It seems to me that a suitable punishment would for hardware review sites to refuse to review Samsung's next product (enough reputable hardware sites would have to agree to this), and instead include a blurb on what happened this time.
That should unfavorably impact sales, and teach Samsung to be honest with hardware reviewers.
It implies that he's envious of Linus. Linus (who didn't even *make* Larry's penguin logo, but gets it plastered all over him) gets all the glamour and media love. RMS and ESR are jealous as hell.
The best thing is that Linus does an amazingly convincing job of not wanting media attention, and not using it as a soapbox to spout his opinions of the month. RMS couldn't do that if his life depended upon it.
I like the word "hacker" because true hackers understand what it means. I also think in that same vein the logo Eric's chosen is a good one, because people "in-the-know" will understand what it means.
And I *don't* like it, because I think precisely the sort of person who cares about being "one of the ones in-the-know" about what "hacker" means is exactly the sort of person that *isn't* a hacker.
A technical conversation will suffice. If you have good input, you are technically knowledgeable. Good person to chat with.
There's no need for the artificial threshold you're implying. You aren't in the club or out, a hacker or not, able to claim rights to ESR's little Life organism or not. You are progressively more logical, inventive, and technically knowledgeable.
I also think that this goes against the entire point of being a hacker. The true hacker is shown by the strength of his ideas and code, not by having a stupid logo. Then it turns into an issue of identity, blah blah blah.
The only person I can see who would directly benefit from this would be ESR, who gets something famous out (like those journalists who try as hard as possible to coin phrases and words) as well as giving himself a more focused community to have influence over.
Dammit, I want to think "ESR, author of fetchmail", not "ESR, guy who made some stupid pop culture logo". If ESR wants to make an Open Source logo, well and good. He can do that. The Free Software people have their stoned gnu that Stallman pushes (which, by the way, is an exceedingly unappealing logo), and ESR sorta-kinda is the lead representative of Open Source.
Plus, most of the people I can think of that refer to themselves as "hackers" (I just like the term "techie") in the sense that ESR likes are middle-aged, and really couldn't care less about some logo.
Bluetooth isn't doing well because there just plain isn't a market for it.
Why does the average consumer want a wireless keyboard? The wired one is more reliable, cheaper, and means that no batteries and recharging are necessary. *He* (unlike the typical Slashdotter) doesn't constantly plug and unplug cables.
I have to admit that you're right -- Microsoft hires some extremely bright computer scientists.
However, very, *very* little of the new advancements that these people should be turning out end up in Microsoft products. Microsoft actually acts very conservatively for a technology company, more like a book publisher. Wait, see what's doing well, and then acquire that.
If folks want more reason to eliminate links to Microsoft's document formats other than the obvious reasons, how about this: Slashdot is a place where more people than any other are aware of macro viruses and the nasty disease vector produced by these formats (which are designed for *internal use only*, not distribution -- that's what PDF is for).
I mean, can you imagine the impact if a link to a virus-infected macro Word document was posted on Slashdot's main page.:-( Not good. Slashdot generally doesn't link to executables from oddball sources ("Here's a neat.exe I got from someone on IRC that claims to exhibit the problem my story is about!"), and that should really be extended to formats that can contain executable data.
Darn it, *what* am I going to do with a PowerPoint document? Can someone please post a conversion (possibly PDF?)
I wish Slashdot would make a policy against.doc,.ppt,.xls, and finally officially ban NYT links (every other site that requires registration *except* NYT is specifically disallowed).
Come on, the camera as security issue is bogus. What are you gonna do, stop everyone with a cell phone because you can now snap 1.2 megapixel pictures with some models and send them in real time?
Yes. It wasn't long ago that there was an article on Slashdot about how some big Japanese company with a research wing was banning the use of camera cell phones.
Even companies that allow people to carry them may have policies against use of the camera on company grounds. This is difficult to enforce, yes...but as it happened, if someone posted pictures to a weblog and an exec got ahold of them, they'd know that they were taking pictures.
No, it wasn't even a question of security, because the first question they asked him is if it (the page in question) was hosted on a Microsoft-owned server (wtf - they couldn't even do a traceroute? oops, forgot - this is Microsoft, not the most tech-savvy company out there by a long shot).
This is unreasonable on your part. Microsoft is not limited to paying for machines in the MICROSOFT.NET and MICROSOFT.COM domains. A number of companies use cohosting/colocation services. Microsoft, if working on a project, especially with outsiders, could easily be using a system not in their regular domain. Sure, it probably wasn't going to be true, but it likely provides the company with legal ammunition (there may be a policy against non-work-related personal use of Microsoft-owned systems), and they then have witnessed claims from him.
If it had been, they would have sacked him for misuse of company property. Since they couldn't they went to their fall-back position, which is that it was a breech of security to let the general public know where the building was located - never mind that the location is already public knowledge - city hall has it, the public utilities have it, the phone company has a detailed layout of the whole site, delivery companies have it, former employees have it (unless they're being mind-wiped on termination), yada yada yada. It's not a secret, so their excuse was typical microsoft bullshit.
They almost certainly aren't trying to prevent people from knowing the "location of the building". You didn't read my post -- I was arguing that they were worried about precedent-setting and possibly the contents of the loading dock itself.
As far as preventing leaks, this is a company with a history of leaking like a sieve halloween is here - we want more halloween documents, just like their products.
Ridiculous. Microsoft took reasonable precautions -- this is legally significant if a leaking employee gets isolated and a trade secret case can be made -- to keep those memos secret. They were probably not sent to outside addresses, etc. There is no way a company the size of MS can stop internal memos from leaking completely, and leaks in the past *certainly* do not mean that the company should throw up their hands and give up on plugging current leaks.
I don't think there is that much OS discrimination within the company, with the exception that each developer needs to have a windows machine for obvious reasons. I think MS fired him because he was blatently trying to embarrass the company.
This is not really the issue (or it's very unlikely that it's the case).
There are probably two factors that played a role. First, while the particular picture is not a big deal, maintaining a policy of not sending out pictures *is* a big deal. If people get in the habit of snapping pictures, sooner or later, important data will leak. Where I work, you just can't have cameras, and just can't take pictures. It's not unusual. Most companies won't just let you walk in and start taking pictures wherever you want. I've known people over the course of my life that *have* been involved in corporate espionage, and a small camera is a seriously useful tool for someone who can't afford to be standing in front of something for a couple of minutes scribbling things down on a clipboard. It's not an unreasonable policy demand at all, though I think it should probably be made more clear to temps. I applaud the guy for not flying off the handle over this.
Second of all, this information *could* be damaging. It's a pretty safe bet that Microsoft conducts competitive research (though the building name tends to make me think that this is not the case). If competitors know what Microsoft is examining, it could put them on guard as to what Microsoft is trying to use from them. Furthermore, it lets them arm the lawyers, so that the moment Microsoft steps near infringing on a patent or whatnot, they can smack them. In this particular case, there's not a lot of suspicious information, but if, say, Microsoft was picking up a handful of iPods, something that doesn't generally have a direct business application (and it seems unlikely that the guy here would stop at snapping a picture with a caption of "Even Microsoft Wants iPods"), things might be a bit worse. Even if it's not competitive research, the contents of a company's loading docks can be quite valuable information. If Boeing has crates and crates marked "titanium sheets" sitting around, you can damn well bet that other airplane-producing defense contractors will be very interested. If Sony's Aibo division has a bunch of bales of fake fur on their loading docks, competitors have a good guess as to where the product is going, and time to produce marketing campaigns and make deals appropriately.
So...I have to say that I can see how frusterating it is for the temp guy, but it's not as if Microsoft Security is firing him for liking Macs and working at Microsoft. Hell, of the people I know that have worked at Microsoft, two of them really like Linux, and one kept a Tux doll in his cubicle. MS doesn't really care about something like that -- they care about potential leaks, or precedent being set that could lead to future leaks.
What I'm complaining about is that he's making claims based on the value of the writing in the book based upon rules that are set up to achieve something else. He's treating the rules as something to be followed for the sake of following them.
For example, if I had to come up with a quick classification scheme, I'd say that writing is generally produced to inform (such as a reference work), to convince (as a political work), or to entertain.
The HP books were probably written with entertainment in mind. That being said, the rules of "no cliches" is valid, as it helps keep stories novel and unpredictable. However, if the vast majority of readers have no complaints with it, the books must not fall into this trap particularly badly. This simply means that the "no cliches" rule is useless, as it is not improving the effectiveness of the writing. Thus, judging the quality of the work based upon a rule that is useless in the given situation seems a bit like the professor is sticking to form for the sake of form.
Oh, and in closing -- I normally dislike poetry as well, but Robert Frost is an exception, and, I think, worth glancing at.
The problem with literary canon tends to be that it is used as a basis for course-work in many levels of school (there was certainly a canon from which titles were chosen in high school), and often is used as a basis for teaching people to read into literature in a particular way (looking for symbolism for instance), rather than getting students interested in literature and teaching at the same time. As someone past my high school years, if The Grapes of Wrath comes up as necessary reading for my grade ever again, I'll withdraw from the course (but since I'm not an English or Literature major, this isn't a major set-back for me).
Ah, you've found a point that we very, very much agree upon. My father lent me a number of Steinbeck's books, which I dearly loved reading. The only Steinbeck I've ever been required to read for a class was Grapes of Wrath, which was also the only work of his that I ended up despising. I read Catch-22 for enjoyment well before I was required to read it for a class, and loved it the first time through -- it's one of my favorite classics. Later, I was required to read it for a class, and hated going through it.
The deal is that somebody that just dropped $300 or $400 on a device is unlikely to criticize it. It's the same phenomenon on game consoles (the dollar amounts are lower, but so is income for teens) that leads to "fanboyism".
The iPod was just about the first player that a lot of people would consider. It was well-built, small, had plenty of storage space, a good interface (AFAI can tell, the iPod team is where all the *good* HCI people at Apple fled when OS X came out), and software that *didn't* have an awful custom-bitmapped interface. As a result, a lot of people picked one up. Now, the subconscious thought of "I blew all that money on an iPod, and I'll argue against anyone insinuating that buying an iPod might no longer be worth it" starts affecting people. Same thing happens to Porsche owners, or owners of other luxury goods. As a result, the iPod gets a disproportionate amount of praise.
I personally used to be a huge Ogg Vorbis fan, then I got an iPod and went back to MP3s for convience. Having acquired a G5 earlier this month, I decided to try reripping parts of my collection to AAC, just as a test. And there is a difference.
I'm curious as to your impressions on Vorbis-AAC comparison, or whether you feel there is a significant difference.
For a few test clips I've tried (and I suspect the music type affects the tests quite a bit), I can actually distingish between Ogg and the real thing more easily, when listening to first one and then the other, than approximate equivalent bitrate (VBR) MP3s. Drums just sound more different in vorbis than in MP3. On the other hand, they don't sound *bad* -- they sound like drums. The main problem with MP3 is that the artifacts tend to make music sound much worse -- especially cymbals.
Also, why were you using CBR MP3s? There's a phenomonal quality difference on almost all music between CBR and VBR. I can see doing VBR *averaging* 192, but not CBR 192. Good VBR compressors have been around for ages. To a significant extent, I find that a not unreasonable portion of the MP3 to [other format] draw is not actually the MP3 format itself, but primarily the fact that some MP3s are *still* CBR, whereas everything modern is *always* VBR. VBR MP3s are *much* more competitive.
It looks like Dell's taking an Apple-like approach, selling a hardware player, 99c songs in their online store, and software with too bloody much eye candy.
All the folks that said "finally, Apple got the right idea" can rejoice -- the meme is spreading. Computer manufacturers have caught on To What People Want.
Even more enjoyably, for the first time that I know of, a storage medium that was *not* endorsed by the MPAA/RIAA has caught on -- hard drives with MP3/OGG/WMA. No design provisions to avoid copying. Just pure what-people-want. It was bound to happen -- with CDs being digital, once ripping systems became popular, people were no longer bound by the medium, as they always had been in the past. Music can flawlessly be moved from medium to medium, and it was only a while until the monopoly shattered.
Slashdot Mirror
A dork is a whale-penis.
And a bitch is a female dog. But both have slang meanings as well.
It seems to me that a suitable punishment would for hardware review sites to refuse to review Samsung's next product (enough reputable hardware sites would have to agree to this), and instead include a blurb on what happened this time.
That should unfavorably impact sales, and teach Samsung to be honest with hardware reviewers.
It implies that he's envious of Linus. Linus (who didn't even *make* Larry's penguin logo, but gets it plastered all over him) gets all the glamour and media love. RMS and ESR are jealous as hell.
The best thing is that Linus does an amazingly convincing job of not wanting media attention, and not using it as a soapbox to spout his opinions of the month. RMS couldn't do that if his life depended upon it.
That's kind of disgusting, actually.
Think how much money ThinkGeek is absolutely *certain* to reap from this one. Suppose they offered ESR $10K to suggest a new logo? :-)
I like the word "hacker" because true hackers understand what it means. I also think in that same vein the logo Eric's chosen is a good one, because people "in-the-know" will understand what it means.
And I *don't* like it, because I think precisely the sort of person who cares about being "one of the ones in-the-know" about what "hacker" means is exactly the sort of person that *isn't* a hacker.
A technical conversation will suffice. If you have good input, you are technically knowledgeable. Good person to chat with.
There's no need for the artificial threshold you're implying. You aren't in the club or out, a hacker or not, able to claim rights to ESR's little Life organism or not. You are progressively more logical, inventive, and technically knowledgeable.
Excellent points.
I also think that this goes against the entire point of being a hacker. The true hacker is shown by the strength of his ideas and code, not by having a stupid logo. Then it turns into an issue of identity, blah blah blah.
The only person I can see who would directly benefit from this would be ESR, who gets something famous out (like those journalists who try as hard as possible to coin phrases and words) as well as giving himself a more focused community to have influence over.
Dammit, I want to think "ESR, author of fetchmail", not "ESR, guy who made some stupid pop culture logo". If ESR wants to make an Open Source logo, well and good. He can do that. The Free Software people have their stoned gnu that Stallman pushes (which, by the way, is an exceedingly unappealing logo), and ESR sorta-kinda is the lead representative of Open Source.
Plus, most of the people I can think of that refer to themselves as "hackers" (I just like the term "techie") in the sense that ESR likes are middle-aged, and really couldn't care less about some logo.
Peace sign? Well I guess we know that you were a total dork in high school, and after it as well.
You expect one to be an anarchist in high school...to be cool?
Bluetooth isn't doing well because there just plain isn't a market for it.
Why does the average consumer want a wireless keyboard? The wired one is more reliable, cheaper, and means that no batteries and recharging are necessary. *He* (unlike the typical Slashdotter) doesn't constantly plug and unplug cables.
Why?
Thank you.
I have to admit that you're right -- Microsoft hires some extremely bright computer scientists.
However, very, *very* little of the new advancements that these people should be turning out end up in Microsoft products. Microsoft actually acts very conservatively for a technology company, more like a book publisher. Wait, see what's doing well, and then acquire that.
Conclusion:
1. These G5s were not part of the "normal business process";
Dammit, tomhudson, take off the tin foil hat. This is ridiculous!
If you were a merchant, would you like someone coming in and taking pictures or making a comprehensive list of what your selling and for how much?
Yup. Merchants pay for 'em. They're called catalogs.
Businesses that deal with the general public do not have "privacy rights" in the same fashion as individuals.
I'm not claiming that you're lying, but I really haven't heard this before. Could you post a link?
If folks want more reason to eliminate links to Microsoft's document formats other than the obvious reasons, how about this: Slashdot is a place where more people than any other are aware of macro viruses and the nasty disease vector produced by these formats (which are designed for *internal use only*, not distribution -- that's what PDF is for).
:-( Not good. Slashdot generally doesn't link to executables from oddball sources ("Here's a neat .exe I got from someone on IRC that claims to exhibit the problem my story is about!"), and that should really be extended to formats that can contain executable data.
I mean, can you imagine the impact if a link to a virus-infected macro Word document was posted on Slashdot's main page.
Darn it, *what* am I going to do with a PowerPoint document? Can someone please post a conversion (possibly PDF?)
.doc, .ppt, .xls, and finally officially ban NYT links (every other site that requires registration *except* NYT is specifically disallowed).
I wish Slashdot would make a policy against
Come on, the camera as security issue is bogus. What are you gonna do, stop everyone with a cell phone because you can now snap 1.2 megapixel pictures with some models and send them in real time?
Yes. It wasn't long ago that there was an article on Slashdot about how some big Japanese company with a research wing was banning the use of camera cell phones.
Even companies that allow people to carry them may have policies against use of the camera on company grounds. This is difficult to enforce, yes...but as it happened, if someone posted pictures to a weblog and an exec got ahold of them, they'd know that they were taking pictures.
No, it wasn't even a question of security, because the first question they asked him is if it (the page in question) was hosted on a Microsoft-owned server (wtf - they couldn't even do a traceroute? oops, forgot - this is Microsoft, not the most tech-savvy company out there by a long shot).
This is unreasonable on your part. Microsoft is not limited to paying for machines in the MICROSOFT.NET and MICROSOFT.COM domains. A number of companies use cohosting/colocation services. Microsoft, if working on a project, especially with outsiders, could easily be using a system not in their regular domain. Sure, it probably wasn't going to be true, but it likely provides the company with legal ammunition (there may be a policy against non-work-related personal use of Microsoft-owned systems), and they then have witnessed claims from him.
If it had been, they would have sacked him for misuse of company property. Since they couldn't they went to their fall-back position, which is that it was a breech of security to let the general public know where the building was located - never mind that the location is already public knowledge - city hall has it, the public utilities have it, the phone company has a detailed layout of the whole site, delivery companies have it, former employees have it (unless they're being mind-wiped on termination), yada yada yada. It's not a secret, so their excuse was typical microsoft bullshit.
They almost certainly aren't trying to prevent people from knowing the "location of the building". You didn't read my post -- I was arguing that they were worried about precedent-setting and possibly the contents of the loading dock itself.
As far as preventing leaks, this is a company with a history of leaking like a sieve halloween is here - we want more halloween documents, just like their products.
Ridiculous. Microsoft took reasonable precautions -- this is legally significant if a leaking employee gets isolated and a trade secret case can be made -- to keep those memos secret. They were probably not sent to outside addresses, etc. There is no way a company the size of MS can stop internal memos from leaking completely, and leaks in the past *certainly* do not mean that the company should throw up their hands and give up on plugging current leaks.
I don't think there is that much OS discrimination within the company, with the exception that each developer needs to have a windows machine for obvious reasons. I think MS fired him because he was blatently trying to embarrass the company.
This is not really the issue (or it's very unlikely that it's the case).
There are probably two factors that played a role. First, while the particular picture is not a big deal, maintaining a policy of not sending out pictures *is* a big deal. If people get in the habit of snapping pictures, sooner or later, important data will leak. Where I work, you just can't have cameras, and just can't take pictures. It's not unusual. Most companies won't just let you walk in and start taking pictures wherever you want. I've known people over the course of my life that *have* been involved in corporate espionage, and a small camera is a seriously useful tool for someone who can't afford to be standing in front of something for a couple of minutes scribbling things down on a clipboard. It's not an unreasonable policy demand at all, though I think it should probably be made more clear to temps. I applaud the guy for not flying off the handle over this.
Second of all, this information *could* be damaging. It's a pretty safe bet that Microsoft conducts competitive research (though the building name tends to make me think that this is not the case). If competitors know what Microsoft is examining, it could put them on guard as to what Microsoft is trying to use from them. Furthermore, it lets them arm the lawyers, so that the moment Microsoft steps near infringing on a patent or whatnot, they can smack them. In this particular case, there's not a lot of suspicious information, but if, say, Microsoft was picking up a handful of iPods, something that doesn't generally have a direct business application (and it seems unlikely that the guy here would stop at snapping a picture with a caption of "Even Microsoft Wants iPods"), things might be a bit worse. Even if it's not competitive research, the contents of a company's loading docks can be quite valuable information. If Boeing has crates and crates marked "titanium sheets" sitting around, you can damn well bet that other airplane-producing defense contractors will be very interested. If Sony's Aibo division has a bunch of bales of fake fur on their loading docks, competitors have a good guess as to where the product is going, and time to produce marketing campaigns and make deals appropriately.
So...I have to say that I can see how frusterating it is for the temp guy, but it's not as if Microsoft Security is firing him for liking Macs and working at Microsoft. Hell, of the people I know that have worked at Microsoft, two of them really like Linux, and one kept a Tux doll in his cubicle. MS doesn't really care about something like that -- they care about potential leaks, or precedent being set that could lead to future leaks.
What I'm complaining about is that he's making claims based on the value of the writing in the book based upon rules that are set up to achieve something else. He's treating the rules as something to be followed for the sake of following them.
For example, if I had to come up with a quick classification scheme, I'd say that writing is generally produced to inform (such as a reference work), to convince (as a political work), or to entertain.
The HP books were probably written with entertainment in mind. That being said, the rules of "no cliches" is valid, as it helps keep stories novel and unpredictable. However, if the vast majority of readers have no complaints with it, the books must not fall into this trap particularly badly. This simply means that the "no cliches" rule is useless, as it is not improving the effectiveness of the writing. Thus, judging the quality of the work based upon a rule that is useless in the given situation seems a bit like the professor is sticking to form for the sake of form.
Oh, and in closing -- I normally dislike poetry as well, but Robert Frost is an exception, and, I think, worth glancing at.
The problem with literary canon tends to be that it is used as a basis for course-work in many levels of school (there was certainly a canon from which titles were chosen in high school), and often is used as a basis for teaching people to read into literature in a particular way (looking for symbolism for instance), rather than getting students interested in literature and teaching at the same time. As someone past my high school years, if The Grapes of Wrath comes up as necessary reading for my grade ever again, I'll withdraw from the course (but since I'm not an English or Literature major, this isn't a major set-back for me).
Ah, you've found a point that we very, very much agree upon. My father lent me a number of Steinbeck's books, which I dearly loved reading. The only Steinbeck I've ever been required to read for a class was Grapes of Wrath, which was also the only work of his that I ended up despising. I read Catch-22 for enjoyment well before I was required to read it for a class, and loved it the first time through -- it's one of my favorite classics. Later, I was required to read it for a class, and hated going through it.
The deal is that somebody that just dropped $300 or $400 on a device is unlikely to criticize it. It's the same phenomenon on game consoles (the dollar amounts are lower, but so is income for teens) that leads to "fanboyism".
The iPod was just about the first player that a lot of people would consider. It was well-built, small, had plenty of storage space, a good interface (AFAI can tell, the iPod team is where all the *good* HCI people at Apple fled when OS X came out), and software that *didn't* have an awful custom-bitmapped interface. As a result, a lot of people picked one up. Now, the subconscious thought of "I blew all that money on an iPod, and I'll argue against anyone insinuating that buying an iPod might no longer be worth it" starts affecting people. Same thing happens to Porsche owners, or owners of other luxury goods. As a result, the iPod gets a disproportionate amount of praise.
It *would* be nice to have Ogg support, tho, especially as more and more other players are supporting it.
I'm with you on Vorbis support.
I'm waiting until prices for a good player with Vorbis support and 40 GB or more are around $200, and them I'll pick one up.
I personally used to be a huge Ogg Vorbis fan, then I got an iPod and went back to MP3s for convience. Having acquired a G5 earlier this month, I decided to try reripping parts of my collection to AAC, just as a test. And there is a difference.
I'm curious as to your impressions on Vorbis-AAC comparison, or whether you feel there is a significant difference.
For a few test clips I've tried (and I suspect the music type affects the tests quite a bit), I can actually distingish between Ogg and the real thing more easily, when listening to first one and then the other, than approximate equivalent bitrate (VBR) MP3s. Drums just sound more different in vorbis than in MP3. On the other hand, they don't sound *bad* -- they sound like drums. The main problem with MP3 is that the artifacts tend to make music sound much worse -- especially cymbals.
Also, why were you using CBR MP3s? There's a phenomonal quality difference on almost all music between CBR and VBR. I can see doing VBR *averaging* 192, but not CBR 192. Good VBR compressors have been around for ages. To a significant extent, I find that a not unreasonable portion of the MP3 to [other format] draw is not actually the MP3 format itself, but primarily the fact that some MP3s are *still* CBR, whereas everything modern is *always* VBR. VBR MP3s are *much* more competitive.
It looks like Dell's taking an Apple-like approach, selling a hardware player, 99c songs in their online store, and software with too bloody much eye candy.
All the folks that said "finally, Apple got the right idea" can rejoice -- the meme is spreading. Computer manufacturers have caught on To What People Want.
Even more enjoyably, for the first time that I know of, a storage medium that was *not* endorsed by the MPAA/RIAA has caught on -- hard drives with MP3/OGG/WMA. No design provisions to avoid copying. Just pure what-people-want. It was bound to happen -- with CDs being digital, once ripping systems became popular, people were no longer bound by the medium, as they always had been in the past. Music can flawlessly be moved from medium to medium, and it was only a while until the monopoly shattered.