Slashdot Mirror
VA Layoff Rumors
An anonymous reader noted that Slashdot's Parent Company VA Linux Systems has made an appearance on f'dcompany. I'm sure I'm not the only one who frequents the site, so I won't bother explaining it. The report says that VA is planning a lot of layoffs. Amusingly enough, it also mentions that VA hardware largely powers F'd company. Your guess is as good as mine wrt the truth in this rumor, and what it means if it is.
VA's stuff is incredibly overpriced, anyway. I'd buy from them if they were within a couple hundred dollars of what I'd pay if I assembled a server myself, but I won't pay thousand dollar premiums when I can trade two hours of work for it. Neither will a lot of other folks they need to start thinking about...
I see nothing special about VA's hardware. It's all off the shelf stuff. I can't even opt out of the "support" to save $$$.
In this age of dirt cheap GHz chips from the AMD/Intel wars, I fail to see how Tranameta can survive. What ever bacame of this "code morphing"? Nothing. Because they kept it's secrets (i.e., native TM instructions) s3cr33t. OK, so it's low power. It's also low on usefulness.
They ought to be selling other OSes with thier systems. There is no advantage to a VA box over any other pc. A Dell or a Compaq cen be had with 4 hour response on support 24x7. The VA box can't or couldn't when we went shopping so they didn't even get considered. Trying to compete with the big guys using little guys tactics wont work unless you are a LOT cheeper. They aren't.
PLEASE NOTE: the above post is a parody. If you have never seen the "*BSD is dying" troll around here, you wouldn't get it.
How long have you been in IBM? I, together with my teammates from R&D, were layoffed during 90's, because some idiots at that time focused on 'business and consultancy services'(i.e. they don't need no stinking R&D)
It's proven to be a biggest failure. IBM cannot live by offerring services alone.
Well, let's see. According to IBM's 2000 annual report, 37.5% of IBM's revenue last year was from services, and the services share is increasing. In 1992, IBM made $33B in hardware sales and $7B in services. In 2000, IBM made $37B on hardware sales and $33B in services. You can try to argue that IBM would have done better to focus more on software and hardware products and less on services, but you can't hardly claim that the move was a "biggest failure".
Actually, though, it's clear that Lou agrees with you that IBM can't live on services alone: IBM spends over $5B annually on R&D.
When they told you IBM don't layoff they lie. Good luck. :)
Everyone knows that IBM has had layoffs. That wasn't true for many years, but it became true around the time you were dumped and it's a fact of life now. It's a fact of life at every company, and it should be. Even successful companies have to clean house periodically.
As you're squeezing those sour grapes, consider this: According to many long-time IBMers, during the bad years company ended retaining all of the so-so people. The truly lazy and stupid were booted and the really smart and agressive took the money and ran.
Which were you?
but I am not going to judge VA Linux by whether
you do or don't get an internship.
It was a nice idea that didn't pan out.
Seems like they have more important things on
their minds these days.
Next.
CNN does post false stories. Amazon does collect personal information and redistribute it. Moron.
Thats because they've laid off the people who are responsible for updating that page.
After all this time you people still don't see what most company web pages are used primarily for? Its a facade. A place to display a perfect image of your company. Even at companies were hiring freezes are in effect you will seldom see this announced on the web pages. Here's a clue, don't believe everything you see on the web. This post included....
If MS layed off employees, you'd be cheering.
It is, and it's $0.043. which is a lot less than $2.50.
Perhaps not all of you, but it seems like most of the people who post on slashdot actually hate the site.
If slashdot's so fucking stupid, why the hell are you losers here?
I like slashdot. I've been here as a regular visitor almost from its start. I sincerely wish CmdrTaco, Hemos, Timothy, Michael and everyone else the best of luck whatever happens. They've got a very nice site, despite all the negative comments that have become common around here.
Microsoft is collapsing in complete disarray.
It is worth considering that you don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Microsoft's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Microsoft faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for MS because Bill Gates is dying. Things are looking very bad for Gates. As many of us are already aware, Gates continues to weaken as he loses blood. His insatiable appetite has endangered them all.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers:
Taco Bell states that there are 7000 Microsoft employees dedicated to ordering Taco Bell meals for Gates. How many employees actually write software? Let's see. The number of employees dedicated to their respective tasks is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 software developers. Slashdot claims that about half of their volume are Microsoft posts. Therefore there are only about 700 software developers actually working on projects.
All medical examinations show that Gates' health has steadily declined. Gates is very sick and Microsoft's long term survival prospects are very dim. If Microsoft is to survive at all it will be only fanatical open source zealots left. Gates continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save him at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Bill Gates is dead.
...I'm sure there aren't any layoffs coming at ThinkGeek.
Those guys gotta be making some serious dough. Getting people hooked on high-dose caffeine products (I mean, come on! SCHEDULED deliveries? THAT is GENIUS!)... Free advertising on Slashdot in endless rotation... What do ya figure the gross margin is on that "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" shirt that is being advertised right above me as I type this? 50%? 60%?
I bet during the VA Linux heydey, at $300/share, ThinkGeek was seen as some dorky little t-shirt & caffeine selling bastard child. Now I gotta bet the bigwigs at VA Linux are saying, "Maybe we should dump selling overpriced servers and turn VA Linux into a pure Linux merchandising play, so we can actually make some money!"
Hats off to the geeks with a business-model that will actually survive the downturn... I hope you guys spin-off of that cumbersome, bloated beastie with the triple-black-diamond ski-slope for a stock chart- and go public yourselves in 2002, when the money runs out at your parents' place.
he was carrying a sign that said "will post news articles for food" alongside him hemos, michael, and timothy were stripping the Slashdot PT Cruiser, they're so ghetto
This link might be useful very soon for you and the rest of the /. staff! Consider it a token of my appreciation.
You know, I still own lots of stock in overhyped companies, and when the dot-com crash happened, I lost hundreds of thousands of dollars. But I swear, it was worth it just to know that ESR's shit-eating grin has finally vanished -- you know, that one I imagine he had on while writing Surprised By Wealth, the most insanely arrogant, egotistical, boorish, and self-centered brag piece I have ever seen from someone who has money.
Fine, Eric. You made money. Great. Lots of people did. But most people don't go shouting from the rafters "Look at me! I have money! And you can't have any! And I will not give any to charity unless they grovel and beg, but don't do that because then I won't give any to you!"
Whoa, that rant has been building for a while.
Apple created something. People then and now loved the product, thought it was insanely great, signed on to Apple's vision and philosophy. And it was Apple's vision, it was Apple's philosophy. They were not only its advocate, but its architect, its visionary.
How do you figure VA Linux has done anything even close to that for Linux? Linux's first kernels were released in, I don't know, 1990 or 1991. VA Linux did not do that. They weren't even in the first round of commercial companies that did things like sell distributions (e.g. SLS). They are a latecomer, and by the time they were founded there were dozens of other companies just like them.
Now, don't get me wrong -- VA Linux is a great company, they are giving back to the community, and in retrospect they have distinguished themselves by being more successful. But there is no way they are the heart and soul of Linux. And the death of VA Linux, the company, will absolutely not mean the death of Linux the OS or movement. That is why there is no rallying cry around them like there was with Apple/Mac; because Apple's death would have meant Mac's death, and here the stakes are nowhere near that high.
Had that experience myself - two years ago I wanted to spend a half million on hardware with them. Couldn't even get a reply out of them. Went with Dell instead.
It's interesting comparing strategies - RedHat have carefully purchased the likes of Cygnus (who make money) and given jobs to researchers like Alan Cos who improve the community code RH rely on. They're making money.
VALinux went on an insane spending spree including the likes of Andover, whose portfolio has never turned a cent, and is in deep shit.
The most ironic thing? Who'd a thunk a hardware company would be going broke while a company dealing n free software would make money?
(And $600K may not be much, but it beats having to lay people off. And making money in a dowturn is a good trick.)
Perhaps you should ask Bowie J. Poag (former propaganda.themes.org guy, and still the PROPAGANDA graphics guy) about the goodwill VA had when they fucked him over. You'll probably have to catch him when he pisses on the grave of VA though.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Several years ago I argued strongly that they should adopt a business model similar to that of Dell, of putting out large quantities of mostly-identical machines in an assembly line fashion. I also suggested that they needed to broaden their sales and distribution efforts to target new markets for Linux rather than sell to the same old server market. Their response was that their customers didn't want that. But the problem is that VA could never build enough volume with custom computers to get the kind of parts deals needed to be competitive in the business. You just can't survive that way, unless you're content to be a fringe provider of custom computers for people who just absolutely can't accept generic hardware. VA's business model just can't sustain more than a dozen or so employees. I know that for a fact, having been in the hardware business (for a competitor that was bought up by them several years back) and having seen the pressures and limitations first-hand.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Did anyone notice that the original article read "fuckedcompany" and now it reads "f'dcompany"?
Okay, so you want to make it kid-friendly. um. ok. But, should article posters really be alowed to edit the contents of an article after it has been posted and commented on?
Granted this is a minor modification, but I still find it a bit odd.
-=e
Perhaps he needs no comma. He may be directing other /.'ers to proofread CmdrTaco's posts. In which case, he would be gramatically correct.
-=e
Makes me feel sorry for the guys still there. It's hard to imagine 4 months reading layoff rumors every day, goung to sleep not knowing if the lifestyle you've known for the last 3 years will still exist tomorrow, every day being another test of faith, my bad memory being their way of life for 4 months. Wonder if the second round will get severance packages.
You're kind of right. Presidents don't act by screwing the economy, they act by ratifiying (or not) treaties for pollution control, developing defense systems that could breed human extinction, and upsetting every other country in the world. Not that I'm too worried, reelect Bush II and in a few decades you (USAans) will have to pay to get the oxygen of other countries or cease breathing.
And no, I am not a United-Stadian, even though I am American (America goes from Patagonia (South Argentina) to Alaska passing by Cuba.
Bush II government (yes, the sequel usually sucks): everybody gets laid off, "Hi mom, my name was in fuckedcompany when I woke up this morning". And what is most amazing is that this government will screw just about everybody, but in 4 years Katz will still be writing reviews for /.
Yikes! That's what I get for getting excited about a press report. $600K is not a whole lot of profit when you have $20 million in one time charges. Still, it looks much better for RedHat than for VA Linux. Their revenues are up, and they are able to partner with Dell, Compaq, and IBM instead of having to compete with them. Plus, RedHat isn't quite as extravagant with their money. Their big ticket purchase was Cygnus (who had a proven track record of actually making money, and a huge pile of gifted hackers). VA Linux, on the other hand, bought into the whole dot com buzz to a much larger extent. Most of their clients were dot coms, and they themselves have spent a substantial amount of money on web properties like Linux.comm, sourcefore, freshmeat, and (of course) slashdot. Until advertisers realize that online ads probably are at least as effective as print ads web properties are going to be hard pressed to make a profit. Even if their sites are popular (and their ads well targetted).
On a much lighter note, it would appear that RedHat, at least, is actually profitable. What's more, they are making a profit at a time when everyone else is feeling a definite crunch.
VA Linux's business plan of selling servers to dot coms looked like a pretty good idea when VC funded flowed like a river, but now that times are tight the hardware market is pretty amazingly brutal.
It's not slashdot that I fear for, as much as I love it. Heck, my productivity would improve quite a bit without slashdot. I am much more concerned about sourceforge.net. There are a lot of important (and not so important) projects going on at sourceforge. I personally think that the Free Software movement would be dealt a substantial blow if we had to go back to relying on Anonymous FTP at sunsite (er... metalab, er... ibiblio).
I imagine that there is a pretty signficant cost associated with hosting sourceforge.
This is the same sort of thing that Bill Parish has been ranting about Microsoft and other companies for quite a while. One legal method of adding up expenses to show Wall Street that you are making money, another legal method to include stuff you've written off to limit the tax liability to the IRS and state govts. Also, are they refusing to give guidance at all or just didn't have good estimates at the time the analysts wanted them?
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
I don't think he is specific about other companies, but he does say that many are following MS' example. The games accountants play.......
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
"I'd place a lot more value on a MSFT support contract than a LNUX one."
Evidently you've NEVER contacted MS for support or you're high enough on the food chain (i.e. someone like Dell, etc.) to get decent help.
There is no value in a support contract with a company that's going to be around for a while when the support's largely useless to most people.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
This where the moderation system needs to improve. Too many Karma whores wear the label as a badge of honor. I can understand why people were distracted for the last year with the stock gyrations, but I hope some creative energy is freed up to improve the moderation system.
The data looks pretty damning in retrospect. It reminds me of the reason for killing the goose that layed the golden eggs. I know the VC crowd plays a big role in building the management team. I wonder how much stock they still own ;-)
Actually, this is completely bogus.
VA Linux has _always_ had great hardware. They do more testing than anyone else. Wonder why their servers are expensive? They use teflon cables, that usually run $100 a piece. Why? Because they NEVER wear out. VA has probably the best-constructed servers on the market, period. All of their servers include EMP, which makes remote-management a cinch. In fact, you can mess with the BIOS at boot-time remotely with EMP. Their 4U boxes also have dual hot-swap power supplies. My company would have bought more VA if they would have only had dual hot-swap power supplies in their 2U boxes (Penguin and Dell both do this).
VA also does extensive testing, finding obscure memory compatibility problems and fixing them _before_ they ship.
I've never seen someone build a 2U VA-like box themselves. Those things are amazing. They always use the best components - that's why they are expensive, and that's why they last forever.
Engineering and the Ultimate
The VA Linux IPO was a simple pump-and-dump stock scheme, which is partly the reason they're now being sued, probably with good reason.
Notice how fast Robert Russo ran off with around $6 million as the stock petered out? How many others inside the company did the same thing?
Read it all here.
This isn't an intentional troll or flamebait, I'm just trying to point out the truth of the situation here. The layoffs are happening because the company cannot support them, and the investments are running out. Looking the other way out of a sense of 'good will' and 'community' is for the suckers.
Because people just as strident as you (maybe even you?) would claim there was a Massive CmdrTaco Conspiracy if the news was NOT reported, given that VA 0wnz /.
Why is this news? I don't see posts for other companies having layoffs. Why is VA special. Dell sells Linux boxes too and you don't see a slashdot news link when they have layoffs. At the end of the day VA Linux is just like any other PC reseller. They buy a bunch of pieces from other manufacturers and put them together and put their name on it. If they go down in flames it still isn't really news for slashdot. Rumors certainly aren't.
I now fully expect to be moderated down by the anything with the word linux masses who read this site.
It's very common for servers hosting the stories linked from /. to sink. We even have a name for it -- the server was "slashdotted".
They should offer a premium service -- so much per month or year -- that will let you see the new stories 15 or 30 minutes before they go out to the masses.
I'm not talking about giving anyone an edge in discusions. I wouldn't let people post comments until everyone can see the story.
But it would be cool to be able to get in before the servers sink. I'd pay for it. I think other people would, too.
especially if it would return the site to the kind of discussions it had a couple years ago.
This new face of Slashdot is in part the product of the moderation system reducing posting to a game of collecting karma. I've noticed myself drifted towards posting "cute" karma grabbing things instead of communicating what I believe to be important, and I suspect I am not alone.
This post seems on topic enough to me, as both it and the article relate to the direction and nature of Slashdot. But some moderator might disagree and nuke my karma. It would be safer for me to have trolled Cmdrtaco about his name being an omen for his future career or ESR over his inability to avoid boasting during his brief LNUX wealth. The Karma system encourages the behavior it rewards, and it rewards these subtitle superficial trolls. Thoughtful tangents are suppressed so they won't be "offtopic", opinions are radicalized so they will be "insightful", and conclusions are exaggerated so "informative".
This karma system has so well trained us what to post even in the face of dramatic news like this article suggesting LNUX is fucked, most comments are cheese-ball jokes and trolls attacking Linux, Slashdot, or VA Linux. Sad.
Ben
VA Linux et al are not "fools" at all.
No major corporation -- NONE -- will authorize the use of any software for mission-critical purposes without a support organization on board.
Geeks don't need formal support. But they are not the ones that buy formal support. Companies need it -- and they buy it.
It is a basic rule of IT. Ask anyone who makes IT decisions for large (Fortune 1000) companies.
Hey, don't feel bad -- I have 25 years experience and no one from VA even calls me (when I'm looking and submit my resume), even when they promised to. Of course, I make more than VA is willing to pay (they do pay under market).
One thing to learn from this: HR (in any company, not just VA) is the most effective form of firewall known.
_Deirdre
The difference between the Mac community (which I'm also a part of) and the /. community is that the Linux community does not depend on a single vendor.
Thus, when Eazel closes and Linuxcare, TurboLinux, SuSE and VA Linux downsize (as has happened within the last year), the Linux community is largely unaffected.
When Apple's in trouble, the Mac community is more directly affected.
The downside to the Linux community approach is that people may not realize what corporate difficulties are ultimately costing them in terms of delivery of software, etc.
and we're always glad to host projects that need homes. drop pj@unc.edu if your information sharing project needs a home -- not restricted to software.
BTW often Fuckedcompany has been wrong. let's hope they are this time out too.
Certified Black Helicopter Pilot *** Unwitting Dupe of One World Gov'ment
Right. I don't suppose you've read Cathedral and the Bazaar, used Fetchmail, or configured a kernel with CML2? No, I didn't think so. Sorry, but you don't have a fucking clue. The same goes for the 4 moderators who thought you did.
--
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
Ohhh.. who's life would be complete without reading the Cathedral and the Bazaar? I looked over it, about as usefull as your average k5 diatribe. And no, I don't use fetchmail, I don't need it. I know how to configure sendmail. Even I had a use, I still wouldn't. I wouldn't touch code written by those slimy fingers. Its not like I couldn't just write my own. (I've written my own telnet, HTTP, FTP, POP3, IRC and Gnutella clients, as well as an HTTPd server. A fetchmail clone would take me like 4 days) And no, I haven't used CML2 to configure my kernel.
I'm not surprised. You know something about playing with Perl, and to create your impressive resume you used the Perl libraries. In other words I was right on all counts, including the question of whether you have a clue. Your main talent seems to be character assassination. Microsoft needs you, they are looking for Perl programmers and people skilled in character assassination. We don't need you.
--
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
I use a quad xeon server from VA Linux to run NT 4.0.
I need that quad xeon server from VA Linux to run NT 4.0.
I've never needed anything like server-class hardware to run linux, and as long as the IT people at work don't support it as a "mission critical system," it'll be relegated to development tasks and serving mp3s.
And, of course, the nice VA Linux boxen purchased by now-long-gone Linux zealots will continue to run NT 4.0.
A story when all the trolls about VA Linux going under are actually on-topic! Have at it, guys :)
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Ha ha, but in fact "wrt" is a perfectly good acronym for "With Respect To", although it is usually in caps: WRT. Of all the potential targets, you picked the wrong editorial mistake :)
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
RedHat actually lost a net $27.6 million this past quarter on revenues of only $25.6 million. Some fancy bookmaking allowed them to present this as a profit, but not everyone was fooled. c|net's lede read: "Red Hat, the top seller of the Linux operating system, became profitable by some measurements while meeting analyst expectations for the most recent quarter."
See, this so called "profit" was only due to all the adjustments they made, just like last quarter, when RedHat said that they broke even (or at least came within $600,000 of it), even though they really lost over $24 million. Be skeptical when a company tells you that they turned a $600,000 profit when they're taking a $20.8 million charge for "amortization of goodwill and tangibles." Yeah, okay....
And not to be too doom-and-gloomish, but the revenue for the quarter was 7% less than what RedHat told Wall Street to expect, revenue is 5% down from last quarter, revenue from their network consulting services are already dropping, and they're now refusing to give analysts any guidance for RHAT performance in future quarters. Maybe they've run out of book-keeping tricks? :) "None of the other companies I cover have refused to give guidance," Prakesh Patel, analyst with WR Hambrecht and Co. "It definitely is troubling. Regardless of the economic environment, the company has a sales pipeline and should have estimates of closing deals that's the job of management."
Cheers,
Here's the good news: Red Hat is in the black. As in, turned a profit this year. Surprise!
No, seriously! http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,44637,00 .html
Quite unpleasant. OTOH, they have been spending to grow during the last several years. Perhaps the best thing to hope is that they have acted in time. If this measure is sufficient for them to become profitable, then it will have been the right measure. When the economy is in a downturn is not a time for the cash strapped to be adventurous. Only for the well funded, and the desparate. We know that VA Linux isn't well funded, and we sure hope they aren't desperate. So this may be the best of the possible choices open.
At least the e-mail is clear about which divisions are being maintained, and which cut back. Many companies act treacherously at times like this.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
What you say is true, but you have to give VA some "pioneer credit". They were on of the first, if not the first actively selling Linux boxes. I first recall them back in 1994 when they were still called Fintronic. I suppose they started earlier than that. OK, sure that isn't 1991. But were you using Linux, or even better, selling, Linux in 1994?
Hey, it was already lost. I'm interviewing at another place in NYC tomorrow anyway, and this seemed like a good place to vent.
-- Veni, vidi, dormivi
I'm feeling somewhat disgruntled towards VA right now myself.
This summer, being in San Jose anyway and being a stockholder in the company, I wrangled a tour of the corporate HQ there. It was neat...a lot of really nice guys, and father and I (disclaimer: I'm 16) talked to Larry Augustin himself, who broached the possibility of my getting to intern at VA's NYC office (I'm from NJ) this summer.
At LWCE in February, we again talked to Larry, and to some really nice guys from the NY and MA offices, who said that it was a virtual certainty that I'd get the internship, AND that I'd get paid.
About a month ago, new terms: no pay, but internship will work.
Three weeks ago: my contact's boss is blocking the internship
Two weeks ago: my contact says that that hurdle is over
One week ago: Contact says that the head of HR and his pet lawyer are blocking the internship because - get this - they don't have ANY forms or procedures for internships. Which is bullshit, because one of my friends's friends interned there last year.
Now: Still unchanged. I certainly didn't get the 'sure thing' internship, for incredibly petty-seeming reasons. My contact is considering resigning over this debacle, and I can't blame him. It's absolutely absurd that a company so publically committed to OSS ideology would be so petty and closed-minded in its internal procedures...
-- Veni, vidi, dormivi
Now I know I've had too much to drink tonight. I parsed that as "Maybe we should put some plans together for shaving Slashdot..."
Pardon me while I try to keep my dinner down.
--
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Taco wouldn't last an hour. Those menus have to have correct spelling on them, dude. Who is going to buy a Bag Moc, Kwertor Pondar, or Phillay 'A' Phist?
--
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
The Free Software Foundation!
Microsoft bought the FSF and has released the new version of the GPL! Thanks to the "upgrade" clause of the GPL, it now applies to any and all GPLed items that Microsoft can find! It reads:
All code and binaries associated with this software belong to Microsoft.
Thank God the FSF is non-profit...
--
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Unless you have a vested interest in VA, I wouldn't worry about sourceforge. Open source will survive with or without sourceforge. My own company, for instance, is planning to release OPP 0.3 (when completed) using our own open source 'distributed collaborative development environment'. That notwithstanding, I believe that most of the underlying sourceforge software is itself opensource; so it shouldn't be too difficult to duplicate.
- Joel Peterson
--
Index of Alternative Operating Systems
--
Index of Alternative Operating Systems
www.indexos.com
Jon has already started "moonlighting" with Shift Magazine. Good magazine, regardless of feelings about Katz.
Stated on VA annoncement on fuckedcompany.com page :
#include "coucou.h"
put the money into a nice trip to Nepal
You might find a nice trip hard to come by -- ever since the Crown Prince (well, apparently him, anyway) strafed the family with bullets while high on hash & cocaine, things have been just a leeetle bit tense there...
deus does not exist but if he does
Sure there was some piling on by VA during what was a heady time for linux, but they put that money into smart, useful places.
Sourceforge is very useful to me, and I would hate to see it go away.
There are a bunch of dead/dormant Sourceforge projects because there is NO barrier of entry for starting a SourceForge project.
:-)
And that's OK.
Why? How much CPU time is dedicated to a dormant project? Zilch. How much hard drive space is dedicated to a dormant project? Zilch. How much RAM... etc.
On the other hand, there are lots of very successful, very popular projects over there, like:
JBoss
MiKteX
ImportScrubber
OK, just kidding about that last one
Yours,
Tom
The Army reading list
my favorite candidate withdrew from the race. She was all the good things that you'd hope a girl to be (pretty, smart, nice, funny, etc) except (despite hints otherwise) into me.
Taking suggestions.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Wasn't me -- I think those cruisers are pretty hideous. (And automatic transmission, too.)
I like my 95 escort a lot better than that -- if I were to win a cruiser in a contest, I'd sell it immediately (but not disassembled) and put the money into a nice trip to Nepal and an engagement ring for Ms. Right.
Just to clarify things.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Well, this is a bit different than the "Apple is dying!" deal. If Apple dies, the Mac dies as well. Linux is in no danger, only one company which supplies hardware that runs it. Personally, as necessary as the contributions of large corporations may be to the future of Linux, I get rather nervous when any one company gains as much influence in the community as VA has. They may be a great resource, but they are also a huge liability, and I'm sure that I'm not the only one who has noticed this.
Crap. There's plenty of other ways to do this. None of the times I've called MS support have I been charged by the minute.
Check your "facts".
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
Actually, it makes sense to purchase from a company that has a significant chance of existing for the foreseeable future. The day MSFT goes Chapter 11 will probably come a long time after the current batch of Linux vendors are well and truly forgotten.
In a world where Linux vendors are selling support and not software, you have to be careful that your support contract is actually worth something. With the present financial climate, I'd place a lot more value on a MSFT support contract than a LNUX one. Nothing to do with the cost of the product - everything to do with the performance of the company.
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
There isn't special Linux only stuff in VAs servers. They have a reputation for building servers like tanks and some of their customers view them strictly as a hardware vender. FuckedCompany probably just wiped the drives and installed NT/IIS when the boxes arrived.
It must be bad, they already fired the /. editor! Oh, wait a second...
Went with Dell instead.
So have quite a few others. VA is basically at the bottom of units sold for Linux systems, 8.6% market share behind Compaq (31), Dell (14), and IBM (14).
Aside from the layoffs which are expected to hit all walks of e-business, I wonder how this will impact Linux to have a company go under. See what I mean by this is, VALinux is pretty cool (wassup Jim Gleason) but their model of selling Linux only appliances is trivial.
... Think cluebie here "Linux stinks because they make no money, and their business falter.. I'll stick with MS, a money maker they must be doing something right."
Why didn't they just focus on selling servers no matter what they were running. VABSD, VANT, nothing else but Linux came out of it. Now when you look at CTO types who know squat but sign those purchase orders, sadly they're likely to be under the impression if it doesn't have a price it's not worthy, meaning Microsoft lurks in their eyes.
Moreso interesting, Linux posted its first profit which sadly is puny on a business aspect. So will VALinux' layoffs shadow Linux as a whole to people who don't know much about OS'
Want Root?
He told me he's in a hurry because a customer was waiting for the answer as we spoke. Out of curiosity I did a /whois on him: valinux.com...
P.S. I know there are more good people in VA then lousy ones, so no hard feeling here okay?
Man that is really not fair. Nobody knows everything. I've been tripped up by silly little things in areas that I would consider myself rather expertish. When a customer did ask him something he couldn't figure out at least he knew where to go get help, #debian would be a good place for help. Most importantly he asked, he didn't brush it off or try and BS his way through it.
I think if more support people knew when to cut out and get more information there would be a lot more happy customer's in the world. This guy finding someone to help him out so he could, in turn, help his customer is a great endorsement for VA in my books.
Actually, I see lots of ads from Sun, Oracle, HP, etc. I would think that /. would be a fairly valuable asset. For one thing, the readership base is incredibly loyal. Think about how lame /. has gotten as of late, and how we still come here.
Someone you trust is one of us.
According to news reports he's pulling in $60k/month from subscriptions.
--
OliverWillis.Com
OliverWillis.Com
An Operative with an Agenda
on Jon Katz.
This is not too far of a stretch:
AMDZone recently published an article by Van Smith that discussed the buyout of tech sites by commercial interests.
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
that doesn't mean anything. many companies are hiring at the same time they're doing layoff. sometimes they'll cut a whole department that's not part of their "core strategy" while simultaneously hiring into the departments that are doing well. many times they'll move people's jobs, but sometimes the skillsets just don't match and they have to look elsewhere.
afterall, it's not like "employees" are just carbon-copied workers. you can have some that won't work while still trying to find some that will.
- j
I believe that most of the underlying sourceforge software is itself opensource; so it shouldn't be too difficult to duplicate.
I don't think that's the real problem. The problem is getting machines and bandwidth. Especially bandwidth. Even if there are tons of people who will help work on/admin sourceforge-II, without a bunch of $$$ it won't happen.
Eh... I don't know. While metalab, etc are far from ideal, it's not really necessary that all the projects be hosted by a single site. Freshmeat.net would work well as a base for a universal index, as long as it could a) enforce using Trove categories, and b) check links periodically and remove those that were dead, to keep it updated. And provide SF like stats for downloads, etc (which I rather like). Then people host web, CVS, ftp, whatever from their ISP or home box or wherever, but everyone can find stuff without resorting to google searches and such.
I have a project on SF, and I find the main advantages are the indexing and statistics capabilities. I can host web and FTP myself no problem (no universally true, but I think it would be OK for the vast majority of people/projects). The shell server is not at all useful (to me), and the compile farm seems to have been dead for some time (at least I can't get in), so even that's out.
And, like a lot of other people, I find SF's universiality unsettling, especially with the recent crack. I figure within 6 months I'll move the project off to my machines.
IBM, Sun or Compaq could pick it up. They wouldn't even notice the sort of cash required to support SourceForge.
I kind of doubt Sun would - last I heard they're still not big Linux/OSS fans (perhaps "cautiously interested" would be a better description). IBM or Compaq (or HP or SGI, perhaps) seem likely, however. And you're sure right about not noticing the cash outflow. Actually, I wonder how much it costs to run SF, admins, hardware, bandwidth, soda, etc? Now I'm all curious...
so far they've been reluctant to do anything that might be seen as attempting to "take over" the Open Source movement.
Yeah, but of course people have other options. And if VA goes down I think people would be more relieved than worried if SF was taken over - better than dying, after all.
Unpleasant? Of course. Like it or not, our modern era is largely rooted in WWII. The Nazis define a certain pole of human behavior - in many contexts they're invoked as the extreme of authoritarianism. Which is not quite the same thing as comparing someone's trivial actions to the holocaust morally.
Godwin's law may have been a good idea at one time (although I doubt it - 'the act of censorship is always worse than that which is censored.') but it kills many interesting discussions now. Hitler really introduced 'total war' and the blitzkreig. The parallels to Microsoft are astonishing, but I'm not sure I could do the subject justice. Especially because of the inequality of their crimes - economic predation versus mass murder.
At any rate, I'm afraid you can't change the fact that 'grammer nazi' is a natural and evocative phrase. Slang tends to touch on the most powerful things - God, sex and death. The crimes of the Nazis have made their name powerful in metaphor.
You're right. The page provides adequate information. I realize now that for some reason (failure to be a bright boy?) my eye has always skipped over the block of text you quoted. Usually I'm using Lynx, and the first two screenfulls or so are meaningless noise. I'm afraid the speed with which I skipped that noise has carried me past the meat of the page.
However, I still don't like SF, and still think the pages are less effective than average open source pages.
And your comment on the lameness filter and suitable uses for the editors' time is apt. I have on occasion spent an hour on a carefully crafted post to explain some abstruse topic, only to be prevented from posting it by the lameness filter.
They were in a strong position to become the linux vendor to many Unix shops and fill the role that HP or Sun would fill. The magic, had they pulled it off, would have consisted of welding the disparate commodified parts of a PC into one shining 'workstation'. Unfortunately they did not do this.
I had a VA workstation at one company. I remember when it first arrived - I turned it on and started X. Someting was wrong. The resolution was (I think) 640x480. This was on a machine with a Matrox card. I've never seen a Sun in low-res mode. I don't even know if they're capable - that's the whole point. From the time you shove the install media into a Sun to the time you throw it in the dumpster due to obsolescence, you only see it in the correct video mode. I have no idea what VA was thinking. If I were a naive purchaser, I would have left the box as it was and been somewhat unhappy with the display. Plenty of Windows users run 800x600 after all. A coworker had a VA box with a CD-RW (factory, of course). It never worked very well. After numerous phone calls, VA said there might be a kernel bug causing the problems, and put the fixed kernel on their servers for download. Which was good. The bad part is that I think they shipped this system not only without testing it, but without ever testing one like it (thus the late discovery of the bug).
VA had all the chances to offer a Macintosh level of integrating and testing. They controlled the OS and hardware. I don't think they delivered.
I should also mention the multi-week lead times for standard workstations. All in all, a bad vendor and the only reason they were used is their support of popular web sites. Which was not very persuasive with management.
- It's full of unfinished (unusable) and utterly vaporous projects. It really pisses me off when I'm searching for a solution to a problem to waste minutes on a SourceForge site, sometimes even downloading a tarball and trying to compile, merely to discover I've wasted my time on someone's empty fantasies. You can assert that as the consumer of software I have no right to expect, etc., but I think it's an act of inconsiderate pollution to spread useless software.
- Before SourceForge, project web pages were both more usable and more informative of the character and status of the project. More usable because less cluttered - Open Source project web pages are generally some of the best on the web for clarity. More informative, because a half-baked toy project will get one hastily-written page, if that, while a mature, heavily used project will have many pages and current release news.
- I shudder to think what Microsoft's PR folks could make of SourceForge. If they want to convince an executive that Open Source is ridiculous, they just have to let him browse this site and take in all the 'discussion forums' with two posts, all the ambitious projects with no release info. It's an ongoing embarassment.
Anyhow, for those who love the enhanced functionality of SourceForge, the software is free and can be implemented elsewhere. Hopefully in a post-SourceForge world it will implemented only when a project has outgrown a simple static site.We're in no danger of reverting to UNC FTP archives. (Not that there's much wrong with them.) Pretty much every ISP offers free static hosting to its customers. Then there's angelfire/geocities for the cash and bandwidth impaired.
what it means if the rumor is true.
obvious.
maybe this is why we still don't have natural language parsing. because programmers are so anal retentive they refuse to understand something unless it conforms to artificial grammar rules they were taught by frustrated latin teachers.
natural language is flexible, fault-tolerant, ever-evolving. None of which applies to programs as they are currently written.
trim the fat from yogurt, not the company!
I agree :)
On top of that, how cool was the text adventure based kernel config? Yeah, he's egotistical. Yeah, he gets more publicity than other coders who have done equivalent amounts of work. But I don't think he's done anything worthy of this kind of hatred.
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Basically what I'm saying is no wonder they're losing money, people try to throw cash at them and they don't catch it.
its only one guy doing everything I think, so it would be more like 'fucked company can't pay its bandwidth costs anymore'
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
Source Forge and linux.com are the first things that come to my mind, but I know there are many more.
A shutdown or down-sizing of sourceforge would deal quite a blow to many projects.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
Looks like they spent it well, too. Not that $600K is anything to call mom about. Profit is profit.
cat
Right. I don't suppose you've read Cathedral and the Bazaar, used Fetchmail, or configured a kernel with CML2
Ohhh.. who's life would be complete without reading the Cathedral and the Bazaar? I looked over it, about as usefull as your average k5 diatribe.
And no, I don't use fetchmail, I don't need it. I know how to configure sendmail. Even I had a use, I still wouldn't. I wouldn't touch code written by those slimy fingers. Its not like I couldn't just write my own. (I've written my own telnet, HTTP, FTP, POP3, IRC and Gnutella clients, as well as an HTTPd server. A fetchmail clone would take me like 4 days)
And no, I haven't used CML2 to configure my kernel.
I don't see why choosing not to use the software of an egomaniac disqualifies me to have an opinion about him.
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
Well, for me, the primary reason for wishing ill on VA Linux is Eric S. Raymond. The man is a parasite on "Open Source", although he seems to think he's their savior. Raymond holds a seat on VA's board, and his fortunes roll with it. I have no ill will toward VA in general. But I delight in seeing Eric Raymond eat his "I'm rich now ha ha" words. As his once $35 on-paper million dollar fortune drops to below a meg.
/. Sold to. CT initially didn't want to be owned by one of the Linux corps, and refused to sell directly to VA)
But other then that, there is a real difference between Apple and the crop of Linux companies. With the Mac, everything depended on Apple, and really it was Steve Jobs who designed the thing. But these Linux companies are just making money off something that's already popular. VA does give back to the community, but they also take. Slashdot was around long before VA bought them (or rather the company that
The real and fundamental difference is that without apple, there would be no Mac. Without VA, what do we loose? You can buy Linux powered hardware from most of the major players nowadays, and Most of the commercially produced Linux code is coming out of Red Hat.
I think a lot of the animosity generated towards VA is caused by the fact that they tried to be 'the' Linux company, getting the stock symbol "LNUX" and everything, buying all the major Linux sites, that kind of thing.
And of course, employing ESR as their 'corporate conscious' is isn't winning them many brownie points (I hope)
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
Is that FuckedCompany's readers are just like /.'s - Or at least, the contributing ones. The message thread has become a Linux vs. Win2k thread and people are insinuating that others have far less experience than they claim - That they may in fact be a pimple-ridden native of Bumfuck, NW.
--
ALL YOUR KARMA ARE BELONG TO US
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Well, I just finished reading through every post, even the ones down at -1. What is going here? Slashdot is a good website. I have been coming here for years, before it was actually Slashdot. Granted, many of the technical articles have been lost somewhere in the submission pile, but I still come back. Why are there so many people who visit this site and absolute hate it? Why put that much effort into posting something negative? It just seems pretty juvenile. All these links to that guy's ass are really getting old. Yeah, it's not shocking anymore. We have seen it enough. I got it in an Email the other day. (yawn) Come with something new please. It's rare that I read all of the posts associated with an article. I don't know if I will read many more after this. I realize that is why the moderation system is in place, but this is just stupid. I am a bit a conspiracy theorist so I have come to my own conclusions on this matter. Are the majority of the people posting these negative comments working for a certain Redmond company? I mean, what better way to get the Linux community to completely fall apart and look ridiculous but by planting this hate in the heart of the community where MANY Linux users go daily? It's probably not the case and judging from what I have read so far I am sure you will put me in my place and tell me how wrong I am. I just don't understand it. Granted, VA Linux will not make or break the Linux community. It might put 2 extremely talented programmers out of work, but I doubt it. We will still have Enlightenment. I have to agree with those that actually stayed on topic here. VA Linux charges too much money for something that many of us could put together for a 1/3 of the price. And all this shit about ESR. Why are we attacking people? A company is not doing well and we want to kick them while they are down. I don't know much about ESR. I read his book. It was ok. So what. If he bragged about his money, well that was stupid, but all you really know about him you read in some article. Granted I'm sure many of you are very knowledgeable when it comes to computers and software, etc. But reading many of these posts, I was just reminded of these two guys I used to work with. Swore up and down about Microsoft this and CD-burner that, blah, blah, blah. They did this all day long. People at work thought they were so smart. They were so quick to point out why Linux sucked and Microsoft was so great. Well, neither of them was ever able to get Linux installed on their computers. That's when they came to me looking for help. You know what? I use Microsoft; I use it to play games. I'm not going to scream one way or the other anymore. Just to cover my ass; I'm sure that for all of you screaming "Linux sucks" there are plenty of you who have installed it. Maybe you are Mac person, maybe BSD, whatever. "Linux sucks, BSD sucks, this sucks, that sucks." What a bunch of children. I haven't posted much on Slashdot and I don't know if this is helping my 'karma.' I really don't care. Linux used to be about adventure. Being able to write code and give it away for free, knowing how your computer works. No, I don't think you can make money off of it. The bubble has crashed and we have to come to back to reality. VA Linux is just another casualty in what will continue to be an economically depressing year. I hope they are there when it's over, but if not, some guy will be up late writing code that you Slashdot haters will complain about. "It sucks, it sucks!" Write a book or something. Title it "The year I linked to that guy's ass over 400 times when posting to Slashdot: And How I disguised it as another link." Oh, you are a genius. Learned HTML today did we? I'm sure I will be flamed to all hell for this one. Oh well, I expect it. The maturity level around here is the equivalent of a child in a schoolyard. I won't even post anonymously so you can send me a bunch of hate mail or maybe some little script that you cut and pasted. Again, VA Linux has a bad business model. I'm talking to the people who stayed on topic. I agree, give people the option of an operating system. For some odd reason people want to use Microsoft. Let them. But, I believe VA Linux would run into the problem with Microsoft's criminal licensing schemes. That, and the company is unfortunately called VA Linux. Again they based the company around a free operating system and thought they could make money doing it. I don't think they are stupid. With all the hype a while back everyone thought you could make money with Linux. I think many of these companies were a bit overzealous. Also they were playing with OTHER people's money and therefore other people expected results. I don't know if this was the case with VA Linux. I don't pretend to know anything about VA Linux other than: Rasterman works there, Mandrake works there, and they sell computers. Everything else is pure speculation. What I do know is that Linux was never about deadlines and always about making a stable operating system. I almost wish it would go back to those "hobbyist" days. Linux is getting a bad name, one that may not be able to be shaken off. That's too bad. Anyway, Rob, Hemos and the others, I appreciate the site and I will continue to visit everyday. I just don't think I will read the comments anymore.
Perhaps part (or most) of the problem lies in /. and other Andover/VA Linux sites that depend on ad revenues. From what I've noticed, /. and other VA sites seem to link to each other, with few ads coming from the outside (which would bring in money to VA, obviously). Are they that short of paid ads that they have to rotate in self-promotion?
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
It is worth considering that you don't need to be a Kreskin to predict VA's future. The hand writing is on the wall: VA Linux faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for VA because Slashdot is dying. Things are looking very bad for VA Linux. As many of us are already aware, VA continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. Their overpriced hardware is the most endangered of them all.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers:
Slashdot leader Taco states that there are 7000 users of Slashdot (the rest of the accounts are for trolls to mod themselves up). How many users of Plastic are there? Let's see. The number of Slashdot versus Plastic posts on their respective sites is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Plastic users. Geekizoid posts on their site are about half of the volume of Plastic posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of Geekizoid. A recent article put Slashdot at about 80 percent of the VA market cap. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 VA Linux users. This is consistent with the number of alpha-stage SourceForge projects.
Due to the troubles of Andover, abysmal sales and so on, they went out of business and were taken over by VA Linux, who sell another troubled OS. Now VA Linux is also dead, its corpse turned over to another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Slashdot has steadily declined in market share. Slashdot is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Slashdot is to survive at all it will be among fanatical open source zealots. Slashdot continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Slashdot is dead.
--
< )
( \
X
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
Amusingly enough, it also mentions that VA hardware largely powers F'd company. Your guess is as good as mine wrt the truth in this rumor
I believe it is definitely true that VA Linux powers most of FuckedCompany.
cultural revolution not unlike the episode of the Simpsons
It's fragments like that which make you realise Pol Pot had a point.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
I had lunch with a valinux rep. last week. The
reason they are struggling is rather ironic.
They built alot of new equiptment for "dot com"
companies that never came through so they were
stuck with all this extra inventory. To make
matters worse, 6 month old equiptment from other
dot commers is flooding ebay for a fraction of
the cost. VA Linux is stuck competing against
their own equiptment for sales. It is hard to
compete against yourself at a reduced rate.
Funny, i Thought the GNU license supported commercialization?!
The death of professional Linux companies like VA will relegate Linux and open source back to the basements and dorm rooms of enthusiasts, and will see enterprise support wither away quicker than you can say "Mozilla"
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
600,000 JOBS FOR THE TAKING (Source: Publish.com) Despite corporate layoffs, employers confront a shortfall of technology workers. What's this about?
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Well, in efforts to show my support, I just ordered about 20K worth of servers from them. Probably won't make a difference on their bottom line, but it serves two good purposes: gets me linux servers (reasonably priced) so I can get my job done, and it makes me feel good by giving back to the Linux community. It's the same reason I acutally purchase copies of the RedHat OS's . I'm willing to support a good product with cash....
there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots
I had the pleasure of dealing VA. I was exploring whether we could employ OnSite or an offsite closed-source Sourceforge version. To start with it was extremely hard at the time to find anyone with VA who would deal with this at all. My emails were disappearing in some VA black-hole. It took them several weeks (after bouncing my messages through various incompetent employees) to actually deal with it. It looks to me as if they have too much money there and need to do zilch to support themselves.
damn i wish i had mod points for this one...
sulli
RTFJ.
Unfortunately, it will probably be too late when the coders realize that user interface and ease of use DOES matter. What can be done to kickstart an EASY distribution?
Couldn't agree with you more, dude, but the problem is that if you say it too loudly on Slashdot you're a "troll".
Don't worry, I'm sure ESR will see the importance of sourceforge to the open source community and deign to share with it some of his $41 million, er... $31 million, no wait... $400,000. Um, never mind. Don't call us Eric, we'll call you.
How about LAST post? What if /. closes tomorrow?
I agree 100%. It's not surprising that VA doesn't attract the kind of hysteria that Mac users had about the possible loss of Apple. I do think, though, that it's noteworthy that a company that puts so much effort into what you're supposed to do to be a good Linux citizen attracts zero sympathy and lots of jokes about how Rob and Jeff are going to be to flipping burgers or turning tricks.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Seriously, with market share being less than 5%, down from very sizable number in 80s one could easily conclude Apple is still on their deathbed.
Yeah, but that's 5% of a far larger total, and a rabidly loyal 5%, all of which buys high-margin Apple hardware and most of which spends a ton on software and peripherals. IMHO, which isn't worth a vast amount, Apple is continuing to tread water with flashy new hardware until OS X is ready for widespread use and has a good native software pool. If they can get it together in the next year or so and especially if Motorola ever figures out how to make faster G4's, Apple will grab 10-15% of the desktop market.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Clearly, one lesson is that having one of your board members write an article bragging about how much money he made on the IPO is unhelpful. But could it also be that the way to build a truly loyal user base is to make something that users think is worth paying for, not by telling one's users that they're heros who are owed the world gift-wrapped on a silver platter?
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
If a rumor was posted on that site's main page its all but released for public knowledge. Its very difficult times. The crash is starting to close down some of the best known websites, like we saw last week with Suck.com. The problem with open source is that there's no money in it. I believe one of the much touted ways companies were going to make money off of open source was to provide support and consulting for the software. These companies never really sprung up. What ended up happening was that it opened access to these extremely advanced systems to the public which learned them, and then went off to work at websites. Consulting co's could have formed a nucleus of an open source market. Instead we got caffienated beverages sponsoring the websites.
VALinux being a hardware supplier will of course suffer sales slowdowns with the rest of the market. Those kinds of servers, like VALinux and Penguin Computing make are for websites and NOCs, and so many IT budgets are frozen. So what happens when bastions of freedom suddenly need money? Will slashdot sell out? And by that I mean will we start seeing animercials ala zdnet? Possibly a licensing fee for slash code? Perhaps slashdot can sell moderation points on ebay? Will we need to accompany our link submissions with a 20 dollar processing fee? I'm of course kidding, I'm sure Slashdot's much too respectable for that, but it must be one of the highest trafficked sites that VALinux owns, and possibly on the internet period. Unfortunately it looks that the only company making money off the internet is AOL.
-- .sig are belong to us!
All your
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Please take a little more time to proofread CmdrTaco.
Reasonable expactations, man, reasonable expactations. That's all we ask.
Speaking of which, where's your comma?
Yeah sure, whatever, I'm not trying to make sense. I'm just trying to be funny.
In all actuality, though, he could just sell the domain. Remember when he put it up on eBay, and it got up to a few million?
the day when the headline @ fuckedcomapny is...."Rumor has it that FuckedCompany.com is planning on laying off a large number of employees. At this time, employees could not be reached for comment."
Maybe we should put some plans together for saving Slashdot, just in case...
Bush's education improvements were
It looks like things started going down hard last spring... Well before Bush took office. He just gets to clean up the mess that was due to overpriced stocks and too much speculation... not anything to do with Clinton or Bush really..
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
Microsoft Technical Support vs. The Psychic Friends Network...
http://www.bmug.org/news/articles/MSvsPF.html
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
It's usually a valid observation. Comparing your opponent to Hitler in the post WWII era is usually like a 17th-Century New Englander calling a hated rival a "witch." It evokes powerful fears in people and paints an unreasonably ugly picture. It's an ad hominem attack with a nuclear warhead. However, what a lot of dorks started to do was take the approach that any argument which tangentially mentioned Nazis or Hitler was automatically invalid, without taking the extra effort themselves of demonstrating why. That's as intellectually sloppy and logically invalid as an ad hominem attack.
Just picture Bush and Gore debating last year, and instead of responding to each other's positions with arguments of their own, they just stood there and said: "You're wrong. You're just attacking my character. You don't know what you're talking about" (of course, since I didn't watch them, for all I know that's exactly what they did). There's a rule in writing called show, don't tell.
When some Godwin-Nazi (heh!) comes up and says "Godwin's law! You lose!" it's irritating but I've noticed the only kind of closure it brings to the thread is to draw a bunch of ire down on the Godwin-Nazi, rather than on the original user of the Nazi or Hitler analogy. In a an amusing way, Godwin's law has become recursive. It now seems that any thread where it gets mentioned becomes a meaningless flame-war.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
As you're squeezing those sour grapes, consider this: According to many long-time IBMers, during the bad years company ended retaining all of the so-so people. The truly lazy and stupid were booted and the really smart and agressive took the money and ran.
:P
:)
/. /    |\/| |\/| |\/| / Run, Bill!
Which were you?
Ok, I must admit I got some money.
Sometime really dumb people would stay. A senior consultant wrongly estimated the project budget which ended up ten times overbudget. This particular project is still costing IBM a million each year(yes he has wrongly estimated the maintenance cost too!)
Guess what? That consultant got promoted for 'bidding a big project', and 1/2 project managers(1 at the beginning, 6 in the end) was fired/layoffed for bad project management(who can effectively manage a project with 1/10 budget?).
He's still there. His survival tips is to stay in the right tree of authority. In retrospective I should have accepted to transfer to R&D.
 _
I forgot where I read(may be here in /.) that /. is actually generate quite an amount of revenue, while sourceforge is in debt all the time. I'll post a 'Ask in /.' asking everybody suggestions to save no-so-good projects in VA to survive. :)
/. /    |\/| |\/| |\/| / Run, Bill!
 _
I'm lucky enough to work for IBM, in Durham, NC, in a job that mostly calls for Linux skills. So far, IBM has not laid anyone off, and is in fact, doing very well.
:)
/. /    |\/| |\/| |\/| / Run, Bill!
How long have you been in IBM? I, together with my teammates from R&D, were layoffed during 90's, because some idiots at that time focused on 'business and consultancy services'(i.e. they don't need no stinking R&D)
It's proven to be a biggest failure. IBM cannot live by offerring services alone.
When they told you IBM don't layoff they lie. Good luck.
 _
Man that is really not fair. Nobody knows everything. I've been tripped up by silly little things in areas that I would consider myself rather expertish. When a customer did ask him something he couldn't figure out at least he knew where to go get help, #debian would be a good place for help. Most importantly he asked, he didn't brush it off or try and BS his way through it.
:)
:)
/. /    |\/| |\/| |\/| / Run, Bill!
I happened to be a VA customers too and I think that'd be funny if I dialed to their technical end up meeting him in #debian asking me questions.
I think if more support people knew when to cut out and get more information there would be a lot more happy customer's in the world. This guy finding someone to help him out so he could, in turn, help his customer is a great endorsement for VA in my books.
I know I'm not being fair to this guy here. Let me explain in general. I've the very old preconception on technical support which I paid a lot of money for. HP were excellent in technical support because their engineers seemed to know everything. When they have complicated problems they will turn to global support repository until a solution comming out. Oracle, on the other hand, would even ask a portion of your code to help you debugging. That's what I mean in technical support. I definitely not refer to something like AOL technical support.
I hang around #debian a lot, and sometime there are some nasty trolls took calls and BS around; and more often you met with some BSD activists bashing Linux whenever people asking question(that's annoying, I know BSD is great, but so what, that's a linux channel. Can't they just shutup if they don't wanna help?). Of course there are lots more helpful and smart people but that's just not the service level a paid customer would expect of.
P.S. Normal commercial grade M1-3 tech support would cost you 5-25% of original purchase. That's quite a lot.
 _
Once I hanged around #debian helping a guy who was obviously knew just a little more than basic things.
/whois on him: valinux.com...
/. /    |\/| |\/| |\/| / Run, Bill!
He told me he's in a hurry because a customer was waiting for the answer as we spoke. Out of curiosity I did a
P.S. I know there are more good people in VA then lousy ones, so no hard feeling here okay?
 _
It's a sad and scary time right now...
/. Though, I doubt that this site would have any problems getting enough community support to survive, should it become necessary. I'd be more than willing to pay my share of $$$ to keep Slashdot alive.
Even as Linux is gaining ever MORE acceptance, the market is still going down. I'm lucky enough to work for IBM, in Durham, NC, in a job that mostly calls for Linux skills. So far, IBM has not laid anyone off, and is in fact, doing very well.
I HATE seeing this happen to VA. They make a great product. And I fear for what might happen to
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
Versal Game Engine.
So... This will be an opensource game engine. A lot of things will be interpreted in it, from 3dengine (opengl) to pathfinding, and so on. And it will be scriptable, so everyone will be able to make games, if he/she wants. It will be cool, I hope!
Development Status: 1 - Planning
Environment: Win32 (MS Windows), X11 Applications
Intended Audience: Developers, End Users/Desktop
License: GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL)
Natural Language: English
Operating System: Windows 95/98/2000, Linux
Programming Language: C++
Topic: Games/Entertainment, 3D Rendering, Software Development
Registered: 2001-01-11 12:46
Activity Percentile: 0%
View project activity statistics
So we've got a package registered as in the planning stage which has been active since January 1st 2001. The activity percentile is 0%, which means that after rounding every other package has been more active than this one. If I were to download it I'd only expect to get nothing or some insignificant fraction above that.
Microsoft will spin anything Open Source bad. If RMS was found with kiddy porn they'd happily label the whole community as a bunch of paedophiles.
Note to slashdot coders, your lameness filter is lame. I wasn't able to format this because your filter, no doubt coded in the advanced stages of ether withdrawl, complained. While you may think this prevents troll posts it doesn't, it only annoys users. A much better use of your times would be to collectively enroll in preschool and learn to spell.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
It means that another bulletin board website will need to be found to host all the inane Slashbots who are suddenly without a home.
Or it could be a cultural revolution not unlike the episode of the Simpsons wherein every kid rediscovers the joys of playing outdoors with other kids.
Of course using a Simpsons reference probably says something, but I'm not sure what.
Dancin Santa
I just went to FC and read through the posts there. Did anyone else notice a great deal of anger between FC posters and the slashdot crowd? What the heck? I'm not blaming it on either group since both seemed to picking their share fare of fights on the board. Did I miss something? Why is there so much contempt?
:-)
I'm not flaming or trolling, just a question because I'd really love to know if this has been a long standing thing that I was unaware of
If Slashdot goes, how else will we be able to stress test all those webservers out there?
would've sent this as an email, but there's no valid one there...
by law, this thread is terminated now.
"Geeks don't need formal support. "
Sure they do. If my company paid 80K for a piece of software that is supposed to do something, it better do it, and if I have any problems getting it to work I will not hesitate to call support.
...and you can't blame meteors for everything.
They still have http://www.valinux.com/about/jobs/
out there with bunch of different positions available.
...and you can't blame meteors for everything.
I had no idea what root meant before i installed linux...i am learning, slowly though. Linux must become easier to use, it is already more stable than windows, more secure than windows....now i just need to be able to do simple things like "mount" a secondary hard drive for all my illegal mp3s....i have no idea why i have to "mount" my hard disk and i can't because i don't know the correct superblock size...this is wrong...i shouldn't have to know what mounting is..it should just autodetect my hard drive and use it...is that too much to ask..and samba must be easier to use...i have spent 3 days trying to configure it...i can't get it talking to my windows boxes...really annoying cause if i was able to do these things on linux i would probably switch over all my computers to linux...but can't at this moment cause it is too hard to use...and i don't have time to learn it... that is my rant for now...linux programmers take note....btw...i am quite an advanced user when it comes to Windows systems...i have never used linux before and it is totally different...you must make linux easy for us to use....so we can all fuck bill gates and the microsoft machine
-OR_BraveHeart "there's nothing certain in life except death and taxes"
When Redhat was up for a while, they where able to do a 'second offering'. This allowed them to sell more shares at then current price (I think over $100/sh). Redhat was lucky enough to do this second offering before the bottom fell out of all the Internet/Linux stock and to pocket alot of cash.
Unfortunately for VA, their stock never stayed up long enough for VA to do this. This could have allowed them to have a large stash of cash for these hard-times.
Looking for any old 8-bit Heathkit/Zenith software/hardware - http://heathkit.garlanger.com
So although it's sad to see VA Linux get hit hard, it's also reassuring to know that WinTel powerhouses are seeing Linux as an important (but perhaps not yet significant) piece of the action.
The OBV reporter quoted a study which stated that CIOs who support Linux have very high faith in the established companies, but respect the service and reliability of VA Linux. (http://obvreport.com/ references a copy of the report - is the original off-line? Someone follow up if you can find the original!)
It's too bad that everyone can't survive. But given the strong market forces of both WinTel, Linux and MacOS, this should NOT be a surprise - even to the VCs!