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Media Technology (Apple) Technology

South Park Turns to Xserve for Storage Upgrade 324

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the dehydrated-apples dept.
Lam1969 writes "Computerworld reports that South Park producers are turning away from digital linear tape and direct-attached disk storage to a linear tape open setup complimented by Xserve RAID disk arrays. The show's creators never thought South Park would last nine seasons, so a storage hardware upgrade was necessary. J.J. Franzen, technology supervisor at South Park Studios in Los Angeles, says he chose Apple hardware based on a "gut" feeling. From the article: 'While South Park may appear technologically amateurish with its character cutouts, over the past nine seasons the cartoon series has added a great deal of storage-consuming detail, including backgrounds and crowd shots that can take up to 100MB of memory each.'"
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South Park Turns to Xserve for Storage Upgrade More

South Park Turns to Xserve for Storage Upgrade

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  • Hm ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ScrewMaster ( 602015 ) on Tuesday January 03, 2006 @10:44PM (#14389279)
    Well, his method of choosing one vendor's product line over another certainly is efficient. Just go with your "gut feeling" and buy whatever your feelings tell you.

    Whether you end up with the best tool for the job is another story.

    • Re:Hm ... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by blair1q ( 305137 ) on Tuesday January 03, 2006 @10:50PM (#14389309) Journal
      Efficient is the key word here.

      He's probably aware that anything he'd choose is adequate for the job that he'd put it to, and he's probably right that just choosing one and saving a few tens of thousands of dollars of meeting, ordering, installing, and evaluation time is plenty better than trying to find one that will increase their total efficiency by that much.

    • Re:Hm ... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Dahamma ( 304068 ) on Tuesday January 03, 2006 @10:50PM (#14389312)
      I don't know... I think that "gut feeling" was actually caused by a noise 92 cents below the lowest octave of E-flat.

      • MOD PARENT UP (Score:3, Interesting)

        by TheoMurpse ( 729043 )
        Here [southparkstudios.com] is an explanation of the "brown noise" that makes you crap your pants when you hear it.

        Such subtle, arcane humor. I love it!
    • Clearly this was posted just so we could all stand around and collectively laugh at the "gut feeling" comment.
    • Well, his method of choosing one vendor's product line over another certainly is efficient. Just go with your "gut feeling" and buy whatever your feelings tell you.

      Whether you end up with the best tool for the job is another story.

      I think that all depends on how good his gut is. I've had chitterlings several times now, and I can say that some guts are better than others.

    • Re:Hm ... (Score:3, Funny)

      by nmb3000 ( 741169 )
      Just go with your "gut feeling" and buy whatever your feelings tell you.

      Are you sure it comes from your gut?

      I think that special feeling might come from the cockles of our hearts, or maybe below the cockles, maybe in the sub-cockle area, maybe in the liver, maybe in the kidneys, maybe even in the colon. We don't know.

      Don't jump to conclusions that these feelings come from the gut. My colon tells me you could be wrong.

  • I figured maybe.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by twocoasttb ( 601290 ) on Tuesday January 03, 2006 @10:44PM (#14389281)
    ...Cartman roshamboed [urbandictionary.com] someone for it.

  • They took jer job (Score:5, Funny)

    by rolandog ( 834340 ) <rolandog@gmail.com> on Tuesday January 03, 2006 @10:45PM (#14389285) Journal
    I'm pretty sure that their providers of DL Tape are probably saying "They took mah job!"

  • Full quote... WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Red Flayer ( 890720 ) on Tuesday January 03, 2006 @10:48PM (#14389300) Journal
    "Franzen said he chose Apple hardware based on a "gut" feeling that its technology would be good, and so far, he has not been disappointed."

    Bad, bad Franzen. Must be nice to have money to burn, but "gut feeling" is a very, very poor way to select hardware... although this is a good example of brand awareness and marketing in action.

    OTOH, it must be nice to have a job where you can make purchasing decisions based on a gut feeling, I normally have to justify every purchase three times in three different ways to three different execs... just like they send out procedural memos.
    • They are graphic designers who wanted something too just work in a familiar setting. It is a *nix OS with a nice interface. Poor performance, but awsome tech support and familiar interface. If they can train themselves on how too use it instead of getting a Linux or MS boxen and hiring someone too admin it full time... I would've made the same decision.

      • Re:Full quote... WTF? (Score:3, Informative)

        by samkass ( 174571 )
        "Poor performance, but awsome tech support and familiar interface."

        While the performance of MacOS X as a MySQL server was well-documented by Anandtech to be sub-par, I haven't seen any benchmarks showing any performance problems with the xRAID/xServe combination as a file server. And last I checked, it was extremely competitive on a dollar-per-GB basis for the claimed performance and reliability levels. If they just need something to store lots of files online, and have it be easy to administer, it doesn'

      • XServe RAIDs (Score:4, Informative)

        by Bobartig ( 61456 ) on Wednesday January 04, 2006 @01:45AM (#14390065)
        What should be said is that it is NOT PowerPC hardware, there are NO G5's in them, and they don't run OSX. They're a sleek chassis full of RAID hardware, fiber channel connectivity, and 7 independant SATA controllers each with 2 hot swappable drives. Price/GB compared to rival products is extremely competitive, as in worlds cheaper. With 2x 512MB caches and dual fibrechannel connectivity, performance is pretty amazing with a full compliment of drives. The RAID servers are certified to work with Novell, Oracle, Windows Server, MacOSX, RedHat, YellowDog, Emulex, Cisco, ATTO, ADIC, etc. etc. etc. They still need some method of administering it (its just the storage), which may be an XServe, or virtually any other modern computer.
    • Well sometimes a Gut Feeling is the best you can do. Even for Computer Gurus it is not always that cut and dry. There are a lot of factors to consider, and the venders don't make it easy for you to figure out these factors. Company A will give speed in Ghz Company B will give speed in Mips. Company C will give time for functions in an application. Will a system with a bigger bus perform my actions better then a computer with a faster clock? Searching the internet is not much help also. With bench ma
      • "Besides if you chose completely by using rational thinking and it turned out to be a flop you probably should have said to yourself I should have went with X"

        Yes, but I tell myself that I was using the best information available to me at the time. I only regret my decisions when I didn't use due diligence in making the choice.

        "When you justify the purchases with the execs. It is different because they all may have different gut feeling and with 4 People with a Gut Feeling of 55% of being right. There

    • Re:Full quote... WTF? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by daveschroeder ( 516195 ) * on Tuesday January 03, 2006 @11:41PM (#14389578)
      Must be nice to have money to burn, but "gut feeling" is a very, very poor way to select hardware.

      Well, we purchased 35 Xserve RAID arrays for a single installation, for a total of 200TB of storage, after real research and comparisons as opposed to a gut feeling.

      The installation is described here [alienraid.org], with pictures. It is NOT a University-wide service; this was installed for one research project. We have much more storage around campus from EMC (in our two primary datacenters), Apple, Sun, and Storagetek, among others.

      It has been up and running for almost a year now, and the only problem, across all 35 Xserve RAID units running 24x7, has been one failed disk. One alternative looked at was building whitebox PCs in huge tower cases and packing them with disk. Ultimately, it was decided that a major commercial vendor, from which 24x7 support and 4-hour on-site response is available for 3 years, was a good choice. And it was much cheaper than competitive commercial solutions. And at a cost of around $1.60/GB for enterprise storage, you can't really go wrong. And for the Mac OS X-haters out there, there is no Mac OS X as part of this solution. We are using commodity 1U servers running Fedora Core. The Linux boxes see it as generic fibre channel disk, because that's all it is. The servers are monitored with Apple's excellent Java-based, platform independent RAID Admin [apple.com] tools, and some command-line tools [alienraid.org] we wrote ourselves.

      It's proven itself to be rock-solid. And that matches with my experience with the 20 Xserve servers we have installed, starting since around mid-2002: zero hardware failures, of any kind. Franzen had a good gut feeling. And, of course, given Apple's track record with reliability and lack of need for repairs (generally number one) when compared with other vendors from organizations such as Consumer Reports, guessing that the reliability of another Apple product will be good is probably a reasonable guess. ;-)
    • Y'know maybe they've got a pile of Apple stuff and a pile of other stuff and the Apple stuff works better. Or, perhaps, they're all really fucking busy and don't have time to piss around debating which is best.

      I normally have to justify every purchase three times in three different ways to three different execs... just like they send out procedural memos.

      Quite. The South Park guys, on the other hand, have to wedge a new show out the door once a week and maybe procedural memos and purchase justifications jus
    • There may be other reasons as to the decision that
      he does not wish to disclose or even hint about at this time.
      The GF (gut feeling) could just be a convienent explanation.

  • Overheard at SP productions when hw came in (Score:4, Funny)

    by FerretFrottage ( 714136 ) on Tuesday January 03, 2006 @10:48PM (#14389304)
    Sweeeeeeeet, but you get your bitch ass back in the kitchen and make me some pie!

  • respect my vector (Score:3, Insightful)

    by hostingreviews ( 941757 ) on Tuesday January 03, 2006 @10:50PM (#14389311) Homepage
    Dear Trey or Matt: Switch to vector graphics methods, not raster! Save many disks of whatever. Kthnksbi.

    • Re:respect my vector (Score:4, Interesting)

      by tinrobot ( 314936 ) on Tuesday January 03, 2006 @11:05PM (#14389397)
      Why do that? You'd lose all the things that makes South Park look the way it does - paper textures, realistic shadows, and so on...

      It's much better that they do the show in Maya. Not only do you get the photorealistic rendering that gives it that low-tech "animation stand" look, you get Maya's great animation and scripting tools, which make the animators and tech directors happy.
      • Wow, have you actually ever used Maya? Or any digital video software?

        • Re:respect my vector (Score:3, Interesting)

          by tinrobot ( 314936 )
          Wow, have you actually ever used Maya? Or any digital video software?

          Actually, I just wrote a book on Maya (which isn't video software, btw...) and I own several seats of it.
      • You're not making any sense. First of all, Maya is a vector graphics program (not raster)! Second of all, vector graphics can do textures, and in fact is (IMHO) better suited to a "paper cutout" style of animation than raster is. Which, after all, is better: storing one copy of a texture plus a bunch of shapes (defined mathematically with vectors), or storing a whole lot of bitmaps, each of which basically just contains the texture and a bit mask to define which pixels are visible?

      • Re:respect my vector (Score:5, Interesting)

        by quantax ( 12175 ) on Tuesday January 03, 2006 @11:56PM (#14389646) Homepage
        They aren't doing Southpark in 3D for the realistic shadows or paper textures, they're using Maya since it allows them much more freedom in the long run with the characters and animation, the very reason they would not use flash or any other 2D program. Character animation in Maya is great & intuitive, especially with animation as simple as Southparks, so they have all their characters in 3D which can be place in any position, any perspective, etc within their scenes. When a character turns around in the show, the animators have keyframed the characters poses, and instead of having to have an artist draw a cell of animation for each perspective of the character (front, rear, side, etc etc etc), they just turn them around in 3D, flatten the animation curves to give it that instant-motion look and they gotta working scene. A majority of their work is very likely the character animations, scene creation, lip-sync and post-render touch up to remove anything that might not have rendered the way they like.

        If they used a 2D program, they would be spending more time dealing with the technical aspect of animation rather than just moving the characters around and putting them where they want them. This is not because 3D is better but simply because it is far more efficient and allows them more flexibility. As far as the paper-look, thats simply a matter of the render engine & post-render effects, nothing that couldn't be done with a 2D program either, but does take a decent amount of time to get looking good, atleast to the degree that post-render touchup will not take much time.

        I would not be surprised if most cartoons in the future moved to 3D since the time-savings can really add up if you get a good setup going, and most cartoons animation movement quality is low to begin with so they can save themselves money on all aspects of it from time saved in the character animation phase.

        • Re:respect my vector (Score:5, Interesting)

          by tinrobot ( 314936 ) on Wednesday January 04, 2006 @12:59AM (#14389890)
          When a character turns around in the show, the animators have keyframed the characters poses, so they have all their characters in 3D which can be place in any position, any perspective, etc within their scenes.

          You know absolutely nothing about how South Park is set up. It is done in a 3D package, but the characters are by no means "3D" in the traditional sense -- they are simply flat parts assembled in 3D space, much like the Oxberry camera stand used for the original shorts.

          Characters are built "flat" using NURBS curves and surfaced using the "make planar" function, which trims a plane to the outline of the curve. The characters are simply an assemblage flat bits of geometry - the digital equivalent of a cutout bit of paper. These flat bits are textured using scans of actual construction paper.

          Animation is done using set driven keys on the visibility tracks of these parts. These keys are tied to the action of a software slider. Running the head turn slider, for example, would turn off visibility on the "right" head and turn it on for the "front" head (I'm simplifying here, but you get the point)

          The original decision in 1997 to go with Alias Power Animator 7 was because of the ability to render accurate textures and shadows, as well as the ability to tie sliders to visibility. Back then the sliders were driven by expressions, but Maya allowed the switch to set driven keys, which are more eficient. Flash really wasn't an option back then but 2D software such as After Effects actually were considered - AE could do the textures, but shadows were difficult as were sliders. Thus the decision to go with a 3D package to essentially do a 2D show.

          (If you haven't figured it out - I used to work there)
    • Although in this particular case you're right, switching to vector graphics doesn't necessarily save space. In particular, it's very inefficient if you've got a complex and detailed image that's going to be rendered at a relatively low resolution.

  • this is news? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ilmdba ( 84076 ) on Tuesday January 03, 2006 @10:53PM (#14389332)
    so they dumped some DLT drives and a ciprico array for some LTO drives and some xserves?

    wow.

    this is news how??

    • Give it time. When they dupe it later this week or next week it will be news then. It just has to have time to ripen, or rot as the case maybe.
    • so they dumped some DLT drives and a ciprico array for some LTO drives and some xserves?

      wow.

      this is news how??

      Especially since the DLT7000 is 1995 technology.
    • You know what's worse than an interesting Slashdot article that isn't actually news?

      When 50-60% of the comments are Slashdotters bitching that not everything on Slashdot is news.

      Shut the hell up and go read another article.

  • "South park compression" (Score:3, Funny)

    by Entropy ( 6967 ) on Tuesday January 03, 2006 @10:54PM (#14389336)
    Bet they sure could save tons of HD space if they just had one clip of Kenny's death.

  • Why so huge? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Cyno01 ( 573917 ) <Cyno01@hotmail.com> on Tuesday January 03, 2006 @10:56PM (#14389344) Homepage
    Isn't South Park done in flash? I know a lot of Adult Swim is done in flash...

  • Why choose Xserve? (Score:3, Funny)

    by nystagman ( 603173 ) on Tuesday January 03, 2006 @10:59PM (#14389365)
    One word: Hellastorage

  • As long as... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Geoffreyerffoeg ( 729040 ) on Tuesday January 03, 2006 @11:07PM (#14389405)
    Just don't name your machine "kenny." It's not good to have it crash every episode - even if you can reboot it.

  • Gut check! (Score:5, Funny)

    by version5 ( 540999 ) <`altovideo' `at' `hotmail.com'> on Tuesday January 03, 2006 @11:13PM (#14389433)

    If you think about it, maybe there are a few missing pieces to the rationale for choosing Apple hardware. But doesn't it feel like the right thing...right here in the gut? Because that's where the truth comes from, ladies and gentlemen...the gut.

    Did you know that you have more nerve endings in your stomach than in your head? Look it up. Now, somebody's gonna say `I did look that up and its wrong'. Well, Mister, that's because you looked it up in a book. Next time, try looking it up in your gut. I did. And my gut tells me that's how our nervous system works.

    Now I know some of you may not trust your gut...yet. But with my help you will. The "truthiness" is, anyone can make IT decisions. I promise to feel IT decisions!

  • I've Got To Wonder.. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mpapet ( 761907 ) on Tuesday January 03, 2006 @11:15PM (#14389438) Homepage
    What, exactly takes 100mb about a background shown at 72ppi and 800x600?

    GIMP tells me that's about 2mb.

    I've got to try that "gut feeling" in a meeting with my clients sometime real soon.

    Client: "So, why exactly should we install PKI infrastructure?"
    Me: "I've got a gut feeling that you need it"

    • Re:I've Got To Wonder.. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by kv9 ( 697238 )
      What, exactly takes 100mb about a background shown at 72ppi and 800x600?

      the many layers?

    • Re:I've Got To Wonder.. (Score:4, Informative)

      by SynapseLapse ( 644398 ) on Tuesday January 03, 2006 @11:29PM (#14389510)
      True the image itself is only 2mb, but they render the show in Maya. So Scripts+models+textures+scenes=100mb.
    • Might be 1024x768 -- at least that's what my Powerbook says my TV can do. Still, if you're creating content, it's best to keep it around in as much detail as possible. South Park does do zooming on some of those backgrounds, and there are South Park posters. And of course, you're keeping all kinds of layers, too.

    • Re:I've Got To Wonder.. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Crizp ( 216129 )
      What, exactly takes 100mb about a background shown at 72ppi and 800x600?


      Because it's most likely not 800x600, but rather 4096x4096 just in case they would want to zoom in on something having the texture. Also, bear in mind that many of the backgrounds are probably still there from "Bigger, Longer, Uncut" movie and many others are probably made for possible future use in a new feature film. Rendering for the silver screen takes a bit higher res than 800x600...
    • What, exactly takes 100mb about a background shown at 72ppi and 800x600?

      Surely you jest, it takes a lot more than 100 millibits to make a background.

      ppi has nothing to do with the final file size if you've already set the raster size.

      Seriously, the article says "up to". If you have a crowd of a lot of people, with several layers being buildings, trees, mountains, sky and clouds, that can add up to a lot.

    • What, exactly takes 100mb about a background shown at 72ppi and 800x600?

      GIMP tells me that's about 2mb.

      The biggest issue that results in needing more space than your calculations would imply is the fact that you just picked numbers out of your ass with no basis in reality. First off, the 72ppi is non-sensical in this context, has no meaning, and doesn't effect the file size. Second, they have the backgrounds done in a much higher resolution than 800x600.

      You see, they do the backgrounds as large pieces tha

    • 2MB per frame (Score:3, Informative)

      by Brendor ( 208073 )
      NTSC video is 720px x 486px at 29.997 frames per second. 2 seconds of video is close to 100MB

      He is also probably talking about assets pre rendering. Every character has textures associated with it, and the geometry, while not that huge, adds up.

  • ...and in response Steve Jobs stated (Score:3, Funny)

    by dickeya ( 733264 ) on Tuesday January 03, 2006 @11:17PM (#14389452)
    RESPECT MY AUTHORITAY!!!!
  • In mid 2005 we here at UMBC [umbc.edu] moved our AFS servers from a bunch of individual Dell/Linux and Sun/Solaris servers with DAS JBODs to Sun V20zs on a fabric with the Xserve RAIDs LUN'd out for each server. We love this set up and the Xserve RAIDs perform amazingly well for what they do (email, home directories for 15k active users). They're cheap, straight-forward to manage, and so far seem quite reliable.

    Details on our setup here [umbc.edu].

  • They're not even very interesting (Score:3, Informative)

    by tap ( 18562 ) on Tuesday January 03, 2006 @11:18PM (#14389456) Homepage
    Their old system was a DLT7000 tape drive. I used one of these for backup around five years ago. They hold 35GB uncompressed per tape and have a trasfer speed of 5 MB/sec. Think about trying to backup a 350 GB drive on one of these things. DLT7000 was replaced by LTO-1 and SDLT about four plus years ago. These systems get 100 GB on a tape. I guess they skipped that generation and went to LTO-2, 200 GB on a tape.

    Last time I was buying this stuff, a 24 tape auto-loader was around $15,000 and the tapes were $50 each. That's only about 6 terrabytes before you have to manually change tapes. If you look at how much it costs to build a multi-terrabyte NAS server with 250GB+ SATA drives (way less), and how much faster and easier to deal with it is, you have to wonder what the point of tape is nowdays.

    Of course the South Park people's data isn't very big at all. They've only got two terra-bytes to deal with! That's nothing by today's standards. I built a system five times that size two years ago. For less than they paid for the Apple Xservers today too.

  • 15TB of Xserve RAID storage? What about 200TB? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by daveschroeder ( 516195 ) * on Tuesday January 03, 2006 @11:21PM (#14389469)
    Why is 15TB of storage news? (And they don't even the full 15TB yet!)

    What about the 200TB of Xserve RAID storage for a single project [alienraid.org] at the University of Wisconsin, which has been up and running for over half a year?

    And no, this isn't a project serving a whole campus or an entire university student body. This is one single research project operated by one entity. Oh well, I guess supporting the Large Hadron Collider [web.cern.ch] isn't as cool as South Park. ;-)

  • Interview with JJ Franzen (Score:5, Informative)

    by datafr0g ( 831498 ) <datafrogNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday January 03, 2006 @11:35PM (#14389550) Homepage
    http://www.southparkstudios.com/behind/interviews. php?tab=20#3 [southparkstudios.com]

    Interesting stuff - has some background technical info on how an episode is put together and what systems they use to do it all.

  • /.ers' thoughts on "Bloody Mary" being pulled? (Score:4, Funny)

    by lysergic.acid ( 845423 ) on Wednesday January 04, 2006 @12:05AM (#14389688) Homepage

    I know this is off-topic, but most of the discussion so far has been pretty uninteresting, so I was wondering how other slashdotters feel about the "Blood Mary" episode [tv.com] of South Park being pulled off the air [eonline.com] and basically being censored from TV or any other future reproductions because it offended a few religious conservatives.

    Here's another news article on it featured in the North Korea Times [northkoreatimes.com].

  • On the next episode... (Score:3, Funny)

    by SamMichaels ( 213605 ) on Wednesday January 04, 2006 @12:07AM (#14389701)
    I'm sure we'll see everyone with ipods, using itunes on ibooks, a new Apple tree infront of the school and a crooked Macintosh logo bumper sticker on the school bus.

    Nothing like trade :)

  • Sweeeeeet! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Eric_Cartman_South_P ( 594330 ) on Wednesday January 04, 2006 @12:40AM (#14389816)
    God damn it, tape drive! Thats a BAD tape drive! That's MY SAN! Mom!

  • There's actually some interesting infor here... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by HockeyPuck ( 141947 ) on Wednesday January 04, 2006 @01:09AM (#14389936)
    From a Storage Admin's perspective, they've got a pretty old infrastructure and they are moving to a newer, faster more flexible setup... smart move.

    They started out with DLT7000, which I don't think you can buy anymore, but those drives could only backup about 32MB/s with compression. Compare that with a modern day LTO-3 drive which can backup 80MB/s WITHOUT compression. Even if they just installed 3year old 1Gb/s FibreChannel HBAs, and upgraded the tape drives, they would have had a better set up. Hopefully they upgraded their backup servers otherwise they'll hit bottlenecks just trying to drive faster tape and disk.

    Even though they went with a Xserve based upon a 'gut feeling', the Xserve, while not the greatest array out there (even in the midrange/low end segment), I've seen worse.

    I think the bigger news in the article is that they kicked out Legato. For a small shop like this, Legato might be over kill.

    Good to see they are upgrading with the times.
  • South Park, for whatever bashing it takes as infantile potty humor mixed in with occasional Left wing / Right wing issues, has set a new standard for cable TV shows. An average episode costs less than $100,000 USD (not counting whatever deals Creators Parker and Stone have with Comedy Central) and can go from concept to final print in two weeks. Throw in it's high ratings with the 18-35 crowd, and in one 30 second commercial spot, you the parent company have just recouped your initial investment.

    Adult swim has taken this sort of guerilla approach, picking up cheap, quick turn around projects. There's no huge capital outlay (unless you're buying an old fox show that was a failure and will probably never see the light of day again.....) and even if it fails, you can drop something fresh into it's slot in no time.

    I wonder if the business plan ripoff has contributed to the Viacom / AS fued? Or if viacom just can't remove their heads from thier asses...

  • Yeah, but Cartman takes up most of that space (Score:3, Funny)

    by elrous0 ( 869638 ) on Wednesday January 04, 2006 @10:34AM (#14391823)
    Okay, I couldn't resist.

    -Eric

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