I can tell you're a "big picture" kind of person. But in regards to this technology, I think that the more doable implementation would be to line roads with it--perhaps finally allowing for road markings that light up at night and improve driver safety.
This could be the singular most harmful thing to open source that has happened all year. As many of you know, Ubuntu has been a solid distribution for new Linux users who are trying to ween themselves off of Windows. These people stopped using Windows for a variety of reasons: It crashed a lot, nothing seemed to work reliably, uninstalling software was dodgy, etc. To have a minor Ubuntu upgrade manifest the same problems they thought they were leaving behind is to suggest to them "Why don't you just run Windows anyway?"
Or Universal Studios might go after you! Seriously, this is a wonderful innovation. In the past, making a new roof out of solar cells was so prohibitively expensive that states such as California had to offer homeowners incentives in the form of buy-down rebates, tax breaks, and so on--basically footing part of the bill just to get them using the technology. With the advent of CIGS, these kinds of environmentally-conscious bribes may not even be necessary. Cheap solar technology will now be far more accessible to people, companies, and governments. That is a Good Thing[tm].
He would have more control over the noise and heat levels than he realizes. The motherboard in that laptop is probably not all that esoteric and you can download software that will control the speed of the fan to give you more noise & less heat or less noise & more heat, depending on your needs.
What's all this buzzing about? I will say on the record that my DNA has not been collected in any way to further their research. I've got just the one WeeBeard (that I know of...heh heh). But, off the record, there was that one time in Tijuana when I woke up in a dumpster behind a roach-infested laundromat, surrounded by empty boxes of Tide, and with an unexplainable soreness in my groin. That was some night! The last thing I remember before I blacked out was some odd fellow running away from me. He was carrying some kind of jar filled with milky fluid right before he disappeared into a white, windowless van. I think he might have muttered something about an "army of giant, unstoppable, bearded killer bees." Oh well, it's probably nothing. See ya!
Well of course, that just brings up the whole pro-gun argument that the framers wrote the Bill of Rights with parity between the military might of the government and that of an armed militia of the people. The argument is a little ridiculous when you apply it to today's military weapons. I don't know about you, but I would personally prefer that cruise missiles and nuclear weapons were in the hands of governments rather than crack dealers, pimps. or even Mr. Joe Ordinary who works at the steel mill down the street. Do you think he needs to be able to destroy cities on a whim?
It is afterall one thing to say you'll give support, another to convince them your support will be better for them then Redhats,
It doesn't matter if Oracle provides better support--only that it provides at least the same level of support for less. That alone will have resounding consequences for Red Hat. Trust me, there is a lot sneakier stuff you can do to depress a stock price than what Oracle is doing now. They haven't even scratched the surface.
As for the buyout, why would redhat go along with that? The two companies don't really overlap that much, Redhat is an OS group and Oracle is a database maker mostly.
This is a good question. The answer is that Red Hat is a publicly-held company and it doesn't matter what its founder, executive officers, or employees think. The only people who matter when it comes to buyouts are the shareholders. And shareholders care about what's best for the shareholders--they don't give two shits about "keeping Linux alive" or about any kind of technological mashup problems in a potential buyout.
What happens is, Oracle presents its offer. Usually the offer involves purchasing at a designated price all of the important shares of the company that's being bought out, and often issuing stock in the buyer's company as incentive--like in this case it would be Oracle stock offered to Red Hat shareholders. Then the shareholders vote. If the offer pleases the shareholders, then Red Hat as we know it is no more. That's really all there is to it. Once you open up your company to public ownership and issue stock in the company, then you forgo the right to refuse business offers that will make the new owners of the company more money.
Hey Mr. Fox. Name's Bob. Listen, I think our deliveries got mixed up and I've got your mask thing or whatever. It also came with two of those crazy 3-pronged Japanese forks, you know--like that ninja turtle uses? Is your real name Raphael?! Because if so, I can totally keep a secret! Cowabunga! Also, if you got a 30-count box of cherry flavored edible underwear, then you just hang onto that. That's, um, for a science experiment I'm conducting for the Nobel...um..Committee...um...Administration for Forwardness. That's right. The Nobel Comittee Administration for Forwardness. Yes. Just email me your phone number and we can arrange to swap these boxes out tomorrow.
I'm reading these Slashdot comments, and I don't understand why all these people are so against getting married. Marriage is a fine institution and...oh no, I think I've misread something.
I will only agree to this if it doesn't interfere with my right to be beaten, tortured, and detained against my will. Otherwise, the President can just count me out of this. No thank you, sir!
I second that emotion. It's hard to quantify, but Firefox 2 feels faster and lighter than earlier iterations. It's more responsive and the memory footprint seems smaller. This seems counterintuitive, because feature creep is usually the bane of most version 2.x.x software releases. Mozilla got this one right. By the way, this is on a highly riced Gentoo Firefox 2 RC3 ebuild, with the same USE and CFLAGS settings.
Sure, we can all agree to that, but you miss my point about legal protection. Unlike the labor of fans, it takes money to buy the labor of lawyers. Promoting something by posting about it on your free personal blog about how you like it is not even close to the same ballpark as filing a motion in court. Not even close. This community you are so fond of has yet to pool together money to mount a legal defense--it is only free time they have pooled. And like it or not, money and labor are not the same thing. And who is going to pony up the money to pay the legal professionals who can actually help them wriggle out of this problem? Mr. Free Blog Post? Probably not. It's a very real problem that cannot be glossed over by fandom.
Not only that, but if you read the copy of the email that was sent, it seems that Universal's issue is with the unlicensed sale of shirts. Hmm let's see...selling something for profit like a shirt is hardly the benevolent, grassroots effort that it's being made out to be. It's making that sweet merchandising money off of a property you absolutely don't own and have no right to profit from in that manner. For a community that loves the GPL and loves to espouse rhetoric such as "You can only license something you own", Slashdot sure does want to have its cake and eat it too. I would rate seeking compensation for unlicensed clothing as something no less petty than, say, demanding that "GNU" precede the word "Linux" in the name of an operating system.
Free time is one thing, but financial resources are another. I really like their response by retroactively invoicing Universal for marketing and promotion--it's funny, clever, and ballsy. But will that spirit translate into meaningful legal protection? It's doubtful.
Thank you for sharing your history with Red Hat. I thought that Red Hat had developed some goodwill in the Linux community over the last decade or so. But what I'm hearing from you is that they've squandered a lot of that and essentially abandoned their original user base, including diehards such as yourself. Would it be too fatalistic to intimate that if Red Hat can't win you and others like you back in the future, then there will be no future for Red Hat?
1) Oracle has come out with greate support real cheap
You made this up. Nobody said anything about the quality of the support at all because the quality of the support is immaterial. It doesn't have to be "great", only adequate and cheap--cheaper than what Red Hat offers. Strike one.
2) So RedHat is doomed, worthless useless and it's stock price will collapse
Pretty much. I can tell you don't know much about this or you would know that Red Hat's (two words) stock already has collapsed. Red Hat stock just lost 25% of its value based merely on the news that Oracle will be competing with for its support contracts. What exactly do you think will happen when Oracle starts to gain some momentum and actually is competing? If you don't believe me about the stock price situation, just check the second paragraph of the posted article that you clearly didn't read before posting. Strike two.
3) the united way is doing great
I see now. You're just a troll. Strike three, you're out.
4) Oracle is going to buy RedHat now.
No, in fact I ballparked a buyout before this time, next year. That's hardly "now", is it? You just got beaned in the head while walking back to the dugout.
...using Google, and the best I could come up with is this. It's an absolutely ugly reddish, brownish, yellowish turd of a web site. Is that the ideal we are supposed to be striving for? Does anybody see the irony in trying to hawk a book about web design using an ugly website?
Oracle might compete... but must not be allowed to takeover RedHat.
Sure thing. Let me just reach into my wallet and pull out $14 billion dollars, the approximate difference in annual revenue between the companies (hint: Red Hat's revenue is not even 1 billion, so most of that 14 belongs to Oracle). I hate to be cynical, but ideals are no match for lots and lots of money, my friend. You can rally around Red Hat all you want, but that won't change the fact that Red Hat and Oracle are both companies--capitalistic entities that are subject to market forces. And as trite as it may seem, if these two companies are "competing" than we have a way of measuring who is "winning" by counting dollars and equity. And as much as we love them, Red Hat loses that game, bigtime. I predict a buyout before Q4 2007.
In many ways they are bigger stumbling blocks to the Open Source revolution than even Microsoft.
Incidentally, you might not want to call it an open source revolution. That tends to scare away investors. And investors are very important to the open source revo...darn, now you've got me doing it!
I'm sorry to reply to your post twice, but there is of course no way to edit former comments:) Here goes:
Despite what Mr. Greenbaum says, Red Hat does have some intellectual property. In fact, that's why Oracle (according to the article) is indemnifying its customers against IP issues that may crop up, just to be on the safe side.
Second, Redhat owns something better than intellectual property. They have kernel and application programers. They have the people who can offer customized support and insight that few can match.
Offering support for half the price on the same product reads like the first part of a plan by Oracle to bilk Red Hat long enough, and make its stock price low enough, in preparation for a buyout. I seemed optimistic that Red Hat could use the time between now and then to improve its product and support and maintain its hold in the corporate Linux market, but upon further consideration I am more skeptical. Red Hat can "love Linux" all it wants, but that won't make stockholders happy and it won't keep the wolves away from the door.
March to Helm's Deep! Leave none alive! To war!
on
Will Red Hat Survive?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
If Slashdot is going to link to articles that predict "The Death of..." every time a prominent tech company takes a hit in the stock market, then its editors are about to be as 100 times as busy! Red Hat (two words;) has lucrative multi-year deals with a number of big players (including, ironically enough, Oracle..), and they are savvy enough to use that time to circle the wagons and modify their business model to deal with this new competition. If they have to lower prices--fine. If they have to fire some people--fine. If, as you mentioned, they have to leverage the IP they have already invested into their products over the past decade or so--fine. What they won't do, as one of the Triangle's most important companies, is run in lieu of adapting.
I guess what few people seem to be talking about is "This is what Red Hat signed up for." When you base your solvency as a company on open source-based software, then this is one of the risks you take. Somebody else might just offer a very similar product at a very different price, using much of your hard work in the process. And that's OK, it comes with the territory. The problem, of course, is that the "somebody" is Oracle, who have the financial resources to bury Red Hat using their own product if they felt so inclined. In the same way in which Microsoft flooded the console market with cheap X-Boxes, taking a hit on each one, Oracle is more than capable of selling their services packages for $1 a pop if they really wanted to. Why isn't that happening yet? Because as I said, many of the big name companies that are using Linux-based solutions already have long-term commitments to Red Hat. This isn't war yet, it is a company building its war machines in preparation for the time when those support contracts expire. In the meantime, Red Hat has all the time in the world to improve itself as a company and to convince those who already use their products and services to stay with Red Hat in the future as well.
I'm sorry, was I supposed to be reading your anonymously and cowardly written novel on Slashdot posting etiquette? Because I didn't. I lost interest after the first chapter. How much staying power do you think people have when it comes to reading the musings of some whiny, fatuous little AC who doesn't like that the world isn't the way he wants it to be?
Get over yourself--you're not an authority on all that which is Slash and Dot. If you really need to get your fix, why don't you browse one of the many +4 or +5 posts that I've made in the past, rather than use my singular attempt at garnering more attention for a quality post (in which I nevertheless make a counterpoint and add to the conversation) as a springboard for your feeble little rant?
But don't answer that question with a sequel to your previous post, it was rhetorical only. No, feel free to disappear into the woodwork, your self-important trolling mission accomplished--the Cheetos dust glistening off of your fat, sausage like fingers--that false sense of self-satisfaction welling, welling up inside your heaving, distended belly. No, like most, I try not to bemoan the long-winded comments of those who lack even the courage to identify themselves and correlate their little rants with a name. See ya, coward.
Please mod parent up, he's right on the ball with this. The only problem is that even if he can get the money back (highly likely), he still won't have the domain.
Slashdot Mirror
I can tell you're a "big picture" kind of person. But in regards to this technology, I think that the more doable implementation would be to line roads with it--perhaps finally allowing for road markings that light up at night and improve driver safety.
This could be the singular most harmful thing to open source that has happened all year. As many of you know, Ubuntu has been a solid distribution for new Linux users who are trying to ween themselves off of Windows. These people stopped using Windows for a variety of reasons: It crashed a lot, nothing seemed to work reliably, uninstalling software was dodgy, etc. To have a minor Ubuntu upgrade manifest the same problems they thought they were leaving behind is to suggest to them "Why don't you just run Windows anyway?"
Or Universal Studios might go after you! Seriously, this is a wonderful innovation. In the past, making a new roof out of solar cells was so prohibitively expensive that states such as California had to offer homeowners incentives in the form of buy-down rebates, tax breaks, and so on--basically footing part of the bill just to get them using the technology. With the advent of CIGS, these kinds of environmentally-conscious bribes may not even be necessary. Cheap solar technology will now be far more accessible to people, companies, and governments. That is a Good Thing[tm].
He would have more control over the noise and heat levels than he realizes. The motherboard in that laptop is probably not all that esoteric and you can download software that will control the speed of the fan to give you more noise & less heat or less noise & more heat, depending on your needs.
What's all this buzzing about? I will say on the record that my DNA has not been collected in any way to further their research. I've got just the one WeeBeard (that I know of...heh heh). But, off the record, there was that one time in Tijuana when I woke up in a dumpster behind a roach-infested laundromat, surrounded by empty boxes of Tide, and with an unexplainable soreness in my groin. That was some night! The last thing I remember before I blacked out was some odd fellow running away from me. He was carrying some kind of jar filled with milky fluid right before he disappeared into a white, windowless van. I think he might have muttered something about an "army of giant, unstoppable, bearded killer bees." Oh well, it's probably nothing. See ya!
Mr. Fox, relax! It's me, Bob! Listen, I brought your mask thingy and your forks and all that. Do you have my package? Mr. Fox? Hello? Hellloooooo??
I dare you to find anything at all funny about the word "AnalogWhole".
Well of course, that just brings up the whole pro-gun argument that the framers wrote the Bill of Rights with parity between the military might of the government and that of an armed militia of the people. The argument is a little ridiculous when you apply it to today's military weapons. I don't know about you, but I would personally prefer that cruise missiles and nuclear weapons were in the hands of governments rather than crack dealers, pimps. or even Mr. Joe Ordinary who works at the steel mill down the street. Do you think he needs to be able to destroy cities on a whim?
It doesn't matter if Oracle provides better support--only that it provides at least the same level of support for less. That alone will have resounding consequences for Red Hat. Trust me, there is a lot sneakier stuff you can do to depress a stock price than what Oracle is doing now. They haven't even scratched the surface.
This is a good question. The answer is that Red Hat is a publicly-held company and it doesn't matter what its founder, executive officers, or employees think. The only people who matter when it comes to buyouts are the shareholders. And shareholders care about what's best for the shareholders--they don't give two shits about "keeping Linux alive" or about any kind of technological mashup problems in a potential buyout.
What happens is, Oracle presents its offer. Usually the offer involves purchasing at a designated price all of the important shares of the company that's being bought out, and often issuing stock in the buyer's company as incentive--like in this case it would be Oracle stock offered to Red Hat shareholders. Then the shareholders vote. If the offer pleases the shareholders, then Red Hat as we know it is no more. That's really all there is to it. Once you open up your company to public ownership and issue stock in the company, then you forgo the right to refuse business offers that will make the new owners of the company more money.
Dear Mr. Fox,
Hey Mr. Fox. Name's Bob. Listen, I think our deliveries got mixed up and I've got your mask thing or whatever. It also came with two of those crazy 3-pronged Japanese forks, you know--like that ninja turtle uses? Is your real name Raphael?! Because if so, I can totally keep a secret! Cowabunga! Also, if you got a 30-count box of cherry flavored edible underwear, then you just hang onto that. That's, um, for a science experiment I'm conducting for the Nobel...um..Committee...um...Administration for Forwardness. That's right. The Nobel Comittee Administration for Forwardness. Yes. Just email me your phone number and we can arrange to swap these boxes out tomorrow.
-Bob "Beebeard" Beekowski
I'm reading these Slashdot comments, and I don't understand why all these people are so against getting married. Marriage is a fine institution and...oh no, I think I've misread something.
I will only agree to this if it doesn't interfere with my right to be beaten, tortured, and detained against my will. Otherwise, the President can just count me out of this. No thank you, sir!
I second that emotion. It's hard to quantify, but Firefox 2 feels faster and lighter than earlier iterations. It's more responsive and the memory footprint seems smaller. This seems counterintuitive, because feature creep is usually the bane of most version 2.x.x software releases. Mozilla got this one right. By the way, this is on a highly riced Gentoo Firefox 2 RC3 ebuild, with the same USE and CFLAGS settings.
And what about all the Slashdot readers who swamped Mozilla's mirrors a day in advance and downloaded the thing? ;)
- An RC3 user
Sure, we can all agree to that, but you miss my point about legal protection. Unlike the labor of fans, it takes money to buy the labor of lawyers. Promoting something by posting about it on your free personal blog about how you like it is not even close to the same ballpark as filing a motion in court. Not even close. This community you are so fond of has yet to pool together money to mount a legal defense--it is only free time they have pooled. And like it or not, money and labor are not the same thing. And who is going to pony up the money to pay the legal professionals who can actually help them wriggle out of this problem? Mr. Free Blog Post? Probably not. It's a very real problem that cannot be glossed over by fandom.
Not only that, but if you read the copy of the email that was sent, it seems that Universal's issue is with the unlicensed sale of shirts. Hmm let's see...selling something for profit like a shirt is hardly the benevolent, grassroots effort that it's being made out to be. It's making that sweet merchandising money off of a property you absolutely don't own and have no right to profit from in that manner. For a community that loves the GPL and loves to espouse rhetoric such as "You can only license something you own", Slashdot sure does want to have its cake and eat it too. I would rate seeking compensation for unlicensed clothing as something no less petty than, say, demanding that "GNU" precede the word "Linux" in the name of an operating system.
Free time is one thing, but financial resources are another. I really like their response by retroactively invoicing Universal for marketing and promotion--it's funny, clever, and ballsy. But will that spirit translate into meaningful legal protection? It's doubtful.
Thank you for sharing your history with Red Hat. I thought that Red Hat had developed some goodwill in the Linux community over the last decade or so. But what I'm hearing from you is that they've squandered a lot of that and essentially abandoned their original user base, including diehards such as yourself. Would it be too fatalistic to intimate that if Red Hat can't win you and others like you back in the future, then there will be no future for Red Hat?
1) Oracle has come out with greate support real cheap
You made this up. Nobody said anything about the quality of the support at all because the quality of the support is immaterial. It doesn't have to be "great", only adequate and cheap--cheaper than what Red Hat offers. Strike one.
2) So RedHat is doomed, worthless useless and it's stock price will collapse
Pretty much. I can tell you don't know much about this or you would know that Red Hat's (two words) stock already has collapsed. Red Hat stock just lost 25% of its value based merely on the news that Oracle will be competing with for its support contracts. What exactly do you think will happen when Oracle starts to gain some momentum and actually is competing? If you don't believe me about the stock price situation, just check the second paragraph of the posted article that you clearly didn't read before posting. Strike two.
3) the united way is doing great
I see now. You're just a troll. Strike three, you're out.
4) Oracle is going to buy RedHat now.
No, in fact I ballparked a buyout before this time, next year. That's hardly "now", is it? You just got beaned in the head while walking back to the dugout.
...using Google, and the best I could come up with is this. It's an absolutely ugly reddish, brownish, yellowish turd of a web site. Is that the ideal we are supposed to be striving for? Does anybody see the irony in trying to hawk a book about web design using an ugly website?
Sure thing. Let me just reach into my wallet and pull out $14 billion dollars, the approximate difference in annual revenue between the companies (hint: Red Hat's revenue is not even 1 billion, so most of that 14 belongs to Oracle). I hate to be cynical, but ideals are no match for lots and lots of money, my friend. You can rally around Red Hat all you want, but that won't change the fact that Red Hat and Oracle are both companies--capitalistic entities that are subject to market forces. And as trite as it may seem, if these two companies are "competing" than we have a way of measuring who is "winning" by counting dollars and equity. And as much as we love them, Red Hat loses that game, bigtime. I predict a buyout before Q4 2007.
Incidentally, you might not want to call it an open source revolution. That tends to scare away investors. And investors are very important to the open source revo...darn, now you've got me doing it!
Despite what Mr. Greenbaum says, Red Hat does have some intellectual property. In fact, that's why Oracle (according to the article) is indemnifying its customers against IP issues that may crop up, just to be on the safe side.
The real problem is that all that great stuff you mentioned will belong to Oracle's if/when Red Hat is bought out. After all, we are talking about a company that pulled down no more than $200 million last year revenues vs. a company that pulled down $14.4 billion in revenues last year. The saying "I could buy and sell your ass" seems to apply here.
Offering support for half the price on the same product reads like the first part of a plan by Oracle to bilk Red Hat long enough, and make its stock price low enough, in preparation for a buyout. I seemed optimistic that Red Hat could use the time between now and then to improve its product and support and maintain its hold in the corporate Linux market, but upon further consideration I am more skeptical. Red Hat can "love Linux" all it wants, but that won't make stockholders happy and it won't keep the wolves away from the door.
If Slashdot is going to link to articles that predict "The Death of..." every time a prominent tech company takes a hit in the stock market, then its editors are about to be as 100 times as busy! Red Hat (two words ;) has lucrative multi-year deals with a number of big players (including, ironically enough, Oracle..), and they are savvy enough to use that time to circle the wagons and modify their business model to deal with this new competition. If they have to lower prices--fine. If they have to fire some people--fine. If, as you mentioned, they have to leverage the IP they have already invested into their products over the past decade or so--fine. What they won't do, as one of the Triangle's most important companies, is run in lieu of adapting.
I guess what few people seem to be talking about is "This is what Red Hat signed up for." When you base your solvency as a company on open source-based software, then this is one of the risks you take. Somebody else might just offer a very similar product at a very different price, using much of your hard work in the process. And that's OK, it comes with the territory. The problem, of course, is that the "somebody" is Oracle, who have the financial resources to bury Red Hat using their own product if they felt so inclined. In the same way in which Microsoft flooded the console market with cheap X-Boxes, taking a hit on each one, Oracle is more than capable of selling their services packages for $1 a pop if they really wanted to. Why isn't that happening yet? Because as I said, many of the big name companies that are using Linux-based solutions already have long-term commitments to Red Hat. This isn't war yet, it is a company building its war machines in preparation for the time when those support contracts expire. In the meantime, Red Hat has all the time in the world to improve itself as a company and to convince those who already use their products and services to stay with Red Hat in the future as well.
I'm sorry, was I supposed to be reading your anonymously and cowardly written novel on Slashdot posting etiquette? Because I didn't. I lost interest after the first chapter. How much staying power do you think people have when it comes to reading the musings of some whiny, fatuous little AC who doesn't like that the world isn't the way he wants it to be?
Get over yourself--you're not an authority on all that which is Slash and Dot. If you really need to get your fix, why don't you browse one of the many +4 or +5 posts that I've made in the past, rather than use my singular attempt at garnering more attention for a quality post (in which I nevertheless make a counterpoint and add to the conversation) as a springboard for your feeble little rant?
But don't answer that question with a sequel to your previous post, it was rhetorical only. No, feel free to disappear into the woodwork, your self-important trolling mission accomplished--the Cheetos dust glistening off of your fat, sausage like fingers--that false sense of self-satisfaction welling, welling up inside your heaving, distended belly. No, like most, I try not to bemoan the long-winded comments of those who lack even the courage to identify themselves and correlate their little rants with a name. See ya, coward.
Please mod parent up, he's right on the ball with this. The only problem is that even if he can get the money back (highly likely), he still won't have the domain.
Fair enough.