In response to Nelson’s comments about a friend of his that “swears by cleartype”, I’ve attached two screenshots illustrating the difference between cleartype and no cleartype:
No Cleartype
With Cleartype
As you can see, cleartype “fuzzes” up the fonts, making it incredibly difficult to read. Maybe some people like their fonts fuzzy?
This song was just short enough and very well done – especially for those following US politics. I don’t normally like these, but this one was especially well done. Worth the two minutes!
Steven den Beste links back to an old post of his, explaining what criteria are needed for an alternative energy source to become feasible:
1. It has to be huge (in terms of both energy and power)
2. It has to be reliable (not intermittent or unschedulable)
3. It has to be concentrated (not diffuse)
4. It has to be possible to utilize it efficiently
5. The capital investment and operating cost to utilize it has to be comparable to existing energy sources (per gigawatt, and per terajoule).
This leaves petroleum, coal, hydro, and nuclear power – all of which are currently employed.
Personally, I try to avoid discussions on this issue, or other related issues (the “conspiracy on the price of oil”, global warming, etc.) since it tends to deviate from reality and more into science fiction – such as layering the Arizona desert with insanely large amounts of solar panels.
We might be able to chip away a couple percent of our consumption through alternative energy (at higher capital and operating costs than what we currently get with existing sources) but it is unlikely we will be able to do any better without a major technological breakthrough (e.g. insanely efficient solar cells, lossless energy storage/transport, sustainable fusion, etc.)
This is why I kind of laugh when I hear politicians talking about the “hydrogen economy” and other buzz-phrases that have little bearing in the cold world reality.
WordPress released another version today, version 2.6. Unlike the rather negative UI changes in the previous version, this one remained the same, but incorporated some significantly enhanced features including version tracking.
The other feature which I took full advantage of is the theme previewer – Doubleblind operates on a derivative of Black Letterhead and I have upgraded from version 1.3 of the template to version 1.5. The user will see little difference other than a few tweaks I have made to the site template. And if you are using IE7 (heaven forbid), things should looks slightly better.
As I continue playing around with the site templates of both Doubleblind and BC2009, I am getting a rather good feel of CSS and site design. The design for Black Letterhead is very clean and elegant and I like working with it. The site template I lifted for BC2009 was heavily modified and the CSS in it is so poorly designed that I’m afraid to touch anything in case if the whole thing breaks. I always keep backups of the templates before I go on any wholesale changes, but in terms of development time, having a simple CSS makes life a lot, lot easier.
Finally, WordPress included in-house the concept of Tags (which were used by trillions of Web 2.0 applications before), but I have consciously decided not to bother writing any – I’ve never figured out how these could be useful considering that the Google search utility I recently installed for the site seems to work quite well.
Also, on the same theme, I have consciously decided to remove any references to submitting articles to Digg, Reddit, Technorati, del.icio.us, etc., simply because if this site got popular it would make life a lot more difficult for me.
I decided to open up my sites in IE7 and I was amazed to find out that it renders fonts quite differently than in Firefox. The reason is because of a feature called “ClearType” which makes fonts fuzzy enough to give me a headache. This is a global (per computer) function and can be easily disabled by doing the following:
Start -> Control Panel -> Internet Options -> Advanced -> and under Multimedia, un-select “Always use ClearType for HTML”.
Your eyes will thank you.
I’m guessing Microsoft was using this to give it the “Mac” feeling when you browse the web, but ClearType is anything but clear. I prefer the much more rigid font.
I’ve been pruning the links on the right hand side.
If you haven’t posted in 3 months, I have removed the link to your site. If at sometime in the future you’ve resumed, just send me a note and I’ll get you back on.
I’ve also been trying to find some more BC political-related weblogs – aiming for all partisan stripes and also non-partisan.
I’ve been following with interest of Jennifer Wright vs. the Liberal party of Canada on the Green Shift trademark issue. Her organization is suing the Liberal Party for $8.75 million for trademark infringement.
Green Shift has an approved (but not registered) trademark on the name “GREEN SHIFT”. The approval came on June 27, 2008. The name Green Shift can be traced back to December 1999 on various products and services, so it looks like they will get some sort of coverage for this trademark once the translation and publication process is completed (later this summer).
An actual registered trademark is not necessary for trademark protection; if there are precedents set that establish the trademark it is sufficient. Obviously, it is much easier to defend with an actual registered trademark, but Green Shift can point out that they filed on January 24, 2005, so any Liberal arguments of prior usage can be thrown out the window.
Liberal Leader Stephane Dion said Wednesday “it’s deplorable” that Jennifer Wright, founder of Green Shift, a Toronto environmental consulting firm, is taking the party to court on grounds of trademark violation. Mr. Dion said he is willing to fight in court to keep the “green shift” policy name that is attracting attention to the Liberals. However, Dion also told reporters that “in a practical way we are ready to work with this businesswoman.” Liberal party president Doug Ferguson also said “given our common interest and passion for the environment, we look forward to a reasonable and amicable resolution that is in the parties’ mutual interest.”
My legal opinion on the matter suggests that the Liberal Party will lose this lawsuit if it goes to a verdict and they’re better off settling as early as possible to avoid the financial bleed. When you want to settle, you never tell people that you’re willing to settle – this is a sign that you know your position is very weak.
I don’t think the Conservative party’s earlier defamation lawsuit (with respect to the alleged Chuck Cadman bribery accusation) will be successful, but this Green Shift lawsuit is a virtual certainty.
A week ago, Starbucks announced it was closing 600 stores across the USA. While the reasons are not interesting (they built too many stores too close to each other, surprise surprise), what is interesting is how this information was transmitted.
Initially, there was a press release, and it also said that employees in affected stores would be notified shortly whether they were part of the affected stores or not. When pressed further, Starbucks refused to give a list of the stores “out of respect”, etc. The real reason is they just didn’t want to give competition information in terms of where the worst performing stores were.
However, something I noticed was that the Seattle Times was keeping a map database of where the affected stores are, based on the (privately given) feedback given to it from employees.
This is something that wouldn’t have been possible to compile 10 years ago and it just shows how quickly information travels on even a relatively trivial issue like this one. But for those really interested in Starbucks, this information is golden.
Keeping information secret through obscurity and fragmentation is becoming less and less effective.
Starbucks, in market trading, went below $14 for the first time since June of 2003. This is on continued fears that sales will be slowing and growth will be stalling out due to the chronic expansion of the franchise.
While this is true, Starbucks is approaching valuations where it would be a purchase. They have global name share (difficult to erode) and their financials are still quite strong (strong cash flows compared to debt) despite the recent setbacks the corporation is going through. On average, they should be able to generate around $1.5 billion in cash for the next three years and this will give them a lot of ability to continue to weeding process and continue to virally infect the rest of the world. The profit picture is if they are able to stop the bleeding and continue to drive same-store sales up after they’ve closed down enough stores.
That said, as it stands, at $14/share, buying the entire company would cost you about $10.3 billion dollars – or about $1 for every $1 in net revenues the company pulls in a year. While I look at the present analyst estimates, they are still slightly high – chances are when Starbucks announces its next quarterly results it will guide projected results down and hopefully this will mean the stock will depreciate further, to the $12 range. This will probably be the best time as any to jump in a little, with a margin of error – if the company’s income growth goes to zero, you still should be able to claim a 7.1% return based on the past 12 month performance.
Ideally, Starbucks will able to modestly grow revenues and through operational leverage, be able to post higher EPS increases – if they can maintain a 15% EPS growth, the simplest of financial models would suggest an approximate $18-20 share price at a very acceptable risk. If things go bubbly (or should I say caffinated?) then perhaps $22-24. Both of these projections are for share prices in the middle of 2010. I doubt we will see the 2006 high price of $39 anytime soon, however.
You see a lot of people try to rationalize cost increases by saying “It only will represent pennies per cup of coffee”. This argument was frequently used (in this case, savings, not costs) when the Conservatives lowered the GST from 7% to 6%, and subsequently to 5%. In both cases, opponents of the GST reduction frequently used the argument that it will “only save you pennies per cup of coffee you get at Tim Hortons”.
This argument never seems to be implied in the reverse direction – would these people want to be paying pennies more per cup? The opposition quickly realized their arguments were not going to work and then talked about “income tax cuts for the poor” as an alternative to the GST reduction. As it turns out, a GST reduction is probably the most egalitarian cut of taxes in addition to being very simple to explain to the public.
Cost cutting is performed in very small and discrete measures, while cost increases usually result from unmanaged and unaccountable excesses that, for whatever reason, control parties are either unable or unwilling to cull.
With that, I refer to Bob Rennie’s comments on CKNW in response to the Canadian government setting policy that will cap mortgage amortization periods up to 35 years (from 40 years today):
Vancouver’s condo king doesn’t think the elimination of 40 year mortgages will make too much of a difference.
Bob Rennie says even though the government will no longer guarantee 40 year mortgages and will require a 5 percent down payment, 35 year options are still relatively affordable.
“The difference between a 35 year amortization and a 40 year, per 100-thousand is 22 dollars per month. So, at 300-thousand dollars, the impact is 66 dollars per month.”
Rennie says the changes won’t affect the high-priced Vancouver market but could affect entry-level buyers in suburbs, especially given rising costs for food and fuel.
You see the same “pennies a cup” argument in the quotation above. Also, Bob employs the political tool of making large numbers look small by dividing it into a monthly period, compared to a year or lifetime of the loan. He could have gone the further step of saying “less than a dollar a day, or how much it costs you to buy a coffee at Starbucks”.
When you work it out on a spreadsheet, it turns out that a 35 vs. 40 year mortgage will end up costing about $19,400 more in interest charges, per $100,000 loaned, assuming a consistent 5% interest rate. This goes up to $29,700 for a 7% rate of interest. Click on the below image for a loan amortization table.
The source document can be found here (it was a quick hack), and please note these numbers are inaccurate (by roughly 10%) since I do not use monthly payments, nor do I compound the interest properly (mortgages in Canada use semiannual compounding). The important factor here is the relative difference between the amortization periods, and this is correctly conceptualized.