A typical home computer owned by a non-gamer doesn't even have a $40 card. It has an embedded graphics chipset that's good enough for some 3D and multimedia (think Google Earth and Netflix) but bogs dowm if you try anything fancy.
Sigh. Since you're such an expert on how my brain works, I'll leave you to carry on both sods of this conversation. Or you could google "principle of charity."
Dude, you got a $200 video card in that thing! Not standard equipment. I suppose for a gamer your rig is low-end, but most of us don't need that kind of hardware -- except to play MP4s.
There are a lot of reasons a big corporation would want his headquarters in a big city. (Notice that Boeing recently moved from the Seattle suburbs to downtown Chicago.) Once you make the decision to do that, moving key staff out of town comets as "dispersal."
Actually a big part of our sarcasm war was you treating a simple difference of opinion as proof of my dickheadedness. And that, if I may say so, is just a little dickheaded.
Your list of things that don't have to be in Manhattan is absurd. Have you ever worked in a company that tried to disperse its basic functions that way? I have, and it's just not that easy. The loss of communication between key people hurts. A lot.
Also, some IT functions are actually cheaper in the city, because of the existing infrastructure and the advantages of being at a major networking nexus.
Another little detail: Those 26 (not 31) floors are not all occupied by a newspaper. Some small part of it is occupied by the New York Times Company, a NYSE-traded media corporation, with $3 billion in revenue, and 10,000 employees. I think it might take a bit of space to house the headquarters of such a concern.
Do I think you're a dickhead for not knowing these things? Not at all. Ignorance is not dickheaded. But gets all pissy when somebody suggests you don't know as much as you think you do is dickheadedness personified.
I have the VLC player, GOM (my personal favorite), Quicktime, and a lot more. When I have video problems, I end up trying all of them. VLC does deal with more obscure formats than anybody else, but it doesn't do anything about this problem.
Perhaps I'm doing something wrong (definitely no expert), but I've had a lot of trouble playing MP4 files on any of my computers. Too much video lag. I always end up converting them to AVI. (We're talking stuff I've downloaded, not rips.) Perhaps the problem is that none of my machines has the video hardware MP4 requires -- but if that's the case, then AVI is hardly "legacy", since my hardware is at least as powerful as most newer home computers.
Every large-ish city typically has 4-5 television stations that also have their own news departments that do journalism.
Oh, please. TV news is the opposite of journalism.
Every small town has a newspaper.
So what? The problem isn't the quantity of newspapers, it's the quality.
I live in San Jose, CA, which used to have a first rate paper. Lots of good content, a long history of award-winning winning investigative journalism, and serious coverage of the computer business. It was even profitable. Craigslist destroyed their classifieds business, which used to be their biggest profit center, but they were still doing pretty well.
Then some "activist investors" decided it wasn't profitable enough. They forced the chain that owned it to sell out completely, and this paper ended up with a chain whose main talent seems to be cost-cutting. Now the page count is down (like 2/3) the quality of the writing is down, they no longer have access to their former chain's news bureaus, and circulation is down.
Profits? What profits? For that you need subscribers. I used to subscribe and read it every day — now I rarely even bother to read it online.
Really, the decline in advertising revenue is only part of the problem, as this sad story illustrates. There's also the fact that most newspapers (including all those small town papers) belong to mammoth media companies that are run by bean counters.
Uh, small detail: a good chunk of their content is about New York.
Also, their main claim to be a GNOR is their coverage of things like business, finance, and the arts. NYC is a center of such things. That's how they became a GNOR in the first place. Hard to cover these things from Kentucky.
There are indeed a lot of businesses that spend too much money on Manhattan offices just for the prestige of being there. This is not one of them.
Also, cost-cutting has not worked out for most newspapers. They lose people, they content declines, they lose subscribers, so their income drops even more... It's a death spiral. I've already posted an interesting quote on the topic from the publisher of the Dallas Morning News.
I know newspapers have to make a living, and I don't care if that comes out of my pocket. But they seem to be unable to come up with a payment model I can live with.
I access a lot of news sites. No way I can pay a subscription to all them, or even to all my favorites. There has to be some way I can access all those different sources without breaking the bank. But newspapers can't seem to find it. Micropayments seem to be an obvious solution that never goes anywhere. (Yes, I know all the objections. I'd take them more seriously if anybody actually tried it.) This notion of "metered" access sounds doable — if they can keep my recurring costs at a reasonable level.
Of course, they main reason newspapers are so anxious to monetize their web editions: the print editions are losing money hand over fist. Most newspapers have responded by cutting costs. But that means fewer pages, more fluff, less solid journalism. This drives away subscribers, and before you know it they're in a death spiral.
I recently heard an interesting interview with Jim Maroney, publisher of the Dallas Morning News. He's taken quite a different approach:
We have continued to protect as much of our scale of journalists and journalistic resources in this market, adding pages to the paper instead of taking them out. One of the things that we have done is we have gone to our customers and said, look, we need to ask you to pay a greater proportion of the cost of publishing and distributing a newspaper to your home. In so doing, we've reduced our dependency on advertising.
The typical model for newspapers has been 80 percent advertising and 20 percent revenue from the people who buy the paper. By this time next year, we'll be something closer to 60/40, maybe even 55/45. To date, we're about 80 percent through all of our renewals, and 92 percent of our subscribers have agreed to pay a higher price, and I'm very proud of that. And I don't think we could have done it had we continued to cut our newsroom or continued to cut pages out of the paper.
End result: the paper is debt-free and profitable.
One wonders why more papers haven't gone this route. The answer I come up with is that most of them are controlled by big corporations, which are run by bean counters who know everything about "controlling costs" and nothing about actually providing something of value.
Consolas is a good font, but I don't like the distinction between 1 and l. I think that incurs more cognitive overhead than it should. This kind of unobvious distinction is an issue with most fonts. For a long time I used Andale Mono (despite hearing fontophiles sneer at its esthetics) because the letter l is radically different from the digit 1. Then I discovered Vera Sans Mono, which has a similar letter l, and also has a narrow underbar, so that sequential underbars don't form a continuous line. I've often wondered why so many "programmer friendly" fonts overlook this issue: continuous underlining makes it easy to get the wrong number of underlines in things like __WEIRDCONSTANT.
Incidentally, both these fonts are designed by major font foundries, but are available for free. Andale Mono used to be part of Microsoft's free "core web font" program; that's long ended, but nobody seems to care about all the copies available on the web. The Vera Sans family appears to be Bitstream's donation to GNOME.
This discussion caused me to google "programmer fonts". Some interesting discoveries:
There are a huge number of fonts designed by programmers who can't quite live with any existing font. Since scalable font design is a specialized skill, these are almost always simple bitmap fonts.
Monofur is a very clever design. Which is precisely why I will never use it — too distracting.
This font is designed around the assumption that "We need to re-engineer the alphabet so that it will be clear at extremely small sizes." I think this guy needs to get out more.
Yes, they survived the Iran-Iraq war — just barely. Recall that Iran was in something of a mess at the time. That's why Saddam invaded — he was sure they were a pushover. But despite grossly mismatched forces, massive international support (including the U.S.!), and social disorder in Iran (which prevented them from even having a unified command structure!), it took him 5 years just to achieve a 3-year stalemate. Not exactly a testament to his military leadership.
There's more to the two conventional wars between Iraq and the U.S. than the fact that they were mismatches. Even allowing for the difference in resources, the collapse of the Iraqi side managed to shock and surprise U.S. commanders and their allies.
I'd be the last to defend the current government in Iraq. But that was a result of the U.S. toppling Saddam without any plan (beyond Paul Wolfowitz's magical thinking) as to what would happen next. The result was something like a civil war combined with a return to feudalism combined with an occupying army. They're only now recovering from that. But that doesn't make Saddam's government any less ugly and inept.
Don't get me started on cables. When I got my first component stereo, I sprung for a spool of "speaker cable". OK, not a lot of money, but lamp wire, which is much cheaper, works just as well. Probably better, since it's better insulated and doesn't kink as easily.
But what I should ask is this: what do you mean by "better"? Often the only difference between two products is their branding. But people still buy the more expensive brand. I've caught myself doing it, even though it's something I try to watch out for.
(My favorite branding weirdness: Whole Foods buys Crystal Geyser bottled water, puts a Whole Foods label on it, and then puts it on the shelf next to its "competitor" at exactly the same price.)
So this is one of those caveat emptor situations. People who make stuff are always going to get you to pay as much as possible for the stuff they make. It's how the system works. Really, there's nothing unethical about using branding to jack at up a price, as long as you don't lie about the differences with the other brands. (As they often do.) Of course, jacking up the price by a factor of 100 is a bit much, but it's really not any worse than Scotch Tape for $1.25 a roll versus generic for $1.00. Ultimately, it's a question of the consumer being well-informed.
I don't think it would have made much difference. The USA had air support.
This isn't about who could beat who in a conventional fight. There isn't anybody left who could beat the U.S. on those terms. (Notice that all armed opposition to the U.S. now consists of non-sovereign entities using guerrilla warfare and terrorism.) But that doesn't mean nobody can thumb their nose at the U.S. If you have a strong military you can dominate your region, enlist allies, and make it very expensive for anybody to attack. That doesn't mean that nobody can beat you, just that the cost of beating you is too high.
Plenty of evidence of a program, none of any serious progress towards actually building a bomb. The Bushies chose to cherry pick the evidence that justified an invasion, but the evidence itself wasn't fabricated.
Did well at what? Militarily, Iraq was a joke (Bushie spin notwithstanding) and civil government, while not the worst, did tend towards repression and corruption.
Slashdot Mirror
A typical home computer owned by a non-gamer doesn't even have a $40 card. It has an embedded graphics chipset that's good enough for some 3D and multimedia (think Google Earth and Netflix) but bogs dowm if you try anything fancy.
Sigh. Since you're such an expert on how my brain works, I'll leave you to carry on both sods of this conversation. Or you could google "principle of charity."
Chronicle the best? Probably time, but I find that scary.
Dude, you got a $200 video card in that thing! Not standard equipment. I suppose for a gamer your rig is low-end, but most of us don't need that kind of hardware -- except to play MP4s.
There are a lot of reasons a big corporation would want his headquarters in a big city. (Notice that Boeing recently moved from the Seattle suburbs to downtown Chicago.) Once you make the decision to do that, moving key staff out of town comets as "dispersal."
Actually a big part of our sarcasm war was you treating a simple difference of opinion as proof of my dickheadedness. And that, if I may say so, is just a little dickheaded.
Your list of things that don't have to be in Manhattan is absurd. Have you ever worked in a company that tried to disperse its basic functions that way? I have, and it's just not that easy. The loss of communication between key people hurts. A lot.
Also, some IT functions are actually cheaper in the city, because of the existing infrastructure and the advantages of being at a major networking nexus.
Another little detail: Those 26 (not 31) floors are not all occupied by a newspaper. Some small part of it is occupied by the New York Times Company, a NYSE-traded media corporation, with $3 billion in revenue, and 10,000 employees. I think it might take a bit of space to house the headquarters of such a concern.
Do I think you're a dickhead for not knowing these things? Not at all. Ignorance is not dickheaded. But gets all pissy when somebody suggests you don't know as much as you think you do is dickheadedness personified.
Gee, I always thought gathering news was the main business of a newspaper.
Why don't we end this sarcasm war. Tell me exactly which functions of the New York Times could be moved to Kentucky.
I have the VLC player, GOM (my personal favorite), Quicktime, and a lot more. When I have video problems, I end up trying all of them. VLC does deal with more obscure formats than anybody else, but it doesn't do anything about this problem.
Perhaps I'm doing something wrong (definitely no expert), but I've had a lot of trouble playing MP4 files on any of my computers. Too much video lag. I always end up converting them to AVI. (We're talking stuff I've downloaded, not rips.) Perhaps the problem is that none of my machines has the video hardware MP4 requires -- but if that's the case, then AVI is hardly "legacy", since my hardware is at least as powerful as most newer home computers.
Unfortunately, your software will probably be pulled after a couple of weeks in favor of a reality show.
Gee I dunno. Maybe it has something to do with reporters actually needing to go out and report
Every large-ish city typically has 4-5 television stations that also have their own news departments that do journalism.
Oh, please. TV news is the opposite of journalism.
Every small town has a newspaper.
So what? The problem isn't the quantity of newspapers, it's the quality.
I live in San Jose, CA, which used to have a first rate paper. Lots of good content, a long history of award-winning winning investigative journalism, and serious coverage of the computer business. It was even profitable. Craigslist destroyed their classifieds business, which used to be their biggest profit center, but they were still doing pretty well.
Then some "activist investors" decided it wasn't profitable enough. They forced the chain that owned it to sell out completely, and this paper ended up with a chain whose main talent seems to be cost-cutting. Now the page count is down (like 2/3) the quality of the writing is down, they no longer have access to their former chain's news bureaus, and circulation is down.
Profits? What profits? For that you need subscribers. I used to subscribe and read it every day — now I rarely even bother to read it online.
Really, the decline in advertising revenue is only part of the problem, as this sad story illustrates. There's also the fact that most newspapers (including all those small town papers) belong to mammoth media companies that are run by bean counters.
Uh, small detail: a good chunk of their content is about New York.
Also, their main claim to be a GNOR is their coverage of things like business, finance, and the arts. NYC is a center of such things. That's how they became a GNOR in the first place. Hard to cover these things from Kentucky.
There are indeed a lot of businesses that spend too much money on Manhattan offices just for the prestige of being there. This is not one of them.
Also, cost-cutting has not worked out for most newspapers. They lose people, they content declines, they lose subscribers, so their income drops even more... It's a death spiral. I've already posted an interesting quote on the topic from the publisher of the Dallas Morning News.
I know newspapers have to make a living, and I don't care if that comes out of my pocket. But they seem to be unable to come up with a payment model I can live with.
I access a lot of news sites. No way I can pay a subscription to all them, or even to all my favorites. There has to be some way I can access all those different sources without breaking the bank. But newspapers can't seem to find it. Micropayments seem to be an obvious solution that never goes anywhere. (Yes, I know all the objections. I'd take them more seriously if anybody actually tried it.) This notion of "metered" access sounds doable — if they can keep my recurring costs at a reasonable level.
Of course, they main reason newspapers are so anxious to monetize their web editions: the print editions are losing money hand over fist. Most newspapers have responded by cutting costs. But that means fewer pages, more fluff, less solid journalism. This drives away subscribers, and before you know it they're in a death spiral.
I recently heard an interesting interview with Jim Maroney, publisher of the Dallas Morning News. He's taken quite a different approach:
We have continued to protect as much of our scale of journalists and journalistic resources in this market, adding pages to the paper instead of taking them out. One of the things that we have done is we have gone to our customers and said, look, we need to ask you to pay a greater proportion of the cost of publishing and distributing a newspaper to your home. In so doing, we've reduced our dependency on advertising.
The typical model for newspapers has been 80 percent advertising and 20 percent revenue from the people who buy the paper. By this time next year, we'll be something closer to 60/40, maybe even 55/45. To date, we're about 80 percent through all of our renewals, and 92 percent of our subscribers have agreed to pay a higher price, and I'm very proud of that. And I don't think we could have done it had we continued to cut our newsroom or continued to cut pages out of the paper.
End result: the paper is debt-free and profitable.
One wonders why more papers haven't gone this route. The answer I come up with is that most of them are controlled by big corporations, which are run by bean counters who know everything about "controlling costs" and nothing about actually providing something of value.
auto-notification when you near your minutes limit
I refuse to give my business to socialists!
Uh, dude, have you ever seen a Slashdot poll? That "suggestion" did not rate (or desire) a serious response.
I wish you people would stop flaunting your preversions.
Oh well, we all have our brilliant/stupid moments. A long time ago, I actually was a fervent dozenalist!
I don't think anybody's really interested in getting their phone service from CowboyNeal!
Consolas is a good font, but I don't like the distinction between 1 and l. I think that incurs more cognitive overhead than it should. This kind of unobvious distinction is an issue with most fonts. For a long time I used Andale Mono (despite hearing fontophiles sneer at its esthetics) because the letter l is radically different from the digit 1. Then I discovered Vera Sans Mono, which has a similar letter l, and also has a narrow underbar, so that sequential underbars don't form a continuous line. I've often wondered why so many "programmer friendly" fonts overlook this issue: continuous underlining makes it easy to get the wrong number of underlines in things like __WEIRDCONSTANT.
Incidentally, both these fonts are designed by major font foundries, but are available for free. Andale Mono used to be part of Microsoft's free "core web font" program; that's long ended, but nobody seems to care about all the copies available on the web. The Vera Sans family appears to be Bitstream's donation to GNOME.
This discussion caused me to google "programmer fonts". Some interesting discoveries:
Yes, they survived the Iran-Iraq war — just barely. Recall that Iran was in something of a mess at the time. That's why Saddam invaded — he was sure they were a pushover. But despite grossly mismatched forces, massive international support (including the U.S.!), and social disorder in Iran (which prevented them from even having a unified command structure!), it took him 5 years just to achieve a 3-year stalemate. Not exactly a testament to his military leadership.
There's more to the two conventional wars between Iraq and the U.S. than the fact that they were mismatches. Even allowing for the difference in resources, the collapse of the Iraqi side managed to shock and surprise U.S. commanders and their allies.
I'd be the last to defend the current government in Iraq. But that was a result of the U.S. toppling Saddam without any plan (beyond Paul Wolfowitz's magical thinking) as to what would happen next. The result was something like a civil war combined with a return to feudalism combined with an occupying army. They're only now recovering from that. But that doesn't make Saddam's government any less ugly and inept.
Don't get me started on cables. When I got my first component stereo, I sprung for a spool of "speaker cable". OK, not a lot of money, but lamp wire, which is much cheaper, works just as well. Probably better, since it's better insulated and doesn't kink as easily.
But what I should ask is this: what do you mean by "better"? Often the only difference between two products is their branding. But people still buy the more expensive brand. I've caught myself doing it, even though it's something I try to watch out for.
(My favorite branding weirdness: Whole Foods buys Crystal Geyser bottled water, puts a Whole Foods label on it, and then puts it on the shelf next to its "competitor" at exactly the same price.)
So this is one of those caveat emptor situations. People who make stuff are always going to get you to pay as much as possible for the stuff they make. It's how the system works. Really, there's nothing unethical about using branding to jack at up a price, as long as you don't lie about the differences with the other brands. (As they often do.) Of course, jacking up the price by a factor of 100 is a bit much, but it's really not any worse than Scotch Tape for $1.25 a roll versus generic for $1.00. Ultimately, it's a question of the consumer being well-informed.
I don't think it would have made much difference. The USA had air support.
This isn't about who could beat who in a conventional fight. There isn't anybody left who could beat the U.S. on those terms. (Notice that all armed opposition to the U.S. now consists of non-sovereign entities using guerrilla warfare and terrorism.) But that doesn't mean nobody can thumb their nose at the U.S. If you have a strong military you can dominate your region, enlist allies, and make it very expensive for anybody to attack. That doesn't mean that nobody can beat you, just that the cost of beating you is too high.
If you mean nuclear, there's not much evidence.
Plenty of evidence of a program, none of any serious progress towards actually building a bomb. The Bushies chose to cherry pick the evidence that justified an invasion, but the evidence itself wasn't fabricated.
Did well at what? Militarily, Iraq was a joke (Bushie spin notwithstanding) and civil government, while not the worst, did tend towards repression and corruption.