I absolutely agree with you on that last point: credit where credit is due. At the end of the day, RH's products are open sourced and the do a lot of good work to protect open source as it's key to their business model.
But this doesn't change the fact that RH is a pain in the ass to deal with as a customer. I'm trying hard to remember one single conversation with them that didn't start off with the assumption that I was a drooling imbecile or where I got back a prompt and useful answer instead of an attempt to redirect blame for the problem back on me. I can't recall any. What I do recall is a vibe of total disdain, being made to feel like I was wasting their precious time with my stupid questions, and what can only be described as a feedback event horizon where bug reports and patches just disappeared into bugzilla never to be responded to nor seen or heard from again.
And it wasn't just me that got that impression. My bosses did, too. I could tell when they'd talked with RH recently because they always swung by my office to ask, "Hey, what do you think about SuSE?"
From a customer service standpoint, RH makes their money because they're the only large company who supports RH products. Aside from Ximian's weak effort to extend support of RH 7-9, they have no competition. While Oracle isn't known for its customer service either, all they really have to do is offer less frustration than RH and suddenly their offering becomes a very, very attractive alternative. And while RH does indeed employ some outstanding technical talent, they've only got a fraction of the bright folks in the open source community... if Oracle plays it right and demonstrates a Googlish atmosphere of encouraging open source innovation in their Linux division they could easily build up their own talent pool.
So, yeah. A lot of "if"s in that equation. If I was RH, I wouldn't be losing sleep just yet.
But I would also be asking what I could to do build customer loyalty and prepare for a day when I'm no longer the only game in town for supporting RHEL in the next quarterly strategy meeting.
I don't think he's looking for something that's necessarily free. And even if he isn't, I'm not.
The fact is that there's nothing analgous to iTunes for sheet music. If you want the music for a contemporary song, then you're stuck having to purchase a whole book filled with other songs just to get the one you're after. Same situation as buying a cd used to be in 1998 was.
While I'm not so hot on paying $20 for a book of 20 songs when I'm only interested in one, paying $1 20 times for 20 songs I do want and could go fetch whenever the impulse struck would be awesome. While it probably won't be a billion dollar a year service, it'd still be better for both hobbyists like me and copyright holders if they could sell their wares more efficiently.
Look. If you're worried about people reading your email, go invest the 20 minutes it takes to learn about PGP and then find a plugin for your favoritest mail client. Make it 25, and you can even get your key uploaded to a public key server so that'll be easy for anyone else in the world to send encrypted mail to you.
Also, it might be a good idea to stop printing out your emails filled with "sensitive information" (like who you're going to fire and which companies are offering you how much to buy which division) to the public printer next to the break room that sales uses.
Bottom line: if you feel you need to keep secrets, then you'd better learn how to, like... keep secrets.
That's pretty much the concept behind the Connexions project. I'd suggest checking out Richard Baraniuk's TED Talk for more info. While there's not a lot of stuff up there now (as compared to what could be), it's a start.
I would imagine that using part of that $100m to pay bounties for specific subjects, to help finance translating material to other languages, or coming up with a way to mix together the info in a multimedia format that could be easily integrated into Wikipedia would be, as the kids today say, "for teh win".:)
Oh and before you neo cons say it, no, there isn't a new thing for misplaced workers to retrain for.
How is it that the unemployment rate in August (according to United States Bureau of Labor Statistics) was 4.7% (down from 4.9% a year earlier)? If outsourcing has been going on since 2000 and there's nothing there to replace jobs lost to it, shouldn't the unemployment rate be higher?
I can't even trust you people to type in your password without forgetting to turn off capslock, and now I'm supposed to trust with you something like food prep?
Now we gotta go snag the Pioneers and rub Pluto off the plaques or else the aliens will be totally fscking lost when they come to find us.
"Is this the right place?"
"No. The map says there's 9 planets, and this system only has 8."
"Are you sure? There seem to be a lot of hairless monkeys running around on that 3rd planet..."
"Look. If a species is capable of sending a spacecraft outside of its solar system, I'm sure they could figure out how many planets they have orbitting their own sun. This obviously isn't the right place and we need to keep going to find the people who sent that probe so we can give them the secrets of universe, the greatest of which is a machine that transmorphizes ordinary seawater into chocolate milkshakes and requires no energy to function."
Thanks a lot, IAU. I hope your proud of yourselves.:(
Does this mean that people have promised to buy shares at an agreed price, but because the price has already dropped they will not actually buy those shares?
Basically, yes. Part of the registration for participation in Vonage's IPO was that you agreed to purchase a set amount of shares at $17. Now that the price is less than $17, it'd cost them money to fulfill this agreement, so they (understandably) want out of it.
If so, how did they 'promise', if they have done so in writing, then surely Vonage can demand they do buy those shares at that price?
Basically, Vonage has got their consent to the online form and the fact that they had to open up a brokerage account to participate as proof that the people entered into the agreement knowingly. There were warnings in the agreement about this situation happening, but most folks probably assumed that was just boilerplate (nevermind the fact that there's a reason that boilerplate is included in the first place).
Or is this a case of a company mucking up a floatation, realising that it is now massively in debt to external creditors and is trying to reclaim that money by threatening people?
I don't know if it's so much that Vonage is in debt as it is that the first sale of its stock during the IPO is how the company raises money from the IPO. Vonage's standpoint here is "You promised to give us $500 a week ago and we're going to hold you to that promise even though you were expecting to make $600 back and now instead will only be able to make $300 back. The $200 loss is your problem, not ours."
A class act would forgive the customers and offer to either release them from the agreement or offer them a chance to change the terms to something that won't cost them money. Aside from being a decent thing to do and aside from being a good way to prevent a bunch of customers from churning over this, it also would make the company look less desperate and maybe help stop the downward spiral the stock price is currently in.
So there's this biz book out there called Death by Meeting. It's like 110 pages long, and it's setup like The Goal in that it's a fictional story about a company that's used as a vehicle to explain an idea.... I'm not a fantastically quick reader and I was able to knock it out in about 6 hours.
While the story was lame, the concept was fscking brilliant, and what's more... it worked. And to save you a few hours and $20, here's the gist:
The basic premise is that most meetings are unproductive affairs that always seem to either wander off topic or get mired down in political squabbling, and this is bad because meetings are the one chance you have for getting everyone on the same page and executing The Grand Uber Strategy for your organization. The book posits that the problem isn't really the meeting, but how the meetings are organized and says that you should design them to be kind of like TV shows.... there are 10 minute meetings (CNN length) that you use as kind of current events thing and do daily, 30 minute - 1 hour meetings (Sienfeld length) either weekly or biweekly to discuss execution problems, the big hairy 2 hour+ meetings (movie length) you use for strategy sessions once a quarter, and the 2-3 day yearly "retreats" where the gameplan for the entire year is hashed out (more for the C?O level twinkies).
By putting a time limit on it and setting strict boundaries for what you can and can't discuss, you keep the meeting on track and the important stuff in focus. That makes the meeting a true information exchange instead of the 3 hour suckfest. Everyone in the group gets about a minute to sum up what they did yesterday and what they plan to do today in the daily meetings, and you simply smack the guy that starts talking about how we should probably move the app from Fedora Core servers to Debian servers upside the head and tell him to save it for the weekly 1 hour meeting where you'll have time for debate on the issue.
I had a chance to implement this for about a quarter (until the company hired a "real" manager), and I was extremely happy with the results. Folks knew what was going on, what needed to get done, and not only did our little IT group stop stepping on each other toes and dropping the ball on important tasks, we actually started to get kudos from other groups. You talked to one guy in the group, and he could tell you the grand strategy for the department for that quarter, could tell you who was working on what project, and let you know what the other person's status was. When the VPs would run down to ask a question, we all had the same (correct) answer, and life was good because they didn't think we were lazy, unprofessional, unshaven bums who were just trying to weasel out of doing work. The Linux guys could tell you what the Windows guys were up to and vice versa, so the VPs got the same story no matter who they talked to.
Meetings, done right, can be a powerful (and painless) tool that will beat the snot out of impersonal email missives any day of the week and twice on Tuesdays. Think of it as an agile methodology for business operations.:)
The rub is figuring out a diplomatic way to tell your boss he sucks at calling and running meetings and getting him/her to fix the problem.
PS: I think, no matter how much frickin money they make, they ALL drive beat up pickups
Maybe it's just me, but I would think taking your Porsche to a construction site is roughly on par with saying "Yeah, but two drives would have to fail, and what are the chances of that happening?" on the Feats of Monumental Hubris That Are Just Inviting A Painful and Swift World Class, All-Star Level Cosmic Bitchslap Scale.
The infrastrcuture might not be a problem (at least in the US). It looks like the ship relies on its wings for a substantial portion of its lift, so it will probably need a runway for takeoff and landing just like any other plane.
With a lot of the military restructuring in the US, there are more than a few bases from the Cold War that are now basically unused. Most of these are being sold to local governments to reclaim as business parks (like Brooks in San Antonio) or airports (like Bergstrom in Austin, TX). Most interesting are the ones that used to be logistics centers as they've got everything you'd need (runways, hangars, functioning rail lines, and easy access to the interstate) and are probably located in a good spot to be a hub for geographical distribution.
Re:So standard electrical plugs destroyed capitali
on
The Demise of IP?
·
· Score: 1
What most people forget is that the whole idea of intellectual property is supposed to have balance. Yeah, you as an IP holder get certain legal protections and you can club other people over the head with them, but the catch was that you didn't get to do it forever. 7 years, and then it's open season, so you'd better move quick AND be working on the next big idea.
Yes, you can go on a rampage when you get the quad damage.... but it doesn't last forever, and it's not supposed to.
Unfortunately, people who run big companies don't like that whole risk thing. Wouldn't it be nice if quad damage lasted for the entire match instead of just 30 seconds? So, let's push to get the laws changed.
And that's how we go from the heyday of IP 100 years ago to the absolute mess we're in right now. That's how you go from Edison and crew slaving away in a workshop to find the right material to make a lightbulb to where RIAA sues grandmothers and twelve year olds, and people can sell an idea for a website for millions of dollars without having to write any real code.
I say we keep IP law, but we move it back to the manly be-quick-or-be-deaded days of yesteryear. With big payoffs and the potential for a small company to go big time, I think you'll start seeing 1) an increased interest in science as more people see it as their path to big screen TVs and sports car, and 2) cheaper goods as companies are forced to keep shipping product that consumers might want but really don't need (same principle behind the fact that you can get a blazing fast PC today for under $500). With a shorter shelf life, there'll be less incentive for the big companies to buy up patents and sit on them until they can figure out just how high they can price it.
Competition is good, and governmental structures (like IP law) need to foster it, not hamstring it.
In any company, there is one person and one person alone who's responsible for the defective product -- the CEO. If payroll isn't met on time, that's the CEO's fault. If someone gets mugged out in the parking lot because there wasn't adequate lighting or your building security was nonexistant, that's the CEO's fault. If there's no toilet paper in the bathroom, that's the CEO's fault. If the company fails to meet its sales expectations, whether it's because the sales staff sucks, the marketing staff screwed up their job, or the engineers decided that the 40% chance of the widget blowing up and unleashing a bolt of lightning into the frontal lobe of the user was "good enough"... that's the CEO's fault.
The CEO is the chief executive officer. He's responsible for everything that his company does and everything that happens at the company. The weight of the world is literally on his shoulders, and it's why he gets the big bucks, the golden parachute, and the nice office.
It's also why it's his responsibility to make sure that the developers that get hired by his company have either been trained properly or get trained properly. It's why it's his responsibility that project managers know what the hell they're doing and make sure that when you design "end-to-end solutions" that they don't have gaping security holes like customer data passing into the accounts payable system in clear text. It's why it's his job to hire a CTO that understands all of this and can hire the project managers and programmers necessary to do the job right.
Schmidt is trying to pass the buck for his mistake. It's as absurd and cowardly as a general trying to say he lost a war because his soldiers didn't fight hard enough, or an NFL coach blaming his kicker missing a 3 pointer for causing the loss.
If he was serious about getting it fixed, there'd be a lot less whining to a trade rag trying to pin the blame on his employees, and a whole lot more fixing it.
Slashdot Mirror
Seals in the southern hemisphere appear to be suffering from an obesity epidemic.
Yet ANOTHER feature Word has that OpenOffice doesn't. :(
I absolutely agree with you on that last point: credit where credit is due. At the end of the day, RH's products are open sourced and the do a lot of good work to protect open source as it's key to their business model.
But this doesn't change the fact that RH is a pain in the ass to deal with as a customer. I'm trying hard to remember one single conversation with them that didn't start off with the assumption that I was a drooling imbecile or where I got back a prompt and useful answer instead of an attempt to redirect blame for the problem back on me. I can't recall any. What I do recall is a vibe of total disdain, being made to feel like I was wasting their precious time with my stupid questions, and what can only be described as a feedback event horizon where bug reports and patches just disappeared into bugzilla never to be responded to nor seen or heard from again.
And it wasn't just me that got that impression. My bosses did, too. I could tell when they'd talked with RH recently because they always swung by my office to ask, "Hey, what do you think about SuSE?"
From a customer service standpoint, RH makes their money because they're the only large company who supports RH products. Aside from Ximian's weak effort to extend support of RH 7-9, they have no competition. While Oracle isn't known for its customer service either, all they really have to do is offer less frustration than RH and suddenly their offering becomes a very, very attractive alternative. And while RH does indeed employ some outstanding technical talent, they've only got a fraction of the bright folks in the open source community... if Oracle plays it right and demonstrates a Googlish atmosphere of encouraging open source innovation in their Linux division they could easily build up their own talent pool.
So, yeah. A lot of "if"s in that equation. If I was RH, I wouldn't be losing sleep just yet.
But I would also be asking what I could to do build customer loyalty and prepare for a day when I'm no longer the only game in town for supporting RHEL in the next quarterly strategy meeting.
I don't think he's looking for something that's necessarily free. And even if he isn't, I'm not.
The fact is that there's nothing analgous to iTunes for sheet music. If you want the music for a contemporary song, then you're stuck having to purchase a whole book filled with other songs just to get the one you're after. Same situation as buying a cd used to be in 1998 was.
While I'm not so hot on paying $20 for a book of 20 songs when I'm only interested in one, paying $1 20 times for 20 songs I do want and could go fetch whenever the impulse struck would be awesome. While it probably won't be a billion dollar a year service, it'd still be better for both hobbyists like me and copyright holders if they could sell their wares more efficiently.
Look. If you're worried about people reading your email, go invest the 20 minutes it takes to learn about PGP and then find a plugin for your favoritest mail client. Make it 25, and you can even get your key uploaded to a public key server so that'll be easy for anyone else in the world to send encrypted mail to you.
Also, it might be a good idea to stop printing out your emails filled with "sensitive information" (like who you're going to fire and which companies are offering you how much to buy which division) to the public printer next to the break room that sales uses.
Bottom line: if you feel you need to keep secrets, then you'd better learn how to, like... keep secrets.
So.... did you get the job?
That's pretty much the concept behind the Connexions project. I'd suggest checking out Richard Baraniuk's TED Talk for more info. While there's not a lot of stuff up there now (as compared to what could be), it's a start.
I would imagine that using part of that $100m to pay bounties for specific subjects, to help finance translating material to other languages, or coming up with a way to mix together the info in a multimedia format that could be easily integrated into Wikipedia would be, as the kids today say, "for teh win". :)
Oh and before you neo cons say it, no, there isn't a new thing for misplaced workers to retrain for.
How is it that the unemployment rate in August (according to United States Bureau of Labor Statistics) was 4.7% (down from 4.9% a year earlier)? If outsourcing has been going on since 2000 and there's nothing there to replace jobs lost to it, shouldn't the unemployment rate be higher?
Then you, sir, are at the wrong website.
I can't even trust you people to type in your password without forgetting to turn off capslock, and now I'm supposed to trust with you something like food prep?
I don't think so, Tim.
Now we gotta go snag the Pioneers and rub Pluto off the plaques or else the aliens will be totally fscking lost when they come to find us.
"Is this the right place?"
"No. The map says there's 9 planets, and this system only has 8."
"Are you sure? There seem to be a lot of hairless monkeys running around on that 3rd planet..."
"Look. If a species is capable of sending a spacecraft outside of its solar system, I'm sure they could figure out how many planets they have orbitting their own sun. This obviously isn't the right place and we need to keep going to find the people who sent that probe so we can give them the secrets of universe, the greatest of which is a machine that transmorphizes ordinary seawater into chocolate milkshakes and requires no energy to function."
Thanks a lot, IAU. I hope your proud of yourselves. :(
But it does add a whole new dimension to the conversation.
Does this mean that people have promised to buy shares at an agreed price, but because the price has already dropped they will not actually buy those shares?
Basically, yes. Part of the registration for participation in Vonage's IPO was that you agreed to purchase a set amount of shares at $17. Now that the price is less than $17, it'd cost them money to fulfill this agreement, so they (understandably) want out of it.
If so, how did they 'promise', if they have done so in writing, then surely Vonage can demand they do buy those shares at that price?
Basically, Vonage has got their consent to the online form and the fact that they had to open up a brokerage account to participate as proof that the people entered into the agreement knowingly. There were warnings in the agreement about this situation happening, but most folks probably assumed that was just boilerplate (nevermind the fact that there's a reason that boilerplate is included in the first place).
Or is this a case of a company mucking up a floatation, realising that it is now massively in debt to external creditors and is trying to reclaim that money by threatening people?
I don't know if it's so much that Vonage is in debt as it is that the first sale of its stock during the IPO is how the company raises money from the IPO. Vonage's standpoint here is "You promised to give us $500 a week ago and we're going to hold you to that promise even though you were expecting to make $600 back and now instead will only be able to make $300 back. The $200 loss is your problem, not ours."
A class act would forgive the customers and offer to either release them from the agreement or offer them a chance to change the terms to something that won't cost them money. Aside from being a decent thing to do and aside from being a good way to prevent a bunch of customers from churning over this, it also would make the company look less desperate and maybe help stop the downward spiral the stock price is currently in.
So there's this biz book out there called Death by Meeting. It's like 110 pages long, and it's setup like The Goal in that it's a fictional story about a company that's used as a vehicle to explain an idea.... I'm not a fantastically quick reader and I was able to knock it out in about 6 hours.
While the story was lame, the concept was fscking brilliant, and what's more... it worked. And to save you a few hours and $20, here's the gist:
The basic premise is that most meetings are unproductive affairs that always seem to either wander off topic or get mired down in political squabbling, and this is bad because meetings are the one chance you have for getting everyone on the same page and executing The Grand Uber Strategy for your organization. The book posits that the problem isn't really the meeting, but how the meetings are organized and says that you should design them to be kind of like TV shows.... there are 10 minute meetings (CNN length) that you use as kind of current events thing and do daily, 30 minute - 1 hour meetings (Sienfeld length) either weekly or biweekly to discuss execution problems, the big hairy 2 hour+ meetings (movie length) you use for strategy sessions once a quarter, and the 2-3 day yearly "retreats" where the gameplan for the entire year is hashed out (more for the C?O level twinkies).
By putting a time limit on it and setting strict boundaries for what you can and can't discuss, you keep the meeting on track and the important stuff in focus. That makes the meeting a true information exchange instead of the 3 hour suckfest. Everyone in the group gets about a minute to sum up what they did yesterday and what they plan to do today in the daily meetings, and you simply smack the guy that starts talking about how we should probably move the app from Fedora Core servers to Debian servers upside the head and tell him to save it for the weekly 1 hour meeting where you'll have time for debate on the issue.
I had a chance to implement this for about a quarter (until the company hired a "real" manager), and I was extremely happy with the results. Folks knew what was going on, what needed to get done, and not only did our little IT group stop stepping on each other toes and dropping the ball on important tasks, we actually started to get kudos from other groups. You talked to one guy in the group, and he could tell you the grand strategy for the department for that quarter, could tell you who was working on what project, and let you know what the other person's status was. When the VPs would run down to ask a question, we all had the same (correct) answer, and life was good because they didn't think we were lazy, unprofessional, unshaven bums who were just trying to weasel out of doing work. The Linux guys could tell you what the Windows guys were up to and vice versa, so the VPs got the same story no matter who they talked to.
Meetings, done right, can be a powerful (and painless) tool that will beat the snot out of impersonal email missives any day of the week and twice on Tuesdays. Think of it as an agile methodology for business operations. :)
The rub is figuring out a diplomatic way to tell your boss he sucks at calling and running meetings and getting him/her to fix the problem.
PS: I think, no matter how much frickin money they make, they ALL drive beat up pickups
Maybe it's just me, but I would think taking your Porsche to a construction site is roughly on par with saying "Yeah, but two drives would have to fail, and what are the chances of that happening?" on the Feats of Monumental Hubris That Are Just Inviting A Painful and Swift World Class, All-Star Level Cosmic Bitchslap Scale.
The infrastrcuture might not be a problem (at least in the US). It looks like the ship relies on its wings for a substantial portion of its lift, so it will probably need a runway for takeoff and landing just like any other plane.
With a lot of the military restructuring in the US, there are more than a few bases from the Cold War that are now basically unused. Most of these are being sold to local governments to reclaim as business parks (like Brooks in San Antonio) or airports (like Bergstrom in Austin, TX). Most interesting are the ones that used to be logistics centers as they've got everything you'd need (runways, hangars, functioning rail lines, and easy access to the interstate) and are probably located in a good spot to be a hub for geographical distribution.
lol no it's not a meme
\o/
lol no it's not a virus
What most people forget is that the whole idea of intellectual property is supposed to have balance. Yeah, you as an IP holder get certain legal protections and you can club other people over the head with them, but the catch was that you didn't get to do it forever. 7 years, and then it's open season, so you'd better move quick AND be working on the next big idea.
Yes, you can go on a rampage when you get the quad damage.... but it doesn't last forever, and it's not supposed to.
Unfortunately, people who run big companies don't like that whole risk thing. Wouldn't it be nice if quad damage lasted for the entire match instead of just 30 seconds? So, let's push to get the laws changed.
And that's how we go from the heyday of IP 100 years ago to the absolute mess we're in right now. That's how you go from Edison and crew slaving away in a workshop to find the right material to make a lightbulb to where RIAA sues grandmothers and twelve year olds, and people can sell an idea for a website for millions of dollars without having to write any real code.
I say we keep IP law, but we move it back to the manly be-quick-or-be-deaded days of yesteryear. With big payoffs and the potential for a small company to go big time, I think you'll start seeing 1) an increased interest in science as more people see it as their path to big screen TVs and sports car, and 2) cheaper goods as companies are forced to keep shipping product that consumers might want but really don't need (same principle behind the fact that you can get a blazing fast PC today for under $500). With a shorter shelf life, there'll be less incentive for the big companies to buy up patents and sit on them until they can figure out just how high they can price it.
Competition is good, and governmental structures (like IP law) need to foster it, not hamstring it.
That may be, but you managed to create a pretty solid SMTP server anyway.
Actually, you're not far off the mark here.
In any company, there is one person and one person alone who's responsible for the defective product -- the CEO. If payroll isn't met on time, that's the CEO's fault. If someone gets mugged out in the parking lot because there wasn't adequate lighting or your building security was nonexistant, that's the CEO's fault. If there's no toilet paper in the bathroom, that's the CEO's fault. If the company fails to meet its sales expectations, whether it's because the sales staff sucks, the marketing staff screwed up their job, or the engineers decided that the 40% chance of the widget blowing up and unleashing a bolt of lightning into the frontal lobe of the user was "good enough"... that's the CEO's fault.
The CEO is the chief executive officer. He's responsible for everything that his company does and everything that happens at the company. The weight of the world is literally on his shoulders, and it's why he gets the big bucks, the golden parachute, and the nice office.
It's also why it's his responsibility to make sure that the developers that get hired by his company have either been trained properly or get trained properly. It's why it's his responsibility that project managers know what the hell they're doing and make sure that when you design "end-to-end solutions" that they don't have gaping security holes like customer data passing into the accounts payable system in clear text. It's why it's his job to hire a CTO that understands all of this and can hire the project managers and programmers necessary to do the job right.
Schmidt is trying to pass the buck for his mistake. It's as absurd and cowardly as a general trying to say he lost a war because his soldiers didn't fight hard enough, or an NFL coach blaming his kicker missing a 3 pointer for causing the loss.
If he was serious about getting it fixed, there'd be a lot less whining to a trade rag trying to pin the blame on his employees, and a whole lot more fixing it.
Leadership for the win. \o/
Actually, I managed to snag one from the $10 bin at Wal-Mart back before Christmas. ISTR seeing a couple in the last-minute racks at CompUSA as well.
:(
I don't think we're going to see a re-release, though.
My Nvidia 6800 just came in yesterday. \o/
And it reads:
s t f u n u b
k t h x b a i
That's why one crew member will be trained extensively in the use of tin snips in zero-gee environments.
Although that'd be a great way to freak out an alien race... Kind of like pulling a Rama on 'em.