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Dick Trauma posted:EDIT: You guys talking about cluster size probably remember wait states and RLL hard drives. Or dealing with IRQs. Sometimes I think people don't realize how hard it used to be just to use the drat PC. I supported an online game that eventually required 618k or so of system RAM and holy poo poo it was a bitch to get that much space without resorting to a boot disk. We were doing things like loading stuff into empty video memory space to try and get those last few k. I hated the developers for those RAM requirements. I've probably already posted this in the last thread, but this was my ultimate achievement from the final days of my still owning a DOS gaming machine: code:
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Sep 3, 2013 12:16
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Crowley posted:Yeah it's been posted before, but if I saw that in a job application it would go right into the "Definitely interview!" stack. Really, I thought by now we wern't supposed to be mentioning ancient stuff like MS-DOS on our CVs? Glad I'm not the only one who, as a teenager, got the job of setting up everyone else's CONFIG.SYS files whenever a new game came out.
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Sep 3, 2013 15:05
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blackswordca posted:About 10 years ago I was in the running for a job with two other people. I was chosen in the end because I knew how to use the subst command without looking it up. SUBST command aka "I have a huge 2GB hard drive and can't be bothered to keep finding and inserting the CD for this game that has lovely copy protection". Used that one a lot back in the day  XCOPY /E D:\*.* C:\GAMES\SHITGAME\CD SUBST E: C:\GAMES\SHITGAME\CD E: INSTALL SUBST E: /D Then make a little batch file that does basically the same thing only runs the game.
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Sep 3, 2013 15:34
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I grew up with a BBC Micro, and later an Atari ST. Also owned a NES and a SNES. hosed up my thumbs playing too much Mario Kart to the point that using a game pad for too long still hurts. Got my first gaming PC for xmas 1993 after being blown away by seeing Doom on a friend's dad's PC. Before that I wanted a Mac as that's what we had in school. Doom literally saved me from becoming a lifelong Mac user. I ended up joining a local "computer club" that it turned out basically existed to allow everyone to pirate games. It even had the obligatory shifty looking old dude selling "Blobby CDs" full of pirated games for £10 each as this was back in the days when CD writers were seriously expensive, so a lot of my social circle from those pre-internet days ended up being PC gamers, and somehow I ended up being the CONFIG.SYS expert. Haven't owned another gaming system since. The fact that gamepads are still physically painful for me means I'm probably always going to remain a PC gamer, and moan about lovely ports that need a gamepad to be playable. It's also worth noting that I didn't fully give up DOS until after several years of dual booting it with Windows XP. Didn't know Charlie Brooker still did anything to do with games (I used to love his columns in PC Zone) but RPS is quite fun. I only started reading that quite recently after chatting with one of the writers at Nine Worlds last month. On the topic of Brooker. Did anyone ever archive his old comics website, superkaylo.com? I'd love to read that again but archive.org don't have it.
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Sep 3, 2013 16:52
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DGK2000 posted:This is my entire job, but covering remote offices in an entire county. As the sole IT guy, with nothing from a former contractor documenting anything. This poo poo is a loving mess. I had a job like that. 60,000 miles a year travelling between sites in my own loving car, 4 or 5 overnight stays a week, and a full day on site fixing poo poo before another 2-8 hour drive to the next site. Constant firefighting since there was never any time to actually improve anything. Then many a weekend spent making sure that one of my cars would last another week. Not helped by many of the sites being in sketchy areas so in my time there I had 3 cars stolen and a few vandalised. I didn't document poo poo either, and I feel no shame in having done so since there simply wasn't time due to the ridiculous working conditions. I'd been telling them for years they needed two of me if things were to improve, they did nothing, eventually I quit and the place went bankrupt six months later. My code was all nicely written and well commented but nobody else there knew much beyond reboot it and try again. Lum fucked around with this message at 11:27 on Sep 4, 2013 |
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Sep 4, 2013 11:25
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"It's my butt technology. TaaS" Turds and a Shitter? Turds as a Service? Testicles and a Scrotum?
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Sep 4, 2013 13:50
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captkirk posted:Please tell me you got covered for mileage. Cost of petrol only. I also had sales-rep style standards to adher to re: age and appearance of car, which I basically ignored and instead mostly ran knackered old 80s/90s Volvos or VWs, keeping the nice car only for trips to the office or to site when I knew other staff would be there.
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Sep 4, 2013 14:15
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anthonypants posted:These aren't personal printers. You should ban inkjets too.
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Sep 4, 2013 16:39
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pr0digal posted:My daily dose of "you've got to be loving kidding me" but.. I just wanted to install Mint.
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Sep 4, 2013 17:09
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deimos posted:The cause: A loving STAPLE DANCING AROUND THE MOTHERBOARD. [img-topper-from-Dilbert.jpg] That's nothing! I had a customer with a Canon DR-3060 scanner. These are lovely little devices and there's plenty of 10 year old ones still in service. They look like this:  I get called out because the computer can't see the scanner. I get there and the scanner won't even turn on. Replace the power lead with a known good one, still dead. Ok time to call out a hardware guy. Hardware guy turns up and is amazed at what he saw. So it turns out that if you ignore the instructions, and scan documents that are still stapled togegher, sometimes the staple gets ripped out of the paper and drops through various holes into the innards of the scanner. Inside the scanner the motherboard and the PSU sit next to each other with a little gap between them, both raised up on standoffs. The motherboard was covered in staples. The gap between the motherboard and PSU had filled up with staples enough to create a building surface to allow more staples to build up eventually bridging the 230V AC input stage to the motherboard and burnning it out. The customer asked if that was covered under warranty. It wasn't.
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Sep 4, 2013 17:27
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poo poo pissing me off today. Chatting with a bunch of people on GTalk Go to do something on youtube.. signed into the wrong google account. Not to worry I'll just sign out of youtube and sign in with my other account.. All my GTalk windows close. gently caress you Google.
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Sep 7, 2013 22:42
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JohnnyCanuck posted:It's why I still use an actual client, rather than just the webapps. Group chat is what I was using it for >.< Didn't know they did an actual client but sounds like it would not be useful to me. I guess I'm to have to run gtalk under IE or something sick like that. (I refuse to allow Chrome on my system)
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Sep 8, 2013 02:04
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stubblyhead posted:Is there any reason you're not using multiple sign-in? I'm reasonably sure that's not browser dependent. I don't want my accounts linked. Way back when, I got banned from Google Plus for refusing to give them my real name. This hosed up my phone which was prevented from logging in and syncing contacts and calendars. I ended creating a new account specifically for my phone and re-entering everything. It sucked. I now have two accounts, that one for the phone, which I also use for GTalk as I use that on the phone as well as the desktop, and another one which I use for uploading my mashups and recordings of my live DJ sets to Youtube. Since this activity basically involves uploading copyright music to Youtube that Google then identifies (usually gets between 2 and 8 songs out of a 2 hour set, then blocks my video in Germany) I figure that account is probably going to get banned eventually. I do not want to link it to my other account and gently caress up my phone again. Edit: vvvvv Oooh, that sounds perfect, thanks. Lum fucked around with this message at 15:29 on Sep 8, 2013 |
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Sep 8, 2013 13:06
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Dilbert As gently caress posted:gently caress SQL EXPRESS WHY DO PEOPLE USE IT IN PRODUCTION? In my experience it goes like: Slimy sales rep conveniently forgets to mention it needs SQL server, in order to make the overall purchase price look cheaper. Tech turns up to do the install, tells the customer they need SQL server. Customer thinks the company are trying to rip them off by selling them more software. Tech eventually gets fed up of taking the blame and installs it on SQL Express.
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Sep 9, 2013 23:45
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"Measure not what is important, but make important what you can measure" - An Idiot
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Sep 10, 2013 16:09
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Edit: Lot of posts while I was writing this. This is re: the boss who wanted a touchscreen laptop with a big screen for movies. Probably need to look at some of the smaller sellers rather than your Dell's and HPs of this world. The laptop will likely end up being a rebadged Clevo, but there's nothing wrong with that. I'm looking at a UK supplier that lets you customise your laptop down to what brand of memory, what drive and even which type of thermal paste you want. There's probably someone doing something similar in the US, maybe Sager? Lum fucked around with this message at 17:56 on Sep 10, 2013 |
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Sep 10, 2013 17:49
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Pissing me off today, getting a Canon DR-5010C to work on Windows 7/8 I absolutely adore the 5010 as a scanner, with it's option for a straight through path and generally chunky and rugged design, you can give it to customers who will do things like mix in a credit card with the paper scans and it handles it all. Problem is, the driver for it is missing about 21 DLL files needed to make TWAIN work. You can get those files if you install Canon's CapturePerfect software, but this only comes on the CD with the scanner, the versions on their website are upgrade-only and check for the original. Without this you can't scan from any TWAIN software at all. So I've had to acquire a copy and then make up a little package for people to dump into SysWOW64.
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Sep 11, 2013 12:53
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teethgrinder posted:I think the only place I haven't had alcohol on the job was the federal government. My current one is just five guys. No one cares. My previous one, the owners would occasionally buy a case on Friday evenings. For a moment I assumed you were drunk on the job.. flipping burgers.
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Sep 12, 2013 14:58
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TWBalls posted:She can do what quite a few of the users here do, hit the Caps lock key, type the letter, then hit the caps lock key again and type out the rest. I know this, because Windows helpfully pops up a balloon that tells them their caps lock is on when they're typing in their password. Do they not know what the shift key is for? The really weird part is that it's not just one user, as I've seen quite a few that do this. I have a foot pedal thingy that presents as a USB keyboard, with the 3 pedals mapped up to Shift, Ctrl and Alt. Saves wear and tear on my little fingers. Or it would, if my typing style wasn't so ingrained after all these years that I can never remember to use it. In practice the pedal only gets used as a crouch button in gaming. Time Crysis.
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Sep 13, 2013 09:30
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tarbrush posted:Price and link please Really not cheap. $149 if you're American http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/fs-savant-elite.htm I use it in combination with this keyboard, which I absolutely adore after loving up my fingers in the late 90s. http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/advantage.htm The foot switch is a little odd, the software for programming it is terrible, but it actually uses something called X-Keys internally, so I managed to blag the X-Keys developer into sending me links to their programming stuff which works a lot better, the default software works fine for actual data input but certain keys get mapped incorrectly when DirectInput is involved. http://xkeys.com/software.php Lum fucked around with this message at 09:59 on Sep 13, 2013 |
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Sep 13, 2013 09:57
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Crowley posted:X-Keys is the industry standard for broadcasting equipment. The one I linked only uses the X-Keys control hardware. The pedals and stuff they make themselves. I probably haven't used it as much as broadcast stuff uses, but it's about 5 years old now and still going.
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Sep 13, 2013 10:57
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HalloKitty posted:I couldn't get excited about a game on 7+ year old console. I'll pass unless there's a PC version. After playing Saints Row IV (which is already out on PC), I can't really get excited for a new GTA game. "Hey cousin let's go bowling" vs giant purple dildo of doom, also dubstep gun.
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Sep 16, 2013 19:50
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GargleBlaster posted:"Don't have kids" is my grumpy response. There's always someone willing to No kids, one cat, I'm working from home, posting poo poo on the forums. Cat is asleep on my GFs chair not bothering me. Pissing me off currently: Job on hold because a customer can't arrange for me to remote access a desktop PC and their IT people never return my calls. I might just move my email client to the second monitor and play bloody Saints Row IV at this rate.
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Sep 17, 2013 14:39
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eszett engma posted:ASUS, you say. I take it this is a P5 series motherboard? If it's important enough you can get a replacement BIOS chip from them for $15. Does the hotswap flash method still work these days? (Find a working board, enable shadow memory, boot to DOS, carefully remove BIOS chip while the system is powered on, flash BIOS, power up, put both chips back in their correct board. Fixed a few boards that way when CIH was running rampant, then I discovered that work had an EPROM programmer so used that instead.
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Sep 18, 2013 11:16
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Sep 18, 2013 14:42
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dennyk posted:A lot of people really don't do poo poo on their computer but check their email and maybe surf the web with a single browser tab, which doesn't use much memory. Even if it does happen to encounter uncorrectable errors from a bad DIMM, it will probably just cause the current application to crash, which most non-technical people won't think twice about unless it happens really frequently. I'd guess a full Windows install uses quite a bit more memory and is therefore more likely to have an issue with a flaky DIMM, and of course when it has a problem, the whole install dies. This poo poo was one of the reasons Vista got such a bad rep back in the day. Loads of XP machines in exactly this state, especially in the enthusiast/ricer community running overclocked rigs that were mostly stable on XP. Oh poo poo all 4GB of RAM is now being used to cache poo poo, only it's faulty RAM so your apps are broken before they've even loaded, therefore Vista is poo poo and crashes all the time.
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Sep 21, 2013 14:37
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Ursine Asylum posted:Sounds like a company that doesn't want to keep it's programming department. If our company had drug tests they'd be out of business by next week. I'd fail one of those, and I don't do drugs. One of the legit medications I'm taking has a side effect of making you test positive for methamphetamine.
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Sep 23, 2013 10:08
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guppy posted:I think it's more about the nature of the employer. Larger organizations more likely to require it than small, public more than private, and so on. Also seems to be more of a US thing. In the past I've worked with people who openly talked in the office about all the ketamine they took at the weekend and the bosses didn't give a poo poo. Oh dear, the company that is buying my division at the end of the month is American. Suddenly I'm afraid that they may try American HR practices over here.
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Sep 23, 2013 14:17
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spog posted:From what I read on these forums, UK employment law would make an American HRs head explode. thought hey are far from perfect, they don't treat employees as disposable assets that it is easier to dump than the contents of a wastebin And that is why I wrote that I'm afraid they might try it on, not that they might find a way to make it legal.
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Sep 23, 2013 16:43
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EAT THE EGGS RICOLA posted:What kind of crazy world do you live in where HP could make their printer drivers fit on anything smaller than a 1GB drive. What kind of crazy world do you live in where the drivers that come with the printer are actually functional, as opposed to being 2 years out of date and bluescreening your machine if you're dumb enough to actually install them.
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Sep 25, 2013 20:37
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Zamboni Apocalypse posted:Maybe I should put in a work order for webcams to enable remote monitoring of their physical mail receptacles? Someone else in IT got all worried about a check he hadn't recieved.. well, hadn't taken out of his mailbox, where it had sat since delivery, 15 minutes after it had been picked up from the business office. Given that the very first webcam ever was used to monitor a coffee pot. This seems like a perfectly valid use.
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Sep 25, 2013 21:04
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TWBalls posted:Person 2: Hmm... I dunno, YouTube it. I'm sure there's a step by step video out there. This pisses me off. When the only instructions you can find to do a thing all link back to some youtube video where a dude with an agonisingly slow whiny voice explains how to do the thing in baby steps when all you needed was a couple of commands, not 5 minutes being shown how to click start run and type CMD in 3 different versions of Windows. Just write the bloody instructions in text.
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Sep 26, 2013 19:29
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^^^ Bonus points if you get to sit through the machine rebooting while the narrator makes jokes about "Microsloth" and rambles on about how great Linux/Macs are before proceeding to carry on with how to do (Windows-only-thing)Biggz posted:I don't think this is the case... Do people really say "I'm just going to facebook that on MySpace"? 
Lum fucked around with this message at 19:50 on Sep 26, 2013 |
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Sep 26, 2013 19:38
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Quote != edit
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Sep 26, 2013 19:46
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I'm just wondering what's so inherently ugly about crotchless knickers?
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Sep 28, 2013 20:26
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Ahh, a 1st gen Compaq DL380. My first experience of ever building a server rack consisted of four of those and eight external disk enclosures. It was made particularly fun that someone had come in before us, unboxed everything into a pile and thrown out all the boxes and instructions. Both me and the dude who'd been assigned to the job with me had never actually done rack stuff before, and had no idea which type of rail went on what other than by counting them and matching them to the number of boxes of that type we had. Fortunately the guy I was working with, I'd gone to school with him, and college, worked on more than a few projects together and generally worked really well with, so we got that thing built and it worked really well. Lasted until after I'd left the company and then some joker decided that moving the server room to another building was a great idea and couldn't possibly go wrong. That setup was a thing of beauty, apart from the fact that someone installed Lotus Notes on it.
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Sep 29, 2013 08:30
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Congrats on your new spine!
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Oct 1, 2013 16:44
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Vin BioEthanol posted:A good reference image for adjusting rgb values between 2 displays? Only way to really do this throughly is to get something like one of these. I have one, they're awesome. Probably not worth the expense for your task though.
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Oct 2, 2013 13:40
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Urit posted:The last company I was at used Second Life as a "virtual training" software instead of just a 8-hour droning conference call with a powerpoint deck in Lync. I'm not sure which is actually worse. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RedLyae4b2s&t=20s (NSFW after 1:15 into the video) Did they make people make new SL accounts, or use their existing ones? I'm imagining a corporate event filled with the default newbie avatar. Not sure I'd fancy explaining my SL avatar (looks basically the same as my forums avatar, only longer hair) to some corporate suit running a training course, and now I'm remembering some of the goon ones from back in the day. Lum fucked around with this message at 12:56 on Oct 9, 2013 |
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Oct 9, 2013 12:53
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Antioch posted:Server 2003 SP2 is what, 6+ years old? End of Life on that poo poo was years ago. Isn't it end of life next year?
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Oct 9, 2013 15:47
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