Disaster for you maybe. The goodwill part is still around. They just didn't want to offer support for it, so they gave it a different name. It is not a different distribution.
IIRC at the time they did this there was a semi-revolt by some of the Red Hat community who didn't like the change.
In Australia you used to be able to buy Red Hat from Newsagents for a very reasonable price. It was available, THERE, when you wanted an up-to-date distro to put on your PC & they got awesome market presence as a result.
Now hardly anybody uses Redhat anymore and a reasonably sizeable %age don't use Fedora either. I moved to Gentoo & I have a DVD of Suse waiting patiently for my new laptop to arrive. If they'd kept the Red Hat/ Red Hat Enterprise branding or even made it Red Hat Community and Red Hat Enterprise they'd have kept a lot of users they've lost. The Joe Sixpacks who would dutifully go down every few months & buy the update for $20 from their local Newsagent but now go & buy a copy of a Linux magazine with a different distro each month.
The managers who used to think Linux was Redhat. Community members know what Fedora is but if Linux is going to really hit the mainstream it's crucial we do a better job of marketing than this. You don't rebrand a successful product without backing it up with a huge marketing budget.
Red Hat's method (Red Hat for the Enterprise, Fedora Core for the Real Users) is acceptable, though certainly not brilliant.
That's a marketing disaster for Red Hat IMHO.
They had the undisputed #1 dominant brand & split off the goodwill generating bit and forced most of their loyal users to switch to a different distro and - get this - the users figured there were OTHER non Red Hat Linux distros and - shock horror - some of them did stuff better than Red Hat.
Brilliant move morons. 5 years ago Red Hat was the shoo in no brainer distro for servers everywhere. Today Suse is the preferred supplier to the NSW govt.
Ahh, the comment was based on something I heard on the radio before Australia signed the FTA with America.
It went along the lines of Canada was building cars then America used the two FTAs with Canada & Mexico to ship Mexican built cars into Canada undercutting the domestic product. So it sounds like a combination of Autopact and the FTA that hosed it...
Mazda are the only company still making Rotory engine also called the Wankel engine after it's designer by some people who don't know what "Wank" means in British (and derivitives) English
In short any Mazda with R in the designation has a rotory engine - for the last 20+ years this has been the RXn series of sports cars although there have been saloons in the 1970s IIRC.
One line description: smooth, quiet, one moving part but thirsty...
Despite all of his objections though, in an exclusive interview with Linux-Watch, Torvalds said that he hasn't ruled out using GPL 3 for the kernel.
It's "quite possible," said Torvalds that the GPL 3 could be used,
Not just that but if you have code that is called from different places in a subtly different way. You end up saying "Yep, covered that routine" only to have it go bang when the user accesses the code using an obscure method...
If SAP were to out-and-out declare they like MySQL better and shift most of their DB usage there, Oracle would have a very large amount of egg on their face.
Also don't ignore the security & integrity implications.
If you only allow Inserts/updates/deletes via stored procedure you can completely eliminate the danger of a rogue application (usually written in %*&% Access) from tanking your data.
Anyone who lives in the sweet little La-La land of writing client-server applications that run efficiently on multiple back-end databases can chase that particular dragon if they want to but it is a huge waste of resources. Every time I've worked on projects that had the "interchangable back-end" design goal that goal was amended during development after a massive amount of wasted resources (and after the first time I've always advised strenuously against doing it)
My point is that at this stage in the year we have used up most of our "delayed builds" but have incurred very few "outages" (my definition of good performance - we've dodged any bullets before they went live) if we do what is best for US according to the wording of the contract we will put in a dodgy build knowing it may fail because we know we will be penalised for delaying the build but can absorb any outage if it occurs.
I don't believe that is what the customer would want us to do...
The contract was badly worded. I'm sure if the customer had forseen the implications it would have been worded differently.
I'm sorry but from my experience I have to call bull.
Most of the time O/S contracts are not negotiated by tech savvy people which results in ridiculous clauses.
The contract I'm working on at the moment only allows us to delay releases a certain number of times in a year and allows us a certain number of outages.
Fair enough you may think...
Now, if we're close to the limit on delayed releases but way ahead of the curve on actual outages what do you think we're going to do when we have to call go/no-go on a release with only a 50-50 chance of being successful? If we pull it we definitely get hit on the service level agreement; if we put it in we've got a 50% chance of taking no hit and a 50% chance of an outage which we can absorb easily. Is this the best thing for the customer? No. Is it the best thing to do pragmatically to protect the profits of the outsourcer? Yes.
Another outsourcer at my company is only contracted to create 30 (IIRC) user IDs per month. If you're new hire 31+ you're out of luck until the first of the next month & the company normally hires in big blocks (when the graduates become available). Somebody averaged the number of new users over 12 months without negotiating in the flexibility to overspend one month & underspend others. It can be created of course but that means big bucks... That outsourcer had used up all of their projected 5 years budget within the first two years with all of the incurred excess charges for stuff like that. Mind you they were SO incompetent that the failures in other areas of SLA incurred penalty clauses to partially counteract that...
I agree that entrenched IT departments can be really bad to have to deal with but they can be fixed if senior management has the will to do something - maybe the CEO needs to be told there's a problem instead of the usual "everything's fine".
If you have a LARGE IT department and you believe outsourcing is the answer - you probably asked the wrong question. Small-medium companies with limited and well defined requirements can and should outsource. I do not believe large IT departments can be economically outsourced because the increase in management overhead that is incurred more than outweighs any savings that may be made - you end up paying for the outsourcers managers while you have to keep your managers to liase with their managers... If you write a cast iron contract the outsourcer will have already charged you a shedload of money to negotiate said contract and you will have also spent a lot of money on your peoples time negotiating it. If you don't have a cast iron contract then you can open wide & say ARGH!!! because the outsourcer will ream you for every excess charge they can before you go bankrupt.
I've not seen the show but it could be that if the $200 bottle was a bottle of Red wine it was too young to drink & the tannins hadn't settled in which case it would be vile.
IME (as a white wine drinker) you do get what you pay for. Good wine is a lot smoother & more enjoyable for me. I don't drink often or much so I concentrate on the experience. Leuwin Estate Art Series Chardonnay for example...
Although this does not cover all non white races, business people like to be able to understand who they are talking to. Overwhelmingly upper management (e.g; people that cut the checks) are white.
Thus white people want to hear white people on the other end of the phone. Or more appropriately, native english speakers.
I am not racist but I know that I prefer to call a support line or a consultant that doesn't have to "try" to speak my language.
Many people will not own up to this but the reality is most people would like to hear a female on the end of the phone as well. Is that sexist? Maybe, but it is reality.
I think the key thing is for the person on the telephone to speak fluent non accented (or at least appropriately accented) English. Also it helps to be of the opposite sex. I've done a bit of telesales many years ago so I know the principles - it also makes me a tough but sympathetic client...
I have answered the phone (In Western Australia) to a junk phone call which started "Hello this is Bruce from Sydney" in a heavily (Indian subcontinent) accented voice. Now, the last time I checked Bruce is not a popular name amongst Indians/Pakistanis/Bangladeshis/Sri Lankans so any credibility he may have had went straight out of the window. We're getting a majority of sales calls now originating from (presumably) India and most of them are utterly hopeless. Unable to deviate even slightly from the script e.g.
Me (Male): Hello.
Them: Hello is that (name of female previous owner)?
Me: No, she doesn't live here any more.
Them: Oh. (3 seconds pause, hangs up)
I didn't even find out what the name of the company was that he was hawking for!
I'm guessing here that the best English speakers get good jobs in India, the passable ones get the tech support jobs, and the barely capable get the telesales jobs. I've heard that Indian telesales is 100x cheaper than Australian originated telesales but with the sort of skill they're demonstrating to me the companies outsourcing telesales are being totally ripped off!
I have worked with a lot of Indians/Pakistanis in my time & I would have to say that I have a slight positive bias in favour of them. I have also worked with Malaysian & Hong Kong Chinese coders and would have a slightly higher positive bias in favour of hiring them in the future. I have never worked with a black coder nor have I ever interviewed a black coder. Tech support is another matter - the best tech support guy I have ever worked with is black and I would have no problem hiring a black candidate for a coding job the resume/CV would have to get past my initial screening for appropriate skillset but that's never happened:(
It baffles me why people would buy "Strategy Guides" to games that they own. It isn't like the games are designed to be undefeatable without them. Much of the point of playing the game is lost if you are told exactly how to win it.
I'm time-poor. I like gaming but I simply do not have the time to figure out some of the oblique puzzles in RPGs or have to revisit places to pick up key items I missed the first time around, so I buy (or find on the web) a strategy guide & I get more new experiences/hour than if I had to figure it out for myself.
I could have finished "Baldur's Gate" without help but it would have probably taken twice as long and I would have missed a whole bunch of cool stuff. Cheat codes are a different beastie I don't use them to complete games. Although I did use them to recreate my BG1 character to inject into BG2 after a HD crash took out my only copy of the BG1 savegames...
I think it's another manifestation of the famous "cultural cringe" where Australians seem to think themselves unable to create anything worthwhile.
With respect to OSS you may well be right about the no free lunch thing. I've had IT support staff at a government department tell me that they are "not allowed to use free software" when the government has recently made it the policy that FOSS must be evaluated before software is purchased. I have seen cases where inferior software (and not just easy to pick on stuff like Windows & IIS either) was used because it was commercial and therefore supported - even though access to the high priced support was limited to God knows who but it wasn't the people that used the software...
1. Buy expensive poor quality software
2. Pay for but don't use a support contract
3. Resist all attempts to bring in a superior FOSS equivalent
4. ???
5. Profit?!
It's factual evidence, but from a single website. That is not statisically valid.
It's also why I'd discard any slashdot browser stats (Lynx has a 5% share... WTF?;)
I was highlighting why you may not be able to trust stats from a banking website vis. a proportion of sophisticated users (ie the ones most likely to have heard of and use Firefox) will also be unhappy to use internet banking - plus of course why I wear my tinfoil hat as a bonus piece of info;).
I wasn't aware that you had one of these machines installed in your house.
Don't be cute...
I'm not in Canada but I don't touch internet banking. I know enough about internet security to be very worried about identity theft etc. I think you'll find there's a significant proportion of sophisticated web-users who don't use internet banking because of security concerns.
Over here in Australia the banks are all scum suckers ripping off their customers I've heard all sorts of horror stories about the hoops you have to jump through to get them to reverse erroneous transactions so I prefer the cast-iron deniability of never having used internet banking. That way if anything screwy does happen & they try to pin it onto a net transaction I'm in the clear.
I find it rather amusing that it's possible to get into a bank website with a 6 digit PIN whereas to recharge my prepaid mobile with $20 credit I need to type in a 20 digit PIN. Until banks start taking security more seriously (and I'm sure they'll need to be forced by legislation) I'm staying with counter transactions & cheques...
Anyway, back onto the subject. It is erroneous to think that users of a bank website are typical because a lot of people are wary of internet banking. These people may well be sophisticated firefox users (like me) as well...
Slashdot Mirror
IIRC at the time they did this there was a semi-revolt by some of the Red Hat community who didn't like the change.
In Australia you used to be able to buy Red Hat from Newsagents for a very reasonable price. It was available, THERE, when you wanted an up-to-date distro to put on your PC & they got awesome market presence as a result.
Now hardly anybody uses Redhat anymore and a reasonably sizeable %age don't use Fedora either. I moved to Gentoo & I have a DVD of Suse waiting patiently for my new laptop to arrive. If they'd kept the Red Hat/ Red Hat Enterprise branding or even made it Red Hat Community and Red Hat Enterprise they'd have kept a lot of users they've lost. The Joe Sixpacks who would dutifully go down every few months & buy the update for $20 from their local Newsagent but now go & buy a copy of a Linux magazine with a different distro each month.
The managers who used to think Linux was Redhat. Community members know what Fedora is but if Linux is going to really hit the mainstream it's crucial we do a better job of marketing than this. You don't rebrand a successful product without backing it up with a huge marketing budget.
That's a marketing disaster for Red Hat IMHO.
They had the undisputed #1 dominant brand & split off the goodwill generating bit and forced most of their loyal users to switch to a different distro and - get this - the users figured there were OTHER non Red Hat Linux distros and - shock horror - some of them did stuff better than Red Hat.
Brilliant move morons. 5 years ago Red Hat was the shoo in no brainer distro for servers everywhere. Today Suse is the preferred supplier to the NSW govt.
I have used Borland tools since the 1980s
I was a Delphi Beta tester
Delphi is running on my PC as I write this.
Just ask Borland/Inprise/Borland...
It went along the lines of Canada was building cars then America used the two FTAs with Canada & Mexico to ship Mexican built cars into Canada undercutting the domestic product. So it sounds like a combination of Autopact and the FTA that hosed it...
In short any Mazda with R in the designation has a rotory engine - for the last 20+ years this has been the RXn series of sports cars although there have been saloons in the 1970s IIRC.
One line description: smooth, quiet, one moving part but thirsty...
Despite all of his objections though, in an exclusive interview with Linux-Watch, Torvalds said that he hasn't ruled out using GPL 3 for the kernel. It's "quite possible," said Torvalds that the GPL 3 could be used,
It's Linus that's saying it...
It's running mighty slow considering it's Steve Wozniak's server...
Linus, is that you?
That would be embarassing ;)
If you only allow Inserts/updates/deletes via stored procedure you can completely eliminate the danger of a rogue application (usually written in %*&% Access) from tanking your data.
Anyone who lives in the sweet little La-La land of writing client-server applications that run efficiently on multiple back-end databases can chase that particular dragon if they want to but it is a huge waste of resources. Every time I've worked on projects that had the "interchangable back-end" design goal that goal was amended during development after a massive amount of wasted resources (and after the first time I've always advised strenuously against doing it)
I don't believe that is what the customer would want us to do...
The contract was badly worded. I'm sure if the customer had forseen the implications it would have been worded differently.
Most of the time O/S contracts are not negotiated by tech savvy people which results in ridiculous clauses.
The contract I'm working on at the moment only allows us to delay releases a certain number of times in a year and allows us a certain number of outages.
Fair enough you may think...
Now, if we're close to the limit on delayed releases but way ahead of the curve on actual outages what do you think we're going to do when we have to call go/no-go on a release with only a 50-50 chance of being successful? If we pull it we definitely get hit on the service level agreement; if we put it in we've got a 50% chance of taking no hit and a 50% chance of an outage which we can absorb easily. Is this the best thing for the customer? No. Is it the best thing to do pragmatically to protect the profits of the outsourcer? Yes.
Another outsourcer at my company is only contracted to create 30 (IIRC) user IDs per month. If you're new hire 31+ you're out of luck until the first of the next month & the company normally hires in big blocks (when the graduates become available). Somebody averaged the number of new users over 12 months without negotiating in the flexibility to overspend one month & underspend others. It can be created of course but that means big bucks... That outsourcer had used up all of their projected 5 years budget within the first two years with all of the incurred excess charges for stuff like that. Mind you they were SO incompetent that the failures in other areas of SLA incurred penalty clauses to partially counteract that...
I agree that entrenched IT departments can be really bad to have to deal with but they can be fixed if senior management has the will to do something - maybe the CEO needs to be told there's a problem instead of the usual "everything's fine".
If you have a LARGE IT department and you believe outsourcing is the answer - you probably asked the wrong question. Small-medium companies with limited and well defined requirements can and should outsource. I do not believe large IT departments can be economically outsourced because the increase in management overhead that is incurred more than outweighs any savings that may be made - you end up paying for the outsourcers managers while you have to keep your managers to liase with their managers... If you write a cast iron contract the outsourcer will have already charged you a shedload of money to negotiate said contract and you will have also spent a lot of money on your peoples time negotiating it. If you don't have a cast iron contract then you can open wide & say ARGH!!! because the outsourcer will ream you for every excess charge they can before you go bankrupt.
Perth ;)
2hrs from the Winery...
IME (as a white wine drinker) you do get what you pay for. Good wine is a lot smoother & more enjoyable for me. I don't drink often or much so I concentrate on the experience. Leuwin Estate Art Series Chardonnay for example...
I have answered the phone (In Western Australia) to a junk phone call which started "Hello this is Bruce from Sydney" in a heavily (Indian subcontinent) accented voice. Now, the last time I checked Bruce is not a popular name amongst Indians/Pakistanis/Bangladeshis/Sri Lankans so any credibility he may have had went straight out of the window. We're getting a majority of sales calls now originating from (presumably) India and most of them are utterly hopeless. Unable to deviate even slightly from the script e.g.
Me (Male): Hello. Them: Hello is that (name of female previous owner)?
Me: No, she doesn't live here any more.
Them: Oh. (3 seconds pause, hangs up)
I didn't even find out what the name of the company was that he was hawking for!
I'm guessing here that the best English speakers get good jobs in India, the passable ones get the tech support jobs, and the barely capable get the telesales jobs. I've heard that Indian telesales is 100x cheaper than Australian originated telesales but with the sort of skill they're demonstrating to me the companies outsourcing telesales are being totally ripped off!
I have worked with a lot of Indians/Pakistanis in my time & I would have to say that I have a slight positive bias in favour of them. I have also worked with Malaysian & Hong Kong Chinese coders and would have a slightly higher positive bias in favour of hiring them in the future. I have never worked with a black coder nor have I ever interviewed a black coder. Tech support is another matter - the best tech support guy I have ever worked with is black and I would have no problem hiring a black candidate for a coding job the resume/CV would have to get past my initial screening for appropriate skillset but that's never happened :(
It's the challenge of the fights & the enjoyment of seeing the artwork & experiencing the plot. YMMV of course
I could have finished "Baldur's Gate" without help but it would have probably taken twice as long and I would have missed a whole bunch of cool stuff. Cheat codes are a different beastie I don't use them to complete games. Although I did use them to recreate my BG1 character to inject into BG2 after a HD crash took out my only copy of the BG1 savegames...
Sounds good - who do you bank with?
With respect to OSS you may well be right about the no free lunch thing. I've had IT support staff at a government department tell me that they are "not allowed to use free software" when the government has recently made it the policy that FOSS must be evaluated before software is purchased. I have seen cases where inferior software (and not just easy to pick on stuff like Windows & IIS either) was used because it was commercial and therefore supported - even though access to the high priced support was limited to God knows who but it wasn't the people that used the software...
1. Buy expensive poor quality software
2. Pay for but don't use a support contract
3. Resist all attempts to bring in a superior FOSS equivalent
4. ???
5. Profit?!
It's also why I'd discard any slashdot browser stats (Lynx has a 5% share... WTF? ;)
;).
I was highlighting why you may not be able to trust stats from a banking website vis. a proportion of sophisticated users (ie the ones most likely to have heard of and use Firefox) will also be unhappy to use internet banking - plus of course why I wear my tinfoil hat as a bonus piece of info
Don't be cute...
I'm not in Canada but I don't touch internet banking. I know enough about internet security to be very worried about identity theft etc. I think you'll find there's a significant proportion of sophisticated web-users who don't use internet banking because of security concerns.
Over here in Australia the banks are all scum suckers ripping off their customers I've heard all sorts of horror stories about the hoops you have to jump through to get them to reverse erroneous transactions so I prefer the cast-iron deniability of never having used internet banking. That way if anything screwy does happen & they try to pin it onto a net transaction I'm in the clear.
I find it rather amusing that it's possible to get into a bank website with a 6 digit PIN whereas to recharge my prepaid mobile with $20 credit I need to type in a 20 digit PIN. Until banks start taking security more seriously (and I'm sure they'll need to be forced by legislation) I'm staying with counter transactions & cheques...
Anyway, back onto the subject. It is erroneous to think that users of a bank website are typical because a lot of people are wary of internet banking. These people may well be sophisticated firefox users (like me) as well...
There's a lot of dissatisfaction there in comment 5 of TFA...