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Microsoft

Microsoft Adding Blogs to Longhorn? 187

Posted by CmdrTaco from the active-rant-technology dept.
prostoalex writes "A Microsoft Research project called 'Wallop' has weblogging and document-sharing features and will be integrated into the next-generation Microsoft OS. In related news, MSN is being split into two subdivisions, one of which will take care of communications tools (Messenger, Passport, Hotmail, ISP service), while the other will deal with Web properties (MSN.com, etc.)"
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Microsoft Adding Blogs to Longhorn? More

Microsoft Adding Blogs to Longhorn?

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  • What next? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 31, 2003 @01:17PM (#7360504)
    Slashdot adding blogs?! HAHAHA... err, oh wait.

  • For keeping better track of Employee blogs? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Altima(BoB) ( 602987 ) on Friday October 31, 2003 @01:19PM (#7360536)
    Remember the slashdot story a couple days ago (Cannot find link right now) about the Microsoft employee who got fired for posting pics of MS's new G5s on his blog? Who knows, maybe there will be hidden "features" in this that will only help MS. Then again, I'm paranoid.

    • Let's take that ball and run with it, shall we? If there is an anti-MS post that gets /.ed, and it is hosted on MS's servers, howlong do you think it would take for MSN to cite the user on violation of terms of service?

      Terms of Service
      ...
      Section 42: Your rights.
      Rights? You don't need no stinkin' rights! By this paragraph, if we don't like something on your site, that's it. Your account is terminated, your copy of Windows DOA is deauthorized, you get reported to Ashcroft as a dissenter, and the men in dark sunglasses pay you a little visit! BWAHAHAHAHAHA!
      • What? They still haven't figured out how to purify water and dispense it through a 5 1/4" drive? Somebody, PLEASE, explain to these guys the difference between an operating system and software!
      • Let's take that ball and run with it, shall we? If there is an anti-MS post that gets /.ed, and it is hosted on MS's servers, howlong do you think it would take for MSN to cite the user on violation of terms of service?

        How is that any different than the moderation mob on Slashdot? Try saying anything (anything!) against Linux, Open Source, Slashdot, etc. and you will get moderated as a troll/flamebait, etc. I don't see why Microsoft's moderators can't do the same thing to anti-Microsoft material if they

        • How is that any different than the moderation mob on Slashdot?

          It's different because on Slashdot, you can browse at -1. Moderators can never delete a post, just push it down a little.

          And downmods can't terminate your account, either. Violating Microsoft(tm) TOS could get you whole access suspended. Just look at OCG [slashdot.org]; he gets modded into the dirt every few days, but he's still sticking around.
          • "It's different because on Slashdot, you can browse at -1. Moderators can never delete a post, just push it down a little.
            "
            -1 doesnt get archived. In effect all they have to do is downmod you and wait for the story to get archived and your post is gone forever.

            "And downmods can't terminate your account, either"
            Except for the IPban that comes with getting modded down too many times, and the 2post a day limit for bad karma. (neither of these are deletion, I'll give you that, but they are censorship.)
    • Him working for M$, maybe he was using a pre-relase version of M$ Blog.
      The software is self-aware, and calls home to report "Crimes against M$"

      So after him losing his job, NO THANKS. I'll stick with my unaware nobody-calling blog.

      -grump

    • Found the Link (Score:2, Informative)

      by Altima(BoB) ( 602987 )
      http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/10/29/14 21223&mode=thread&tid=109&tid=187 My HTML skills really suck, sorry for not formatting it, but it was the first thing to jump into my head when I read the article.
    • Maybe it'll also have content restrictions embedded in it. Rememember the Frontpage 2002 EULA [slashdot.org] which forbade its use "in connection with any site that disparages Microsoft" (to say nothing not allowing the user to "promote racism, hatred or pornography")? Which would be even more problematic if applied to the OS itself. The racism and hatred provisions wouldn't be a problem for me (unless you count general misanthropy), but between the other two, I'd have to cut my blogging in half.
    • Remember the slashdot story a couple days ago about the Microsoft

      There has been at least 14 articles relating to Microsoft in the past 2 days ... its getting hard to remember which is which ... this might as well be M$.com

      http://slashdot.org/search.pl?query=microsoft [slashdot.org]

    • the best way for Moft to keep an eye on their employees' blogs is to encourage them to run them at Moft sites like ASP.net [asp.net] and gotdotnet.com [gotdotnet.com].
  • And we all say "Amen".

    Praise the lord, ye almight Gates, whose code is not flawless and security not impeded!
  • Coming up next on your worst nightmare: blogspot, livejournal, movable type, etc. get sued for infringing on M$'s upcoming patent on blogs.
    Note that this is a satirical post, so please don't think that I am claiming that M$ is going to patent blogs. I no way of knowing this.

  • Sounds great... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 31, 2003 @01:20PM (#7360554)
    And when someone uses this feature, they'll get a big "Wallop" from the exploits in the document sharing code...

    Thanks a lot microsoft, for making another security risk. The hackers will have a field day with this one!

  • This is incredible (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Pingular ( 670773 )
    MSN is being split into two subdivisions
    First Microsoft was forced to split itself into 2 divisions, now they are actively doing it themselves. Maybe they've decided that more divisions is better for the company as a whole?

  • Blog shmog (Score:5, Interesting)

    by stratjakt ( 596332 ) on Friday October 31, 2003 @01:21PM (#7360562) Journal
    For the record, the article says "parts" of Wallop are going into Longhorn, probably the user/group management features and not a built in Blogging utility. Besides, Windows already has one - it's called notepad.

    Now, here's the meat in this article:

    On the presentation front, Rashid said Microsoft is advancing the state of the art and making it so that the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) can be used to do more general-purpose computations for things like simulations, user interface work, font rendering, and display management and manipulation. Some examples include geometry amplification on the GPU and pre-computed radiance transfer--for doing things like translucent objects, view-dependent displacement mapping and water rendering on the Xbox.

    How cool is that? Now that 500mhz CPU on your fancy video card can actually do something useful.
    • Been there, Done that.. Yet another non-innovation.. Quartz Extreme [apple.com] (apple.com) has been in MacOSX for more then a year now. (thats 2 generations in OS years)

      • Re:Actually using the GPU for Graphics Processing (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        You're wrong. Quartz Extreme writes most everything to the framebuffer, the work is done on the CPU. Even their own little flowchart on the link you provided says this. OpenGL goes to the GPU - Quartz3D is done in the CPU and sent to the framebuffer.

      • without going to far into it, heres what apple has to say about their technology. Any MacOSX user can attest to this providing real tangible benifits on their system From the Apple link in the parent post: (yea it's marketing, but it's not false) "Quartz uses the integrated OpenGL technology to convert each window into a texture, then sends it to the graphics card to render on screen..." "Quartz Extreme uses a supported graphics card built into your Mac to relieve the main PowerPC chip of on screen calc
        • without going to far into it, heres what apple has to say about their technology. Any MacOSX user can attest to this providing real tangible benifits on their system From the Apple link in the parent post: (yea it's marketing, but it's not false) "Quartz uses the integrated OpenGL technology to convert each window into a texture, then sends it to the graphics card to render on screen..." "Quartz Extreme uses a supported graphics card built into your Mac to relieve the main PowerPC chip of on screen calcula

    • Re:Blog shmog (Score:4, Funny)

      by An Onerous Coward ( 222037 ) on Friday October 31, 2003 @01:30PM (#7360651) Homepage
      I think it's a cool idea to use the GPU to assist in performing other computations. To make this process even more powerful, I think they should integrate a GPU onto the CPU itself. That way, um... er...

      I'll shut up now.

  • the blue screen blog (Score:4, Funny)

    by simpl3x ( 238301 ) on Friday October 31, 2003 @01:22PM (#7360570)
    i want to know what my windows machine is thinking while it's trying to retain its memory. does it wish it was another os? does it wonder why this is happening again?... i mean didn't i just blue screen a few minutes ago for the very same reason? the blue screen would be the perfect place for such discussion. i'm sitting there captivated!

    i want to know! tell me windows! how do you feel about this?

  • Hell... (Score:5, Funny)

    by daeley ( 126313 ) * on Friday October 31, 2003 @01:22PM (#7360571) Homepage
    Hell, they'll get Blogger if they take over Google.

    And a Google disruption can mean only one thing: Invasion.

  • they are after usenet archive as well... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by zasos ( 688522 ) on Friday October 31, 2003 @01:22PM (#7360574) Homepage Journal
    Blogs and Usenet - that's what Micro$oft is after... The Usenet archive and Blogger worth a lot and that's why they'll try to take over Google..
    • Yeah, because the worlds most popular search engine isn't really worth more than some blog tools, right?

      /me thinks MS might buy Google for Google; blogger and the usenet archive would just be the icing on the cake.

      • Perhaps the search engine might not be the real attraction? "It's almost quaint to think of Google as a search engine, but the astronomical estimates for the value of its flotation are based on its potential value as an advertising business. Google's own google.com front page is a valuable property, but it's conceivable that the business could prosper without its free flagship public search." From this article [theregister.co.uk] on The Register [theregister.co.uk].

  • No Integration. (Score:3)

    by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Friday October 31, 2003 @01:27PM (#7360613)
    It looks like Microsoft grand scheem for taking over the world is not going as planned with everything under one area integrated as one. But the real question is which segment will go away first the MSN or the Tools (I hope the tools), I meen by breaking them up it allows them to kill off one and not the other without making both look bad.
    As for the blogs I really dont care eather way. This is not a supper killer feature it is one of Microsoft standerd things that make them say "Hey I'm Cool, I'm With it" type of thing. Even though Microsoft won the browser war. They were not able to get a strong foot hold in Internet Technologies. So the Blogging is one of those features are a so what anyone can program that.
  • one of which will be a ghetto for consumers (Win98 and XP home users), while the other will a gated community for corporate users (XP Professional, MS only shops) ;-)

  • staggering (Score:2, Insightful)

    by selderrr ( 523988 )
    Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates said Microsoft will spend about $6.8 billion on research and development this year.

    Amazing... they can spend all this money (without hardware R&D like Apple) and still don't get anywhere near MacOSX in terms of userfriendlyness.

    I always wondered : do MS programmers/unit managers get a bonus for every feature they come up with ? In the past 10 years, bloat has been the only constant in redmond IMHO
    • I've pondered this question as well. But more than just "why can't they get a usable OS", I wonder "why can't they get a real server OS", and "why can't they get a secure OS."

      The problem, as I see it, is internal corporate politics. Decision makers don't see the revenue benefits of usability, security and separate server and client systems. So they end up with interfaces that are only considered usable by fact that they are familiar, software firewalls that even M$ doesn't recommend, and "server" versions
    • MS has a seperate research division that isn't beholden to developing products, though. It's not like everything MSR comes up with goes into a product, nor is it necessary for MSR to apply money and time to something that MS wants for their next OS. SO, part of that $6.8 billion is just MSR's funding (which increases substantially every few years), while the rest of it is the R&D required for their products.
      • okay, i can agree with that, but explain me why they can not come up with a decent network configuration assistant ????

        You have NO IDEA what fucking pain it is to switch a machine from modem-connected to LAN-connected without getting the fucker to stop searching for his modem !

        It's so insanely counter-intuitive ! If they'd spend 0.001% of their 6.8billion on some straightforward thinking and monkey-testing with newbie users, they would by now have found out their entire network configuration interface s

  • Microsoft vs. Slashdot (Score:4, Funny)

    by Ridgelift ( 228977 ) on Friday October 31, 2003 @01:30PM (#7360654)
    Great, now they're going to steal the idea of a weblog, which Slashdot was the originator of.
    I can see it now:

    MS-Slashdot
    News for Terds. Our stuff's in tatters.

  • Go Slashdot! (Score:5, Funny)

    by MoxCamel ( 20484 ) on Friday October 31, 2003 @01:30PM (#7360659)
    Wow, just when I thought Slashdot was dead. Today we have: Microsoft is evil! [slashdot.org] (and here. [slashdot.org]
    Bill Gates is evil! [slashdot.org]
    SCO is evil! [slashdot.org]
    RIAA is evil! [slashdot.org]
    Fox is evil! [slashdot.org]

    and of course...

    Sex! [slashdot.org]

    It's been quite a long time since I've been able to be quite so indignant!

  • research, review... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Empiric ( 675968 ) * on Friday October 31, 2003 @01:32PM (#7360668)
    Blogs are Microsoft Research?

    This just seems like a relatively trivial application-level chunk of code. But then I suppose any technologies existing anywhere which Microsoft wishes to integrate into the operating system are best-marketed as coming from "research". Observing as R&D... enviable position.

  • Blog Screen of Death... (Score:5, Funny)

    by tktk ( 540564 ) on Friday October 31, 2003 @01:32PM (#7360676)
    Great--in 2005, we'll be able to read millions of blogs about how often their computers are crashing.

    April 20, 2005 12:12pm Computer crashed.

    April 20, 2005 12:45pm Computer crashed again.

    April 20, 2005 1:32pm And again.

    April 21, 2005 Installed Linux

    • Why would we see that? I've never had XP crash. GNOME, on the other hand...
      • Gnome is not an OS. Gnome is a window manager. Please remember the separation of kernel and GUI that linux has which XP doesnt. If you get kernel panics and the box locks up completely, then you can say you've had Linux crash. Saying that gnome crashes is like saying that you've had the task bar in XP crash.

        As for XP crashing, yea, it's pretty stable, almost as stable as Linux. Sadly because the GUI is coupled so tightly with the OS, having an IE crash or your video drivers mess up sometimes means tha
        • Gnome is not an OS.

          Not an OS? What is an OS? Ah, an "Operating System". So if it isn't an OS, it must be a Non-Operating System. Therefore those crashes were totally expected!

          Seriously though, every piece of software which provides critical support to another layer of software running on top of it is an "Operating System", and any crash should be treated as an exceptionally bad event. If your computer runs Gnome, then it's probably a desktop or workstation, and a crash of Gnome will suddenly termi
          • If you don't want XP to crash, you can't use XP.

            If you don't want GNOME to crash under Linux, then you CAN use XFCE or something under Linux. At least the base (Linux kernel) is stable. I had 1 month of solid uptime in XFCE before I unplugged my computer and, uh, lost the uptime :)

    • Re:Blog Screen of Death... (Score:4, Funny)

      by Lizard_King ( 149713 ) on Friday October 31, 2003 @02:17PM (#7361202) Journal
      This is kind of like a Clinton-Monica joke... its gettin' old.

      I'm a Mac fanatic and wouldn't touch Windows if I wasn't forced to at work. I've been givin a Win XP Pro machine and its never crashed and I leave it on all the time.

      I'm not supporting Windows nor endorsing it (like I would the Mac), but stability jokes show a certain ignorance.

      You should know better... security jokes are much more timely =)

  • I'll bet Clippy's going to make a reappearance (Score:5, Funny)

    by The Evil Couch ( 621105 ) on Friday October 31, 2003 @01:35PM (#7360706) Homepage
    "It looks like you're writing an angsty letter.

    Would you like me to

    • Look up badly written pop-metal songs to quote?
    • Begin capitalizing and bolding every swear word?
  • I've had a blogging engine - no, actually a wiki engine but I'm the only one using it - as part of my desktop for more than a year now. And I have a friend who picked up on the idea himself after seeing how handy it was. I'm surprised there aren't more who have discovered this.

    Just think about making notes on a project, recording all that misc data that you tell yourself to remember but never do - and right there, in the browser and one click away, is a full featured web server. All my downloaded files go

    • "I've had a blogging engine - no, actually a wiki engine but I'm the only one using it - as part of my desktop for more than a year now."

      Microsoft seems to almost never enter into a market first. Just think about browsers. They're pretty good at leaving victorious, though.
    • I tried this for a little while too and I ended up abandoning it.

      I keep my notes in a plain text file. It's browsable and searchable with no overhead.

      There were a few things that made me uncomfortable about the wiki (moinmoin).
      1) I was never quite sure how to back it up (or restore it).
      2) I couldn't figure out if I would be able to move to a different wiki later if moinmoin became abondonware.
      3) The camel-caps for topic headings conflicted too much with notes about source code. When I read a page, a lot o
      • you're not gonna like this, but I use openwiki. It's not only ASP based, it uses gawd awful vbscript for everything. But I'd still rather edit vbscript (I have it fairly customized) than perl, which is what most of the apache solutions I've seen use.

        Because it's just me I use the access database version, which makes it a breeze to backup. In fact, after several migrations I've yet to lose ANYTHING, and that includes the ass-large flat directory where all my misc. downloads are stored.

        It should also be fa

        • It sounds like some of my worries are a little justified.

          MoinMoin is a Python wiki and it runs just about anywhere. Not sure how the feature set compares to OpenWiki, but it seems to be relatively complete, widely used, and actively developed.

          On my machine MySQL is the backend database and I suppose it would also be easy to migrate. Unfortunately, I don't know a damned thing about MySQL. It's definitely not as new-user-friendly as Access is.

          I'll probably give the wiki another go, but I'm still not really

  • Microsoft Longhorn (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by ayjay29 ( 144994 )
    "Microsoft Longhorn"

    Now there's an oxymoron for you.

  • Wow 5 Microsoft Articles (Score:2, Interesting)

    by PPGMD ( 679725 )
    Kind of cool seeing 5 Microsoft articles on the front page, you can't say /. doesn't cover MS, even if 90% of the comments modded up are negative.

  • on when their blog will suffer a critical security exploit?

    I don't see why Microsoft is handing out more matches while trying to put out their own fires...

  • Their marketing division.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Bendebecker ( 633126 ) on Friday October 31, 2003 @01:44PM (#7360825) Journal
    Their marketing division must be drunk. 'Wallop'? 'SHell'?

  • FYI: Apple ALREADY integrated the iBlog software (free with .mac). User blogs are posted on user's .mac webpage.

    [doesn't every /. article has to talk about Apple ;-)]
  • ..continues.

    people, it doesn't matter what they announce longhorn to have at this point! they don't even take them(features set&announced) seriously themselfs yet, such features(as this) that are pretty simple to add in mere weeks or month s time don't really matter if they're announced or not.

    it's not really new to them(ms&some other companies) to announce things and then quietly drop it later once they've stalled for long enough that nobody even remembers what cool stuff there were supposed to b
  • MSN is being split into two subdivisions

    Called MICROSO~1.MSN and MICROSO~2.MSN ?

  • Not a great many home users currently use their computer as a webserver, although that's certainly possible. But I shudder a little bit to think that every grandma in the country will be running a blog on the IIS built into their computer, and leaving it on on their broadband connection 24/7, since now they have something to serve.

    Won't this magnify the security issues surrounding MSFT's web serving software? Although it will help to inflate IIS's marketshare, too, once 95% of 200 million people start us
    • Almost certainly the blog data will be stored in a central location, and you will probably need an MSN account to use this (though they may try to make MSN come with Windows for "free")

  • ...and entire testing staff gets fired for trying it out. Cats make excellent snipers.
  • Halloween or Microsoft Day?

    Stories invloving MS on Slashdot so far today:

    • Google Considering Merger With Microsoft
      Microsoft's new CLI
      Gates: 'You don't need perfect code' for Security
      Microsoft Adding Blogs to Longhorn?

    I suppose next we'll have another Halloween Document and the day will be complete ;-)

    Happy Halloween!!
  • ...by the time Longhorn comes out the whole blog thing will have died. Here's a sample from a CNN article a few weeks ago....

    There are over 4 million blogs on the net, more than half run by teenagers. Research group Perseus says the typical blog is written by a teenage girl who updates it about twice a month. Sites such as Diaryland and Blogspot make it easy for anyone to launch one. Even AOL is hosting web logs, a sign that this trend has hit the big time. There are predictions the net will be littered
  • "Microsoft Adding Bugs to Longhorn?"

    Microsoft is talking about all this new funtionality thats going to be put into longhorn. Although these features sound great, shouldn't they decide on a feature set and then work to make it stable?

    With open source development features seem to be "planned", not just stuck in so they can include buzzwords in their advertising. By MS incorporating all of these features which, IMO most probably could just be at the application level, they will be adding bugs all over the
  • sheesh, the umpteen article yet about our beloved microsoft.

  • P2P also? (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Just because MS is researching something doesn't mean it's going to be in Longhorn... check out Pastry [microsoft.com].
  • We wouldn't know what to do without blogging integrated into our OS.

  • Ya.. right

    because when longhorn is released in 2-3 years blogs wont be a fad anymore

    whatEVER
  • Let's create a phony standard, premote the hell out of it, and see how long it takes Microsoft to say they are implementing it.

    Buzzwords for Buzzbrains.
  • Excellent! I just have to wait until 2006 to start my blog! ...or, I could download Movable Type today. Of course, I'd miss out on all the great wizards if I did that.

    "It looks like you are trying to write a Microsoft-bashing post! Would you like me to manually delete it for you, or do you want your Windows license to be revoked?"
  • For the record, it's "Lili Cheng" not Chang.

  • Let the LongHorn extrava-blowme-ganza continue! (Score:3, Funny)

    by cr@ckwhore ( 165454 ) on Friday October 31, 2003 @02:29PM (#7361334) Homepage
    The last couple of days have produced a flood of LongHorn related FUD being propigated around the media ... it hasn't been covered here at Slashdot yet, but I read a few interesting items yesterday ...

    -- Microsoft research has yielded a new feature which will be included in LongHorn ... a special key stroke on the keyboard will cause your computer to dispense ice cream from the floppy drive.

    -- Microsoft research has also found a way to incorporate a george foreman grill directly into the operating system. Users will no longer need to purchase a separate piece of hardware ... with LongHorn, the cd-tray will be able to accept and grill hamburger patties.

    -- In another Microsoft research innovation, LongHorn will be able to determine the users emotions and can react accordingly. For example, if the user is feeling sad, LongHorn will emit cute furry kittens, to the user's delight, from various fan ports in the case. Some newer model PC's will support puppies as well.

    I'm sure there's more ... these are just a few of the major points I've seen going around.

  • For those of you new to computing, this isn't a new concept.

    http://www.wohl.com/g0021.htm

    Enjoy,
  • ...first we have applications broadcasting to the world, now... oh, blogs! ;)

    I hope search engines have an option to uncheck searching within such things before this goes mainstream.

  • .... that MS is market testing possibilities of what to add to longhorn. Which amounts to the request for comments and other ideas and specifics issues... They will then sekll back to you and those who gave in the request.
  • Am i the only one who needs an OS and not every application ever written? Sure MS can and should make applications too but why cram them into the OS with a hammer and vaseline? A more modular approach would benefit everyone in the long run.

    I dont think MS is capable of imagening themselves being able to compete on merits. They are so tuned into forcefeeding people that they have forgotten hoeto listen to their customers and deliver what they want.

    This constant bundling and tight integration of apps into t
  • Oh great so now there will be an advertisement on the bottom of every blog post? Like all those advertisements I get on the bottom of emails from Hotmail people.

    Just like Microsoft to turn something virtually free, with such an open community spirit, into something branded-up-the-whazoo to generate revenue for them....

  • remember windows '98? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by mstamat ( 519697 )
    With Windows '98 Microsoft was proudly proclaiming that they integrated the browser with the OS, thus unifying and enhancing the user experience. I remember hearing stupid quotes like "The browser is the OS" and other crap from these days.
    Microsoft said that because in '98, surfing the web was supposedely the coolest thing around. Today weblogs are considered cool, so Microsoft goes that way. They just want to make the "average" user eager to pay them to get the new "cool" features.
    Personally I don't expe
  • [Foghorn Leghorn voice]
    What's the big idea putting blogs in longhorn?

    Next thing you know they'll call it Bloghorn ! And that's just a little, I say, a little TOO close for comfort.

  • Now Microsoft doesn't just want to know everything about the hardware on your machine, no...they want to know your most intimate personal thoughts! They will glean the blog entries of their user base and use peoples' deepest fears and desires to further enhance their market stranglehold! Muahahahaaaaaa!! Ahhahahaaaaa!! Haaaah*choke, cough, splutter*

  • .. we would all be running Dashboard [nat.org] and Storage [gnome.org].

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