The minor rants thread.



  • @Yamikuronue said in The minor rants thread.:

    Bullets are basically disposable.

    It is, indeed, quite difficult to use them more than once.



  • True.

    What? I used to sell them.

    We would sell some models over and over again to the same customers, because they were good vibes but would burn out after a few months. I think most of the money my father made in that less-than-successful venture came from a single model, the California Exotics Whisper Heated Micro-Bullet, because while it was surprisingly powerful for its size (the bullet itself was only about 1mm in diameter by 1 cm long, with about half of that being just from the latex cladding, and was attached to the battery pack/controller by a wire), the motor usually would burn out long before they would need to change the batteries.


  • FoxDev

    @ScholRLEA said in The minor rants thread.:

    True.

    What? I used to sell them.

    We would sell some models over and over again to the same customers, because they were good vibes but would burn out after a few months. I think most of the money my father made in that less-than-successful venture came from a single model, the California Exotics Whisper Heated Micro-Bullet, because while it was surprisingly powerful for its size (the bullet itself was only about 1mm in diameter by 1 cm long, with about half of that being just from the latex cladding, and was attached to the battery pack/controller by a wire), the motor usually would burn out long before they would need to change the batteries.

    you have my full and undivided attention.



  • Well, you might want to look into that, then. They are pretty easy to get, and needless to say, very popular.

    And not just for women - it apparently can serve as a cheap alternative to a WeVibe, if both partners don't mind the wire dangling out like a tampon string. My father would always mention how good it was for that in his sales pitch.

    Oh, and it has other colors than pink, lavender being the most popular IME.



  • @RaceProUK, not so much a rant as a question: who else is on the list? I'm guessing Sonic is likely to be at or near #1, and that there is at least one from Redwall, but I'm not sure who else would be on it. I would think maybe Hedge, except he's only part hedgehog (OK, so he can become all hedgehog when he chooses to, but most of the time he just a really buff guy with the kind of hair spikes that Vegeta would envy, and owls circling over him trying to get him to read more). Not clue beyond that.


  • I survived the hour long Uno hand


  • FoxDev

    @ScholRLEA Oh, you're talking about my sig? You should know that number keeps changing…




  • FoxDev

    @anonymous234 orijanil caracta donut steel


  • BINNED

    @Yamikuronue
    At first glans these two came ... euh ... mixed together in my mind

    0_1483778850674_upload-3f2271dc-dc95-43cf-b285-bdd0ad894e3b


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  • @Lorne-Kates said in The minor rants thread.:

    @Dreikin said in The minor rants thread.:

    @Jaloopa said in The minor rants thread.:

    @asdf said in The minor rants thread.:

    programming projects

    The linux way would be to call that prj

    Nah, it'd be called src.

    It's be called something more esoteric and indecipherable along the lines of etc.

    Or they'll be douchtards and name in bin for binary but pronounce it "bin" like "pin" instead of like "pine" which is what BINE-ary sounds like.

    It's a bin full of binaries!

    In other news, I have a char-broiled character array.


  • FoxDev

    Fun with data types:

    float parade;
    double shot;
    decimal point;
    short arse;
    long story;
    char coal;
    string cheese;
    

  • kills Dumbledore

    @RaceProUK

    var up = new Exception();
    throw up;
    

  • FoxDev

    @Jaloopa said in The minor rants thread.:

    @RaceProUK

    var up = new Exception();
    throw up;
    
    var down = new Exception();
    throw down;
    

    also works 🙂
    Also

    var away = new Exception();
    throw away;
    


  • @RaceProUK Not tried it but:

    var toss = throw;
    var dwarf = new Exception();
    toss dwarf;
    

    If it doesn't work then Gimli was right all along.


  • FoxDev

    @Rhywden It won't work in C#, as you can't assign a keyword to a variable. But through macros, you could do something like that in C++.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @RaceProUK said in The minor rants thread.:

    you can't assign a keyword to a variable

    :(



  • Status: The inept fuckers in charge of our IT have managed to throw a classic curveball to my colleagues' and my plans.

    So, we have a bunch of Surface 3 Pro tablets and recently discovered that some of them actually do have this tiny firmware problem where the charge level is reported incorrectly, leading to emergency shutdowns (as in: They power down instantly). Which is not great when you couple that behaviour with our configuration of "Forget everything after shutdown." But, and this is important, they still work fine as long as you hook them up to their power supply.

    But since I don't have admin rights on those tablets and while their configuration is managed centrally (which definitely makes sense), they're not managed by Microsoft tools but some kind of homegrown stuff where you have to create a new configuration and image for every single combination of hardware.

    This approach bit them into the ass already because our school has wildly different hardware configurations because not even the PCs in one classroom may be from the same batch - some have ATI, some nVidia and others are on Intel display drivers, to name just one example. I'm also not sure why they even have to do that because last time I installed a new motherboard, Windows 10 didn't even blink.

    But I digress.

    Anyway, I have already researched the issue, identified the batch of drivers which should fix the issue and gave them all the info they need. They only need to install the update, confirm that it's working on the Surface I left them for just that purpose and then distribute the patch through their system because that's what we have that central distribution system for in the first place.

    Today, mid-lesson, it's knocking on the door and one of my science colleagues steps in: "Say, why aren't the Surfaces working anymore?"

    From what I can tell, the boot loader has left the image on all Surfaces in an unusable state. It boots up this bootloader, then (sometimes!) connects to the DHCP via wireless and then tells me to choose from a list of nodes - only that said node list is empty.

    Other assorted stuff: They have a ticket system which is on HTTPS but also a non-functional landing page under the same domain and URI as the ticket system. Which means that I regularly have to type in the https:// manually because they obviously never heard of redirects.

    Pet peeve: They have a client through which you login and which then connects all the network drives and stuff. This client is able to send Windows 10 notifications in the notification center. And yet the UI is straight from Windows 95 while the login form's <TextBox />s promptly do not listen to <KeyDown>Enter which means that you either have to press Tab to move to the OK-Button and then Enter, or you have to click on the OK-button.

    The big "surveillance and control" client is chock-full of ill-conceived icons where you always have to wait for the tooltips to figure out what exactly they're meant to be. There's also an "Exam-Mode" which is supposed to lock down the pupils' PCs down to a teacher-approved list of applications. It's just a bit problematic if said "Exam-Mode" only engages a full 15 minutes after you have clicked on the button (at which point you don't even expect the damn thing anymore).
    Also, if you accidentally close the big client you better reboot the PC.

    Oh, and the best thing: When you want to logout out of the client, you right-click the icon in the taskbar and select "Logout" which makes sense so far.
    You're then presented with another Windows95-era window which sports a single Checkbox labeled "Logout". Genius.



  • @Rhywden Small follow-up:

    So, turns out that, according to their statements in the ticket system, the Surfaces have to be connected to the server at least once every 90 days (was a bit of news to me). I took that to mean that they have to be connected via LAN because they were definitely still working last week, albeit over WiFi.

    Not a problem, though, that's what we bought the USB-to-LAN-adapters for. 25 of them, one for each Surface, because they were not able to figure out how to get the whole thing working with, say, 4 shared adapters.

    I thusly took a random Surface, connected it to the LAN through a definitely working port and got ... nothing. Same error as before - DHCP timeouts, followed by an empty node list. Tried out several Surfaces, several ports in different buildings, no luck.

    I then took the one Surface I gave them to install the updates on, which they supposedly did last week. And, as they have to connect that Surface with a LAN adapter to install the updates, it should be working, right? After all, that one definitely had to be connected to the server in order to update the image, right?

    Same error. Good job, guys.

    In retrospective, I'd like to have the old system back: No centralized image but at least I had local admin and could install and fix stuff on the fly.



  • @Rhywden And in a twist, surprising exactly noone, the software they installed turns out to be even shittier than I first imagined.

    It's a prime example for why some developers shouldn't be let near a UI even if the world was coming to an end otherwise.

    So, for example, one of the icons is supposed to deal with exams. You left-click on that and you get three options in a dropdown menu: "Prepare an exam", "End Exam" and "Something I forgot and has nothing to do with exams."

    So, you click on "Prepare exam" and nothing happens. All the options on the dropdown are now greyed out. According to the manual, this should create a dialog box "Do you want to start the exam?" which makes sense because "Start" and "Prepare" amount to the same thing. /s

    Anyway, thus I thought: "Well, maybe there's something else to be done first?" and remembered that there was this option to "Put files into the exam folder". That's under the icon which is supposed to mean: "Send files" (instead of putting that under the exam icon or, novel idea! putting it into both icons...)

    So, I click on that icon. Nothing happens. I click all the other icons. Nothing happens, except for the exam icon which yields the disabled dropdown. Then I right-click on the send files icon and get a drop-down.
    So I use that one to send files to the exam folder and get ... nothing. Hoooray for no status messages at all.

    Oh, and by the way: You're supposed to be able to send files to that exam folder before the exam starts. Only, the option to do so is greyed out unless you click on "Prepare exam". Which starts the exam as I detailed above.

    At that point I give up.

    Turns out that my colleague had a bit more luck, for him the exam mode did actually activate. However, upon sending the files he wasn't able to figure out where exactly on the pupils' PCs they were ending up.
    Also, the exam mode sometimes only activated after 15 minutes.

    Tomorrow I'm supposed to teach my colleagues on how to use this POS. My lecture will contain largely of: "Hell if I know!" and "Here's how you work around that one thing."



  • @Rhywden Oh, and before I forget: The option to change a pupil's password is hidden inside the Settings menu (with the masterfully crafted password of "master") where you can also irrevocably bork the application's settings. The Settings menu also has a "Log" page where I haven't found out yet what exactly it is that it's supposed to be logging - some of the entries simply don't make sense as they're stuff like "User XYZ logged in at the opposite end of the school". With no timestamp, mind.



  • So I've had to order the last upgrade for my current workstation PC I built in 2014. It will be up to 32gb of ram and hopefully that will be enough for the next few years before the next build.

    SQL Server 2016 Express seems to be using about 4gb of ram and I am going to repurpose two lower end workstation backups (Core Quad machines from the last decade with 8gb of ram each) as server machine with WOL enabled so my electric is caned. VS 2015, Sublime text with some plugins and running a node watch instance seems to take another 8-10gb somehow. CPU usage is just maxing out 2 of the 8 real cores I have. CPU bottle neck isn't happening (yet).

    I had to pay over £130 (for the ram) in total because I had to order matching pairs (to the pairs I had already installed) the only place was CCL Online which aren't the best in terms of price.

    I look forward to the inevitable bios update, removing and replacing components until something boots and other bullshit when I finally upgrade everything.


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @lucas1 said in The minor rants thread.:

    SQL Server 2016 Express seems to be using about 4gb of ram

    Oh, be watchful, it will actually use more IIRC if you don't tell it not to. Microsoft's SQL Servers tend to gobble RAM if given the chance....



  • I hate how ridiculously buggy all DirectX and OpenGL games are.

    I feel like no one ever mentions this problem despite it being so prevalent. Check the forum for any 3D game, literally any 3D game, old or new, you'll find dozens if not hundreds of people complaining about weird bugs: missing textures, input problems, black screens, crashes, anything you can think of. Check any game developer forum, you'll find they have to add like 200 workarounds for graphics card bugs.

    Or when browsers started having 3D acceleration, they all had to resort to a tiny whitelist of approved graphics cards. And I remember seeing (I can't find it now) a report from Microsoft, back in the Vista days, saying that graphics card drivers were responsible for >50% of all Windows crashes.

    Why can't the damn stuff just work? Are 3D APIs inherently difficult? I think the problem is more with Nvidia and AMD not giving a fuck about following standards (they actually brag about writing game-specific patches in their drivers), and other people not forcing them to do so. Plus the standards themselves might be too flexible or poorly designed (I admit I don't know enough about them to say).

    And they are all so inflexible, especially the older ones. They will only run at the resolutions they allow you, they always want exclusive mode, no remapping controls, no alt-tabbing allowed, you will watch our cutscenes and you will like it.

    For example, I'm trying to play Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (released in 2003). Problems found:

    1. The game runs only in full screen, exclusive mode. This means a 2 second pause every time you alt-tab in or out, and the other maximized windows get smushed down to the game's size every time you do so. And I should be thankful it even lets me alt-tab since the manual says it's not supported.
      I understand why that existed back in 2003, but nowadays I would expect Windows to just emulate it somehow, and redirect the graphics to a virtual surface like the rest of programs. Of course there's probably some stuff in DirectX 9 that makes this very difficult, because who would ever design an API with future technology improvements in mind.

    2. The game won't run at the screen's native resolution. Because of course, like all games, it only supports 5 different resolutions, none of which are widescreen.

    3. Mouse lag. I've tried it in two computers, on one it's extremely noticeable, on the other one it's mild enough to play. Seems to be proportional to the screen resolution, it disappears completely if I set it to 800x600.

    Still a huge success that I can play it at all, of course.


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election

    @anonymous234 said in The minor rants thread.:

    I hate how ridiculously buggy all DirectX and OpenGL games are.

    I feel like no one ever mentions this problem despite it being so prevalent. Check the forum for any 3D game, literally any 3D game, old or new, you'll find dozens if not hundreds of people complaining about weird bugs: missing textures, input problems, black screens, crashes, anything you can think of. Check any game developer forum, you'll find they have to add like 200 workarounds for graphics card bugs.

    Or when browsers started having 3D acceleration, they all had to resort to a tiny whitelist of approved graphics cards. And I remember seeing (I can't find it now) a report from Microsoft, back in the Vista days, saying that graphics card drivers were responsible for >50% of all Windows crashes.

    Why can't the damn stuff just work? Are 3D APIs inherently difficult? I think the problem is more with Nvidia and AMD not giving a fuck about following standards (they actually brag about writing game-specific patches in their drivers), and other people not forcing them to do so. Plus the standards themselves might be too flexible or poorly designed (I admit I don't know enough about them to say).

    Ars Technica, 2012:

    it sometimes seems like AMD and NVIDIA are competing to see who can make the worst drivers


    And they are all so inflexible, especially the older ones. They will only run at the resolutions they allow you, they always want exclusive mode, no remapping controls, no alt-tabbing allowed, you will watch our cutscenes and you will like it.

    For example, I'm trying to play Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (released in 2003). Problems found:

    1. The game runs only in full screen, exclusive mode. This means a 2 second pause every time you alt-tab in or out, and the other maximized windows get smushed down to the game's size every time you do so. And I should be thankful it even lets me alt-tab since the manual says it's not supported.
      I understand why that existed back in 2003, but nowadays I would expect Windows to just emulate it somehow, and redirect the graphics to a virtual surface like the rest of programs. Of course there's probably some stuff in DirectX 9 that makes this very difficult, because who would ever design an API with future technology improvements in mind.

    2. The game won't run at the screen's native resolution. Because of course, like all games, it only supports 5 different resolutions, none of which are widescreen.

    3. Mouse lag. I've tried it in two computers, on one it's extremely noticeable, on the other one it's mild enough to play. Seems to be proportional to the screen resolution, it disappears completely if I set it to 800x600.

    Maybe run it in a VM?


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @anonymous234 said in The minor rants thread.:

    Why can't the damn stuff just work? Are 3D APIs inherently difficult?

    They're APIs done by hardware guys, and therefore are at best whimsically different.

    Alas, graphics cards are actually good by comparison with some of the utter shit in the robotics world, though those don't usually need complex in-kernel drivers which counteracts a lot of the crazy. 🤦 :facepalm:



  • @Tsaukpaetra I am running 4 small databases and 1 large sitecore database (SQL Server) and 2 Postgres database (I can't stand MySQL).

    I've done all the old school stuff of making sure there isn't too much shit running in the background. Looking at startup turning all the shit I don't need at start up and it is still at about 6 gigs before I open up VS2015.

    I've been doing work in VS2010 since it came out as .NET 4 and 2010 were good enough by the new client is running .NET 4.6 everything so I've had to upgrade.



  • @Rhywden So, yesterday was the day the tech support guy was in the house and was supposed to fix the Surfaces so that they're booting again.

    He told me: "Yes, they're working now!"

    Fast forward to today where I tried to use them alongside my pupils. Turns out that several of them were showing various degrees of either not booting correctly, suddenly rebooting and then not booting correctly or completely booting and then not logging into the correct WLAN.

    Also, a reboot of the working ones will not always result in a working state after said reboot.

    Bravo.

    Afterwards I marched to my superior and told him in no uncertain terms that I'm this close to demanding to administrate those things myself - give me a clean Win10 install, an admin account and a working WLAN connection and I'll care for those Surfaces myself.

    It will be more reliable because a) this crappy bootloader is gone and b) I can install firmware and driver updates in a timely fashion. It will be faster because even if I have to touch them manually, I still won't have to wait 2+ weeks until they install / change what I want.
    And if something does not work I can fix it myself.

    My superior was not unsympathetic - in fact, he's telling me that he's actively looking for alternatives and gave me the task of scoping out just one such alternatives (which I'm already familiar with and which I also know is actually working reliably).



  • @Rhywden My superior sent off an email regarding this and other issues to our tech support - he then forwarded the reply to me because I was to run TeamViewer on one of the Surfaces and leave it running so they could do stuff remotely.

    In that chain of emails I got was one particular pearl from our tech support guy - it was a direct copy of the ticket I wrote concerning the battery driver/firmware issue, basically going this:

    The battery charging problem is a software problem according to Microsoft, we need to install some drivers and firmware to fix that. Detailed information on how to check for the problem and how to fix it can be found here: LINK_TO_MS_FAQ.
    The actual fix can be downloaded here: LINK_TO_CUMULATIVE_UPDATE

    So, pretty helpful of me, right? Diagnosed the problem, found a solution and even included helpful links to both the solution and the files, right?

    Yeah, for some it's still too complicated - because that email contained not only my ticket but also the answer of the tech guy:

    How do I install updates on a Surface?

    Jesus fuckin' Christ on a tapdancing pogostick!


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @Rhywden said in The minor rants thread.:

    How do I install updates on a Surface?

    Clearly you need to start with a clean rag, wipe it down a bit to get rid of any extra cruft. Once completed, place the surface on the update package sometime during a Tuesday (make sure the calendar is on the right month!) and wait until the surface kicks off the process with a boot. After it's finished you may need to clean it off again when it comes up, depends on how big the update was. Sometimes the surface might do that for you, other times not so much.



  • Angular CLI -- It has a whole uninstall procedure.


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @lucas1 said in The minor rants thread.:

    Angular CLI -- It has a whole uninstall procedure.

    Better posted in the WTF Bites thread?



  • @Tsaukpaetra It is a "minor annoyance" ... who knows.

    Okay for the minor Rant part.

    Angular CLI acts as part scaffolding tool (that doesn't work that well) and build system which works really well ... I mean it does pretty much everything you would want for building and deploying a angular 2 project.

    I checked in some code Friday night into the CI environment (the whole product is pre-alpha) and it was 6-7pm. All PRs need to be approved by another dev or the boss before it builds to the staging environment. My boss and the lead dev were away on slack so I thought sod it I will complete everything on Saturday when it would be approved.

    Apparently Hosted Azure builds updated everything which meant everything was broken, the other dev fixed everything for me as I found out when I logged into slack ... so I am going to send him a bottle of expensive whiskey his way.

    But everything broke because Angular-CLI was updated which broke "angular-material-design" and then broke the npm build process.

    YAY!!!!

    I now how to re-merge everything tomorrow and get everything working again on Sunday to make sure I have enough time to complete the other sprint items I thought I was finished with.



  • Another minor rant.

    Boss keeps on asking me to do Database stuff.

    I am mostly a front-end dev that is good with some back-end stuff. Doing Database stuff is painful and takes me ages.



  • @lucas1 funny... I always saw you more as a rear end dev... :trollface:



  • @Mikael_Svahnberg I think you are confusing my love for ladies rear ends.



  • I just remembered another reason why I don't like Chrome. The Omnibar gives almost no weight to recently visited pages, and there's no way to customize it. Meaning I can't just revisit some page by typing its title.

    Yet sometimes it gets "stuck" and keeps suggesting some site I don't care about over and over again forever.


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @anonymous234 said in The minor rants thread.:

    I just remembered another reason why I don't like Chrome. The Omnibar gives almost no weight to recently visited pages, and there's no way to customize it. Meaning I can't just revisit some page by typing its title.

    Yet sometimes it gets "stuck" and keeps suggesting some site I don't care about over and over again forever.

    I would definitely like an editor to get rid of those entries. Maybe a x button like Outlook does for email addresses?


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @anonymous234 Trivial searching gives this: Shift+Delete

    So wonderfully discoverable. (So easily findable by looking for “chrome remove url from autocomplete”…)



  • Apparently Chrome, Windows and Android have all decided to have a "Cast to device" option, and just call it "cast". Not Miracast, not DLNA, not Chromecast, not whatever-other-technology-they're-using, just "cast".

    I assume it's intentional. They're trying to hide the scary names from users. "Why should they care about the geek stuff? Just make it all work together!"

    BUT THAT'S NOT HOW IT WORKS

    A VHS tape is a VHS tape, and a Betamax tape is a Betamax tape. They do the same thing but are not compatible, and will never be compatible. Hence, having the same logo on the tape and player is necessary to know that the two things work together.

    This is not a technological problem to be fixed, it's how it's supposed to work. What if I want to invent a new format? How will customers know if it will work on their devices?

    And it's very user friendly. You don't have to know literally anything about how VHS tapes are encoded to understand that, same with Miracast or any other file format or internet protocol. Stop hiding things from the user that don't need to be hidden.


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @anonymous234 said in The minor rants thread.:

    Windows

    0_1488432564895_upload-cd1a5058-df7b-445e-bbd7-d4df5e2d7791

    Ha. Yeah, Windows' "Cast To" searches for DLNA renders apparently, which doesn't find the ChromeCast or Miracast devices nearby...



  • @anonymous234 I actually build a video server in python with some other bits and pieces to stream to DLNA or Chromecast a while back. Never finished it.

    I was going to market it for training videos, as like a corporate internal youtube. Had DLNA working with my TV but just never had the time to finish it.



  • @anonymous234 It's also annoying because, as I understand it, the Nexus 6 seems to have the ability to use Miracast while the the Pixel doesn't and is Chromecast only.

    Which is annoying because Miracast doesn't need any kind of setup: Plug in the receiver, power it up, connect device, done.

    With Chromecast you need to connect it to a WLAN which has internet access, have the device in the same WLAN and so on and so forth. Which is a bit of a pain if the WLAN is not in your control and has IP isolation enabled...


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @Rhywden said in The minor rants thread.:

    With Chromecast you need to connect it to a WLAN which has internet access, have the device in the same WLAN and so on and so forth. Which is a bit of a pain if the WLAN is not in your control and has IP isolation enabled...

    There used to be some kind of audio-based pairing with a pin, but I haven't seen that work yet (if it's still a thing).



  • @Rhywden
    Not completely true. You can CC from a wired device to a Chromecast in the same subnet & broadcast domain.

    Works well for ye olde typical home network. Not designed with corporate nets in mind (though the AppleTV has the same limitation)


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @izzion said in The minor rants thread.:

    @Rhywden
    Not completely true. You can CC from a wired device to a Chromecast in the same subnet & broadcast domain.

    Works well for ye olde typical home network. Not designed with corporate nets in mind (though the AppleTV has the same limitation)

    Still, I think the point is that it needs intermediate devices to work, whereas Miracast doesn't.

    Now, if only Chromecast could support it, then we wouldn't need all those Chinese knockoffs that are a Miracast receiver and DLNA.



  • @Tsaukpaetra
    Er, wut?

    The default config of the CC is "operate as a wireless AP and connect to it wirelessly to cast" 😕


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @izzion said in The minor rants thread.:

    @Tsaukpaetra
    Er, wut?

    The default config of the CC is "operate as a wireless AP and connect to it wirelessly to cast" 😕

    It's been forever since I last tried it, but essentially all it did was say "Oops! The wifi you connected to has no internet! Hey, rerun setup to connect to another network plz!"

    Still, no Miracast.



  • @izzion said in The minor rants thread.:

    @Rhywden
    Not completely true. You can CC from a wired device to a Chromecast in the same subnet & broadcast domain.

    Works well for ye olde typical home network. Not designed with corporate nets in mind (though the AppleTV has the same limitation)

    The wired network is even more locked down than the WLAN. Not to mention that casting from a wired device to a Chromecast is an absurdity in and of itself.


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