Slashdot Mirror
Supporting Community Projects
Lulu has announced a new program of creating boxed sets around particular technologies. They've got Fedora Core 3, OpenOffice, Bugzilla, as well our little Slashcode . The boxes include documentation and the code on CD with the money going back to support the communities building it. Lulu also does a whole bunch of cool stuff around self-publishing for on-demand items.
I think part of the point of this stunt is the manuals, which are at least potentially better than anything you could get elsewhere. The books are written by Colin Charles http://www.bytebot.net/blog/index.php, who is an interesting guy. Lulu's strength is obviously in providing a distribution platform for unconventional books; in essence this is just a way to package software with the books.
http://MarketingType.com
"I couldn't find it now."
Huh??? http://www.rtr.com/
I use a combination of the Mixonic; custom CD-R printing and Jewelboxing; cases to make up bundles for my web clients. I deliver all of the project deliverables (code, images, initial database loads, etc.) as well as video tutorials on using the content management system, photo galleries and other tools installed on the site (using Wink) . The packaging uses one of my templates, but both the template for the CD and the packaging has slots for their logo and company information, so each bundle is completely customized to their company. The packaging really cements the client's confidence in the work done and it really ends up as an inconsequential cost with much higher benefits. It costs a little more than having 100 CD-R's printed all the same (5x more), but $5 is still dirt cheap for a serious web project. When I started doing this, it actually cut down dramatically on complaints about the bill size. They had something in hand to match up to the invoice. I'm amazed at the number of software companies, web design companies and others that just don't take the time to put a bit of polish into their presentation. I've paid $150 for software that came on a store-bought CD-R with Sharpie marker as the "label" and others with a cheap paper label sloppily slapped on the disc.
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
It should be officially released on the 8th, it goes out to mirrors tomorrow. Its going to be pretty ground breaking as far as any of the linux distros go. It'll have Gnome 2.8, the 2.6.9 kernel with SELinux support. The newest KDE, the new xorg server with xdamage and xcomposite extensions allowing true shadowing and transparency. And a ton of other nice features, too many to note here. Judging from the tests, this release is going to be the best one yet.
Regards,
Steve