Net profit is almost certainly down significantly by making this move. The Guardian, which I don't think was a more popular paper before the paywall (it certainly is after!), brings in 41 million a year in ad revenue. The NYT paywall is projected to bring in about 10 million a year, tops (that's if all 105k readers are subscribers, but only half of them are according to TFA).
I honestly can't believe that The Guardian was more than four times as successful as the NYT was before the paywall. That's the way things would have to have been for this not to be a significant net loss for the NYT. This is almost certainly a significant loss in net profit.
Yet the WSJ is the exception that proves the rule.
I don't think you understand what that saying actually means.
To "prove" something in this context is to test or challenge it. A more modern way of stating this would be "The WSJ is the exception that challenges the rule." That the WSJ can do it is evidence that others can do the same thing and be successful. What must be discovered is why the WSJ can do it when others do not seem to be able to, because the rule is generally a reliable predictor of the outcome. It just was not for the WSJ's case, and knowing why is important to any who want to follow them.
That is the exception that proves the rule. You generally end up with a revised rule after figuring out such a thing.
If you've got a relevant site, it's going to show up in Google's search. If it's the most relevant site, it will probably be at or near the top.
That's what is so great about Google. Some people do really well with AdWords (particularly those who have imminently relevant websites but the site isn't particularly good at letting the search engine know that). Others, like yourself, don't.
One thing you can count on with Google (and now I guess Bing too) is that the search results are probably the best ones available for your query, or at least pretty close to the best possible. They haven't been bought off like the old search engines. They can still be gamed, but it's pretty obvious when that happens.
They expected to lose 90% of readers (i.e. those who go beyond the headlines on the first page and actually read the stories deeper in the site), not visitors to their front page. They lost 87% of visitors.
Nielsen puts The NYT UK's readership before the paywall at 3 million (that's actual readers, not just visitors, they measure it the same way they do TV ratings). 100,000 out of 3 million is 3%, or a 97% loss in readership.
It's an epic failure that they are trying to spin as a success in order to save face.
It's hard to compare it to their ad revenues before the paywall since they haven't released them (and probably never will, now), but given the fact that other online papers in the UK like The Guardian have ad revenues of around 40 million, The NYT UK's projected 10 million subscription revenue isn't very impressive, especially for being one of the largest most respected newspapers in the world.
Actually the list only has 50,000 gullible customers. The rest simply bought one-offs, which there could be many valid reasons for doing. For example, they could have been bored shitless somewhere, when, "Hey a digital paper! How quaint!"
Writing for PCMag, Lance Ulanoff says the decision should rest in parents' hands: "If I have real concerns, it's up to me to argue it out with my son and take away the games or not buy them for him when he asks." If you're already buying the game for your kid, then a prohibition on sale directly to minors would be irrelevant. If anything, this law supports Ulanoff's point - that the decision should rest in parents' hands, and that they can freely buy the game if they want.
Predicting consequences has nothing to do with the SCOTUS's job, and if you think it does, you're an idiot.
The SCOTUS's job is to test law (and its application) against the constitution. It doesn't really matter what comes of the law after they rule, the question is "Is it or is it not constitutional?".
SC justices are very good at figuring out how a particular case fits the constitution, mainly by forcing the proponents of each side of the argument to do most of the leg work. They can decide to uphold or strike down the ruling, but they can also ignore it altogether if neither argument is convincing enough, which leaves the issue open for another review.
The constitution itself is fairly short and pretty straightforward, and all but the most recent justice have decades of experience as judges, and before that a decade or more experience as lawyers. They know the law inside and out, and they know the constitution inside and out. All they need to know after that is how this particular case fits into the law. That's what the two sets of lawyers who argue their case are for.
That's going away, though. When you've virtualized everything, and all the individual parts are compatible, there should not be a reason you can't mix and match CPU's, memories, HBA's, etc. It's a software limitation more than a hardware limitation (the software should be able to manage the differing available resources) Microsoft is actively working to remove this limitation from their cluster products, and I imagine VMWare is too.
No-bid contracts typically can only be issued when nobody has any idea what the particular service will cost. If it is possible to quantify a cost and therefore issue a bid, a no-bid contract is essentially not a possibility. They tend to be constantly adjustable as well, to reflect the fact that, after a while you will know how much things cost.
For example, Halliburton's no-bid contract to provide support services in Iraq. Going in, nobody had any idea what things would cost, and a contract based on bids would be absolutely ridiculous - you'd have outrageous bids as companies tried to cover their asses for every potential cost imaginable. It would be completely unrealistic and the bids would be astronomical. The only option then is to pick a contractor that is large enough to handle just about any issue that may crop up, and has a track record of doing good work for the government. That's where Halliburton comes in, as they fit the bill quite well (there are others that would have worked, but they have to pick one from the start, as no bids are possible).
The contract is then structured such that Halliburton estimates what each particular duty will cost as a baseline. Once they have the baseline, an arbitrary incentive is set up - something like whenever they beat the baseline cost by more than 10% Haliburton receives a 20% bonus. Follow that with criteria that if the baseline cost is beaten 6 out of 10 times, the baseline is re-adjusted.
Thus Haliburton is given the incentive to continually reduce costs until you get down to the optimum cost for whatever they are doing. The keys to doing this right is to make the bonus big enough that they want to hit it as much as possible, but not so big that it dwarfs the baseline cost. Basically you give them a moving target - they definitely want to hit it, but the more they hit it the harder it is to hit (and the less the government ultimately spends).
That's how no-bid contracts work from a bird's eye view. They are for special situations only, and are not used for every-day things.
What they are talking about in the article is gaming the bidding process to get your preferred supplier, and it is usually pretty hard to prove. Someone messed up on this one though, because it seems pretty blatant. All products that meet the requirements should be on the table, not just a single vendor's products. We've got something similar going on at my company - one service company bid $5 million to install a product that has significant use in the company, and another bid $15 million for an inferior product that has limited use within the company. The project manager added $10 million to the first bid for "potential unforseen issues" and then declared the second bid to be clearly superior. I mean, WTF?
We've got something similar where I live (not a chain, it's a home-grown theater) - great beer, great pizza (among other things), and $3 movies. There is only one screen, so you get whatever they're playing, and they tend to only show the super popular mainstream movies or cult/art flicks. It's almost always good no matter what is playing though. There is just nothing like drinking beer and eating pizza while watching a movie on the big screen.
The absolutely jam packed parking lot every night of the week is evidence that they are doing very well with that setup.
All the theaters I've seen in the US give you the glasses for "free" (it's really just included in the $2-$3 surcharge). They then encourage you to recycle them to keep their profits up. I mean costs down.
Really, forcing me to buy the 3d glasses is just begging me to sneak in to 3d movies without paying.
If you can get your camera synced to the movie all you have to do is toss out half the frames. You could also use a somewhat hokey but effective mirror setup to combine the images before they get to the camera (doing this without the polarizing glasses in front of the mirrors is a way to shoot stereoscopic film with a normal camcorder).
Polarized 3D is what the movie theaters use. Shutter glasses are what home theaters use.
Seriously, if home theaters could use passive glasses as described in the wikipedia article it wouldn't be an issue.
Go to a store some time and look at the 3D TVs and tell me what those glasses are doing if they aren't shutter glasses.
There is a technique that works with LCD, and is cheap. The problem is you need a screen that is twice as wide as your intended video, because it must show two full images side by side.
I could envision an LCD technology that has twinned pixels and double the pixel density of the final film, and each pixel is polarized in the opposite direction and controlled by a different controller. Passive glasses could then be used, and it would operate as a normal TV without the glasses.
Slashdot Mirror
Net profit is almost certainly down significantly by making this move. The Guardian, which I don't think was a more popular paper before the paywall (it certainly is after!), brings in 41 million a year in ad revenue. The NYT paywall is projected to bring in about 10 million a year, tops (that's if all 105k readers are subscribers, but only half of them are according to TFA).
I honestly can't believe that The Guardian was more than four times as successful as the NYT was before the paywall. That's the way things would have to have been for this not to be a significant net loss for the NYT. This is almost certainly a significant loss in net profit.
About 50,000, since that's the number of actual digital subscribers.
The rest were one off's.
Yet the WSJ is the exception that proves the rule.
I don't think you understand what that saying actually means.
To "prove" something in this context is to test or challenge it. A more modern way of stating this would be "The WSJ is the exception that challenges the rule." That the WSJ can do it is evidence that others can do the same thing and be successful. What must be discovered is why the WSJ can do it when others do not seem to be able to, because the rule is generally a reliable predictor of the outcome. It just was not for the WSJ's case, and knowing why is important to any who want to follow them.
That is the exception that proves the rule. You generally end up with a revised rule after figuring out such a thing.
If you've got a relevant site, it's going to show up in Google's search. If it's the most relevant site, it will probably be at or near the top.
That's what is so great about Google. Some people do really well with AdWords (particularly those who have imminently relevant websites but the site isn't particularly good at letting the search engine know that). Others, like yourself, don't.
One thing you can count on with Google (and now I guess Bing too) is that the search results are probably the best ones available for your query, or at least pretty close to the best possible. They haven't been bought off like the old search engines. They can still be gamed, but it's pretty obvious when that happens.
They expected to lose 90% of readers (i.e. those who go beyond the headlines on the first page and actually read the stories deeper in the site), not visitors to their front page. They lost 87% of visitors.
Nielsen puts The NYT UK's readership before the paywall at 3 million (that's actual readers, not just visitors, they measure it the same way they do TV ratings). 100,000 out of 3 million is 3%, or a 97% loss in readership.
It's an epic failure that they are trying to spin as a success in order to save face.
It's hard to compare it to their ad revenues before the paywall since they haven't released them (and probably never will, now), but given the fact that other online papers in the UK like The Guardian have ad revenues of around 40 million, The NYT UK's projected 10 million subscription revenue isn't very impressive, especially for being one of the largest most respected newspapers in the world.
Actually the list only has 50,000 gullible customers. The rest simply bought one-offs, which there could be many valid reasons for doing. For example, they could have been bored shitless somewhere, when, "Hey a digital paper! How quaint!"
Please tell me you aren't a native English speaker.
If you are, I'm going to be depressed.
If not, well nevermind.
Either way I can't understand a thing you said.
Writing for PCMag, Lance Ulanoff says the decision should rest in parents' hands: "If I have real concerns, it's up to me to argue it out with my son and take away the games or not buy them for him when he asks." If you're already buying the game for your kid, then a prohibition on sale directly to minors would be irrelevant. If anything, this law supports Ulanoff's point - that the decision should rest in parents' hands, and that they can freely buy the game if they want.
Pay attention.
Predicting consequences has nothing to do with the SCOTUS's job, and if you think it does, you're an idiot.
The SCOTUS's job is to test law (and its application) against the constitution. It doesn't really matter what comes of the law after they rule, the question is "Is it or is it not constitutional?".
SC justices are very good at figuring out how a particular case fits the constitution, mainly by forcing the proponents of each side of the argument to do most of the leg work. They can decide to uphold or strike down the ruling, but they can also ignore it altogether if neither argument is convincing enough, which leaves the issue open for another review.
The constitution itself is fairly short and pretty straightforward, and all but the most recent justice have decades of experience as judges, and before that a decade or more experience as lawyers. They know the law inside and out, and they know the constitution inside and out. All they need to know after that is how this particular case fits into the law. That's what the two sets of lawyers who argue their case are for.
That's Wal-Mart, a private entity, not the government.
Dumbass.
The MPAA is an industry body, not a governmental body, and it's ratings are 100% voluntary, as is the enforcement of its ratings.
Now, the reason it exists is because the government threatened to censor movies, but that doesn't mean such censorship would have held up in court.
That an unrated movies are often not carried by retailers has to do with the entertainment industry's practices, not anything the government has done.
Making it illegal to sell games with certain ratings to minors, however, is entirely different.
That's going away, though. When you've virtualized everything, and all the individual parts are compatible, there should not be a reason you can't mix and match CPU's, memories, HBA's, etc. It's a software limitation more than a hardware limitation (the software should be able to manage the differing available resources) Microsoft is actively working to remove this limitation from their cluster products, and I imagine VMWare is too.
Of course he didn't, that's why he made the idiotic comment.
Duh. ;)
Exactly.
No-bid contracts typically can only be issued when nobody has any idea what the particular service will cost. If it is possible to quantify a cost and therefore issue a bid, a no-bid contract is essentially not a possibility. They tend to be constantly adjustable as well, to reflect the fact that, after a while you will know how much things cost.
For example, Halliburton's no-bid contract to provide support services in Iraq. Going in, nobody had any idea what things would cost, and a contract based on bids would be absolutely ridiculous - you'd have outrageous bids as companies tried to cover their asses for every potential cost imaginable. It would be completely unrealistic and the bids would be astronomical. The only option then is to pick a contractor that is large enough to handle just about any issue that may crop up, and has a track record of doing good work for the government. That's where Halliburton comes in, as they fit the bill quite well (there are others that would have worked, but they have to pick one from the start, as no bids are possible).
The contract is then structured such that Halliburton estimates what each particular duty will cost as a baseline. Once they have the baseline, an arbitrary incentive is set up - something like whenever they beat the baseline cost by more than 10% Haliburton receives a 20% bonus. Follow that with criteria that if the baseline cost is beaten 6 out of 10 times, the baseline is re-adjusted.
Thus Haliburton is given the incentive to continually reduce costs until you get down to the optimum cost for whatever they are doing. The keys to doing this right is to make the bonus big enough that they want to hit it as much as possible, but not so big that it dwarfs the baseline cost. Basically you give them a moving target - they definitely want to hit it, but the more they hit it the harder it is to hit (and the less the government ultimately spends).
That's how no-bid contracts work from a bird's eye view. They are for special situations only, and are not used for every-day things.
What they are talking about in the article is gaming the bidding process to get your preferred supplier, and it is usually pretty hard to prove. Someone messed up on this one though, because it seems pretty blatant. All products that meet the requirements should be on the table, not just a single vendor's products. We've got something similar going on at my company - one service company bid $5 million to install a product that has significant use in the company, and another bid $15 million for an inferior product that has limited use within the company. The project manager added $10 million to the first bid for "potential unforseen issues" and then declared the second bid to be clearly superior. I mean, WTF?
Welcome to the government, my friend.
Wow, the grammar self-police. ;)
For $300 it had better be one hell of a nice meal.
But yeah.
We've got something similar where I live (not a chain, it's a home-grown theater) - great beer, great pizza (among other things), and $3 movies. There is only one screen, so you get whatever they're playing, and they tend to only show the super popular mainstream movies or cult/art flicks. It's almost always good no matter what is playing though. There is just nothing like drinking beer and eating pizza while watching a movie on the big screen.
The absolutely jam packed parking lot every night of the week is evidence that they are doing very well with that setup.
I want my suspension of disbelief back.
Buy contacts.
All the theaters I've seen in the US give you the glasses for "free" (it's really just included in the $2-$3 surcharge). They then encourage you to recycle them to keep their profits up. I mean costs down.
Really, forcing me to buy the 3d glasses is just begging me to sneak in to 3d movies without paying.
If you can get your camera synced to the movie all you have to do is toss out half the frames. You could also use a somewhat hokey but effective mirror setup to combine the images before they get to the camera (doing this without the polarizing glasses in front of the mirrors is a way to shoot stereoscopic film with a normal camcorder).
Polarized 3D is what the movie theaters use. Shutter glasses are what home theaters use.
Seriously, if home theaters could use passive glasses as described in the wikipedia article it wouldn't be an issue.
Go to a store some time and look at the 3D TVs and tell me what those glasses are doing if they aren't shutter glasses.
There is a technique that works with LCD, and is cheap. The problem is you need a screen that is twice as wide as your intended video, because it must show two full images side by side.
I could envision an LCD technology that has twinned pixels and double the pixel density of the final film, and each pixel is polarized in the opposite direction and controlled by a different controller. Passive glasses could then be used, and it would operate as a normal TV without the glasses.
...and nothing digital really can supplement an IMAX image yet.
Fixed that for you.
You're an idiot.