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[tlug] tlug-digest Digest V2004 #16

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tlug-digest Digest				Volume 2004 : Issue 16

Today's Topics:
  Re: [tlug] RE: getting back on track  [ Jonathan Byrne <jq@example.com ]
  Re: [tlug] RE: getting back on track  [ Brett Robson <b-robson@example.com ]
  Re: [tlug] RE: getting back on track  [ Jonathan Byrne <jq@example.com ]
  Re: [tlug] RE: getting back on track  [ Brett Robson <b-robson@example.com ]
  [tlug] Goatse is dead                 [ Jonathan Byrne <jq@example.com ]
  Re: [tlug] RE: getting back on track  [ Larry Stanbery <lstanber@example.com ]
  [tlug] advse on Zaurus                [ =?iso-8859-1?q?Graham=20Street?= <g ]
  Re: [tlug] Goatse is dead             [ Jonathan Byrne <jq@example.com ]
  RE: [tlug] advse on Zaurus            [ "Alfred Rodriguez" <arodriguez@example.com ]
  Re: [tlug] Goatse is dead             [ Anthony Cunningham <anthony.cb@example.com ]
  RE: [tlug] advse on Zaurus            [ "Alfred Rodriguez" <arodriguez@example.com ]
  Re: [tlug] RE: getting back on track  [ Godwin Stewart <gstewart@example.com ]
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On Thu, Jan 15, 2004 at 08:04:13PM +0900, Raymond Regalado wrote:

>Would Red Hat's abandonment of the RH 7.x 8.x 9.x be a good thing for 
>TL?

If this was 3 or 4 years ago, yes, certainly.  Now, it doens't make
any difference.  TurboLinux made it big in Japan, and later Korea,
before Red Hat got here.  They were also moving into China and 
doing well.  Red Hat came along and used its superior cash reserves
and army of programmers to quickly close the ground with TurboLinux
in terms of CJK support.

Meanwhile, TL had gotten a ton of venture capital, expanded from about
10 staff members (at the time I did their website makeover in 1998)
up to nearly 100 and moved to expensive new digs in Shibuya.  That
was after moving to new but more reasonable digs near Shinjuku.  They
then (foolishly, in the opinion of just about everyone) decided they
would take their powerbase in Asia and use it to try and break into
the US market in a big way, since TurboLinux was almost unknown there,
even though it was in origin an American company.

Red Hat was by far the market leader among people who wanted a "friendly'
distro, and among those who didn't, Slackware and Debian had most of it,
as the still do now.  Mandrake and SuSe also had percentages, then as now.
If I'm leaving out any distro that had a significant percentage, my
apologies, but those were the major players.

In jumped TurboLinux.  They spent huge amounts of money and effort trying
without any great success to break into the US market.  Meanwhile, back
here in their home market, Red Hat was working very hard at trying to 
unseat them, and they succeeded.  So at the end of the day, they were
left with not much more market share in North America than they had when
they started, and far less in Japan than they had when they started.

TL soon dumped those dozens of employees, and shrunk way down.  Rumor has it
that they were then smaller than when they were in a storefront office in
Umegaoka and I was redoing their website and on the beta test team for
Turbo Linux 2.0.

They grew very quickly, got lots of VC (in retrospect, maybe more than
was good for them) and brought in a professional management team.  That
was probably really their downfall.  That team understood business well
enough, I'm sure (although I have to question why they missed the fact
that North America was a crowded and maturing Linux market and their just
wasn't room for another major distro; the major players now are the same
as they were then, and TL is, too; to get another major in would require
the disappearance of an existing one, and even then, the survivors would
mostly divide the spoils among themselves), but it never seemed to anyone
that they properly understood Linux or the Free Software movement in
general.  The approach seemed just like that of a proprietary software
vendor.  The glitz, the companion girls at Linux shows, the big display,
all that.  They also engaged in the worst case of version number 
inflation until Solaris 7 (2.6 -> 7, and even then it was referenced 
in many place in the OS as 2.7): They went from TurboLinux 4.x to
TurboLinux 6.0 with nothing in between.  There was perhaps one point
release in the 4.x series IIRC, and 5.x was skipped entirely.  Apparently,
a bigger version number makes your software better :-p


>I can't help but feel that perhaps RH is shooting itself in the foot 
>with their end-of-support policy...

They may be.  It's the reason I stopped using Red Hat.  I'd been an
RH user in the beginning, then TurboLinux, then back to RH.  I don't
see myself ever going back to RH, or even Fedora, from here.  Distaste
for BlueCurve was a partial motivator, but the real clincher was when
they announced the one-year-to-EOL plan and 7.3 became unsupported.
I never liked RH 8 and never installed it on any of my own machines.
I did it once for a customer who wanted it, but normally pushed Debian
at that point.

>At the moment I'm wondering what to do about my RH 8.0 box...

Debian is one answer.  Also, Ximian is providing paid support for EOLed
Red Hat versions through their Red Carpet service.  I believe they cover
7.3 and 8.0.  Great news for people who don't want to migrate now
and can spend a little.  7.3 was an excellent Red Hat, IMO their best
ever.  This is a good option for people who want to keep it.

Jonathan
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> On Thu, Jan 15, 2004 at 08:04:13PM +0900, Raymond Regalado wrote:
> 
> They also engaged in the worst case of version number 
> inflation until Solaris 7 (2.6 -> 7, and even then it was referenced 
> in many place in the OS as 2.7): They went from TurboLinux 4.x to
> TurboLinux 6.0 with nothing in between.  There was perhaps one point
> release in the 4.x series IIRC, and 5.x was skipped entirely.  Apparently,
> a bigger version number makes your software better :-p
> 

Until you get to version 9. There seems to be very few packages that go
to double digit versions. Count the number of version 10s you see, they
are very rare and you can be sure they are from "serious" suppliers.
Version 9 is a guarrantee of a major name change (still trying to work
out the successor to Cakwalk Audion Pro 9 that I have).

I think this will be RHs death nell. VMS then Unix became popular
because of university exposure. It is people like us that decide which
system to install but RH have reduced their "market" to enterprise
servers (RH) and the serious hacker (Fedora). People like me are less
interested in nuts and bolts of Linux as such, but more interested in it
as a programming environment.

With a lot less new people choosing RH their market will only decrease.

Brett


-- 
Brett Robson 
Systems Administrator
GOL 
http://www.gol.com
Phone: 03-3239-6856    International: +81-3-3239-6856
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On Fri, Jan 16, 2004 at 10:09:53AM +0900, Brett Robson wrote:

>Until you get to version 9. There seems to be very few packages that go
>to double digit versions. Count the number of version 10s you see, they
>are very rare and you can be sure they are from "serious" suppliers.

Slackware is at 10, I think (OK, they are serious) and Mandrake has a 
10 coming up (clowns) and SuSE should have a 10 at some point (serious).
Of course, those are whole distros, but your point is well-taken: not
much has been around long enough to have a version 10, and those that
have are generally legit: they have nine previous major releases to get
to 10.

>I think this will be RHs death nell. VMS then Unix became popular

It may well be.  Red Hat got where it is by being everywhere and
pushing the state of the Linux art on ease of installation, etc.
They did a lot of good, and contributed back (and are contributing back)
a lot to the community. However, there is no question that RH took a
mindshare hit when they decided to abandon the free (as in beer) version
of RH entirely and replace it with Fedora, which will always be kind of
a hacker's Linux, I suspect.  People who don't want to hack around with
their distro but just want to use it to get work done will mostly steer
clear of Fedora.  People who need to buy RH Enterprise Linux for corporate
means will do so.  However, it was being freely available for free that
got RH into a lot of companies in the first place.  In companies that
are no considering Linux, that is no longer a possibility.

Since any company that is looking at Linux is looking at TCO as one of
the motivators for change, coming around to management and saying "We
should try Linux, but by the way, it's going to cost about as much
up-front as Windows costs" isn't going to make the doors swing wide
for Red Hat.  They'll swing wider for something that is free, unless of
course the goal is something like running Oracle.  Then you are basically
locked into RH Enterprise at least if you want support from Oracle.
Since support is a big deal for most Oracle customers, that will go
without saying and RH will get the nod.

That leaves the smaller outfits and the Linux-curious out of the 
Red Hat picture, though.  It's a calculated risk on RH's part.
They figure, I think, that they will risk the mindshare loss at the
low end since they make little or no money there anyway, and count on
their partnerships with companies like Oracle to allow them to retain
their high-end marketshare, where they do make money.  It's a risk, but
a fairly well thought-out one.  Red Hat may find itself in a niche,
albeit a fairly broad and profitable niche - enterprise Linux - and is
willing to take the risk of reduced overall mindshare and marketshare.
Will it be their death?  Probably not, but it will, I think, result in
a significant lessening of  Red Hat's overall stature in the Linux world.
They were so ubiquitous that it was quite common to see people write that
they were running "Linux 7.2" when what they meant was Red Hat 7.2.
We'll see a lot less of that.  I already see less of that.  Or at least,
it's not RH-specific.  Other newbie-oriented distros get their
version number substituted there.

Still, RH needs to watch out.  A lot of the people they lost early on
when they announced this EOL plan and the end of free Red Hat were
sysadmins and other IT professionals.  Those are people you want to have
using your product.  If I were them, I'd be handing out free or very cheap
copies of RH Entreprise products to universities all over the place and
also giving free versions of it to sysadmins and the like to try out.
The rules would be no support and no redistribution, I would suppose, but
that would be enough to help them retain mindshare.

Jonathan
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I love the smell of filtered spam in the morning - it smells like victory!

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> On Fri, Jan 16, 2004 at 10:09:53AM +0900, Brett Robson wrote:
> 
> >Until you get to version 9. There seems to be very few packages that go
> >to double digit versions. Count the number of version 10s you see, they
> >are very rare and you can be sure they are from "serious" suppliers.
> 
> Slackware is at 10, I think (OK, they are serious) and Mandrake has a 
> 10 coming up (clowns) and SuSE should have a 10 at some point (serious).
> Of course, those are whole distros, but your point is well-taken: not
> much has been around long enough to have a version 10, and those that
> have are generally legit: they have nine previous major releases to get
> to 10.


Actually I meant software in general, not Linux distributions.

Interestingly Oracle is at version 9. There are one of the worst
companies for changing their products' names every chance they get.
Particularly annoying when I was a contractor as the agencies didn't
know that SQL Forms 3, Forms 4.5, and whatever they are calling it now,
was the same product.




-- 
Brett Robson 
Systems Administrator
GOL 
http://www.gol.com
Phone: 03-3239-6856    International: +81-3-3239-6856
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It seems that CX NIC has suspended goatse.cx because it violates their
AUP.  An era of the Internet has ended.

I only fear that it will rise again in some other quarter :-p

Jonathan
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gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys ACC46EF9
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I love the smell of filtered spam in the morning - it smells like victory!

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On Friday, January 16, 2004, at 03:27  PM, Jonathan Byrne wrote:
> ...  If I were them, I'd be handing out free or very cheap
> copies of RH Entreprise products to universities all over the place and
> also giving free versions of it to sysadmins and the like to try out.

Actually, they are:  $25 for a desktop, $50 for a server:
http://www.redhat.com/solutions/industries/education/indiv/
They've got reasonable rules on who qualifies, too.  I emailed them 
about our college here in Miyazaki, and we wound up buying some copies 
(beats XP pricing, and still get support).  As a student, fac, staff of 
a school, you can buy, too.

- - - - - - - -
Larry Stanbery, RHCE
GPG Key ID: 2CEFA662

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Dear members of TLUG

Can I ask the members for advise on the Zaurus PDA ? I
am hoping that since the Zaurus runs Linux this
question is relevant to this mailing list.

I am looking for any general comments on Zaurus PDAs.
In particular if anyones has had any experience with
the SL-B500

Basically I want the PDA to play MP3 music files,
browse the internet, run Java applications. Read
documents. Also I want it to be a discrete voice
recorder. (ie built in microphone)

Had a wander round akihabara to look at the models on
offer. The model I wanted was the SL5600 but wasnt
able to find it anywhere. I assume because it is built
for the English speaking market place or is a new
model.
The Zaurus model that seems to be getting the most
marketing attention is the new SLC860. It doesnt look
like a bad model but the SL-B500 is the one that
caught my eye. Judging by the specification sheet this
one has everything that the SL C860 has except the
B500 can only play MPEG1.
The SLC860 can play MPEG-4. 
The SLC860 retails at 69,800 yen whereas the SLB500
retails at 49,800 yen

Any comments would be useful.

regards
Graham


________________________________________________________________________
Yahoo! Messenger - Communicate instantly..."Ping" 
your friends today! Download Messenger Now 
http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com/download/index.html
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P.S.  If you don' t know what goatse.cx is, count your blessings and don't
try to find out - you'll be sorry :-p

Joathan
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im about to leave the office right now - so id just send a more appropriate post L8r

the SLC860 has a faster processor than the SL-B500 (i think)...
to be honest, im even finding the SLC750 (my own) a bit slow though

hhhmmm... i dont think you could get the SL-B500 unless you go through the "underground" shops in akihabara

OR, trying looking for it at yahoo-japan auctions

better yet, try www.sparco.com - delivery to japan (plus importation tax) cost around US$30 to US$40

cheers!!!

  -alfred


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Graham Street [mailto:gpstreet@example.com]
> Sent: Friday, January 16, 2004 6:36 PM
> To: tlug@example.com
> Subject: [tlug] advse on Zaurus
> 
> 
> Dear members of TLUG
> 
> Can I ask the members for advise on the Zaurus PDA ? I
> am hoping that since the Zaurus runs Linux this
> question is relevant to this mailing list.
> 
> I am looking for any general comments on Zaurus PDAs.
> In particular if anyones has had any experience with
> the SL-B500
> 
> Basically I want the PDA to play MP3 music files,
> browse the internet, run Java applications. Read
> documents. Also I want it to be a discrete voice
> recorder. (ie built in microphone)
> 
> Had a wander round akihabara to look at the models on
> offer. The model I wanted was the SL5600 but wasnt
> able to find it anywhere. I assume because it is built
> for the English speaking market place or is a new
> model.
> The Zaurus model that seems to be getting the most
> marketing attention is the new SLC860. It doesnt look
> like a bad model but the SL-B500 is the one that
> caught my eye. Judging by the specification sheet this
> one has everything that the SL C860 has except the
> B500 can only play MPEG1.
> The SLC860 can play MPEG-4. 
> The SLC860 retails at 69,800 yen whereas the SLB500
> retails at 49,800 yen
> 
> Any comments would be useful.
> 
> regards
> Graham
> 
> 
> ______________________________________________________________
> __________
> Yahoo! Messenger - Communicate instantly..."Ping" 
> your friends today! Download Messenger Now 
> http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com/download/index.html
> 
> -- 
> TLUG Technical Meeting:  Saturday, January 17th 14:00-16:30
> At Wall Street Associates Japan, Ginza   http://www.tlug.jp/
> Topics:  LDAP replication, digital video recording with Linux
> 
> TLUG server is hosted by Open Source Development Lab Japan
> http://www.osdl.jp/
> 
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, 
> please see the instructions at <http://www.tlug.jp/list.html>
> 
>
--- End Message ---
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Jonathan Byrne wrote:
> 
> P.S.  If you don' t know what goatse.cx is, count your blessings and don't
> try to find out - you'll be sorry :-p
> 
and definitely don't try at work especially if you work in a typical
open plan japanese company with no privacy whatsoever and all scrunched
up to save space meaning 3 rows behind you can all see your screen...

I'll never know, but I hope no one was watching when i clicked that
innocent link in a Slashdot comment...
what was worse than what i saw was wondering whether anyone else saw it
and whether my job was going to end...
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one thing good about the SL-B500 is that most of those who do customizations (reflash the kernel or something) have done it on the SL-B500 instead of the SLC750 (wherein you could run into problems - say, like screen resolution and/or orientation)

try this site out ---> http://www.zaurus.com/dev/board/index.php

cheers again!!!

and now for a party night in town

  -- alfred


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Alfred Rodriguez 
> Sent: Friday, January 16, 2004 7:01 PM
> To: tlug@example.com
> Subject: RE: [tlug] advse on Zaurus
> 
> 
> im about to leave the office right now - so id just send a 
> more appropriate post L8r
> 
> the SLC860 has a faster processor than the SL-B500 (i think)...
> to be honest, im even finding the SLC750 (my own) a bit slow though
> 
> hhhmmm... i dont think you could get the SL-B500 unless you 
> go through the "underground" shops in akihabara
> 
> OR, trying looking for it at yahoo-japan auctions
> 
> better yet, try www.sparco.com - delivery to japan (plus 
> importation tax) cost around US$30 to US$40
> 
> cheers!!!
> 
>   -alfred
> 
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Graham Street [mailto:gpstreet@example.com]
> > Sent: Friday, January 16, 2004 6:36 PM
> > To: tlug@example.com
> > Subject: [tlug] advse on Zaurus
> > 
> > 
> > Dear members of TLUG
> > 
> > Can I ask the members for advise on the Zaurus PDA ? I
> > am hoping that since the Zaurus runs Linux this
> > question is relevant to this mailing list.
> > 
> > I am looking for any general comments on Zaurus PDAs.
> > In particular if anyones has had any experience with
> > the SL-B500
> > 
> > Basically I want the PDA to play MP3 music files,
> > browse the internet, run Java applications. Read
> > documents. Also I want it to be a discrete voice
> > recorder. (ie built in microphone)
> > 
> > Had a wander round akihabara to look at the models on
> > offer. The model I wanted was the SL5600 but wasnt
> > able to find it anywhere. I assume because it is built
> > for the English speaking market place or is a new
> > model.
> > The Zaurus model that seems to be getting the most
> > marketing attention is the new SLC860. It doesnt look
> > like a bad model but the SL-B500 is the one that
> > caught my eye. Judging by the specification sheet this
> > one has everything that the SL C860 has except the
> > B500 can only play MPEG1.
> > The SLC860 can play MPEG-4. 
> > The SLC860 retails at 69,800 yen whereas the SLB500
> > retails at 49,800 yen
> > 
> > Any comments would be useful.
> > 
> > regards
> > Graham
> > 
>
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