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.
...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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
on Jon Katz.
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.
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
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
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
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.
How about LAST post? What if /. closes tomorrow?
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.
-- .sig are belong to us!
All your
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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."
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
If Slashdot goes, how else will we be able to stress test all those webservers out there?