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Jobs is on the cover of Time


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Jobs is on the cover of Time
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SKMDC
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2005-10-17, 16:34

link

There is a four or five page spread with some nice photos, one of Jobs, Ive, Schiller, Rubinstein & Fadell sitting around a table with plans laid out.

edit=here's a link to the actual story with the photo

"What's a Canadian farm boy to do?"

Last edited by SKMDC : 2005-10-17 at 16:41.
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atomicbartbeans
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2005-10-17, 16:52

Anybody want to paste the full article?
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chucker
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2005-10-17, 16:58

Time Canada has the full story.
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alcimedes
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2005-10-17, 17:15

Isn't Time owned by Disney, who's busy sucking Steve's balls any way possible to try and get Pixar back?
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SKMDC
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2005-10-17, 17:22

No Time is owned by Time Warner Aol or whatever the heck they call it now.

Disney owns ABC and they are sucking Jobs balls by giving him cheap content for the video iPod. This deal has really pissed off studio and network heads.
I think Jobs used Pixar as leverage with Disney to get content. Now that Eisner's gone he does't have a problem with Disney.

The whole Pixar fiasco was the writing on the wall for the board to show Eisner the door. Jobs made it pretty clear, he couldn't do business with them with Shrek, I mean Eisner there.

"What's a Canadian farm boy to do?"
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atomicbartbeans
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2005-10-17, 17:31

Quote:
The new iPod’s potential is so huge, it inspires even Jobs to a burst of understatement. “There is no market today for portable video,” he says. “We’re going to sell millions of these to people who want to play their music, and video is going to come along for the ride. Anyone who wants to put out video content will put it out for this. And we’ll find out what happens.” Yes, we will. We’re all coming along for the ride, and we all know who’s going to be driving.
This guy is a damned genius.
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omem
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2005-10-17, 20:20

http://img.timeinc.net/time/daily/2005/0510/jobs_ep.jpg
who wouldn't want to be part of that. :smokey:
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psmith2.0
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2005-10-17, 20:41

I believe that's one of the first looks I've ever gotten into Apple. That's a very cool photo of the five of them, sitting around.

If there was a super-high res version available, some true hardcore wingnuts (okay, me), would be analyzing EVERYTHING...

"Ohmigosh, those plans in front of Jobs...looks like schematics for a G5 Cube if you squint!"



There is an iMac G4 on the far right, back in a door or closet of some sort.

The tables there are the same ones at the Apple stores. They must've gotten a bulk discount.



Seriously though...cool photo. A lot of world-shaping talent and brainpower represented there!

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Robo
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2005-10-17, 21:44

Quote:
Originally Posted by atomicbartbeans
This guy is a damned genius.
You can say that again! Making video standard on the iPod - even if it meant using a 2.5", 240x320 screen - meant, well, making video standard on the iPod. Every 5G iPod owner will be a potential customer for iTunes videos.

As much as I'd love to see an "iPod video" (and I still think we will), this makes a ton more sense for now. I can't wait to see iTunes videos grow.
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groverat
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2005-10-18, 01:21

I agree completely with Jobs about portable video. It's a gimmick.
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Brad
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2005-10-18, 01:30

Quote:
Originally Posted by atomicbartbeans
Anybody want to paste the full article?
Sure, here's a copy for prosperity:


[image]
The Core: The Apple team, from left: engineering vice president Fadell, iPod head Jon Rubinstein, industrial design chief Ive, CEO Jobs and marketing director Philip Schiller

How Apple Does It

Conventional wisdom says its strategy is wrong, yet it keeps turning out great products. TIME looks inside the world's most innovative company.

By LEV GROSSMAN / CUPERTINO

This is partly a story about a company called Apple Computer. It’s also partly a story about a fancy new iPod that plays videos as well as music and that could dramatically change the way people entertain themselves. But it’s mostly a story about new things and where they come from, about which there are a few popular misconceptions.

Stop and look at Apple for a second, since it’s an odd company. It has been around long enough and has a high enough profile that it’s easy to forget that. While most high-tech firms focus on one or two sectors, Apple does all of them at once. Apple makes its own hardware (iBooks and iMacs), it makes the operating system that runs on that hardware (Mac OS X), and it makes programs that run on that operating system (iTunes, iMovie, Safari Web browser, etc.). It also makes the consumer-electronics devices that connect to all those things (the rapidly multiplying iPod family), and it runs the online service that furnishes content to those devices (iTunes Music Store). If you smooshed together Microsoft, Dell and Sony into one company, you would have something like the diversity of the Apple technological biosphere.

Why would anybody run a business like that? If you follow conventional wisdom, Apple is doing it all wrong. Try to do everything at once, and you won’t do anything well. Worse, the way Apple operates is not how you’re supposed to foster innovation, or not in the U.S., anyway. Under the traditional, capitalist, Adam Smithian model, new and better things arise as a result of freedom and open competition, but Apple is essentially operating its own closed miniature techno-economy. What is this, Soviet Russia? Why not license Mac OS X to Dell, see what hardware it comes up with and let the market decide whose ride is flyest? Is Steve Jobs afraid of a little healthy wrasslin’ in the great American bazaar?

And yet ... this is the company that gave us three of the signature technological innovations of the past 30 years: the Apple II, the Macintosh and the iPod. In the past six weeks alone, Apple has shipped three impressive new products: an ultra-tiny iPod called the nano, the video iPod and a nifty feature called Front Row that lets you run your computer from across the room, lying on a sofa, clicker in hand, without crouching over a keyboard. That is cool stuff. So, where does it all come from?

ask apple ceo steve jobs about it, and he’ll tell you an instructive little story. Call it the Parable of the Concept Car. “Here’s what you find at a lot of companies,” he says, kicking back in a conference room at Apple’s gleaming white Silicon Valley headquarters, which looks something like a cross between an Ivy League university and an iPod. “You know how you see a show car, and it’s really cool, and then four years later you see the production car, and it sucks? And you go, What happened? They had it! They had it in the palm of their hands! They grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory!

“What happened was, the designers came up with this really great idea. Then they take it to the engineers, and the engineers go, ‘Nah, we can’t do that. That’s impossible.’ And so it gets a lot worse. Then they take it to the manufacturing people, and they go, ‘We can’t build that!’ And it gets a lot worse.”

When Jobs took up his present position at Apple in 1997, that’s the situation he found. He and Jonathan Ive, head of design, came up with the original iMac, a candy-colored computer merged with a cathode-ray tube that, at the time, looked like nothing anybody had seen outside of a Jetsons cartoon. “Sure enough,” Jobs recalls, “when we took it to the engineers, they said, ‘Oh.’ And they came up with 38 reasons. And I said, ‘No, no, we’re doing this.’ And they said, ‘Well, why?’ And I said, ‘Because I’m the ceo, and I think it can be done.’ And so they kind of begrudgingly did it. But then it was a big hit.”

There are two lessons to be drawn from that story: one about collaboration, one about control. Apple employees talk incessantly about what they call “deep collaboration” or “cross-pollination” or “concurrent engineering.” Essentially it means that products don’t pass from team to team. There aren’t discrete, sequential development stages. Instead, it’s simultaneous and organic. Products get worked on in parallel by all departments at once—design, hardware, software—in endless rounds of interdisciplinary design reviews. Managers elsewhere boast about how little time they waste in meetings; Apple is big on them and proud of it. “The historical way of developing products just doesn’t work when you’re as ambitious as we are,” says Ive, an affable, bearlike Brit. “When the challenges are that complex, you have to develop a product in a more collaborative, integrated way.”

Everybody you meet at Apple will echo that precise sentiment, in almost machine-like unison. Not only have they all drunk the Kool-Aid; they all have the same favorite flavor. They’re on a hot streak, and they know it. (“The Sony guys are over there across the street with binoculars,” jokes a senior vice president. “They rented space on the fourth floor.” High-tech trash talk!) It’s almost eerie: Apple employees all like one another, and they have a strong sense that they are the chosen of the earth, and they’re not going to be a jerk about it, but all others who dwell on this mortal coil are missing out by not working here.

The second lesson of Jobs’ parable is about control, and to that extent, it’s a lesson about Jobs himself. He is one of the technology world’s great innovators but not because he’s an engineer or a programmer. He doesn’t have an M.B.A. either. He doesn’t even have a college degree. (He dropped out of Reed College after one semester.) Jobs has a great native sense of design and a knack for hiring geniuses, but above all, what he has is a willingness to be a pain in the neck about what matters most to him.

Sure, Jobs is perfectly pleasant to be around. And he pays attention to what you’re saying, but if he disagrees with it—if, hypothetically, you’re maybe airing a pet peeve about the fact that iMacs have all their ports in the back, where they’re hard to get at—he’ll come storming back and hammer at you until you change your mind or at least shut up. When he generously introduces you to the guy who runs Apple’s iTunes development team, Jobs makes it clear that you’re welcome to meet him but you can’t print his name. Jobs doesn’t want competitors poaching his talent. “You can mention his first name but not his last name,” Jobs says. “How’s that?” It’ll have to do. The guy’s name, by the way, is Jeff.

In other words, Jobs is into control. In itself, that is of no real importance, except that in a lot of ways, Apple is an expression of Jobs’ personal ethos. One reason Apple makes its own hardware and software is that when Jobs goes to the trouble of creating a piece of software, he doesn’t want it running on hardware built by a bunch of dudes he doesn’t know and can’t fire. He wants it on hardware he makes himself. How else can he be sure that every little thing integrates together the way he says—nay, insists—it should?

He needs that control because he is fastidious about technology the way a gourmet is fastidious about foie gras, and he recognizes that in an increasingly networked world, in which gadgets can’t just do their own thing but have to talk to one another, that conversation will go better if Jobs has scripted both sides of it. “One company makes the software. The other makes the hardware ... It’s not working,” Jobs says. “The innovation can’t happen fast enough. The integration isn’t seamless enough. No one takes responsibility for the user interface. It’s a mess.”

That isn’t the only way to run a business. Look at Microsoft. Bill Gates focused on operating systems. He didn’t worry about hardware. He gave Windows to anybody who could pony up a licensing fee, and he let them worry about hardware. Result? He devoured the market and made the biggest killing in the history of killings. Apple kept its Mac operating system on Apple hardware almost exclusively. It may have won a moral victory—or a technological one or an aesthetic one. But business-wise, it got the bits kicked out of it.

But Jobs doesn’t care just about winning. He’s willing to lose. He has done it often enough. He’s just not willing to be lame, and that may, increasingly, be the winning approach. The iPod proved that design and ease of use are at least as important as increased functionality, and the iTunes Music Store proved that goes for smoothly integrating physical devices with online services too. “I think the definition of product has changed over the decades,” observes Tony Fadell, vice president of engineering in the iPod division, who played a key role in conceiving and building the first iPod. “The product now is the iTunes Music Store and iTunes and the iPod and the software that goes on the iPod. A lot of companies don’t really have control, or they can’t really work in a collaborative way to truly make a system. We’re really about a system.”

That’s one aspect of control. Here’s another. What Jobs has accepted—the truth that he’s willing to face and others cower from—is that new things don’t want to be born. Innovation causes problems, and it’s much easier simply to avoid it. In fact, it’s downright tempting. Other guys may give in to that temptation but not Jobs. He’s smart, but more than that, he’s willing to be the guy who looks over your shoulder and tells you you’re not going to make your dinner reservation tonight because you’re going to be here at the office, thinking different.

Here’s the end of his parable, the story of what happened after Jobs got the iMac launched. “The people around here—some of them left,” he remembers. “Actually, some of them I got rid of. But most of them said, ‘Oh, my God, now I get it.’ We’ve been doing this now for seven years, and everybody here gets it. And if they don’t, they’re gone.”

if jobs, say, ran a hedge fund or an army platoon, that talk would not sound so blunt. But because he looks and acts like such a cool guy—this is the guy who put Lennon and Gandhi on thousands of billboards—the words are bracing, to say the least. And yet that approach produces shiny, innovative things like the new iPod. Even though it costs the same ($299) as its immediate predecessor, which Apple introduced only 15 months ago, the new iPod has more memory (30 GB as opposed to 20 GB), and it’s thinner (0.43 in. [1.09 cm], as opposed to 0.6 in. [1.52 cm]). Plus, it plays video. The screen is just 2.5 in. [6.35 cm] diagonally, but because it’s extremely bright and very sharp, it looks bigger than it is. It’s the kind of thing you could definitely imagine being unable to live without.

There are other portable video players out there, but none look as nice or are as easy to use as the new iPod. And it works well—seamlessly, as Jobs would say—with the iTunes Music Store, which gives users a quick, legal and reasonably cheap way to buy video content (which so far consists of music videos, some charming Pixar shorts and a few TV shows from the abc network, including Lost and Desperate Housewives). That is the kind of integration that Apple’s approach makes possible.

Right now, nobody disputes that digital music is the future and that Apple is the gatekeeper. If it becomes the gatekeeper to portable video, well, then, golly. Video is the blood and the lymph and the lingua franca of contemporary culture. Music is important, of course, but the scale is different. In a typical week, a top-selling album may move 300,000 copies. A top-rated TV show can draw an audience of 30 million. Add to that movie trailers, animated shorts, old syndicated shows, dvd-extra-style exclusives, and the entire television industry, which is hungry for new kinds of revenue, is going to have to reorient itself. And maybe a few other industries besides (cough! porn! cough!) The new iPod’s potential is so huge, it inspires even Jobs to a burst of understatement. “There is no market today for portable video,” he says. “We’re going to sell millions of these to people who want to play their music, and video is going to come along for the ride. Anyone who wants to put out video content will put it out for this. And we’ll find out what happens.” Yes, we will. We’re all coming along for the ride, and we all know who’s going to be driving.
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SonOfSylvanus
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2005-10-18, 02:22

Quote:
Originally Posted by pscates2.0
I believe that's one of the first looks I've ever gotten into Apple. That's a very cool photo of the five of them, sitting around.

Yeah. I thought: 'That's obviously a bit posed, but what a cool place to work—and with really clever people, too!'

Quote:
Originally Posted by groverat
I agree completely with Jobs about portable video. It's a gimmick.
I agree. A "bonus" indeed.
  quote
Ã¥sen
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Join Date: May 2004
 
2005-10-18, 09:12

This Time Magazine article reminded me of another good article, this time in The Economist. It was posted on September 15:

Face value
The resurrection of Steve Jobs
Sep 15th 2005
From The Economist print edition

That which does not kill the boss of Apple seems to make him stronger

ONE morning, about a year ago, a doctor told Steve Jobs that a cancerous tumour in his pancreas would kill him within months, and that it was time to start saying his goodbyes. Later that night, an endoscopy revealed that the tumour could be cut out. But for one day Mr Jobs, the boss of Apple Computer, as well as Pixar, the world's most successful animation studio, stared death in the face.

The experience seems to have invigorated him. Last week, gaunter but otherwise undiminished, he was on a stage in San Francisco, putting on a show (for that is what Apple product launches are) that was as flashy and dynamic as any as he has ever thrown. When businessmen try to rub shoulders with pop stars, the effect is usually embarrassing. But “Steve” had arranged to have his pal, Madonna, pop up on screen and kidded around with her with panache. Does she have an iPod? Of course she has! “That's so duh,” said the superstar playfully. Then Mr Jobs segued into his announcements—a new mobile phone from Motorola that has iTunes, Apple's music software, pre-installed and that represents a beachhead into the world of phones; and the “iPod nano”, a new digital music-player that is thinner than a pencil, but still holds 1,000 songs.

For Mr Jobs, the product launch seemed mainly to be an opportunity to drive home the message that his hold on downloaded and portable music now seems overwhelming. iTunes sells 2m songs a day and has a world market share of 82%—Mr Jobs reckons that it is the world's second-largest internet store, behind only Amazon. And the iPod has a market share of 74%, with 22m sold. For a man who helped launch the personal-computer era in 1976 with the Apple I, but then had to watch Microsoft's Bill Gates walk away with, in effect, the monopoly on PC operating systems (Apple's market share in computers today is less than 3%), this must be some vindication.

The odd thing about near-death experiences—literal or metaphorical—in Mr Jobs's life is that he seems actually to need them sporadically in order to thrive. Mr Jobs himself suggested as much when he addressed the graduating class at Stanford University in June. Until he turned 30 in 1985, Mr Jobs led a life that fits almost every Silicon Valley cliché. He dropped out of college (like Bill Gates and Michael Dell); he started a company with a friend in a garage (like everybody from Hewlett and Packard to the founders of Google); he launched a revolution (the PC era). Big deal. The interesting event occurred when he was 30 and got fired from his own company, after Apple's board turned against him. He was “devastated”. His career seemed dead.

Characteristically, though, Mr Jobs bounced back, once he realised, as he said at Stanford, that “the heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again.” He did something uninterrupted success might have made impossible: he became more creative. In 1986 he started two new companies, NeXT, a computer-maker that was always too far ahead of its time, and Pixar, an animation studio that went on to have a series of box-office hits. A decade later, ironically enough, NeXT was bought by Apple, and Mr Jobs was brought back to run the company he had founded.

Mr Jobs, a pescatarian (ie, a vegetarian who eats fish) with a philosophical streak and a strong interest in the occult, interprets these reversals as lessons. As befits a man who grew up in California in the 1960s, he proclaims his belief in karma and in love. Not necessarily love of his employees, apparently—some of whom have found working for him a nightmare—but love of one's ideals. Always do only what you love, and never settle, he advised the students at Stanford. His brush with cancer, in particular, seems to have focused his mind. “Death is very likely the single best invention in life,” Mr Jobs told his young audience. “All external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.”

Do not get the impression that Mr Jobs is now hugging strangers in random acts of kindness. He is still testy, irascible and difficult; he is still prepared to sue teenagers who publish Apple gossip on their websites for alleged abuses of trade secrets. But the reminders of mortality have changed him. “He was already softened” after his public humbling in 1985, says Bruce Chizen, the boss of Adobe Systems, a software company that is a long-time partner of Apple's. After the cancer, he says, “he's even softer” and, Mr Chizen reckons, even more creative.

New toys on the way

Mr Jobs's rivals may feel the same way. The digerati in Silicon Valley, Redmond (Microsoft), Tokyo (Sony), Seoul (Samsung) and other places now simply take it for granted that Mr Jobs has a top-secret conveyor belt that will keep churning out best-selling wonders like the iPod. What could these toys be? A portable video player is rumoured. A new and cooler sort of television is possible. A user-friendly and elegant mobile-phone handset would be nice, perhaps called something like “iPhone”.

Hollywood and music studios are also increasingly frightened. The music studios, which barely took him seriously when he launched iTunes in 2001, are sick of his power and are pressuring him to change his 99-cents-per-song flat rate for music. Slim chance. Disney, a long-time partner of Pixar whom Mr Jobs broke with when he got tired of its former boss, is now trying to worm its way back into his favour.

In short, Mr Jobs currently seems vivacious by anybody's standards. There are even rumours that he might run for governor of California (as a Democrat, presumably; Al Gore is on Apple's board). For somebody famous in large part for a spectacular defeat—to Bill Gates and Microsoft—all this must feel like a new lease of life, in every respect.
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Robo
Formerly Roboman, still
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2005-10-18, 14:47

If only the cover of Time had this Wednesday's innovations on it.
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Lior
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2006-04-29, 11:38

Hello There,

Does someone have the original article on PDF file?


Thanks,
Lior

(sorry about the spilling mistake)
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PKIDelirium
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2006-04-29, 12:19

Wow.

Six month old topic, suddenly bumped back.
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Lior
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2006-04-29, 12:27

Yep !
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turbulentfurball
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2006-04-29, 12:33

Here's a messy solution; why don't you save the website as a pdf?

In Safari, File -> Print, click on the PDF button and 'Save as pdf'
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Lior
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2006-04-29, 12:36

Hey,

I'm looking for the original article from the printed edition.
Maybe some of the members here have the specific journal.
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turbulentfurball
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2006-04-29, 12:40

I think I'm subscribed to Time online through my University's library, I'll go have a look
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Lior
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2006-04-29, 12:42

Thanks man, I appreciate that
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turbulentfurball
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2006-04-29, 12:43

Got it, but it's just HTML, sorry
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Lior
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2006-04-29, 12:50

It's okay, you tried. thanks a lot

somebody put it in his flickr gallery
but it is so small , I can't read it.
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