It's funny to see the Slashdot community holding SuSE up as some sort of beacon of light compared to the evil Red Hat, when SuSE is just a guilty of sketchy decisions (closed-source YaST, closed ISO images) as Red Hat is.
Guess what? All of you people who are railing against Red Hat for charging big money for their enterprise release, SuSE has $100 "user licences" for their desktop release and charges $800 for their "Enterprise Server". Sound familiar?
But because the groupthink has decided Red Hat == bad, and ! Red Hat == good, it's a cause for celebration.
Re:Encyclopedia Brown and the Missing NIS Login
on
How Were You Fired?
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· Score: 1
Ok, one horror story.
I was technically a salaried employee. However, the way the owner worked the pay was this:
If you worked over 40 hours a week, you got paid for 40 hours, and the overage went into a bank of "comp time" that could only be used at his discretion. Needless to say, he didn't let you use that time very often. Apparently, after I left, another employee had a collapsed lung and missed a month or so of work. Instead of letting him take some of the obscene amount of comp time he had accumulated, the owner made him wait a few weeks without pay and then go on short-term disability.
If you worked less than 40 hours in a week, you only got paid for the hours that you worked. Hm, doesn't sound like a salaried job to me.
I wish, I wish, I wish I'd sic'd the labor lawyers on him, but I was so glad to get out I didn't care. Ah, regrets.
Encyclopedia Brown and the Missing NIS Login
on
How Were You Fired?
·
· Score: 1
I worked for a small software company in Cary, NC, owned and run by a guy who was insane. His MO was that he'd hire someone, treat them like royalty for about six months, get tired of them, and fire them. As one of two sysadmins, I found out about a firing when I was told at the close of business on a given day "Disable Joebob's login tonight - he's getting fired tomorrow."
The company had about 12 people, and I saw about half of them turn over in nine months. Of course, about seven months into it, I was told "You need to show $NEW_SYSADMIN how to do the stuff you do." I saw the writing on the wall, and started quietly interviewing.
One day, I came in and attempted to log into my workstation, and my password didn't work. I knew what was up then. The owner came in and said "Can I see you in my office?" Four of us got the axe that day.
Apparently the guy's still at it - $NEW_SYSADMIN got fired about six months later, and he even fired a few of his inner circle who I thought were untouchable.
If anyone's considering interviewing with a small software company in Cary that does serial console work, drop me an email and I'll be glad to fill you in on the horror stories.
Have you ever tried to program using the perl bindings? I have done it in the past and was extremely annoyed by the fact that it is a non-stop moving target. It also broke quite often. I ended up abandoning the entire stuff.
Yup, sure have. I've been working with this app for going on three years, producing useful releases every 4-5 months or so, and haven't run across a "moving target" in Perl/Tk. Aside from bugfixes, I haven't had to go back and change any of my code or work around any brokenness in new Perl/Tk releases.
Granted, my app doesn't tax the outer limits of the Tk bindings, but for what I do, I've found Perl/Tk to be a stable and adequate cross-platform toolkit.
For me, it came down to documentation. I have a moderately complicated GUI Perl app (Perl because it was the language I was most familiar with). I looked into various toolkits, like wxPerl, GTK/Perl, QT/Perl, but ended up using good ol' reliable Perl/Tk.
The big advantage with picking up Perl/Tk was that the O'Reilly books were extremely informative - good examples on each widget, how they interoperate, how to use them, and larger program examples. The documentation for the other toolkits I considered basically consisted of "look at the arguments this C++ function takes, and use it," which didn't make for an easy time picking things up (wxPerl was the worst in that regard). While an experienced C++ programmer might not have a hard time with that, it was way over my head.
As a result, though, I have a decent app that runs on X11 and Win32. With the great PAR archiver, I can even package the app up in a nice bundle.
Well, when you're talking home, you mean the Old Dominion. Just southeast of heaven to the surf and the hills. She's the best of 13 sisters, and 37 more. Sweet, sweet Virginia always keeps an open door.
Cheaper to buy? No, not really. Apple's education programs are second-to-none.
Maybe for the direct-to-schools stuff, but my mom is a middle school teacher, and was looking at the Apple Education Store, and hardware prices there are only about $100 cheaper than retail.
The discounts on software are significant, though.
Today I heard on the SCO/Caldera conference call that you are using SCO/X web-services platform.
Actually, I don't think I was very clear. SCO referenced salesforce.com as the type of ASP business that they're targeting with SCO/X, not as a customer of SCO/X.
Sorry for the confusion - it was kinda type-as-you-go from the conference call.
I dialed into the conference call, secure in the knowledge that I may have cost SCO $0.50 for using their 800-number. Highlights (Lowlights?)
They got $8.8M in revenue this quarter from their SCOsource licensing program. All the revenue came from two agreements - one with Microsoft, another with an unnamed company.
Aside from the extortion racket, their other big plan for future revenue is "SCO/X" - a "web services" platform running on SCO. They somehow see a huge demand for ASP stuff (they mention salesforce.com as an example) running on their third-rate platform. They mentioned potential $3B in revenue from SCO/X, based apparently on everyone who owns a SCO server buying an equiavelent number of SCO/X boxes at $1500
There is "confusing" language in the Unix agreement between Novell and SCO. Novell is taking a hard line on ownership of Unix, but all four people who signed the transfer agreement (two for SCO, two for Novell) say that the intent was to transfer all rights to SCO.
If IBM doesn't pay up by June 13th, SCO will terminate their AIX license.
The financial impact from terminating the SCO/Caldera Linux business was "minimal" - no shit.
They won't be making the disputed bits public, but they welcome affected people to check it out at SCO's office under an NDA.
They have a legal team working on a contingency basis with respects to the extortion - minimal cost to SCO if they lose.
The chance of SCO getting back into Linux is small. (Awwwww)
Wal-Mart, Dell, and Home Depot haven't been proven in court to have and maintain an illegal monopoly in their market areas, and to use that monopoly to extend control to other market areas.
You make it sound like Apple is just bursting with posies in its niceness. I've yet to meet any credible people who believe that given half the chance Apple wouldn't have turned out just like Microsoft, or even worse. You only have to look at their history of using lawyers as weapons to suddenly start appreciating the lack of lawsuit-happiness over at Redmond.
The simple fact of the matter is that most Slashdot posters wouldn't know consistancy of opinion if it slapped them round the face with a wet kipper. It's fashionable to like Apple, it's fashionable to dislike Microsoft. The fact that they are just two sides of the same coin is something most would apparently rather ignore.
Reading for comprehension can be fun, in six quick and easy steps!
If you'll go back and actually read what I wrote before the Redmond side of your brain kicked into overdrive, you'll see that I made no judgements one way or the other of the relative "niceness" of either company, or as to what Apple would do if they had 90% of the marketshare in home PCs.
So, just for you, I'll hit the salient points again:
1) Microsoft has been convicted of having an illegal monopoly in the PC market, and using that monopoly to crush competition in that and other markets. Apple has about 5% marketshare, and thus isn't going to be able to use iTunes to bully anyone but themselves into releasing Mac-exclusive products.
2) Microsoft has the power to use an integrated music service to dictate the future of digital music provided over the internet. Apple, as a niche player, does not.
3) It's logical to be concerned with potential anticompetitive results from pretty much anything Microsoft does, based on their market share, market power, and past history. It's not logical to be concerned with anticompetitive results from Apple, as they don't have anywhere near enough power to influence competitors or control a market.
Then why do people always protest Microsoft's bundling of browsers, media players, etc with the OS?
If Apple is "good" for bundling applications and not giving consumers the choice (for example, the music purchasing ONLY works with iTunes), then why is Microsoft "bad" for including IE and Windows Media Player with the OS? And can you imagine the outcry if Microsoft began selling music inside Windows Media Player? Slashdot would be screaming about the monopoly.
The difference is that one company is an illegal monopoly, convicted of antitrust violations, and has a history of using its monopoly power to eliminate all competition in areas it enters with new products, whereas the other company is a small niche competitor that poses no threat to dominate the personal computer market and stifle innovation.
It may not be an ideal world, but them's the breaks.
Australia trips me out. The country gives off this vibe of "Hey! We're a rough-and-tumble, individualistic frontier land." But when you look closer, you'll find one of the most mealy-mouthed, censoring, "Daddy Government please take care of me" political systems in the world.
My prediction: In fifty years junior high school kids will be learning about the Gate's vaccine for Malaria. (named after the benefactor for the research)
After, of course, those schoolkids plunk down $25 for a 15-minute limited copy of the Gates Vaccine MS-PDF (tied to their computer at school - if they want to read it at home, it's $50 for the "extra license") on their Trusted Computing Tablet PC (c)
Slashdot Mirror
SUSE doesn't have a 100$ user licens (not even one you could put into quotations)
What about this product from the SuSE online store?
5 User License ($598.00)
10 User License ($1097.00)
I wish, I wish, I wish I still had my mod points.
It's funny to see the Slashdot community holding SuSE up as some sort of beacon of light compared to the evil Red Hat, when SuSE is just a guilty of sketchy decisions (closed-source YaST, closed ISO images) as Red Hat is.
Guess what? All of you people who are railing against Red Hat for charging big money for their enterprise release, SuSE has $100 "user licences" for their desktop release and charges $800 for their "Enterprise Server". Sound familiar?
But because the groupthink has decided Red Hat == bad, and ! Red Hat == good, it's a cause for celebration.
Ok, one horror story.
I was technically a salaried employee. However, the way the owner worked the pay was this:
If you worked over 40 hours a week, you got paid for 40 hours, and the overage went into a bank of "comp time" that could only be used at his discretion. Needless to say, he didn't let you use that time very often. Apparently, after I left, another employee had a collapsed lung and missed a month or so of work. Instead of letting him take some of the obscene amount of comp time he had accumulated, the owner made him wait a few weeks without pay and then go on short-term disability.
If you worked less than 40 hours in a week, you only got paid for the hours that you worked. Hm, doesn't sound like a salaried job to me.
I wish, I wish, I wish I'd sic'd the labor lawyers on him, but I was so glad to get out I didn't care. Ah, regrets.
I worked for a small software company in Cary, NC, owned and run by a guy who was insane. His MO was that he'd hire someone, treat them like royalty for about six months, get tired of them, and fire them. As one of two sysadmins, I found out about a firing when I was told at the close of business on a given day "Disable Joebob's login tonight - he's getting fired tomorrow."
The company had about 12 people, and I saw about half of them turn over in nine months. Of course, about seven months into it, I was told "You need to show $NEW_SYSADMIN how to do the stuff you do." I saw the writing on the wall, and started quietly interviewing.
One day, I came in and attempted to log into my workstation, and my password didn't work. I knew what was up then. The owner came in and said "Can I see you in my office?" Four of us got the axe that day.
Apparently the guy's still at it - $NEW_SYSADMIN got fired about six months later, and he even fired a few of his inner circle who I thought were untouchable.
If anyone's considering interviewing with a small software company in Cary that does serial console work, drop me an email and I'll be glad to fill you in on the horror stories.
When a person buys Kazaa they are entering into a legally binding agreement
I don't think you can say with certainty that a EULA is a "legally binding agreement."
Have you ever tried to program using the perl bindings? I have done it in the past and was extremely annoyed by the fact that it is a non-stop moving target. It also broke quite often. I ended up abandoning the entire stuff.
Yup, sure have. I've been working with this app for going on three years, producing useful releases every 4-5 months or so, and haven't run across a "moving target" in Perl/Tk. Aside from bugfixes, I haven't had to go back and change any of my code or work around any brokenness in new Perl/Tk releases.
Granted, my app doesn't tax the outer limits of the Tk bindings, but for what I do, I've found Perl/Tk to be a stable and adequate cross-platform toolkit.
For me, it came down to documentation. I have a moderately complicated GUI Perl app (Perl because it was the language I was most familiar with). I looked into various toolkits, like wxPerl, GTK/Perl, QT/Perl, but ended up using good ol' reliable Perl/Tk.
The big advantage with picking up Perl/Tk was that the O'Reilly books were extremely informative - good examples on each widget, how they interoperate, how to use them, and larger program examples. The documentation for the other toolkits I considered basically consisted of "look at the arguments this C++ function takes, and use it," which didn't make for an easy time picking things up (wxPerl was the worst in that regard). While an experienced C++ programmer might not have a hard time with that, it was way over my head.
As a result, though, I have a decent app that runs on X11 and Win32. With the great PAR archiver, I can even package the app up in a nice bundle.
Good times.
Well, when you're talking home, you mean the Old Dominion.
Just southeast of heaven to the surf and the hills.
She's the best of 13 sisters, and 37 more.
Sweet, sweet Virginia always keeps an open door.
--Eddie From Ohio
I perform improvisational comedy when I'm not geeking out. Though it edges toward the geeky side with the software I wrote for the audio stuff.
Cheaper to buy? No, not really. Apple's education programs are second-to-none.
Maybe for the direct-to-schools stuff, but my mom is a middle school teacher, and was looking at the Apple Education Store, and hardware prices there are only about $100 cheaper than retail.
The discounts on software are significant, though.
Honestly, I don't know why Red Hat and others include sendmail.
Red Hat includes both Sendmail and Postfix on their CDs - sendmail is just the default.
You can install Postfix, and then use "redhat-switch-mail" to activate Postfix. And with that, you're running a not-Sendmail mailer.
Today I heard on the SCO/Caldera conference call that you are using SCO/X web-services platform.
Actually, I don't think I was very clear. SCO referenced salesforce.com as the type of ASP business that they're targeting with SCO/X, not as a customer of SCO/X.
Sorry for the confusion - it was kinda type-as-you-go from the conference call.
They mentioned potential $3B in revenue from SCO/X, based apparently on everyone who owns a SCO server buying an equiavelent number of SCO/X boxes at $1500
I was loving being able to sit at work and connect to my password-protected home library and stream the tunes.
I'm sure someone will find a way around it, but it still sucks. Guess I'll stick with 4.0 for the time being.
Wal-Mart, Dell, and Home Depot haven't been proven in court to have and maintain an illegal monopoly in their market areas, and to use that monopoly to extend control to other market areas.
That would be the main difference, yeah.
You make it sound like Apple is just bursting with posies in its niceness. I've yet to meet any credible people who believe that given half the chance Apple wouldn't have turned out just like Microsoft, or even worse. You only have to look at their history of using lawyers as weapons to suddenly start appreciating the lack of lawsuit-happiness over at Redmond.
The simple fact of the matter is that most Slashdot posters wouldn't know consistancy of opinion if it slapped them round the face with a wet kipper. It's fashionable to like Apple, it's fashionable to dislike Microsoft. The fact that they are just two sides of the same coin is something most would apparently rather ignore.
Reading for comprehension can be fun, in six quick and easy steps!
If you'll go back and actually read what I wrote before the Redmond side of your brain kicked into overdrive, you'll see that I made no judgements one way or the other of the relative "niceness" of either company, or as to what Apple would do if they had 90% of the marketshare in home PCs.
So, just for you, I'll hit the salient points again:
1) Microsoft has been convicted of having an illegal monopoly in the PC market, and using that monopoly to crush competition in that and other markets. Apple has about 5% marketshare, and thus isn't going to be able to use iTunes to bully anyone but themselves into releasing Mac-exclusive products.
2) Microsoft has the power to use an integrated music service to dictate the future of digital music provided over the internet. Apple, as a niche player, does not.
3) It's logical to be concerned with potential anticompetitive results from pretty much anything Microsoft does, based on their market share, market power, and past history. It's not logical to be concerned with anticompetitive results from Apple, as they don't have anywhere near enough power to influence competitors or control a market.
Then why do people always protest Microsoft's bundling of browsers, media players, etc with the OS?
If Apple is "good" for bundling applications and not giving consumers the choice (for example, the music purchasing ONLY works with iTunes), then why is Microsoft "bad" for including IE and Windows Media Player with the OS? And can you imagine the outcry if Microsoft began selling music inside Windows Media Player? Slashdot would be screaming about the monopoly.
The difference is that one company is an illegal monopoly, convicted of antitrust violations, and has a history of using its monopoly power to eliminate all competition in areas it enters with new products, whereas the other company is a small niche competitor that poses no threat to dominate the personal computer market and stifle innovation.
It may not be an ideal world, but them's the breaks.
KMart has been using the blue light for YEARS, and look where it got them!
After this phase, they will unleash a weapon even more heinous and powerful than Shock and Awe - Chaka Kahn!!!
That's probably chat.cnn.com, but I don't see the closed-caption feed channel that they had going around 9/11 - dunno if it's still there or not.
Channel #CNN doesn't appear to have it.
You know, you could replace "Perl" with "Red Hat", and "Python" with "Other Linux Distros", and the meaning wouldn't change at all.
I equate it with insecure people's need to lash out at whatever is most popular or mainstream, in an effort to look like they're cool.
Australia trips me out. The country gives off this vibe of "Hey! We're a rough-and-tumble, individualistic frontier land." But when you look closer, you'll find one of the most mealy-mouthed, censoring, "Daddy Government please take care of me" political systems in the world.
It's just a weird split.
Howard Coble (R-NC)
Uh oh - Hollywood Howard from Greensboro. We're doomed.
My prediction: In fifty years junior high school kids will be learning about the Gate's vaccine for Malaria. (named after the benefactor for the research)
After, of course, those schoolkids plunk down $25 for a 15-minute limited copy of the Gates Vaccine MS-PDF (tied to their computer at school - if they want to read it at home, it's $50 for the "extra license") on their Trusted Computing Tablet PC (c)
I'd like to see Intel machines support serial consoles - that kind of stuff comes in very handy in a datacenter.