Yeah, Here's the thing, genius. I like debian. I like gentoo. Why? They don't charge HUNDREDS OF FREAKING DOLLARS for the same stuff that's in redhat!
My point wasn't to point out things that redhat didn't write... it was to make the point that they were selling (for LOTS of money) stuff that they didn't write and that all the other distros give away for free.
And like Gigs said in a previous post, I'm happy for their PHB and shareholders that their financial windfall has been so great. Doesn't mean I'm happy about the small business aspect.
I really wouldn't mind sending money in Red Hat's direction, except that I'd never be able to justify it nowadays. They charge too much for something I already get for free, and do not accept small donations AFAIK.
That's EXACTLY how I feel. We used to buy the commercial versions of the RedHat CDs - at about $30-$50 per box, with a dead-tree install guide. I thought that was more than fair - no license issues, no time limits, and we're still supporting them. I would have even given them money as a donation.
Now, it's the same product, but it's thousands of dollars over the product life cycle.
The reason that I and many others don't like redhat is becaus they're not "making a buck", they're making millions and millions of dollars while screwing small business.
I worked at a place that used RedHat almost exclusively on our servers (and some of these were customer's servers, some were ours). We used 7.1-7.3, 8.0, and 9. We liked them all. Heck, I still really like 7.3.
But, all of a sudden, out of the blue, RedHat announced "no more free linux from us". Then, they released RHEL, and it was a couple of months before they announced Fedora Core was coming out. RHEL pricing is completely insane. It's VASTLY more expensive than freaking WINDOWS. $180 for a workstation version, with NO SUPPORT and ONE YEAR of software updates?? Jesus. WinXP costs $180, but it comes with support, and at least 5 years of updates, 10 for security fixes. Plus, Microsoft doesn't ask you to repurchase every year to get more support. Want RHEL Server? Minimum you're going to pay is $300+, and that's again, without phone support, whithout installation support, and only a year of software updates. People talk about them making money on support... I don't see any support coming from them excepting when you pay out the nose.
RHEL is the reason that there's a grain of truth to those studies about TCO of linux.
And people point to Fedora... Well, fedora is only supported for 6 months at a time, and then you go through a violent upgrade cycle if you want to stay current. Plus, I'm not going to do their beta testing for them. Screw that. Test your own damn product; you sure are making enough money.
There's also issues about the effort put into it. For one: I keep hearing people say that redhat contributes "Millions" to the open source community. Where? And is it significant compared to the return they get on it? Are they only doing it because it benifits them? I know they pay the salaries of several people who are "RedHat employees", but really just kernel hack, but Millions? Really? For two: They DIDN'T EVEN WRITE THEIR DAMN SOFTWARE. As bad as Windows is (and it is), at least Microsoft wrote it. Redhat took the same shit that everyone else has in their distros, packaged it, and added a few configuration utilities and a logo.
Maybe it's just that all of a sudden, when I worked in Webhosting, the razor-thin margins that were there on servers dissappeared when we realized that we were going to have to pass along $600+/yr to our clients in order to give them the support they needed, or leave them in the lurch with an unsupported redhat 9.0 that had only been out for 8 months... but, really... screw redhat.
"If you have to ask, you don't know Linux or Open Source". Right. I know redhat. And no thanks.
Look, I know what ssh does, and you know what ssh does, and we think nothing of it - I use it every day, and you probably do, too.
But, the fact remains: If you're willing to hire someone at $30,000/yr, and you require them to know how to use SSH, and people who know who live in San Jose require $60,000/yr, you're not going to get anyone. The practical matter that it isn't a hard concept to understand doesn't negate the fact that it differentiates column A from column B.
The obvious answer is to find a bright kid willing to work at $30k, and teach them.
If you require A qualification at B payrate, and people who have A qualification require 2xB payrate, you're not going to get a lot of quality people, and the ones you do get will leave quickly for better jobs.
Yeah, when our first was on the way, we'd go to a store, burger king, or pretty much anywhere, and everyone would ask my wife if she was pregnant. No, moron, she's smuggling a beach ball. I mean she weighed 120 lbs before she got pregnant, and she's 6 ft tall... it was pretty obvious. And then, all of 'em would ask if it was our first, and when we told people that it was, the only answer we ever got is "Ooooh, everything in your life is about to change".
I mean, on the one hand, I got so sick of hearing it, I used to scowl at people. And on the other hand, our lives were going to continue on, we were still going to be the same people... just with the added person in the family.
Plus, we got several different copies of the childhood encyclopedia-type books, which only scare you and don't offer much help.
I've said this before in similar threads, and you're hitting on the same point. The key to not getting your job outsourced, or not getting yourself replaced by someone else at half the cost, is to be a ground-pounder.
I did it for a little over a year. It's not glorious work, and the pay isn't great, but... there will always be people (end users, small business, and corporate users) who will be willing to pay to have someone else show up physically and either install new stuff or correct screwed up existing stuff. If you're that guy, you're not replaceable with someone in Korea or India - because you have to be *there*, physically, and anyone else they bring into the area is going to run into all the same cost of living problems that you and everyone else there has - you're going to have to pay your Indian (dots not feathers) guy $50k, too, so he can afford the same apartment as everyone else in a 30 mile radius.
Not to mention: Building relationships with your corporate consulting clients is about the best job security. Even if your employer can find someone to work at 1/2 the rate with 2x the experience, they don't have the hands-on and face-to-face with the current customers. Sometimes those trust relationships take years to build, but lead to very profitable contracts or sales; that's a good thing for everyone involved - the customer gets someone who he/she trusts implicitly, with reason; the company makes money; and the tech gets job security.
It ain't great, but if you're desperate for work, you gotta do what you gotta do.
When I was a student at Virginia Tech, Ingersol-Rand used to hand out t-shirts at trade shows that said "Ingersol-Rand Hires Hokies". They were mainly looking for engineers, but the point is the same.
Give your resume to teksystems or any number of a hundred consulting firms in the DC area, or put your resume on Monster / Career Builder, with preferred area in Virginia, and you'll get a call a day. For starters, there's a LOT of infrastructure in the Reston / Fairfax area. Additionally, due to wasteful government spending, there's litterally billions of dollars of Department of Homeland Security contracts floating free.
At the local super walmart, they have a clean water dispenser that's coin-op. Just bring your own gallon or 5 gallon jugs, and you won't have to pay for the container again and again. That's kind of nice. It's $0.25/gallon, but whatever, a 5 Gal container of water is like $12.
See, that's why *I* don't use iTunes... it's not because the songs are compressed. It's because I want to buy albums. I pointed this out once before, that I didn't want to pay $26 for Rancid 2000 when it's only 37 minutes worth of music, versus $12 for a new Metallica CD that's got 66 minutes of $sys$torture music on it.
Someone once told me that there's a ceiling for albums on iTunes - if you buy the whole album, you don't pay more than $10 or $12 or whatever... but if that isn't, or is no longer, the case... I want nothing to do with it.
Find a university somewhere you want to live and work for them.
I say that because 1.) it's what I just did, and 2.) there tend to be universities in the "middle of nowhere", where there's little to no crime, lots of bandwidth, low cost of living, inexpensive apartments / townhouses, and a higher standard of living (college towns usually have more sales and alcohol tax revenue than they know what to do with).
I turned down $75k at network solutions because I'll be damned if I wanted to live in Dulles or Fairfax. $75k doesn't even begin to cover the expenses of having to buy a house at 750k+, lunch every day at $15+, and a commute around the Beltway. I just moved to southwest virginia and am working for my alma-matter, Virginia Tech, at substantially less than I would make working in D.C., but substantially more than is required to live a comfortable life. Plus, I live in a town with 20,000 residents and 30,000 students with little to no crime and a very high standard of living, including fantastic public parks for my 18 month old to play at, excellent public transportation, and all the bandwidth I can shake a torrent at.
Not to mention the possibility that CSI will now become something of a reality: Now, they submit those DNA samples to the lab, and get results back in a matter of minutes, when we all know that in reality, forensic investigative DNA testing takes a week or two minimum.
And good lord, my brain doesn't function at this time of morning - my fingers just wrote "DNS" when I asked them to write "DNA".
To quote my wife, who has read them all (ender's game, speaker for the dead, xenocide, children of the mind, ender's shadow, shadow of the hegemon, shadow puppets, as well as Songmaster, the call of earth, and probably more - she reads alot):
"Orson Scott Card is an author who can't write a sequel to save his life."
Right, but if I understand you correctly, what you're suggesting is to hide the more complex stuff from the casual user, and I think that's not a bad idea. The target of my aggression, the grandparent poster, wouldn't have wanted that - if you read his posts, he was looking for a way to "configure the minimum amount of stuff for security reasons". Giving him a simple config file, and telling him there were more advanced options somewhere else, wouldn't have helped him, because he wanted to go through and turn off or get rid of everything he didn't need.
1.) I feel dumber and somehow less useful to society if I watch star trek or CSI on spike tv, but I do it anyway
2.) If anyone says in public what you just said (white males are facing an identity crisis in a sea of minorities where society expects nothing good to come from them and they have no role models), you're accused of being a member of the Aryan Brotherhood or the Imperial Klans of America.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, Here's the thing, genius. I like debian. I like gentoo. Why? They don't charge HUNDREDS OF FREAKING DOLLARS for the same stuff that's in redhat!
My point wasn't to point out things that redhat didn't write... it was to make the point that they were selling (for LOTS of money) stuff that they didn't write and that all the other distros give away for free.
RPM is relatively insignificant compared to Apache, the Kernel, mysql, sendmail, ldap, gcc, and most of the packages that make up the core of redhat.
And of those packages they've appearantly contributed, I've only ever heard of cygwin, which they took over from the previous maintainers.
And like Gigs said in a previous post, I'm happy for their PHB and shareholders that their financial windfall has been so great. Doesn't mean I'm happy about the small business aspect.
I really wouldn't mind sending money in Red Hat's direction, except that I'd never be able to justify it nowadays. They charge too much for something I already get for free, and do not accept small donations AFAIK.
That's EXACTLY how I feel. We used to buy the commercial versions of the RedHat CDs - at about $30-$50 per box, with a dead-tree install guide. I thought that was more than fair - no license issues, no time limits, and we're still supporting them. I would have even given them money as a donation.
Now, it's the same product, but it's thousands of dollars over the product life cycle.
~W
*Sigh*
The reason that I and many others don't like redhat is becaus they're not "making a buck", they're making millions and millions of dollars while screwing small business.
I worked at a place that used RedHat almost exclusively on our servers (and some of these were customer's servers, some were ours). We used 7.1-7.3, 8.0, and 9. We liked them all. Heck, I still really like 7.3.
But, all of a sudden, out of the blue, RedHat announced "no more free linux from us". Then, they released RHEL, and it was a couple of months before they announced Fedora Core was coming out. RHEL pricing is completely insane. It's VASTLY more expensive than freaking WINDOWS. $180 for a workstation version, with NO SUPPORT and ONE YEAR of software updates?? Jesus. WinXP costs $180, but it comes with support, and at least 5 years of updates, 10 for security fixes. Plus, Microsoft doesn't ask you to repurchase every year to get more support. Want RHEL Server? Minimum you're going to pay is $300+, and that's again, without phone support, whithout installation support, and only a year of software updates. People talk about them making money on support... I don't see any support coming from them excepting when you pay out the nose.
RHEL is the reason that there's a grain of truth to those studies about TCO of linux.
And people point to Fedora... Well, fedora is only supported for 6 months at a time, and then you go through a violent upgrade cycle if you want to stay current. Plus, I'm not going to do their beta testing for them. Screw that. Test your own damn product; you sure are making enough money.
There's also issues about the effort put into it. For one: I keep hearing people say that redhat contributes "Millions" to the open source community. Where? And is it significant compared to the return they get on it? Are they only doing it because it benifits them? I know they pay the salaries of several people who are "RedHat employees", but really just kernel hack, but Millions? Really? For two: They DIDN'T EVEN WRITE THEIR DAMN SOFTWARE. As bad as Windows is (and it is), at least Microsoft wrote it. Redhat took the same shit that everyone else has in their distros, packaged it, and added a few configuration utilities and a logo.
Maybe it's just that all of a sudden, when I worked in Webhosting, the razor-thin margins that were there on servers dissappeared when we realized that we were going to have to pass along $600+/yr to our clients in order to give them the support they needed, or leave them in the lurch with an unsupported redhat 9.0 that had only been out for 8 months... but, really... screw redhat.
"If you have to ask, you don't know Linux or Open Source". Right. I know redhat. And no thanks.
~w
Look, I know what ssh does, and you know what ssh does, and we think nothing of it - I use it every day, and you probably do, too.
But, the fact remains: If you're willing to hire someone at $30,000/yr, and you require them to know how to use SSH, and people who know who live in San Jose require $60,000/yr, you're not going to get anyone. The practical matter that it isn't a hard concept to understand doesn't negate the fact that it differentiates column A from column B.
The obvious answer is to find a bright kid willing to work at $30k, and teach them.
If you require A qualification at B payrate, and people who have A qualification require 2xB payrate, you're not going to get a lot of quality people, and the ones you do get will leave quickly for better jobs.
~W
Yeah, when our first was on the way, we'd go to a store, burger king, or pretty much anywhere, and everyone would ask my wife if she was pregnant. No, moron, she's smuggling a beach ball. I mean she weighed 120 lbs before she got pregnant, and she's 6 ft tall... it was pretty obvious. And then, all of 'em would ask if it was our first, and when we told people that it was, the only answer we ever got is "Ooooh, everything in your life is about to change".
I mean, on the one hand, I got so sick of hearing it, I used to scowl at people. And on the other hand, our lives were going to continue on, we were still going to be the same people... just with the added person in the family.
Plus, we got several different copies of the childhood encyclopedia-type books, which only scare you and don't offer much help.
~W
Let your baby help you instead of just eating, crying and pooping all day.
I've been around slashdot long enough to hear all the cliche's, but I think that most slashdot readers definately do more than eat, cry, and poop.
I've said this before in similar threads, and you're hitting on the same point. The key to not getting your job outsourced, or not getting yourself replaced by someone else at half the cost, is to be a ground-pounder.
I did it for a little over a year. It's not glorious work, and the pay isn't great, but... there will always be people (end users, small business, and corporate users) who will be willing to pay to have someone else show up physically and either install new stuff or correct screwed up existing stuff. If you're that guy, you're not replaceable with someone in Korea or India - because you have to be *there*, physically, and anyone else they bring into the area is going to run into all the same cost of living problems that you and everyone else there has - you're going to have to pay your Indian (dots not feathers) guy $50k, too, so he can afford the same apartment as everyone else in a 30 mile radius.
Not to mention: Building relationships with your corporate consulting clients is about the best job security. Even if your employer can find someone to work at 1/2 the rate with 2x the experience, they don't have the hands-on and face-to-face with the current customers. Sometimes those trust relationships take years to build, but lead to very profitable contracts or sales; that's a good thing for everyone involved - the customer gets someone who he/she trusts implicitly, with reason; the company makes money; and the tech gets job security.
It ain't great, but if you're desperate for work, you gotta do what you gotta do.
~W
How is this somehow bad?
It's not bad; it's just that for the practical purposes of your hiring interviews, the difference between Telnet and SSH is $30,000 on your payroll.
When I was a student at Virginia Tech, Ingersol-Rand used to hand out t-shirts at trade shows that said "Ingersol-Rand Hires Hokies". They were mainly looking for engineers, but the point is the same.
See Also: "Northern Virginia"
Give your resume to teksystems or any number of a hundred consulting firms in the DC area, or put your resume on Monster / Career Builder, with preferred area in Virginia, and you'll get a call a day. For starters, there's a LOT of infrastructure in the Reston / Fairfax area. Additionally, due to wasteful government spending, there's litterally billions of dollars of Department of Homeland Security contracts floating free.
~W
Because slashdot has thousands of submissions each day. Every dupe is a story that could have been posted that might have been more interesting.
Well, of course, but it's not super-carbon-activated-deactivated ionized deion ultra-mega-double-plus filtered if you did it at home.
Yeah, I know it's dumb, but it's substantially less dumb than buying a new 5 gallon container and wasting that class2 quasi-recyclable plastic.
~W
from the website: The Clairvoyant 4D has no equal at its price point.
A-yup.
At the local super walmart, they have a clean water dispenser that's coin-op. Just bring your own gallon or 5 gallon jugs, and you won't have to pay for the container again and again. That's kind of nice. It's $0.25/gallon, but whatever, a 5 Gal container of water is like $12.
~Will
See, that's why *I* don't use iTunes... it's not because the songs are compressed. It's because I want to buy albums. I pointed this out once before, that I didn't want to pay $26 for Rancid 2000 when it's only 37 minutes worth of music, versus $12 for a new Metallica CD that's got 66 minutes of $sys$torture music on it.
Someone once told me that there's a ceiling for albums on iTunes - if you buy the whole album, you don't pay more than $10 or $12 or whatever... but if that isn't, or is no longer, the case... I want nothing to do with it.
~W
Find a university somewhere you want to live and work for them.
I say that because 1.) it's what I just did, and 2.) there tend to be universities in the "middle of nowhere", where there's little to no crime, lots of bandwidth, low cost of living, inexpensive apartments / townhouses, and a higher standard of living (college towns usually have more sales and alcohol tax revenue than they know what to do with).
I turned down $75k at network solutions because I'll be damned if I wanted to live in Dulles or Fairfax. $75k doesn't even begin to cover the expenses of having to buy a house at 750k+, lunch every day at $15+, and a commute around the Beltway. I just moved to southwest virginia and am working for my alma-matter, Virginia Tech, at substantially less than I would make working in D.C., but substantially more than is required to live a comfortable life. Plus, I live in a town with 20,000 residents and 30,000 students with little to no crime and a very high standard of living, including fantastic public parks for my 18 month old to play at, excellent public transportation, and all the bandwidth I can shake a torrent at.
~W
Not to mention the possibility that CSI will now become something of a reality: Now, they submit those DNA samples to the lab, and get results back in a matter of minutes, when we all know that in reality, forensic investigative DNA testing takes a week or two minimum.
And good lord, my brain doesn't function at this time of morning - my fingers just wrote "DNS" when I asked them to write "DNA".
~W
Its called integrity... I take it you've never done scientific research before (and if you have, shame on you)
It's called continued funding. I take it you've never actually applied for a Federally funded research grant (and if you have, something else witty).
~W
To quote my wife, who has read them all (ender's game, speaker for the dead, xenocide, children of the mind, ender's shadow, shadow of the hegemon, shadow puppets, as well as Songmaster, the call of earth, and probably more - she reads alot):
"Orson Scott Card is an author who can't write a sequel to save his life."
~Will
And it's where the remains of Mary Magdeline are kept.
Yeah. Jesus, Romeo. Break the bank and spring for some Cat5e.
(you can propose with fiber, later)
~W
Right, but if I understand you correctly, what you're suggesting is to hide the more complex stuff from the casual user, and I think that's not a bad idea. The target of my aggression, the grandparent poster, wouldn't have wanted that - if you read his posts, he was looking for a way to "configure the minimum amount of stuff for security reasons". Giving him a simple config file, and telling him there were more advanced options somewhere else, wouldn't have helped him, because he wanted to go through and turn off or get rid of everything he didn't need.
~W
And the sad reality is:
1.) I feel dumber and somehow less useful to society if I watch star trek or CSI on spike tv, but I do it anyway
2.) If anyone says in public what you just said (white males are facing an identity crisis in a sea of minorities where society expects nothing good to come from them and they have no role models), you're accused of being a member of the Aryan Brotherhood or the Imperial Klans of America.
~w