Honestly, I've seen more 1and1 advertisements than any other hosting company, except maybe godaddy. They regularly take out 6 page spreads in PCWorld, as well as other tech magazines.
I was talking about their start in the US market only, not about ongoing operations now. Of course they'd switch to "normal" marketing at some point. However, I think most companies that START something new (a new market, new offereing in existing market, anything) would do that with a big ad campaign rather than relying on give-aways to a small techie group and relying on their word-of-mouth marketing power. I found and still find this remarkable, especially since employees in large firms usually prefer doing what everyone else does because it's better for their job security... (also see Dilbert);-)
Just to clarify this minor aspect of my original posting...
From everything I know about them they're a "mass market company", i.e. they are great and cheap as long as their standard offerings suit your needs. I would not expect great individual service from such a firm. So far they are exactly what *I* need - something cheap and a standard offering, I've no special requests. If I did I would probably look for someone else where I could expect more individual attention, as 1&1 is set up I don't expect this from them, it's more like a discount supermarket chain and whenever you ask for something out of the ordinary that their interface and scripts don't cover it may not be easy to get.
Possibly I have to correct one thing I said. Not sure anymore if they host in the US or in Europe only, since I juts found their nice Flash presentaton of their data center is the same on both their.de and their.com sites...
I have been using 1and1.com as my provider for about 3 years.
They are a very large company, originally from Europe. In Germany they are the largest hosting provider. What they did when they entered the US market 3 years ago was what brought me to them:
Any other company would have spent the allocated marketing millions for buying ad space and all that stuff. They gave away their best (shared) hosting product for free for 3 years, no strings attached - no ads (on your site), no need to stay with them after the period. Free hosting on a shared Debian-based system with Mysql, PHP, etc. for nothing. I thought that was a GREAT idea compared to what any other company would have done (i.e. "traditional marketing" using ads). For a large company trying to rely on word of mouth marketing instead of "doing what everyone else does" is very good, that's why I like them.
After two years I used an upgrade offer for those early adopters like me, and now I've their "Developer Hosting" (Linux, shared server) for half the price. I've had no reason for complaints, except that their support works "the Unix way": no news is good news;-) When I complained about a problem (after the plan upgrade my quota hadn't been changed) I never got a response, but the problem was solved quickly.
I would not use any small companies as a hosting provider. Maybe if I knew they in turn host at a large facility and I needed the sepcial services of that small company for something, but not for a standard off-the-shelf hosting plan. Competition is all nice, but I prefer my server to be in a hosting location like the one I once visited in Sao Paulo (Brazil): huge, extremely clean, two huge ship diesel engines for backup power (and huge batteries to last until they were up), great connections to several Internet backbone providers at once, not just one, excellent security, etc. The company I once worked for rented a small room in some old building in Oakland (CA) and put a few servers and a movable AC in - I don't want that kind of hosting for myself (we were not a hosting provider, we were so stupid to do that for ourselves instead of outsourcing).
Just my own opinion, I've no experience worth mentioning with other providers than 1and1, only with their shared hosting plan and I've no critical apps running.
Oh, maybe one more thing. I said in Germany they're #1, but #2 is not far. It was interesting to see that the two largest German hosters (for some readers who may misunderstand what I say - 1and1.COM is American, you won't have your servers in Europe, okay?) use tow radically different approaches:
1and1 uses decentralized small Linux boxes (or MS Windows, but Linux is their default) for all hosting, they're more like Google (they also use lots of boxes). The other large provider developed the opposite structure: a huge server (Sun) and net attached storage. Of course, things have developed, don't know how much things have progressed, they're now putting lots of ads for Opteron based servers in the papers, but I don't think they threw away the single server for shared hosting. Anyway, I liked the 1and1 philosophy much more - another reason for me to stay with them.
I read this story in a German magazine a few days ago (http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/weltraum/0,151 8,300232,00.html). They pointed to a an article about a study (http://xxx.uni-augsburg.de/abs/astro-ph/0404580) that says simulations of a complete failure of the earths mag. field is going to lead to a complete replacement by a new mag. field - created by the charged particles of the solar wind when they encounter the upper parts of the earths atmposphere. They also point out that this simulation seems credible because nowhere could anyone find any signs of mass extinctions or even mass mutations the many times the earths m.f. reversed so far.
This mechanism isn't new and it's not secret (otherwise I wouldn't have known about it and wondered what all the fuss is all about - with articles about this "new revelation" all over the tech news...). It's not meant to track home users, I think it's been first implemented years ago when only some very expensive high-end printers where able to print with a quality that would qualify them for counterfeiting at all. Such machines where sold mostly to businesses and to copy shops, and the tracking code is to be able to identify the copy shop a counterfeit was made at - and copy shops have full-service contracts with all facts about the machine, which definitely includes the serial number, known to the service company, which is the printer manufacturer. It's not meant to be a 100% solution against hardcore criminals, it's meant to raize the bar a little to be able to lower the overall number of occurences of counterfeiting. Law enforcement is not a 0/1 thing (everyone's a criminal/no crimes worldwide at all), they deal in large numbers of incidents and in probablities (of crime prevention). The tracking mechanism doesn't cost much (implementation or print quality) and brings a comparatively high reward in making it easier to solve some kinds of counterfeiting.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "they didn't tell anyone". It was one of the first things I heard after starting to look into digital printing. I heard it at Ricoh, don't know from whom, but it certainly isn't a secret at all. Of course, it's the kind of information that is not broadcast over CNN daily, you actually have to go and LOOK or ASK, but then so is 99.9999999999% of ALL information...;-)
How does such a useless comment get a rating of 5? I don't mind people saying such things, but I do mind if I get to see this with such a high rating. Okay, I'm off-topic myself, true...
... and by the way, since some people were arguing this, it's not normally so that your ad purchase influences the *contents* of the article you get, you just get an article. Of course, you don't get a negative article - this is like those stock ratings which almost NEVER turn negative, they just say "hold". The newspaper equivalent would be no article about you. This all depends on the quality/reputation of the paper, you'd be unable (I guess/hope) to buy yourself good coverega at NY Times, but I'm sure there are some more obscure and questionable magazines out there, especially some niche publications (not the daily newspaper, but e.g. specializes in some very special kind of manufacturing - there are far more magazines out there than those in the news stand at Barnes&Noble...
Well, that is pretty normal in the commercial press world. We (company I used to work for, now part of a larger US company) had the same arrangements when we paid for ads in some papers (no names - but they all do it) - we place ads, they write about us. It's not always talked about, and it doesn't always happen. Usually you get an article if you indeed *are* at least somewhat newsworthy *and* if you're a new customer (for ads) of the paper.
If you can get such an arrangement from the paper depends on A) if your story is indeed newsworthy B) how important a customer you are for the paper
The better the paper (reputation), the higher A) and/or B) has/have to be. With Firefox it's all "A)", so no need to complain:-)
Exactly! Actually, the rpm version number gets updated, but not the version of the software itself, i.e. (example) 1.2.3-23 is updated to 1.2.3-24. "1.2.3" is the version of the software (i.e. what you get e.g. from ftp.sendmail.org) and "-23, -24, etc. is the internal vendor (SuSE, RedHat) version number of the particular rpm package. The new "Enterprise" versions (SuSE Linux Enterprise Server, RedHat Advanced Server) explicitly have the purpose to NOT update any packages, but ONLY fix bugs in them. That is a VERY reasonable policy, in the earlier Linux days I (as a consultant) encountered quite a few customers who updated their Linux distribution and ended up with lots of problems because the packages contained feature updates (often undocumented) that changed the behavior of the software ever so slightly (e.g. when pppd suddenly changed the way it parsed the config file and this was visible only in the source code and nowhere else and broke remote modem login for one of my clients...). So I definitely LOVE the new policy for these "enterprise" Linux distributions... but yes, it will definitely confuse tools such as security scanners that are going to report vulnerabilities where there are none - simply because they don't really check for the actual vulnerability, but they report them based on their knowledge that "version xyz of sendmail has vulnerability abc"! But this is NOT a new problem, most security scanners work like that for most vulnerabilities they check for, and have been reporting false positives occasionally.
I forgot: why do I know this? Well, I work for SuSE in Oakland and also at Oracle (building 401 right where the Oracle Linux group is) in Redwood Shores.
Oracle used to use a RedHat 6.0 based Linux for Oracle 8i. In December, for Oracle 9i, they switched to SuSE Linux 7.1 for all Linux work, and later they used the 7.2 kernel with their 7.1 installations. They now use SuSE Linux 7.0 for the older glibc 2.1 based products and SuSE Linux 7.1 and 7.2 for the glibc 2.2 based (Oracle 9i) ones and for the Oracle 8i+glibc 2.2-oracle patch stuff.
SuSE Oracle support page is
http://www.suse.com/en/support/oracle/<p>
See the LVM whitepaper there for some interesting SuSE-only things (although it's all opensource (GPL) stuff).
Just to keep things in perspective, SuSE lost about 30 out of more than 600 employees. It's a very big issue for those leaving, and - I wouldn't have thought it would be that big - also for those staying who see those guys leave.
However, from the companies perspective:
- No development for SuSE Linux took place here at all, so nothing will happen to the product.
- We had hired a lot of people in expectation of things to come in the US - and then the box sales (for ALL Linux boxes) didn't really jump up a lot, and the little was absorbed by much increased competition. That left a lot more people than needed.
I would also like to point out the difference between Europe and the US for SuSE. In Europe we have used the revenue from the box sales in a not nearly as competitive, but equally big or even larger market, to grow into the service business. T-Online, Europes largest ISP, for example, is a SuSE reference customer. And the great thing is they don't just use the distribution - damn, that's next to free! - they actually used and use our _services_ and give us real $$$.
Different in the US, here we only sold the boxed product (and started building Services only recently, which will continue!), and for that the workforce was way too big for that in the current market. If people bought as many packages as they download from the ftp-server, and that's true for all distros,...
So, basically, we got rid of a lot of functions needed for expected strong box sales which now will be done by the already established bigger organisation in Europe. you don't need two call centers for installation support if in the territory that the US one was to cover you sell much less than in the over one's territory (so that one is a big call center already anyway). So people here weren't as busy as expected.
The problems together:
- market situation now lets investors demand IMMEDIATE profitibility
- box sales were the largest contributor for SuSE Inc. revenue
- box sales for Linux in general didn't rise too much...
-...but competition in this area rose a lot
Which basically means for the boxes alone we wouldn't have needed nearly as many additional people as we had hired.
The good news is that SuSE in general doesn't depend on this. Sales in Europe has risen much more, and service revenue of our consulting company - which was founded only in 1999 and is about to become bigger than the "original" SuSE - has reached levels where the box sales have a hard time following, and it's increasing much faster than those as well. Yes, there are a lot more RedHat boxes out there - but unlike for SuSE Linux where we get money for every single one they don't get any money for by far most of it. Of course, now some people might call this bad because Linux is supposed to be free - and I respond yes, "Linux" is supposed to be free, and we still pay the most Linux developers and their stuff goes back to Linux, but "SuSE Linux" is not free. (Well, the ftp version even is, plus the usual stuff, i.e. buy on epackage, install a million times, etc.; we just don't want anyone else to take our final product and sell it filling _their_ own pockets.)
Michael Hasenstein
BEST Oracle on Linux support in town:
http://www.suse.com/en/support/oracle/ ...and our engineering presence at Oracle HQ will _increase_, not decrease. Yeah, I'm one of the Oracle guys around here;-)
So WHAT? If you can configure sendmail you can configure sendmail! What type of questions do you expect at that test? The kind that you can learn for without knowing anything? Now, so far all the people who said they made the test said they were good, so it cannot be such simple type of questions, so it shouldn't matter if anyones knows them or not.
Actually, it's easy to speak against them again and again, but they really have some quite good programs for supporting e.g. developers. The same with Oracle. No Linux company has anything even remotely similar to what those companies have. It's quite effective for the masses of people as well. Try and subscribe to one of MS's or Oracle's partner programs! We will get there... but one has to acknowledge that 3xx people companies like us (SuSE) or RH can't have everything 4x.xxx people companies like Oracle have. -- Michael Hasenstein http://www.suse.de/~mha/
No, lets not give them a break. Or us (see my email address) for that matter. We don't get any extra points for doing Linux stuff in the market, except from some of you guys here. We have to _compete_ with all the other players, especially MS. I don't _want_ special treatment, we just don't need that. We can't go to the customers telling them "Oh, but we're so small compared to MS, would you excuse us charging you more, so that we can use the extra money to grow?". Excuse me, something is wrong with your argumentation. And that from an American (if the.edu is right?)! -- Michael Hasenstein http://www.suse.de/~mha/
You can't be serious. A test that needs to hide the answers because people could learn them by heart is not worth anything. I don't think that their test is like that, I actually think - without having tried it (I didn't need it to get hired;-) ) - that they have a good test. -- Michael Hasenstein http://www.suse.de/~mha/
No no no, Open Sound System is a commercial package, we've nothing to do with that. What you mean is open source ALSA. See http://www.suse.cz/development/index.html which is a page of our developers in the Prague (Chech Republic) office. -- Michael Hasenstein http://www.suse.de/~mha/
Right. SuSE Labs employs far more than a hundred open source developers. Don't forget (journaling) reiserfs, which we sponsored pretty heavily, or also LVM (logical volume manager), which will both be in SuSE Linux 6.4 (march) and bring Linux up to a standard with other Linuxes which had that for servers extremely useful combination of an LVM and a not just journaling, but also on-the-fly growing/shrinking filesystem (to make use of an LVM, with ext2 you still have to reformat the partition to use additional space).
Also, see not just the kernel or glibc list for the many suse people there, but also our latest commitment for HA (high availability).
I would not want to have any company set the Linux standard. Some day, they'd use the power they'd get through this.
Better: LSB (which will happen), and then let everyone who wants build on top of that independent and free (thats free as in freedom, not just free as in no-money) standard. I don't understand why you want to give someone so much power. -- Michael Hasenstein http://www.suse.de/~mha/
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly, I've seen more 1and1 advertisements than any other hosting company, except maybe godaddy. They regularly take out 6 page spreads in PCWorld, as well as other tech magazines.
;-)
I was talking about their start in the US market only, not about ongoing operations now. Of course they'd switch to "normal" marketing at some point. However, I think most companies that START something new (a new market, new offereing in existing market, anything) would do that with a big ad campaign rather than relying on give-aways to a small techie group and relying on their word-of-mouth marketing power. I found and still find this remarkable, especially since employees in large firms usually prefer doing what everyone else does because it's better for their job security... (also see Dilbert)
Just to clarify this minor aspect of my original posting...
... and one more thing came to my mind:
From everything I know about them they're a "mass market company", i.e. they are great and cheap as long as their standard offerings suit your needs. I would not expect great individual service from such a firm. So far they are exactly what *I* need - something cheap and a standard offering, I've no special requests. If I did I would probably look for someone else where I could expect more individual attention, as 1&1 is set up I don't expect this from them, it's more like a discount supermarket chain and whenever you ask for something out of the ordinary that their interface and scripts don't cover it may not be easy to get.
Possibly I have to correct one thing I said. Not sure anymore if they host in the US or in Europe only, since I juts found their nice Flash presentaton of their data center is the same on both their .de and their .com sites...
I have been using 1and1.com as my provider for about 3 years.
They are a very large company, originally from Europe. In Germany they are the largest hosting provider. What they did when they entered the US market 3 years ago was what brought me to them:
Any other company would have spent the allocated marketing millions for buying ad space and all that stuff. They gave away their best (shared) hosting product for free for 3 years, no strings attached - no ads (on your site), no need to stay with them after the period. Free hosting on a shared Debian-based system with Mysql, PHP, etc. for nothing. I thought that was a GREAT idea compared to what any other company would have done (i.e. "traditional marketing" using ads). For a large company trying to rely on word of mouth marketing instead of "doing what everyone else does" is very good, that's why I like them.
After two years I used an upgrade offer for those early adopters like me, and now I've their "Developer Hosting" (Linux, shared server) for half the price. I've had no reason for complaints, except that their support works "the Unix way": no news is good news ;-) When I complained about a problem (after the plan upgrade my quota hadn't been changed) I never got a response, but the problem was solved quickly.
I would not use any small companies as a hosting provider. Maybe if I knew they in turn host at a large facility and I needed the sepcial services of that small company for something, but not for a standard off-the-shelf hosting plan. Competition is all nice, but I prefer my server to be in a hosting location like the one I once visited in Sao Paulo (Brazil): huge, extremely clean, two huge ship diesel engines for backup power (and huge batteries to last until they were up), great connections to several Internet backbone providers at once, not just one, excellent security, etc. The company I once worked for rented a small room in some old building in Oakland (CA) and put a few servers and a movable AC in - I don't want that kind of hosting for myself (we were not a hosting provider, we were so stupid to do that for ourselves instead of outsourcing).
Just my own opinion, I've no experience worth mentioning with other providers than 1and1, only with their shared hosting plan and I've no critical apps running.
Oh, maybe one more thing. I said in Germany they're #1, but #2 is not far. It was interesting to see that the two largest German hosters (for some readers who may misunderstand what I say - 1and1.COM is American, you won't have your servers in Europe, okay?) use tow radically different approaches:
1and1 uses decentralized small Linux boxes (or MS Windows, but Linux is their default) for all hosting, they're more like Google (they also use lots of boxes). The other large provider developed the opposite structure: a huge server (Sun) and net attached storage. Of course, things have developed, don't know how much things have progressed, they're now putting lots of ads for Opteron based servers in the papers, but I don't think they threw away the single server for shared hosting. Anyway, I liked the 1and1 philosophy much more - another reason for me to stay with them.
Michael
I read this story in a German magazine a few days ago (http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/weltraum/0,151 8,300232,00.html). They pointed to a an article about a study (http://xxx.uni-augsburg.de/abs/astro-ph/0404580) that says simulations of a complete failure of the earths mag. field is going to lead to a complete replacement by a new mag. field - created by the charged particles of the solar wind when they encounter the upper parts of the earths atmposphere. They also point out that this simulation seems credible because nowhere could anyone find any signs of mass extinctions or even mass mutations the many times the earths m.f. reversed so far.
I'd like to give this post a mod point... I can't so I'm limited to adding a boring "I like it and agree" posting.
This mechanism isn't new and it's not secret (otherwise I wouldn't have known about it and wondered what all the fuss is all about - with articles about this "new revelation" all over the tech news...). It's not meant to track home users, I think it's been first implemented years ago when only some very expensive high-end printers where able to print with a quality that would qualify them for counterfeiting at all. Such machines where sold mostly to businesses and to copy shops, and the tracking code is to be able to identify the copy shop a counterfeit was made at - and copy shops have full-service contracts with all facts about the machine, which definitely includes the serial number, known to the service company, which is the printer manufacturer. It's not meant to be a 100% solution against hardcore criminals, it's meant to raize the bar a little to be able to lower the overall number of occurences of counterfeiting. Law enforcement is not a 0/1 thing (everyone's a criminal/no crimes worldwide at all), they deal in large numbers of incidents and in probablities (of crime prevention). The tracking mechanism doesn't cost much (implementation or print quality) and brings a comparatively high reward in making it easier to solve some kinds of counterfeiting.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "they didn't tell anyone". It was one of the first things I heard after starting to look into digital printing. I heard it at Ricoh, don't know from whom, but it certainly isn't a secret at all. Of course, it's the kind of information that is not broadcast over CNN daily, you actually have to go and LOOK or ASK, but then so is 99.9999999999% of ALL information... ;-)
Would you please check some very basic facts first? They (the "big" Linux companies) DO certify against LSB!
l /t echnical/lsb.html
http://www.novell.com/products/linuxprofessiona
How does such a useless comment get a rating of 5? I don't mind people saying such things, but I do mind if I get to see this with such a high rating. Okay, I'm off-topic myself, true...
... and by the way, since some people were arguing this, it's not normally so that your ad purchase influences the *contents* of the article you get, you just get an article. Of course, you don't get a negative article - this is like those stock ratings which almost NEVER turn negative, they just say "hold". The newspaper equivalent would be no article about you. This all depends on the quality/reputation of the paper, you'd be unable (I guess/hope) to buy yourself good coverega at NY Times, but I'm sure there are some more obscure and questionable magazines out there, especially some niche publications (not the daily newspaper, but e.g. specializes in some very special kind of manufacturing - there are far more magazines out there than those in the news stand at Barnes&Noble...
Michael
Why an ad if they make a good article for free ?
:-)
Well, that is pretty normal in the commercial press world. We (company I used to work for, now part of a larger US company) had the same arrangements when we paid for ads in some papers (no names - but they all do it) - we place ads, they write about us. It's not always talked about, and it doesn't always happen. Usually you get an article if you indeed *are* at least somewhat newsworthy *and* if you're a new customer (for ads) of the paper.
If you can get such an arrangement from the paper depends on
A) if your story is indeed newsworthy
B) how important a customer you are for the paper
The better the paper (reputation), the higher A) and/or B) has/have to be. With Firefox it's all "A)", so no need to complain
Michael
Exactly! Actually, the rpm version number gets updated, but not the version of the software itself, i.e. (example) 1.2.3-23 is updated to 1.2.3-24. "1.2.3" is the version of the software (i.e. what you get e.g. from ftp.sendmail.org) and "-23, -24, etc. is the internal vendor (SuSE, RedHat) version number of the particular rpm package. The new "Enterprise" versions (SuSE Linux Enterprise Server, RedHat Advanced Server) explicitly have the purpose to NOT update any packages, but ONLY fix bugs in them. That is a VERY reasonable policy, in the earlier Linux days I (as a consultant) encountered quite a few customers who updated their Linux distribution and ended up with lots of problems because the packages contained feature updates (often undocumented) that changed the behavior of the software ever so slightly (e.g. when pppd suddenly changed the way it parsed the config file and this was visible only in the source code and nowhere else and broke remote modem login for one of my clients...). So I definitely LOVE the new policy for these "enterprise" Linux distributions... but yes, it will definitely confuse tools such as security scanners that are going to report vulnerabilities where there are none - simply because they don't really check for the actual vulnerability, but they report them based on their knowledge that "version xyz of sendmail has vulnerability abc"! But this is NOT a new problem, most security scanners work like that for most vulnerabilities they check for, and have been reporting false positives occasionally.
Michael
I forgot: why do I know this? Well, I work for SuSE in Oakland and also at Oracle (building 401 right where the Oracle Linux group is) in Redwood Shores.
--
Michael Hasenstein
http://www.suse.de/~mha/
SuSE Oracle support page is
http://www.suse.com/en/support/oracle/<p>
See the LVM whitepaper there for some interesting SuSE-only things (although it's all opensource (GPL) stuff).
--
Michael Hasenstein
http://www.suse.de/~mha/
When 12 out of 42 stay that's hardly "everyone", you liar. Plus, we never ever had an office in hyper-expensive San Francisco.
--
Michael Hasenstein
http://www.suse.de/~mha/
Just to keep things in perspective, SuSE lost about 30 out of more than 600 employees. It's a very big issue for those leaving, and - I wouldn't have thought it would be that big - also for those staying who see those guys leave.
However, from the companies perspective:
- No development for SuSE Linux took place here at all, so nothing will happen to the product.
- We had hired a lot of people in expectation of things to come in the US - and then the box sales (for ALL Linux boxes) didn't really jump up a lot, and the little was absorbed by much increased competition. That left a lot more people than needed.
I would also like to point out the difference between Europe and the US for SuSE. In Europe we have used the revenue from the box sales in a not nearly as competitive, but equally big or even larger market, to grow into the service business. T-Online, Europes largest ISP, for example, is a SuSE reference customer. And the great thing is they don't just use the distribution - damn, that's next to free! - they actually used and use our _services_ and give us real $$$.
Different in the US, here we only sold the boxed product (and started building Services only recently, which will continue!), and for that the workforce was way too big for that in the current market. If people bought as many packages as they download from the ftp-server, and that's true for all distros,...
So, basically, we got rid of a lot of functions needed for expected strong box sales which now will be done by the already established bigger organisation in Europe. you don't need two call centers for installation support if in the territory that the US one was to cover you sell much less than in the over one's territory (so that one is a big call center already anyway). So people here weren't as busy as expected.
The problems together: ...but competition in this area rose a lot
Which basically means for the boxes alone we wouldn't have needed nearly as many additional people as we had hired.
- market situation now lets investors demand IMMEDIATE profitibility
- box sales were the largest contributor for SuSE Inc. revenue
- box sales for Linux in general didn't rise too much...
-
The good news is that SuSE in general doesn't depend on this. Sales in Europe has risen much more, and service revenue of our consulting company - which was founded only in 1999 and is about to become bigger than the "original" SuSE - has reached levels where the box sales have a hard time following, and it's increasing much faster than those as well. Yes, there are a lot more RedHat boxes out there - but unlike for SuSE Linux where we get money for every single one they don't get any money for by far most of it. Of course, now some people might call this bad because Linux is supposed to be free - and I respond yes, "Linux" is supposed to be free, and we still pay the most Linux developers and their stuff goes back to Linux, but "SuSE Linux" is not free. (Well, the ftp version even is, plus the usual stuff, i.e. buy on epackage, install a million times, etc.; we just don't want anyone else to take our final product and sell it filling _their_ own pockets.)
Michael Hasenstein
BEST Oracle on Linux support in town: http://www.suse.com/en/support/oracle/
...and our engineering presence at Oracle HQ will _increase_, not decrease. Yeah, I'm one of the Oracle guys around here ;-)
--
Michael Hasenstein
http://www.suse.de/~mha/
So WHAT? If you can configure sendmail you can configure sendmail! What type of questions do you expect at that test? The kind that you can learn for without knowing anything? Now, so far all the people who said they made the test said they were good, so it cannot be such simple type of questions, so it shouldn't matter if anyones knows them or not.
--
Michael Hasenstein
http://www.suse.de/~mha/
Actually, it's easy to speak against them again and again, but they really have some quite good programs for supporting e.g. developers. The same with Oracle. No Linux company has anything even remotely similar to what those companies have. It's quite effective for the masses of people as well. Try and subscribe to one of MS's or Oracle's partner programs!
We will get there... but one has to acknowledge that 3xx people companies like us (SuSE) or RH can't have everything 4x.xxx people companies like Oracle have.
--
Michael Hasenstein
http://www.suse.de/~mha/
No, lets not give them a break. Or us (see my email address) for that matter. We don't get any extra points for doing Linux stuff in the market, except from some of you guys here. We have to _compete_ with all the other players, especially MS. I don't _want_ special treatment, we just don't need that. We can't go to the customers telling them "Oh, but we're so small compared to MS, would you excuse us charging you more, so that we can use the extra money to grow?". Excuse me, something is wrong with your argumentation. And that from an American (if the .edu is right?)!
--
Michael Hasenstein
http://www.suse.de/~mha/
You can't be serious. A test that needs to hide the answers because people could learn them by heart is not worth anything. I don't think that their test is like that, I actually think - without having tried it (I didn't need it to get hired ;-) ) - that they have a good test.
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Michael Hasenstein
http://www.suse.de/~mha/
No no no, Open Sound System is a commercial package, we've nothing to do with that. What you mean is open source ALSA. See http://www.suse.cz/development/index.html which is a page of our developers in the Prague (Chech Republic) office.
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Michael Hasenstein
http://www.suse.de/~mha/
Also, see not just the kernel or glibc list for the many suse people there, but also our latest commitment for HA (high availability).
Right, we should hire more marketing gurus...
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Michael Hasenstein
http://www.suse.de/~mha/
I would not want to have any company set the Linux standard. Some day, they'd use the power they'd get through this.
Better: LSB (which will happen), and then let everyone who wants build on top of that independent and free (thats free as in freedom, not just free as in no-money) standard.
I don't understand why you want to give someone so much power.
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Michael Hasenstein
http://www.suse.de/~mha/
I don't see that anyone has told you anything. He was asked (here: by the press) and he answered.
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Michael Hasenstein
http://www.suse.de/~mha/