often seem to underestimate how long it takes infrastructure to migrate to newer, incompatible versions of a language. For instance, the Python 2.7/3.x split, which occurred a *decade* ago, is still causing headaches on occasion. At least the Python devs had the good sense to support 2.7 until 2020. I'm going to bet that another four years from now, you'll still see a significant number of sites still using PHP 5.6, official support or not.
Everything you mentioned, I'd answer "yes... with enough time and refinement" And I should point out, humans are none too adept at picking up on all those things you mentioned either, as well as the general problem with inattention, distractions, sleepiness, misjudgments, and the fact that we can only point our eyes in one direction at a time.
I think for the first generation of autonomous cars, the vehicle will only be able to drive itself in routine conditions. When you need to navigate a parking garage or drive in poor conditions, the human still will need to take over. But "typical traffic" accounts for the vast majority of travel time, meaning the autonomous driving functionality is still very useful. Additionally, those automated systems can help to augment vehicle safety even when driving "manually".
I think the most compelling argument for automated cars, though, is that unlike with human drivers, improvements in autonomous driving algorithms will be a collective learning experience. That is, every situation and corner case experienced (and yes, there will still be accidents) will be a way to improve every other car from that same manufacturer - and even others, if they're smart about it. Eventually, cars are going to become much better at driving than humans, even when handling rare conditions and corner cases, because of the wealth of collective experiences to learn from.
It took me a few moments to recognize it as well. "If This Then That". The acronym is, I believe, based on a site of the same name that monitors other websites, and allows them to trigger changes in your own online "apps". It's essentially a shorthand for saying "user programmable triggers hosted in the cloud".
20 years ago the internet was a valuable resource. Now it's pretty much worthless, a cesspool of privacy invasion, spying, advertizing and battleground for the so-called "culture war".
It's not about reducing inequality, it's about getting fresh meat into the machine to be exploited for everything they are worth...
It's still incredibly valuable to me. Any question I have about programming or most other tech questions, even incredibly obscure topics, are more than likely to be found and answered. I stream my entertainment on-demand these days, both video and videogames. All shopping is done online, except for grocery shopping, and that may even change someday too. Instant communication with anyone in the world at any time. And those are just my everyday benefits.
Am I being exploited here? Certainly I have privacy concerns as well, but damn... what a jewel of the modern age we've received in return. Try looking at it with fresh eyes, and maybe you won't sound like such a bitter old man yelling at the cloud.
Your version of freedom is giving people the right to take away other people's rights by locking down code.
I've never understood this logic. Nothing from the original code is lost or diminished in any way. It's guaranteed to remain free and open in perpetuity.
I've written a couple of open source libraries, and I use the MIT license. I don't see how my code is diminished by someone using it in their closed source projects. On the contrary, the more people use it, the more bugs and usability issues are found and fixed, and everyone benefits. If someone makes improvements, it's in their own best interest to get those improvements into the mainline, otherwise the code diverges and they can't reap the benefit of future use. I feel any benefits lost to enforcing open-source-only rules are more than made up for by having a permissive license. Some of the most popular 3rd party libraries in the world benefit from this philosophy, like zlib and SQLite.
I don't necessarily think GPL is bad or wrong, but it seems to have different priorities than permissive licenses. I feel like it's primary aim is to promote the growth of open source, whereas the other licenses only seek to preserve themselves as open source.
I think you're mixing up cause and effect here. It's not that the computer industry doesn't *want* to radically improve hardware speeds. It's becoming increasingly difficult and expensive to do so. We're no longer on track with Moore's law due to physics, not from a lack of effort.
Slashdot Mirror
And it isn't spam unless it's a can of meat. It's unsolicited e-mail. Because words can never mean more than one thing.
Yes, but how boring would that be?
Only to people who don't really care about chess, I'd think.
If you really want your code to be free, abandon licenses altogether. All you're doing is increasing the probability that some lawyer will get a new Porsche. Instead, say that you're giving the code away, no restrictions, no rights reserved, no credit required, period — and then have the stones to stick to your word.
Trying to avoid legal entanglements by simply ignoring the fact that we actually have a legal system is terrible, terrible advice. No one cares about "your stones" - they want stronger guarantees than that.
If you want your software to remain legally protected and as free as possible for all types of use, use an MIT or BSD style permissive license. If you wish your software to remain open source only, use GPL. And like AC said, there's Creative Commons Zero for an unconditional giveaway. By not choosing a license, you're simply choosing legal ambiguity.
If VVC is controlled by the MPEG group, then why should we expect it to be any less of a licensing clusterfuck than H.265? That's the entire reason these companies are getting behind AV1, not some nefarious scheme to increase encoding costs - and I'm pretty sure you know that as well.
You know, lots of things can occur outside the bounds of decent and proper behavior at a workplace which don't happen to be a crime.
The fact that this was publicly announced just means it's a PR stunt by the Beijing Institute of Technology. If you think about it, all it says is "we've recruited our first class for a new four-year program that will likely be relevant in the future weapons development industry."
For many years, I didn't enjoy black coffee. But I was honest enough to call what I drank "liquid coffee candy". As I got older, I found that I enjoyed black coffee more. It allows you to enjoy more subtle flavors which cream, sugar, and flavorings cover up.
This minimalism is why I don't find modern Gnome usable without installing a bunch of tweak tools and add-ons that I shouldn't even need. Seriously, the cruisade to minimal'ize the Gnome environment has made it far more featureless than Windows or macOS to the point that it pisses me off.
The problem with minimalism is that no one can really disagree on what particular features are candidates for removal - except for the developers who simply make executive decisions, of course. It reminds me of a story/article I remember reading about some MS developers explaining why their company didn't release a simpler version of MS Word that cut out the 90% few people use. After all the "common wisdom" is that most of Word is simply bloat that's little used. Everyone who used it claims to only use about 10% of it's features.
Microsoft actually has a significant amount of metrics on what features people actually use in Word. As it turns out, beyond the core set of common features nearly everyone uses, it turns out that the bulk of the "unnecessary" features are used by a small percentage of people, but the distribution of who uses those features is spread out very broadly. Some people rely on mail-merge features, some require the review features, while others need support for more advanced page layout features. But they're typically not the same customers. So in reality, there's no mythical "90% of unneeded features" they can cut without making the software nearly useless to a very high percentage of their customers.
I think desktop UIs and layouts are probably somewhat similar, in that when removing some "little used" options, you're going to annoy a small percentage of people with each option you remove. No one uses ALL of those options, but many people probably used one or two of them.
At least for Facebook, one approach suggested is to force Facebook to split off their subsidiaries to create rivals and reduce the broad range of data they can collect. So that would mean re-establishing Instagram, WhatsApp, and other large brands as separate entities. It's not perfect, but it would break up the sheer scale they've achieved through those acquisitions.
I think the problem with FB is that the relative power and value between the parent company and those acquisitions you mentioned is so asymmetrical that it wouldn't have much effect. There's a reason FB acquired those companies and not the other way around. Google has the same issue. There are lots of companies you could split away, but most of them would probably die out without the revenue from search.
Breaking apart Amazon or Microsoft would be easier, because they both have more effectively diversified, and now have more than one cash cow.
One problem with breaking up Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc, is that often these companies have ONE service which dominates their revenue. It's not like the old Standard Oil or AT&T in which you can break them up into smaller regional interests which are roughly equivalent. In Google's case, there's no point in breaking up search and advertising, because search is what drives eyeballs, while advertising is what funds damn near everything else they do.
And how the heck would you split up Facebook or Twitter? Nothing they do is really all that significant outside of their ONE primary product. How would breaking up Facebook even work? Facebook1 and Facebook2? Randomly split up accounts? Duplicate them and make people choose? You can't really make a case for splitting apart their advertising and social media platform, as one drives the revenue for the other. And everything else they do is a sideshow by comparison. Even moreso with Twitter.
To say nothing of the risks of the finished product not being suitable for purpose.
Like perhaps an "autopilot" feature that doesn't seem to always work as it should in avoiding obvious obstacles.
I remain in the "mixed feelings" category. Musk has led his companies to do some pretty amazing things, but he's clearly not the most stable of personalities, and not a person I'd likely enjoy working under.
This is why I've never understood some of the arguments by some people against permissive open source licenses, such as "it could be forked and kept closed" by some corporation. If an organization uses a piece of open source software, it's actually in their own interest to push fixes and improvements back to the mainline, because otherwise, maintenance becomes a pain, as they've now taken on responsibility for maintaining an entire fork on their own.
Well, some childish folks do, I suppose, but that's nothing new or unique with polarizing figures. Some people like me simply disagree with his fundamental philosophy, while still respecting his opinion and what he and his contemporaries did for the state of computing decades ago. It seems like these days he's more advocate and software philosopher. I think he's definitely worth listening to, even if you don't necessarily agree with all the points he makes, because if nothing else, what he says often makes you think about how things are and how they could be better.
One problem is that his philosophy simply brushes aside any arguments one might have that inconveniently points out situations in which free software is not a practical solution. Let's take videogames, for example. No one has really figured out how to combine a popular consumer-goods-type product like that with the philosophy of free software. The common advice when asked how to make a living writing free software of "provide a service for hire to support your product" only works with some very narrow types of products, and never really with consumer-level products. So, essentially, videogames simply don't exist in Stallman's universe.
I do consider myself a proponent of "open source", but not necessarily "free software" as defined by Stallman. I use the MIT license, not GPL, because I feel that works better for the open source libraries I've released. I don't mind if people use them in open or closed source products. That's none of my concern. But I've made a contribution that other people can make use of if they choose.
Good article, btw.
Why not just set the inheritance tax at 100%?
After all, the person is dead and the government has better uses for the money than giving it needlessly to the spouse, children or other family members who didnt make it.
Note the presumption here that it's the government's money to give in the first place. And nevermind that the now-deceased has already paid taxes on those earnings or properties over his or her entire working life.
There are just so many things that are morally wrong with this argument. You seriously just argued that a widow should not inherit his or her spouses assets? What about children who's parents die young? Kick the kids into the streets, because screw you kiddies, the government deserves whatever savings or property they have? Note that this would have little effect on the rich, who can afford all the lawyers and accountants in the world to set up legal mechanisms that would avoid these problems. But it would definitely cause problems lower and middle class family wealth, and make it all that much harder to climb the economic ladder over successive generations.
Beware unintentional consequences to simplistic feel-good solutions. This is the same shallow thinking which launched the luxury tax in the early 90's, then saw it repealed as the disastrous unintended consequences came to light.
SourceSafe suffers random database corruption. They might not be able to move off it.
MS never used SourceSafe internally. They used an internal licensed fork of Perforce.
They'd never cope with Git, totally alien to their mindset.
They've been using git to manage Windows for over a year now, as well as many other projects, and they've contributed back some of the work they did to support extremely large repositories (~300GB). git support is even directly integrated into Visual Studio now.
I agree, cars are so much safer its not even funny. People under 40 have no idea how much the industry has improved in safety, mileage, HP and comfort.
I had no idea cars have more hit points than they used to. But I've definitely seen improved reliability. I seem to remember when cars used to be nearly worthless at 100K miles. It's pretty much expected they'll last that long these days, plus quite a bit longer. And they spend far less time in the shop being tweaked and tuned than I remember as a kid. Granted, I'm a data point of one, but from what I hear, that's the general experience as well. On occasion people get stuck with a lemon, but that's always been the case.
Yep, this has been my experience as well. It's not systemic across the industry, but varies greatly from company to company.
I've been in the videogame industry for quite a while, and have worked at a number of videogame companies. The best companies I've worked for had very good work-life balance, and actively discouraged crunching. They wanted their employees to be happy and productive over the long haul, not to burn out and leave. The companies who tried to push employees into working longer... well, I found better jobs, simple as that. I think the younger the workers, the easier it is to exploit them, because they don't have as much leverage or confidence in their ability to get a different job. People who have a lot of shipped titles and industry experience are a bit harder to push around, I guess.
It's frustrating to hear about people still being taken advantage of, because I really do enjoy the industry I'm in, and feel lucky to be making a good living doing what I love. Not too many people can really say that. I'm hopeful that more employers eventually realize that mistreating your employees is a terrible long-term way to do business, as you'll eventually lose your best people after they get burnt out, and take all their hard-won real-world experience with them.
Everyone is making it sound like PHP 5.6 is some ancient piece of cruft that everyone has had PLENTY of time to upgrade. In fact, after looking it up, it's only about four years old. That surprised me. It's at end of life already?
Since when is "move fast and break things" a winning strategy for a server-side scripting language which runs much of the world's internet infrastructure? Shouldn't the "deadline will not be extended" attitude perhaps be re-evaluated in light of reality?
We've seen this happen before, of course. Language developers often seem to underestimate how long it takes infrastructure to migrate to newer, incompatible versions of a language. For instance, the Python 2.7/3.x split, which occurred a *decade* ago, is still causing headaches on occasion. At least the Python devs had the good sense to support 2.7 until 2020. I'm going to bet that another four years from now, you'll still see a significant number of sites still using PHP 5.6, official support or not.
Everything you mentioned, I'd answer "yes... with enough time and refinement" And I should point out, humans are none too adept at picking up on all those things you mentioned either, as well as the general problem with inattention, distractions, sleepiness, misjudgments, and the fact that we can only point our eyes in one direction at a time.
I think for the first generation of autonomous cars, the vehicle will only be able to drive itself in routine conditions. When you need to navigate a parking garage or drive in poor conditions, the human still will need to take over. But "typical traffic" accounts for the vast majority of travel time, meaning the autonomous driving functionality is still very useful. Additionally, those automated systems can help to augment vehicle safety even when driving "manually".
I think the most compelling argument for automated cars, though, is that unlike with human drivers, improvements in autonomous driving algorithms will be a collective learning experience. That is, every situation and corner case experienced (and yes, there will still be accidents) will be a way to improve every other car from that same manufacturer - and even others, if they're smart about it. Eventually, cars are going to become much better at driving than humans, even when handling rare conditions and corner cases, because of the wealth of collective experiences to learn from.
You should, if you dont you are considered more jr as a dev, or at least that has been th case in most of my roles since its release.
Not every dev does web programming, you sanctimonious ass.
It took me a few moments to recognize it as well. "If This Then That". The acronym is, I believe, based on a site of the same name that monitors other websites, and allows them to trigger changes in your own online "apps". It's essentially a shorthand for saying "user programmable triggers hosted in the cloud".
20 years ago the internet was a valuable resource. Now it's pretty much worthless, a cesspool of privacy invasion, spying, advertizing and battleground for the so-called "culture war".
It's not about reducing inequality, it's about getting fresh meat into the machine to be exploited for everything they are worth...
It's still incredibly valuable to me. Any question I have about programming or most other tech questions, even incredibly obscure topics, are more than likely to be found and answered. I stream my entertainment on-demand these days, both video and videogames. All shopping is done online, except for grocery shopping, and that may even change someday too. Instant communication with anyone in the world at any time. And those are just my everyday benefits.
Am I being exploited here? Certainly I have privacy concerns as well, but damn... what a jewel of the modern age we've received in return. Try looking at it with fresh eyes, and maybe you won't sound like such a bitter old man yelling at the cloud.
Your version of freedom is giving people the right to take away other people's rights by locking down code.
I've never understood this logic. Nothing from the original code is lost or diminished in any way. It's guaranteed to remain free and open in perpetuity.
I've written a couple of open source libraries, and I use the MIT license. I don't see how my code is diminished by someone using it in their closed source projects. On the contrary, the more people use it, the more bugs and usability issues are found and fixed, and everyone benefits. If someone makes improvements, it's in their own best interest to get those improvements into the mainline, otherwise the code diverges and they can't reap the benefit of future use. I feel any benefits lost to enforcing open-source-only rules are more than made up for by having a permissive license. Some of the most popular 3rd party libraries in the world benefit from this philosophy, like zlib and SQLite.
I don't necessarily think GPL is bad or wrong, but it seems to have different priorities than permissive licenses. I feel like it's primary aim is to promote the growth of open source, whereas the other licenses only seek to preserve themselves as open source.
I think you're mixing up cause and effect here. It's not that the computer industry doesn't *want* to radically improve hardware speeds. It's becoming increasingly difficult and expensive to do so. We're no longer on track with Moore's law due to physics, not from a lack of effort.
Oh the humanities!