Unfortunately, it's not really relevent what percentage of the Web is owned by any given c orporation (or set of corporations). What's relevent is what percentage of total minutes/page views of actual Web surfing time of any given body of users is spent on corporate sites.
I have a sneaking suspicion that there are millions of people out there who wake up in the morning, read their (AOL) e-mail, go to www.cnn.com (also owned by AOL) to get their news, go off to work and read msnbc.com (Microsoft) and time.com (more AOL), occasionally dipping into si.com (yet more AOL). Then they go home and load up their copy of AOL Instant Messenger (no, not Trillian, not gAIM-- the actual real deal from AOL, complete with annoying adverts) and chat with their friends, who tell them about something they read in (insert AOL-owned magazine) today...
And so on, and so on.
I'm sure that somewhere in the US, there is a person who gets 95 or more percent of all the information they partake of (in media form, perhaps even including movies) from AOL/Time Warner.
I have nothing against capitalism. But Microsoft's New (Computer Industry) World Order is not capitalism.
Capitalism implies a free market. It implies real consumer choice. It implies competition based on features, not marketing.
What we have here is not capitalism.
If MS's products had succeeded solely on their own merits, without ridiculously and sometimes illegally aggressive marketing (witness MS plastering midtown Manhattan with their cutesy rainbow butterflies to sell MSN), or sleazy back-room wheeling and dealing with OEMs ("If you offer any systems with any non-MS OS, or with no OS, we'll charge you more"), I'd not dislike them so much-- maybe at all. I might still dislike their products, which I do, but I wouldn't hate them like I do.
As for the "KFC and mallowmars" bit-- I'm a vegetarian (no KFC), and I'm skinny. (no mallowmars).
that the first "grassroots" (as opposed to "astroturf";) ) protest commercial I've ever heard of involves Farscape. I've heard a lot of good things about this show-- but still, where are the "the environment is going to pot and the politicians don't care" protest commercials.. or the "drug companies are keeping patents to life-saving AIDS and cancer drugs under lock and key, while millions die" protest commercials?
I'd love to hear about (I'll never see it unless someone puts it online, since I don't own a TV, nor do I want one) MORE protest work on TV. It's about time that the "little guys/gals" claimed their piece of the television pie. Nowadays, it seems that 90% of the content on TV is dictated by the Fortune 500 companies...
Does anyone know of any other efforts to produce true 'grassroots' commercials like this?
Personally, I would love to see a grassroots commercial that advocates re-opening the Federal case against MS. But hey, that's 'cuz I'm one of those evil Unix lovers your mom warned you about.
A) Withstanding any climate is terribly easy when you're made of molecules of metals and/or minerals.
B) It doesn't have to be able to consume 'any' material. The Earth's crust contains certain things in disproportionate amounts. And then there's the air. Between the two of them, let's see-- we've got silicon dioxide, titanium dioxide, o2, n2, co2, h2o... one could easily assemble a "short list" of the top dozen or two compounds in the ground and the air. All it would need would be those.
Re:It doesn't take half a brain to see this.
on
Don't Stymie Nanotech
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Nanotech doesn't play by the same rules as currently extant terrestrial biology.
We can't 'eat' air and dirt and use it (and it alone) to grow and reproduce. Nanites could, in theory, do just that, by using raw materials in the air and the earth to reproduce. It all depends on (A) how they are programmed, (B) how they mutate, and (C) how lucky (or unlucky) we are.-
It has more benefits than drawbacks...
on
Don't Stymie Nanotech
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
1) Only if in responsible hands.
2) Only if the infamous 'grey goo' problem doesn't become reality. Then we're ALL fucked.
It's like nuclear bombs. We're stepping into unknown territory here, and there is lots of potential for evil. Hell, at first, they weren't even sure if an a-bomb detonation would IGNITE THE ATMOSPHERE, killing us all. Luckily, it didn't-- we dodged a bullet. We may not be so lucky next time.
On the other hand, if you ban it, then (not to be trite or anything, but...) "only criminals will have nanotech." So the terrorists will have nanotech, and the Mafia, but not the legitimate scientists.
Really, it's a lose-lose situation any time you open such a Pandora's box. Either way, you have to worry.
On the bright side, a lot of good can come out of new developments like this too.
The prospect of buying and using this game excites me to no end. But my computers are a Linux box, and a "somewhat old" (Power Mac 7300 with a G3/220 upgrade card) Mac.
What I fear here is that the client will run only on Windows; if we're incredibly lucky, and Lucasarts is feeling generous, they'll also produce a Mac OS X port.
Which would mean that I'd be out of luck either way, since I don't run Windows, and my Mac isn't juicy enough to run OS X games. (It can barely muster OS X itself).
I find it incredible that I'm the first person to point this out. It's really sad. I WANT to give LucasArts my money, but something tells me that, just like previous MMORPGs (or whatever the acronym is), I won't be able to run this thing:(
It is quite a bit annoying when people say "Linux and Unix". Usually they mean "Linux and Solaris", or maybe "Linux, Solaris and HP", or (increasingly often, as the business world funnels itself down to only one or two Unixlike systems... ahhh, how great monopolies are born!) "Red Hat Linux for x86 and Solaris for SPARC".
It would be simpler-- and more accurate-- to just list the actual operating systems it's available for.
And then there's that whole thing about 'Unix'. Technically, as most of us know, the name 'Unix' only applies to whomever owns the trademarked name 'Unix' at the moment (first AT&T, and then I seem to recall control passed to Novell, and to SCO, at various points in history? Can someone provide a full history?), but most Unix admins just consider any "Unixlike" system to be Unix-- and that includes Linux.
If you don't know the actual OS names, you could always use "...will be available for several Unixlike systems, including Mac OS X, Linux, and Solaris", or whatnot...
And the shirt would be a bit more explicit if these guys, whose services I use, didn't explicitly ban the mention of any copyrighted names, or photos of any famous people, etc. etc. etc.
I really wanted to put this picture on a shirt.. but that would have broken CafePress's rules on several counts.
BTW: It's a fucking shirt. I could easily fill ten or twenty pages with why you should "resist Redmond", but that wouldn't be too effective on a shirt. Can you picture it: "Hey! Is your shirt printed in microfilm!? I can't read it!"
P.S. Nice troll.
P.P.S. Nice to see SlashDotters coming to defense of Microsoft again.
P.P.P.S. Nice to see them lacking the nerve to do it as anyone but 'Anonymous Coward'.:)
Remember the current administration's relationship with the oil industry. Things do trickle down to the local level, at least to some degree.
All it would take would be for Bush to send a high-level diplomat to Seattle to convince them to stop the whole thing. It probably wouldn't take much doing either.
On the one hand, this is an absolutely wonderful idea whose time, I have felt for quite some time, has long since come. On the other hand, I remember a bit of my history, and I am a bit afraid that Big Oil and/or the big car companies might throw a spanner into this plan.
If you'll remember, in the past, this nation had a lot more trolley, El, and miscellaneous sorts of commuter train tech infrastructure than it does now. In a sort of ghastly partnership, the big automotive interests convinced local governments to rip out the trolley tracks, the El lines, and the like-- and replace them with (what else) buses. And roads-- more roads for more cars.
Only in the most heavily populated areas, where trains are almost a necessity, do commuter trains still exist. I live just to the West of New York City (in the Newark/Jersey City area), and HERE we DO have commuter trains-- just here in the NYC area, we have the subway, the PATH, the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail, the Long-Island Railroad, Metro-North, NJ Transit trains, and regular Amtrak service to nearby cities in Connecticut.
But I recognize that my beloved NYC metro area is the exception-- not the rule.
What happens when Ford (or another giant car company-- or an oil company) waves a cool million bucks under the Seattle politicians' collective noses?
Whoa there. Okay, I might be clueless, but-- who are these guys? Are they Blessed by Linus? (Alternatively, are they Blessed by any of the big Linux-friendly firms like Intel, IBM, etc.?)
I wonder if there is a "short list" somewhere of all the biggest and most important Linux "consortiums" (consortia?), standardization projects, documentation projects, etc.? Ideally, listing which ones are and aren't Linus-Blessed, and which companies back/support each one?
I really hate to say it, but sometimes the decentralized (yeah, Linus calls the shots in the kernel, but come on, that's not all there is to it) nature of the Linux community can lead to this sort of confusion...
Maybe they meant "enumerator". I always wanted to enumerate an arcade. (Only every time I went in an arcade, I just kept "enumerating" my losses in quarters...)
I wonder-- might such devices be used to implement super-high-capacity optical storage?
Of course, when you get things that small, dust/fingerprints would be a REAL big issue.
Perhaps sealing a disc into a permanent caddy would do.
Any math/science/optics geeks out there up to the challenge of computing what a theoretical "femto-burned" disc the size of a CD/DVD could hold, assuming you didn't have to worry about dust? (sealed in a caddy)
My votes: Slackware 3.0, or perhaps Red Hat 4.2.
on
Antique Distros?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
These distros were what I was using years and years hence. I recall running a stripped-down Slack 3.0 on a '386-16 laptop with 4MB of RAM and an 80MB HDD. (No kidding. It was an AT&T Safari-- remember those? If you squinted just right, you could swear the front of the case said "Satan" instead of "Safari". Or maybe that was the demons in my head taunting me.;) )
Red Hat 4.2 used to run just dandy on desktops I had with around the level of hardware power you're talking about.
If you want to be lean and mean, go with Slackware. If you want something a bit more user-friendly/desktop-ish, go with Red Hat. However, I must say that installing Slackware 3.0 was never terribly hard for me. It was the first time I installed Linux, and the whole process went rather smoothly. If you know any existing modern distros well enough, Slack 3 should be a cakewalk for you.
How hard would it be for a hobbyist geek to use one of these devices, commodity hardware, and a little cleverness (like that of those Mac hackers who would take apart a Powerbook, flip the keyboard back behind the display, mount it on a stand, and call it an iMac Jr.) to design the "OpenTablet" spec?
Someone could make a fortune selling do-it-yourself kits with instructions... and of course the specs could be made open, for those of us (not me!) handy enough with a soldering iron and whatnot to make it ourselves...
A pen tablet running something like Debian... would easily be the perfect antidote to MS's admittedly nifty-looking new pen tablets:)
First of all, it was just an example. Are you next going to tell me that since one of my examples was bad, obviously "product dumping" / selling items as a "loss leader" is a myth too? Maybe my example was wrong; maybe it wasn't. But my point still stands.
Secondly, accounts on this "myth" vary. Some very reputable sources say it's quite true. Who do you believe? Might not be the same folks I believe.
From this page on The Guardian: "All three manufacturers are determined to build up a large user base. The consoles are sold at a loss...".
1) One small good deed does not cancel out many large bad deeds.
2) IE is actually not a buggy piece of anything-- I personally think it's quite nice. I merely dislike it because of the morals of the people making/pushing it.
3) Putting words in my mouth does not mean I agree with them. There will always be situations where companies will release some things at a loss or for free-- it's the concept of the "loss leader". Look at how many video game companies routinely lose GOBS of money underselling their consoles. They make their money on the cartridges/CDs. That's a very common and acceptable course of action.
Do you really think your cell phone company (assuming you have a cell phone) makes money off of the sale of cell phones?
1 : exclusive ownership through legal privilege, command of supply, or concerted action
2 : exclusive possession or control
3 : a commodity controlled by one party
4 : one that has a monopoly
What you are talking about is merely one "classical complaint" about why monopolies are bad ("Monopolies are potentially dangerous because once a company has a monopoly, it can effectively charge whatever it wants").
Microsoft is a monopoly because they have a near-100% market share in many areas.
Microsoft is abusiving their monopoly (as determined by the Feds) because they abused their monopoly standing in various ways (e.g. browbeating all hardware vendors to not offer any alternative-OS/no-OS computers).
If I recall correctly, having a monopoly isn't even illegal... it's abusing a monopoly that's illegal. But as the old saying goes, "power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely", so most people nowadays don't seem to draw much distinction between "a monopoly" and "an abusive monopoly". Since, in the end, virtually all of the former turn into the latter-- and usually in short order...
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, it's not really relevent what percentage of the Web is owned by any given c orporation (or set of corporations). What's relevent is what percentage of total minutes/page views of actual Web surfing time of any given body of users is spent on corporate sites.
I have a sneaking suspicion that there are millions of people out there who wake up in the morning, read their (AOL) e-mail, go to www.cnn.com (also owned by AOL) to get their news, go off to work and read msnbc.com (Microsoft) and time.com (more AOL), occasionally dipping into si.com (yet more AOL). Then they go home and load up their copy of AOL Instant Messenger (no, not Trillian, not gAIM-- the actual real deal from AOL, complete with annoying adverts) and chat with their friends, who tell them about something they read in (insert AOL-owned magazine) today...
And so on, and so on.
I'm sure that somewhere in the US, there is a person who gets 95 or more percent of all the information they partake of (in media form, perhaps even including movies) from AOL/Time Warner.
Now now, Mr. or Ms. Troll.
I have nothing against capitalism. But Microsoft's New (Computer Industry) World Order is not capitalism.
Capitalism implies a free market. It implies real consumer choice. It implies competition based on features, not marketing.
What we have here is not capitalism.
If MS's products had succeeded solely on their own merits, without ridiculously and sometimes illegally aggressive marketing (witness MS plastering midtown Manhattan with their cutesy rainbow butterflies to sell MSN), or sleazy back-room wheeling and dealing with OEMs ("If you offer any systems with any non-MS OS, or with no OS, we'll charge you more"), I'd not dislike them so much-- maybe at all. I might still dislike their products, which I do, but I wouldn't hate them like I do.
As for the "KFC and mallowmars" bit-- I'm a vegetarian (no KFC), and I'm skinny. (no mallowmars).
that the first "grassroots" (as opposed to "astroturf" ;) ) protest commercial I've ever heard of involves Farscape. I've heard a lot of good things about this show-- but still, where are the "the environment is going to pot and the politicians don't care" protest commercials.. or the "drug companies are keeping patents to life-saving AIDS and cancer drugs under lock and key, while millions die" protest commercials?
I'd love to hear about (I'll never see it unless someone puts it online, since I don't own a TV, nor do I want one) MORE protest work on TV. It's about time that the "little guys/gals" claimed their piece of the television pie. Nowadays, it seems that 90% of the content on TV is dictated by the Fortune 500 companies...
Does anyone know of any other efforts to produce true 'grassroots' commercials like this?
Personally, I would love to see a grassroots commercial that advocates re-opening the Federal case against MS. But hey, that's 'cuz I'm one of those evil Unix lovers your mom warned you about.
Is there a 'grassroots marketing forum' anywhere?
A) Withstanding any climate is terribly easy when you're made of molecules of metals and/or minerals.
B) It doesn't have to be able to consume 'any' material. The Earth's crust contains certain things in disproportionate amounts. And then there's the air. Between the two of them, let's see-- we've got silicon dioxide, titanium dioxide, o2, n2, co2, h2o... one could easily assemble a "short list" of the top dozen or two compounds in the ground and the air. All it would need would be those.
Nanotech doesn't play by the same rules as currently extant terrestrial biology.
We can't 'eat' air and dirt and use it (and it alone) to grow and reproduce. Nanites could, in theory, do just that, by using raw materials in the air and the earth to reproduce. It all depends on (A) how they are programmed, (B) how they mutate, and (C) how lucky (or unlucky) we are.-
1) Only if in responsible hands.
2) Only if the infamous 'grey goo' problem doesn't become reality. Then we're ALL fucked.
It's like nuclear bombs. We're stepping into unknown territory here, and there is lots of potential for evil. Hell, at first, they weren't even sure if an a-bomb detonation would IGNITE THE ATMOSPHERE, killing us all. Luckily, it didn't-- we dodged a bullet. We may not be so lucky next time.
On the other hand, if you ban it, then (not to be trite or anything, but...) "only criminals will have nanotech." So the terrorists will have nanotech, and the Mafia, but not the legitimate scientists.
Really, it's a lose-lose situation any time you open such a Pandora's box. Either way, you have to worry.
On the bright side, a lot of good can come out of new developments like this too.
The prospect of buying and using this game excites me to no end. But my computers are a Linux box, and a "somewhat old" (Power Mac 7300 with a G3/220 upgrade card) Mac.
:(
What I fear here is that the client will run only on Windows; if we're incredibly lucky, and Lucasarts is feeling generous, they'll also produce a Mac OS X port.
Which would mean that I'd be out of luck either way, since I don't run Windows, and my Mac isn't juicy enough to run OS X games. (It can barely muster OS X itself).
I find it incredible that I'm the first person to point this out. It's really sad. I WANT to give LucasArts my money, but something tells me that, just like previous MMORPGs (or whatever the acronym is), I won't be able to run this thing
...of a 'simple lifeform'. It lives in the white house...
They're called "books". And unless you burn them, they generally have a 0% failure rate.
It is quite a bit annoying when people say "Linux and Unix". Usually they mean "Linux and Solaris", or maybe "Linux, Solaris and HP", or (increasingly often, as the business world funnels itself down to only one or two Unixlike systems... ahhh, how great monopolies are born!) "Red Hat Linux for x86 and Solaris for SPARC".
It would be simpler-- and more accurate-- to just list the actual operating systems it's available for.
And then there's that whole thing about 'Unix'. Technically, as most of us know, the name 'Unix' only applies to whomever owns the trademarked name 'Unix' at the moment (first AT&T, and then I seem to recall control passed to Novell, and to SCO, at various points in history? Can someone provide a full history?), but most Unix admins just consider any "Unixlike" system to be Unix-- and that includes Linux.
If you don't know the actual OS names, you could always use "...will be available for several Unixlike systems, including Mac OS X, Linux, and Solaris", or whatnot...
Ahh, but think of the fees they'd have to pay Microsoft for all that extra storage ;)
:)
After they carefully posted the new Hotmail address all over the Web, they'd blow their quota in around 12 hours.
...where wizened historians wearing horn-rimmed spectacles will sit, hunched over computers, studying the archives of ancient spam.
"This one mentions sex... apparently, sex was a preoccupation of the early twenty-first century..."
That's Ms. rebel, thanks.
:)
And the shirt would be a bit more explicit if these guys, whose services I use, didn't explicitly ban the mention of any copyrighted names, or photos of any famous people, etc. etc. etc.
I really wanted to put this picture on a shirt.. but that would have broken CafePress's rules on several counts.
BTW: It's a fucking shirt. I could easily fill ten or twenty pages with why you should "resist Redmond", but that wouldn't be too effective on a shirt. Can you picture it: "Hey! Is your shirt printed in microfilm!? I can't read it!"
P.S. Nice troll.
P.P.S. Nice to see SlashDotters coming to defense of Microsoft again.
P.P.P.S. Nice to see them lacking the nerve to do it as anyone but 'Anonymous Coward'.
Except when you don't.
Remember the current administration's relationship with the oil industry. Things do trickle down to the local level, at least to some degree.
All it would take would be for Bush to send a high-level diplomat to Seattle to convince them to stop the whole thing. It probably wouldn't take much doing either.
It's just a CafePress store. If you went to the URL, you'd see the redirector. :)
IIS is most certainly not "best" for the job. I'm just at CafePress's mercy when I use their services.
On the one hand, this is an absolutely wonderful idea whose time, I have felt for quite some time, has long since come. On the other hand, I remember a bit of my history, and I am a bit afraid that Big Oil and/or the big car companies might throw a spanner into this plan.
If you'll remember, in the past, this nation had a lot more trolley, El, and miscellaneous sorts of commuter train tech infrastructure than it does now. In a sort of ghastly partnership, the big automotive interests convinced local governments to rip out the trolley tracks, the El lines, and the like-- and replace them with (what else) buses. And roads-- more roads for more cars.
Only in the most heavily populated areas, where trains are almost a necessity, do commuter trains still exist. I live just to the West of New York City (in the Newark/Jersey City area), and HERE we DO have commuter trains-- just here in the NYC area, we have the subway, the PATH, the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail, the Long-Island Railroad, Metro-North, NJ Transit trains, and regular Amtrak service to nearby cities in Connecticut.
But I recognize that my beloved NYC metro area is the exception-- not the rule.
What happens when Ford (or another giant car company-- or an oil company) waves a cool million bucks under the Seattle politicians' collective noses?
Well, apparently one of them ended up as head of Xircom... ;)
Whoa there. Okay, I might be clueless, but-- who are these guys? Are they Blessed by Linus? (Alternatively, are they Blessed by any of the big Linux-friendly firms like Intel, IBM, etc.?)
I wonder if there is a "short list" somewhere of all the biggest and most important Linux "consortiums" (consortia?), standardization projects, documentation projects, etc.? Ideally, listing which ones are and aren't Linus-Blessed, and which companies back/support each one?
I really hate to say it, but sometimes the decentralized (yeah, Linus calls the shots in the kernel, but come on, that's not all there is to it) nature of the Linux community can lead to this sort of confusion...
Anyone got a list?
Maybe they meant "enumerator". I always wanted to enumerate an arcade. (Only every time I went in an arcade, I just kept "enumerating" my losses in quarters...)
I wonder-- might such devices be used to implement super-high-capacity optical storage?
Of course, when you get things that small, dust/fingerprints would be a REAL big issue.
Perhaps sealing a disc into a permanent caddy would do.
Any math/science/optics geeks out there up to the challenge of computing what a theoretical "femto-burned" disc the size of a CD/DVD could hold, assuming you didn't have to worry about dust? (sealed in a caddy)
These distros were what I was using years and years hence. I recall running a stripped-down Slack 3.0 on a '386-16 laptop with 4MB of RAM and an 80MB HDD. (No kidding. It was an AT&T Safari-- remember those? If you squinted just right, you could swear the front of the case said "Satan" instead of "Safari". Or maybe that was the demons in my head taunting me. ;) )
Red Hat 4.2 used to run just dandy on desktops I had with around the level of hardware power you're talking about.
If you want to be lean and mean, go with Slackware. If you want something a bit more user-friendly/desktop-ish, go with Red Hat. However, I must say that installing Slackware 3.0 was never terribly hard for me. It was the first time I installed Linux, and the whole process went rather smoothly. If you know any existing modern distros well enough, Slack 3 should be a cakewalk for you.
How hard would it be for a hobbyist geek to use one of these devices, commodity hardware, and a little cleverness (like that of those Mac hackers who would take apart a Powerbook, flip the keyboard back behind the display, mount it on a stand, and call it an iMac Jr.) to design the "OpenTablet" spec?
:)
Someone could make a fortune selling do-it-yourself kits with instructions... and of course the specs could be made open, for those of us (not me!) handy enough with a soldering iron and whatnot to make it ourselves...
A pen tablet running something like Debian... would easily be the perfect antidote to MS's admittedly nifty-looking new pen tablets
First of all, it was just an example. Are you next going to tell me that since one of my examples was bad, obviously "product dumping" / selling items as a "loss leader" is a myth too? Maybe my example was wrong; maybe it wasn't. But my point still stands.
Secondly, accounts on this "myth" vary. Some very reputable sources say it's quite true. Who do you believe? Might not be the same folks I believe.
From this page on The Guardian: "All three manufacturers are determined to build up a large user base. The consoles are sold at a loss...".
<JessLeah casts 'Dispel Troll' and recites:>
1) One small good deed does not cancel out many large bad deeds.
2) IE is actually not a buggy piece of anything-- I personally think it's quite nice. I merely dislike it because of the morals of the people making/pushing it.
3) Putting words in my mouth does not mean I agree with them. There will always be situations where companies will release some things at a loss or for free-- it's the concept of the "loss leader". Look at how many video game companies routinely lose GOBS of money underselling their consoles. They make their money on the cartridges/CDs. That's a very common and acceptable course of action.
Do you really think your cell phone company (assuming you have a cell phone) makes money off of the sale of cell phones?
The definition of "monopoly" has absolutely nothing to do with "whether or not a company sells things for what the market will bear".
From Merriam-Webster:
1 : exclusive ownership through legal privilege, command of supply, or concerted action
2 : exclusive possession or control
3 : a commodity controlled by one party
4 : one that has a monopoly
What you are talking about is merely one "classical complaint" about why monopolies are bad ("Monopolies are potentially dangerous because once a company has a monopoly, it can effectively charge whatever it wants").
Microsoft is a monopoly because they have a near-100% market share in many areas.
Microsoft is abusiving their monopoly (as determined by the Feds) because they abused their monopoly standing in various ways (e.g. browbeating all hardware vendors to not offer any alternative-OS/no-OS computers).
If I recall correctly, having a monopoly isn't even illegal... it's abusing a monopoly that's illegal. But as the old saying goes, "power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely", so most people nowadays don't seem to draw much distinction between "a monopoly" and "an abusive monopoly". Since, in the end, virtually all of the former turn into the latter-- and usually in short order...