I am a professional, and posting a profit under "standard accounting methods" means that what they say is a profit is what you would understand to be a profit.
God, I'd be grateful for linux native games. I have 2 systems right now - a linux box for serious work, and a MS box that I use only for gaming. I have the usual objections to Windows, but mostly I resent the forced march upgrade. I don't like WindowsMe, but it runs Diablo just fine, and I'm willing to put up with a certain amount of extra BS.
What I'm not willing to do is shuck out a pile of cash for Windows XP. Or a pile of cash for any other Windows system. Unfortunately, I know damned well that I'm likely to see a whole rash of new, cool games that won't run on Me or 98, and that I'm going to be forced to buy another expensive, bloated, crappy operating system.
And blow WINE. I actually went out and bought Corel Office for Linux, partly because I needed a suite and partly to provide support for linux development. It's a piece of junk, and I'm assured that it's not the office suite itself, it's the damned EMU that underlies it. If WordPerfect won't run right, why on earth would I expect Unreal or Half-Life to behave?
It's not just Verizon that does this kind of thing. Last spring Houston flooded from Tropical Storm Allison. The Sprint routers went down and left them with Plan B, which turned out to be "Hope that Plan A Doesn't Fail." We had problems with phone service for ages. Furthermore, my university uses the Sprint routers in Houston for the Internet gateway, and wound up sharing out time on the Austin system with UT Austin. As far as I know, Sprint hasn't sunk a pile into their infrastructure to prevent a repeat occurrence...
As a consumer, I don't want to buy anything that won't function according to my expectations. And my expectations are that when I buy an audio CD, I'll be able to stick it into my computer's CD player and listen to it at work.
Now I'm thinking that if the cases don't have to be labeled, there isn't any way to tell ex ante whether it's one of the 'defective' CDs. What I want to know is if anyone has had success in returning one of these things to the retailer because it won't function properly? Or is one, in general, basically screwed and stuck with the bogus CD?
No, this is the abuse of monopoly power in the radio markets to control the content of what we are exposed to. It's corporate censorship, not government censorship.
It wouldn't be as *much* of a problem if Clear Channel weren't the Microsoft of the radio world. As it is, broad groups of people are effectively denied exposure to these pieces of music, without any viable feedback mechanism for voicing their dissatisfaction with the situation to the company.
And I am certain that the artists of these songs would certainly object to their suppression in this manner.
This is disgusting. If we're going to have a war, let's have it, but for crying out loud, let's not insist on sanitizing it as well. Either we've got to turn our minds from this situation in an effort to heal (in which case the songs dealing with guns and fire can go, but the anti-war songs must stay; not only stay, but be played repeatedly) OR we've got to stay mindful of our pain and steel our resolve to fight (in which case the guns and fire songs stay and the anti-war songs go). It doesn't make sense to avoid reminding us of the tragedy while *also* calling us to battle.
Furthermore, the ENTIRE conflict is about freedom and liberty. This censorship (and yes, if the primary broadcast company has a list of songs that affiliates are not allowed to play, that *does* constitute censorship) is against everything that we stand for. If large portions of certain communities are offended by some or all of these songs, let them speak out to their local broadcasters. Don't blanket the rest of us with this silly and misguided propaganda disguised as "sensitivity".
I, for one, will be tuning into the public radio. A source of objective and high-quality news and information, and a lone voice in the wild for FREEDOM!!!
er, no. I have a CD player on my computer that is capable of playing music CDs. I like to be able to play music CDs on my computer, because I don't have a stereo in my office. If you can't stick the think in your computer CD and listen to it, it *doesn't* "work fine". That's at least half of the problem.
Oh come, now. Half the books that are listed here are "sci-fi" *only* in that they are set on another planet or have a spaceship in them. The Harry Potter books are certainly not set in _our_ space-time continuum. None of the Witches I know can actually change someone into a frog or make a broomstick fly through the air.
What they all are, including Goblet of Fire, are well-written, gripping novels set in a reality other than ours.
This is an excellent point which deserves an extension.
The original argument: The monolithich Microsoft is abusing its phenomenal market share to force bloated yet feeble products down the throats of the digerati.
Let's reframe this: Computers have attained phenomenal market penetration, which means that the masses requires an operating system that does not tax their limited computing abilities.
I see this as a natural extension of the life-cycle of computing. Twenty years ago, very few people had access to computers. The number of people who needed or wanted computers was relatively small as well, and that select group either possessed or was able to develop a high level of skills with which to operate the things.
IBM (mainly) gets the idea that they can extend their revenue stream by expanding the market. Voila, the PC.
Over the next 7 or 8 years, we have an expanding user market which is still largely limited to business applications. (Not entirely, but largely.) There's still a relatively high level of sophistication that can be assumed of the users. However, every incremental degree of market penetration is getting carved out of increasingly lower-skilled users.
Over this time, the *average* (not maximum!) skill level of the user base increases. This translates to an increasing demand for easy-to-use systems. Microsoft steps up to the plate.
The point here is that Microsoft didn't get all that market share via a Gift From God. They didn't steal it from anyone else. They didn't get it through offering crappy software. They got it because they were willing to pander to the thousands of Joe AOL "I don't want to think, I just want it to work" new computer users. Think of it, if you will, as a Monopoly of Morons.
This does not imply that all Microsoft users are stupid, merely that the primary bases for the products are people who don't need or want to know anything more than the absolute necessary. The world is full of these incurious souls (which is a constant frustration to professors and teachers everywhere...).
Castigating Microsoft for fulfilling the market demand for brainless computing is not The Way. Better to ask why we're flooded with people who don't care enough to learn.
I'm not sure why a culture that puts up with MacDonald's merchandising partnerships and three (3) Pokemon movies considers it so heinous to collect personally identifiable information from adolescent web-surfers. Is this because they don't understand that by giving their name and address, they're going to be inundated with e- or snail-mail spam for My Little Pony and Barbie collections for the next 10 years?
Don't misunderstand. I object to all of the aggressive marketing efforts that are targeted at kids. I don't think that it's right to flood them with this commercial crap, much of which has little immediate or staying value. I think it confuses them and contributes to an increase in our already excessively materialistic society. I'm also very firm on my personal privacy - I loathe junk mail and unsolicited phone marketing.
Spam is like weeds. If you want it, or find it interesting, it isn't Spam.
I get regular e-mailings from RedHat, American Airlines, and a couple of other enterprises I do business with regularly. This is not Spam. It's solicited advertisements. OTOH, I get ads for pornography, get-rich-quick schemes, pyramid schemes, cars, magazines, other merchandise, and indecipherable crap from Asian addresses. I do not want any of this stuff. It is Spam. It shows up in my box because someone harvested my e-mail address from Usenet or god-only-knows where.
Are you a responsible e-mail marketer? Do you offer recipients a way to get their name off your list? Does you return address resolve? Do you get your names from a reliable source? Can you assume that the members of the recipient list are likely to have some interest in your products? If so, then GREAT! You aren't a member of the group that is being maligned in the article, and you shouldn't take it personally.
I respectfully disagree. Yes, many of these businesses do conform to a new business model. No, that's not the extent of the shift. The business model departs so radically from the business models upon which our accounting and financing systems are based that they effectively constitute a paradigm shift in American industry.
In the old economy (the one you cite as existing since the 1850s), the borders of the firm were well defined, the assets were tangible (and if not tangible, then identifiable [patents, copyrights]). Human resources were productive, but not *individual-specific*. That is, employees were relatively interchangeable. Business cycles were known, revenues and profits were relatively easy to predict. These things made it much easier for our capital markets to value the firm.
In the new economy (internet business, open source, etc) the major productive assets of the firm are *individual-specific* human resources. The present business model of Microsoft may not differ from the BEIC, but that has not always been the case. In the early years, the primary asset was Bill Gates, his specific skill set, and his vision. Now there is less reliance on tangible assets such as factories and store fronts, and more reliance on intangibles. No longer are these intangibles easily identifiable, even. Old-line software still relies upon patents and copyrights, but not so with Open Source. They've got business cycles, but we don't know what they are yet.
Perhaps the most persuasive evidence that exists that these enterprises *are* a product of a new paradigm, and are *not* just a new form of the existing economy is that the markets demonstrate a pervasive inability to value them correctly. Investors, even highly sophisticated investors, do not display consensus on what the productive assets of these firms are or what their future earnings streams look like. High variance in returns is a powerful indicator of a lack of agreement among investors about the true underlying value of the firm. This phenomenon is pervasive among these internet firms and open source businesses. Far more so that it is among any other emerging industrial segment, now or historically.
HAH! I listen to Public Radio and watch Public TV. I have often thought that if they had a special deal during pledge week where once you made your pledge, you could avoid the 20 minutes of dunning per 1 hour of broadcast they'd get a really high return. I know that I'd be happy to pay a flat fee to avoid the ads with them.
Not so sure with the internet though - the poster who remarked on my consumer information becoming an asset to the firm has an *excellent* point.
Y'all are failing to take into account the Texas Legislature Factor. Contemplate our current Fearless Leader, realize where he cut his political teeth, then *all* of this will make sense.
Our Leg is packed with low-functioning idiots elected (on the whole) by people who vote for the guy with the prettiest and/or meanest political ad. Over the years, their decision making has caused us to consistently duke it out with Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas for the lowest rung on the ladder with respect to social services _including_education_ and basic quality-of-life issues. This is much more an indictment of Texas (home to 3 of the nations 10 largest cities) than it is of those other states (since agriculture provides less money than industry overall).
I'm not too concerned about this bill - it probably requires an amendment to the Texas Constitution (not kidding).
Texas: Living proof that Corruption Is Unnecessary Where Ignorance Will Do.
I can see the intuitive appeal for many of these arguments, but I suggest that this only serves to highlight the pernicious nature of the commercial software business. Often, the "improvements" that we see from one version to the next are minimal, and certainly not worth any significant sum to buy.
As far as the attitude that one won't see P3s running Office XXXX in five years - I wholeheartedly disagree. I still run Office 95 on my P3. Why? Simple - it runs a *lot* faster than any of the more recent versions, and it offers all of the features that I am interested in.
Don't forget that the tradeoff for all those bells and whistles that no one uses (how many people really *need* to run text vertically in a table?) is FEATURE BLOAT. Which is why Office 2000 runs no more quickly on my P3 than did WordPerfect for Windows ran on my 386 nearly 10 years ago.
This article references a browser called Galeon - I've never heard of it before and have been looking for an alternative to Netscape for my linux box. Anyone have experience with Galeon, to recommend or *not* recommend it?
Netscape is driving me nuts - on the linux box it crashes on java sites occasionally, on the windows box at home if we use the roll button on the mouse, it takes the entire system down and necessitates a hard boot. IE isn't any better. I hate the notion of supporting the economic blitzkrieg of the Active Desktop. Furthermore, it takes it's own sweeeeeeettt time about loading in web pages and does not reliably respond to input in the form of, say, mouse clicks. grrr.
I don't know about business and getting paid, but if I had a sawbuck for every guy I've dated who filled his apartment with antiquated legacy hardware under the aegis of "creating a computer museum" I'd buy a couple of really nice dinners at the steakhouse...:>
Saw this in the second article mentioned:
"But the chairman studiously avoided bad-mouthing Redmond, Wash., even when asked by an attendee why Dell systems preconfigured with Linux continued to be more expensive than similarly configured Windows machines."
and thought I was about to get the official answer at last!
No luck. I've been wondering for ages why the dell linux boxes are so much more expensive than the windows boxes. I thought they might be dealing with amortization of costs from the learning curve, but Dell also mentions in that article that they, themselves, are relying on linux boxes for several segments of their production process. My theory goes right out the window on that statement.
Does anyone have a better idea? Or does anyone know what Dell actually responded to the question of why the linux boxes cost more?
I respectfully disagree with the original poster of this article on a matter of fact. With respect to theses and dissertations, Contentville listings are derived from the UMI database. UMI also sells the dissertations and/or theses. Under the UMI contract, when a dissertation/thesis is purchased, the author is entitled to royalties. Likewise, when Contentville sells a dissertation/thesis, the sales are tracked and the royalties are paid as per the UMI agreement. There's a lengthy note on the Contentville website expressly about this.
The author of the dissertation/thesis is presumed to hold copyright. This material is not in the public domain. Nor is it GPL's or anything like it. Academic research is more like open-source software than anything else I can think of, but on this issue they differ quite a bit. Research is subjected to intensive scrutiny before publication; generally (some of) the data is made available to other researchers working in the same area, or to the referees of the journal where the paper has been submitted for publication. In this, it is very like open source software. However, once the study has been completed, the paper is no longer available for general revision and iterative commenting - any related studies must be sufficiently different as to constitute a new work.
On a point of opinion, I wholeheartedly agree with the original poster. I think that it is wrong for sites like this to conscript intellectual property and redistribute it without the author's knowledge. It came as an ugly shock to the faculty in my department to find that everyone's work is being sold on line in this manner. Makes it ever so much harder to ensure that UMI is complying with the royalty agreements
This essay cuts directly to the heart of an important issue that is often well below the awareness level of the average citizen. Daily I am confronted with reports of thus-and-such findings in some poll or some study in my newspaper, on the television, on the radio. As an academic, I am prone to dismiss these things out of hand as probably belonging more to the class of "paid advertising" than "robust research". Even though I am well aware of the increasing inroads of Corporate America in universities, I find myself assuming that if the study has been conducted by members of the academic community it is ensured to be objective. In this light, I think that the author provides a service in reminding us all that we must be careful in assessing the reliabilities of reported results from any sources, not just the popular media.
The best point of this article is buried deep within the text:
"Technology and corporatism are a particularly lethal combination,even more so when applied to competitive and money-hungry institutions like academe. That was a world where technology and research were supprted for their own sake and for the larger public good."
It is critical to note that over the period discussed in this piece (late 70s - late 80s), the money provided in terms of government and public support for universities declined sharply, especially with respect to major state research institutions. Reduced cash flows from these previously stable sources had to be replaced somehow, if the organizations were to survive. Universities had a large supply of competent and enthusiastic researchers and a demand for funds. Corporations brought the cash to the table, and wanted the benefits of high-powered researchers without the expense of maintaining them in-house. In economic terms, this is the proverbial Match Made In Heaven.
Is it appropriate to criticize universities for buying into this deal, or to criticize corporations for providing it? It may be better, instead, to direct one's attention to the governmental policies that catalyzed the cash-crunch in the first place. The People elect lawmakers according to policy preferences; the People, ultimately, are responsible for this situation.
I note, as an ironic aside, that at my institution, the influence of the corporate pressures on research are far more prevalent in the sciences than they are in the business school
Slashdot Mirror
I am a professional, and posting a profit under "standard accounting methods" means that what they say is a profit is what you would understand to be a profit.
God, I'd be grateful for linux native games. I have 2 systems right now - a linux box for serious work, and a MS box that I use only for gaming. I have the usual objections to Windows, but mostly I resent the forced march upgrade. I don't like WindowsMe, but it runs Diablo just fine, and I'm willing to put up with a certain amount of extra BS.
What I'm not willing to do is shuck out a pile of cash for Windows XP. Or a pile of cash for any other Windows system. Unfortunately, I know damned well that I'm likely to see a whole rash of new, cool games that won't run on Me or 98, and that I'm going to be forced to buy another expensive, bloated, crappy operating system.
And blow WINE. I actually went out and bought Corel Office for Linux, partly because I needed a suite and partly to provide support for linux development. It's a piece of junk, and I'm assured that it's not the office suite itself, it's the damned EMU that underlies it. If WordPerfect won't run right, why on earth would I expect Unreal or Half-Life to behave?
It's not just Verizon that does this kind of thing. Last spring Houston flooded from Tropical Storm Allison. The Sprint routers went down and left them with Plan B, which turned out to be "Hope that Plan A Doesn't Fail." We had problems with phone service for ages. Furthermore, my university uses the Sprint routers in Houston for the Internet gateway, and wound up sharing out time on the Austin system with UT Austin. As far as I know, Sprint hasn't sunk a pile into their infrastructure to prevent a repeat occurrence...
As a consumer, I don't want to buy anything that won't function according to my expectations. And my expectations are that when I buy an audio CD, I'll be able to stick it into my computer's CD player and listen to it at work.
Now I'm thinking that if the cases don't have to be labeled, there isn't any way to tell ex ante whether it's one of the 'defective' CDs. What I want to know is if anyone has had success in returning one of these things to the retailer because it won't function properly? Or is one, in general, basically screwed and stuck with the bogus CD?
No, this is the abuse of monopoly power in the radio markets to control the content of what we are exposed to. It's corporate censorship, not government censorship.
It wouldn't be as *much* of a problem if Clear Channel weren't the Microsoft of the radio world. As it is, broad groups of people are effectively denied exposure to these pieces of music, without any viable feedback mechanism for voicing their dissatisfaction with the situation to the company.
And I am certain that the artists of these songs would certainly object to their suppression in this manner.
This is disgusting. If we're going to have a war, let's have it, but for crying out loud, let's not insist on sanitizing it as well. Either we've got to turn our minds from this situation in an effort to heal (in which case the songs dealing with guns and fire can go, but the anti-war songs must stay; not only stay, but be played repeatedly) OR we've got to stay mindful of our pain and steel our resolve to fight (in which case the guns and fire songs stay and the anti-war songs go). It doesn't make sense to avoid reminding us of the tragedy while *also* calling us to battle.
Furthermore, the ENTIRE conflict is about freedom and liberty. This censorship (and yes, if the primary broadcast company has a list of songs that affiliates are not allowed to play, that *does* constitute censorship) is against everything that we stand for. If large portions of certain communities are offended by some or all of these songs, let them speak out to their local broadcasters. Don't blanket the rest of us with this silly and misguided propaganda disguised as "sensitivity".
I, for one, will be tuning into the public radio. A source of objective and high-quality news and information, and a lone voice in the wild for FREEDOM!!!
er, no. I have a CD player on my computer that is capable of playing music CDs. I like to be able to play music CDs on my computer, because I don't have a stereo in my office. If you can't stick the think in your computer CD and listen to it, it *doesn't* "work fine". That's at least half of the problem.
Oh come, now. Half the books that are listed here are "sci-fi" *only* in that they are set on another planet or have a spaceship in them. The Harry Potter books are certainly not set in _our_ space-time continuum. None of the Witches I know can actually change someone into a frog or make a broomstick fly through the air.
What they all are, including Goblet of Fire, are well-written, gripping novels set in a reality other than ours.
I don't know about web-bugs, but I do keep getting hits from images.slashdot.com on my firewall...
This is an excellent point which deserves an extension.
The original argument: The monolithich Microsoft is abusing its phenomenal market share to force bloated yet feeble products down the throats of the digerati.
Let's reframe this: Computers have attained phenomenal market penetration, which means that the masses requires an operating system that does not tax their limited computing abilities.
I see this as a natural extension of the life-cycle of computing. Twenty years ago, very few people had access to computers. The number of people who needed or wanted computers was relatively small as well, and that select group either possessed or was able to develop a high level of skills with which to operate the things.
IBM (mainly) gets the idea that they can extend their revenue stream by expanding the market. Voila, the PC.
Over the next 7 or 8 years, we have an expanding user market which is still largely limited to business applications. (Not entirely, but largely.) There's still a relatively high level of sophistication that can be assumed of the users. However, every incremental degree of market penetration is getting carved out of increasingly lower-skilled users.
Over this time, the *average* (not maximum!) skill level of the user base increases. This translates to an increasing demand for easy-to-use systems. Microsoft steps up to the plate.
The point here is that Microsoft didn't get all that market share via a Gift From God. They didn't steal it from anyone else. They didn't get it through offering crappy software. They got it because they were willing to pander to the thousands of Joe AOL "I don't want to think, I just want it to work" new computer users. Think of it, if you will, as a Monopoly of Morons.
This does not imply that all Microsoft users are stupid, merely that the primary bases for the products are people who don't need or want to know anything more than the absolute necessary. The world is full of these incurious souls (which is a constant frustration to professors and teachers everywhere...).
Castigating Microsoft for fulfilling the market demand for brainless computing is not The Way. Better to ask why we're flooded with people who don't care enough to learn.
I'm not sure why a culture that puts up with MacDonald's merchandising partnerships and three (3) Pokemon movies considers it so heinous to collect personally identifiable information from adolescent web-surfers. Is this because they don't understand that by giving their name and address, they're going to be inundated with e- or snail-mail spam for My Little Pony and Barbie collections for the next 10 years?
Don't misunderstand. I object to all of the aggressive marketing efforts that are targeted at kids. I don't think that it's right to flood them with this commercial crap, much of which has little immediate or staying value. I think it confuses them and contributes to an increase in our already excessively materialistic society. I'm also very firm on my personal privacy - I loathe junk mail and unsolicited phone marketing.
Spam is like weeds. If you want it, or find it interesting, it isn't Spam.
I get regular e-mailings from RedHat, American Airlines, and a couple of other enterprises I do business with regularly. This is not Spam. It's solicited advertisements. OTOH, I get ads for pornography, get-rich-quick schemes, pyramid schemes, cars, magazines, other merchandise, and indecipherable crap from Asian addresses. I do not want any of this stuff. It is Spam. It shows up in my box because someone harvested my e-mail address from Usenet or god-only-knows where.
Are you a responsible e-mail marketer? Do you offer recipients a way to get their name off your list? Does you return address resolve? Do you get your names from a reliable source? Can you assume that the members of the recipient list are likely to have some interest in your products? If so, then GREAT! You aren't a member of the group that is being maligned in the article, and you shouldn't take it personally.
I respectfully disagree. Yes, many of these businesses do conform to a new business model. No, that's not the extent of the shift. The business model departs so radically from the business models upon which our accounting and financing systems are based that they effectively constitute a paradigm shift in American industry.
In the old economy (the one you cite as existing since the 1850s), the borders of the firm were well defined, the assets were tangible (and if not tangible, then identifiable [patents, copyrights]). Human resources were productive, but not *individual-specific*. That is, employees were relatively interchangeable. Business cycles were known, revenues and profits were relatively easy to predict. These things made it much easier for our capital markets to value the firm.
In the new economy (internet business, open source, etc) the major productive assets of the firm are *individual-specific* human resources. The present business model of Microsoft may not differ from the BEIC, but that has not always been the case. In the early years, the primary asset was Bill Gates, his specific skill set, and his vision. Now there is less reliance on tangible assets such as factories and store fronts, and more reliance on intangibles. No longer are these intangibles easily identifiable, even. Old-line software still relies upon patents and copyrights, but not so with Open Source. They've got business cycles, but we don't know what they are yet.
Perhaps the most persuasive evidence that exists that these enterprises *are* a product of a new paradigm, and are *not* just a new form of the existing economy is that the markets demonstrate a pervasive inability to value them correctly. Investors, even highly sophisticated investors, do not display consensus on what the productive assets of these firms are or what their future earnings streams look like. High variance in returns is a powerful indicator of a lack of agreement among investors about the true underlying value of the firm. This phenomenon is pervasive among these internet firms and open source businesses. Far more so that it is among any other emerging industrial segment, now or historically.
HAH! I listen to Public Radio and watch Public TV. I have often thought that if they had a special deal during pledge week where once you made your pledge, you could avoid the 20 minutes of dunning per 1 hour of broadcast they'd get a really high return. I know that I'd be happy to pay a flat fee to avoid the ads with them.
Not so sure with the internet though - the poster who remarked on my consumer information becoming an asset to the firm has an *excellent* point.
Y'all are failing to take into account the Texas Legislature Factor. Contemplate our current Fearless Leader, realize where he cut his political teeth, then *all* of this will make sense.
Our Leg is packed with low-functioning idiots elected (on the whole) by people who vote for the guy with the prettiest and/or meanest political ad. Over the years, their decision making has caused us to consistently duke it out with Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas for the lowest rung on the ladder with respect to social services _including_education_ and basic quality-of-life issues. This is much more an indictment of Texas (home to 3 of the nations 10 largest cities) than it is of those other states (since agriculture provides less money than industry overall).
I'm not too concerned about this bill - it probably requires an amendment to the Texas Constitution (not kidding).
Texas: Living proof that Corruption Is Unnecessary Where Ignorance Will Do.
I can see the intuitive appeal for many of these arguments, but I suggest that this only serves to highlight the pernicious nature of the commercial software business. Often, the "improvements" that we see from one version to the next are minimal, and certainly not worth any significant sum to buy.
As far as the attitude that one won't see P3s running Office XXXX in five years - I wholeheartedly disagree. I still run Office 95 on my P3. Why? Simple - it runs a *lot* faster than any of the more recent versions, and it offers all of the features that I am interested in.
Don't forget that the tradeoff for all those bells and whistles that no one uses (how many people really *need* to run text vertically in a table?) is FEATURE BLOAT. Which is why Office 2000 runs no more quickly on my P3 than did WordPerfect for Windows ran on my 386 nearly 10 years ago.
This article references a browser called Galeon - I've never heard of it before and have been looking for an alternative to Netscape for my linux box. Anyone have experience with Galeon, to recommend or *not* recommend it?
Netscape is driving me nuts - on the linux box it crashes on java sites occasionally, on the windows box at home if we use the roll button on the mouse, it takes the entire system down and necessitates a hard boot. IE isn't any better. I hate the notion of supporting the economic blitzkrieg of the Active Desktop. Furthermore, it takes it's own sweeeeeeettt time about loading in web pages and does not reliably respond to input in the form of, say, mouse clicks. grrr.
I don't know about business and getting paid, but if I had a sawbuck for every guy I've dated who filled his apartment with antiquated legacy hardware under the aegis of "creating a computer museum" I'd buy a couple of really nice dinners at the steakhouse... :>
Saw this in the second article mentioned:
"But the chairman studiously avoided bad-mouthing Redmond, Wash., even when asked by an attendee why Dell systems preconfigured with Linux continued to be more expensive than similarly configured Windows machines."
and thought I was about to get the official answer at last!
No luck. I've been wondering for ages why the dell linux boxes are so much more expensive than the windows boxes. I thought they might be dealing with amortization of costs from the learning curve, but Dell also mentions in that article that they, themselves, are relying on linux boxes for several segments of their production process. My theory goes right out the window on that statement.
Does anyone have a better idea? Or does anyone know what Dell actually responded to the question of why the linux boxes cost more?
I respectfully disagree with the original poster of this article on a matter of fact. With respect to theses and dissertations, Contentville listings are derived from the UMI database. UMI also sells the dissertations and/or theses. Under the UMI contract, when a dissertation/thesis is purchased, the author is entitled to royalties. Likewise, when Contentville sells a dissertation/thesis, the sales are tracked and the royalties are paid as per the UMI agreement. There's a lengthy note on the Contentville website expressly about this.
The author of the dissertation/thesis is presumed to hold copyright. This material is not in the public domain. Nor is it GPL's or anything like it. Academic research is more like open-source software than anything else I can think of, but on this issue they differ quite a bit. Research is subjected to intensive scrutiny before publication; generally (some of) the data is made available to other researchers working in the same area, or to the referees of the journal where the paper has been submitted for publication. In this, it is very like open source software. However, once the study has been completed, the paper is no longer available for general revision and iterative commenting - any related studies must be sufficiently different as to constitute a new work.
On a point of opinion, I wholeheartedly agree with the original poster. I think that it is wrong for sites like this to conscript intellectual property and redistribute it without the author's knowledge. It came as an ugly shock to the faculty in my department to find that everyone's work is being sold on line in this manner. Makes it ever so much harder to ensure that UMI is complying with the royalty agreements
This essay cuts directly to the heart of an important issue that is often well below the awareness level of the average citizen. Daily I am confronted with reports of thus-and-such findings in some poll or some study in my newspaper, on the television, on the radio. As an academic, I am prone to dismiss these things out of hand as probably belonging more to the class of "paid advertising" than "robust research". Even though I am well aware of the increasing inroads of Corporate America in universities, I find myself assuming that if the study has been conducted by members of the academic community it is ensured to be objective. In this light, I think that the author provides a service in reminding us all that we must be careful in assessing the reliabilities of reported results from any sources, not just the popular media.
The best point of this article is buried deep within the text:
"Technology and corporatism are a particularly lethal combination,even more so when applied to competitive and money-hungry institutions like academe. That was a world where technology and research were supprted for their own sake and for the larger public good."
It is critical to note that over the period discussed in this piece (late 70s - late 80s), the money provided in terms of government and public support for universities declined sharply, especially with respect to major state research institutions. Reduced cash flows from these previously stable sources had to be replaced somehow, if the organizations were to survive. Universities had a large supply of competent and enthusiastic researchers and a demand for funds. Corporations brought the cash to the table, and wanted the benefits of high-powered researchers without the expense of maintaining them in-house. In economic terms, this is the proverbial Match Made In Heaven.
Is it appropriate to criticize universities for buying into this deal, or to criticize corporations for providing it? It may be better, instead, to direct one's attention to the governmental policies that catalyzed the cash-crunch in the first place. The People elect lawmakers according to policy preferences; the People, ultimately, are responsible for this situation.
I note, as an ironic aside, that at my institution, the influence of the corporate pressures on research are far more prevalent in the sciences than they are in the business school