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Novell cuts 3 percent of its workforce (cnet)
cnet
reports that Novell has laid off 3 percent of its employees.
"Linux jobs in the United States are booming, up 6 percent since January, according to data from Dice.com. This will come as small consolation to Novell employees, however, which weathered another round of layoffs at the Waltham, Mass.-based company.
According to several sources within the company, and confirmed by Novell's public-relations director, Ian Bruce, Novell last week laid off 100 to 130 people of its roughly 3,900 global employees.
While my sources indicated that the Workgroup division was particularly hard-hit, Bruce told me that the cuts came "across the company, both geographically and productwise.""
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Novell cuts 3 percent of its workforce (cnet) Posted Nov 5, 2009 20:16 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
Maybe it's time to quit wasting money duplicating dead-end technologies like Silverlight? Just a thought.
I hope all the laid off employees have no trouble finding rewarding jobs elsewhere.
Novell cuts 3 percent of its workforce (cnet) Posted Nov 5, 2009 20:38 UTC (Thu) by ccchips (subscriber, #3222) [Link]
I also wish the folks who have lost their jobs all the luck I can wish for.
One thing though; could you please back this statement with something, or is it just a rant:
"Maybe it's time to quit wasting money duplicating dead-end technologies like Silverlight? Just a thought."
Not that I want proprietary codecs either--I'm not pleased about how difficult it is to see certain physics lectures from a Linux box because of Silverlight. But I'm curious where this comes from. How is it a dead-end technology?
Novell cuts 3 percent of its workforce (cnet) Posted Nov 5, 2009 21:12 UTC (Thu) by liljencrantz (subscriber, #28458) [Link] I'm not the OP, but I truly hope that Silverlight (and flash) die in a fire. Among the many things that don't work with most flash/Silverlight sites:
But aside from all that, as a web developer, I see a huge problem with technologies that are essentially a black box when viewed from the rest of the web. With the video tag and svg, we can use regular javascript to control video playback, hopefully we can even use css to style things in the future. That level of integration opens up for many new possibilities.
Novell cuts 3 percent of its workforce (cnet) Posted Nov 5, 2009 22:18 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]
Send along Mono, too. Oh, and Java. And JVMs, and JITs. And sans-serif
fonts.
Here's hoping the people who spent their whole careers on this stuff, so
Novell cuts 3 percent of its workforce (cnet) Posted Nov 6, 2009 9:02 UTC (Fri) by liljencrantz (subscriber, #28458) [Link]
IMO, theres is technically nothing wrong with Mono, Java or other VM-based languages. As long as you don't try to embed them in a stupid black box inside a browser, that is. I would be just fine with adding e.g. Java as an extra DOM manipulation language next to JavaScript, so long as the browser overhead could be kept minimal.
Novell cuts 3 percent of its workforce (cnet) Posted Nov 6, 2009 18:29 UTC (Fri) by DOT (subscriber, #58786) [Link]
I don't think that's a very good idea. If Mozilla adds Java to the DOM, then Microsoft will add .NET to the DOM. Then Google will add Python to the DOM and Apple will add Objective-C to the DOM. What you'd end up with is that every browser has to support all those platforms or break the web.
Flash uses Posted Nov 6, 2009 7:16 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] On the other hand, these things work well in Flash (and Silverlight):
Flash uses Posted Nov 6, 2009 9:06 UTC (Fri) by liljencrantz (subscriber, #28458) [Link]
I really hope that using the video tag to display ads, silly sidebar vids and porn becomes the norm, as the video tag is _far_ easier to introspect and selectively filter. For flash, there is flashblock, which works, but is clunky because you only have two options, allow everything or allow nothing. With the video tag, it's trivial to write a FF plugin to do things like forcing the sound to be off on untrusted sites, preventing autoplay, refusing to play videos above a certain size when on a cell connection, etc..
Just a few of the advantages of not treating video like a black box. :-)
Flash uses Posted Nov 6, 2009 15:57 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] I forgot one category: "Stupid games". Here the video tag does not work, but I have little use for them nowadays.
Flash uses Posted Nov 6, 2009 17:36 UTC (Fri) by Kit (guest, #55925) [Link]
>For flash, there is flashblock, which works, but is clunky
>because you only have two options, allow everything or allow nothing.
Adblock and the like (such as Block Content in Opera) still work perfectly fine with Flash. It's rather amusing as I always forget about there being ads on YouTube (only when using a computer without adblock and co do I ever see them). Also, Firebug/Dragonfly can still show you what content the flash is loading (with only a few exceptions, which seems like only Hulu uses).
Flash uses Posted Nov 6, 2009 12:51 UTC (Fri) by lkundrak (subscriber, #43452) [Link]
Um, no, they work far from well. Ever tried to save such video (I mean 10 min porn/stupid video) to a local storage?
Flash uses Posted Nov 6, 2009 15:56 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] Yes, just go to /tmp and copy whatever starts with Flash to your public/private stash (I learned this trick here on LWN.net :). Alternatively you can use clive (in the Debian repos), but it is far from convenient.
Inflexible by design Posted Nov 6, 2009 7:39 UTC (Fri) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] Among the many things that don't work with most flash/Silverlight sites: I suspect that most Flash-heavy sites see all those items (except maybe the problem of disabled users) really as advantages: They have what could be called the "TV broadcaster mentality": they want to present the content and ads precisely the way they want, with no interference from the consumer, and no copyright theft by copy-pasting...
Novell cuts 3 percent of its workforce (cnet) Posted Nov 7, 2009 2:06 UTC (Sat) by SEJeff (subscriber, #51588) [Link]
Suck for the former Novell employees.
I know of a Linux company that is hiring. Their stock is strong and their profits are up.
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