new york times Archives - The Silicon Underground

You might need a new router

Dave Farquhar — Thu, 15 Oct 2015 11:00:21 +0000

Do you need a new router? If your Internet is slow after upgrading to a faster service, and if your wifi range and reception is poor, or your Internet connection just generally misbehaves a lot, you might need a new

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The New York Times’ dialect map can’t figure me out

Dave Farquhar — Sun, 22 Dec 2013 16:02:56 +0000

My first semester of college, one of the copy editors for the student newspaper either minored in linguistics or just enjoyed the subject. He could peg where all of us were from–except me. The New York Times‘ interactive dialect map struggled

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The price of Amazon

Dave Farquhar — Mon, 08 Jul 2013 11:00:30 +0000

Slashdot posted a link to a New York Times piece that asserts that the full extent of Amazon’s existence hasn’t been felt yet, but it asserts that book pricing is becoming whimsical. My experience disagrees with that. The market will

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CISPA is trying to solve a legitimate problem

Dave Farquhar — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 10:01:25 +0000

I read yet another anti-CISPA piece today. I’m not comfortable trying to read it and decide whether it’s a good or bad piece of legislation, but I do understand the problem it’s trying to solve. Those who have tried to

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The LCMS won’t be able to work out its differences in the dark

Dave Farquhar — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 00:30:15 +0000

I wish I had a nickel for every time I heard a journalism professor say, “Don’t ever do something you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of the New York Times.” It’s worse today. In the 1990s, the

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Nobody respects craftsmanship anymore

Dave Farquhar — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 12:09:52 +0000

The New York Times laments the decline of craftsmanship and its side effects in the United States. A generation ago, it wasn’t terribly uncommon for men to make their own kitchen cabinets. And those cabinets, if built correctly, would last

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Apple and China, or Why the U.S. Middle Class is Shrinking

Dave Farquhar — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 13:38:10 +0000

“Companies once felt an obligation to support American workers, even when it wasn’t the best financial choice,” said Betsey Stevenson, the chief economist at the Labor Department until last September. “That’s disappeared. Profits and efficiency have trumped generosity.” Apple Computer,

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News flash: e-books are overpriced

Dave Farquhar — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 13:15:19 +0000

I saw a story yesterday about how e-readers are getting cheaper, but e-books are rising in cost. In some cases, the e-books cost as much as, or more than a paper copy of the book. Which, as anyone with any

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How to tame e-books

Dave Farquhar — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 18:05:46 +0000

I haven’t exactly been rushing out to buy an e-reader, for at least a couple of reasons. The practical reason is that I’m afraid of being locked in to a single vendor. Amazon is the market leader and the most

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On content farms

Dave Farquhar — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 17:19:27 +0000

It looks like Google has taken action against content farms, low-quality sites that publish articles about anything and everything quickly, and try to make money from the ads. I can’t tell yet if this has really affected my traffic any–my

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