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Slackware 10.1 Beta And Pat's Health 151

phreakuencies writes "The ChangeLog in slackware-current got a distiguished update today on Jan 22: Patrick Volkerding updated us on his health condition stating he is not back in perfect shape but getting more medical tests and results. The initial phrase on the ChangeLog: 'I'm going to call this Slackware 10.1 beta 1, because we're at a state where things are relatively stable.' Read up here"
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Slackware 10.1 Beta And Pat's Health

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 23, 2005 @09:17AM (#11447268)
    Patrick could just post a complete changelog of his health?
  • by vladd_rom ( 809133 ) on Sunday January 23, 2005 @09:22AM (#11447276) Homepage
    I think this "event" reflects the way in which most open source projects are lead.

    Certainly you won't see in a commercial product news about the health of the developers as items in a ChangeLog.

    However, in open source, the freedom to fork is often given as an excuse for allowing one person to be the benevolent dictator of the whole thing. On good merits, it seems, because many argue that if it weren't for that, things would never get done and stuff. But this "dictator" stuff gives the project owner a lot of power and a lot of discretion, and someone said once "power corrupts".

    Is it ok to notify the community about how the leader feels and where he's headed from a medical perspective? Yes. But, is the official changelog of the distribution the right place to do it? Would such a thing be done in a commercial product?
    • slackware *IS* a commercial distro, and mostly an one man show.

      a lot of people forget that very often :)

      in ultra small businesses(1 or 2 people) the health of the people in it is actually pretty important to know for the clients..
    • by Anonymous Coward
      "power corrupts"? Show the corruption here. So Pat's running the show for Slackware. Big deal if he puts his current medical condition in a changelog. This isn't the common cold we're talking about. He's gotten lots of support from the Slackware community, so I want you to explain how he's somehow mad with power.

      Parent: -1 Troll or -1 Stupid
      • by Vlad_the_Inhaler ( 32958 ) on Sunday January 23, 2005 @09:56AM (#11447364)
        I'd go further than that, since Slackware is his one-man-show baby, people who use it are very much interested in both his health and what will happen if the worst comes to the worst.

        A couple of years ago (or maybe even now for outsiders), people were wondering what would happen if Linus went one-to-one with a bus. That was actually a reason not to adopt Linux. Now we all know that people like Andrew Morton and Alan Cox are available and experienced.

        What way would people go if Slackware went down the tubes? Debian? I know I found Red Hat incredibly frustrating when my ignorance and Unix inexperience meant I had to leave Slackware and move to something easier to configure. In the end it was SuSE 5.0 I turned to, it's PCnfs printing capabilities worked 'out of a box'. Not sure I'd see SuSE as a migration path for Slackware users nowadays though.

        Get well soon.
        • I'm using slackware-current right now, and if Slack *did* go down the tubes for any reason? I'd probably switch to - are you ready for this - FreeBSD.
          • I have thought of that for one machine of mine (the firewall/proxy), but there is always that one problem: Linux simply supports far more hardware than any BSD variant. Linux hardware support used to be a major issue, now it is almost a given.

            Funny, someone here on /. suggested a couple of years back that Linux would one day be mainstream and 'Uncool', and that people would migrate to BSD. I thought they were joking . . .
        • I think Debian and Gentoo are the obvious alternatives. Slackware people tend to compile a lot of their own stuff anyway since the default distribution is a bit light on the packages (no OOo for example), and there's a very nice port of emerge to slackware. Debian is quite slack-like but may be too political for many slackers.
          • I've been using Slackware since it diverged from SLS so many years ago and I'd have to say that you are 100% correct about Debian... nice idea but if I wanted politics, I'd tune in to CSPAN. Their rabid use of GNU/everything has utterly and totally turned me off of the distribution. Gentoo? I don't think so. I think that I'd move to something like Vector Linux which is Slackware based and has a more sensible set of installer defaults (I use my own tagsets though already). The only real reason I'm not u
            • I'd say give emerde a try. One change to por2pkg and everything becomes completely reversible, so you can use packages for both. Just make sure you don't let it install pam and it works fine. And you don't need to worry about install defaults if you already have a working system.
        • by Anonymous Coward
          A couple of years ago (or maybe even now for outsiders), people were wondering what would happen if Linus went one-to-one with a bus.


          What is there to wonder about? Clearly the bus would be completely and utterly destroyed.

    • by RenHoek ( 101570 ) on Sunday January 23, 2005 @09:37AM (#11447307) Homepage
      Hmmm I think the benevolent dictator argument is a good one, but you forget one think. As democracy protects us (in principle) against politicians going corrupt after getting elected, so does the GPL protect us from benevolent dictators going bad..

      If the 'people' no longer wish to live under the benevolent dictators rule, then they can just pack up the 'country' (=software) and start one of their own. If the rest of the people agree that the dictator has gone corrupt, then they will flock to the new distribution, leaving the old corrupt dictator with nothing to rule over.

      So I don't think giving health reports in a changelog is going to have the people up in arms.
    • by lars_stefan_axelsson ( 236283 ) on Sunday January 23, 2005 @09:44AM (#11447325) Homepage
      Is it ok to notify the community about how the leader feels and where he's headed from a medical perspective? Yes. But, is the official changelog of the distribution the right place to do it? Would such a thing be done in a commercial product?

      I don't see why not. If people don't like it, they can, as you say, fork.

      However, your question of whether that would be done in a commercial product needs a more serious answer.

      In a word, 'no', you would not expect to see that in a commercial product (at least not typically, see below). The reason is that commercial products are produced by organisations that like to project (the falsehood) that they have transcended the inviduals working for them. I.e. we the organisation will support and stand by, this product, even if all the 'worker bees' that actually build it and know it would all go and croak tomorrow. As anyone who has ever been involved in professional software development can attest, that's simply and emphatically not true. If only a few key personel leaves a product development team then pandemonium (and frequently hillarity) ensues as the organisation reels from the shock and grief and desperately tries to find it's balance again.

      As the customers of said (large) organisation already have a feeling this is true, they must always be kept as completely in the dark as possible about the individuals in the organisation actually doing the work (and their well being). If it were otherwise, the customers suspicions would be confirmed within a week and they'll all run away rather than walk.

      This is why we've had the 'quality' revolution in the past decade or so. Corporations hate to be in the hands of the worker bees, since said worker bees then can (and will) demand more of a share. Hence every large corporation (or organisation, think the military that practice for a scenario where a large percentage of the worker bees /and even a few queens/ can be killed at any instant) must 'commoditize' the work done for them, making the workers as replacable as possible, so that they can be replaced. Not even cogs in the machinery, because the typical machine will stop with a cog missing, but rather less than cogs.

      That's why you see CMM and the like. To make workers less of craftsmen (i.e improving their skils, taking pride in their work etc, as craftsmen have a tendency to make themselves irreplacable) and more like worker bees. Instantly replacable.

      This has gone on for quite some time in 'ordinary' industry, started with Henry Ford in fact, and the transformation in the production industry is now almost complete. Less so when it comes to the design side of things as the corporations still need design skil. They're trying as hard as they can though, hence the call for process improvements.

      In open source we don't have to try and fool our customers as we aren't dependent on them. Hence we don't have to keep up the pretense that the project isn't in the hands of a few skilled people. Some smaller companies with heroes can operate the same way (as going with them is the long shot anyway, their customers aren't as easily scared). I remember when Dan Hildebrand (the chief architect of QNX) died from cancer. The company put his obituary on the front page and had it there for quite some time. Now, of course, in that business everyone already knew that he'd died, so trying to pretend that it hadn't happened wouldn't have worked anyway.

      So, the fact that we all know that Linus is the boss of Linux and that the project will flounder without him if e.g. he were to step in front of a bus (at least for quite some time) is actually a sign of strength, not weakness. We have smarter 'customers' who can handle the truth. "You wan't the truth, you can't handle the truth!"

      • Your post explains why I have left the software industry (or at least the world of "enterprise software" bullshit).

        From a management perspective (I've been there before), I understand you don't want the whole fate of the company to rest on one person's shoulders. You want source code that is clean and well documented so if somebody leaves, somebody else can pick it up and eventually figure the damned thing out. But if a key team member leaves, it WILL have an adverse affect on the project and time lines,
        • Would anybody actually want to work in a CMM level 5 organization?

          Amen and not me. I mean, I even went back to finish my PhD because I thought that I'd develop personally from it (not because it would make me more money, over the course of my career it's a net loss). Hence I (and every damn geek I know) are firmly in the 'craftsman' category.

          Corporations OTOH is in the business of making money, not making cars, or software or whatever. (They're even required by law to be in this business; increase share

    • perhaps you should consider the entire paragraph for Lord Acton [libertystory.net]'s letter :

      "Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end...liberty is the only object which benefits all alike, and provokes no sincere opposition...The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to to govern. Every class is unfit to govern...Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
    • I don't really care what commercial software would do, arguments about how commercial slackware is aside. I don't want my distro to behave like "commercial" software anyway.
    • Dude, cut Pat some slack (no pun intended). He only put his health update in the changelog because it is the most effective way of getting the word out to the Slackware community. Pat doesn't really have a blog, so the changelog is the next best thing.
    • ...produced by an organization of one -- or very few.

      The issue that we face is that organizations themselves are changing. In Dan Pink's Free Agent Nation [freeagentnation.com] and on Tom Peters' website [tompeters.com] (among other places) there's lots of conversation about the change in organizations. They were an aberration. When this country first got founded we had craftspeople producing goods for themselves because there were no other ways to do it. When the tools needed to produce goods got too expensive (steel mills, cars, etc.) Or
    • Is it ok to notify the community about how the leader feels and where he's headed from a medical perspective? Yes. But, is the official changelog of the distribution the right place to do it? Would such a thing be done in a commercial product?

      Ok:

      "Commercial" (or rather proprietary)products do not have changelogs. They have release schedules and such marketing BS. Even if such a product is a one man show, outsiders do not know it, and if something happens to that man, many times the schedules are delaye

    • Would such a thing be done in a commercial product?

      No, in a commercial product they would just put advertisements in their changelog.
    • I disagree with the parent comment. I don't feel Pat's comments reflect a "Benevolent Dictator" attitude at all. And, it's silly to think that the owner of a project could, or indeed should, distance themselves personally from their project...

      Here is the quote from the changelog:
      And about my status... I didn't want to have to bring this up again, but since a lot of people are under the impression that I've recovered and I'm just fine (and are beginning to make the usual demands of my time ;-), I'd better
    • I think this "event" reflects the way in which most open source projects are lead.

      Certainly you won't see in a commercial product news about the health of the developers as items in a ChangeLog.

      I don't follow your line of reasoning at all. There are lots of small businesses, for instance, that operate with exactly the same philosophy and relation to their customers. This doesn't mean that nearly all businesses operate in the same way, and it doesn't mean that it the sometimes less-formal methods

  • by XChilde ( 748078 ) on Sunday January 23, 2005 @09:37AM (#11447305)
    "Patrick Volkerding".

    However, it seems that there has been a bug fix for this package's recent problem :-)
  • Ok, flame away... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by odessa ( 218514 ) on Sunday January 23, 2005 @09:46AM (#11447333)
    but I wonder: assuming he has to pay for medical care (I'm British, sorry) - I hope he makes enough money from this project to adequately cover these costs.

    Here is my real beef - I love open source, but it pisses me off when I speak to people in business when they talk about free software in terms of monetary cost. I believe that if you regularly use and rely on certain software - OS or not - that you should be obliged to pay something in return to the support the process.

    Frankly, there are a number of businesses who really rely on this software and refuse to believe that they owe anything in return - money or code.

    Sorry folks, rant over...
    • Frankly, there are a number of businesses who really rely on this software and refuse to believe that they owe anything in return - money or code.

      And hence the GPL as then you're not getting it for 'free'. The code you put into our project, you owe us back in return. So that we and others may remain free (as in libre).

    • Re:Ok, flame away... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by jwdb ( 526327 )
      Well, that's the idea behind OS - people willingly giving away the product of their mind for others to benefit from. The idea is to expand the common pool of ideas and tools and to do something you enjoy, with the bonus of giving something back to the community.

      Compare programmers to artists. You've got your traditional artist (software company) selling his paintings (products) retaining all rights. On the other side you've got the graffiti artists (OS programmers) painting murals on the city walls - every
    • I believe that if you regularly use and rely on certain software - OS or not - that you should be obliged to pay something in return to the support the process.

      Isn't that what RedHat concluded, then split their distribution into Enterprise and Fedora. Ever since the Enterprise product came out, more people at my organization started using Linux.

      You just can't sell free software.
    • I have a complimentary rant.

      People who distribute software that is explicitly marked as "distribute at will, you are not obligated to pay anything" and then get annoyed when nobody sends them money piss me off! If you think that people should be obligated to pay you, then release your software under that license. If you're releasing your software under the GPL, BSD license, or other open source license, you are explicitly saying that nobody is obligated to pay anything for anything. If that's not what you
      • That would make sense, but...

        Most 'great' OS projects start out really, really small. For example, PHP, mySQL and Linux all started out as just a hobby - noone really had intentions of making money out of them. So they release the code, go through a few releases before it becomes apparent that it's a good project. By this time the code has got quite a few contributors and it's rather large.

        Now it becomes obvious that the original person who started this would like to close it up and charge for it. But the
        • Basically, your argument boils down to this: people are stupid and don't plan ahead, so they don't match their actions to their intentions at the beginning of the project.

          To which I say, tough cookies! If you open source your code, you are giving explicit permission for everybody to use it and not pay you a dime.

          Most popular open source projects would never have become so popular if they were closed to begin with, so I don't see the problem. The GPL giveth, and the GPL taketh away.

          If you think you might
      • If you think that people should be obligated to pay you, then release your software under that license.

        Other commercial Linux companies have found workable business models with the GPL. SuSE charges for CDs, while Red Hat charges for support.

        Meanwhile, Mandrake and Slackware give away their product away for free in iso form and basically panhandle.

        What's ironic is that the same people that try to guilt the public into supporting a given freely available commercial distro turn around and say, "Hey, d

    • As far as the GPL is concerned (Linux's primary license, more or less) it so happens that RMS agrees with you. Check this [gnu.org] out, if you're interested...it's an article he's written about that very thing.
      And of course, this is only something that comes up as a potential question in people's minds with the GPL anyway...if you're talking about software that uses the BSD or virtually any other FOSS license, of which there are several [opensource.org], it generally doesn't need to be mentioned. It seems to be primarily the GPL wit
    • Frankly, there are a number of businesses who really rely on this software and refuse to believe that they owe anything in return - money or code.

      You don't owe anything in return, hence the term "free" software. We love free software and it saves us hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in maintenance and licensing costs that would've otherwise went to proprietary companies. The entire reason we're using free software is because it costs nothing, not because we are free to change the source code. Fr

    • I believe that if you regularly use and rely on certain software - OS or not - that you should be obliged to pay something in return to the support the process.

      Perhaps if the British weren't already paying out their arses for a managerial nanny state with socialized medicine they'd have some money left in their pockets for charity, eh mate? ;)

      • Troll or not, I'm gonna bite.

        The British public coughed up £100 million plus in donations following the Boxing Day tsunami.
      • I doubt it. The US spends far more per capita on health care than any other country. Almost 3x as much per person as the UK. See here [umaine.edu].
        • Thanks for that - wish I had Mod points. That's been my contention for some time. All this BS about privatising health care just introduces more companies that want to leach off more profit.
          When the (Right wing corporatist) Australian Government gave a $500 rebate for people with health care to encourage the take up of private health cover (admitedly rather well implemented over here but that's not what I'm talking about) the health funds all raised their prices by - wow, $500! What a surprise...
          And th
  • From TFA... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by md81544 ( 619625 ) on Sunday January 23, 2005 @09:47AM (#11447338) Homepage
    So, this verson is going to be wrapped up pretty quickly. I hope people
    will support the release, because I'm sure I'll have a lot more bills before
    all of this is through, and I'm blowing through what little money I've managed
    to save.


    This struck me... I use Slack on two *really slow* PCs (233 Mhz) and it makes them perform just fine. And yet I've never paid Pat a dime. I think it's time I started a subscription. What about you?
  • by Anonymous Coward
    I sure hope the guy doesn't die soon, Slackware has been the only Linux distribution I ever really liked. Anyway, Pat's ChangeLog gave me an idea, what if most developers kept mental health ChangeLogs? Mhlogs!
  • by DrYak ( 748999 ) on Sunday January 23, 2005 @10:00AM (#11447373) Homepage
    This guy got finally reasonnable. Instead of trying to take care of by himself, he finally went to a doctor, and, best part : Stayed with the same doctor

    Of cours, any doctor usually start thinking of the most plausible and statistically significant cause of disease. Usually patient should come back and only if no improvement has been seen, then only the doctors start considering more unlikely or rarer diseases.
    But if the patient is unhappy with the first diagnosis of the first doctor and moves to another doctor, the new will start over again from the very beginning.

    It's OK to try change doctors when you're not very sick and when you try to find a nice doctor who you like to have him as the one who you usually refer first to.

    BUT when someone health is compromised HE SHOULDN'T keep switching doctors. He should try to stay with one (and eventually have him refer to other colleauges if he need more help).
    Because each time a patient siwtch doctors, he loose time because of this start-over-again.

    And I'm not speaking about the economical problems : doctor switching reases the health cost a lot because a lot of things (lab exams, etc...) are done twice or thrice.
    It's a big problem we have here in Switzerland.

    There's some work to avoid this kind of redundancy : One exemple of such project in Geneva (CH) is e-toile [geneve.ch] (Sorry website in french, you have some english info here [lake-geneva.net]).
    We hope that by building secured networks, doctors could share some information and avoid repeating the same stuffs all over again.

    • by DarkTempes ( 822722 ) on Sunday January 23, 2005 @10:39AM (#11447512)
      you really don't understand the current state of medical doctors in the states then...

      most don't CARE about every looking for the obscure. they're good at taking care of the low end stuff (a one week virus, a cold) with advice or some small medication, and the high end immediate life threatening stuff (surgery, cancer) but if it comes to some obscure middle-ranged life degrading disease or problem they tend to just do their normal battery of blood tests and then say "you're fine, it's all in your head!"

      and so then you must do doctor shopping.
      you think people like wasting their time and money utterly with a doctor? they just HAVE to. and they tend to self-diagnose cause the doctor doesn't do his job and diagnose you himself. the medical profession is one of the few BUISNESS professions where you PAY MONEY and are not guarenteed RESULTS of ANY KIND.

      I did the whole game, went around for two years with NMH [neurally mediated hypotension] before a cardiologist finally diagnosed me and gave me the proper medicine. First went to my primary care physican, she was just like "yes i know your life sucks and you're losing tons of weight and you look like you're dying but i have no clue so go elsewhere!" and that was basically the same thing, either they didn't know and they didn't care or they just wanted me to see a psych professional (which i saw many of and they all said i was just fine mentally for a person in my condition)
      it's easy to judge something until it actually happens to you...
      </rant>
    • Do you know the whole story? Do you know what this guy went through to try to get his doctor to actually help him before joy riding around the country looking for someone to seriously look at his problem?

      After what I went through this year, a story too simular to Pat's, I DO NOT trust any doctor in the US.

      I pay for copies of every piece of paper from any doctor I see, I then copy it again and keep one full medical file in my car and one in my safety deposit box. This avoids the problem you describe, ex

    • by Anonymous Coward
      This is mildly off topic, but I'll back you up on a recent experience of mine. I've had some intense sinus pressure on the right side of my face, but no pain. My normal GP (who has served me well) dismissed it initially, but after 8 months did little more than keep offering me decongestants. They didn't really help. We stepped through a few other options, including ear infections and a course of antibiotics. Still nothing. A few times I asked the guy if he could just take a look up my nose, it *felt* like t
    • It's OK to try change doctors when you're not very sick and when you try to find a nice doctor who you like to have him as the one who you usually refer first to.

      BUT when someone health is compromised HE SHOULDN'T keep switching doctors.

      From what I understand (a mutual friend knows Pat and told me his story, independent of /.) many of the doctors Pat consulted simply refused to acknowledge that he was capable of diagnosing his own Actinomyces infection. I even saw a physician on slashdot criticisi [slashdot.org]

  • by Fredge ( 186975 ) on Sunday January 23, 2005 @10:09AM (#11447413)
    One of Pat's logs mentions that he was diagnosed with and being treated for infective endocarditis. The medical literature I've read informally refers to that disease as IE.

    I think we all know what IE can do to your system. I would have thought Pat would have known better than to mess with it. Perhaps he should spend a little more time reading Slashdot? At any rate, the cure is pretty simple [firefox.com].
  • Good News (Score:2, Informative)

    by datadriven ( 699893 )
    This is good news for me. I've been waiting rather impatiently for the next release of slackware. I've tried every distro that offers a download and slackware is the only one I liked. I liked it enough to get a subscription. I'm sure Pat would appreciate it if some of you did the same.
    • I subscribe as well. I can't wait for those 10.1 disks to show up in my mailbox! For anyone curious, you sign up and it charges you $25 each time a new release comes out...about twice a year. Thats a pretty damn good deal, and since I run Slackware on...4 machines, 5 if you count Splack, its a very very good deal. Thats like $5 a box ;) And of course, people buying Slackware who can afford to is what keeps it around for free download for everyone else. If it stops being financially viable, Slack might
  • Someone got sick (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 23, 2005 @10:35AM (#11447498)
    In my prior work we were doing customisation work on our companys own product. Most customisation was done my team of 1 Programmer, (1/3)Project Manager and (1/2)Grapician. Sometimes Pm and graphician being the same person. Programmer was generally doing one project at time. Project manager was managing 2 or 3 and graphician was doing mostly one at time, but was resereved only for hald of the time for a project. Typical project lasted 2 months. Getting specification and connectons from client has half the work.

    Employees got sick once in a while like people do.

    There was allways the trouble to explain customers.

    The usual question was. Why have you not replaced him(her). Our project is prime importance.

    a) 25 some will most likely be sick 2 days, geting new programmer to understand takes longer.

    b) Puting people in middle of half written code that does not do what is needed, usually means large chunks being rewritten, when original author knows what is missing and only adds that.

    c) a lot of specification was usually on the air, and doing the code to interface was the minor part.

    d) We sure did not have spare developers.

    e) Yes, they all are.
  • According to this [tmc.edu], Infective Endocarditis is an infection of the lining of the heart's chambers (called the endocardium) or the heart's valves. If left untreated, endocarditis can cause life-threatening complications.

    If you have chronic endocarditis, which may last for months, you may feel feverish and chilled, be very tired, lose weight, and have joint pain, night sweats, or the symptoms of heart failure.

    It's treated by antibiotics, and sometimes requires surgery. The incidence of IE is approximatel
  • by Jugalator ( 259273 ) on Sunday January 23, 2005 @02:19PM (#11448686) Journal
    I'm going to call this Slackware 10.1 beta 1, because we're at a state where things are relatively stable.

    WTF!

    He shouldn't let his health condition affect what he labels the Slackware versions! :-)
  • Seriously. Up here, self-employed people who get sick don't face financial ruin. You probably can't find a better argument about why universal medicare benefits a country. Someone like Pat can run a one or two person business that benefits his community in an enormous way, without the risk of losing his shirt if he gets sick.

    You could probably get in on one of those "genius" visas. I think we have them up here too.
    • by bluGill ( 862 )

      Maybe. IF they allow you to continue to see doctors after the first says there is nothing they can do. IF there is enough money to pay for the tests you need. (Of course if it is life or death it is done, but we do the work here in that case too, when the condition isn't that serious though there may be lines)

      Its all a maybe. There are many people in Canada who come to the US for treatment because it is better. You pay for it, but you get better treatment. The reverse is also true because for some


  • So now we (the peanut gallery) are bad because we criticized him for all these self-diagnosis. I'm happy he finally guess right with the infective endocarditis. But that's a far way from this sulfur actinomycosis he was originally claiming...

    Just a thought.
  • Pat, I love ya, but you really need to get some more people on board. You can't be trying to do everything.

    What's up with 10.0? There has not been a security update for a long time. Good to see you've upgraded to 2.4.29 for current, but the poor schmucks who are still running slack 10.0 might not know about this bug [securitytracker.com] which allows local users to become root. I tried it myself on my slack 10, and it works (not every slack 10 box can reproduce the exploit, but I, for one, could). There are other bugs in 1

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