WinG huh? It wasn't until IBM showed ID's Doom running in a window on OS/2 that Microsoft got off their ars and build WinG. IBM build DIVE with IDs help but something happened in the process and ID dropped out of the partnership. I think it had to do with culture clashes. Just a guess. From what I remember, there were huge groups of people around the OS/2, Doom-in-a-window demos at COMDEX.
You're talking about apples and goats here. Running DooM in a DOS window is only a demonstration of, well, DOS. WinG and DirectX after it are API's for writing Win32 programs that can access the hardware by more sophisticated means. If IBM had demonstrated DooM ported to OpenGL, that would have been something impressive. But it wasn't. Running a DOS window is not impressive.
Gesh, OS/2 v3.0 had OpenGL support builtin too, though it never got hardware OGL support.
Saying an operating system has OpenGL support built in just does not make sense. What you mean is that OS/2 came bundled with native libraries that provided OpenGL routines. If you want to "add" OpenGL support to an operating system, you just port (devil of details here) it and recompile. Windows 9x had support for OpenGL if you went to SGI's web site and downloaded their runtime libs. However, Microsoft just bundled them eventually. Big deal. As for never getting hardware support... well, case in point.
There is very little, if anything, Microsoft ever did first in the computer industry. Most was just copied and they dominated by the anti-competitive leveraging of their monopoly. IMHO.
This is the only point on which I'd say you're absolutely correct.
There's a few other simple reasons OS/2 might have failed. The first was that it was just too robust. You comment in the story that it was 10 years ago that it was begun. Well, think about the machines we had 10 years ago. Most people, if they even had a computer, they were in the 286 or 386 department. OS/2 is a heavy-weight. It compared more to what NT was soon to become back then. Yes, it had smaller hardware requirements, but most people's machines were just insufficient for running it. Other possibility was the amount of DOS software out there 10 years ago.
Games and multimedia software were mostly written for DOS because authors needed direct hardware access. OS/2, while having excellent DOS support, it was still too slow and unstable to play Falcon 3.0 or what have you (although, I admit I was able to get CrystalDream II by Triton to run... only after a LOT of hacking).
Aside from that, there were no direct hardware access API's available... ever (as far as I know). When OS had to start competing with Windows 95, Microsoft was introducing the WinG (Windows Graphics) library, the library that eventually lead to DirectX. I'm not saying that OS/2 had no multimedia support (it had a fantastic multimedia model), but it simply was not ambitious enough.
Too bad. OS/2 was never geared towards people with lower end (average at the time) hardware and those who wanted to play games.
The Open Source movement, otherwise known as 'Free Software', has been a topic of considerable debate on the Internet'smost controversial site. The majority of this debate has centered around the technical merits of the software, with the esteemed editors argueing against adopting Linux by employing the full depth of their considerable intellects, and the other side hurling death threats and similar invective. This has allowed many who would not otherwise receive quality information about Open Source software to be made aware of many of its ramifications, but one issue has been left alone: The overt racism that is deeply embedded in the movement.
What do you see in this list of names? Are there any African-Americans on it? Absolutely not, none of those names sound like one a self-respecting black person would have! No Maurice, no Luther, no Lil' Kim. There are many other lists such as this, you can see one here. Flip through each page, do you see anything other than white faces? Of course you don't, because Open Source and its adherents are ardent racists and they absolutely forbid access to the sacred 'kernel' by any person of color.
Lets look at another list, this time a compendium of the companies using Linux. Are there any blackownedcompanies on that list? Nooooooo. How about these companies? They all have something to do with Open Source software, any of them owned by an African-American? No again. Here is an extensive collection of photographs from a LUG (Linux User Gathering) meeting, more can be viewed at that link. What is odd about these pictures, and every other photograph I have ever seen of a LUG meeting, is that there is not one single black person to be seen, and probably none for miles.
More racist overtones can be found by examining the language of Open Source. They often refer to 'white hat' hackers. These 'white hats' scurry about the Internet doing good, but illegal, acts for their fellow man. In stark contrast we find the 'black hat' hackers. They destroy the good works of others by breaking into systems, stealing data, and generally causing havoc. These two terms reflect the mindset of most Linux developers. White means good, black means bad. Anywhere there is black, there is uncontrollable destruction and lawlessness. Looking further we see black lists that inform other users of 'bad' hardware, Samba, an obvious play on the much hated Little Black Sambo book, Mandrake, which I won't explain except to say that the French are notorious racists. This type is linguistic discrimination is widespread throughout the Open Source culture, lampooned by many of its more popular sites.
It is also a fact that all Unix 'distros' contain a plethora of racist commands with not so hidden symbolism.
It can hardly be coincidence that the prime operating system of choice of the 'open source supremacists' - Linux, features commands which are poorly disguised racist acronyms. For example: 'awk' (All White Klan) , 'sed' (shoot nEgroes dead), 'ln' (lynch negroes), 'rpm' (raical purity mandatory), 'bash' (bring a slave home), 'ps' (persecute sambo), 'mount' (murder or unseat nubians today), 'fsck' (favored supreme Christian klan). I could go on and on about the latent racist symbolism in Linux, but I fear it would take weeks to enumerate every incidence.
Is there a single unix command out there that does not have some hidden racist connotation ?
Suffice it to say that the racism pervades Linux like a particularly bad smell.
Can you imagine the effect of running such a racist operating system on the impressionable mind ? I don't have to remind you that transmitting subliminal messages is banned in the USA, and yet here we have an operating system that appears to be one enormous submliminal ad for the Klan!
One of the few selling points of Open Source software is that it is available in many different languages. Browsing through the list I see that absolutely none are offered in Swahili, nor Ebonics. Obviously this is done to prevent black people from having access to the kernel. If it weren't for the fact that racism is so blatantly evil I would be impressed by the efforts these Open Sourcers have invested in keeping their little hobby lilly white. It even appears that they hate the Japanese, as some of these self proclaimed hackers defaced a web site with anti-Japanese slogans. Hell, these people even go all the way to Africa (South Africa mind you, better known as White Africa) and the pictures prove that they don't even get close to a black person.
Of course, presenting overwhelming evidence such as this is a bit unfair without some attempt to determine why these Open Sourcers are so racist. Much of the evidence I have collected indicates that their views are so deeply held that they are seldom questioned by the new recruits. This, coupled with the robot-like groupthink that dominates the culture allows the racist mindset to continue to permeate the ranks. Indeed, the Open Source version of a Klan rally, OSDN (known to the world as Open Source Developer's Network, known to insiders as Open Source Denies Negroes) nearly stands up and shouts its racist views on its demographics page. It doesn't mention the black man one single time. Obviously, anyone involved with Open Source doesn't need to be told that the demographic is entirely white, it is a given.
I have a sneaking suspicion as to why their beliefs are so closely held: they are all terrible athletes.
Really. Much like the tragedy at Columbine High School, where two geeks went on a rampage to get back at 'jocks', these adult geeks still bear the emotional scars inflicted upon them due to their lack of athletic ability during their teen years. As African-Americans are well known for their athletic skills, they are an obvious target for the Open Source geeks. As we all know, sports builds character, thus it follows that the lack of sports destroys character. These geeks, locked away in their rooms, munching on stale pizza and Fritos, engage in no character building activities. Further, they interact only with computers and never develop the level of social skill that allows normal people to handle relationships with persons of color.
Contrasted with the closed source, non-geeky software house Microsoft, Open Source has a long, long way to go.
Join me in my next article where I will lay bare the rampant anti-semitism in the Open Source community.
Since VA Software (ticker: LNUX) is now trading at a substantial premium to book value and cash (after writing down goodwill on a number of acquisitions made at optimistic dot com valuations), its cash generation or lack thereof is a much more important issue than it used to be in the days when the stock was available for less than the cash on its balance sheet. Which leaves us unsure of what to make of the latest developments.
Good results
First, we have the second quarter fiscal 2002 results, released last week. These were actually really quite good. VA has reduced its cash burn to $6.1m/quarter this is not only a massive fall from the hardware services days of a >$30m cash burn, but is substantially below the target of $8m/quarter which VA announced at the time of quitting the hardware business. Having left the hardware and consulting businesses, VA was concentrating on selling its main software product, Sourceforge 3.0, and had made a number of new sales to blue-chip customers such as Stanford Universty and Pfizer. We had a few problems with their statement in the conference call and the press release that they had "$61m in cash and marketable securities" which is true, but highly misleading as to their actual financial position as they also have current liabilities of $18m (ie; they need this much to pay bills falling due in the next six months, so the actual cash available to burn is more like $43m), and we regard their description of the redundancy payments and lease cancellation fees which make up their restructuring costs as "non cash items" as actively ludicrous, but this is nit-picking; the facts as of a couple of weeks ago appeared to be that VA Software was on the raspberry road to profitability.
But.
Then we got this little bombshell; Slashdot, jewel in the crown of VA Software's OSDN network of Open Source websites, is moving to a pay subscriptions model a la Salon. Well, perhaps that's being a little bit too harsh; Slashdot isn't doing the full reader reduction exercise of making you pay for the only content you came to read, but it is going to be having "more intrusive" ads (by which I think we mean expanded banners and skyscrapers surely Slashdot wouldn't dare to go down the route of pop-ups or interstitials, would they? WOULD THEY? AARRGH!), and you'll be able to view slashdot without these ads at the bargain subscription rate of $5 per thousand pages. Obviously, this caused much wailing and gnashing of teeth among the assorted slashbots (2275 comments so far, nearly a third as many as adequacy.org's most popular article), but we can't help thinking that they're missing the point. Nobody, least of all VA, thinks that there will be material revenue opportunities from the subscription model; all this is, is a figleaf designed to allow Slashdot to accept pop-up X10 ads while giving its editors hobbyists Rob Malda and Jeff Bates, a lightning conductor of "well, why don't you subscribe?" to deal with the floods of threatening email they are likely to receive.
So fair enough. But when we read the actual announcement on Slashdot, we at adequacy.org got worried. When we think we're looking at a company which is on the right track, we don't like to see senior staff at its only profitable business unit making statements like:
" The large ads that you see on many other sites are coming here. We really don't have an option: these are what advertisers want, and if we don't provide them, we won't be around much longer"
or
" We won't create subscriber only features that cost more to maintain than they generate. But we do need support from you if we are to continue."
What the hell? Slashdot was known to be profitable and cash positive when taken over by Andover.net in 1999. Andover.net was known to be profitable and cash-positive when taken over by VA Linux in 2000. The OSDN group of sites was, according to the 2Q02 results conference call, the source of more or less all the revenue generated by VA Software. And now we're being told that the ad market is so precarious that the VA cash pile is likely to be burnt up imminently? What gives? Quite apart from anything, statements like "we won't be around much longer" are Forward Looking Statements. Companies with publicly traded securities outstanding should not be making forward looking statements outside of the context of a scheduled conference call or an announcement to the general public under Regulation FD. It is, quite simply, not good enough for Rob Malda to be making this kind of wild assertion about the trading conditions faced by the key media property in the only profitable division of VA Software, ad hoc and without any kind of "safe harbor" statement. We don't know whether or not this announcement was technically in breach of Section 21 (E) of the Securities Exchange Act 1934, but we do know that well-managed companies with competently run press office and investor relations functions don't leak rumors in this kind of way.
Adequacy investigates
When we at adequacy.org witness an informational cluster-fuck like this in the making, we want to dig and delve, for the benefit of you our readers. We're about to make a few fairly controversial statements in this report, and we'd like you to take the following on trust: all the statements we make below which are in bold face can be sourced to a prominent (as in, you'd recognise the name if we told you) employee of Slashdot. We at adequacy don't want to cost anyone their job, so we'll make the following statement:
The statements sourced to an employee of Slashdot were acquired as the result of IRC conversation on an open channel. For this reason, adequacy.org does not feel bound to protect its source come what may. However, on general principles, we will only hand over the IRC logs which prove the veracity of our information on receipt of a subpoena from VA Software. In the event of our receiving such a subpoena, we will do our very best to publicise throughout the Internet the fact that VA Software issued such a subpoena to us in order to track down a critical employee, something which we would imagine would not generate good publicity with the core slashdot audience.
Ok, here's the dirt
Sourceforge is not profitable and looks like it never will be. According to our source, "it's a giant vacuum". And this seems about right to us. The recent conference call with VA Chief Executive Larry "Eleven Million Dollar Man" (that's how much VA stock he's sold for cash since the float) Augustin was full of the joys of Sourceforge "Enterprise Edition" 3.0, a "proprietary" version of the popular Open Source collaborative software development tool. Indeed, in response to a question, VA's Chairman and Chief Executive told the world that VA Software (a company which, according to its CFO made "substantially all" of its revenue from the online advertising of the OSDN) was "a company in the enterprise software market". Much was made of the fact that new sales had been made to Stanford and Pfizer, two new key clients. But when you try to pin down these sales to hard revenue numbers, it kind of drifts away. The hard fact is that Sourceforge charges $1000 per seat license (there are apparently issues relating to revenue recognition over the term of the long-term licensing contracts which VA is trying to sll, but $1K was the hard number given at the conference call). That means that, before VA Software can be considered to be mainly a software company, it needs to be selling 5000 seats worth of Sourceforge per quarter (generating $5m of revenue, roughly the same as OSDN's revenue). How close is it now to that goal?
Not close. Although the reference implementation of Sourceforge; the licensing level at which it starts to generate positive RoI for its customers, is estimated to be 120 seats, the vast majority of its current customer base are installing it on trial implementations of 30 seats to see if it's any good. Two or three big sales of Sourceforge might make a quarter of a million bucks at the outside; Sourceforge revenue for 2Q02 might possibly be as low as $60,000. Since Sourceforge 3.1, with better integration with other tools and added functionality is on the way, we can't see anyone springing for a full installation of 3.0, meaning that sales are at the mercy of the development schedule. In any case, we're not sure why anyone would buy 3.0; as far as we can tell, the main advantage over the Open Source version is that you get to use Oracle rather than PostGreSQL as a back end, which shouldn't be too terribly hard an alteration to make in-house given that the source code for the biggest existing implementation of Sourceforge (http://www.sourceforge.net) is available.
So, on the basis of publicly verifiable facts, our source appears to know what he's talking about.
OSDN is run tightly; VA as a whole is not. This is more or less a direct quote from our source, and we believe it. OSDN, for all its expensive branding and new name, is the business of Andover.net, which was always the poor man's CMG, or Ziff-Davis for the technologically literate. Which is to say, a bunch of guys who knew how to sell ads for computer stuff. They're still good. Let's consider the following:
Again from the conference call, we learn that in 2Q02, Intel accounted for 20% of total revenues. That's (cue drum roll, Dr Evil voice) one million dollars! Did they buy a thousand Sourceforge seats? To put it bluntly, no. They spent this on advertising
You can't spend one million dollars on advertising
At any reasonable CPM rate (or indeed, at OSDN's quoted rates for "selfserve" ads recently posted, one million dollars would buy you 250 million ad impressions. According to the OSDN advertising screen, they serve 120 million page views a month. So, by this standard, roughly two out of every three ads on OSDN during the second quarter of fiscal 2002 would have been ads for Intel. I have to tell you, and every regular viewer of Slashdot will agree, that they weren't.
Slashdot is notorious for running ads for thinkgeek tshirts, other OSDN sites and caffeinated mints, but surprisingly few ads for the high-end server gear which is the unique selling point of OSDN to its advertiser base. And slashdot accounts for an awful lot of those 120 million pages. Specifically, according to figures given in in Malda's statement, Slashdot has "one third of a million visitors per day", and the median visitor generates ten pageviews (we guesstimate this from the statement that, at a subscription rate of $5 per 1000 pages without ads, "82% of our readers could view slashdot for a year for $20", ie, 4000 pages per year). That means that over a quarter, just about 90 million of OSDN's 120 million pages are accounted for by Slashdot. So if Intel has spent One Million Dollars on OSDN advertising without making a material impact on slashdot, then something pretty strange has gone on.
Here's our guess. Intel is the sponsor of the "Large Linux Installation Foundry" on sourceforge.net. What's been going on here is "narrowcasting" Intel isn't so much interested in serving 250 million pages to random Slashbots, but is more interested in serving about 400 pages over the quarter to a group of people possibly as small as nine or ten, who were making the decision in 2Q02 about which technology provider they would be going for in a large Linux installation. It is not at all unknown for big ticket computer salesmen to drop a seven-figure check in promotions if they're hoping to land a nine-figure contract. It's also not impossible that the sponsorship of Sourceforge Large Linux Installations during 2Q02 was the subject of a bidding war between to rivals over the same large contract. We can't prove this, but we're pretty sure that something of this sort happened (if there are any more disgruntled VA employees out there, we'd love to know if we were right). In any case, it's not what you might call "high-quality income"; although VA hope to continue doing business with Intel, this is a big chunk of revenue to be dependent on one piece of marketing whim.
Slashdot could be sold to another media organisation. We had to read between the lines to get to this one, and it's probably not fair to pin it on our source, but he certainly entertained our speculation on the subject. And the interesting thing is that, with the information we were able to glean about the decomposition of 2Q earnings, Slashdot doesn't look like the cash cow for VA that we thought it might be. Out of the $5m revenue of VA Software, we can take out approximately $750K of interest income on the cash balance and maybe $200K for Sourceforge, meaning that the Intel contract accounts for roughly a quarter of the operating income of OSDN. From the pagecount, we know that Slashdot accounts for three quarters of the pageviews (and thus roughly three quarters of the bandwidth costs); to assume that it generates three quarters of the revenue would be tantamount to assuming that the other OSDN sites make next to zero revenue. Which is a crazy assumption, particularly given the intangible benefit to VA Software of having sourceforge.net as a promotional device for Sourceforge Enterprise Edition. And if Slashdot accounts for three quarters of the costs and less than three quarters of the revenues, it's a dog in the OSDN portfolio, not a star or a cash cow.
So, why not sell it? Although Slashdot may be a drain on the average profitability of OSDN, it probably breaks even, and in the world of magazine publishing, that's not bad. Publishing companies know that profitability has to be measured across a portfolio of magazines, not unit by unit, and it's often worth your while publishing a loss-making Talk Magazine for a while for the touch of stardust glamour it adds to a lucrative (but potentially rather prosaic) Conde Nast Traveller. Slashdot would be a perfect "hood ornament" for a profitable stable of computer magazines, dragging the kids in while they were in college and then cross-promoting them onto other titles by the time they had reached a saleable demographic. And all this could be done without compromising its "editorial integrity", which is something usually respected in the media world, though not so much in the software publishing world ("Andover.net had all sorts of evil plans for Slashdot", our source reveals).
Bottom line: If Larry Augustin wants to claim to be running a company in the enterprise software business, it's time for him to walk the talk. Let's see some divestment of non-core assets like Slashdot. Otherwise, we ought to be facing facts and reminding ourselves that the company which used to be "VA Linux" and is now "VA Software" has always been "VA Media". It's a publishing company, and ought to be managed as one. If that means getting rid of Eleven Million Dollar Larry and getting a graduate of the Si Mewhouse academy, then so be it.
Since VA Software (ticker: LNUX) is now trading at a substantial premium to book value and cash (after writing down goodwill on a number of acquisitions made at optimistic dot com valuations), its cash generation or lack thereof is a much more important issue than it used to be in the days when the stock was available for less than the cash on its balance sheet. Which leaves us unsure of what to make of the latest developments.
Good results
First, we have the second quarter fiscal 2002 results, released last week. These were actually really quite good. VA has reduced its cash burn to $6.1m/quarter this is not only a massive fall from the hardware services days of a >$30m cash burn, but is substantially below the target of $8m/quarter which VA announced at the time of quitting the hardware business. Having left the hardware and consulting businesses, VA was concentrating on selling its main software product, Sourceforge 3.0, and had made a number of new sales to blue-chip customers such as Stanford Universty and Pfizer. We had a few problems with their statement in the conference call and the press release that they had "$61m in cash and marketable securities" which is true, but highly misleading as to their actual financial position as they also have current liabilities of $18m (ie; they need this much to pay bills falling due in the next six months, so the actual cash available to burn is more like $43m), and we regard their description of the redundancy payments and lease cancellation fees which make up their restructuring costs as "non cash items" as actively ludicrous, but this is nit-picking; the facts as of a couple of weeks ago appeared to be that VA Software was on the raspberry road to profitability.
But.
Then we got this little bombshell; Slashdot, jewel in the crown of VA Software's OSDN network of Open Source websites, is moving to a pay subscriptions model a la Salon. Well, perhaps that's being a little bit too harsh; Slashdot isn't doing the full reader reduction exercise of making you pay for the only content you came to read, but it is going to be having "more intrusive" ads (by which I think we mean expanded banners and skyscrapers surely Slashdot wouldn't dare to go down the route of pop-ups or interstitials, would they? WOULD THEY? AARRGH!), and you'll be able to view slashdot without these ads at the bargain subscription rate of $5 per thousand pages. Obviously, this caused much wailing and gnashing of teeth among the assorted slashbots (2275 comments so far, nearly a third as many as adequacy.org's most popular article), but we can't help thinking that they're missing the point. Nobody, least of all VA, thinks that there will be material revenue opportunities from the subscription model; all this is, is a figleaf designed to allow Slashdot to accept pop-up X10 ads while giving its editors hobbyists Rob Malda and Jeff Bates, a lightning conductor of "well, why don't you subscribe?" to deal with the floods of threatening email they are likely to receive.
So fair enough. But when we read the actual announcement on Slashdot, we at adequacy.org got worried. When we think we're looking at a company which is on the right track, we don't like to see senior staff at its only profitable business unit making statements like:
" The large ads that you see on many other sites are coming here. We really don't have an option: these are what advertisers want, and if we don't provide them, we won't be around much longer"
or
" We won't create subscriber only features that cost more to maintain than they generate. But we do need support from you if we are to continue."
What the hell? Slashdot was known to be profitable and cash positive when taken over by Andover.net in 1999. Andover.net was known to be profitable and cash-positive when taken over by VA Linux in 2000. The OSDN group of sites was, according to the 2Q02 results conference call, the source of more or less all the revenue generated by VA Software. And now we're being told that the ad market is so precarious that the VA cash pile is likely to be burnt up imminently? What gives? Quite apart from anything, statements like "we won't be around much longer" are Forward Looking Statements. Companies with publicly traded securities outstanding should not be making forward looking statements outside of the context of a scheduled conference call or an announcement to the general public under Regulation FD. It is, quite simply, not good enough for Rob Malda to be making this kind of wild assertion about the trading conditions faced by the key media property in the only profitable division of VA Software, ad hoc and without any kind of "safe harbor" statement. We don't know whether or not this announcement was technically in breach of Section 21 (E) of the Securities Exchange Act 1934, but we do know that well-managed companies with competently run press office and investor relations functions don't leak rumors in this kind of way.
Adequacy investigates
When we at adequacy.org witness an informational cluster-fuck like this in the making, we want to dig and delve, for the benefit of you our readers. We're about to make a few fairly controversial statements in this report, and we'd like you to take the following on trust: all the statements we make below which are in bold face can be sourced to a prominent (as in, you'd recognise the name if we told you) employee of Slashdot. We at adequacy don't want to cost anyone their job, so we'll make the following statement:
The statements sourced to an employee of Slashdot were acquired as the result of IRC conversation on an open channel. For this reason, adequacy.org does not feel bound to protect its source come what may. However, on general principles, we will only hand over the IRC logs which prove the veracity of our information on receipt of a subpoena from VA Software. In the event of our receiving such a subpoena, we will do our very best to publicise throughout the Internet the fact that VA Software issued such a subpoena to us in order to track down a critical employee, something which we would imagine would not generate good publicity with the core slashdot audience.
Ok, here's the dirt
Sourceforge is not profitable and looks like it never will be. According to our source, "it's a giant vacuum". And this seems about right to us. The recent conference call with VA Chief Executive Larry "Eleven Million Dollar Man" (that's how much VA stock he's sold for cash since the float) Augustin was full of the joys of Sourceforge "Enterprise Edition" 3.0, a "proprietary" version of the popular Open Source collaborative software development tool. Indeed, in response to a question, VA's Chairman and Chief Executive told the world that VA Software (a company which, according to its CFO made "substantially all" of its revenue from the online advertising of the OSDN) was "a company in the enterprise software market". Much was made of the fact that new sales had been made to Stanford and Pfizer, two new key clients. But when you try to pin down these sales to hard revenue numbers, it kind of drifts away. The hard fact is that Sourceforge charges $1000 per seat license (there are apparently issues relating to revenue recognition over the term of the long-term licensing contracts which VA is trying to sll, but $1K was the hard number given at the conference call). That means that, before VA Software can be considered to be mainly a software company, it needs to be selling 5000 seats worth of Sourceforge per quarter (generating $5m of revenue, roughly the same as OSDN's revenue). How close is it now to that goal?
Not close. Although the reference implementation of Sourceforge; the licensing level at which it starts to generate positive RoI for its customers, is estimated to be 120 seats, the vast majority of its current customer base are installing it on trial implementations of 30 seats to see if it's any good. Two or three big sales of Sourceforge might make a quarter of a million bucks at the outside; Sourceforge revenue for 2Q02 might possibly be as low as $60,000. Since Sourceforge 3.1, with better integration with other tools and added functionality is on the way, we can't see anyone springing for a full installation of 3.0, meaning that sales are at the mercy of the development schedule. In any case, we're not sure why anyone would buy 3.0; as far as we can tell, the main advantage over the Open Source version is that you get to use Oracle rather than PostGreSQL as a back end, which shouldn't be too terribly hard an alteration to make in-house given that the source code for the biggest existing implementation of Sourceforge (http://www.sourceforge.net) is available.
So, on the basis of publicly verifiable facts, our source appears to know what he's talking about.
OSDN is run tightly; VA as a whole is not. This is more or less a direct quote from our source, and we believe it. OSDN, for all its expensive branding and new name, is the business of Andover.net, which was always the poor man's CMG, or Ziff-Davis for the technologically literate. Which is to say, a bunch of guys who knew how to sell ads for computer stuff. They're still good. Let's consider the following:
Again from the conference call, we learn that in 2Q02, Intel accounted for 20% of total revenues. That's (cue drum roll, Dr Evil voice) one million dollars! Did they buy a thousand Sourceforge seats? To put it bluntly, no. They spent this on advertising
You can't spend one million dollars on advertising
At any reasonable CPM rate (or indeed, at OSDN's quoted rates for "selfserve" ads recently posted, one million dollars would buy you 250 million ad impressions. According to the OSDN advertising screen, they serve 120 million page views a month. So, by this standard, roughly two out of every three ads on OSDN during the second quarter of fiscal 2002 would have been ads for Intel. I have to tell you, and every regular viewer of Slashdot will agree, that they weren't.
Slashdot is notorious for running ads for thinkgeek tshirts, other OSDN sites and caffeinated mints, but surprisingly few ads for the high-end server gear which is the unique selling point of OSDN to its advertiser base. And slashdot accounts for an awful lot of those 120 million pages. Specifically, according to figures given in in Malda's statement, Slashdot has "one third of a million visitors per day", and the median visitor generates ten pageviews (we guesstimate this from the statement that, at a subscription rate of $5 per 1000 pages without ads, "82% of our readers could view slashdot for a year for $20", ie, 4000 pages per year). That means that over a quarter, just about 90 million of OSDN's 120 million pages are accounted for by Slashdot. So if Intel has spent One Million Dollars on OSDN advertising without making a material impact on slashdot, then something pretty strange has gone on.
Here's our guess. Intel is the sponsor of the "Large Linux Installation Foundry" on sourceforge.net. What's been going on here is "narrowcasting" Intel isn't so much interested in serving 250 million pages to random Slashbots, but is more interested in serving about 400 pages over the quarter to a group of people possibly as small as nine or ten, who were making the decision in 2Q02 about which technology provider they would be going for in a large Linux installation. It is not at all unknown for big ticket computer salesmen to drop a seven-figure check in promotions if they're hoping to land a nine-figure contract. It's also not impossible that the sponsorship of Sourceforge Large Linux Installations during 2Q02 was the subject of a bidding war between to rivals over the same large contract. We can't prove this, but we're pretty sure that something of this sort happened (if there are any more disgruntled VA employees out there, we'd love to know if we were right). In any case, it's not what you might call "high-quality income"; although VA hope to continue doing business with Intel, this is a big chunk of revenue to be dependent on one piece of marketing whim.
Slashdot could be sold to another media organisation. We had to read between the lines to get to this one, and it's probably not fair to pin it on our source, but he certainly entertained our speculation on the subject. And the interesting thing is that, with the information we were able to glean about the decomposition of 2Q earnings, Slashdot doesn't look like the cash cow for VA that we thought it might be. Out of the $5m revenue of VA Software, we can take out approximately $750K of interest income on the cash balance and maybe $200K for Sourceforge, meaning that the Intel contract accounts for roughly a quarter of the operating income of OSDN. From the pagecount, we know that Slashdot accounts for three quarters of the pageviews (and thus roughly three quarters of the bandwidth costs); to assume that it generates three quarters of the revenue would be tantamount to assuming that the other OSDN sites make next to zero revenue. Which is a crazy assumption, particularly given the intangible benefit to VA Software of having sourceforge.net as a promotional device for Sourceforge Enterprise Edition. And if Slashdot accounts for three quarters of the costs and less than three quarters of the revenues, it's a dog in the OSDN portfolio, not a star or a cash cow.
So, why not sell it? Although Slashdot may be a drain on the average profitability of OSDN, it probably breaks even, and in the world of magazine publishing, that's not bad. Publishing companies know that profitability has to be measured across a portfolio of magazines, not unit by unit, and it's often worth your while publishing a loss-making Talk Magazine for a while for the touch of stardust glamour it adds to a lucrative (but potentially rather prosaic) Conde Nast Traveller. Slashdot would be a perfect "hood ornament" for a profitable stable of computer magazines, dragging the kids in while they were in college and then cross-promoting them onto other titles by the time they had reached a saleable demographic. And all this could be done without compromising its "editorial integrity", which is something usually respected in the media world, though not so much in the software publishing world ("Andover.net had all sorts of evil plans for Slashdot", our source reveals).
Bottom line: If Larry Augustin wants to claim to be running a company in the enterprise software business, it's time for him to walk the talk. Let's see some divestment of non-core assets like Slashdot. Otherwise, we ought to be facing facts and reminding ourselves that the company which used to be "VA Linux" and is now "VA Software" has always been "VA Media". It's a publishing company, and ought to be managed as one. If that means getting rid of Eleven Million Dollar Larry and getting a graduate of the Si Mewhouse academy, then so be it.
Secondly, Slashdot sucks RoboTroll's [slashdot.org] balls. You know why? Because for being so "user" and "community" oriented, the editors sure do manage to fuck things up for all of us. Oh wait a minute, this is connected to my first point. Oh well. The users ARE Slashdot. Without the users, Slashdot is just another detnet [detonate.net]. Without our input, it's just a failed "news" site run by a bunch of retards.
And what the fuck is up with this subscription? Have you ever taken a shit and then had someone pick that piece of shit up and sell it back to you for $20/year? Fuck that. You idiots manage to pull literally a thousand comments out of your asses every fucking day! These thousands of comments that you shit onto these discussion forums is THE CONTENT THAT DRIVES THIS PATHETIC WEB SITE. And now, Cmdr "Snotting" Taco wants to fucking bill you for it.
For being so pro open source, anti-MS [goatse.cx], and other BS, Slashdot is exactly like its arch-nemesis [microsoft.com].
What's the solution?
Make Malda, his 0.02$ mexican whore, and the rest of his ass fucking homo lovers [slashdot.org] appreciate all the hard work we put into making this site meaningful! STOP POSTING COMMENTS TO SLASHDOT UNTIL THE SUBSCRIPTION GOES AWAY! Screw this shit! Let's take OUR content and go home!
President George W. Bush, is a maniac when it comes to slaughter. The man's face lights up at any mention of the death penalty or bombing people. How determined is he to destroy the whole world and become the king of a graveyard is anyone's guess. This is simply too much.
No one with as miserable of an education as Dubya would even consider that Lou Tzu offered wisdom on the topic of war thousands of years ago. To sum it up, anytime you make more weapons, your enemy makes more weapons. If the US reverses its anti-nuke policy, everyone else is going to become as gun-ho to compensate. And as weapons increase, the world becomes less safe for everyone.
George W. Bush, you moron. STOP IT. We do not have to bomb everyone, let alone nuke anyone!
Nuclear weapons are so unmistakably evil it's amazing how this fruitcake religious fanatic who uses Christianity (a religion that teaches non-violence - think about the teaching of Jesus) as a campaign platform... is so EAGER to deal out death! Not to mention his empowerment of John Ashcroft, who is die-hardly determined to become the next McCarthy.
Where is it going to end? I honestly wonder if we're all going to make it to 2004.
Linux versus Mac OS X is not a valid comparison.
on
Penguin2Apple
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· Score: 5, Insightful
First of all, "Linux" in this case is vastly a misnomer, but bear with it for the moment. Linux is an operating system that is trying to fill many niches in many markets. Developers work hard to give it a wide range of hardware support and a wide range of functionality (everything in the range of a variety of desktops to a variety of servers configurations). However, the overall Linux experience is the result of a tremendous amount of contributions from many directions in a community.
Mac OS X, exclusive to the Macintosh and suitable for limited roles, on the other hand, is different but same. Beneath that stunning, pretty Aqua interface, you have a set of powerful core API's that essentially make up widget sets and abstraction layers. Beneath that however, is a traditional unix architecture (Darwin). When you look at Linux, BSD, Solaris, or whatever versus Darwin, you see pretty much the same thing.
So what's my beef with the comparison? Mac OS X is more appropriately pitted against KDE, GNOME, or [insert favorite desktop environment here]. Apple is focused on offering a user experience which is much different from offering an operating system and a million and one tools to make it useful. Linux offers an operating system and a huge suite of software for doing a lot of things. OS X from the perspective of comparison, is a very well polished UI.
I am certain that if all OSS developers turned their attention to making a Quartz for Linux, it could be done. But, that's not the case because we're dealing with two different offerings altogether. So, it's stupid to run out and say "Mac OS X is going to beat down Linux" or just that "it's better" and people should "move over to it". No. No. NO. NO!
Two completely different animals with their own uses, strengths, and weaknesses. This whole "Penguin2Apple" thing is just stupid. You're moving from an operating system to a machine with a different processor. Pfft.
I was under the impression that this dispute has been ongoing for quite a long while. The whole process is inherently flawed and geared to please corporations (how many domains held by individuals have been seized by corporations?) and is a matter of controversy. Silly/. journalism! I thought this site was about news.:)
And he actually asked me what I'd rather have for Valentine's Day, a nice dinner and flowers, or a gamecube. I told him I'd rather have the game cube.
If you are the maintainer of a geek girl, please consider the following advice. If dinner and flowers are cheaper than [insert latest game console / cool computer toy here], please bear in mind that your geek girl may likely request the gift with greater longevity.
You have been warned.;)
DISCLAIMER Please note that I'm kidding. I do not regret having bought my beloved such a gift.:) She seems to really enjoy it and that's what matters guys!
My girlfriend is a ubergeek who plays the Nintendo a hell of a lot more than I do (I participate in two player games... where she proceeds to whoop my white ass). She does Linux admin, codes C in circles around my head, is a LaTeX Goddess (follow the link you sickos), and has had every Nintendo game system since NES. Now, you tell me who the Gamecube was for.:)
I purchased a Gamecube for my girlfriend this past Valentine's Day. The console has been out since before Christmas, and so far, the title selection is to say the least, poor.
There's in the neighborhood of 10 titles for the GC, and while some of them are gems (Super Smash Bros.), over all, they are relatively lackluster. Sega has developed for them, but not even they can provide a must-have title.
Enter SquareSoft. Any platform they touch these days will probably experience Square's huge following buying power. I think a lot of Nintendo's decline is a result of losing SquareSoft's contributions.
So maybe this will give Nintendo a huge boost. Why is that important? Aside from the argument of "yea, we need more competition," Nintendo is truly an "honorable player" in this market. They may have relatively shitty licensing tactics (everyone does), but over all, Nintendo demands an extremely high level of quality for their software. The titles, regardless of fun factor, are always extremely well polished. You don't always get that on all the other platforms.
Maybe Square will be able to give us die-hard Nintendo fans something to be truly proud of our platform for.
First, you don't have to block the board. The ones we use are rear projection so they just look like a big TV set. You can also get overlays for plasma TV screens- neither have this problem.
OKay, it's rear projection or plasma... got it. My original point still stands. Besides, it doesn't make any sense to pay $2000-$8000 for a white board that is no more effective than a... white board.
If you're writing so small that a 1024x768 screen can't pick it up, nobody in your audience can either. These aren't designed to be used alone: they're for people to use in classrooms/teleconferences. Put a single black pixel up and step back 10 feet- you won't see it. You need an area of at least 6-10 pixels.
I am not talking about an audience necessarily. I am talking about interacting closely with peers and coworkers. And I am not talking about writing small. I am talking about writing detailed. You can also put a single black pixel on a 640x480 computer display, and you'll not really see it to clearly. But would you say 640x480 is sufficient resolution for sketching?
By the way, for about $200-$500, you can have an effective resolution on a white board of millions of dpi (think molecules). Now try to buy a Smart Board of similar size that has 1000dpi resolution.:)
Smart Boards not all they are cracked up to be. They are inaccurate, very crude, and uncomfortable to work with. Aside from blocking the projector all the time... It's just another silly case of "we must make this digital so that it's 'cool'" phenomenon.
But aside from that, they are just plain and simple a Bad Idea. The whole point of a chalk board or a white board, or even a scratch pad, is that you have freedom in your sketches. You are expressing ideas or at least trying to develop those ideas. The moment that you have to try to conform your ideas into some sort of restriction from the paradigm of your media, you lose pieces of your idea. Example: lines on paper, text only for jotting ideas on your Palm Pilot, etc.
Enter the Smart Board. Regardless of the resolution, you're still dealing with pixels (probably pretty low res for the size of the surface versus the resolution of the projector). You're conforming what you want to express to a grid. Now while that may not seem like such a big idea, how often have you found that you write in tiny little details or hash marks or some other marking on a diagram? Sometimes those are very useful. What if you tried to draw a couple parallel hash marks and found that the resolution of the white board was insufficient to draw them... and made one thick line.
It's little nuances like this that make Smart Boards utterly useless. You have to be as freeform as possible when expressing ideas! You should set the guide lines... and not your canvas.
+1 Troll Of The Day
on
To The Pain
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· Score: -1, Troll
Secondly, Slashdot sucks RoboTroll's balls. You know why? Because for being so "user" and "community" oriented, the editors sure do manage to fuck things up for all of us. Oh wait a minute, this is connected to my first point. Oh well. The users ARE Slashdot. Without the users, Slashdot is just another detnet. Without our input, it's just a failed "news" site run by a bunch of retards.
And what the fuck is up with this subscription? Have you ever taken a shit and then had someone pick that piece of shit up and sell it back to you for $20/year? Fuck that. You idiots manage to pull literally a thousand comments out of your asses every fucking day! These thousands of comments that you shit onto these discussion forums is THE CONTENT THAT DRIVES THIS PATHETIC WEB SITE. And now, Cmdr "Snotting" Taco wants to fucking bill you for it.
For being so pro open source, anti-MS, and other BS, Slashdot is exactly like its arch-nemesis.
What's the solution?
Make Malda, his 0.02$ mexican whore, and the rest of his ass fucking homo lovers appreciate all the hard work we put into making this site meaningful! STOP POSTING COMMENTS TO SLASHDOT UNTIL THE SUBSCRIPTION GOES AWAY! Screw this shit! Let's take OUR content and go home!
That this guy has managed to run a very successful dot.com. He gets lots of visitors who are willing to fork over a bit of money here, a bit of money there... and it all adds up.
What does that mean? He probably was a good director of business, who was screwed because his superiors were idiots. He's actually demonstrated real good business sense here and a company would probably do well to hire him to run their dot.com.:)
For as shallow and positive only, this article does indeed sound like propaganda. Sounds entirely like a sales pitch and not at all like an informed review.
As usual, yet another review of the latest and greatest, easy-to-use, Windows-friendly Linux distribution XYZ.
This review is a waste. It's purely propaganda. I love Linux, but he doesn't really offer any counter points to the review. No "This is great, but..." and certainly insufficient detail. I wouldn't even call this distribution remotely good. Sure, it's got cool icons and desktop wallpapers, but it looks kludgy and messy at best. The choice of an Aqua-esque theme is only a point on which to confuse users. Doing menus the non-standard way only will cause problems when users want to install packages not supplied by these Lycoris people. I'm sure nobody is really head-over heels for this thing, so I'll stop preaching to the choir...
But what can you expect? The community is producing a dozen new distros ever year and all we're doing is adding dead wood to a lot of existing dead weight. This distro may be organized in a "cool" way, but all it will cause for users is a mess. Linux needs to move forward and as it does, paradigms change. I am all in favor of having lots of choices... but we've got hundreds of distros as it stands now. If half of these people/groups wrote software instead of repacking it for their own self-validation, imagine how far we'd be.
Emulating the way Windows works and feels is not the answer! We need the solve the problem! The problem is Linux is difficult to use for the average user, and not necessarily the Windows user. Let me make it clear: Microsoft Windows is NOT easy to use. It simply is not. The Macintosh is easy to use. That's an example of slick, clean, effective interface design. Windows, however, regardless of MS's BS about how they spend millions researching inferface engineering, is difficult.
Ever watch a novice computer user attempt to use Windows? It's unbelievably clunky for them to do even simple tasks. Some users I've seen still don't understand how to switch between tasks. Others can't use max/minimize buttons. Most can't even figure out where their files went or what those files are! "I saved it, but now it's gone!" Do we really want to make Linux more like this?
If we can create a user-friendly environment, it won't matter if it looks/works like Windows. People will be able to figure it out. When novice users explain they want to "just be able to write email and letters and surf the web", they don't mean they want their computer to "look and work like Windows".
I say again. Solve the problem.
Make it easy for users to write letters and surf. Doing this the Microsoft way makes it hard. Let's figure out something better.
If you must post to get self-validation, try making up a story or something.
I'd agree with you if the editors didn't reject every damn story submitted. Lots of interesting stuff gets let go, but editors ALWAYS seem to make sure that a patch level kernel release gets posted. It's silliness. The editors here are just too pigheaded for users to submit interesting stories and get them known. Disagree? Stupid crap like this Linux-newbie question gets posted while intelligent topics get thrown out.
The only option is to whine about the stories that do get posted.
Big Unix software venders have been doing this for years. There's software that authenticates against a license server each time it's run (Maple, large CAD packages, etc). That's easy enough for the "owner" of the package to disable. SCO did something very similar and even had its software report back to them when a license violation was detected. Also, if you had read the post more closely, I mention that subscription software is becoming a hot topic. Companies don't want you to own software anymore. They want to lease it to you in a service format. Don't think the idea of running all your applications from a server on the Internet is too far off. It's a lot closer than you think. Also, there's always the simple solution of Some B. Guy at Adobe calling up his buddies at Microsoft and getting them to fuck with your Photoshop installation.
Your systems aren't safe with proprietary software on them. It's best to assume that companies can do whatever they choose with your computer once you give them access to it. Would you stick a black box full of technology from someone you didn't trust in your house? Could be anything. Same goes for software.
Re:Great... Content Control Features For Creators?
on
Photoshop for OS X
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· Score: 1
Yep... Proprietary format, can't be read in anything else... Oh, wait, I can open.PSD files in Macromedia Fireworks and others. Please.
Care to guess how many hundreds of thousands of dollars Macromedia pays Adobe to license code to read their formats flawlessly? Can you or your small print house pay that much?
Please.
That's right. Post anonymously when you post something stupid.
Re:Great... Content Control Features For Creators?
on
Photoshop for OS X
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· Score: 3, Insightful
You don't present any valid reason that it is a bad thing other than your reactionary comment about the DMCA. Care to give some reasons that password-protected files are a bad thing?
Great. Now I have to preach to the choir. *sigh* I thought we had technical readers on this site that could reason these things out. Here we go...
The schemes are proprietary. Non-public protection schemes can be changed by the owner without the consumers' knowledge. As a result, much power is given in the hands of corporations to limit access to your own content if you do not meet their approval. ("Upgrade to Photoshop 11, or we'll revoke the unlocking scheme in your existing software.") This does nothing but give more power to Adobe down the line. Soon, these protection schemes will work their way into all of Adobe's products and file formats (the latter of which I'm sure have already been implimented). With software becoming more and more connected to the developer, and subscription fees more and more likely on the horizon... what do you think that restricting access to the file actually means? Think about it!
There already exist a plethora of superior, open-standard protection schemes for securing data. These are, but not limited encrypted data storage/transmission (SSH/PGP/GPG/etc for securely sending your PS/PSD/PDF/SUX/etc to your coworkers), one-time access to a resource, and so on. Tools to secure data have been in development since long before Adobe entered the graphics market. These tools and open standards are far superior to any offerings Adobe can make. Why not just use them if you're interested in protecting your IP? I'm sure that Adobe is also not interested in really protecting your data. These schemes are almost always token just so that companies can leverage laws in their favor. This is not reactionary or imaginary. It's reality, stupid. And as mentioned, if you're serious about protecting your data, you use tried and true methds of doing it - not some buzzword feature fizzle in Photoshop. Otherwise, if you're going for protected public distribution, this is utterly useless.
It's stupid. Purely feature bloat. PkZIP added this feature years ago just so you had something to spend more money for. Easily cracked. However, if you crack something like this... you get sued. And not by the owners of the content.
You cannot protect your content once it has entered the public domain. It's not possible. There's always at least one person in the world that's smarter than you and will find a way around your protection. Adobe knows this but people are dazzled by their silliness. They think these features protect them. They don't. Makes Adobe stronger, doesn't increase security, and adds a tiny pebble as a stumbling block to anyone who wants to pirate content.
Re:Great... Content Control Features For Creators?
on
Photoshop for OS X
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· Score: 1
The security implementation in limited to Photoshop PDF fles. They aren't trying to lock you out of your own.psd, tiff, eps, gif, jpeg, etc. files.
You're right. Adobe has never pulled any bullshit before. Sure, it's a proprietary format... and sure, there's a strong chance that this "protection" is already implimented... But we'll never know until Adobe actually does start yanking strings. We can freely read their eBook format, right?
Re:Great... Content Control Features For Creators?
on
Photoshop for OS X
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· Score: 1, Troll
There is nothing wrong with content protection. Really. There is something wrong with the way some orgazinations/companies use it, but there's really nothing wrong with the concept. Do you think it's wrong that artists should get paid for their work and have some way to help ensure they get paid?
This isn't about artists getting paid, you idiot. This is about huge, monopolistic corporations protecting their best interests at the expense of these artists you claim to care so much about. Adobe impliments file protecting schemes, like eBook encryption, to better their position at the expense of the producers and the consumers. Putting a password on a PSD/PS/PDF/whatever doesn't help pay anybody... except Adobe. Think about what Adobe can do with this. Deny you access to your own content if you don't make them happy (think subscription service to Photoshop, for example - using an unlicensed copy, and suddenly all your protected/encrypted Photoshop files are unreadable).
This doesn't give the artists more control... it gives a big ugly corporation who has already SHOWN they are willing to manhandle people who cross them on these grounds.
Proprietary software is not acceptable. Closing off access to software and information is not acceptable. Giving up your rights to those with more money in their pockets is not acceptable. HELLO!?
Slashdot Mirror
WinG huh? It wasn't until IBM showed ID's Doom running in a window on OS/2 that Microsoft got off their ars and build WinG. IBM build DIVE with IDs help but something happened in the process and ID dropped out of the partnership. I think it had to do with culture clashes. Just a guess. From what I remember, there were huge groups of people around the OS/2, Doom-in-a-window demos at COMDEX.
You're talking about apples and goats here. Running DooM in a DOS window is only a demonstration of, well, DOS. WinG and DirectX after it are API's for writing Win32 programs that can access the hardware by more sophisticated means. If IBM had demonstrated DooM ported to OpenGL, that would have been something impressive. But it wasn't. Running a DOS window is not impressive.
Gesh, OS/2 v3.0 had OpenGL support builtin too, though it never got hardware OGL support.
Saying an operating system has OpenGL support built in just does not make sense. What you mean is that OS/2 came bundled with native libraries that provided OpenGL routines. If you want to "add" OpenGL support to an operating system, you just port (devil of details here) it and recompile. Windows 9x had support for OpenGL if you went to SGI's web site and downloaded their runtime libs. However, Microsoft just bundled them eventually. Big deal. As for never getting hardware support... well, case in point.
There is very little, if anything, Microsoft ever did first in the computer industry. Most was just copied and they dominated by the anti-competitive leveraging of their monopoly. IMHO.
This is the only point on which I'd say you're absolutely correct.
There's a few other simple reasons OS/2 might have failed. The first was that it was just too robust. You comment in the story that it was 10 years ago that it was begun. Well, think about the machines we had 10 years ago. Most people, if they even had a computer, they were in the 286 or 386 department. OS/2 is a heavy-weight. It compared more to what NT was soon to become back then. Yes, it had smaller hardware requirements, but most people's machines were just insufficient for running it. Other possibility was the amount of DOS software out there 10 years ago.
Games and multimedia software were mostly written for DOS because authors needed direct hardware access. OS/2, while having excellent DOS support, it was still too slow and unstable to play Falcon 3.0 or what have you (although, I admit I was able to get CrystalDream II by Triton to run... only after a LOT of hacking).
Aside from that, there were no direct hardware access API's available... ever (as far as I know). When OS had to start competing with Windows 95, Microsoft was introducing the WinG (Windows Graphics) library, the library that eventually lead to DirectX. I'm not saying that OS/2 had no multimedia support (it had a fantastic multimedia model), but it simply was not ambitious enough.
Too bad. OS/2 was never geared towards people with lower end (average at the time) hardware and those who wanted to play games.
How teh hell do you do that? I have been trying to figure it out forever with nos ucess. Stupid lameness filter.
Allow me to explain.
Alan Cox; Richard Stallman; Bruce Perens; Wichert Akkerman; Miguel DeIcaza.
What do you see in this list of names? Are there any African-Americans on it? Absolutely not, none of those names sound like one a self-respecting black person would have! No Maurice, no Luther, no Lil' Kim. There are many other lists such as this, you can see one here. Flip through each page, do you see anything other than white faces? Of course you don't, because Open Source and its adherents are ardent racists and they absolutely forbid access to the sacred 'kernel' by any person of color.
Lets look at another list, this time a compendium of the companies using Linux. Are there any black owned companies on that list? Nooooooo. How about these companies? They all have something to do with Open Source software, any of them owned by an African-American? No again. Here is an extensive collection of photographs from a LUG (Linux User Gathering) meeting, more can be viewed at that link. What is odd about these pictures, and every other photograph I have ever seen of a LUG meeting, is that there is not one single black person to be seen, and probably none for miles.
More racist overtones can be found by examining the language of Open Source. They often refer to 'white hat' hackers. These 'white hats' scurry about the Internet doing good, but illegal, acts for their fellow man. In stark contrast we find the 'black hat' hackers. They destroy the good works of others by breaking into systems, stealing data, and generally causing havoc. These two terms reflect the mindset of most Linux developers. White means good, black means bad. Anywhere there is black, there is uncontrollable destruction and lawlessness. Looking further we see black lists that inform other users of 'bad' hardware, Samba, an obvious play on the much hated Little Black Sambo book, Mandrake, which I won't explain except to say that the French are notorious racists. This type is linguistic discrimination is widespread throughout the Open Source culture, lampooned by many of its more popular sites.
It is also a fact that all Unix 'distros' contain a plethora of racist commands with not so hidden symbolism.
It can hardly be coincidence that the prime operating system of choice of the 'open source supremacists' - Linux, features commands which are poorly disguised racist acronyms. For example: 'awk' (All White Klan) , 'sed' (shoot nEgroes dead), 'ln' (lynch negroes), 'rpm' (raical purity mandatory), 'bash' (bring a slave home), 'ps' (persecute sambo), 'mount' (murder or unseat nubians today), 'fsck' (favored supreme Christian klan). I could go on and on about the latent racist symbolism in Linux, but I fear it would take weeks to enumerate every incidence.
Is there a single unix command out there that does not have some hidden racist connotation ? Suffice it to say that the racism pervades Linux like a particularly bad smell. Can you imagine the effect of running such a racist operating system on the impressionable mind ? I don't have to remind you that transmitting subliminal messages is banned in the USA, and yet here we have an operating system that appears to be one enormous submliminal ad for the Klan!
One of the few selling points of Open Source software is that it is available in many different languages. Browsing through the list I see that absolutely none are offered in Swahili, nor Ebonics. Obviously this is done to prevent black people from having access to the kernel. If it weren't for the fact that racism is so blatantly evil I would be impressed by the efforts these Open Sourcers have invested in keeping their little hobby lilly white. It even appears that they hate the Japanese, as some of these self proclaimed hackers defaced a web site with anti-Japanese slogans. Hell, these people even go all the way to Africa (South Africa mind you, better known as White Africa) and the pictures prove that they don't even get close to a black person.
Of course, presenting overwhelming evidence such as this is a bit unfair without some attempt to determine why these Open Sourcers are so racist. Much of the evidence I have collected indicates that their views are so deeply held that they are seldom questioned by the new recruits. This, coupled with the robot-like groupthink that dominates the culture allows the racist mindset to continue to permeate the ranks. Indeed, the Open Source version of a Klan rally, OSDN (known to the world as Open Source Developer's Network, known to insiders as Open Source Denies Negroes) nearly stands up and shouts its racist views on its demographics page. It doesn't mention the black man one single time. Obviously, anyone involved with Open Source doesn't need to be told that the demographic is entirely white, it is a given.
I have a sneaking suspicion as to why their beliefs are so closely held: they are all terrible athletes.
Really. Much like the tragedy at Columbine High School, where two geeks went on a rampage to get back at 'jocks', these adult geeks still bear the emotional scars inflicted upon them due to their lack of athletic ability during their teen years. As African-Americans are well known for their athletic skills, they are an obvious target for the Open Source geeks. As we all know, sports builds character, thus it follows that the lack of sports destroys character. These geeks, locked away in their rooms, munching on stale pizza and Fritos, engage in no character building activities. Further, they interact only with computers and never develop the level of social skill that allows normal people to handle relationships with persons of color.
Contrasted with the closed source, non-geeky software house Microsoft, Open Source has a long, long way to go.
Join me in my next article where I will lay bare the rampant anti-semitism in the Open Source community.
Good results
First, we have the second quarter fiscal 2002 results, released last week. These were actually really quite good. VA has reduced its cash burn to $6.1m/quarter this is not only a massive fall from the hardware services days of a >$30m cash burn, but is substantially below the target of $8m/quarter which VA announced at the time of quitting the hardware business. Having left the hardware and consulting businesses, VA was concentrating on selling its main software product, Sourceforge 3.0, and had made a number of new sales to blue-chip customers such as Stanford Universty and Pfizer. We had a few problems with their statement in the conference call and the press release that they had "$61m in cash and marketable securities" which is true, but highly misleading as to their actual financial position as they also have current liabilities of $18m (ie; they need this much to pay bills falling due in the next six months, so the actual cash available to burn is more like $43m), and we regard their description of the redundancy payments and lease cancellation fees which make up their restructuring costs as "non cash items" as actively ludicrous, but this is nit-picking; the facts as of a couple of weeks ago appeared to be that VA Software was on the raspberry road to profitability.
But .
Then we got this little bombshell; Slashdot, jewel in the crown of VA Software's OSDN network of Open Source websites, is moving to a pay subscriptions model a la Salon. Well, perhaps that's being a little bit too harsh; Slashdot isn't doing the full reader reduction exercise of making you pay for the only content you came to read, but it is going to be having "more intrusive" ads (by which I think we mean expanded banners and skyscrapers surely Slashdot wouldn't dare to go down the route of pop-ups or interstitials, would they? WOULD THEY? AARRGH!), and you'll be able to view slashdot without these ads at the bargain subscription rate of $5 per thousand pages. Obviously, this caused much wailing and gnashing of teeth among the assorted slashbots (2275 comments so far, nearly a third as many as adequacy.org's most popular article), but we can't help thinking that they're missing the point. Nobody, least of all VA, thinks that there will be material revenue opportunities from the subscription model; all this is, is a figleaf designed to allow Slashdot to accept pop-up X10 ads while giving its editors hobbyists Rob Malda and Jeff Bates, a lightning conductor of "well, why don't you subscribe?" to deal with the floods of threatening email they are likely to receive.
So fair enough. But when we read the actual announcement on Slashdot, we at adequacy.org got worried. When we think we're looking at a company which is on the right track, we don't like to see senior staff at its only profitable business unit making statements like:
" The large ads that you see on many other sites are coming here. We really don't have an option: these are what advertisers want, and if we don't provide them, we won't be around much longer"
or
" We won't create subscriber only features that cost more to maintain than they generate. But we do need support from you if we are to continue."
What the hell? Slashdot was known to be profitable and cash positive when taken over by Andover.net in 1999. Andover.net was known to be profitable and cash-positive when taken over by VA Linux in 2000. The OSDN group of sites was, according to the 2Q02 results conference call, the source of more or less all the revenue generated by VA Software. And now we're being told that the ad market is so precarious that the VA cash pile is likely to be burnt up imminently? What gives? Quite apart from anything, statements like "we won't be around much longer" are Forward Looking Statements. Companies with publicly traded securities outstanding should not be making forward looking statements outside of the context of a scheduled conference call or an announcement to the general public under Regulation FD. It is, quite simply, not good enough for Rob Malda to be making this kind of wild assertion about the trading conditions faced by the key media property in the only profitable division of VA Software, ad hoc and without any kind of "safe harbor" statement. We don't know whether or not this announcement was technically in breach of Section 21 (E) of the Securities Exchange Act 1934, but we do know that well-managed companies with competently run press office and investor relations functions don't leak rumors in this kind of way.
Adequacy investigates
When we at adequacy.org witness an informational cluster-fuck like this in the making, we want to dig and delve, for the benefit of you our readers. We're about to make a few fairly controversial statements in this report, and we'd like you to take the following on trust: all the statements we make below which are in bold face can be sourced to a prominent (as in, you'd recognise the name if we told you) employee of Slashdot. We at adequacy don't want to cost anyone their job, so we'll make the following statement:
Ok, here's the dirtSourceforge is not profitable and looks like it never will be. According to our source, "it's a giant vacuum". And this seems about right to us. The recent conference call with VA Chief Executive Larry "Eleven Million Dollar Man" (that's how much VA stock he's sold for cash since the float) Augustin was full of the joys of Sourceforge "Enterprise Edition" 3.0, a "proprietary" version of the popular Open Source collaborative software development tool. Indeed, in response to a question, VA's Chairman and Chief Executive told the world that VA Software (a company which, according to its CFO made "substantially all" of its revenue from the online advertising of the OSDN) was "a company in the enterprise software market". Much was made of the fact that new sales had been made to Stanford and Pfizer, two new key clients. But when you try to pin down these sales to hard revenue numbers, it kind of drifts away. The hard fact is that Sourceforge charges $1000 per seat license (there are apparently issues relating to revenue recognition over the term of the long-term licensing contracts which VA is trying to sll, but $1K was the hard number given at the conference call). That means that, before VA Software can be considered to be mainly a software company, it needs to be selling 5000 seats worth of Sourceforge per quarter (generating $5m of revenue, roughly the same as OSDN's revenue). How close is it now to that goal?
Not close. Although the reference implementation of Sourceforge; the licensing level at which it starts to generate positive RoI for its customers, is estimated to be 120 seats, the vast majority of its current customer base are installing it on trial implementations of 30 seats to see if it's any good. Two or three big sales of Sourceforge might make a quarter of a million bucks at the outside; Sourceforge revenue for 2Q02 might possibly be as low as $60,000. Since Sourceforge 3.1, with better integration with other tools and added functionality is on the way, we can't see anyone springing for a full installation of 3.0, meaning that sales are at the mercy of the development schedule. In any case, we're not sure why anyone would buy 3.0; as far as we can tell, the main advantage over the Open Source version is that you get to use Oracle rather than PostGreSQL as a back end, which shouldn't be too terribly hard an alteration to make in-house given that the source code for the biggest existing implementation of Sourceforge (http://www.sourceforge.net) is available.
So, on the basis of publicly verifiable facts, our source appears to know what he's talking about.
OSDN is run tightly; VA as a whole is not. This is more or less a direct quote from our source, and we believe it. OSDN, for all its expensive branding and new name, is the business of Andover.net, which was always the poor man's CMG, or Ziff-Davis for the technologically literate. Which is to say, a bunch of guys who knew how to sell ads for computer stuff. They're still good. Let's consider the following:
Again from the conference call, we learn that in 2Q02, Intel accounted for 20% of total revenues. That's (cue drum roll, Dr Evil voice) one million dollars! Did they buy a thousand Sourceforge seats? To put it bluntly, no. They spent this on advertising
You can't spend one million dollars on advertising
At any reasonable CPM rate (or indeed, at OSDN's quoted rates for "selfserve" ads recently posted, one million dollars would buy you 250 million ad impressions. According to the OSDN advertising screen, they serve 120 million page views a month. So, by this standard, roughly two out of every three ads on OSDN during the second quarter of fiscal 2002 would have been ads for Intel. I have to tell you, and every regular viewer of Slashdot will agree, that they weren't.
Slashdot is notorious for running ads for thinkgeek tshirts, other OSDN sites and caffeinated mints, but surprisingly few ads for the high-end server gear which is the unique selling point of OSDN to its advertiser base. And slashdot accounts for an awful lot of those 120 million pages. Specifically, according to figures given in in Malda's statement, Slashdot has "one third of a million visitors per day", and the median visitor generates ten pageviews (we guesstimate this from the statement that, at a subscription rate of $5 per 1000 pages without ads, "82% of our readers could view slashdot for a year for $20", ie, 4000 pages per year). That means that over a quarter, just about 90 million of OSDN's 120 million pages are accounted for by Slashdot. So if Intel has spent One Million Dollars on OSDN advertising without making a material impact on slashdot, then something pretty strange has gone on.
Here's our guess. Intel is the sponsor of the "Large Linux Installation Foundry" on sourceforge.net. What's been going on here is "narrowcasting" Intel isn't so much interested in serving 250 million pages to random Slashbots, but is more interested in serving about 400 pages over the quarter to a group of people possibly as small as nine or ten, who were making the decision in 2Q02 about which technology provider they would be going for in a large Linux installation. It is not at all unknown for big ticket computer salesmen to drop a seven-figure check in promotions if they're hoping to land a nine-figure contract. It's also not impossible that the sponsorship of Sourceforge Large Linux Installations during 2Q02 was the subject of a bidding war between to rivals over the same large contract. We can't prove this, but we're pretty sure that something of this sort happened (if there are any more disgruntled VA employees out there, we'd love to know if we were right). In any case, it's not what you might call "high-quality income"; although VA hope to continue doing business with Intel, this is a big chunk of revenue to be dependent on one piece of marketing whim.
Slashdot could be sold to another media organisation. We had to read between the lines to get to this one, and it's probably not fair to pin it on our source, but he certainly entertained our speculation on the subject. And the interesting thing is that, with the information we were able to glean about the decomposition of 2Q earnings, Slashdot doesn't look like the cash cow for VA that we thought it might be. Out of the $5m revenue of VA Software, we can take out approximately $750K of interest income on the cash balance and maybe $200K for Sourceforge, meaning that the Intel contract accounts for roughly a quarter of the operating income of OSDN. From the pagecount, we know that Slashdot accounts for three quarters of the pageviews (and thus roughly three quarters of the bandwidth costs); to assume that it generates three quarters of the revenue would be tantamount to assuming that the other OSDN sites make next to zero revenue. Which is a crazy assumption, particularly given the intangible benefit to VA Software of having sourceforge.net as a promotional device for Sourceforge Enterprise Edition. And if Slashdot accounts for three quarters of the costs and less than three quarters of the revenues, it's a dog in the OSDN portfolio, not a star or a cash cow.
So, why not sell it? Although Slashdot may be a drain on the average profitability of OSDN, it probably breaks even, and in the world of magazine publishing, that's not bad. Publishing companies know that profitability has to be measured across a portfolio of magazines, not unit by unit, and it's often worth your while publishing a loss-making Talk Magazine for a while for the touch of stardust glamour it adds to a lucrative (but potentially rather prosaic) Conde Nast Traveller. Slashdot would be a perfect "hood ornament" for a profitable stable of computer magazines, dragging the kids in while they were in college and then cross-promoting them onto other titles by the time they had reached a saleable demographic. And all this could be done without compromising its "editorial integrity", which is something usually respected in the media world, though not so much in the software publishing world ("Andover.net had all sorts of evil plans for Slashdot", our source reveals).
Bottom line: If Larry Augustin wants to claim to be running a company in the enterprise software business, it's time for him to walk the talk. Let's see some divestment of non-core assets like Slashdot. Otherwise, we ought to be facing facts and reminding ourselves that the company which used to be "VA Linux" and is now "VA Software" has always been "VA Media". It's a publishing company, and ought to be managed as one. If that means getting rid of Eleven Million Dollar Larry and getting a graduate of the Si Mewhouse academy, then so be it.
Good results
First, we have the second quarter fiscal 2002 results, released last week. These were actually really quite good. VA has reduced its cash burn to $6.1m/quarter this is not only a massive fall from the hardware services days of a >$30m cash burn, but is substantially below the target of $8m/quarter which VA announced at the time of quitting the hardware business. Having left the hardware and consulting businesses, VA was concentrating on selling its main software product, Sourceforge 3.0, and had made a number of new sales to blue-chip customers such as Stanford Universty and Pfizer. We had a few problems with their statement in the conference call and the press release that they had "$61m in cash and marketable securities" which is true, but highly misleading as to their actual financial position as they also have current liabilities of $18m (ie; they need this much to pay bills falling due in the next six months, so the actual cash available to burn is more like $43m), and we regard their description of the redundancy payments and lease cancellation fees which make up their restructuring costs as "non cash items" as actively ludicrous, but this is nit-picking; the facts as of a couple of weeks ago appeared to be that VA Software was on the raspberry road to profitability.
But .
Then we got this little bombshell; Slashdot, jewel in the crown of VA Software's OSDN network of Open Source websites, is moving to a pay subscriptions model a la Salon. Well, perhaps that's being a little bit too harsh; Slashdot isn't doing the full reader reduction exercise of making you pay for the only content you came to read, but it is going to be having "more intrusive" ads (by which I think we mean expanded banners and skyscrapers surely Slashdot wouldn't dare to go down the route of pop-ups or interstitials, would they? WOULD THEY? AARRGH!), and you'll be able to view slashdot without these ads at the bargain subscription rate of $5 per thousand pages. Obviously, this caused much wailing and gnashing of teeth among the assorted slashbots (2275 comments so far, nearly a third as many as adequacy.org's most popular article), but we can't help thinking that they're missing the point. Nobody, least of all VA, thinks that there will be material revenue opportunities from the subscription model; all this is, is a figleaf designed to allow Slashdot to accept pop-up X10 ads while giving its editors hobbyists Rob Malda and Jeff Bates, a lightning conductor of "well, why don't you subscribe?" to deal with the floods of threatening email they are likely to receive.
So fair enough. But when we read the actual announcement on Slashdot, we at adequacy.org got worried. When we think we're looking at a company which is on the right track, we don't like to see senior staff at its only profitable business unit making statements like:
" The large ads that you see on many other sites are coming here. We really don't have an option: these are what advertisers want, and if we don't provide them, we won't be around much longer"
or
" We won't create subscriber only features that cost more to maintain than they generate. But we do need support from you if we are to continue."
What the hell? Slashdot was known to be profitable and cash positive when taken over by Andover.net in 1999. Andover.net was known to be profitable and cash-positive when taken over by VA Linux in 2000. The OSDN group of sites was, according to the 2Q02 results conference call, the source of more or less all the revenue generated by VA Software. And now we're being told that the ad market is so precarious that the VA cash pile is likely to be burnt up imminently? What gives? Quite apart from anything, statements like "we won't be around much longer" are Forward Looking Statements. Companies with publicly traded securities outstanding should not be making forward looking statements outside of the context of a scheduled conference call or an announcement to the general public under Regulation FD. It is, quite simply, not good enough for Rob Malda to be making this kind of wild assertion about the trading conditions faced by the key media property in the only profitable division of VA Software, ad hoc and without any kind of "safe harbor" statement. We don't know whether or not this announcement was technically in breach of Section 21 (E) of the Securities Exchange Act 1934, but we do know that well-managed companies with competently run press office and investor relations functions don't leak rumors in this kind of way.
Adequacy investigates
When we at adequacy.org witness an informational cluster-fuck like this in the making, we want to dig and delve, for the benefit of you our readers. We're about to make a few fairly controversial statements in this report, and we'd like you to take the following on trust: all the statements we make below which are in bold face can be sourced to a prominent (as in, you'd recognise the name if we told you) employee of Slashdot. We at adequacy don't want to cost anyone their job, so we'll make the following statement:
Ok, here's the dirtSourceforge is not profitable and looks like it never will be. According to our source, "it's a giant vacuum". And this seems about right to us. The recent conference call with VA Chief Executive Larry "Eleven Million Dollar Man" (that's how much VA stock he's sold for cash since the float) Augustin was full of the joys of Sourceforge "Enterprise Edition" 3.0, a "proprietary" version of the popular Open Source collaborative software development tool. Indeed, in response to a question, VA's Chairman and Chief Executive told the world that VA Software (a company which, according to its CFO made "substantially all" of its revenue from the online advertising of the OSDN) was "a company in the enterprise software market". Much was made of the fact that new sales had been made to Stanford and Pfizer, two new key clients. But when you try to pin down these sales to hard revenue numbers, it kind of drifts away. The hard fact is that Sourceforge charges $1000 per seat license (there are apparently issues relating to revenue recognition over the term of the long-term licensing contracts which VA is trying to sll, but $1K was the hard number given at the conference call). That means that, before VA Software can be considered to be mainly a software company, it needs to be selling 5000 seats worth of Sourceforge per quarter (generating $5m of revenue, roughly the same as OSDN's revenue). How close is it now to that goal?
Not close. Although the reference implementation of Sourceforge; the licensing level at which it starts to generate positive RoI for its customers, is estimated to be 120 seats, the vast majority of its current customer base are installing it on trial implementations of 30 seats to see if it's any good. Two or three big sales of Sourceforge might make a quarter of a million bucks at the outside; Sourceforge revenue for 2Q02 might possibly be as low as $60,000. Since Sourceforge 3.1, with better integration with other tools and added functionality is on the way, we can't see anyone springing for a full installation of 3.0, meaning that sales are at the mercy of the development schedule. In any case, we're not sure why anyone would buy 3.0; as far as we can tell, the main advantage over the Open Source version is that you get to use Oracle rather than PostGreSQL as a back end, which shouldn't be too terribly hard an alteration to make in-house given that the source code for the biggest existing implementation of Sourceforge (http://www.sourceforge.net) is available.
So, on the basis of publicly verifiable facts, our source appears to know what he's talking about.
OSDN is run tightly; VA as a whole is not. This is more or less a direct quote from our source, and we believe it. OSDN, for all its expensive branding and new name, is the business of Andover.net, which was always the poor man's CMG, or Ziff-Davis for the technologically literate. Which is to say, a bunch of guys who knew how to sell ads for computer stuff. They're still good. Let's consider the following:
Again from the conference call, we learn that in 2Q02, Intel accounted for 20% of total revenues. That's (cue drum roll, Dr Evil voice) one million dollars! Did they buy a thousand Sourceforge seats? To put it bluntly, no. They spent this on advertising
You can't spend one million dollars on advertising
At any reasonable CPM rate (or indeed, at OSDN's quoted rates for "selfserve" ads recently posted, one million dollars would buy you 250 million ad impressions. According to the OSDN advertising screen, they serve 120 million page views a month. So, by this standard, roughly two out of every three ads on OSDN during the second quarter of fiscal 2002 would have been ads for Intel. I have to tell you, and every regular viewer of Slashdot will agree, that they weren't.
Slashdot is notorious for running ads for thinkgeek tshirts, other OSDN sites and caffeinated mints, but surprisingly few ads for the high-end server gear which is the unique selling point of OSDN to its advertiser base. And slashdot accounts for an awful lot of those 120 million pages. Specifically, according to figures given in in Malda's statement, Slashdot has "one third of a million visitors per day", and the median visitor generates ten pageviews (we guesstimate this from the statement that, at a subscription rate of $5 per 1000 pages without ads, "82% of our readers could view slashdot for a year for $20", ie, 4000 pages per year). That means that over a quarter, just about 90 million of OSDN's 120 million pages are accounted for by Slashdot. So if Intel has spent One Million Dollars on OSDN advertising without making a material impact on slashdot, then something pretty strange has gone on.
Here's our guess. Intel is the sponsor of the "Large Linux Installation Foundry" on sourceforge.net. What's been going on here is "narrowcasting" Intel isn't so much interested in serving 250 million pages to random Slashbots, but is more interested in serving about 400 pages over the quarter to a group of people possibly as small as nine or ten, who were making the decision in 2Q02 about which technology provider they would be going for in a large Linux installation. It is not at all unknown for big ticket computer salesmen to drop a seven-figure check in promotions if they're hoping to land a nine-figure contract. It's also not impossible that the sponsorship of Sourceforge Large Linux Installations during 2Q02 was the subject of a bidding war between to rivals over the same large contract. We can't prove this, but we're pretty sure that something of this sort happened (if there are any more disgruntled VA employees out there, we'd love to know if we were right). In any case, it's not what you might call "high-quality income"; although VA hope to continue doing business with Intel, this is a big chunk of revenue to be dependent on one piece of marketing whim.
Slashdot could be sold to another media organisation. We had to read between the lines to get to this one, and it's probably not fair to pin it on our source, but he certainly entertained our speculation on the subject. And the interesting thing is that, with the information we were able to glean about the decomposition of 2Q earnings, Slashdot doesn't look like the cash cow for VA that we thought it might be. Out of the $5m revenue of VA Software, we can take out approximately $750K of interest income on the cash balance and maybe $200K for Sourceforge, meaning that the Intel contract accounts for roughly a quarter of the operating income of OSDN. From the pagecount, we know that Slashdot accounts for three quarters of the pageviews (and thus roughly three quarters of the bandwidth costs); to assume that it generates three quarters of the revenue would be tantamount to assuming that the other OSDN sites make next to zero revenue. Which is a crazy assumption, particularly given the intangible benefit to VA Software of having sourceforge.net as a promotional device for Sourceforge Enterprise Edition. And if Slashdot accounts for three quarters of the costs and less than three quarters of the revenues, it's a dog in the OSDN portfolio, not a star or a cash cow.
So, why not sell it? Although Slashdot may be a drain on the average profitability of OSDN, it probably breaks even, and in the world of magazine publishing, that's not bad. Publishing companies know that profitability has to be measured across a portfolio of magazines, not unit by unit, and it's often worth your while publishing a loss-making Talk Magazine for a while for the touch of stardust glamour it adds to a lucrative (but potentially rather prosaic) Conde Nast Traveller. Slashdot would be a perfect "hood ornament" for a profitable stable of computer magazines, dragging the kids in while they were in college and then cross-promoting them onto other titles by the time they had reached a saleable demographic. And all this could be done without compromising its "editorial integrity", which is something usually respected in the media world, though not so much in the software publishing world ("Andover.net had all sorts of evil plans for Slashdot", our source reveals).
Bottom line: If Larry Augustin wants to claim to be running a company in the enterprise software business, it's time for him to walk the talk. Let's see some divestment of non-core assets like Slashdot. Otherwise, we ought to be facing facts and reminding ourselves that the company which used to be "VA Linux" and is now "VA Software" has always been "VA Media". It's a publishing company, and ought to be managed as one. If that means getting rid of Eleven Million Dollar Larry and getting a graduate of the Si Mewhouse academy, then so be it.
I just wanted to use my high karma points to help deteriorate Slashdot, just a little. Here we go. [slashdot.org]
First of all, I hate the editors. They can all suck my tiny little cock. Those bastards are such greedy, blooding sucking fuck offs. Words cannot even begin to describe how much I hate those guys. I even hate them more than Kenny. They reject awesome stories and then post lots of bullshit and other corporate sponsored crap. On top of that, they flood our faces with lots of stupid, ugly ads. There are really two words that sum them up entirely: "sell outs". [slashdot.org]
Secondly, Slashdot sucks RoboTroll's [slashdot.org] balls. You know why? Because for being so "user" and "community" oriented, the editors sure do manage to fuck things up for all of us. Oh wait a minute, this is connected to my first point. Oh well. The users ARE Slashdot. Without the users, Slashdot is just another detnet [detonate.net]. Without our input, it's just a failed "news" site run by a bunch of retards.
And what the fuck is up with this subscription? Have you ever taken a shit and then had someone pick that piece of shit up and sell it back to you for $20/year? Fuck that. You idiots manage to pull literally a thousand comments out of your asses every fucking day! These thousands of comments that you shit onto these discussion forums is THE CONTENT THAT DRIVES THIS PATHETIC WEB SITE. And now, Cmdr "Snotting" Taco wants to fucking bill you for it.
For being so pro open source, anti-MS [goatse.cx], and other BS, Slashdot is exactly like its arch-nemesis [microsoft.com].
What's the solution?
Make Malda, his 0.02$ mexican whore, and the rest of his ass fucking homo lovers [slashdot.org] appreciate all the hard work we put into making this site meaningful! STOP POSTING COMMENTS TO SLASHDOT UNTIL THE SUBSCRIPTION GOES AWAY! Screw this shit! Let's take OUR content and go home!
The opinions and statements made in this post are entirely for inflamatory purposes only. Nobody's feelings should be hurt and everyone who is shedding tears over this thing should go shoot themselves. Dear RoboTroll: for my act of karma suicide to get your URL linked on a +1 comment post, please add this stunning example of trollmanship to your library. [slashdot.org]
President George W. Bush, is a maniac when it comes to slaughter. The man's face lights up at any mention of the death penalty or bombing people. How determined is he to destroy the whole world and become the king of a graveyard is anyone's guess. This is simply too much.
No one with as miserable of an education as Dubya would even consider that Lou Tzu offered wisdom on the topic of war thousands of years ago. To sum it up, anytime you make more weapons, your enemy makes more weapons. If the US reverses its anti-nuke policy, everyone else is going to become as gun-ho to compensate. And as weapons increase, the world becomes less safe for everyone.
George W. Bush, you moron. STOP IT. We do not have to bomb everyone, let alone nuke anyone!
Nuclear weapons are so unmistakably evil it's amazing how this fruitcake religious fanatic who uses Christianity (a religion that teaches non-violence - think about the teaching of Jesus) as a campaign platform... is so EAGER to deal out death! Not to mention his empowerment of John Ashcroft, who is die-hardly determined to become the next McCarthy.
Where is it going to end? I honestly wonder if we're all going to make it to 2004.
First of all, "Linux" in this case is vastly a misnomer, but bear with it for the moment. Linux is an operating system that is trying to fill many niches in many markets. Developers work hard to give it a wide range of hardware support and a wide range of functionality (everything in the range of a variety of desktops to a variety of servers configurations). However, the overall Linux experience is the result of a tremendous amount of contributions from many directions in a community.
Mac OS X, exclusive to the Macintosh and suitable for limited roles, on the other hand, is different but same. Beneath that stunning, pretty Aqua interface, you have a set of powerful core API's that essentially make up widget sets and abstraction layers. Beneath that however, is a traditional unix architecture (Darwin). When you look at Linux, BSD, Solaris, or whatever versus Darwin, you see pretty much the same thing.
So what's my beef with the comparison? Mac OS X is more appropriately pitted against KDE, GNOME, or [insert favorite desktop environment here]. Apple is focused on offering a user experience which is much different from offering an operating system and a million and one tools to make it useful. Linux offers an operating system and a huge suite of software for doing a lot of things. OS X from the perspective of comparison, is a very well polished UI.
I am certain that if all OSS developers turned their attention to making a Quartz for Linux, it could be done. But, that's not the case because we're dealing with two different offerings altogether. So, it's stupid to run out and say "Mac OS X is going to beat down Linux" or just that "it's better" and people should "move over to it". No. No. NO. NO!
Two completely different animals with their own uses, strengths, and weaknesses. This whole "Penguin2Apple" thing is just stupid. You're moving from an operating system to a machine with a different processor. Pfft.
Domain Name Dispute Process Called Into Question
/. journalism! I thought this site was about news. :)
I was under the impression that this dispute has been ongoing for quite a long while. The whole process is inherently flawed and geared to please corporations (how many domains held by individuals have been seized by corporations?) and is a matter of controversy. Silly
And he actually asked me what I'd rather have for Valentine's Day, a nice dinner and flowers, or a gamecube. I told him I'd rather have the game cube.
;)
:) She seems to really enjoy it and that's what matters guys!
If you are the maintainer of a geek girl, please consider the following advice. If dinner and flowers are cheaper than [insert latest game console / cool computer toy here], please bear in mind that your geek girl may likely request the gift with greater longevity.
You have been warned.
DISCLAIMER
Please note that I'm kidding. I do not regret having bought my beloved such a gift.
My girlfriend is a ubergeek who plays the Nintendo a hell of a lot more than I do (I participate in two player games... where she proceeds to whoop my white ass). She does Linux admin, codes C in circles around my head, is a LaTeX Goddess (follow the link you sickos), and has had every Nintendo game system since NES. Now, you tell me who the Gamecube was for. :)
I purchased a Gamecube for my girlfriend this past Valentine's Day. The console has been out since before Christmas, and so far, the title selection is to say the least, poor.
There's in the neighborhood of 10 titles for the GC, and while some of them are gems (Super Smash Bros.), over all, they are relatively lackluster. Sega has developed for them, but not even they can provide a must-have title.
Enter SquareSoft. Any platform they touch these days will probably experience Square's huge following buying power. I think a lot of Nintendo's decline is a result of losing SquareSoft's contributions.
So maybe this will give Nintendo a huge boost. Why is that important? Aside from the argument of "yea, we need more competition," Nintendo is truly an "honorable player" in this market. They may have relatively shitty licensing tactics (everyone does), but over all, Nintendo demands an extremely high level of quality for their software. The titles, regardless of fun factor, are always extremely well polished. You don't always get that on all the other platforms.
Maybe Square will be able to give us die-hard Nintendo fans something to be truly proud of our platform for.
Haven't used one recently, have you?
:)
Just the other day.
First, you don't have to block the board. The ones we use are rear projection so they just look like a big TV set. You can also get overlays for plasma TV screens- neither have this problem.
OKay, it's rear projection or plasma... got it. My original point still stands. Besides, it doesn't make any sense to pay $2000-$8000 for a white board that is no more effective than a... white board.
If you're writing so small that a 1024x768 screen can't pick it up, nobody in your audience can either. These aren't designed to be used alone: they're for people to use in classrooms/teleconferences. Put a single black pixel up and step back 10 feet- you won't see it. You need an area of at least 6-10 pixels.
I am not talking about an audience necessarily. I am talking about interacting closely with peers and coworkers. And I am not talking about writing small. I am talking about writing detailed. You can also put a single black pixel on a 640x480 computer display, and you'll not really see it to clearly. But would you say 640x480 is sufficient resolution for sketching?
By the way, for about $200-$500, you can have an effective resolution on a white board of millions of dpi (think molecules). Now try to buy a Smart Board of similar size that has 1000dpi resolution.
Smart Boards not all they are cracked up to be. They are inaccurate, very crude, and uncomfortable to work with. Aside from blocking the projector all the time... It's just another silly case of "we must make this digital so that it's 'cool'" phenomenon.
But aside from that, they are just plain and simple a Bad Idea. The whole point of a chalk board or a white board, or even a scratch pad, is that you have freedom in your sketches. You are expressing ideas or at least trying to develop those ideas. The moment that you have to try to conform your ideas into some sort of restriction from the paradigm of your media, you lose pieces of your idea. Example: lines on paper, text only for jotting ideas on your Palm Pilot, etc.
Enter the Smart Board. Regardless of the resolution, you're still dealing with pixels (probably pretty low res for the size of the surface versus the resolution of the projector). You're conforming what you want to express to a grid. Now while that may not seem like such a big idea, how often have you found that you write in tiny little details or hash marks or some other marking on a diagram? Sometimes those are very useful. What if you tried to draw a couple parallel hash marks and found that the resolution of the white board was insufficient to draw them... and made one thick line.
It's little nuances like this that make Smart Boards utterly useless. You have to be as freeform as possible when expressing ideas! You should set the guide lines... and not your canvas.
I just wanted to use my high karma points to help deteriorate Slashdot, just a little. Here we go.
First of all, I hate the editors. They can all suck my tiny little cock. Those bastards are such greedy, blooding sucking fuck offs. Words cannot even begin to describe how much I hate those guys. I even hate them more than Kenny. They reject awesome stories and then post lots of bullshit and other corporate sponsored crap. On top of that, they flood our faces with lots of stupid, ugly ads. There are really two words that sum them up entirely: "sell outs".
Secondly, Slashdot sucks RoboTroll's balls. You know why? Because for being so "user" and "community" oriented, the editors sure do manage to fuck things up for all of us. Oh wait a minute, this is connected to my first point. Oh well. The users ARE Slashdot. Without the users, Slashdot is just another detnet. Without our input, it's just a failed "news" site run by a bunch of retards.
And what the fuck is up with this subscription? Have you ever taken a shit and then had someone pick that piece of shit up and sell it back to you for $20/year? Fuck that. You idiots manage to pull literally a thousand comments out of your asses every fucking day! These thousands of comments that you shit onto these discussion forums is THE CONTENT THAT DRIVES THIS PATHETIC WEB SITE. And now, Cmdr "Snotting" Taco wants to fucking bill you for it.
For being so pro open source, anti-MS, and other BS, Slashdot is exactly like its arch-nemesis.
What's the solution?
Make Malda, his 0.02$ mexican whore, and the rest of his ass fucking homo lovers appreciate all the hard work we put into making this site meaningful! STOP POSTING COMMENTS TO SLASHDOT UNTIL THE SUBSCRIPTION GOES AWAY! Screw this shit! Let's take OUR content and go home!
The opinions and statements made in this post are entirely for inflamatory purposes only. Nobody's feelings should be hurt and everyone who is shedding tears over this thing should go shoot themselves. Dear RoboTroll: for wasting my valuable karma to get your URL linked on a +1 comment post, please add this stunning example of trollmanship to your library.
That this guy has managed to run a very successful dot.com. He gets lots of visitors who are willing to fork over a bit of money here, a bit of money there... and it all adds up.
:)
What does that mean? He probably was a good director of business, who was screwed because his superiors were idiots. He's actually demonstrated real good business sense here and a company would probably do well to hire him to run their dot.com.
For as shallow and positive only, this article does indeed sound like propaganda. Sounds entirely like a sales pitch and not at all like an informed review.
As usual, yet another review of the latest and greatest, easy-to-use, Windows-friendly Linux distribution XYZ.
This review is a waste. It's purely propaganda. I love Linux, but he doesn't really offer any counter points to the review. No "This is great, but..." and certainly insufficient detail. I wouldn't even call this distribution remotely good. Sure, it's got cool icons and desktop wallpapers, but it looks kludgy and messy at best. The choice of an Aqua-esque theme is only a point on which to confuse users. Doing menus the non-standard way only will cause problems when users want to install packages not supplied by these Lycoris people. I'm sure nobody is really head-over heels for this thing, so I'll stop preaching to the choir...
But what can you expect? The community is producing a dozen new distros ever year and all we're doing is adding dead wood to a lot of existing dead weight. This distro may be organized in a "cool" way, but all it will cause for users is a mess. Linux needs to move forward and as it does, paradigms change. I am all in favor of having lots of choices... but we've got hundreds of distros as it stands now. If half of these people/groups wrote software instead of repacking it for their own self-validation, imagine how far we'd be.
Emulating the way Windows works and feels is not the answer! We need the solve the problem! The problem is Linux is difficult to use for the average user, and not necessarily the Windows user. Let me make it clear: Microsoft Windows is NOT easy to use. It simply is not. The Macintosh is easy to use. That's an example of slick, clean, effective interface design. Windows, however, regardless of MS's BS about how they spend millions researching inferface engineering, is difficult.
Ever watch a novice computer user attempt to use Windows? It's unbelievably clunky for them to do even simple tasks. Some users I've seen still don't understand how to switch between tasks. Others can't use max/minimize buttons. Most can't even figure out where their files went or what those files are! "I saved it, but now it's gone!" Do we really want to make Linux more like this?
If we can create a user-friendly environment, it won't matter if it looks/works like Windows. People will be able to figure it out. When novice users explain they want to "just be able to write email and letters and surf the web", they don't mean they want their computer to "look and work like Windows".
I say again. Solve the problem.
Make it easy for users to write letters and surf. Doing this the Microsoft way makes it hard. Let's figure out something better.
If you must post to get self-validation, try making up a story or something.
I'd agree with you if the editors didn't reject every damn story submitted. Lots of interesting stuff gets let go, but editors ALWAYS seem to make sure that a patch level kernel release gets posted. It's silliness. The editors here are just too pigheaded for users to submit interesting stories and get them known. Disagree? Stupid crap like this Linux-newbie question gets posted while intelligent topics get thrown out.
The only option is to whine about the stories that do get posted.
Big Unix software venders have been doing this for years. There's software that authenticates against a license server each time it's run (Maple, large CAD packages, etc). That's easy enough for the "owner" of the package to disable. SCO did something very similar and even had its software report back to them when a license violation was detected. Also, if you had read the post more closely, I mention that subscription software is becoming a hot topic. Companies don't want you to own software anymore. They want to lease it to you in a service format. Don't think the idea of running all your applications from a server on the Internet is too far off. It's a lot closer than you think. Also, there's always the simple solution of Some B. Guy at Adobe calling up his buddies at Microsoft and getting them to fuck with your Photoshop installation.
Your systems aren't safe with proprietary software on them. It's best to assume that companies can do whatever they choose with your computer once you give them access to it. Would you stick a black box full of technology from someone you didn't trust in your house? Could be anything. Same goes for software.
Yep... Proprietary format, can't be read in anything else... Oh, wait, I can open .PSD files in Macromedia Fireworks and others. Please.
Care to guess how many hundreds of thousands of dollars Macromedia pays Adobe to license code to read their formats flawlessly? Can you or your small print house pay that much?
Please.
That's right. Post anonymously when you post something stupid.
Great. Now I have to preach to the choir. *sigh* I thought we had technical readers on this site that could reason these things out. Here we go...
The schemes are proprietary. Non-public protection schemes can be changed by the owner without the consumers' knowledge. As a result, much power is given in the hands of corporations to limit access to your own content if you do not meet their approval. ("Upgrade to Photoshop 11, or we'll revoke the unlocking scheme in your existing software.") This does nothing but give more power to Adobe down the line. Soon, these protection schemes will work their way into all of Adobe's products and file formats (the latter of which I'm sure have already been implimented). With software becoming more and more connected to the developer, and subscription fees more and more likely on the horizon... what do you think that restricting access to the file actually means? Think about it!
There already exist a plethora of superior, open-standard protection schemes for securing data. These are, but not limited encrypted data storage/transmission (SSH/PGP/GPG/etc for securely sending your PS/PSD/PDF/SUX/etc to your coworkers), one-time access to a resource, and so on. Tools to secure data have been in development since long before Adobe entered the graphics market. These tools and open standards are far superior to any offerings Adobe can make. Why not just use them if you're interested in protecting your IP? I'm sure that Adobe is also not interested in really protecting your data. These schemes are almost always token just so that companies can leverage laws in their favor. This is not reactionary or imaginary. It's reality, stupid. And as mentioned, if you're serious about protecting your data, you use tried and true methds of doing it - not some buzzword feature fizzle in Photoshop. Otherwise, if you're going for protected public distribution, this is utterly useless.
It's stupid. Purely feature bloat. PkZIP added this feature years ago just so you had something to spend more money for. Easily cracked. However, if you crack something like this... you get sued. And not by the owners of the content.
You cannot protect your content once it has entered the public domain. It's not possible. There's always at least one person in the world that's smarter than you and will find a way around your protection. Adobe knows this but people are dazzled by their silliness. They think these features protect them. They don't. Makes Adobe stronger, doesn't increase security, and adds a tiny pebble as a stumbling block to anyone who wants to pirate content.
The security implementation in limited to Photoshop PDF fles. They aren't trying to lock you out of your own .psd, tiff, eps, gif, jpeg, etc. files.
You're right. Adobe has never pulled any bullshit before. Sure, it's a proprietary format... and sure, there's a strong chance that this "protection" is already implimented... But we'll never know until Adobe actually does start yanking strings. We can freely read their eBook format, right?
There is nothing wrong with content protection. Really. There is something wrong with the way some orgazinations/companies use it, but there's really nothing wrong with the concept. Do you think it's wrong that artists should get paid for their work and have some way to help ensure they get paid?
This isn't about artists getting paid, you idiot. This is about huge, monopolistic corporations protecting their best interests at the expense of these artists you claim to care so much about. Adobe impliments file protecting schemes, like eBook encryption, to better their position at the expense of the producers and the consumers. Putting a password on a PSD/PS/PDF/whatever doesn't help pay anybody... except Adobe. Think about what Adobe can do with this. Deny you access to your own content if you don't make them happy (think subscription service to Photoshop, for example - using an unlicensed copy, and suddenly all your protected/encrypted Photoshop files are unreadable).
This doesn't give the artists more control... it gives a big ugly corporation who has already SHOWN they are willing to manhandle people who cross them on these grounds.
Proprietary software is not acceptable. Closing off access to software and information is not acceptable. Giving up your rights to those with more money in their pockets is not acceptable. HELLO!?