Though Google Apps for Education is free, I'm guessing that Brown is paying for SLAs (and supposedly for enhanced privacy haha). Personally, I think this is pretty bad: college email accounts are supposed to be more-secure forms of communication than regular email (in that sensitive communication can go through them). It's a bit unacceptable to have this happen, even during rollout. Many people use their university emails for personal or professional purposes; I would be pretty upset if this happened to me.
I think your general point has merit, but your examples might not be 100% correct.
We all know how profitable Skype has been for after eBay paid 2.6 Billion dollars for them.
Skype actually has been profitable recently. That said, Skype does not match up well with eBay's overall business model and I remember reading that they are looking to sell it.
Not to even mention how profitable Youtube has been since Google paid a mere 1.65 Billion dollars for them.
Could it be a branding/goodwill tool that also helps them drive users to their search? They certainly paid an exorbitant amount for the eventual profitability, regardless, but Google and YouTube are now both cultural icons.
The article, frankly, seemed to be out in lala land, so I'm going to put it out to the general populance of slashdot: if your book is out of print, how can you still make money from it? Are you making lots of cash from residuals from online databases?
If you can't make much money from it or even if you can, doesn't this Google project offer you the chance of making a lot more money? Yes, the Author's Guild's skimming seems excessive, but at least they managed to put together a comprehensive deal to streamline copyright issues.
Now, if there's a whole source of money that I've missed, I withdraw my argument. But this seems like a good thing for out of print books, right?
If user accounts are set up properly, there is no need to lock the system down.[...] Linux would be ideal for such a case because students could be limited to low-privilege accounts where they wouldn't be able to tamper with anything.
Excellent point. I've been using OSX/Linux for a while and guess I forgot that the Windows user-privilege model was probably the reason for the lockdown. That said, I bet school principals will THINK that this is a big issue, so your point would be an excellent one to highlight and emphasize.
When I was in high school, all of the computers were extremely locked down (couldn't do anything except internet + word processing). It sucked. I'm not sure that schools would be willing to adopt a platform unless they'd be able to lock it down similarly (for reasons they'd cite as security, cost, whatever). Presenting up front the ways that you can control the user experience might be a good way to sell open source.
(to be really honest, my initial reaction was: no! open source software can't be locked down! school's will never use that!... then I thought about it, and realized that someone had probably designed a way to do it )
One thing to add into this debate: Microsoft can have a big imposing patent portfolio and can patent something like the filename table mentioned above, but its patents *can* be bypassed by similar inventions. The original point of the patent system (as I understand it) was both to allow inventors to earn money from their inventions by giving them an exclusive right to them AND to give others an incentive to develop *new* mechanisms to work around patented ideas.
Basically, if your competitor had patented something and was successful, the only way you can make money is if you figure out how to develop around your competitor's patent (thus, supposedly spurring innovation). This is also, I guess, why software patents are significantly more difficult to administer than hardware patents.
It makes many patent cases (and patent portfolios) seem less intimidating when you look at them in this way.
Outsourcing is like delegating simple chores to your 8-year-old kid -- in theory, he could clean the bathroom for $5, freeing you up to do your $xx/hr job, but by the time he's called you up and interrupted your work to ask what cleaner to use on the toilet, where the spare sponges are, and whether he needs to vacuum the bath mat, you would have saved time by just doing it yourself.
That is a great way to describe it! But I wonder if there are any jobs that might not fit that description, that are entirely able to be replaced? Seems to me in most cases tech jobs cannot be replaced so easily, but what about transcription jobs, etc?
I'd like to call academic feminists "useful idiots" in that respect, but that'd be letting them off the hook as they have often whole-heartedly promoted the idea that women have no legitimate right to choose a traditional housewife role
I think you might be a bit off the mark with "useful idiots" or any other pithy derogations of feminists as a whole. It's certainly not the case that these feminists have prevented women from choosing a housewife role, as there are certainly millions of women in the US and other countries who are housewives right now who would disagree with you. Moreover, the emphasis on other roles for women that many, including feminists, advocate has much more to do with the still-continuing barriers and difficulties that face women when they attempt to enter the workplace or government.
Look at the disparity of the college admissions scene, where women outnumber men in applications and in gross numbers altogether. Yet somehow this difference does not extend to the workplace, where women are greatly outnumbered by men in many of the higher ranks of the corporate ladder, as well as in professional jobs.
Heck, we are even requiring the Iraqis to allow for more women in their government than we actually elect to our own. It certainly doesn't seem like "the pendulum" has swung in the other direction and women really have the full opportunity to choose a different lifepath than that of the housewife.
Ok, well, I guess my post came out as a really populist, eliminate-big-corporations whine. But what I was thinking much more along the lines of the feeling of the person who is buying. I think if some of the commercial *feel* (not necesarily the commercial profits) left CDs/DVDs/etc, it might encourage more people to legally buy media.
"the more the artist sells, the better a contract they will be able to negotiate, and in turn get paid better."
However, I didn't realize that, it's a good point.
I agree...but a further problem with the current copyright and music/video/whatever industry situation is that you never feel like you are actually buying the media from the person who created it. Instead, you buy it from a (usually big chain) store, who bought it from a big conglomerate, who paid some portion to the actual artists to produce it. Set up this way, the negative feelings of the "man on the street" are exacerbated by the disconnection from the artist. I think many people would be more willing to pay for media if they felt like they were supporting the artists, instead of a slickly packaged machine/company bent on earning money.
Slashdot Mirror
Though Google Apps for Education is free, I'm guessing that Brown is paying for SLAs (and supposedly for enhanced privacy haha). Personally, I think this is pretty bad: college email accounts are supposed to be more-secure forms of communication than regular email (in that sensitive communication can go through them). It's a bit unacceptable to have this happen, even during rollout. Many people use their university emails for personal or professional purposes; I would be pretty upset if this happened to me.
We all know how profitable Skype has been for after eBay paid 2.6 Billion dollars for them.
Skype actually has been profitable recently. That said, Skype does not match up well with eBay's overall business model and I remember reading that they are looking to sell it.
Not to even mention how profitable Youtube has been since Google paid a mere 1.65 Billion dollars for them.
Could it be a branding/goodwill tool that also helps them drive users to their search? They certainly paid an exorbitant amount for the eventual profitability, regardless, but Google and YouTube are now both cultural icons.
The article, frankly, seemed to be out in lala land, so I'm going to put it out to the general populance of slashdot: if your book is out of print, how can you still make money from it? Are you making lots of cash from residuals from online databases?
If you can't make much money from it or even if you can, doesn't this Google project offer you the chance of making a lot more money? Yes, the Author's Guild's skimming seems excessive, but at least they managed to put together a comprehensive deal to streamline copyright issues.
Now, if there's a whole source of money that I've missed, I withdraw my argument. But this seems like a good thing for out of print books, right?
If user accounts are set up properly, there is no need to lock the system down.[...] Linux would be ideal for such a case because students could be limited to low-privilege accounts where they wouldn't be able to tamper with anything.
Excellent point. I've been using OSX/Linux for a while and guess I forgot that the Windows user-privilege model was probably the reason for the lockdown. That said, I bet school principals will THINK that this is a big issue, so your point would be an excellent one to highlight and emphasize.
When I was in high school, all of the computers were extremely locked down (couldn't do anything except internet + word processing). It sucked. I'm not sure that schools would be willing to adopt a platform unless they'd be able to lock it down similarly (for reasons they'd cite as security, cost, whatever). Presenting up front the ways that you can control the user experience might be a good way to sell open source.
(to be really honest, my initial reaction was: no! open source software can't be locked down! school's will never use that! ... then I thought about it, and realized that someone had probably designed a way to do it )
One thing to add into this debate: Microsoft can have a big imposing patent portfolio and can patent something like the filename table mentioned above, but its patents *can* be bypassed by similar inventions. The original point of the patent system (as I understand it) was both to allow inventors to earn money from their inventions by giving them an exclusive right to them AND to give others an incentive to develop *new* mechanisms to work around patented ideas.
Basically, if your competitor had patented something and was successful, the only way you can make money is if you figure out how to develop around your competitor's patent (thus, supposedly spurring innovation). This is also, I guess, why software patents are significantly more difficult to administer than hardware patents.
It makes many patent cases (and patent portfolios) seem less intimidating when you look at them in this way.
Huh...that sounds remarkably like the Chicago Tribune's attempt to simplify the Inglish Langwaj a number of years ago :-P. And, yes, it failed utterly...but it did give us "catalog"...thank goodness for that!
That is a great way to describe it! But I wonder if there are any jobs that might not fit that description, that are entirely able to be replaced? Seems to me in most cases tech jobs cannot be replaced so easily, but what about transcription jobs, etc?
I think you might be a bit off the mark with "useful idiots" or any other pithy derogations of feminists as a whole. It's certainly not the case that these feminists have prevented women from choosing a housewife role, as there are certainly millions of women in the US and other countries who are housewives right now who would disagree with you. Moreover, the emphasis on other roles for women that many, including feminists, advocate has much more to do with the still-continuing barriers and difficulties that face women when they attempt to enter the workplace or government.
Look at the disparity of the college admissions scene, where women outnumber men in applications and in gross numbers altogether. Yet somehow this difference does not extend to the workplace, where women are greatly outnumbered by men in many of the higher ranks of the corporate ladder, as well as in professional jobs.
Heck, we are even requiring the Iraqis to allow for more women in their government than we actually elect to our own. It certainly doesn't seem like "the pendulum" has swung in the other direction and women really have the full opportunity to choose a different lifepath than that of the housewife.
Ok, well, I guess my post came out as a really populist, eliminate-big-corporations whine. But what I was thinking much more along the lines of the feeling of the person who is buying. I think if some of the commercial *feel* (not necesarily the commercial profits) left CDs/DVDs/etc, it might encourage more people to legally buy media.
"the more the artist sells, the better a contract they will be able to negotiate, and in turn get paid better."However, I didn't realize that, it's a good point.
I agree...but a further problem with the current copyright and music/video/whatever industry situation is that you never feel like you are actually buying the media from the person who created it. Instead, you buy it from a (usually big chain) store, who bought it from a big conglomerate, who paid some portion to the actual artists to produce it. Set up this way, the negative feelings of the "man on the street" are exacerbated by the disconnection from the artist. I think many people would be more willing to pay for media if they felt like they were supporting the artists, instead of a slickly packaged machine/company bent on earning money.