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May 28, 2005
Smartest Guys Showing Here
The local Boardman's Art Theatre is showing Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. This documentary follows the rise and fall of one of the largest corporate failures in American history. I wrote a review of the film a few weeks ago, so it's nice to see it arrive in our little town. The new Art seems to do a good job of attracting relevant, current films on controversial topics to downtown Champaign. And best of all, you can pick, reserve, and purchase your seats online!
Posted on 02:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 17, 2005
The Times Seeks Irrelevance
The NY Times has decided to start charging for a portion of their content, including op-ed and news colummns. This is part of an attempt to secure a new business model to replace waning paper subscriptions for newspapers nationwide. They will charge $50/year for access to the columns, as well as their archives (which they already charged for).
I guess the NYT hopes to equal the influence of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, which has been secured behind a pay-required screen for years. How many of you have read a WSJ editorial lately? The only time I read one is when a subscriber quotes a snippet of one on their blog.
With the emergence of blogs as the new op-ed columnists, this decision will cement the NY Times' fate as irrelevant. As a regular reader of the Times, and someone who has frequently read and linked to their op-ed pages (Paul Krugman, for example), I will now be unable to do so.
This is certainly a poor decision with regard to the Times' position in daily political discourse, but is it a good business decision? I could just pay the 50 bucks and continue to read the content and link away (of course, almost nobody could follow the links). I am sympathetic to the plight of newspapers struggling to find a new way to fund their work, but for an international paper like the Times, the model that makes most sense is an advertising one. In particular, their op-ed pages drive a lot of traffic to their site, which in turn creates ad impressions that result in revenue. Their op-eds are often their most emailed stories as well. This move will cause a huge drop in traffic. Will the $50 subscriptions make up the difference?
I think a subscription model makes more sense for smaller, independent, and local newspapers and magazines. While I'd still prefer free access with ad-driven revenue streams for most sites, a small paper has a small clientele that might be willing to pay for the content.
The local paper is a good example of a site that might survive in this model. The Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette has one of the worst online sites on the internet. They only post five stories/day, with no op-ed. They delay posting of their content until after 2pm each day in hopes of avoiding the loss of sales for their paper version. Their search engine is pitiful. They are missing the future. However, I continue to go back and forth on my traditional subscription because of two things: their monopoly on information vs. the wasted paper that piles up in my house (most of which goes unread because it's repetitive national AP content). If the paper charged less for their online version (and it was a quality site with full content, no ads, RSS feeds, etc.), then I would probably cough up the dough.
I do pay $20/year for my Salon subscription. I enjoy reading the independent content, and feel like I'm getting something there I can't get anywhere else. However, I rarely link to a Salon article, nor do I even forward them on to friends, because they can't read the content without their own subscription.
Choosing the subscription model takes oneself out of the public discourse. You might have thought joining the discussion was the point, but here in wonderful capitalist America it was really just to make money.
More reason to read the blogs.
Posted on 08:12 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 09, 2005
Why Word on the Mac is a Drag
While my normal and daily computing platform is Windows XP on the PC, I've also owned and used a G4 Powerbook for several years. I continue to have fits of rage at the ugliness of XP (and the slowness of Photoshop, but that's another entry) which keeps me trying the Mac from time to time.
When I first got my Powerbook about 3 years ago, one thing that drove me nuts was the display resolution in Microsoft Word. Text at "100%" in Word was way too small. Alternatively, on Windows XP, I find the text size to be just right. On the mac I always found myself squinting at the screen or increasing the magnification. The problem with increasing the mag, however, was that the text's kerning got wonky and the font looked bold. This was back when Word was on version "X" and OS X was version 10.1 or something like that.
I recently installed Tiger and Word 2004 on my Powerbook, and was eager to see if they had fixed this problem. While the text quality is improved, they forgot to fix the size problem. Here's the mac displaying Times New Roman at 12pt with 100% magnification in Word 2004 (click the image for a full-size screenshot):
Now here's the same text in the same font at the same mag in Word 2002 on XP:
What you can see is that the same font at the same size with the same mag is about 30% smaller on the mac than it is on the PC. But other interface elements are roughly the same--the title bar text and size, the buttons, the menus, etc.
Whats up with this!? Why is the text so much smaller, and who thinks this is a good idea?
I do a lot of collaborative writing in my work (for grants, papers, etc.) and as is becoming more and more common, academics are adopting the mac. One thing I've started to notice is how many Word docs I get from people that have the mag set higher than 100% when I open them up. In fact, pretty much everybody I know that I share Word docs with that uses the mac increases the magnification on their end.
This isn't surprising given my examples above. So why don't I just increase the mag and be done with it? Well, as I mentioned above, back in Word X, the kerning was bad and the font looked bold. So how about now? Here's the same text on the mac in Word 2004 with the mag at 135%:
They have improved (but not solved) the magnified kerning problem since Word X, but the bold font look is still there. I can't help but see this text as bold--so much so that bolded text doesn't stand out much.
So, its nice to see they worked on it some (and clearly saw it as a problem), but why not actually fix the problem?
My question to all those mac users out there is what mag do you use in Microsoft Word, and how can you stand it? It seems like everytime I try to use a Mac for a real-world purpose, I run into a show-stopper like this one. And don't suggest I use Apple's Pages or something like that. I need a real word processor with all the bells/whistles that is absolutely compatible with Microsoft Word because of the collaborative writing I do. I also try every OpenOffice version when it comes out and not a single one can handle even the simplest Word docs with embedded images without screwing it up.
I don't know who I should be blaming for this--Microsoft or Apple. I suppose it could be some contrived attempt by Microsoft to make Apple an inferior platform for word processing. If so, its successful. On the other hand, perhaps its Apple who hopes to squeeze Microsoft out? If thats the case then they don't understand the world of word processing very well.
Until things like this get fixed I'll never be able to actually use the mac as a replacement platform. Word processing is about the most basic and fundamental use for a computer, and for whatever reason the Mac can't handle it.
Posted on 12:12 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack