The most annoying thing about movie computers is the incessant beeping that accompanies every freaking keystroke. Oh god, and the NET what an -awful- movie. Jeeze.
If DC is wired as all that, here's what I'd love to see happen: employees at the ISP's in the area take thier email and publish them everywhere they can find on the web. We'll see how they feel about privacy issues after that.
Wonder how this would change the governmental's view on privacy. I've always thought that if the people whom we've foolishly elected were subjected to the same scrutiny and invasions of privacy that have become endemic, then encryption would enjoy the right kind of attention. Course I am not so naive to belive that this will make any difference whatsoever.
Kay. I was doing svlug way before I was working at VA, but whatever,dude. You should know that I am also responsible for JFK's murder.
, Past that If Larry would like to change my job description to read like that, I'd be totally cool with that. Larry?
Chris -- Grant Chair, Linux Int. VP, SVLUG
Actually it was a champagne bucket.
on
Hemos is Homeless
·
· Score: 3
Thought I'd just clear that up. I feel really bad about it. We were messing around with it (it was new, tragically), and there was this random champagne cooler in the corner of the restaurant. (the restaurant had just opened, so I expected it to be empty). So I felt totally bad about it when I heard the telltale "ploop" noise. I felt really bad. Still do. So public apology and such.
Past that the whole house thing -sucks- those pictures are heartbreaking.
I don't mean to jinx things, but has the pepsi company figured out a backup plan should the rocket launch and explode. Or worse, should launch and explode in such a way that kills thousands? This is the kind of marketing that has to make you wonder who is behind it. Chris DiBona -- Grant Chair, Linux Int. VP, SVLUG
Assure you that no Chris DiBona's were hurt during the recording of Geeks in Space. I acutally had a lot of fun doing it. I hope everyone enjoyed it as much as I did. Chris -- Grant Chair, Linux Int. VP, SVLUG
I'm shocked! Simply shocked! Next thing you know they might claim credit for something they didn't invent, or market something that doesn't exist yet.
Of course it is even funnier that sun posted something like this on the site, I mean how weird is that? It seems Sun might be spending a wee bit too much time thinking about ol' billg. (Note that this is very different from thinking about or complulsivly reloading/. , which I would of course never do)
Chris DiBona VA Linux Systems. -- Grant Chair, Linux Int. VP, SVLUG
To a degree. A quiet period is a tricky thing. Then there will be some things I can't talk about. I don't think that the quiet period would cover political questions and such though.
I'm sure Mandrake and Ras may answer this, but here's why. And yes we've hired raster, but we'll announce that officially with some other key people we've brought on.
VA Feels that the desktop will be a huge part of the business. We love E. So there you go. And we write tools all the time that could use a good interface and I don't have as much time as I'd like to write interfaces anymore. Hence, Mandrake , ras and Michael Jennings.
I have no eta's for you. Sorry.
As far as BSD goes, VA concentrates on Linux only and that won't change any time in the forseeable future. What's funny is a bunch of companies buy our boxes and run bsd on them anyway, which is pretty funny, but they run well so we're happy about it.
And don't worry about the questions, watching slashdot is part of my job and I'll answer whatever I can.
And as far as my job description goes, It's been changed to , get this, "Linux Community Evangelist". Which means, um, well, whatever I like:-)
Chris DiBona VA Linux Systems -- Grant Chair, Linux Int. VP, SVLUG
I'm not saying how or why or how much or even if, but {when|if} VA goes public we will find a way to do it. The trick is in doing it in such a way that doesn't alienate anyone and is still legal.
I invite anyone who cares to to email me thier suggestions on the best way to do it. Or just post here on slashdot.
Again, I'm not confirming anything but our intentions to do this right, in case some VA IPO style event should happen. I have some great ideas, but I'm wary of sharing them until I get more legal feedback.
Chris DiBona mail me here. VA Linux Systems. -- Grant Chair, Linux Int. VP, SVLUG
I want to say this here , right now. VA IS NOT IN THE DISTRIBUTION BUSINESS we take red hat and recompile it and add code to the kernel to support our hardware configurations. We write drivers to accomodate hardware we want to sell and make that software freely available under whatever license the developer prefers. We ship updates to our customers for thier machines.
VA used to support more distros and we will be supporting more in the future (look at our hiring of Joey and Sean for debian) it's just that while we were growing exponentially, we had to grow fast, so we cut the product line down and settled on our most popular distribution until we had the bandwidth to handle more.
Again, VA has it's own machine configuration and not it's own distribution As far as standing in line for the IPO that's your call, but the reason we hire the people we do is to make it possible to create the best linux machines we can. That's our value.
We do have machines under 2000$. And as far as AMD goes, we'd love to have a broader product line and include them, and we may later, but it's more like why we chose red hat above, we had to choose what we wanted to ship a -lot- of and concentrate on it.
Chris VA Linux Systems -- Grant Chair, Linux Int. VP, SVLUG
Treason, The Changed Man...
on
Ender's Shadow
·
· Score: 2
Hi all, I have to tell you a book I have completely destroyed by rereading it is OSC's Treason. It's a pretty good novel. As far as Ender's Game goes , I always thought that the novella was tighter than the novel, and when taken in competition with each other, the novella is better, but that's not to say that the book isn't good on it's own.
I, like many others, didn't find children of the mind to be incredibly gripping stuff. I remember when first reading Ender's Game, I couldn't put it down, but the sequels didn't live up to it.
But on another note entirely, OSC's short story collection "The Changed Man" will absolutely rivet you if you like reading, period. It includes some -very- dark stuff, which isn't something I expected from OSC.
This is actually a problem we've tackled carefully, each VP that comes in is, well, forced to drink our Kool-Aid. The problem is finding specialists in thier field who are also linux zealots. It's not possible in some specialties, so we have to literally train them to understand Linux.
This is a problem that Penguin had with thier vp, Alison as well, it's nothing new. All of the growing Linux companies have to deal with this.
And we did, his name is Dan Schorr (not the newsguy, mind you:-), he's really done wonders during our growth spurt.
But on the "usefullness" question, look at it this way, we ship systems, and we base our parts decisions on advice from the engineers who wrote the software. We aren't in the distro business. They do good work on linux, linux grows, we grow and linux progresses.
So the logical next question is "what about Raster, Mandrake, Mark V. etc.." well, we anticipate a time when the majority of shipments will be desktops vs. servers, at that point it will be nice to have desktop guys here to help out.
So if someone should post about VA I shouldn't comment on it just because the story is about a company that ships Linux machines? Whatever dude.
On another note, in the few times that people have ahd troubles with VA, I have always been the first to put my email and number out there and personally try to fix whatever problem occured. Yeah, I can see why you'd hate for someone to do that.
And no, I will not stop reading slashdot, I enjoy it, fascist. (oops, almost invoked godwin's law)
Chris DiBona VA Linux Systems -- Grant Chair, Linux Int. VP, SVLUG
Well, of course we see competitors around every corner, that's how modern corporations work. I hate to tell you this, but , newsflash, having the author of the ext2 fs and raid on staff -does- add value to our systems. And the quality of components we use does mean that they are more costly than the average machine, but so be it, people want good machines, and we'll sell them to them.
We really don't see not hiring good people as an alternative.
How most of these posts seem to be about VA and not aobut Penguin? Honestly, this is kind of creeping me out, is VA a big topic over at Penguin?
It seems to me that the Linux HW world is big enough for a lot of players, Penguin and VA included, but this sort of strange AC posting simply to slam competitors is just uncool.
On another note, VA has the volume of sales to be able to have people like Ted and Raster on staff and we feel it is our duty to hire people like them as otherwise, Linux is just some huge exploitation game, and we are not into that.
Chris DiBona VA Linux Systems. -- Grant Chair, Linux Int. VP, SVLUG
Well, we were waiting for INS paperwork before releasing the latest batch of banners, it went through today, so we released them, and raster put it on his page. So there you go.
Slashdot Mirror
Chris DiBona
--
Grant Chair, Linux Int.
VP, SVLUG
Chris
--
Grant Chair, Linux Int.
VP, SVLUG
Wonder how this would change the governmental's view on privacy. I've always thought that if the people whom we've foolishly elected were subjected to the same scrutiny and invasions of privacy that have become endemic, then encryption would enjoy the right kind of attention. Course I am not so naive to belive that this will make any difference whatsoever.
Chris DiBona
--
Grant Chair, Linux Int.
VP, SVLUG
, Past that If Larry would like to change my job description to read like that, I'd be totally cool with that. Larry?
Chris
--
Grant Chair, Linux Int.
VP, SVLUG
Past that the whole house thing -sucks- those pictures are heartbreaking.
Chris
--
Grant Chair, Linux Int.
VP, SVLUG
I don't mean to jinx things, but has the pepsi company figured out a backup plan should the rocket launch and explode.
Or worse, should launch and explode in such a way that kills thousands? This is the kind of marketing that has to make you wonder who is behind it.
Chris DiBona
--
Grant Chair, Linux Int.
VP, SVLUG
Assure you that no Chris DiBona's were hurt during the recording of Geeks in Space. I acutally had a lot of fun doing it. I hope everyone enjoyed it as much as I did. Chris
--
Grant Chair, Linux Int.
VP, SVLUG
Of course it is even funnier that sun posted something like this on the site, I mean how weird is that? It seems Sun might be spending a wee bit too much time thinking about ol' billg. (Note that this is very different from thinking about or complulsivly reloading /. , which I would of course never do)
Chris DiBona
VA Linux Systems.
--
Grant Chair, Linux Int.
VP, SVLUG
Chris DiBona
VA Linux Systems
--
Grant Chair, Linux Int.
VP, SVLUG
Chris DiBona
VA Linux Systems
--
Grant Chair, Linux Int.
VP, SVLUG
Chris
--
Grant Chair, Linux Int.
VP, SVLUG
Chris DiBona
--
Grant Chair, Linux Int.
VP, SVLUG
VA Feels that the desktop will be a huge part of the business. We love E. So there you go. And we write tools all the time that could use a good interface and I don't have as much time as I'd like to write interfaces anymore. Hence, Mandrake , ras and Michael Jennings.
I have no eta's for you. Sorry.
As far as BSD goes, VA concentrates on Linux only and that won't change any time in the forseeable future. What's funny is a bunch of companies buy our boxes and run bsd on them anyway, which is pretty funny, but they run well so we're happy about it.
And don't worry about the questions, watching slashdot is part of my job and I'll answer whatever I can.
And as far as my job description goes, It's been changed to , get this, "Linux Community Evangelist". Which means, um, well, whatever I like :-)
Chris DiBona
VA Linux Systems
--
Grant Chair, Linux Int.
VP, SVLUG
Chris DiBona
VA Linux Systems
--
Grant Chair, Linux Int.
VP, SVLUG
I invite anyone who cares to to email me thier suggestions on the best way to do it. Or just post here on slashdot.
Again, I'm not confirming anything but our intentions to do this right, in case some VA IPO style event should happen. I have some great ideas, but I'm wary of sharing them until I get more legal feedback.
Chris DiBona
mail me here.
VA Linux Systems.
--
Grant Chair, Linux Int.
VP, SVLUG
VA used to support more distros and we will be supporting more in the future (look at our hiring of Joey and Sean for debian) it's just that while we were growing exponentially, we had to grow fast, so we cut the product line down and settled on our most popular distribution until we had the bandwidth to handle more.
Again, VA has it's own machine configuration and not it's own distribution As far as standing in line for the IPO that's your call, but the reason we hire the people we do is to make it possible to create the best linux machines we can. That's our value.
We do have machines under 2000$. And as far as AMD goes, we'd love to have a broader product line and include them, and we may later, but it's more like why we chose red hat above, we had to choose what we wanted to ship a -lot- of and concentrate on it.
So there you go.
Chris DiBona
VA Linux Systems
--
Grant Chair, Linux Int.
VP, SVLUG
Chris
VA Linux Systems
--
Grant Chair, Linux Int.
VP, SVLUG
I, like many others, didn't find children of the mind to be incredibly gripping stuff. I remember when first reading Ender's Game, I couldn't put it down, but the sequels didn't live up to it.
But on another note entirely, OSC's short story collection "The Changed Man" will absolutely rivet you if you like reading, period. It includes some -very- dark stuff, which isn't something I expected from OSC.
Chris DiBona
VA Linux Systems
--
Grant Chair, Linux Int.
VP, SVLUG
Chris
--
Grant Chair, Linux Int.
VP, SVLUG
This is a problem that Penguin had with thier vp, Alison as well, it's nothing new. All of the growing Linux companies have to deal with this.
Chris DiBona
VA Linux Systems
--
Grant Chair, Linux Int.
VP, SVLUG
But on the "usefullness" question, look at it this way, we ship systems, and we base our parts decisions on advice from the engineers who wrote the software. We aren't in the distro business. They do good work on linux, linux grows, we grow and linux progresses.
So the logical next question is "what about Raster, Mandrake, Mark V. etc.." well, we anticipate a time when the majority of shipments will be desktops vs. servers, at that point it will be nice to have desktop guys here to help out.
Chris DiBona
VA Linux Systems
--
Grant Chair, Linux Int.
VP, SVLUG
On another note, in the few times that people have ahd troubles with VA, I have always been the first to put my email and number out there and personally try to fix whatever problem occured. Yeah, I can see why you'd hate for someone to do that.
And no, I will not stop reading slashdot, I enjoy it, fascist. (oops, almost invoked godwin's law)
Chris DiBona
VA Linux Systems
--
Grant Chair, Linux Int.
VP, SVLUG
We really don't see not hiring good people as an alternative.
Chris DiBona
VA Linux Systems
--
Grant Chair, Linux Int.
VP, SVLUG
It seems to me that the Linux HW world is big enough for a lot of players, Penguin and VA included, but this sort of strange AC posting simply to slam competitors is just uncool.
On another note, VA has the volume of sales to be able to have people like Ted and Raster on staff and we feel it is our duty to hire people like them as otherwise, Linux is just some huge exploitation game, and we are not into that.
Chris DiBona
VA Linux Systems.
--
Grant Chair, Linux Int.
VP, SVLUG
Chris DiBona
VA Linux Systems
--
Grant Chair, Linux Int.
VP, SVLUG