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Making a Buck Online - Without Ads
A New York Times article hosted by C|Net looks at the unique position of the Consumer Reports website; they're one of the few online resources that gets by completely on subscription fees. They have no ads. One key seems to be valuing their online readers as much as their print readers - and charging both the same amount. "The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times tried charging for some online content, then abandoned the practice. For a decade, however, Consumer Reports has charged Internet readers the same price as print subscribers, currently $26 a year (or $5.99 for a month's online access or $45 a year to get the magazine both in print and on the Web). While the rest of the industry sees print readers as more valuable--because advertisers do--Consumer Reports actually makes more money from readers on its Web site, because it avoids printing, trucking, and mailing costs."
Why point to the C-Net version of the article when the original article is freely available online here?
I'm a computer professional, and my Vista box has been my most trouble-free Windows machine yet. To read Slashdot I would've thought it was the OS equivalent of a burning paper bag full of dog crap on my doorstep, but surprisingly my experience with it's been great.
Granted, I waited until 6 months or so after the launch to get it.
I don't see a compelling reason for most people to move to Vista, but I haven't experienced a compellign reason not to yet either.
About a CD burner they said something along the lines of "It can copy an audio CD but the sound quality will be reduced and the copy cannot be further duplicated."
I know exactly what you're talking about because i remember going "WTF?" after reading the same thing. So I researched it, and sure enough it was correct -- the device they were reviewing was a turntable->CD device for converting old records to CD, and could be hooked up via USB to a computer as well. And yes, if you used it to make multiple copies of the CD it would use an analog circuit rather than just doing a bitwise copy. If you hooked it up via USB of course you could do regular bit-for-bit copies using your computer, but that was not the primary advertised way to do it.
As with 99% of the criticisms of CR, errors are usually just a matter of them not having the space to explain every technical detail of every device for pages on end (and their readers don't want to read pages of technical crap, either) -- so they summarize, and no summary is ever as complete as the whole explanation.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.