You contribute "free data" that other people sell all the time. Your email address is sold along with thousands of other people to targeted marketing firms. Every time you go shopping and pay with a savings card or credit card, your purchases are tied to the zipcode you live in, and that data is also sold. Why should CDDB be any different?
Thats not to say I support these numbskulls. I've actually contributed to CDDB like so many others, and I find it laughable that someone feels they have the right to own it and sell it. It should remain free, like it was back when I contributed. However, you really shouldn't be surprised that this sort of crap is happening. Happens all the time.
Not to promote Mickeysoft or anything, but they have an awfully nice timekiller on the web called Terraserver. It holds a crapload of fairly-recent USGS satellite maps (1994/1996 or so) that you can zoom in on, and pick out your home town, your home street, even your house and the car in your driveway from orbit...Your entire neighborhood photographed at 1m resolution. For example, I work here...Zoom in, and you can see me waving to the satellite's camera.:)
No offense, but if you would have read my original post a little more carefully, you'de realize that it wasn't the perceptions of the users that I was referring to, but rather the perceptions of the media and the industry as a whole. I dont think the Linux movement will ever dry up and vanish, but in the eyes of everyone BUT its users, Linux will be dead when VA dies. The public perception of Linux is that it was shepherded by a singular company. Microsoft didn't kill Linux -- VA Linux Systems did. They made the mistake of taking an inherently decentralized community and shoved all the eggs in one basket. That's what people are going to see. The buzz will die down, and the game will be over. On to something else.
The point has already been made by someone else in this thread that IBM's commitment to Linux was a drop in the bucket compared to the money they put behind OS/2 -- And look where OS/2 is now.
The money is meaningless--All the money in the world can't make up for a bad business strategy. If you don't agree with me, you're more than welcome to pull up a performance chart of VA's stock over the past 6 months. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see where that train is headed..
It may be a tough pill to swallow, but on who's machine you develop makes alot of difference -- If youre building code on servers provided by the University, then i'd say the University has a fair right to assert at least partial ownership over that material. After all, you were working on their systems--You don't own it, you don't lease it, and without them you'de have squat anyway.
The real world works the same way. My dad was an Engineer for Rockwell for 30 some-odd years...Whatever he designed became property of the company, obviously. I work at IBM here in Tucson--The code I write belongs to IBM. In both cases, the reason is the same -- The giant CAD terminal my dad used was provided by Rockwell International Graphics Systems Division. My workstation(s) are provided by IBM Corporation. We were merely being allowed to use them for the benefit of our respective companies.
Perhaps it would benefit you to think of the situation like that in the future--Whenever you sit down infront of a University computer system, just remind yourself of the fact that whatever you build is not necessarrily yours--Its property of the University, and there's really nothing wrong with that. If you want to release something under the GPL, don't use a box you don't own to develop it in the first place.
Have a look at our own home-grown boys, VA Linux Systems. They ran a self-congratulatory article on the two year anneversary of Linux.com's opening, and the people who worked on it--Several people pointed out in responses to the article that VA had carefully neglected to mention some of the less-than-pleasant aspects of the deveopment process (namely all the volunteers who got screwed, people who were promised employment in exchange for services rendered, etc)....VA had these negative responses deleted from the post, leaving only the repsonses that reflected positively on the company.
So, the whole point of this post is that a company who offers cell phone service is telling people not to read messages from people they don't know.
Brilliant.
Call me crazy, but, who the hell bothers to read mail from people they don't know? Especially if the subject line is screaming about MAKE MONEY FAST? This "warning" is like saying "Don't spray yourself in the face with pepper spray -- It may impair your ability to watch Carson Daly on TRL."
Allright..There's something i've been meaning to ask here. The biggest question that haunts the whole Amiga picture is: why bother.
For the late 80's/early 90's, nobody disputes that the Amiga was king of the hill when it came to multimedia apps. But by today's standards, its really nothing to bark about. With every Amiga, you got 22 Khz stereo sound (about half the sample quality of a $5 audio card you can buy for any PC these days), and an 8-bit display capable of resolutions considered low-to-average in today's PC market, looking past graphics mode hacks unsuitable for GUIs like HAM. 24-bit displays on Amiga systems are basically RTG kludges that sit ontop of an already overburdoned planar display. Again, in terms of capability and performance, it's beaten by even the lowest of low-end video cards for PCs.
Next virtue...Small footprint. Sure, you can boot the OS off a single floppy, and it has a remarkably small footprint for an OS with those sorts of capabilities... But so what, so does Linux, so does QNX and others. Why bother with the Amiga?
When I was younger, I never thought i'd see the day when the Amiga's capabilities were surpassed by a platform as braindead as the PC, but it's happened, and happened a long time ago. I owned one for like 9 years, and I agree, it was a good machine..I just don't see the reason why anyone should really bother with AmigaOS other than pure religious zealotry or novelty.
Dean Henrichsmeyer = "Beret", the DNS guy at VA, dumb-ass. The other contacts listed are also VA employees. Hell, even the DNS servers point to OctobrX's (Trae McCombs, another VA employee) machine. Perhaps you should go back and get a Blue's Clue before defending VA when it comes to squatting.
It's not just individuals that are squatting on domains. I happen to agree with the guy, but for different reasons--Companies themselves are also engadged in squatting. Hell, our very own beloved VA Linux Systems is still squatting on system12.com/net/org, and has steadfastly refused to relinquish control over it. To make matters worse, they've still got some hokey BS explanation up on propaganda.themes.org that makes people think my project dried up and blew away--Rather than redirect traffic to where they can easilly obtain them freely, they blackhole it into their own now-dead site.
The squatting issue goes both ways. Its rather hypocritical when Company X accuses someone of squatting on a domain they want when they're doing the same crap themselves.
Thats the problem. You probably don't have the resources to do so -- SourceForge is losing money for the company, and has become so overgrown that to rehouse the data on it would ultimately amount to breaking it all down into little pieces anyway. History's going to show that it wasnt M$ that killed Linux, it was VA.
VA thought that changing the inherently anarchaic order of the Linux community could be profitable to a company. It isn't. They thought that housing everything under one umbrella was a good idea--Turns out they couldn't afford to hold their umbrella up.
VA continues to slip steadilly towards bankruptcy. Most analysts give the company a TTL of ~6 months. That means, if your project is housed on SourceForge, you and your project are going to have to find a new placew to live within the next 6 months. The pipe that VA leases (yes, they pay money for it. No pay, no play.) will dry up leaving you without access and more than likely without adequate warning as well. Thats been the cast with most of the.com's... That doesn't bode well for people who have invested alot of time in centralizing resources.
Maybe now you see my point for all the yelling and screaming I did about how it was a mistake to centralize development at one location--Youre assuming that location is going to survive, when the evidence says it won't.
Lets further examine our mess for a moment--The resources that VA owns that you visit frequently, ala Slashdot, Freshmeat, and others--What's going to happen to them? Is there a plan in place that describes what to do when your parent company hits the skids? If Themes.org can be taken down for several weeks over something as simple as a security breach, it tells me they're largely unprepared for these sorts of events. Everyones got too much sunshine going up their ass to sit down and think about what to do when the party's over.
Don't go tell me "Oh, VA's a good company, they'll find a way to rescue us!" because thats total horseshit. You and I both know that business doesn't work that way. Rob and Jeff can't exactly go back to their dorms..So where's our beloved Slashdot going to move to? If they cant remain profitable on their own, or under the management of a parent company, who's to suggest they can be profitable at all?
Call me crazy (you wouldn't be the first) , but shouldn't we really be spending our time on thinking up new designs instead of re-hashing old ones? I mean, everyone and their mom thinks of computers the same way -- three piece units -- A monitor , a keyboard, and a beige box. There's really nothing wrong with the traditional three-piece idea, but if you really want to be unique, think up something different.
How's this: Stackable cube computers. You start with one cube. The cubes are build to be interconnectable in a cluster environment, something that is easilly do-able with low end parts right now. Put high-speed IR transcievers on the sides, and make the side panels of the cube out of translucent plastic, like the same plastic that sits infront of the emitter on a remote control. Put two of the cubes near eachother and they establish a connection, and become a node on the cluster. You could stack and arrange these cubes in any sort of shape or fashion, so long as at least one side faces a side of another cube. You could build rings of them, walls of them, or giant 3x3x3 Rubik's Cube clusters out of them.
Better still, how about modular computers that are meant to physically connect? Have a standard where everything you build has to fit within a 4x4x1" brick. You could multiply the computing power of your cluster just by going out, buying more bricks, and stacking them up. The topology of your stacking would depend upon the type of computing being done -- A linear 1D stack of bricks would be good for horsepower, but a 2D stack would be more efficient at message-passing.
Lots of things to think about instead of "Duh, here's another 3-piece. Its shiny!!"...God gave us brains, and Autodesk gave us CAD. Get to work.
The only thing I could think of in a jiffy that would max out a high-perf network would be a setup something like the following:
This is a little tricky to imagine, but here's what I'd so.
Suppose you select 5 nodes on this network.. Each node is equipped with a display, a camera, a mic, and a few local & exported NFS filesystems. Each display has a window on it showing what the camera sees. Point the camera towards the monitor in a video feedback sort of fashion, so you get a picture within a picture within a picture.. Make this stream available to others on the network via NFS. Similarly, have every other node do the same thing, making their streams available as well. The separate displays of each node should be displayed on each node. Now, do the same trick for audio.
As the network begins to reach saturation, you should begin to see a lag in terms of recorded image versus displayed image, and recorded sound versus perceieved sound. Use this lagtime as a barometer for how well your network is able to handle the traffic. The worse the conditions on the network are, the more noticable the delay will be between your live, real-world actions, and the perceptions of those actions when viewed from other nodes.
Now, with this sort of setup in place, you can then design or tweak your network so as to minimize or eliminate this lagtime. Protocol choice will have alot to do with it, but dont neglect the obvious..A chain is only as strong as it's weakest link.
Bowie J. Poag
Re:I would like to eat one of these "kernels"...
on
Linux 2.4.3 Released
·
· Score: 2
Well, lets see. I've got a few reasons. Lets start with the small ones first.
I did about 2 1/2 years worth of "volunteer work" growing themes.org and its children. Even got asked to head up the site a couple times... Quite an honor, but I declined it. McCombs turned around and sold themes.org to VA Linux Systems when he signed on..Sold what basically amounted to our work, our builds, our code, our maintenance, not his. Yeah, he came up with it, but had very little to do with maintaining it. Thats #1.
#2 is even better---How VA treats people. I hate VA for what they did to people I respected greatly--Here's a fun story for you to think about: I knew and worked with a guy named David Coulson, aka Techn0ir..He lives in England. VA promised him employment over here in America, contingent upon delivery of themes.org's V2 code & backend. So, David, thinking this was his golden opportunity to stake his claim in the new dot com boom, dropped out of school, laid down like $1500 on a new setup and new gear, and busted his ass overtime for WEEKS to come up with something elegant, beautiful and useful. He worked as hard as he could, and did a better job than anyone could have imagined..And delivered on his promise. When it came time to hold out his hand, VA did nothing. Absolutely nothing. So, since David had dropped out of school, he now needed to wait another 6 months to re-enroll. Worse than that, he was screwed out of a job and $1500 poorer while VA generates banner sales 24 hours a day directly off his work. Thats your wonderful community-friendly company, bud. Funny thing is, i've heard about that same basic story happening to at least 3 other people doing work for VA. Spot a trend here?
Third is even more fun -- They're a corrupt company at the core. Hell, what more proof do you need? No less than nineteen separate class-action lawsuits alleging securities fraud have been filed against this company! They're under investigating by the SEC, for Christ's sake! This doesn't happen by accident! Theres enough proof out there that VA knowingly dicked their investors (hah, and people called me nuts for NOT investing my money in them, believe it or not) that they're all going to court to sue whatever few pennies the company has left to operate on. Yeah, VA is innocent -- And OJ wasn't guilty either, right?
Last, and finally, is my personal vendetta against them for what Biles, McCombs and Guntharp did to us. Us, meaning myself and the 11 other people who made up System 12. Caitlen, M0par, John, Ashp, all of us got royally screwed off the map by Trae McCombs who took what we believed were private conversatons regarding our development, and funneled them to Guntharp, a full-time VA employee and McCombs "best friend", at least according to McCombs. When it became clear that VA was going to buy Andover last year, Guntharp was ordered to stop production on ColdStorage, the Freshmeat clone (why waste effort replicating what you're eventually going to own in a matter of weeks?) So, Guntharp did the only thing he knew how to do - Rip off the work of others. An unwitting patsy who had no idea where the ideas were coming from. SourceForge is the result of that, namely, the result of conversations McCombs and I had during the summer of '99. Hell, we even came up with the fucking name, let alone the concept, and we were actively engadged in developing it by the time we got nailed.
Put that in your damn "I (heart) VA!" pipe and suck it down. Ignore it all you want -- Your supporting a company that has fundementally screwed the Linux community. Wait for them to go bankrupt, then the real dirt will come out. The 150-some-odd employees they laid off last month are already starting to talk.
Well, I cant say I've read the book, but I can tell you this much -- I once wrote a paper for a Philosophy class I was in that argued that ordinary household thermostats can technically be considered alive, if you agree that the fundemental definition of life is an object that both consumes and produces energy, responds to its environment..The ability to reproduce isn't necessarrilly required -- Life itself could be a dead-end.
If you make the definition intentionally vague, you can fit pretty much any dynamic system under the flag of being "alive"...So be careful when someone tells you that they have a formula for it. Chances are it hangs heavilly on the definition of "alive" to make it work.
I dont think it's so much a matter of education as it is a matter of having skills. More and more these days, IT jobs have a pretty wide spectrum of possibiliies for demonstrating that you have experience... You know, "Bachelors degree and 2 years experience OR 4 years related experience." sort of things. The problem is, most places arent willing to go to the line when it comes to salaries. For example, I could get a position here at the University doing system administration, but i'd have to take 10-15K below industry standard wage since the University cant afford to keep step with the rest of the industry. To make matters worse, they invite recruiters onto campus to gobble up most people before they even graduate.
Theres a point of diminishing returns..Your peak of marketability is what matters. A subtle formula of age, skills, and competencies.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's an idea -- How about we QUIT WHINING about it?
You contribute "free data" that other people sell all the time. Your email address is sold along with thousands of other people to targeted marketing firms. Every time you go shopping and pay with a savings card or credit card, your purchases are tied to the zipcode you live in, and that data is also sold. Why should CDDB be any different?
Thats not to say I support these numbskulls. I've actually contributed to CDDB like so many others, and I find it laughable that someone feels they have the right to own it and sell it. It should remain free, like it was back when I contributed. However, you really shouldn't be surprised that this sort of crap is happening. Happens all the time.
Cheers,
Duh, screwed up the URL. Here you go....Enjoy. :)
Not to promote Mickeysoft or anything, but they have an awfully nice timekiller on the web called Terraserver. It holds a crapload of fairly-recent USGS satellite maps (1994/1996 or so) that you can zoom in on, and pick out your home town, your home street, even your house and the car in your driveway from orbit...Your entire neighborhood photographed at 1m resolution. For example, I work here...Zoom in, and you can see me waving to the satellite's camera.
Cheers,
Hi Paul,
No offense, but if you would have read my original post a little more carefully, you'de realize that it wasn't the perceptions of the users that I was referring to, but rather the perceptions of the media and the industry as a whole. I dont think the Linux movement will ever dry up and vanish, but in the eyes of everyone BUT its users, Linux will be dead when VA dies. The public perception of Linux is that it was shepherded by a singular company. Microsoft didn't kill Linux -- VA Linux Systems did. They made the mistake of taking an inherently decentralized community and shoved all the eggs in one basket. That's what people are going to see. The buzz will die down, and the game will be over. On to something else.
The point has already been made by someone else in this thread that IBM's commitment to Linux was a drop in the bucket compared to the money they put behind OS/2 -- And look where OS/2 is now.
The money is meaningless--All the money in the world can't make up for a bad business strategy. If you don't agree with me, you're more than welcome to pull up a performance chart of VA's stock over the past 6 months. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see where that train is headed..
It may be a tough pill to swallow, but on who's machine you develop makes alot of difference -- If youre building code on servers provided by the University, then i'd say the University has a fair right to assert at least partial ownership over that material. After all, you were working on their systems--You don't own it, you don't lease it, and without them you'de have squat anyway.
The real world works the same way. My dad was an Engineer for Rockwell for 30 some-odd years...Whatever he designed became property of the company, obviously. I work at IBM here in Tucson--The code I write belongs to IBM. In both cases, the reason is the same -- The giant CAD terminal my dad used was provided by Rockwell International Graphics Systems Division. My workstation(s) are provided by IBM Corporation. We were merely being allowed to use them for the benefit of our respective companies.
Perhaps it would benefit you to think of the situation like that in the future--Whenever you sit down infront of a University computer system, just remind yourself of the fact that whatever you build is not necessarrily yours--Its property of the University, and there's really nothing wrong with that. If you want to release something under the GPL, don't use a box you don't own to develop it in the first place.
Have a look at our own home-grown boys, VA Linux Systems. They ran a self-congratulatory article on the two year anneversary of Linux.com's opening, and the people who worked on it--Several people pointed out in responses to the article that VA had carefully neglected to mention some of the less-than-pleasant aspects of the deveopment process (namely all the volunteers who got screwed, people who were promised employment in exchange for services rendered, etc)
Cheers,
So, the whole point of this post is that a company who offers cell phone service is telling people not to read messages from people they don't know.
Brilliant.
Call me crazy, but, who the hell bothers to read mail from people they don't know? Especially if the subject line is screaming about MAKE MONEY FAST? This "warning" is like saying "Don't spray yourself in the face with pepper spray -- It may impair your ability to watch Carson Daly on TRL."
Allright..There's something i've been meaning to ask here. The biggest question that haunts the whole Amiga picture is: why bother
For the late 80's/early 90's, nobody disputes that the Amiga was king of the hill when it came to multimedia apps. But by today's standards, its really nothing to bark about. With every Amiga, you got 22 Khz stereo sound (about half the sample quality of a $5 audio card you can buy for any PC these days), and an 8-bit display capable of resolutions considered low-to-average in today's PC market, looking past graphics mode hacks unsuitable for GUIs like HAM. 24-bit displays on Amiga systems are basically RTG kludges that sit ontop of an already overburdoned planar display. Again, in terms of capability and performance, it's beaten by even the lowest of low-end video cards for PCs.
Next virtue...Small footprint. Sure, you can boot the OS off a single floppy, and it has a remarkably small footprint for an OS with those sorts of capabilities... But so what, so does Linux, so does QNX and others. Why bother with the Amiga?
When I was younger, I never thought i'd see the day when the Amiga's capabilities were surpassed by a platform as braindead as the PC, but it's happened, and happened a long time ago. I owned one for like 9 years, and I agree, it was a good machine..I just don't see the reason why anyone should really bother with AmigaOS other than pure religious zealotry or novelty.
You're welcome.
Dean Henrichsmeyer = "Beret", the DNS guy at VA, dumb-ass. The other contacts listed are also VA employees. Hell, even the DNS servers point to OctobrX's (Trae McCombs, another VA employee) machine. Perhaps you should go back and get a Blue's Clue before defending VA when it comes to squatting.
Nah. Common sense died around the same time that Vanilla Ice got popular.
It's not just individuals that are squatting on domains. I happen to agree with the guy, but for different reasons--Companies themselves are also engadged in squatting. Hell, our very own beloved VA Linux Systems is still squatting on system12.com/net/org, and has steadfastly refused to relinquish control over it. To make matters worse, they've still got some hokey BS explanation up on propaganda.themes.org that makes people think my project dried up and blew away--Rather than redirect traffic to where they can easilly obtain them freely, they blackhole it into their own now-dead site.
The squatting issue goes both ways. Its rather hypocritical when Company X accuses someone of squatting on a domain they want when they're doing the same crap themselves.
Cheers,
By performing the Safety Dance live infront of my webcam.
Why could anyone be expected to pay money for A) what they got for free for so long, and B) what they helped build to begin with?
Cheers,
There(ow!) is no (ouch!)su(owww!!)ch thing as(aagh) (ouch)carpal(owwwww!!) tunnel sy(oww!!)ndrome. Get over (ouch) it.
Thats the problem. You probably don't have the resources to do so -- SourceForge is losing money for the company, and has become so overgrown that to rehouse the data on it would ultimately amount to breaking it all down into little pieces anyway. History's going to show that it wasnt M$ that killed Linux, it was VA.
VA thought that changing the inherently anarchaic order of the Linux community could be profitable to a company. It isn't. They thought that housing everything under one umbrella was a good idea--Turns out they couldn't afford to hold their umbrella up.
Perhaps a more poigniant question:
VA continues to slip steadilly towards bankruptcy. Most analysts give the company a TTL of ~6 months. That means, if your project is housed on SourceForge, you and your project are going to have to find a new placew to live within the next 6 months. The pipe that VA leases (yes, they pay money for it. No pay, no play.) will dry up leaving you without access and more than likely without adequate warning as well. Thats been the cast with most of the
Maybe now you see my point for all the yelling and screaming I did about how it was a mistake to centralize development at one location--Youre assuming that location is going to survive, when the evidence says it won't.
Lets further examine our mess for a moment--The resources that VA owns that you visit frequently, ala Slashdot, Freshmeat, and others--What's going to happen to them? Is there a plan in place that describes what to do when your parent company hits the skids? If Themes.org can be taken down for several weeks over something as simple as a security breach, it tells me they're largely unprepared for these sorts of events. Everyones got too much sunshine going up their ass to sit down and think about what to do when the party's over.
Don't go tell me "Oh, VA's a good company, they'll find a way to rescue us!" because thats total horseshit. You and I both know that business doesn't work that way. Rob and Jeff can't exactly go back to their dorms..So where's our beloved Slashdot going to move to? If they cant remain profitable on their own, or under the management of a parent company, who's to suggest they can be profitable at all?
Cheers,
If you're interested in doing bizzaro stuff with your C64, you might want to check out these links:
:)
LUnix (Fully functioning SLIP-TCP/IP stack for C64)
GeckOS/A65 (Multitasking Unix-ish OS for C64s)
Lemon for a good stockpile of C64 warez.
Call me crazy (you wouldn't be the first) , but shouldn't we really be spending our time on thinking up new designs instead of re-hashing old ones? I mean, everyone and their mom thinks of computers the same way -- three piece units -- A monitor , a keyboard, and a beige box. There's really nothing wrong with the traditional three-piece idea, but if you really want to be unique, think up something different.
How's this: Stackable cube computers. You start with one cube. The cubes are build to be interconnectable in a cluster environment, something that is easilly do-able with low end parts right now. Put high-speed IR transcievers on the sides, and make the side panels of the cube out of translucent plastic, like the same plastic that sits infront of the emitter on a remote control. Put two of the cubes near eachother and they establish a connection, and become a node on the cluster. You could stack and arrange these cubes in any sort of shape or fashion, so long as at least one side faces a side of another cube. You could build rings of them, walls of them, or giant 3x3x3 Rubik's Cube clusters out of them.
Better still, how about modular computers that are meant to physically connect? Have a standard where everything you build has to fit within a 4x4x1" brick. You could multiply the computing power of your cluster just by going out, buying more bricks, and stacking them up. The topology of your stacking would depend upon the type of computing being done -- A linear 1D stack of bricks would be good for horsepower, but a 2D stack would be more efficient at message-passing.
Lots of things to think about instead of "Duh, here's another 3-piece. Its shiny!!"...God gave us brains, and Autodesk gave us CAD. Get to work.
Bowie
The only thing I could think of in a jiffy that would max out a high-perf network would be a setup something like the following:
This is a little tricky to imagine, but here's what I'd so.
Suppose you select 5 nodes on this network.. Each node is equipped with a display, a camera, a mic, and a few local & exported NFS filesystems. Each display has a window on it showing what the camera sees. Point the camera towards the monitor in a video feedback sort of fashion, so you get a picture within a picture within a picture.. Make this stream available to others on the network via NFS. Similarly, have every other node do the same thing, making their streams available as well. The separate displays of each node should be displayed on each node. Now, do the same trick for audio.
As the network begins to reach saturation, you should begin to see a lag in terms of recorded image versus displayed image, and recorded sound versus perceieved sound. Use this lagtime as a barometer for how well your network is able to handle the traffic. The worse the conditions on the network are, the more noticable the delay will be between your live, real-world actions, and the perceptions of those actions when viewed from other nodes.
Now, with this sort of setup in place, you can then design or tweak your network so as to minimize or eliminate this lagtime. Protocol choice will have alot to do with it, but dont neglect the obvious..A chain is only as strong as it's weakest link.
Bowie J. Poag
Well, lets see. I've got a few reasons. Lets start with the small ones first.
I did about 2 1/2 years worth of "volunteer work" growing themes.org and its children. Even got asked to head up the site a couple times... Quite an honor, but I declined it. McCombs turned around and sold themes.org to VA Linux Systems when he signed on..Sold what basically amounted to our work, our builds, our code, our maintenance, not his. Yeah, he came up with it, but had very little to do with maintaining it. Thats #1.
#2 is even better---How VA treats people. I hate VA for what they did to people I respected greatly--Here's a fun story for you to think about: I knew and worked with a guy named David Coulson, aka Techn0ir..He lives in England. VA promised him employment over here in America, contingent upon delivery of themes.org's V2 code & backend. So, David, thinking this was his golden opportunity to stake his claim in the new dot com boom, dropped out of school, laid down like $1500 on a new setup and new gear, and busted his ass overtime for WEEKS to come up with something elegant, beautiful and useful. He worked as hard as he could, and did a better job than anyone could have imagined..And delivered on his promise. When it came time to hold out his hand, VA did nothing. Absolutely nothing. So, since David had dropped out of school, he now needed to wait another 6 months to re-enroll. Worse than that, he was screwed out of a job and $1500 poorer while VA generates banner sales 24 hours a day directly off his work. Thats your wonderful community-friendly company, bud. Funny thing is, i've heard about that same basic story happening to at least 3 other people doing work for VA. Spot a trend here?
Third is even more fun -- They're a corrupt company at the core. Hell, what more proof do you need? No less than nineteen separate class-action lawsuits alleging securities fraud have been filed against this company! They're under investigating by the SEC, for Christ's sake! This doesn't happen by accident! Theres enough proof out there that VA knowingly dicked their investors (hah, and people called me nuts for NOT investing my money in them, believe it or not) that they're all going to court to sue whatever few pennies the company has left to operate on. Yeah, VA is innocent -- And OJ wasn't guilty either, right?
Last, and finally, is my personal vendetta against them for what Biles, McCombs and Guntharp did to us. Us, meaning myself and the 11 other people who made up System 12. Caitlen, M0par, John, Ashp, all of us got royally screwed off the map by Trae McCombs who took what we believed were private conversatons regarding our development, and funneled them to Guntharp, a full-time VA employee and McCombs "best friend", at least according to McCombs. When it became clear that VA was going to buy Andover last year, Guntharp was ordered to stop production on ColdStorage, the Freshmeat clone (why waste effort replicating what you're eventually going to own in a matter of weeks?) So, Guntharp did the only thing he knew how to do - Rip off the work of others. An unwitting patsy who had no idea where the ideas were coming from. SourceForge is the result of that, namely, the result of conversations McCombs and I had during the summer of '99. Hell, we even came up with the fucking name, let alone the concept, and we were actively engadged in developing it by the time we got nailed.
Put that in your damn "I (heart) VA!" pipe and suck it down. Ignore it all you want -- Your supporting a company that has fundementally screwed the Linux community. Wait for them to go bankrupt, then the real dirt will come out. The 150-some-odd employees they laid off last month are already starting to talk.
Want more?
Bowie J. Poag
Well, I cant say I've read the book, but I can tell you this much -- I once wrote a paper for a Philosophy class I was in that argued that ordinary household thermostats can technically be considered alive, if you agree that the fundemental definition of life is an object that both consumes and produces energy, responds to its environment..The ability to reproduce isn't necessarrilly required -- Life itself could be a dead-end.
If you make the definition intentionally vague, you can fit pretty much any dynamic system under the flag of being "alive"...So be careful when someone tells you that they have a formula for it. Chances are it hangs heavilly on the definition of "alive" to make it work.
Bowie J. Poag
Hehehehe..Your comment actually made me laugh out loud. :) Yes, even I grow tired of shameless self-promotion and parasitic trolling. :)
Bowie J. Poag
I dont think it's so much a matter of education as it is a matter of having skills. More and more these days, IT jobs have a pretty wide spectrum of possibiliies for demonstrating that you have experience... You know, "Bachelors degree and 2 years experience OR 4 years related experience." sort of things. The problem is, most places arent willing to go to the line when it comes to salaries. For example, I could get a position here at the University doing system administration, but i'd have to take 10-15K below industry standard wage since the University cant afford to keep step with the rest of the industry. To make matters worse, they invite recruiters onto campus to gobble up most people before they even graduate.
Theres a point of diminishing returns..Your peak of marketability is what matters. A subtle formula of age, skills, and competencies.
Bowie J. Poag