Really not what the original article says - have you read it?
From TFA:
In fact, Burt says that the Banshee team had unanimously opted to turn off the Amazon store when given the choice, but now "Canonical came up with their own plan: essentially the option we rejected."
Further, Burt doesn't seem pleased with the way Canonical has handled the situation. "Canonical offering us options and then going back on them when we didn't pick their preferred one was not reasonable." Lorentz says he agrees "wholeheartedly" with Burt's response.
Some who commented on the original report suggested that the Banshee team had made a mistake in choosing to turn off the store rather than taking the 25% cut. Burt says, "it is possible that GNOME will do better financially with this arrangement than if Canonical disabled the Amazon store. GNOME would do 4x better than that if our upstream code shipped unmodified, as it does in other Linux distributions.
Did you RTFA? The maintainers they asked were *not* happy with the decision and the maintainers have *gone on record* as saying it's "unreasonable" - I know that one of the OMGUbuntu folks has been going around saying he's a Banshee contributor (he is, but not one of the maintainers) and trying to characterize it as everything is OK - but that is NOT the case.
Okay, let me re-phrase: When I got my press credentials, I was told that videotaping sessions (presumably for making public) was not allowed. I'm sure O'Reilly wasn't policing the conference, but I did talk to O'Reilly's organizers and re-affirmed at the conference that they weren't allowing reporters to videotape sessions for use.
Sorry, no. I have some additional video interviews that will be up this week for individual stories, but none of Chris or Karl. Note that O'Reilly didn't allow video of the actual sessions (like the executive briefing), or I would have just set the camera up on a tripod for all of the sessions that I attended. I really would have loved to have shared Eben Moglen's keynote from Friday...
I disagree. If a person shows a willingness to stay with a company that is very obviously doing the Wrong Thing, I wouldn't want to work with them. Yeah, it's a tough job market -- and SCO is trying to make it tougher for folks in the Linux crowd by sowing FUD about Linux and trying to stall or stop its adoption. If you stay on with the company -- even as the receptionist or janitor, you're condoning its actions.
Trying justify this "anything for a buck" mentality just doesn't work for me. How evil would a company have to be before you'd stop taking money from them?
It's about time that other folks picked up on the lock-in strategy. I was writing about this back in March.
Re:Looks like an interesting book.
on
Hacking the XBox
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· Score: 4, Insightful
but some of this information probably shouldn't be widely known (thinking of the IDE card that could be changed into a RAID card at one soldier point for 1/5th of the cost of the RAID card from the company.)
In a word: Bullshit. Manufacturers shouldn't be able to use the law to prop up bogus pricing schemes or to enforce their business plan. If they're selling the consoles at a loss, they take that risk -- the law shouldn't step in to enforce that so a manufacturer can make money. It's the responsiblity of the business to create a workable business plan. If someone can turn a Xbox IDE controller into a RAID controller "for 1/5 the cost of the RAID card from the company" then it means the company is seriously overpricing their cards.
The DMCA is increasingly being used as a way to defeat competition and enforce shoddy business practices -- not to uphold legitimate rights. If it continues, it won't be long before auto manufacturers are including chips to defeat third-party auto parts from working with their vehicles, and you can look forward to seriously inflated prices when you need to get new brake pads or whatever on your car because they'll be suing the competition out of business.
Taken to the extreme, I can see a day when you won't even be able to buy inexpensive replacement parts for household appliances -- motor burned out on your fridge? Too bad, buy a new one. Elements burned out in your oven? Hey, a new one from GE will only cost $300!
When you buy a product, it should be YOURS, period, end of story. If you want to mod your Xbox into a PC, and you have the skills to do it, then you damn well ought to be able to do so. Once you pay your $175 (or whatever they're going for) for an Xbox, Microsoft should cease to have any control over what you do with it -- save voiding the warranty if you decide to take it apart and start modding it.
There are several, actually. I've worked with a few of them. New Riders is much better than a lot of them, but the fact remains that the author is usually free to ignore advice from the tech editors/reviewers -- and they often do.
Tech publishing is pretty slipshod with some of the major publishers. Their project editors and acquisitions editors aren't experts in the field, so they have no way of knowing whether the author knows what they're talking about or not. The authors sometimes recommend their own tech editors because, again, the editors working directly for the company don't know the field well enough to know who's an expert and who's not.
Much of the work is done by freelancers who may be completely overloaded... it's a mess with very little quality control. O'Reilly is a wonderful exception to this. Tech publishers that are part of the huge press conglomerates really don't place quality control very high on the list.
As to staffing my business with hamsters... well, that'd depend on what my business model was.;)
the book had two "technical reviewers" but their contributions seemingly didn't include fixing mangled syntax and strained style.
When you see a book in print, don't assume that the suggestions of the technical editors/reviewers have been heeded. The author basically has final say over the content of the book -- meaning that a tech reviewer/editor can be completely ignored no matter how much they complain about the content of the book or how much it doesn't address what it should.
And, the tech reviewers/editors are explicitly asked not to try to fix grammar and so forth -- that's supposed to be the job of a different editor.
Also... I'm surprised to see a review of this book popping up now, it was published about a year ago.
Give me a break, okay? No one is forcing you to go see the movies. You can say what you want about Lucas' directing ability or his writing ability, but no one is making you go see the movies. Lucas hasn't "stolen" anything, whatever his other flaws may be. Get a grip.
I've got news for you, almost all computer companies hurt themselves by making scheduled releases of software and new models. If you do any kind of research at all, you know that Intel and AMD drop prices on set schedules. Once people get hold of those schedules, they avoid buying new processors before a price drop. Software companies regularly pre-announce software before it's available.
Apple hurts themselves by announcing products that they can't meet demand for. When Apple announces a new product, they typically cannot meet the initial demand, they're always in a hurry to announce the product and create a "frenzy" of interest - which the preview sites help create.
The bottom line here is that Apple has no real reason to go after these sites except that they're control freaks. Any other computer company - hell, damn near any company period - would kill for that kind of devotion.
It must be sooo hard for Apple to deal with having such an enthusiastic fan base that they're willing to go to such great lengths to get previews of products. I feel sooo sorry for Steve Jobs and crew that they have to "put up" with this kind of thing.
I think I'll stick to PC hardware and Linux instead of a company that obviously doesn't value its user base.
Yeah... Hell, Red Hat goes to new versions of GCC before the GCC folks even say they're ready, that's really something to be desired...
If you must play on the bleeding edge, you can always roll your own packages. I tend to prefer older, tested and more stable releases. I'm happy to use an older version of GCC or any other software that's less likely to have issues than jump to the new version just because. If you absolutely have to have a new feature, you can always grab it - but I don't think it justifies fobbing off beta stuff on paying customers.
How was any flood "catastrophic" if there is no life on the planet? If there's no one there to harm, it isn't catastrophic no matter how large the flood may have been. Jeez people, read a fscking dictionary.
Besides, which do you prefer to carry, 4 quarters, or one dollar coin? A dollar coin would consolidate much of the coinage you carry around, imho.
No, not really. I usually carry 5-10 dollars in singles, I rarely carry change any longer than it takes to purchase something and get home and empty my pockets. The quarters I use for laundry, the rest I save and cash in when my change jar fills - or squander in penny-ante poker. It's useful to have a number of singles so I can leave a tip or buy something that I wouldn't bother with using a debit card. But I don't carry change for purchases, I'm not going to count out three dollars in quarters.
Besides, if you really hate it, just use your check-card for a nice, exact-change cashless transaction!:-)
Sorry, but I feel kind of silly putting $1.05 on a debit card. Also, I'm the paranoid type - if we ever switch completely to a "cashless" society where most people use debit/check cards for transactions, I'm dead certain that banks will start charging per transaction or charge fees for the cards monthly - I don't want to depend that much on the bloodsuckers at the bank.
Easier than what? Being able to count? Sorry, but I've never felt that dealing with U.S. currency was hard enough to merit having to make it easier. We're not talking about rocket science here, we're talking about the ability to read a number that appears eight times in numeric form and is written out at least twice.
Now, I can understand it might be difficult for non-English speaking people to deal with money if we only wrote the denomination out in English, but they probably wouldn't understand the color scheme we come up with either.
I don't care if we do decide to start printing purple, green and orange money or whatever, but I really don't think that we need to color coordinate our money to make it "simpler" for anyone. If you're not bright enough to figure out 1,2,5,10,20,50,100, etc. then you have no business being out on your own in the first place.
Doing away with the penny is basically giving in to the idea of infinite inflation, and that a penny will never again be worth something.
The dollar coin can be useful, but I prefer paper. The last time I spent a few days in Canada, I felt awash in coinage. I'd feel sorry for anyone who makes a living off of tips... and slipping a coin into a G-string just isn't the same! (Not that I'd know...)
Pennies do circulate, even though you yourself may not use them.
Abolishing the penny altogether probably would hurt the poor to some degree, though I'm not prepared to argue that it would be catastrophic, but it would undoubtably have a negative effect if merchants are allowed to round all transactions to the nearest nickel. My real concern is that officially getting rid of the penny would speed devaluation of U.S. currency.
Re:Loonies, Twonies & what, "Finnies"
on
Greenbacks No More
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· Score: 1
Heh... yeah. I'll buy that - the U.S. currency is homely - especially the newer "big head" versions of the currency. But, we're talking money here - it's only purpose is to serve as a means of exchange, it's not necessary for it to be pretty too.
Anyone who feels confused or aesthetically offended by their U.S. currency, feel free to send it all to me. I'll put up with it, I don't mind...
I don't know anyone who has trouble with U.S. currency... that's what the nice numbers are for. How difficult is it to look at the corner of the bill and read the number?
There may be many examples of arrogance, but that's not one of them.
A lot of suggestions in this thread basically consist of "tell the admins to document everything." Which would be fine, execpt for the fact that your average admin isn't really very good at writing documentation. Depending on how many admins/servers/projects you have going on, you could do well to either hire a *nix-savvy tech writer on contract or hiring a full-time tech writer.
Too many companies try to get by with sub-standard docs produced by people who aren't qualified to be writing documentation thinking that they're saving money by putting the job of documenting on the backs of people who are already overworked and will do whatever they can do to avoid writing documentation. In the long run, said company ends up wasting money by having people recreating the wheel or spending time having to fix problems that would never have arose if good documentation had been available in the first place.
Most of the reasons that were linked to this story were highly conditional - yes, your employer might decide to try to replace you or you might be the first person laid off - then again, they might really value you and want to keep you.
Since you're the only person who really knows what your workplace is like, you're the only one who can really judge whether you'll still be happy if you stay there - and what you're giving up by leaving. If the money is the only issue, you might think about staying. You've already established yourself there, it's a known quantity. Leaving could be a mistake, staying could be a mistake. But it's impossible to say since there are too many variables to post in an "ask Slashdot."
I've accepted counteroffers before, and I've turned them down before too.I turned down more money to stay at a job where I wasn't appreciated and the money wasn't the real issue in the first place. I've accepted a counteroffer when I liked my original employer, but was approached with an offer that wasn't solicited.
Hell, I'd wager that a good 25% to 50% of the people reading this are just wishing they could find a good job right now... never mind choosing between two decent salaries...
Slashdot Mirror
Really not what the original article says - have you read it?
From TFA:
In fact, Burt says that the Banshee team had unanimously opted to turn off the Amazon store when given the choice, but now "Canonical came up with their own plan: essentially the option we rejected."
Further, Burt doesn't seem pleased with the way Canonical has handled the situation. "Canonical offering us options and then going back on them when we didn't pick their preferred one was not reasonable." Lorentz says he agrees "wholeheartedly" with Burt's response.
Some who commented on the original report suggested that the Banshee team had made a mistake in choosing to turn off the store rather than taking the 25% cut. Burt says, "it is possible that GNOME will do better financially with this arrangement than if Canonical disabled the Amazon store. GNOME would do 4x better than that if our upstream code shipped unmodified, as it does in other Linux distributions.
Don't depend on the summary or the commenter's summary - RTFA. It is *not* a win/win - and the Banshee devs do not characterize it as such.
Did you RTFA? The maintainers they asked were *not* happy with the decision and the maintainers have *gone on record* as saying it's "unreasonable" - I know that one of the OMGUbuntu folks has been going around saying he's a Banshee contributor (he is, but not one of the maintainers) and trying to characterize it as everything is OK - but that is NOT the case.
Nice reading drinkypoo... the typo's in the summary submitted by someone else, not in the article.
Okay, let me re-phrase: When I got my press credentials, I was told that videotaping sessions (presumably for making public) was not allowed. I'm sure O'Reilly wasn't policing the conference, but I did talk to O'Reilly's organizers and re-affirmed at the conference that they weren't allowing reporters to videotape sessions for use.
No relation.
Sorry, no. I have some additional video interviews that will be up this week for individual stories, but none of Chris or Karl. Note that O'Reilly didn't allow video of the actual sessions (like the executive briefing), or I would have just set the camera up on a tripod for all of the sessions that I attended. I really would have loved to have shared Eben Moglen's keynote from Friday...
They should not be punished for this.
I disagree. If a person shows a willingness to stay with a company that is very obviously doing the Wrong Thing, I wouldn't want to work with them. Yeah, it's a tough job market -- and SCO is trying to make it tougher for folks in the Linux crowd by sowing FUD about Linux and trying to stall or stop its adoption. If you stay on with the company -- even as the receptionist or janitor, you're condoning its actions.
Trying justify this "anything for a buck" mentality just doesn't work for me. How evil would a company have to be before you'd stop taking money from them?
The ending paragraph of that article
It would be disturbing if it were an article, but it's a press release, not an article. Press releases frequently carry such garbage.
It's about time that other folks picked up on the lock-in strategy. I was writing about this back in March.
but some of this information probably shouldn't be widely known (thinking of the IDE card that could be changed into a RAID card at one soldier point for 1/5th of the cost of the RAID card from the company.)
In a word: Bullshit. Manufacturers shouldn't be able to use the law to prop up bogus pricing schemes or to enforce their business plan. If they're selling the consoles at a loss, they take that risk -- the law shouldn't step in to enforce that so a manufacturer can make money. It's the responsiblity of the business to create a workable business plan. If someone can turn a Xbox IDE controller into a RAID controller "for 1/5 the cost of the RAID card from the company" then it means the company is seriously overpricing their cards.
The DMCA is increasingly being used as a way to defeat competition and enforce shoddy business practices -- not to uphold legitimate rights. If it continues, it won't be long before auto manufacturers are including chips to defeat third-party auto parts from working with their vehicles, and you can look forward to seriously inflated prices when you need to get new brake pads or whatever on your car because they'll be suing the competition out of business.
Taken to the extreme, I can see a day when you won't even be able to buy inexpensive replacement parts for household appliances -- motor burned out on your fridge? Too bad, buy a new one. Elements burned out in your oven? Hey, a new one from GE will only cost $300!
When you buy a product, it should be YOURS, period, end of story. If you want to mod your Xbox into a PC, and you have the skills to do it, then you damn well ought to be able to do so. Once you pay your $175 (or whatever they're going for) for an Xbox, Microsoft should cease to have any control over what you do with it -- save voiding the warranty if you decide to take it apart and start modding it.
There are several, actually. I've worked with a few of them. New Riders is much better than a lot of them, but the fact remains that the author is usually free to ignore advice from the tech editors/reviewers -- and they often do.
;)
Tech publishing is pretty slipshod with some of the major publishers. Their project editors and acquisitions editors aren't experts in the field, so they have no way of knowing whether the author knows what they're talking about or not. The authors sometimes recommend their own tech editors because, again, the editors working directly for the company don't know the field well enough to know who's an expert and who's not.
Much of the work is done by freelancers who may be completely overloaded... it's a mess with very little quality control. O'Reilly is a wonderful exception to this. Tech publishers that are part of the huge press conglomerates really don't place quality control very high on the list.
As to staffing my business with hamsters... well, that'd depend on what my business model was.
the book had two "technical reviewers" but their contributions seemingly didn't include fixing mangled syntax and strained style.
When you see a book in print, don't assume that the suggestions of the technical editors/reviewers have been heeded. The author basically has final say over the content of the book -- meaning that a tech reviewer/editor can be completely ignored no matter how much they complain about the content of the book or how much it doesn't address what it should.
And, the tech reviewers/editors are explicitly asked not to try to fix grammar and so forth -- that's supposed to be the job of a different editor.
Also... I'm surprised to see a review of this book popping up now, it was published about a year ago.
Surely with all that money he's stolen from us
Give me a break, okay? No one is forcing you to go see the movies. You can say what you want about Lucas' directing ability or his writing ability, but no one is making you go see the movies. Lucas hasn't "stolen" anything, whatever his other flaws may be. Get a grip.
Some of these sites hurt Apple with their rumors.
I've got news for you, almost all computer companies hurt themselves by making scheduled releases of software and new models. If you do any kind of research at all, you know that Intel and AMD drop prices on set schedules. Once people get hold of those schedules, they avoid buying new processors before a price drop. Software companies regularly pre-announce software before it's available.
Apple hurts themselves by announcing products that they can't meet demand for. When Apple announces a new product, they typically cannot meet the initial demand, they're always in a hurry to announce the product and create a "frenzy" of interest - which the preview sites help create.
The bottom line here is that Apple has no real reason to go after these sites except that they're control freaks. Any other computer company - hell, damn near any company period - would kill for that kind of devotion.
It must be sooo hard for Apple to deal with having such an enthusiastic fan base that they're willing to go to such great lengths to get previews of products. I feel sooo sorry for Steve Jobs and crew that they have to "put up" with this kind of thing.
I think I'll stick to PC hardware and Linux instead of a company that obviously doesn't value its user base.
lets see them actually use gcc3.1 before redhat
Yeah... Hell, Red Hat goes to new versions of GCC before the GCC folks even say they're ready, that's really something to be desired...
If you must play on the bleeding edge, you can always roll your own packages. I tend to prefer older, tested and more stable releases. I'm happy to use an older version of GCC or any other software that's less likely to have issues than jump to the new version just because. If you absolutely have to have a new feature, you can always grab it - but I don't think it justifies fobbing off beta stuff on paying customers.
How was any flood "catastrophic" if there is no life on the planet? If there's no one there to harm, it isn't catastrophic no matter how large the flood may have been. Jeez people, read a fscking dictionary.
Besides, which do you prefer to carry, 4 quarters, or one dollar coin? A dollar coin would consolidate much of the coinage you carry around, imho.
:-)
No, not really. I usually carry 5-10 dollars in singles, I rarely carry change any longer than it takes to purchase something and get home and empty my pockets. The quarters I use for laundry, the rest I save and cash in when my change jar fills - or squander in penny-ante poker. It's useful to have a number of singles so I can leave a tip or buy something that I wouldn't bother with using a debit card. But I don't carry change for purchases, I'm not going to count out three dollars in quarters.
Besides, if you really hate it, just use your check-card for a nice, exact-change cashless transaction!
Sorry, but I feel kind of silly putting $1.05 on a debit card. Also, I'm the paranoid type - if we ever switch completely to a "cashless" society where most people use debit/check cards for transactions, I'm dead certain that banks will start charging per transaction or charge fees for the cards monthly - I don't want to depend that much on the bloodsuckers at the bank.
It just makes things easier.
Easier than what? Being able to count? Sorry, but I've never felt that dealing with U.S. currency was hard enough to merit having to make it easier. We're not talking about rocket science here, we're talking about the ability to read a number that appears eight times in numeric form and is written out at least twice.
Now, I can understand it might be difficult for non-English speaking people to deal with money if we only wrote the denomination out in English, but they probably wouldn't understand the color scheme we come up with either.
I don't care if we do decide to start printing purple, green and orange money or whatever, but I really don't think that we need to color coordinate our money to make it "simpler" for anyone. If you're not bright enough to figure out 1,2,5,10,20,50,100, etc. then you have no business being out on your own in the first place.
Doing away with the penny is basically giving in to the idea of infinite inflation, and that a penny will never again be worth something.
The dollar coin can be useful, but I prefer paper. The last time I spent a few days in Canada, I felt awash in coinage. I'd feel sorry for anyone who makes a living off of tips... and slipping a coin into a G-string just isn't the same! (Not that I'd know...)
Pennies do circulate, even though you yourself may not use them.
Abolishing the penny altogether probably would hurt the poor to some degree, though I'm not prepared to argue that it would be catastrophic, but it would undoubtably have a negative effect if merchants are allowed to round all transactions to the nearest nickel. My real concern is that officially getting rid of the penny would speed devaluation of U.S. currency.
Heh... yeah. I'll buy that - the U.S. currency is homely - especially the newer "big head" versions of the currency. But, we're talking money here - it's only purpose is to serve as a means of exchange, it's not necessary for it to be pretty too.
Anyone who feels confused or aesthetically offended by their U.S. currency, feel free to send it all to me. I'll put up with it, I don't mind...
I don't know anyone who has trouble with U.S. currency... that's what the nice numbers are for. How difficult is it to look at the corner of the bill and read the number?
There may be many examples of arrogance, but that's not one of them.
A lot of suggestions in this thread basically consist of "tell the admins to document everything." Which would be fine, execpt for the fact that your average admin isn't really very good at writing documentation. Depending on how many admins/servers/projects you have going on, you could do well to either hire a *nix-savvy tech writer on contract or hiring a full-time tech writer.
Too many companies try to get by with sub-standard docs produced by people who aren't qualified to be writing documentation thinking that they're saving money by putting the job of documenting on the backs of people who are already overworked and will do whatever they can do to avoid writing documentation. In the long run, said company ends up wasting money by having people recreating the wheel or spending time having to fix problems that would never have arose if good documentation had been available in the first place.
Most of the reasons that were linked to this story were highly conditional - yes, your employer might decide to try to replace you or you might be the first person laid off - then again, they might really value you and want to keep you.
Since you're the only person who really knows what your workplace is like, you're the only one who can really judge whether you'll still be happy if you stay there - and what you're giving up by leaving. If the money is the only issue, you might think about staying. You've already established yourself there, it's a known quantity. Leaving could be a mistake, staying could be a mistake. But it's impossible to say since there are too many variables to post in an "ask Slashdot."
I've accepted counteroffers before, and I've turned them down before too.I turned down more money to stay at a job where I wasn't appreciated and the money wasn't the real issue in the first place. I've accepted a counteroffer when I liked my original employer, but was approached with an offer that wasn't solicited.
Hell, I'd wager that a good 25% to 50% of the people reading this are just wishing they could find a good job right now... never mind choosing between two decent salaries...