I know people have been saying "well, this proves that the support model for Linux is broken," but that's not really the case. The reality is that this is a hard time for most businesses, especially fledgling ones. I think Linuxcare will be just fine -- and the support model will prove profitable ultimately. That it's not raking in megabucks now is a reflection on the current state of the economy more than anything else.
Linuxcare was designed to be distribution-agnostic and I'm glad this will mean they'll be able to untie themselves from a single distro -- and back toward that independence. Overall, I think that's better for Linuxcare.
Oh, and kudos to Art Tyde for hanging in there, it can't have been fun.
Well, this was posted on April Fool's, which, imho, it should be taken as pretty much.
You see, Eric doesn't understand women. And yes, I know him well enough to say that.
For one thing, the courtship token issue. A lot of women don't like them, not because they are too intrusive, but rather because they don't like what they represent. One has to find the appropriate level of gift at the appropriate time. It used to be flowers and candy, but for many modern women, either or both will be turn-offs at any time. And I disagree that these are "after sex" types of tokens. In fact, I think I'd be much more insulted if I'd received them right after! But if someone's interested and having trouble expressing that, flowers can be helpful in communicating that.
I'd also amend his point about having sex only with people you're prepared to love to the following, more realistic statement: have sex only with people with whom you're not only willing to love, but who you're willing to pay child support to for 18 years. You see, the choice of whether or not there's a child isn't your choice, ultimately, and no method of contraception is foolproof. If you're not ready to have a child and the costs thereof, keep zipped unless you know the outcome could not possibly produce a child.
One key point he misses: Women have an ability to turn off sexual interest (as distinct from romantic interest) for long periods in ways that guys don't. Like the chronic interest in men, it is a biological feature of women. This is one key reason women don't think the way men do.
I didn't work at Be long (the position I was hired for was filled prematurely), but, of all the places I've been at, it's the one I miss the most.
But here's a few lessons that I learned that Be did right (and other companies I've worked for, such as Linuxcare, didn't):
Have a clear focus. Sure, it'll have to change over time, but have one anyway.
Focus on what you want to produce, rather than "IPO in 18 months."
It's better to grow slowly over the course of years than sell out to VCs early. For one thing, this means you don't have to have prissy furniture.
In Menlo Park, you can get REALLY good couches at garage sales (where Be's couches come from).
A good company has movie nights in the staff lounge.
A good company has the CEO on the engineering floor.
Espresso machines are a necessity, not a luxury (but, unlike TiVo, Be's were clearly used machines).
I don't think I've ever had the pleasure of working with a group of people who were, on average, as multi-talented as those I knew at Be. Hang in there, all of you.
I'm writing this via my own Northpoint DSL line (through via.net), so I can assure you it's still on here, though it worries me that I might have to move to alternate IP addresses before my new line is turned on on 4/7.
ObDisclaimer: I work for TiVo, specifically, if your box harfs and we need to diagnose it using info from the logs, I'm one of the people that does that. I don't work with the viewing (aka "private") logs, only the "public" logs (temperature, file system, kernel messages, etc.).
TiVo is paranoid enough about your privacy that when they do upload the viewing logs, they are given a creation date and time that's bogus so they can't be matched to the "public" logs. Or to the time you called in. Even if I knew when you called and what you watched and had access, I'd have no way of matching which viewing log went with which machine.
Naturally, no one at the "Privacy Foundation" sought to see what was implemented on the *server* side of the process to ensure anyone's privacy.
But, getting back to all this, why is such information useful? Because shows are expensive to produce. Because airtime is expensive. Because the information about what someone who watches A also watches might be of interest to someone. Like an advertiser.
Perhaps, in the future, better information will help prevent cancelling my favorite shows (like Total Recall 2070 and Cleopatra 2525). Perhaps companies will realize the value of syndication for hour-long quality dramas. Perhaps it'll help open more markets.
And, while I'm in the middle of this commentary, perhaps it'll mean that we get MORE diversity in shows. For example, science fiction author Steven Barnes makes the point that the first show in which an African-American actor: 1) received top billing; 2) for an hour-long drama; 3) that lasted more than one season was Avery Brooks for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Isn't that about 40 years too late?
And so we have Gina Torres, a Hispanic African-American actress, who may well be the second. And the show gets cancelled. Yeah, Cleo isn't exactly as serious as DS9, but it is a solid show. If you care, please write to feedback@studiosusa.com and program@www.scifi.com. After all, it's better than half the original series on SciFi.
They are an acquisition target, as are a number of other companies we both know well. There are some big boys out there who want to buy Linux expertise in a working company today, rather than build it. That is why Eazel is not laying off the key developers - they know where their value is.
In order to be a viable acquisition target, the expected added benefits have to exceed the expected added costs. And I don't see that they do in Eazel's case. Or any of several other cases.
As a friend pointed out after one company laid off people, "well, we'll still get about 70% of the benefit of his work regardless." This is a part of the problem, you see: for a normal coder, a business gets 100% of the benefit of their work. There's a much greater disincentive to keep open source developers if one is paying market rates (especially in Silicon Valley) and only reaping an additional 30% over what one would have gotten without spending a dime.
So, you see, those coders may be worth, to any acquisition targets, about 30% of what they're being paid. That, plus Eazel's business model wasn't making sense to even people in-house, well the two of those together spell doom and gloom to me. But then I'm a cheery sort.
Too many companies think that the way to make it is to go public. What is wrong with a privately held, privately run group? No shareholders to appease, the freedom to do what you feel is really important, the ability to maintain control. Many private companies are often more tight-knit, smaller but very agile. Too many want to jump on the good-ole IPO bnadwagon.
First, a misconcepton: even private companies have shareholders. Being private does not mean the founders are in control. Quite the contrary, as anyone from Linuxcare could tell you. It all depends on how one financed the startup and what one had to give away in terms of equity to get there.
Most of the "dot com" strategy in terms of financing was to grow to the point where there was a significant economy of scale.
One problem: growing a company is very expensive. It's virtually impossible to grow significantly AND turn a profit. You'll note a lot of profitable times come after scaling back. There's good reasons for that.
So really the IPO bit is about growing to the point where one can make significant profit easier. Sure, it's a gamble. It's often a really bad idea.
In summary, it's already way too late for Eazel on these matters: they likely already gave away most of the control for VC funding.
But if they go down (and that's a very big if), the code is way past the bootstrap stage and is certain to remain alive.
Oh Bruce, give it a rest. They've never had a viable revenue model -- even their developers know that (and geeks are not the most finance-savvy community).
The only reason they're still around at all is that they got funding just before it got hard to get.
I expect they'll go the way of several other companies (like SiteRock formerly CapTech) and pull back on some of the core open source/free software (pick your terminology of choice) stuff they're doing because It Does Not Fulfill The Investor's Requirements For Profit.
"how can a religion have trade secrets???"
Several a.r.s. regulars and I went over this at one point. There are some perfectly ordinary trade secrets that I have no problem with a church having: for example, "customer lists." Who is or is not a member (or former member) of a religion should be at least as protected, if not more so, than who is or is not a customer of a given business.
That said, I don't believe that there is or should EVER be any protection for doctrine as a trade secret. This is in flagrant violation of the first amendment's right to freedom of religion: I should be able to practice the exorcism of body thetans whether or not I'm a scientologist (I don't, but I should be able to if I wanted).
So, imho, scientology ultimately needs to decide one of two things:
Is it going to be a business and pay taxes? (upside: protects "docrine" as a legit trade secret; downsides: cost, loses "confessional" privileges) OR
Is it going to be a church and have to open its doctrine? (downside: no trade secret on doctrine; upsides: lower cost, keeps "confessional" privileges)
Knowing what I know, it will probably ultimately go for #2 even though it wants to have its cake and eat it too.
Ahhh, the old troll about evil Intel coaxing Be into dropping PPC support. Be still supports the older PowerMacs which they have the hardware specs to. They don't support any newer Macs because Apple won't release the specs.
Well, that's mostly true. When I worked at Be, I was told that I could write the stuff to support the newer machines on my own time if I wished -- and if it was deemed stable enough, it would be rolled in. I was starting to evaluate it. But, basically, they focused their energy on the non-PPC platform, which, imho, is a shame.
From the point of view of contract law, "sign or be fired" is an offer of valuable consideration (continued employment) in exchange for valuable consideration to the other party (non-competition with them).
No, because the fundamental concept of a contract requires that it be an arm's length transaction -- and that's not. It is instead a hostage situation.
?? an offer without mentioning a non-compete and you accepted it, you have a contract. If they add additional strings to it with a "do-or-die" clause, they have breached.
That's pretty straightforward, no?
In the case of a company that came by with a new "agreement" I simply point out that an agreement isn't binding without all six elements of a contract, one of which is that each side has "valuable consideration." If they want to offer me valuable consideration (continued employment is insufficient) for signing an additional agreement, well, we'll have to negotiate that.
One example is the "agreement" passed around at Linuxcare about the new employee handbook. It purported to cancel all previous contracts (such as the one for salary and stock options). I returned my own form stating that I had read and unerstood the employee manual -- but not that I'd agreed to it. No one ever said a word.
Unfortunately, I've *had* to learn to be tough as nails in this business because, over 25 years, I really HAVE seen every kind of sleazy stunt pulled.
Since so many geeks are in California but are
asked to sign non-competes anyway, I thought
I'd give a pointer to California law. I remember another section but couldn't find it quickly.
16600. Except as provided in this chapter, every contract by which anyone is restrained from engaging in a lawful profession, trade, or business of any kind is to that extent void.
Cheers to Zack for providing this excellent service despite being laid off by Linuxcare.
Actually, Zack was hired by Linuxcare because he wrote Kernel Traffic and Kernel Cousins. They probably thought, "hey, it's GPLed, and if we lay him off we'll get it anyway so why are we paying him for it?"
They recently fired Zack Brown, who does Kernel Traffic. It's now at http://kt.zork.net
He wasn't fired -- he was part of the layoffs.
Sorry to hear that you're unemployed, you were one of the shining stars of the old Linuxcare too. Glad to hear you're still in Italy; you always seemed the most vivacious while speaking Italian.
Hmm, prior attempt to post didn't seem to take....
Assuming that the new shares are issued at the market value of the company at the date of offering, then there is no decrease in per-share values.
Well, that would be true if they were going to keep the cash in the bank, but that's not why it's being raised. It's being raised in order to be spent. Thus, while shares are sold for cash (less the expenses of raising said cash, which are quite significant), it does result in dilution.
The hope is that said investment will allow the company to invest it wisely and ultimately grow into a mature company that turns a consistent profit. However, growth is extremely expensive and it's almost impossible to grow significantly AND turn a profit. That's why we have IPOs in part -- to allow many investors to help take a company through that transition period.
That said, growth can't be done just for growth's sake -- ultimately it has to result in profit, leading to increased assets and therefore increased equity.
Unfortunately, what we've seen in the dot com sector and, to a lesser extent, the Linux sector is a lot of growth for growth's sake with little real business to back it up. In other words, there's been a whole lot of effort that's been misdirected and wasted.
The reining in of the capital markets is simply a signal of "enough growth, show me the money." And a lot of companies haven't been able to do that. EToys, for example.
However, I think VA is a much more solid company and will do just fine.
I work for a startup semiconductor company, and last summer it became obvious that the only thing preventing us from being profitable was our debt.
Without going into the long form (which would require me to review the thinking that went into such decisions and that would, alas, make my brain hurt), this is precisely why my finance prof said that nobody sane loaned tech companies money.
This doesn't, of course, mean that loans don't happen. In part, loans can happen as an interim measure where equity financing is expected (i.e., as in your company, the liability is going to transform from debt to equity).
There are certain businesses where it makes more sense to have a debt load than an equity load and certain businesses where it's the other way.
It is generally a better option, at least in tech, to finance capital through equity rather than through debt. This is why the venture capitalists have been getting rich off the tech boom and the banks haven't.
So VA Linux doubled its revenue, but it missed its loss projects by $.02/share. This necessitates a 25% cut. Can someone explain why?
The reason VA cut staff that much was that the cost of capital was very high. As my old finance prof said, "no one with any sense loans a tech company money." So, what do they do? They have to issue equity, which dilutes the value existing shares.
Quick example: say I have 1M shares outstanding worth $5 each. I need to raise $1M. This means I can issue another.2M shares, which basically means, since the company has no more assets, that each share is worth 5/6 (1M old shares / 1.2M new shares) what it was before. That's what dilution means.
This requires the permission of the shareholders, who are basically therefore asked to vote on two possibilities:
Dilute your share value (say, from $7 per share to $5 per share) and continue losing gobs of money.
Cut costs dramatically so that the company will make money and, ultimately, the share price will increase, say from $7 to $10.
Let's say you own 100,000 shares of VA and that the vote is therefore: "Do I want my $700k investment to be worth $500k in a year or $1,000k in a year?"
Any sane shareholder is going to say, "I want you to increase the value of my investment in your company." Right? Remember, the whole purpose of the company is to make the shareholders money.
So that's why the layoffs.
It's not a personal thing, it's just that they had to operate based on expectations. They were wrong. A lot of companies were wrong.
The code is based on a different imaging model (PDF, instead of postscript) and seems to be mostly new.
Postscript and PDF really aren't that different, at least from the imaging model concept. For example, in display postscript, there were half a billion PDF readers. Anyone could write one, it was only a few lines of code. The reason they went to Display PDF was that it kept them out of royalty agreements with Adobe that they wanted out of -- without fundamentally changing the code base.
Far more work was done in porting the OpenSTEP stuff from x86 to PowerPC.
As far as Aqua being new, yeah, it's a new LOOK. Big woop. Yes, it's gorgeous. I love it. I use it at home. But it's not fundamental.
Well, I assume that The GIMP, and all the other GTK+ programs, will be programed for GTK+, and only for GTK+.
GTK+ will probably get a port to Aqua, at which point X on X would be worth much less than it is now.
GTK+ is a good solid toolkit and I don't see any special reason why it just couldn't be wrapped around Quartz (Aqua is the look, Quartz is the GUI layer).
I know there are projects to port GTK+ to both Quartz and Classic. Given that and the other GTK+ ports (to Windows and BeOS, among others), that would make GTK+ the one truly universal GUI toolkit.
Providing, that is, that any of us have time to work on these projects.::sigh::
"It seems to me that other computer platforms, such as the mac and windows and so forth, are moving onwards and upwards with their windowing systems, whilst Unix lags behind, to a small degree."
Funny, what is called Quartz (the Display PDF model in MacOS X) is older than a stable X11. X wasn't used on the NeXT because it wasn't stable *yet*. Weird how we think of Quartz as being new when it's old.
I agree with you that it would be MUCH better if we all moved away from X11, taking the good with and forgetting the stuff that could be better designed. I haven't seriously looked at Berlin, nor, given that I like Aqua and Quartz a lot, am I likely to.
Slashdot Mirror
I know people have been saying "well, this proves that the support model for Linux is broken," but that's not really the case. The reality is that this is a hard time for most businesses, especially fledgling ones. I think Linuxcare will be just fine -- and the support model will prove profitable ultimately. That it's not raking in megabucks now is a reflection on the current state of the economy more than anything else.
Linuxcare was designed to be distribution-agnostic and I'm glad this will mean they'll be able to untie themselves from a single distro -- and back toward that independence. Overall, I think that's better for Linuxcare.
Oh, and kudos to Art Tyde for hanging in there, it can't have been fun.
You see, Eric doesn't understand women. And yes, I know him well enough to say that.
For one thing, the courtship token issue. A lot of women don't like them, not because they are too intrusive, but rather because they don't like what they represent. One has to find the appropriate level of gift at the appropriate time. It used to be flowers and candy, but for many modern women, either or both will be turn-offs at any time. And I disagree that these are "after sex" types of tokens. In fact, I think I'd be much more insulted if I'd received them right after! But if someone's interested and having trouble expressing that, flowers can be helpful in communicating that.
I'd also amend his point about having sex only with people you're prepared to love to the following, more realistic statement: have sex only with people with whom you're not only willing to love, but who you're willing to pay child support to for 18 years. You see, the choice of whether or not there's a child isn't your choice, ultimately, and no method of contraception is foolproof. If you're not ready to have a child and the costs thereof, keep zipped unless you know the outcome could not possibly produce a child.
One key point he misses: Women have an ability to turn off sexual interest (as distinct from romantic interest) for long periods in ways that guys don't. Like the chronic interest in men, it is a biological feature of women. This is one key reason women don't think the way men do.
_Deirdre
But here's a few lessons that I learned that Be did right (and other companies I've worked for, such as Linuxcare, didn't):
- Have a clear focus. Sure, it'll have to change over time, but have one anyway.
- Focus on what you want to produce, rather than "IPO in 18 months."
- It's better to grow slowly over the course of years than sell out to VCs early. For one thing, this means you don't have to have prissy furniture.
- In Menlo Park, you can get REALLY good couches at garage sales (where Be's couches come from).
- A good company has movie nights in the staff lounge.
- A good company has the CEO on the engineering floor.
- Espresso machines are a necessity, not a luxury (but, unlike TiVo, Be's were clearly used machines).
I don't think I've ever had the pleasure of working with a group of people who were, on average, as multi-talented as those I knew at Be. Hang in there, all of you._Deirdre
_Deirdre
TiVo is paranoid enough about your privacy that when they do upload the viewing logs, they are given a creation date and time that's bogus so they can't be matched to the "public" logs. Or to the time you called in. Even if I knew when you called and what you watched and had access, I'd have no way of matching which viewing log went with which machine.
Naturally, no one at the "Privacy Foundation" sought to see what was implemented on the *server* side of the process to ensure anyone's privacy.
But, getting back to all this, why is such information useful? Because shows are expensive to produce. Because airtime is expensive. Because the information about what someone who watches A also watches might be of interest to someone. Like an advertiser.
Perhaps, in the future, better information will help prevent cancelling my favorite shows (like Total Recall 2070 and Cleopatra 2525). Perhaps companies will realize the value of syndication for hour-long quality dramas. Perhaps it'll help open more markets.
And, while I'm in the middle of this commentary, perhaps it'll mean that we get MORE diversity in shows. For example, science fiction author Steven Barnes makes the point that the first show in which an African-American actor: 1) received top billing; 2) for an hour-long drama; 3) that lasted more than one season was Avery Brooks for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Isn't that about 40 years too late?
And so we have Gina Torres, a Hispanic African-American actress, who may well be the second. And the show gets cancelled. Yeah, Cleo isn't exactly as serious as DS9, but it is a solid show. If you care, please write to feedback@studiosusa.com and program@www.scifi.com. After all, it's better than half the original series on SciFi.
_Deirdre
In order to be a viable acquisition target, the expected added benefits have to exceed the expected added costs. And I don't see that they do in Eazel's case. Or any of several other cases.
As a friend pointed out after one company laid off people, "well, we'll still get about 70% of the benefit of his work regardless." This is a part of the problem, you see: for a normal coder, a business gets 100% of the benefit of their work. There's a much greater disincentive to keep open source developers if one is paying market rates (especially in Silicon Valley) and only reaping an additional 30% over what one would have gotten without spending a dime.
So, you see, those coders may be worth, to any acquisition targets, about 30% of what they're being paid. That, plus Eazel's business model wasn't making sense to even people in-house, well the two of those together spell doom and gloom to me. But then I'm a cheery sort.
_Deirdre
First, a misconcepton: even private companies have shareholders. Being private does not mean the founders are in control. Quite the contrary, as anyone from Linuxcare could tell you. It all depends on how one financed the startup and what one had to give away in terms of equity to get there.
Most of the "dot com" strategy in terms of financing was to grow to the point where there was a significant economy of scale.
One problem: growing a company is very expensive. It's virtually impossible to grow significantly AND turn a profit. You'll note a lot of profitable times come after scaling back. There's good reasons for that.
So really the IPO bit is about growing to the point where one can make significant profit easier. Sure, it's a gamble. It's often a really bad idea.
In summary, it's already way too late for Eazel on these matters: they likely already gave away most of the control for VC funding.
_Deirdre
Oh Bruce, give it a rest. They've never had a viable revenue model -- even their developers know that (and geeks are not the most finance-savvy community).
The only reason they're still around at all is that they got funding just before it got hard to get.
I expect they'll go the way of several other companies (like SiteRock formerly CapTech) and pull back on some of the core open source/free software (pick your terminology of choice) stuff they're doing because It Does Not Fulfill The Investor's Requirements For Profit.
_Deirdre
That said, I don't believe that there is or should EVER be any protection for doctrine as a trade secret. This is in flagrant violation of the first amendment's right to freedom of religion: I should be able to practice the exorcism of body thetans whether or not I'm a scientologist (I don't, but I should be able to if I wanted).
So, imho, scientology ultimately needs to decide one of two things:
Knowing what I know, it will probably ultimately go for #2 even though it wants to have its cake and eat it too.
_Deirdre
Well, that's mostly true. When I worked at Be, I was told that I could write the stuff to support the newer machines on my own time if I wished -- and if it was deemed stable enough, it would be rolled in. I was starting to evaluate it. But, basically, they focused their energy on the non-PPC platform, which, imho, is a shame.
_Deirdre
No, because the fundamental concept of a contract requires that it be an arm's length transaction -- and that's not. It is instead a hostage situation.
_Deirdre
"If a company makes you an offer without mentioning a non-compete and you accepted it, you have a contract."
I previewed it and it looked fine, it just garbled upon posting. Gar.
_Deirdre
That's pretty straightforward, no?
In the case of a company that came by with a new "agreement" I simply point out that an agreement isn't binding without all six elements of a contract, one of which is that each side has "valuable consideration." If they want to offer me valuable consideration (continued employment is insufficient) for signing an additional agreement, well, we'll have to negotiate that.
One example is the "agreement" passed around at Linuxcare about the new employee handbook. It purported to cancel all previous contracts (such as the one for salary and stock options). I returned my own form stating that I had read and unerstood the employee manual -- but not that I'd agreed to it. No one ever said a word.
Unfortunately, I've *had* to learn to be tough as nails in this business because, over 25 years, I really HAVE seen every kind of sleazy stunt pulled.
_Deirdre
California Business & Professions Code 16600-16607.
Special point of interest:
16600. Except as provided in this chapter, every contract by which anyone is restrained from engaging in a lawful profession, trade, or business of any kind is to that extent void.
Note: IANAL
Actually, Zack was hired by Linuxcare because he wrote Kernel Traffic and Kernel Cousins. They probably thought, "hey, it's GPLed, and if we lay him off we'll get it anyway so why are we paying him for it?"
The more you think about it, the more it sucks.
_Deirdre
He wasn't fired -- he was part of the layoffs.
Sorry to hear that you're unemployed, you were one of the shining stars of the old Linuxcare too. Glad to hear you're still in Italy; you always seemed the most vivacious while speaking Italian.
_Deirdre
Assuming that the new shares are issued at the market value of the company at the date of offering, then there is no decrease in per-share values.
Well, that would be true if they were going to keep the cash in the bank, but that's not why it's being raised. It's being raised in order to be spent. Thus, while shares are sold for cash (less the expenses of raising said cash, which are quite significant), it does result in dilution.
The hope is that said investment will allow the company to invest it wisely and ultimately grow into a mature company that turns a consistent profit. However, growth is extremely expensive and it's almost impossible to grow significantly AND turn a profit. That's why we have IPOs in part -- to allow many investors to help take a company through that transition period.
That said, growth can't be done just for growth's sake -- ultimately it has to result in profit, leading to increased assets and therefore increased equity.
Unfortunately, what we've seen in the dot com sector and, to a lesser extent, the Linux sector is a lot of growth for growth's sake with little real business to back it up. In other words, there's been a whole lot of effort that's been misdirected and wasted.
The reining in of the capital markets is simply a signal of "enough growth, show me the money." And a lot of companies haven't been able to do that. EToys, for example.
However, I think VA is a much more solid company and will do just fine.
_Deirdre
That's right in the TiVo/Palm/Transmeta stomping grounds. If anyone has further info, I'd appreciate it. _Deirdre
Without going into the long form (which would require me to review the thinking that went into such decisions and that would, alas, make my brain hurt), this is precisely why my finance prof said that nobody sane loaned tech companies money.
This doesn't, of course, mean that loans don't happen. In part, loans can happen as an interim measure where equity financing is expected (i.e., as in your company, the liability is going to transform from debt to equity).
There are certain businesses where it makes more sense to have a debt load than an equity load and certain businesses where it's the other way.
It is generally a better option, at least in tech, to finance capital through equity rather than through debt. This is why the venture capitalists have been getting rich off the tech boom and the banks haven't.
_Deirdre
The reason VA cut staff that much was that the cost of capital was very high. As my old finance prof said, "no one with any sense loans a tech company money." So, what do they do? They have to issue equity, which dilutes the value existing shares.
Quick example: say I have 1M shares outstanding worth $5 each. I need to raise $1M. This means I can issue another .2M shares, which basically means, since the company has no more assets, that each share is worth 5/6 (1M old shares / 1.2M new shares) what it was before. That's what dilution means.
This requires the permission of the shareholders, who are basically therefore asked to vote on two possibilities:
Let's say you own 100,000 shares of VA and that the vote is therefore: "Do I want my $700k investment to be worth $500k in a year or $1,000k in a year?"
Any sane shareholder is going to say, "I want you to increase the value of my investment in your company." Right? Remember, the whole purpose of the company is to make the shareholders money.
So that's why the layoffs.
It's not a personal thing, it's just that they had to operate based on expectations. They were wrong. A lot of companies were wrong.
_Deirdre
NeXTSTEP was Display Postscript.
Quartz is Display PDF.
They are fundamentally same except that Apple doesn't have to pay Adobe any more and Quartz has the Aqua look-and-feel and NeXTSTEP didn't.
_Deirdre
Postscript and PDF really aren't that different, at least from the imaging model concept. For example, in display postscript, there were half a billion PDF readers. Anyone could write one, it was only a few lines of code. The reason they went to Display PDF was that it kept them out of royalty agreements with Adobe that they wanted out of -- without fundamentally changing the code base.
Far more work was done in porting the OpenSTEP stuff from x86 to PowerPC.
As far as Aqua being new, yeah, it's a new LOOK. Big woop. Yes, it's gorgeous. I love it. I use it at home. But it's not fundamental.
_Deirdre
GTK+ will probably get a port to Aqua, at which point X on X would be worth much less than it is now.
GTK+ is a good solid toolkit and I don't see any special reason why it just couldn't be wrapped around Quartz (Aqua is the look, Quartz is the GUI layer).
I know there are projects to port GTK+ to both Quartz and Classic. Given that and the other GTK+ ports (to Windows and BeOS, among others), that would make GTK+ the one truly universal GUI toolkit.
Providing, that is, that any of us have time to work on these projects. ::sigh::
_Deirdre
Funny, what is called Quartz (the Display PDF model in MacOS X) is older than a stable X11. X wasn't used on the NeXT because it wasn't stable *yet*. Weird how we think of Quartz as being new when it's old.
I agree with you that it would be MUCH better if we all moved away from X11, taking the good with and forgetting the stuff that could be better designed. I haven't seriously looked at Berlin, nor, given that I like Aqua and Quartz a lot, am I likely to.
_Deirdre
C'mon Tom, you worked there with me and your login is "AIXadmin." Gimme a break. Last I heard you were at Apple.
Besides, you knew at the time that I *preferred* MacOS X Server - I just realized it was only a pragmatic choice for one hardware platform.
I still love Linux, work with it every day. But it doesn't have the warm fuzzy appeal that MacOS X has -- and I doubt it ever will.
_Deirdre