The only way Salon is any different from TV news is that they don't have any revenue. Both exist for the dual purpose of informing people and making money.
Spinning an unprofitable news/opinion site (I should probably list 'opinion' first, actually) as a selfless and benevolent bastion of pure information, for the purpose of bringing more money to the site, is wildly hypocritical.
And your comparison of keeping Salon afloat with truly noble movements like stopping the war and repealing the DMCA makes me furious.
Maybe if I have any "compassion" left I will send... a dime to the local newspaper -- they must be losing money to[o].
Actually... unless they're part of a major conglomerate like Gannett or Knight-Ridder... they probably are.
Paper near where I work had to cut staff by 50% just to stay afloat a little while ago. Salaries are dismal throughout the industry, profit margins are tiny.
If you care about quality print journalism, newspapers need your support.
Not to mention all the cash they spent developing their own CMS (yeah, they really did).
You mean like SlashCode?
Given the poor experiences I've had with rigid and monolithic Content Management Systems from leading vendors, I'd recommend writing a custom CMS to any site the size of Salon or larger, so that the site's specific needs can be best addressed.
(It also depends on who you get to develop the CMS, though. There's a lot of bad developers and coders out there.)
one of these things is not like the others
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Salon Asks for Help
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· Score: 1
There is nothing forcing them to spend alot of money on fancy offices, marketing executives and coke habits.
Nerds tend to think of Marketing as unnecessary and even counterproductive (viz any number of Dilbert strips), but this is not true. You can have the greatest product in the world, but what good is it if no one uses it? It's a rare product that can gain widespread popularity by word-of-mouth alone.
Whether the value delivered by marketing staff is greater than the salaries and benefits paid to them is not always clear. In Salon's case I think the company certainly didn't get what they paid (and are continuing to pay) for.
Re:Schadenfreude, Bankruptcy, & the Prisoners
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Salon Asks for Help
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· Score: 1
Even amazon, who we regard as somewhat successful, was losing between 25%-125% of that amount per quarter until just 6 months ago*.
Amazon is a couple orders of magnitude larger than Salon, though. In terms of fiscal losses as percentage of total operating costs, I'd bet Amazon is doing better than Salon and has been for a long time now.
they're flogging a business model we'd all love to see succeed: the pureplay online publication.
It's not the business model's fault though; it's Salon's cash-hemmorhaging implementation thereof.
They should have filed for bankruptcy by now, to break the long-term leases and contracts that are preventing them from having a sustainable business and get them back on their feet. That they haven't just seems to be further proof that no one there knows how to run a profitable business.
There's demand in any organization for digital rights management... you want to restrict modifying the purchase order forms to the accounting department, but make them globally readable? Check.
It will allow governments and corporations strong control over who can read electronic versions of documents, preventing information leaks.
Okay, but shouldn't access controls be handled at the filesystem level, rather than the application level?
Between NT's duak System and Discretionary ACLs, file permissions on modern Windows systems are already robust (and confusing!) enough. I don't see how adding YET ANOTHER layer of complexity into the Office documents themselves provides any benefit.
Why do you assume that the "bad guys" who are exploiting the vulnerability AREN'T employed by the bank itself? There's no proof that Citibank isn't to blame except Citibank's own word.
the GUI should probably consist of a web server (so that the BIOS can be configured over the net)
OH GOD NO.
You're thinking "remote administration of the company's desktop machines", I'm thinking "hacker breaks into my box over TCP/IP and disables all my peripherals".
Call me crazy, but I think any changes to hardware settings ought to be done only from a location where you can actually see the hardware.
In this case the companies will just have to suck it up and NOT pay Ralph Nacchio $300 million over two years.
Actually, what happens to companies when they can't turn a profit is that they go out of business of their not essential to the economy, or the government steps in and uses your and my tax dollars to keep them afloat if they are essential.
And neither of those scenarios is a good one for consumers of DSL services.
But ooooh no, regulation is bad for business. BS! In natural monopolies like this it's the only way to go. You simply TELL the company they must provide quality service, no excuses.
Okay. But what happens when the laws requiring companies to provide certain quality of service are incompatible with profitability?
Didn't 9/11 teach us that you cannot stop a determined enemy?
Richard Reed was determined to blow up his shoes and an airplane full of innocent people with it. He was stopped.
Who knows how many other terrorist plots have been foiled without the public ever hearing about it?
Terrorists hate not because they are taught to hate. Indoctrination trumps logic. There's nothing we, as individuals or as nations, can do to make sure that no one anywhere hates us enough to want to kill us.
Would people before 9/11 have run out of a club screaming and freaking out because someone used mace? Nope.
No, they would have stayed where they were and happily choked down the cloud of caustic mist!
Are you that stupid?
Stampede deaths have been happening ever since people began gathering in confined places thousands of years ago. Here's a few recent examples. Note that only two of these 23 incidents occurred after 9/11/01.
The other reason is that when they order their medical equipment online, their friends and neighbors never find out that they're sick freaks with doctor fetishes...
Use copyright law instead of agreeing to any licenses, and consider the 50 instances to be fair use.
You don't get to decide what constitutes fair use, though. If Microsoft disagrees with you, they'll take you to court and it will be decided there, and probably not in your favor. Common sense says that "one" does not mean "fifty".
Apparently, the estate now has a legal precedent on owning all musical works composed entirely of rests.
Nope.
The precedent only applies to works for which it is claimed that Cage was a composer of.
Mike Batt used "Batt/Cage" as the composer credit for his work, which was a cuter little joke that ended up costing him six figures. If he hadn't made any claims that his work was based on Cage's, he wouldn't have had to pay.
Just as open source software will eliminate commercial software development as we know it today.
I was in agreement with you up until this point.
Commercial software development will never go away, so long as there are businesses that perceive an advantage in a situation where they have something that no one else does.
Although I do use IE most of the time, it is not because it is *there already*, I use it because it loads pages faster than other browsers
And why is it faster...? Because it's *there already*. In memory. In DLL's that you can't run Windows without.
Mozilla (other browsers too) try to accomplish the same thing by keeping parts of their code in memory before you open a browser window, too. But I've never seen the internals of the Windows code -- for all we know, it could be running the IE code at a higher priority than any other code, making it next to impossible for a 3rd-party browser to match IE on speed.
If you're not happy with it, just return the CD. How hard can that be?
Slashdot Mirror
*coughbullshit*
The only way Salon is any different from TV news is that they don't have any revenue. Both exist for the dual purpose of informing people and making money.
Spinning an unprofitable news/opinion site (I should probably list 'opinion' first, actually) as a selfless and benevolent bastion of pure information, for the purpose of bringing more money to the site, is wildly hypocritical.
And your comparison of keeping Salon afloat with truly noble movements like stopping the war and repealing the DMCA makes me furious.
Maybe if I have any "compassion" left I will send ... a dime to the local newspaper -- they must be losing money to[o].
Actually... unless they're part of a major conglomerate like Gannett or Knight-Ridder... they probably are.
Paper near where I work had to cut staff by 50% just to stay afloat a little while ago. Salaries are dismal throughout the industry, profit margins are tiny.
If you care about quality print journalism, newspapers need your support.
Not to mention all the cash they spent developing their own CMS (yeah, they really did).
You mean like SlashCode?
Given the poor experiences I've had with rigid and monolithic Content Management Systems from leading vendors, I'd recommend writing a custom CMS to any site the size of Salon or larger, so that the site's specific needs can be best addressed.
(It also depends on who you get to develop the CMS, though. There's a lot of bad developers and coders out there.)
There is nothing forcing them to spend alot of money on fancy offices, marketing executives and coke habits.
Nerds tend to think of Marketing as unnecessary and even counterproductive (viz any number of Dilbert strips), but this is not true. You can have the greatest product in the world, but what good is it if no one uses it? It's a rare product that can gain widespread popularity by word-of-mouth alone.
Whether the value delivered by marketing staff is greater than the salaries and benefits paid to them is not always clear. In Salon's case I think the company certainly didn't get what they paid (and are continuing to pay) for.
Even amazon, who we regard as somewhat successful, was losing between 25%-125% of that amount per quarter until just 6 months ago*.
Amazon is a couple orders of magnitude larger than Salon, though. In terms of fiscal losses as percentage of total operating costs, I'd bet Amazon is doing better than Salon and has been for a long time now.
they're flogging a business model we'd all love to see succeed: the pureplay online publication.
It's not the business model's fault though; it's Salon's cash-hemmorhaging implementation thereof.
They should have filed for bankruptcy by now, to break the long-term leases and contracts that are preventing them from having a sustainable business and get them back on their feet. That they haven't just seems to be further proof that no one there knows how to run a profitable business.
There's demand in any organization for digital rights management... you want to restrict modifying the purchase order forms to the accounting department, but make them globally readable? Check.
/purchaseorders/* /purchaseorders/*
$ chgrp accounting
$ chmod 664
It will allow governments and corporations strong control over who can read electronic versions of documents, preventing information leaks.
Okay, but shouldn't access controls be handled at the filesystem level, rather than the application level?
Between NT's duak System and Discretionary ACLs, file permissions on modern Windows systems are already robust (and confusing!) enough. I don't see how adding YET ANOTHER layer of complexity into the Office documents themselves provides any benefit.
Why do you assume that the "bad guys" who are exploiting the vulnerability AREN'T employed by the bank itself? There's no proof that Citibank isn't to blame except Citibank's own word.
This is like Alexy Pajitnov demanding fifty bucks from me because I own a copy of Tengen Tetris for me NES.
I hope someone develops a network interface card (NIC) that connects over a Serial ATA (SATA) bus.
They could market it as "SATA NIC"!
(And you thought only SCSI chains required the sacrifice of chickens)
The CIA does not, and is not allowed, to opperate within the borders of the united states.
Murdering people is against the law in every civilized nation but does that stop the CIA from carrying out the occasional assassination?
If you can find any decent politicians where you're from, perhaps you might consider running for office yourself?
the GUI should probably consist of a web server (so that the BIOS can be configured over the net)
OH GOD NO.
You're thinking "remote administration of the company's desktop machines", I'm thinking "hacker breaks into my box over TCP/IP and disables all my peripherals".
Call me crazy, but I think any changes to hardware settings ought to be done only from a location where you can actually see the hardware.
In this case the companies will just have to suck it up and NOT pay Ralph Nacchio $300 million over two years.
Actually, what happens to companies when they can't turn a profit is that they go out of business of their not essential to the economy, or the government steps in and uses your and my tax dollars to keep them afloat if they are essential.
And neither of those scenarios is a good one for consumers of DSL services.
But ooooh no, regulation is bad for business. BS! In natural monopolies like this it's the only way to go. You simply TELL the company they must provide quality service, no excuses.
Okay. But what happens when the laws requiring companies to provide certain quality of service are incompatible with profitability?
A href="California energy crisis", that's what.
Didn't 9/11 teach us that you cannot stop a determined enemy?
Richard Reed was determined to blow up his shoes and an airplane full of innocent people with it. He was stopped.
Who knows how many other terrorist plots have been foiled without the public ever hearing about it?
Terrorists hate not because they are taught to hate. Indoctrination trumps logic. There's nothing we, as individuals or as nations, can do to make sure that no one anywhere hates us enough to want to kill us.
Would people before 9/11 have run out of a club screaming and freaking out because someone used mace? Nope.
No, they would have stayed where they were and happily choked down the cloud of caustic mist!
Are you that stupid?
Stampede deaths have been happening ever since people began gathering in confined places thousands of years ago. Here's a few recent examples. Note that only two of these 23 incidents occurred after 9/11/01.
The other reason is that when they order their medical equipment online, their friends and neighbors never find out that they're sick freaks with doctor fetishes...
A business that does not have a presence in my state has no authorization to collect the use tax for my state on any purchases I make from them.
Use copyright law instead of agreeing to any licenses, and consider the 50 instances to be fair use.
You don't get to decide what constitutes fair use, though. If Microsoft disagrees with you, they'll take you to court and it will be decided there, and probably not in your favor. Common sense says that "one" does not mean "fifty".
Does that make me a potential terrorist?
If it does, so what? You can't be arrested for potential.
Even with an average this high, it's every easy to drop into mid-40's or upper-30's during a big cluster*uck.
Oh no! That's only twice the framerate of motion picture film!
Apparently, the estate now has a legal precedent on owning all musical works composed entirely of rests.
Nope.
The precedent only applies to works for which it is claimed that Cage was a composer of.
Mike Batt used "Batt/Cage" as the composer credit for his work, which was a cuter little joke that ended up costing him six figures. If he hadn't made any claims that his work was based on Cage's, he wouldn't have had to pay.
Just as open source software will eliminate commercial software development as we know it today.
I was in agreement with you up until this point.
Commercial software development will never go away, so long as there are businesses that perceive an advantage in a situation where they have something that no one else does.
Although I do use IE most of the time, it is not because it is *there already*, I use it because it loads pages faster than other browsers
And why is it faster...? Because it's *there already*. In memory. In DLL's that you can't run Windows without.
Mozilla (other browsers too) try to accomplish the same thing by keeping parts of their code in memory before you open a browser window, too. But I've never seen the internals of the Windows code -- for all we know, it could be running the IE code at a higher priority than any other code, making it next to impossible for a 3rd-party browser to match IE on speed.
If you're not happy with it, just return the CD. How hard can that be?
Haha, yeah. How hard indeed.