I'm glad you looked into the numbers, because you can learn like I did how deliberately they hide the costs of printing.:) There's a reason I don't own their stock...
I think you are right about ereaders not getting as much revenue per reader - of course, the per-reader distribution costs are also much lower. It seems to work for Amazon, and even smaller players like B&N, which is wisely spinning off their Nook so that their stockholders don't have to lose everything when the big ship goes down.
It's news because the largest software company in the world is ignoring the fastest growing platform for software in the world, rather than writing software for it.
Methinks that MS has gotten it in their head that they are a hardware company... they are not.
It probably makes sense for them to "eat their own dogfood" to a point, but it is disturbing that the dogfood does not include an iOS app!
Had they went to the "printed" edition on eReader, I don't think their ad revenue would have dropped off. Heck, Amazon can afford to sell a Kindle for $30 less for what must be the least obtrusive ad system ever (the "screen saver" when the unit is not in use and a banner on the main menu).
Unless over 40% of their total cost is for printing and distributing, print is still carrying more than it's share of the load.
From their financials: cost of goods sold 957.5 selling general & admin expenses, total 1,006.0 depreciation & amortization, total 116.5
So if you assume that COGS is mostly printing costs and you lump all of the other costs away from print, and even if we don't include depreciation & amortization (which is probably mostly print equipment and delivery equipment), print is 46% of costs. Of course, "selling general & admin expenses" is going to include a LOT of print expenses, so in reality print costs are much higher.
The really sad thing is that print scales really well up, but not down. At a certain point you are spending a ton of money on the print infrastructure and the delivery network but not getting much return. They respond by making their print subscriptions really, really expensive, which of course leads to fewer subscribers, which leads to... well, their current unsustainable situation.
In reality the UN inspectors observed and reported that the uranium facility in Iran is only 20% pure..... well below the levels allowed by the treaty (it bans 30% and up).
Great! So then Iran wouldn't mind letting them hang around to continue testing as enrichment continues, right? Oh...
I was just comparing same-level-of-access. Yes, you can get the web and smartphone for just over $16/month ($3.75/week)... of course you can also get the print edition weekly for $3.85/week that comes with the full digital access, so a 10 cent/week difference between the $16 smartphone only and $38/month full access plans, with a free paper thrown in to boot.
Makes no sense unless you consider their print edition trying to hold on for dear life and calling the shots at the marketing level. At the very least, I should be able to buy the print edition for my Kindle without having to take delivery of an actual paper newspaper. As it is right now, the Kindle version is not complete and costs more than weekday delivery. The Times will die out when their print customers do, and they seem fine with this situation.
To me it is an amazing squandering of an empire. They could have been Amazon... offer the print edition on an ebook reader of their own design. Throw the reader in for free. Put up a store offering books and other periodicals for the same reader. BAM, instant userbase and just like that they are in the 21st century. The Kindle came out in late 2007, so it should have been technically possible to create a NY Times Kindle back then, when they still had a circulation over 1 million. Probably too late now for the Grey Lady.
It is assumed they are not living up to their treaty obligations.
They aren't letting inspections occur, which is why they have the UN sanctions. No assumptions being made.
But regardless the US does not want Iran to have any nuclear capability, which is in violation of the treaty; Iran can have peaceful nuclear programs.
Obviously the US does not want Iran to have nuclear capability at all, but they have in the recent past offered to help supply Iran with enriched uranium in exchange for giving up the weapons program.
It's worth noting that the US isn't the only one sanctioning Iran - there also is the UN and other Western countries, and even Iranian bestest buds Russia and China are participating.
I don't pay for it because, while I think the Times' reporting is top-notch, the print side has too much power and keeps the digital version artificially high to prevent poaching. The Kindle version is $20/month and is totally gimped and does not include digital access. Meanwhile the dead-tree edition is about $30/month and comes with unlimited digital access. You can get the dead-tree edition weekday-only for the same price as the Kindle version, and that also includes unlimited digital access.
But this is the best part: just digital access, no Kindle, no dead-tree is... $8.75/week! Yes, $38/month for less product than the dead tree edition. The mind boggles. I refuse to pile up a bunch of unused newspapers just to save $18/month for digital access, so they can pound sand.
Tell me, did I sign some kind of a contract with the NY Times where I promise to keep their data on my machine in exchange for their services? Am I "stealing" if I load their results in a browser that doesn't support persistent cookies?
They offer up web pages on a public webserver, and even allow sites like Google to crawl (partnering really, see the robots.txt) their site.
You probably think it is "stealing" to block known advertising sites as well.
it also applies to treated sewage water that doesn't include a tertiary process as well.
Well, TFA certainly uses the term to describe effluent, so I don't doubt your education:)
But the term "greywater" clearly has other uses - you've already used it to describe effluent and storm run-off... it seems appropriate to use for anything between blackwater and drinking water.
Iran doesn't even HAVE a missile capable of reaching Israel.
I know that, but we also don't have an effective anti-missile system yet. Iran has an active missile development program and (probably) an active nuclear weapon program, so it is prudent to co-develop an anti-missile program.
So why on earth are you worried about a missile strike that is beyond Iran's capability?
Because they seem to be working on one with that capability, and we can't just "poof" invent and deploy an anti-missile system as soon as it is needed.
Besides Israel has 300+ nuclear weapons.
Thus my mentioning first-strike. Their nukes also seem to be bombs rather than missiles, so the Israelis would seem to depend on having functioning airfields for a retaliatory strike.
They are more than capable of wiping-out their Arab neighbors (which is why they don't attack).
Well, that and said Arab neighbors having their butts handed to them each time they tried to invade Israel.
Iran is a signatory of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty with the U.S., England, France, and so on.
Which is what all the fuss is about. They are not living up to the treaty obligations. North Korea formally withdrew from the treaty after developing nuclear weapons, and so people are upset that Iran is doing the exact same thing.
The big problem is not that it makes Russia mad, but that with further development it could make America not MAD.
I think you might be right, but not for the reason you might believe.
Let's imagine that Iran hurls a bunch of warheads at Tel Aviv and maybe some other Israeli cities. I don't think that's terribly likely, but lets just roll with that for now. Do you think that the US would reply with nukes? I think it's about 50/50, yet it needs to be 100% for MAD to work. Unlikely as it might be, Iran might actually feel that they can get a first strike in on Israel without nuclear retribution. Put a missile defense shield in place, no matter how patchy, and the equation changes - now the idea that they might be able to totally destroy Israel in one burst is more of a question, and either Israel or the US or some other party may very well return the favor.
I don't worry about MAD with China or Russia because I don't think they have anything to gain by using a nuclear weapon on the US, and MAD never caused Russia to refrain from conventional military buildup, so I don't see why it would work on China.
Whatever Excel was "for", it has become a jack of all trades. It is often the quick dirty way to look at some data. And some of it's features, like pivot tables, make it even more powerful than some of the "additional pieces of software" you mention. I'm not afraid to get my hands dirty with Matlab - but Matlab is really more suited to analyzing the same kind of data set over and over. Excel is far more flexible, even though it is not nearly as powerful overall.
The only place I would caution people away from Excel is in statistical analysis. Until very recently, some of the basic functions were simply broken. Even now, I don't always trust the results (though that may not be fair to the current version). Let's just say there has been a long history of problems.
Greywater is wastewater generated from domestic activities such as laundry, dishwashing, and bathing, which can be recycled on-site for uses such as landscape irrigation and constructed wetlands. Greywater differs from water from the toilets which is designated sewage or blackwater to indicate it contains human waste.
Pee is usually sterile, and while I - ahem - know people who pee in the shower, I do not know anyone who drops a deuce in the shower. My understanding is that the only "grey" area is in clothes washing, since it could potentially contain cloth diapers.
Ah, so it does. So they have one for inflow and one for outflow. Seems expensive, but like I said, these probably aren't much more than a big pool and some monitoring devices. Depending on the quality of the effluent from the municipal plant, they may or may not need to run the water through a sand filter since I'd bet the little chunks of algae and bacteria would mess with their cooling system.
I'll list my particular grievances: 1. It undoes 15 years of expertise I had in using Excel and Word. I've been using the ribbon now for over a year and still find myself hunting occasionally - my productivity has still not caught up to the "old" interface. 2. It changes depending on window size/screen size. On my laptop with a small screen, the ribbons are subtly rearranged compared to those on my desktop. On my desktop, I don't run Word full screen, since my monitor is large. Depending on how large I make the windows, the buttons on the ribbon rearrange themselves. This breaks a fundamental human interface rule that MS loves to break - things should not move around. 3. Adding custom buttons is now murderous, and the built-in selection of buttons is very limited. They've had a icon editor built in to MS Office since, what, 1996? And they take it out because... they want to force you into this cumbersome XML editing workflow for user-defined icons. Ugh. 4. You are absolutely correct - it isn't very different from the old UI. It takes vertical drop-down menus and makes them horizontal, then adds pictures. Humans are worse at scanning lists horizontally than they are scanning vertically. This change makes no sense. It now takes me longer to scan through the ribbon than it did to scan through the drop-down menu.
In short, I am angry that Microsoft didn't spend more time fixing obvious flaws in Office and instead screwed up the GUI.
Take VBA... it is the killer feature of Excel, and really the only reason to use it over other spreadsheets. Unfortunately, they haven't really updated it in 10 years and it is stale. Big macros have to be split into multiple procedures. The performance is awful. User-defined functions fail silently. Mostly, though, the IDE and language have not seen any modernization in 15 years and even simple things like a Perl "associative array" or a Python "dictionary" are painful to implement (via Collections is usually how I do it...). Meanwhile, Open/Libre Office has steadily improved their macro support and it is almost usable. I can see a day where I start writing to that package instead - especially if I can abandon VBA and use something more modern.
Take graphing... Quattro Pro had better graphing tools in 1997 and it still does today:) No, I haven't compared them recently:) But Excel's graphing options are pretty much stuck in 1996. Heck, the formula bar still shows graphs as Excel 4 macros! Goodness... Meanwhile, Open/Libre Office has steadily improved their graphing capabilities and it is pretty much a credible alternative.
Now to be fair, the ribbon in 2010 makes more sense than the ribbon in 2007, so there is hope.
Actually, they built a wastewater plant to treat the water that already passed through the data center - and I suspect that was a requirement even when they were using tap water... I highly doubt that you can dump any kind of industrial wastewater without "treating" it, even if treating just means putting it in a big open-air tank to let it settle and testing it once in a while.
That is a great idea. I don't live somewhere with a water scarcity problem (I don't even have a water-saving washing machine), but that is a good idea.
The summary (and Google) are being misleading here. This is treated sewage that would have been otherwise dumped in the local river - thus it is almost drinkable, and almost certainly cleaner than the river water itself. "Greywater" usually describes untreated sewage from non-toilet sources (showers, sinks, dishwashers, clothes washers).
Yeah, it's pretty clear that F was based on someone with a low-grade fever:)
The ironic thing here is that C no longer is based on the boiling point or freezing point of water, which is a bit too sketchy. It has been re-based to the triple-point of pure water - much like F was originally only for a different solution - and absolute zero. So C is now based on points that measure as -273.15 C and 0.01 C:)
And then to really set the ironic alarms off, F is standardized on the boiling and freezing points of water! So 32 and 212 F... Just like the original Centigrade scale.
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I'm glad you looked into the numbers, because you can learn like I did how deliberately they hide the costs of printing. :) There's a reason I don't own their stock...
I think you are right about ereaders not getting as much revenue per reader - of course, the per-reader distribution costs are also much lower. It seems to work for Amazon, and even smaller players like B&N, which is wisely spinning off their Nook so that their stockholders don't have to lose everything when the big ship goes down.
Cool, didn't know they had anything on there.
It's news because the largest software company in the world is ignoring the fastest growing platform for software in the world, rather than writing software for it.
Methinks that MS has gotten it in their head that they are a hardware company... they are not.
It probably makes sense for them to "eat their own dogfood" to a point, but it is disturbing that the dogfood does not include an iOS app!
Had they went to the "printed" edition on eReader, I don't think their ad revenue would have dropped off. Heck, Amazon can afford to sell a Kindle for $30 less for what must be the least obtrusive ad system ever (the "screen saver" when the unit is not in use and a banner on the main menu).
Unless over 40% of their total cost is for printing and distributing, print is still carrying more than it's share of the load.
From their financials:
cost of goods sold 957.5
selling general & admin expenses, total 1,006.0
depreciation & amortization, total 116.5
So if you assume that COGS is mostly printing costs and you lump all of the other costs away from print, and even if we don't include depreciation & amortization (which is probably mostly print equipment and delivery equipment), print is 46% of costs. Of course, "selling general & admin expenses" is going to include a LOT of print expenses, so in reality print costs are much higher.
The really sad thing is that print scales really well up, but not down. At a certain point you are spending a ton of money on the print infrastructure and the delivery network but not getting much return. They respond by making their print subscriptions really, really expensive, which of course leads to fewer subscribers, which leads to... well, their current unsustainable situation.
In reality the UN inspectors observed and reported that the uranium facility in Iran is only 20% pure..... well below the levels allowed by the treaty (it bans 30% and up).
Great! So then Iran wouldn't mind letting them hang around to continue testing as enrichment continues, right? Oh...
I was just comparing same-level-of-access. Yes, you can get the web and smartphone for just over $16/month ($3.75/week)... of course you can also get the print edition weekly for $3.85/week that comes with the full digital access, so a 10 cent/week difference between the $16 smartphone only and $38/month full access plans, with a free paper thrown in to boot.
Makes no sense unless you consider their print edition trying to hold on for dear life and calling the shots at the marketing level. At the very least, I should be able to buy the print edition for my Kindle without having to take delivery of an actual paper newspaper. As it is right now, the Kindle version is not complete and costs more than weekday delivery. The Times will die out when their print customers do, and they seem fine with this situation.
To me it is an amazing squandering of an empire. They could have been Amazon... offer the print edition on an ebook reader of their own design. Throw the reader in for free. Put up a store offering books and other periodicals for the same reader. BAM, instant userbase and just like that they are in the 21st century. The Kindle came out in late 2007, so it should have been technically possible to create a NY Times Kindle back then, when they still had a circulation over 1 million. Probably too late now for the Grey Lady.
It is assumed they are not living up to their treaty obligations.
They aren't letting inspections occur, which is why they have the UN sanctions. No assumptions being made.
But regardless the US does not want Iran to have any nuclear capability, which is in violation of the treaty; Iran can have peaceful nuclear programs.
Obviously the US does not want Iran to have nuclear capability at all, but they have in the recent past offered to help supply Iran with enriched uranium in exchange for giving up the weapons program.
It's worth noting that the US isn't the only one sanctioning Iran - there also is the UN and other Western countries, and even Iranian bestest buds Russia and China are participating.
I don't pay for it because, while I think the Times' reporting is top-notch, the print side has too much power and keeps the digital version artificially high to prevent poaching. The Kindle version is $20/month and is totally gimped and does not include digital access. Meanwhile the dead-tree edition is about $30/month and comes with unlimited digital access. You can get the dead-tree edition weekday-only for the same price as the Kindle version, and that also includes unlimited digital access.
But this is the best part: just digital access, no Kindle, no dead-tree is... $8.75/week! Yes, $38/month for less product than the dead tree edition. The mind boggles. I refuse to pile up a bunch of unused newspapers just to save $18/month for digital access, so they can pound sand.
I wonder if you can hit your limit by browsing through coral cache? Slow as hell, but I guess I'll try it and see.
LOL @ "stealing".
Tell me, did I sign some kind of a contract with the NY Times where I promise to keep their data on my machine in exchange for their services? Am I "stealing" if I load their results in a browser that doesn't support persistent cookies?
They offer up web pages on a public webserver, and even allow sites like Google to crawl (partnering really, see the robots.txt) their site.
You probably think it is "stealing" to block known advertising sites as well.
it also applies to treated sewage water that doesn't include a tertiary process as well.
Well, TFA certainly uses the term to describe effluent, so I don't doubt your education :)
But the term "greywater" clearly has other uses - you've already used it to describe effluent and storm run-off... it seems appropriate to use for anything between blackwater and drinking water.
The reason I've heard is that lobbing them so high means that when they come back down they are going fast enough to defeat missile defense.
I was mistaken - Israel does apparently have second-strike ICBM capability.
Iran doesn't even HAVE a missile capable of reaching Israel.
I know that, but we also don't have an effective anti-missile system yet. Iran has an active missile development program and (probably) an active nuclear weapon program, so it is prudent to co-develop an anti-missile program.
So why on earth are you worried about a missile strike that is beyond Iran's capability?
Because they seem to be working on one with that capability, and we can't just "poof" invent and deploy an anti-missile system as soon as it is needed.
Besides Israel has 300+ nuclear weapons.
Thus my mentioning first-strike. Their nukes also seem to be bombs rather than missiles, so the Israelis would seem to depend on having functioning airfields for a retaliatory strike.
They are more than capable of wiping-out their Arab neighbors (which is why they don't attack).
Well, that and said Arab neighbors having their butts handed to them each time they tried to invade Israel.
Iran is a signatory of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty with the U.S., England, France, and so on.
Which is what all the fuss is about. They are not living up to the treaty obligations. North Korea formally withdrew from the treaty after developing nuclear weapons, and so people are upset that Iran is doing the exact same thing.
The big problem is not that it makes Russia mad, but that with further development it could make America not MAD.
I think you might be right, but not for the reason you might believe.
Let's imagine that Iran hurls a bunch of warheads at Tel Aviv and maybe some other Israeli cities. I don't think that's terribly likely, but lets just roll with that for now. Do you think that the US would reply with nukes? I think it's about 50/50, yet it needs to be 100% for MAD to work. Unlikely as it might be, Iran might actually feel that they can get a first strike in on Israel without nuclear retribution. Put a missile defense shield in place, no matter how patchy, and the equation changes - now the idea that they might be able to totally destroy Israel in one burst is more of a question, and either Israel or the US or some other party may very well return the favor.
I don't worry about MAD with China or Russia because I don't think they have anything to gain by using a nuclear weapon on the US, and MAD never caused Russia to refrain from conventional military buildup, so I don't see why it would work on China.
Whatever Excel was "for", it has become a jack of all trades. It is often the quick dirty way to look at some data. And some of it's features, like pivot tables, make it even more powerful than some of the "additional pieces of software" you mention. I'm not afraid to get my hands dirty with Matlab - but Matlab is really more suited to analyzing the same kind of data set over and over. Excel is far more flexible, even though it is not nearly as powerful overall.
The only place I would caution people away from Excel is in statistical analysis. Until very recently, some of the basic functions were simply broken. Even now, I don't always trust the results (though that may not be fair to the current version). Let's just say there has been a long history of problems.
You need to head over and edit Wikipedia:
Pee is usually sterile, and while I - ahem - know people who pee in the shower, I do not know anyone who drops a deuce in the shower. My understanding is that the only "grey" area is in clothes washing, since it could potentially contain cloth diapers.
Diapers is one area where I'm firmly on the side of the polluters and not the environmentalists :)
Ah, so it does. So they have one for inflow and one for outflow. Seems expensive, but like I said, these probably aren't much more than a big pool and some monitoring devices. Depending on the quality of the effluent from the municipal plant, they may or may not need to run the water through a sand filter since I'd bet the little chunks of algae and bacteria would mess with their cooling system.
Dunno why people bitch about the ribbon so much.
I'll list my particular grievances:
1. It undoes 15 years of expertise I had in using Excel and Word. I've been using the ribbon now for over a year and still find myself hunting occasionally - my productivity has still not caught up to the "old" interface.
2. It changes depending on window size/screen size. On my laptop with a small screen, the ribbons are subtly rearranged compared to those on my desktop. On my desktop, I don't run Word full screen, since my monitor is large. Depending on how large I make the windows, the buttons on the ribbon rearrange themselves. This breaks a fundamental human interface rule that MS loves to break - things should not move around.
3. Adding custom buttons is now murderous, and the built-in selection of buttons is very limited. They've had a icon editor built in to MS Office since, what, 1996? And they take it out because... they want to force you into this cumbersome XML editing workflow for user-defined icons. Ugh.
4. You are absolutely correct - it isn't very different from the old UI. It takes vertical drop-down menus and makes them horizontal, then adds pictures. Humans are worse at scanning lists horizontally than they are scanning vertically. This change makes no sense. It now takes me longer to scan through the ribbon than it did to scan through the drop-down menu.
In short, I am angry that Microsoft didn't spend more time fixing obvious flaws in Office and instead screwed up the GUI.
Take VBA... it is the killer feature of Excel, and really the only reason to use it over other spreadsheets. Unfortunately, they haven't really updated it in 10 years and it is stale. Big macros have to be split into multiple procedures. The performance is awful. User-defined functions fail silently. Mostly, though, the IDE and language have not seen any modernization in 15 years and even simple things like a Perl "associative array" or a Python "dictionary" are painful to implement (via Collections is usually how I do it...). Meanwhile, Open/Libre Office has steadily improved their macro support and it is almost usable. I can see a day where I start writing to that package instead - especially if I can abandon VBA and use something more modern.
Take graphing... Quattro Pro had better graphing tools in 1997 and it still does today :) No, I haven't compared them recently :) But Excel's graphing options are pretty much stuck in 1996. Heck, the formula bar still shows graphs as Excel 4 macros! Goodness... Meanwhile, Open/Libre Office has steadily improved their graphing capabilities and it is pretty much a credible alternative.
Now to be fair, the ribbon in 2010 makes more sense than the ribbon in 2007, so there is hope.
Actually, they built a wastewater plant to treat the water that already passed through the data center - and I suspect that was a requirement even when they were using tap water... I highly doubt that you can dump any kind of industrial wastewater without "treating" it, even if treating just means putting it in a big open-air tank to let it settle and testing it once in a while.
That is a great idea. I don't live somewhere with a water scarcity problem (I don't even have a water-saving washing machine), but that is a good idea.
The summary (and Google) are being misleading here. This is treated sewage that would have been otherwise dumped in the local river - thus it is almost drinkable, and almost certainly cleaner than the river water itself. "Greywater" usually describes untreated sewage from non-toilet sources (showers, sinks, dishwashers, clothes washers).
It's more like MS Office than current versions of MS Office... ribbonless, the way I likes it. Now get off my lawn!
Yeah, it's pretty clear that F was based on someone with a low-grade fever :)
The ironic thing here is that C no longer is based on the boiling point or freezing point of water, which is a bit too sketchy. It has been re-based to the triple-point of pure water - much like F was originally only for a different solution - and absolute zero. So C is now based on points that measure as -273.15 C and 0.01 C :)
And then to really set the ironic alarms off, F is standardized on the boiling and freezing points of water! So 32 and 212 F... Just like the original Centigrade scale.