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Wednesday, May 14th, 2008
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5:36 pm - gwap is awesome.
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| Tuesday, May 13th, 2008
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3:39 pm - The Fedora bureaucracy, and why it matters
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It's been a common complaint since the dawn of the Fedora project: the process for getting new software into Fedora is too complex.
We feel everyone's pain, and always have. It's a difficult balance: you want to make sure that you open participation to as many packagers as possible -- but you also want to ensure the quality of those packages. Particularly from a security perspective.
The Debian/Ubuntu OpenSSL bug is scary as hell. It's a tough day for those projects right now, but everyone who's been around the Fedora community knows the uncomfortable truth: there, but for the grace of God, go us. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, indeed.
It may be fashionable among some to paint this as a stupid mistake on the part of some Debian maintainer -- but this Slashdot poster gives details about the what appears to be an honest and understandable mistake. He also quotes Bruce Schneier to devastating effect: "bad crypto looks much the same as good crypto". Which is why it took over a year for folks to notice this bug, with the result that literally millions of Debian-based systems could be exposed to remote exploits.
Fedora dodged this bullet. Will we dodge the next one?
One defense is to make sure that we diverge as little as possible from upstream developers -- and when we do diverge, make sure that everyone, upstream and downstream, knows about any patches, and why they exist. There's a lot of discussion going on right now about how to do that.
Another possible defense is to put certain packages in a different review category -- especially any packages that deal with fundamental system-level encryption. That discussion is also ongoing.
So there may be changes. There may be a bit more bureaucracy in Fedora, and another step or two (or three, or more) in a process that is already very long indeed. But if it cuts down the chance of a catastrophic mistake like this, it's worth it.
A great day for Fedora today -- but also a tough day for Linux.
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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11:08 am - Fedora 9 is out.
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| Wednesday, May 7th, 2008
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2:47 pm - ZOMG STICKERS!!!!!
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Mo, you are awesome.
The next task: putting together DEAD SIMPLE instructions for manufacturing these stickers. Like:
1. Go down to the local office store and buy Avery white sticker paper.
2. Put that sticker paper into your inkjet printer.
3. Fire up (program of choice). (Is it just "print from Inkscape"? How about "print from Evince"? Which is better?)
4. Print!
5. Cut out stickers, and cover your laptop with your very own Fedora witticisms!
I love it. Love it, love it, love it.
Oh, and one more thing: you should really put the URL for the sticker page itself on the very bottom of the sticker page, in small print.
Oh, and another thing: a similar set of sticker pages with all of the hackergotchis of Fedora peeps would be *unbelievably awesome*. I want to be able to print off the head of our fearless leader and put filthy, filthy words in his mouth.
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(5 comments | comment on this)
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| Thursday, April 24th, 2008
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12:17 pm - OLPC developers are *not* fundamentalists.
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Nicholas, with all due respect, I think you're pretty seriously mischaracterizing the nature of OLPC's problems. Laying the blame for OLPC's shortcomings at the feet of "open source fundamentalists" is misinformed at best, and deliberately disingenuous at worst.
Now, to be clear: when you say that "Sugar needs to run on many platforms," I completely agree with you. I couldn't possibly agree more. But moving from that point, which is clearly correct, to an ad hominem attack on the open source community as a whole, is a frustrating and dangerous non-sequitor, and a slap in the face to the people who have been your most strident supporters for many years now.
When a man like Walter Bender walks away from your shared dream because he feels like you are choosing the wrong path, then maybe you should consider being a bit more introspective, instead of lashing out at the big bad free software fundies. Did Walter, your friend for 30 years, the guy with whom you built the MIT Media Lab, turn into a fundamentalist whack job over night? Really?
OLPC's goals have been extremely ambitious from the very beginning. The possibility of failure has always been very real, even had you made all of the right moves from day one. Most of the issues you face are the issues that are inherent to solving really hard problems. Fundamentally changing the computing metaphor from the noun-based "file" metaphor to the verb-based "activity" metaphor is a really hard problem. Building the *only* major networking stack using the 802.11s standard for grid networking is a really hard problem. And your reliance upon open source has, to date, been one of your most effective levers in solving those problems.
From my perspective, your biggest problem has been that you have not relied *enough* on open source principles to build Sugar.
First of all, your organization has been notoriously opaque. I'm absolutely certain that this hasn't been deliberate, but when you're running a community project, your first job -- and your second job, and your third, and your fourth -- is to make damned sure that when volunteers show up, you have something useful for them to do. Volunteers, in the open source world, are gold. For most of the history of the project, you haven't treated them that way -- not out of malice, but out of neglect. There were always "more important" things to do than to help a newbie contribute.
Second of all, until very recently, Sugar only ran reliably on the XO itself. From *day one*, it should have been a priority to have stable, checkpointed releases of Sugar running on Fedora *and* Debian *and* Ubuntu *and* every other distro, all installable with a simple yum or apt command. "Release early, release often" -- have you heard that before? Instead, if someone wanted to run Sugar on their own system, it involved running jhbuild, which involved installing a half-dozen different SCM clients and almost continually rebuilding from broken source repositories. Which made it devilishly difficult to write robust activities for Sugar. All understandable mistakes, to be sure. Mistakes common to young open source projects. Mistakes that are now being fixed.
The irony of your rant is that porting Sugar to many platforms, thereby increasing the number of potential users, thereby increasing the number of potential contributors, is an obviously correct move that will help you leverage open source more effectively. To conflate that correct message with an attack on "open source fundamentalists" is misguided, and diminishes your ability to recruit community talent at the very time when your project most desperately needs it.
So cut it out already. The folks at 1CC have enough problems to solve. They are really good, good quality people, and they're certainly not "fundamentalists", whatever that means. They've worked like dogs for you. They've sacrificed their personal lives to help make your noble vision a reality. Maybe you should think a little harder next time before you, Great Leader, slap them in the face in such a public and mean-spirited way, because *you* can't figure out how to close deals. It's a shitty thing to do to people, and you ought to be better than that.
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(3 comments | comment on this)
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| Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
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2:07 pm - You may notice...
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...a lot more Portuguese on Planet Fedora lately.
This was at my urging. I think that we have an unnecessarily English-centric view of our Fedora world. After having met so many awesome Brasilieros at FISL, my first thought was "I want to see these guys blog." So I asked them all to provide their blog feeds, and a number have obliged.
With immediate benefits. Today I was delighted to discover that Diego will be participating in GSoC to work on Transifex, and that Tulio sees a strong resemblance between Maddog and Santa, and that Duda needs to package nttcp for Fedora. :)
I know that many of our English readers find it painful to read through posts in multiple languages. It might be nice to figure out how to filter the Planet feed by language, for those who care, and to have one great big polyglot feed for those of us who love the international flavor.
And no, I don't read Portuguese. Yet. But until I learn, Google translations are good enough. Seriously. Install the Firefox extension, and rudimentary translations are a right-click away.
Viva o Fedora! Brazil was awesome, and I will *definitely* be back.
(Pictures of my friends and I drinking mate will be coming soon.)
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(7 comments | comment on this)
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| Sunday, April 20th, 2008
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12:24 am - Yummy.
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| Friday, April 18th, 2008
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3:28 pm - I offer the following code...
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...under the WTFPL. Which Spot assures me is a valid license for Fedora, Zod help us.
I think that my terrible, terrible code speaks for itself. It's self-documenting that way.
Hey, ambassadors! Got a big event? Want to draw attention to yourself and your booth? Just yum install espeak on your system, load the following script up with annoying Fedora slogans in multiple languages, find some truly gigantic speakers, and turn the volume up to ELEVEN!
Note: apparently, one of these translations is wrong and appears to lead native Brazilians to think we're talking about squirrels. Not sure what to make of that.
Another note: offensive phrases removed. Replace them at your leisure.
Yet another note: I may have lost Dennis's awesome phrasebook. If so, I'm a total asshat.
Can't figure out how to use another language besides Brazilian Portuguese? Try man espeak. I can't do everything for you.
#!/usr/bin/perl
# Absolutely, positively, do *not*
# use strict;
%translation = (
"hello", "bom dia",
"Fedora is awesome", "Fedora é surpreendente",
"Contribute to Fedora. Ask us how.", "Contribuir para o Fedora. Pergunte-nos como."
);
while () {
foreach $english (keys %translation) {
`espeak -v en -s 80 -a 200 -g 2 "$english"`;
sleep 2;
`espeak -v pt -s 80 -a 200 -g 2 "$translation{$english}"`;
sleep 2;
}
}
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(10 comments | comment on this)
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9:51 am - Phrasebooks and chicken hearts
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Hello from FISL. :)
After a long trip of 20+ hours, I arrived in Porto Alegre yesterday, in need of a nap and a shower. My Centro, which is my organizer as well as my phone, went into a state of low-battery coma, and my USB phone charger cannot seem to rouse it. So the first few hours after my arrival, with none of my notes, were pretty hectic -- but all is well now, and I'm looking forward to a good day today.
I was, frankly, unprepared for the sheer number of people who don't speak English. At all. As a traveller, I always feel vaguely guilty when I'm struggling to communicate in the local language, as though I'm wasting people's time as I stumble to find the words, and it leads me to be quite shy.
Today will not be like that, because if it is, I will have wasted a lot of time and money coming here. No, I can't speak the language, and no, not many of the attendees of FISL can speak my language.
Fortunately, today I will have two tools at my disposal:
1. The best phrasebook on Earth. Dennis brought a Lonely Planet Brazilian Portuguese / English phrasebook with him, and it is chock full of awesome. Like "you are a very good dancer," and "you are only using me for sex" and "I promise that I will call you" and "it's important to have a sense of humor." Indeed.
2. eSpeak. I love Festival for the high quality of its text-to-speech work, but the non-English voicings are all non-free, and can be difficult to track down. eSpeak, while a lot less smooth, has *lots* of default languages. Including Brazilian Portuguese. So I've got it running on my laptop, hurray.
See, ordinarily I love booth duty, because it means I get to talk to lots of enthusiastic folks. And FISL is *fabulous* because it is a large, vibrant, relatively suit-free show. It reminds me of how LinuxWorld used to be. The problem, though, is that I can't really participate much without being able to speak even rudimentary Portuguese. Fortunately, the Fedora booth is heavily staffed by Fedora Ambassadors -- who we will be treating to a great night tonight, and whose praises I will be singing in a later post -- but I'm not adding much value in the ways I usually do, and not really needed in that capacity anyway.
Therefore, I have decided that I will connect as best I can by using my ability to be an amusing idiot. So if you are at FISL later this afternoon, and you'd like real-time, vaguely inappropriate English-Portuguese lessons, as read aloud by eSpeak, come on by and say "bom dia".
(Oh, also, chicken hearts are incredibly tasty. Spot wouldn't know, because he's a culinary coward. I still love him, though.)
(Oh, and I wish I had pics to share, but my Centro was also going to be my phone, and with it on life support, I have no way of taking pictures. I'll just harass Dennis to take plenty of pics instead.)
(And one last thing: I miss my wife terribly. She's incredibly cool, and when I'm away from her for a prolonged period of time, I feel like a bit of an empty glass. Don't tell her, though, because it would give her a swelled head. She doesn't read my blog anyway.)
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Tuesday, April 15th, 2008
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10:02 pm - Bugs are awesome.
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Davidson, if you are at FISL later this week, I hope that we can get together so I can witness your issues firsthand. I'm sure that between the two of us, we can break livecd-tools and Revisor in beautiful and spectacular ways. :)
Staying up late to finish my presentation at CSEET tomorrow. As a college dropout, I'm still vaguely intimidated by the prospect of speaking as the "expert" to a room full of professors, so I find myself working and reworking and reworking my presentation over and over. The way I figure it, I'll have plenty of time to sleep on the plane to Brazil tomorrow night.
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(3 comments | comment on this)
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| Thursday, April 10th, 2008
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2:32 pm - Those who do not learn from .bash_history are doomed to repeat it.
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[10:46:32][gdk@dingoesatemybaby:~]$ history | awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
385 fetchmail
239 pine
137 exit
52 ll
32 cd
21 vi
20 ssh
18 kill
14 pwd
14 ps
I suck too bad to even use Alpine, although my coming migration to F9 will certainly remedy that problem.
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(2 comments | comment on this)
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| Monday, March 17th, 2008
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9:52 am - Sometimes...
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...when the world isn't going your way, it's nice to hide for a weekend and hack on something fun.
So that's what I did this weekend, and now I can take a picture of my dog with my spiffy new phone, push a button, and voila! it ends up in my smugmug gallery, like magic. Because I hate nothing like I hate USB cables.
My incredibly cute dog, for your consideration.
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(3 comments | comment on this)
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| Saturday, March 15th, 2008
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5:44 pm
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Spot, none of your semantic jiu jitsu means that MP3 software is *actually* freely redistributable. Saying that "the MP3 codec is open sourced" is a nice attempt at a dodge, but the fact remains that even though *the code* for the MP3 codec may be "open source", the *patent license* is not. Which is why we chose to make this kind of ugly compromise in the first place.
Unless something has changed, this sentence -- "we see it as a way to help inform our users about the perils of software patents in the multimedia space, without preventing them from leveraging free software solutions" -- is misleading. MP3 CODECS ARE NOT FREE SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS. (Again, unless something in the legal landscape has changed, and if it has, let's hear more about that change.)
Which means that someone had to *pay* for those redistribution rights. And who was that? Fedora? Red Hat? No, actually. It was *Fluendo* who paid for those rights, in this case.
So we're basically allowing thousands of users to freeload from Fluendo (thanks guys!), and in return we give Fluendo... what, exactly?
If we're going to basically take the convenience of MP3 that Fluendo provides because we *can*, but then not provide Fluendo with *any* upsell opportunities, then we're basically ripping off Fluendo's good will to make ourselves feel better about our "user experience".
If the Board has decided that they don't want to point to any "non-free software" at all -- which is a fine stance to take, by the way -- then remove Codeina entirely. Either have the courage to say "we don't encourage any non-free software at all," or have the courage to say "we support your right to choose non-free software, so long as you obtain it legally, and here's how." Because the current poor compromise seems to be the worst of both worlds.
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(13 comments | comment on this)
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| Tuesday, March 11th, 2008
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10:47 am - Popularity or principles?
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| Tuesday, February 26th, 2008
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4:21 pm - Fedora weekend hacks
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You there. Fedora geek. Yes, you.
I'm sure you've got a clever idea involving Fedora. Something you think you could probably hack together over a long weekend. Maybe it's a clever desktop widget. Maybe it's a Wesnoth campaign entitled "The March of Fedora". Maybe it's a func module for synching web server content. Maybe it's a calendaring hack using ncurses. But whatever it is, it's something you just can't quite find the time to do.
Can you find the time to describe your "weekend hack"?
I'd love to have a catalogue of "weekend hacks" for Fedora wannabees. There are a lot of folks who would love to participate in Fedora, but who don't necessarily want to learn the arcana of RPM to do it.
Take a couple of minutes and think about it: if you could spare a weekend to bang out some cool Fedora hack... what would it be?
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(7 comments | comment on this)
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| Tuesday, February 19th, 2008
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9:30 am - Googling myself.
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| Monday, February 18th, 2008
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11:12 am - Down with State Street!
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If software patents make you ill, be of good cheer: new developments may mean a reconsideration of the disastrous State Street decision. For those of you who have no idea what State Street is, I wrote an article for Red Hat Magazine back in the day. I was quite proud of it, actually -- Webbink approved it, but Luis, feel free to savage it with your law-fu. :)
Down with State Street!
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(comment on this)
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| Friday, February 15th, 2008
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5:54 pm - Iranian women coders
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Here's a fascinating article:
"What’s behind the rise of women in Iran’s open source movement? With the restrictions put on women in the Middle East, technology is an attractive option for those who want a career. Technological work, and coding in particular, can be done from home, allowing ambitious women to become well-known within their industry without becoming taboo in their communities. “They feel freer, and the anonymity allows for career choices that are more serious and more interesting,” says Mahnaz Afkhami, an Iranian women’s rights activist."
I wonder what the Fedora community can do to help women like this? (Meaning, of course, the Fedora community that's outside the US and not subject to its laws?) Maybe Roozbeh could give us some insights.
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(4 comments | comment on this)
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| Wednesday, February 13th, 2008
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11:26 pm - Dear Facebook:
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I don't want to know who has new friends. I don't want people knowing when I have new friends. I don't want to know that Dan Fogelberg is popular among my Red Hat friends -- in fact, discovering that fact makes me downright angry.
I don't want a key to anyone's heart. I don't want to play Oregon Trail. I don't want to be a zombie, or a vampire, or a werewolf, or a transvestite succubus hooker. I don't want to be in a dance contest, and I don't want to play poker, and I don't care how many chips some asshat I knew from high school *twenty years ago* has in his account.
I don't want to join your group, and I don't want to play trivia, and I don't want want to be your top friend. And you there, especially -- you know who you are -- I don't want to take your drunk quiz, and I don't want to know who my secret admirer is, and I most *certainly* do not want to know what kind of lingerie you think you should be wearing.
Oh, and here's another thing that I *really* don't want. When I engage in a lengthy email disagreement with my wife, I *don't* want to see gmail recommend a bleeping counselor to me, or to sell me a bunch of bleeping penis pills!
I do not want the default state of my online life to say, in neon signs, "snoop into my bleeping bidness".
So bleep you, web two dot oh. I've had my fill. Bleep you, bleep you, bleep you, you're cool, and bleep you, I'm out.
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(18 comments | comment on this)
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| Thursday, January 31st, 2008
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11:51 am - "Project" versus "SIG"
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Ahh, Fedora governance. :)
To some degree, I think we worry too much about this stuff. I've always believed that governance in Fedora should be *extremely* lightweight and consensus-driven.
So the question of the day: should the newly-relaunched Fedora marketing effort be a "project" or a "special interest group"?
Here's my simpleton take.
A "Fedora project" means that (a) the Board asks about its progress on a regular basis, (b) there's a clear leader who is responsible for moving the project forward, (c) there are tasks defined for people to work on, and (d) there are occasional meetings to hold folks accountable for doing the things they said they'd do.
A "SIG" means that someone wants to get a new idea moving, and they want a mailing list / IRC channel / whatever, and they follow whatever "governance" model they see fit.
If governance in Fedora is not simple, then we're probably Doing It Wrong.
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(3 comments | comment on this)
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