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• Why is Windows registry needed?

  - by Job

  As I have debugged problems in com, side by side, dealt with dll hell, all while hating the windows registry with passion, I was wondering why is it needed. I never felt compelled to read an entire book on registry best practices, and then just "get it". I have, however, used Linux and Mac OS, and look at the ways one can install multiple versions of Python and its libraries on the same *nix computer. Because registry has somewhat of a free (albeit ugly) format, and is used for all sorts of purposes, I have never understood what essential problem it is trying to solve. For instance, Microsoft does not want you to have two different versions of MS Office installed side by side. They use registry to enforce this during installation. This limitation is artificial, in my opinion. If they really cared to allow a different behavior, they could have adjusted their architecture accordingly. In Mac OS you can install and remove apps by just dropping them into a particular folder. So, A) What essential problem it is trying to solve? B) How do other operating systems solve it?

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• If all programming languages are Turing Complete then why do we have language wars?

  - by kadaj

  There are language wars saying one programming language is better than other.. Consider Lisp and Java; and we can argue that the meta programming capabilities of Lisp is better than that of Java. But that does not mean Java cannot have meta programming capabilities without being another dialect of Lisp. Basically all programming languages are Turing Complete. So doesn't that mean we could solve any solvable problem in all those programming languages?

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• What to answer to a customer who asks which one of two equivalent technologies must be used?

  - by MainMa

  As a freelancer, I am often asked by my customers what they must choose between similar elements, neither of which being better than another. Examples: “Do I need my e-commerce website be in PHP or ASP.NET?” “Do I need to host this ordinary web service in Cloud or use an ordinary hosting service?” “Which one is better for my new website: MySQL or Oracle?” etc. There is maybe at most 1% of cases where the choice is relevant, and there is a real, objective reason to use one over another, based on the precise metrics and studies. In all other cases, it doesn't matter at all. It is totally, completely irrelevant, either because there are no implications¹, or because those implications are too small to be taken in account², or, finally, because it's impossible to predict those implications³. If you know one thing and not another one, the answer to those questions is easy: “You can either write the application in C# or Java, both being probably equivalent in your case. Note that I'm a C# developer, so if you choose Java, I would not be able to work on your project and you would need to find another freelancer.” When you know both technologies, you can't answer that. In this case, how to explain to the customer that the question he asks is subject to flamewar and has no real consequences on his project? In other words, how to explain that you've chosen to use one technology rather than an equivalent one for the reasons related to human resources, without giving the impression to be unprofessional or to not care about the project? ¹ Example: Is MySQL better (worse?), performance-wise, compared to Oracle, for a personal website which will be accessed by, oh, let's be optimistic, two people per day? ² Example: for a given project, I was asked to asset if Windows Azure hosting would be cheaper than the hosting of the same application on a well-known ASP.NET hosting provider. The cost revealed to be exactly the same. ³ Example: your customer have an idea of a future application (the idea itself being extremely vague). There is no business plan, no requirements, nothing at all. Just an idea. You are asked if Java is better than C# for this app. What do you answer?

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• How to market yourself as a software developer?

  - by karlphillip

  I have noticed that this is a frequent issue among younglings from technical areas such as ours. In the beginning of our careers we simply don't know how to sell ourselves to our employers, and random guy #57 (who is a programmer, but not as good as you - technically) ends up getting a raise/promotion just because he knows how to communicate and market himself better than you. Many have probably seen this happen in the past, and most certainly many more will in the future. What kind of skill/ability (either technical, or of other nature) do you think is relevant to point out when doing a job interview or asking for a raise, besides listing all the programming languages and libraries you know?

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• Naming convention: Final fields (not static)

  - by Zeeker

  Today I had a discussion with a co-worker about the naming of final fields in Java classes. In his opionion final fields should also be considered constants since their values won't change after the creation of the instance. This would lead to the following naming convention for final fields: public class Foo { private static final String BLA_BLA = "bla"; private final String BAR_BATZ; ... } In my opinion only static final fields should be considered constants while fields which are only final should follow the usual camelCase naming convention. public class Foo { private static final String BLA = "bla"; private final String barBatz; ... } Now I'm a bit uncertain since he is a far more experienced programmer than I am and I usually agree with his opinions and consider him a very good developer. Any input on this?

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• Is type safety worth the trade-offs?

  - by Prof Plum

  I began coding in in Python primarily where there is no type safety, then moved to C# and Java where there is. I found that I could work a bit more quickly and with less headaches in Python, but then again, my C# and Java apps are at much higher level of complexity so I have never given Python a true stress test I suppose. The Java and C# camps make it sound like without the type safety in place, most people would be running into all sorts of horrible bugs left an right and it would be more trouble than its worth. This is not a language comparison, so please do not address issues like compiled vs interpreted. Is type safety worth the hit to speed of development and flexibilty? WHY? to the people who wanted an example of the opinion that dynamic typing is faster: "Use a dynamically typed language during development. It gives you faster feedback, turn-around time, and development speed." - http://blog.jayway.com/2010/04/14/static-typing-is-the-root-of-all-evil/

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• Should the number of developers be considered when estimating a task?

  - by Ludwig Magnusson

  I am pretty inexperienced with working in agile projects but I have tried it a few times and I always run into this problem when estimating a task. Do we bring into the estimate the number of developers that will work on the task? Let me explain: Task A is estimated to one time unit and developer 1 will work on it. Task B is also estimated to one time unit and developer 2 and 3 will work on it together. I.e. if developer 1 begins to work on task A at the same time developer 2 and 3 begins to work on task B they will all finish at the same time according to the estimate. Should the estimate for task B be twice of that for task A or the same? The problem as I see it is that when a task is received and estimated, it is not always possible to know how many people will work on it. And if you assumed that two developers would work on the task for one time unit but it turns out that only one developer will actually do it, this will not automatically mean that that developer will work on it for two time units. Is there any standard practice for this?

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• How to make sprint planning fun

  - by Jacob Spire

  Not only are our sprint planning meetings not fun, they're downright dreadful. The meetings are tedious, and boring, and take forever (a day, but it feels like a lot longer). The developers complain about it, and dread upcoming plannings. Our routine is pretty standard (user story inserted into sprint backlog by priority story is taken apart to tasks tasks are estimated in hours repeat), and I can't figure out what we're doing wrong. How can we make the meetings more enjoyable? ... Some more details, in response to requests for more information: Why are the backlog items not inserted and prioritized before sprint kickoff? User stories are indeed prioritized; we have no idea how long they'll take until we break them down into tasks! From the (excellent) answers here, I see that maybe we shouldn't estimate tasks at all, only the user stories. The reason we estimate tasks (and not stories) is because we've been getting story-estimates terribly wrong -- but I guess that's the subject for an altogether different question. Why are developers complaining? Meetings are long. Meetings are monotonous. Story after story, task after task, struggling (yes, struggling) to estimate how long it will take and what it involves. Estimating tasks makes user-story-estimation seem pointless. The longer the meeting, the less focus in the room. The less focused colleagues are, the longer the meeting takes. A recursive hate-spiral develops. We've considered splitting the meeting into two days in order to keep people focused, but the developers wouldn't hear of it. One day of planning is bad enough; now we'll have two?! Part of our problem is that we go into very small detail (in order to get more accurate estimations). But when we estimate roughly, we go way off the mark! To sum up the question: What are we doing wrong? What additional ways are there to make the meeting generally more enjoyable?

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• Are there similarities between operating system kernels and programming language kernels?

  - by rahmu

  I know very little about Smalltalk but I noticed that there's a frequent mention of the "kernel". Dan Ingalls prime maintainer of several implementations of Smalltalk also worked on a Javascript environment called "Lively Kernel" and in Peter Siebel's book he kept mentionning the "kernel". I cannot help but think that it is no coincidence that the creators of Smalltalk used the name of a (central) part of operating systems to refer to a particular component of their language. Was it because Smalltalk intended to act as an operating system? Was it because theory behind programming languages and operating systems have a lot in common? What is the reason behind the common appelation of the two components?

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• If an app runs well on iPhone 3GS with iOS 5.1, how to know that it runs well on iOS 4.3? [closed]

  - by ????

  I bought an iPhone 3GS just to test backward compatibility of apps that I developed, but it arrived preinstalled with iOS 5.1. So even if an app runs well on iPhone 3GS and iOS 5.1 with its hardware limitation, how can we tell that it runs well even on iPhone 3GS with iOS 4.3? Will it actually be better to install iOS 4.3 on the phone so that we know even the older iOS can support it, so the newer iOS will work well supposedly? Or is there a need to buy yet another iPhone 3GS and install 4.3 on one and 5.1 on the other? (my assumption is that if we set the app's build target iOS to 4.3, the iPhone 3G won't be able to install it, because iPhone 3G only runs iOS up to 4.2. So the target device is 3GS but not earlier. But it will exclude iPod Touch 2nd Generation as well because they also can only support iOS up to 4.2 only)

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• 1 to 1 Comparison and Ranking System

  - by David

  I'm looking to create a comparison and ranking system which allows users to view 2 items, click on the one that they feel is the better one and then get presented with 2 more random items and continue to do this until they decide to stop. In the background, I want the system to use these wins and loses to rank each item in an overall ranking table so I can then see what is #1 and what isn't. I haven't got a clue where to begin with the formula, but I image I need to log wins and loses. Any help/direction appreciated!

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• How to deal with WYSIWYG editors?

  - by Pino

  There are now lots of WYSIWYG editors, however whenever we use one on a CMS-based website we consistently have issues. The biggest being users pasting content from Word or other online sources and all the various formatting rules being added in "behind the scenes". How do you deal with these editors on a live production website? I love Markdown, however its target market is most definitely the tech industry.

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• How to visualize code?

  - by gablin

  I've mostly only had to read my own code. As such, I've had no need to visualize the code as I already know how each and every class and module communicate with one another. But the few times I've had to read someone else's code - let us now assume we are talking about at least one larger module which contains several internal classes - I've almost always found myself wishing "This would have been so much easier to understand if I could just visualize it!" So what are the common methods or tools for enabling this? Which do you use, and why do you prefer them over the others? I've heard stuff like UML, module and class diagrams, but I imagine there are more. Furthermore, any of these is most likely better than anything I can devise on my own. EDIT: For those who answer with "Use pen and paper and just draw it": This isn't very helpful unless you explain this further. What exactly am I supposed to draw? A box for each class? Should I include the public methods? What about its fields? How should I draw connections that explain how one class uses another? What about modules? What if the language isn't object-oriented but functional or logical, or even just imperative (C, for instance)? What about global variables and functions? Is there an already-standardized way of drawing this, or do I need to think up of a method of my own? You get the drift.

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• migrating product and team from startup race to quality development

  - by thevikas

  This is year 3 and product is selling good enough. Now we need to enforce good software development practices. The goal is to monitor incoming bug reports and reduce them, allow never ending features and get ready for scaling 10x. The phrases "test-driven-development" and "continuous-integration" are not even understood by the team cause they were all in the first 2 year product race. Tech team size is 5. The question is how to sell/convince team and management about TDD/unit testing/coding standards/documentation - with economics. train the team to do more than just feature coding and start writing test units along - which looks like more work, means needs more time! how to plan for creating units for all backlog production code

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• How to handle fine grained field-based ACL permissions in a RESTful service?

  - by Jason McClellan

  I've been trying to design a RESTful API and have had most of my questions answered, but there is one aspect of permissions that I'm struggling with. Different roles may have different permissions and different representations of a resource. For example, an Admin or the user himself may see more fields in his own User representation vs another less-privileged user. This is achieved simply by changing the representation on the backend, ie: deciding whether or not to include those fields. Additionally, some actions may be taken on a resource by some users and not by others. This is achieved by deciding whether or not to include those action items as links, eg: edit and delete links. A user who does not have edit permissions will not have an edit link. That covers nearly all of my permission use cases, but there is one that I've not quite figured out. There are some scenarios whereby for a given representation of an object, all fields are visible for two or more roles, but only a subset of those roles my edit certain fields. An example: { "person": { "id": 1, "name": "Bob", "age": 25, "occupation": "software developer", "phone": "555-555-5555", "description": "Could use some sunlight.." } } Given 3 users: an Admin, a regular User, and Bob himself (also a regular User), I need to be able to convey to the front end that: Admins may edit all fields, Bob himself may edit all fields, but a regular User, while they can view all fields, can only edit the description field. I certainly don't want the client to have to make the determination (or even, for that matter, to have any notion of the roles involved) but I do need a way for the backend to convey to the client which fields are editable. I can't simply use a combination of representation (the fields returned for viewing) and links (whether or not an edit link is availble) in this scenario since it's more finely grained. Has anyone solved this elegantly without adding the logic directly to the client?

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• How to be successful at BDD Specifications Workshops?

  - by sigo

  Today we tried to introduce BDD in our software development process by having a specification workshop. For this workshop we had 2 developers, 1 tester and 1 business analyst. The workshop lasted 1h30 and by the end of it we managed to figure out some BDD scenarios for our new feature. We tried to focus on finding the scenarios that we could miss, and the difficult ones. At the end of the workshop some people were actually unhappy with the workshop. One developer felt he wasted his time as he was used to be given out the scenarios directly by the business analyst and review them with her. The business analyst didn't feel confident with our scenario coverage (Had a feeling that we could have missed out other important stuff) but more importantly felt that this workshop was also a waste of time as she could have figured out all these scenarios by herself and in a shorter period of time. So my question is how that kind of workshop can actually work. In the theory, given you have a new feature to develop, you put the tree 'amigos' (dev/tester/ba) in the same room so that they can collaborate together on writing the differents requirements for the new feature using examples. I can see all the benefits from that. Specially in term of knowledge sharing and common product/end goal/done vision. But in practice, we still think it is more cost effective to first have a BA to work on his own on the examples and only then to have the scenarios to be reviewed/reworked by the 3 'amigos'. By having the BA to work on his own, we actually feel more confident that we are less going to miss out stuff + we still get to review the scenarios afterward to double check. We don't think than simple brainstorming/deliberate discovery is actually enought to seriously cover all the requirement for a feature. The business analyst is actually the best person for that kind of stuff. The thing we just do is to review what she wrote and see if then we have a common understanding (which could then lead to rewrite some of her scenarios or add new ones she could have missed). This workshop lasted 1h30, and by the end of it, we didn't feel confident enought about wha we did...sure we could have spent more time on it but honestly most people get exhausted after 1h30 of brainstorming. So how can you get that to work effectively in practice ?

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• String Formatting with concatenation or substitution

  - by Davio

  This is a question about preferences. Assume a programming language offers these two options to make a string with some variables: "Hello, my name is ". name ." and I'm ". age ." years old." StringFormat("Hello, my name is $0 and I'm $1 years old.", name, age) Which do you prefer and why? I have found myself using both without any clear reason to pick either. Considering micro-optimizations is not within the scope of this question. Localization has been mentioned as a reason to go with option #2 and I think it's a very valid reason and deserves to be mentioned here. However, would opinions differ based on aesthetic viewpoints?

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• Does NASA license the software that it develops?

  - by Abe

  NASA provides a visualization software called Panoply. There is a Credits and Acknowledgments page that acknowledges and lists the licenses of software dependencies, but provides no information about its own license. I have looked at other software produced by NASA, including the source code for GISS and can not find any information about a licence. The closest information that I can find is in the FAQ for the global climate model EdGCM Global that says the code is in the "public domain" is it standard practice at NASA to release code into the public domain? are there exceptions? Can I assume that Panoply is public domain and can be used without restriction other than than those imposed by licenses of software dependencies? Is the absence of specific permission to reuse the code a concern (this issue was raised in the answer to a separate question) How common is this practice across government agencies?

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• Balancing dependency injection with public API design

  - by kolektiv

  I've been contemplating how to balance testable design using dependency injection with providing simple fixed public API. My dilemma is: people would want to do something like var server = new Server(){ ... } and not have to worry about creating the many dependencies and graph of dependencies that a Server(,,,,,,) may have. While developing, I don't worry too much, as I use an IoC/DI framework to handle all that (I'm not using the lifecycle management aspects of any container, which would complicate things further). Now, the dependencies are unlikely to be re-implemented. Componentisation in this case is almost purely for testability (and decent design!) rather than creating seams for extension, etc. People will 99.999% of the time wish to use a default configuration. So. I could hardcode the dependencies. Don't want to do that, we lose our testing! I could provide a default constructor with hard-coded dependencies and one which takes dependencies. That's... messy, and likely to be confusing, but viable. I could make the dependency receiving constructor internal and make my unit tests a friend assembly (assuming C#), which tidies the public API but leaves a nasty hidden trap lurking for maintenance. Having two constructors which are implicitly connected rather than explicitly would be bad design in general in my book. At the moment that's about the least evil I can think of. Opinions? Wisdom?

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• Wanting to learn .NET, can I benefit from the MS discounts?

  - by Chris

  I quit high-school a couple of years ago and now I'm studying to get my diploma at a special course the EU created for people in my situation. This course is basically identical to normal high-school the only difference being fewer hours due to the fact that a lot of us have jobs(not me). I would like to learn windows development and .NET and I've seen around that they offer students some great discounts and even some free tools such as Visual Studio and Windows 7. I'm learning Java on Ubuntu at the moment but I'd like to move to .NET but can't afford Windows or other MS-related tools since I don't have a job and no real income. Can someone in my situation benefit from their offers?

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• Why setter method when getter method enough in PHP OOP

  - by phphunger

  I am practicing OOP with PHP, and I am struck at setter and getter methods. I can directly access the class properties and methods with getter method then what's the use of setter method? See my example. <?php class MyClass{ public $classVar = "Its a class variable"; public function Getter(){ return $this -> classVar; } } $obj = new MyClass; echo $obj -> Getter(); ?>

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• Removing occurrences of characters in a string

  - by DmainEvent

  I am reading this book, programming Interviews exposed by John Wiley and sons and in chapter 6 they are discussing removing all instances of characters in a src string using a removal string... so removeChars(string str, string remove) In there writeup they sey the steps to accomplish this are to have a boolean lookup array with all values initially set to false, then loop through each character in remove setting the corresponding value in the lookup array to true (note: this could also be a hash if the possible character set where huge like Unicode-16 or something like that or if str and remove are both relatively small... < 100 characters I suppose). You then iterate through the str with a source and destination index, copying each character only if its corresponding value in the lookup array is false... Which makes sense... I don't understand the code that they use however... They have for(src = 0; src < len; ++src){ flags[r[src]] == true; } which is turning the flag value at the remove string indexed at src to true... so if you start out with PLEASE HELP as your str and LEA as your remove you will be setting in your flag table at 0,1,2... t|t|t but after that you will get an out of bounds exception because r doesn't have have anything greater than 2 in it... even using there example you get an out of bounds exception... Am is there code example unworkable? Entire function string removeChars( string str, string remove ){ char[] s = str.toCharArray(); char[] r = remove.toCharArray(); bool[] flags = new bool[128]; // assumes ASCII! int len = s.Length; int src, dst; // Set flags for characters to be removed for( src = 0; src < len; ++src ){ flags[r[src]] = true; } src = 0; dst = 0; // Now loop through all the characters, // copying only if they aren’t flagged while( src < len ){ if( !flags[ (int)s[src] ] ){ s[dst++] = s[src]; } ++src; } return new string( s, 0, dst ); } as you can see, r comes from the remove string. So in my example the remove string has only a size of 3 while my str string has a size of 11. len is equal to the length of the str string. So it would be 11. How can I loop through the r string since it is only size 3? I haven't compiled the code so I can loop through it, but just looking at it I know it won't work. I am thinking they wanted to loop through the r string... in other words they got the length of the wrong string here.

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• Why does it take so long to finalize the HTML 5 spec? [closed]

  - by EpsilonVector

  I was reading this and one sentence caught my eye (emphasis mine): So Ian Hickson, XHTML’s biggest critic, fathered HTML 5, an action-oriented toddler specification that won’t reach adulthood until 2022, although some of it can be used today. Is that true? Is that really the HTML 5 development cycle? Why is it taking so long? What makes it so difficult to get right that it won't be final until 11 years from now?

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• What are MPEG I, P and B frames?

  - by Fasih Khatib

  I was recently going over MPEG articles and videos to understand how it works. I understand what I, P and B frames do but I do not understand how the prediction is calculated. Assume that I want to record a video of a ball falling from the sky to the ground and then bouncing a couple of times before finally coming to a halt. Also, I am not clear with the concept of the 16x16 macroblock. Please tell me: how prediction is calulated what is macroblock and how it helps in MPEG encoding My references: MPEG Prediction Video on MPEG conversion

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• How can I best implement 'cache until further notice' with memcache in multiple tiers?

  - by ajreal

  the term "client" used here is not referring to client's browser, but client server Before cache workflow 1. client make a HTTP request --> 2. server process --> 3. store parsed results into memcache for next use (cache indefinitely) --> 4. return results to client --> 5. client get the result, store into client's local memcache with TTL After cache workflow 1. another client make a HTTP request --> 2. memcache found return memcache results to client --> 3. client get the result, store into client's local memcache with TTL TTL = time to live Is possible for me to know when the data was updated, and to expire relevant memcache(s) accordingly. However, the pitfalls on client site cache TTL Any data update before the TTL is not pick-up by client memcache. In reverse manner, where there is no update, client memcache still expire after the TTL First request (or concurrent requests) after cache TTL will get throttle as it need to repeat the "Before cache workflow" In the event where client require several HTTP requests on a single web page, it could be very bad in performance. Ideal solution should be client to cache indefinitely until further notice. Here are the three proposals about futher notice Proposal 1 : Make use on HTTP header (current implementation) 1. client sent HTTP request last modified time header 2. server check if last data modified time=last cache time return status 304 3. client based on header to decide further processing GOOD? ---- - save some parsing for client - lesser data transfer BAD? ---- - fire a HTTP request is still slow - server end still need to process lots of requests Proposal 2 : Consistently issue a HTTP request to check all data group last modified time 1. client fire a HTTP request 2. server to return last modified time for all data group 3. client compare local last cache time with the result 4. if data group last cache time < server last modified time then request again for that data group only GOOD? ---- - only fetch what is no up-to-date - less requests for server BAD? ---- - every web page require a HTTP request Proposal 3 : Tell client when new data is available (Push) 1. when server end notice there is a change on a data group 2. notify clients on the changes 3. help clients to fetch again data 4. then reset client local memcache after data is parsed GOOD? ---- - let the cache act/behave like a true cache BAD? ---- - encourage race condition My preference is on proposal 3, and something like Gearman could be ideal Where there is a change, Gearman server to sent the task to multiple clients (workers). Am I crazy? (I know my first question is a bit crazy)

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