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TheAdmin writes "A few years ago the first Linux-based Zaurus, the SL-5500, was released for some $600 by Sharp. Today, it only costs $140 in some places online. This article at TuxTops reviews the 5500 from the point of view of trying to figure out how this model fares against today's PDAs and if it's still a good purchase after all these years, especially at this low price. And so I bought one recently because I needed a full-fledged pocket Linux at my workplace where I work as an admin. I just added a $30 Linksys WCF12 WiFi card (works out of the box after upgrading the SL-5500 ROM to version 3.10) which I use with SSH and by utilizing Zaurus' thumb-board. Works great and it's much more portable than a laptop, especially when all you need is some email and SSH on the go."

Espectr0 writes "TuxTops has a small review comparing the Pocket PC handhelds against the Palm ones (no pun intended), with advantages and disadvantages of each. The conclusion? If you are after gaming, multimedia, good WiFi+Bluetooth support, a lot of accessories and versatility, go with Pocket PC. If you are after small and stylish devices with good battery life, simple interface and simple PIM apps, go with PalmOS."

Espectr0 writes "TuxTops has a small review comparing the Pocket PC handhelds against the Palm ones (no pun intended), with advantages and disadvantages of each. The conclusion? If you are after gaming, multimedia, good WiFi+Bluetooth support, a lot of accessories and versatility, go with Pocket PC. If you are after small and stylish devices with good battery life, simple interface and simple PIM apps, go with PalmOS."

Provataki writes "TuxTops reviews Fedora Core 4 and finds a number of problems with the popular distribution: high memory usage, usability problems, bugs, bloat. They awarded FC4 with 6 out of 10 at the end as despite its quirks they also find it a 'powerful distro' and easy to use."

Tina Gasperson writes: "Nathan Myers, the former CEO of now defunct LinuxLapTops, says he gave Tuxtops a suggestion that could turn into big business for them. He shares the scoop, and Tuxtops CEO Graham Hine confirms (pretty much)[in this story at] Newsforge." The short n' juicy is this: after announcing last week that it would no longer sell laptops with Linux pre-installed (the business model till then), it now "looks as if Tuxtops might make a full-time venture out of creating those ready-made Linux installation images." Which is a great idea, considering that the complications of making sure a particular distro works predictably and reliably with AcmeCorp's computers is probably one of the major reasons it's so tough to buy laptops running Linux.

With a planned move to San Francisco next summer, last week saw San Jose's last Linux World Expo, at least for now. The future as always is stubbornly uncertain, but it's impressive that the serendipitous combination of Free tools (from GNU) and a Free kernel (from Linus) has inspired enough interest and prosperity to excite a larger group of people each year. If you've not had the chance to attend one of these expositions, we hope this article will give you a flavor of what it's like. Note: Here are a few pictures from the floor (Day 1 & Day 2) contributed by Sensei^); do you have any cool shots to link to in comments?

First, the prelude: If you've worked on the pre-show aspects of anything from a high-school play to a LAN party, you know all those booths, displays, people and computers don't materialize by themselves. For several days before the show floor opened on Tuesday, forklift crews zipped cargos of wooden, fiberglass, plastic, aluminum and steel cases from moving trucks to exhibit spaces. These contained banners, snap-together modules, computers, lighted signs -- and Yes, more gratis logo-imprinted toys than you can wave a TuxTops LED light at.

Spiderwebs of CAT-5 and electric cord (run beneath the show floor) sprouted from the centerpoints of many booths, with strands for each computer to be connected to the Net during the show. Rolls of padding and carpet came next, then the slow assembly of display booths. These ranged from no-nonsense fabric partitions that housed companies like TuxTops and Sendmail (and legions of volunteers from PerlMonks, the Simple End User Linux project, Flightgear, and many others), to elaborate constructions with motorized signs, projected lasers and huge illuminated logos. Note: Slashdot (the site) was put together last week mostly from the comfy chairs of the PerlMonks booth.

The "C" (as in conference) part of LWCE got started on Monday, and for the days that followed, attendees got instruction -- on everything from Linux security to evangelizing Free software to their bosses-- in half-day doses. Meanwhile, the setup work continued into the wee hours, as exhibitors raced the clock to make sure that at least their signs, if not their networks, were up for the next day. And at the OSDN booth (home of the red-carpeted Slashdot stage and beanbags), prep work included stacking thousands of boxed distributions of Debian, and attempted to pawn a few copies off on every passer by.

Tuesday morning, at a shade before 10:00, visitors willing to miss Michael Dell's keynote began to stream into the halls, on a quest to find new distros, old friends, and swag. It's amazing what companies will give away in order to snag a little nook in your brain. Besides the usual trinkets (keychains, T-shirts, stickers) and the distributions that a Linux show would be empty without, booth visitors were handed everything from knives (Sendmail) to cute monkeys (Helixcode) to embarrassing pictures of themselves (BSDi), as well as too many toys with embedded LEDs to bother counting. Rather than a full swag accounting (which would only annoy those unable to attend), let me just say that you won't hurt for toys when the chance presents itself. (CT:I just wanted to note that VA gave away 2300 pounds of shrink-wrapped boxed Debian. Like 5000 copies. It was beautiful)

The things on display around the LWCE floor were more interesting than the toys, though. (And unlike a museum, most were available for hands-on demonstration, not hidden behind glass.) Indrema showed a prototype player (not in the sleek black box you see on their Web site, but still sporting that cool blue LED) hooked up to a HDTV display, playing a very fast game of Quake. (CT:Actually it was an HDTV demo, they promised the real deal will be less vaporous before I have children) In the Intel booth were server clusters populated with quad Itanium processors, demonstrating failover when one system was rudely but intentionally shut down. The amazing-like-emacs-is-amazing Flightgear project showed a really nice looking demo which is enough incentive by itself to invest in a better video card for my system so I can play with it.

Both Helixcode and Eazel made their first LWCE appearance this time around, exciting for those filling their anti-FUD cannon for the perpetual "Linux is tough to use" argument. The Eazel folks showing off Nautilus seemed to be all but cackling as they showed off the smoothness of the zooming information available for documents and the cool music-integration abilities it contains. It would have been cool if they'd had some sample CDs, but they promise a developers' release soon. (CT:They also promised .deb's, but I'll believe it when I see it. The UI was awesome, I just hope that someone hacks in something like the GUI command line in EFM)

Considering that Sun was showing off the GNOME desktop on Solaris (hinting at its inclusion in stock Solaris systems sometime very soon, too) and that the GNOME project itself was not only in one of the small booths against the wall but the subject of a big announcement -- about the advent of the GNOME Foundation -- it looks it's showing up everywhere. Happily, there seems to be no shortage of room for window managers right now: the KDE folks were also there not only in their own booth, but showing up in software demonstrations all over the floor, as SuSE, Caldera and others demonstrated the very slick KDE 2.0. (Can't we all just get along, anyhow?)

SuSE, by the way, was the only distributor I noticed showing off Linux on Apple hardware, and their current distro was sweet and fast on a G4. Beyond the curious lack of Apples, and the obvious ubiquity of x86 machines, there were machines based on everything from microcontrollers to StrongArm, MIPS, Alpha, Itanium ... even the IBM S/390s which have gotten attention for the ridiculous number of concurrent Linux systems they can support.

For all the cool hardware and cusp-of-reality, bleeding-edge distros, it's interesting that the announcement which seemed to generate the most buzz of the entire show was the long-awaited release of Debian's Potato. Considering the reputation that Debian has for intelligent upgrading, stability, and diligence in guarding the license of the software which makes it up, it's not as surprising as it might otherwise be that Debian's new release made people sit up a bit more than the newest offerings from the large commercial distros.

(CT: Also extremely impressive was the Pocket Linux booth, where they actually had iPaq's running Linux. The first dude that demoed the box to me was very nice, but what I really wanted to see was X11 running on it ... oddly enough, I encountered one of his cohorts in the bar later that night who showed it to me: X, xeyes, xterm, and twm running on an iPaq. When they get the wireless action going on these things I'm totally there ... I'll just need to hack minimalist interfaces onto pronto and my MP3 player software and use the thing as a portable X terminal on the local 802.11 wireless lan. Yum.)

Oh, and there were people on the floor as well -- close to 20,000, all told. I met some folks I've known previously only through IRC, and quite a few I might never have otherwise encountered.

It's interesting to see in the space of a few hours many of the smart people who you may experience vicariously through writings, speeches, code, art or IRC chatter -- and it also belies the idea that software celebrities of the Free software world are becoming celebrities of the traditional variety, since everyone from ESR to Jon "maddog" Hall (and Linus himself) are willing to talk to anyone who catches up with them long enough to say hello. The atmosphere (especially outside the mondo corporate-castle booths) is mellow and accomodating, and suprisingly so even within most of those castles. There were undoubtably personality conflicts at work, but it seems like most people have the good grace to deal nicely with each other for these few days at least.

At the close of each day, people shuffle out to drop laptops, T-shirts and bags of stuff at their hotels, then thousands of them show up to parties sponsored by companies from AMD to Red hat to VA, which are full-blown events in themselves. Mandrake's party, for instance, had go-go dancers in cages, which may be the most bacchanal thing I have ever witnessed. Ironically, though, many coders couldn't attend even events sponsored by their own companies, or thrown in the honor of their projects, because of strict carding policies. Wouldn't a chem-free party or two be a thoughtful way to include people?

(CT: This has been a consistent problem for several years. Although I know at "Someones" party (no names *grin*) they weren't carding, and I recieved many a happy note from fellow attendees proclaiming that they were able to get in. The parties themselves weren't bad: the OSDN/Potato release party was fun, with San & Zak spinning the tunes (next time we'll force CowboyNeal to scratch for us under threat of death). They had 2 buildings: one was a pool hall, where we tormented The Pope for nearly an hour, carefully distracting him, and then returning his balls to the table. He never noticed. We also met up with Nitrozac from After Y2k, and I snuck accross the street to the Eazel party for a bit, and got to meet Dave "You might remember me from cheat codes in some first person shooter" Taylor.) Attendeees mostly filed out for flights or drives home Thursday and Friday, but some are still in San Jose for the Intel Developers Conference, or otherwise enjoying the Northern California weather. It's a strange familiarity that many of them will feel when the next big conference rolls around, to see many of the same fellow attendees or workers -- of course, by the time the next big conference happens, perhaps we'll all be too excited by the release of 2.4 to notice.

I get a steady trickle of e-mail from Microsoft employees who dislike many of their employer's actions, and I know many good, concerned reporters who work at ZDNet, the Washington Post, USA Today, and other media outlets who do not follow any secret "editorial agenda." There are plenty of real conspiracies out there. We shouldn't waste our time making up fake ones, and we should never assume that all employees or associates of a company or government agency are part of a faceless, marching mass that always does exactly what its leaders want.

Let's start with Microsoft. Remember when they asked us to pull some reader posts? That was the work of a few people in an obscure legal department, not a case of a leering, drooling Bill Gates calling a cowering subordinate and screaming, "Slashdot sucks! Kill Slashdot, kill, kill, kill!" And obviously not everyone at Microsoft agreed that it was a good idea to keep the matter alive, because it has since been allowed to die quietly. (We haven't written anything further on the subject because there has been nothing to say. No news is good news.)

There is no giant, singleminded conspiracy at Microsoft, just thousands of people trying to get through the day. This is how things really work at any large company. Good decisions get made and so do bad ones. Projects get started. Some of them work out and some of them don't. Orders issued from the top sometimes get carried out effectively and efficiently, and sometimes they don't. I often suspect that some of the worst software (and the worst Web sites) I see are so crappy because the workers actually putting them together are unenthusiastic about management's plans and are either consciously or subconsciously dragging their feet -- or, in this case, their coding fingers. I'm not implying any employee conspiracy, either; these tend to be individual decisions that, collectively, may look like a consipracy to an outsider (or a boss) when there really isn't one.

Now let's take a look at one of Slashdot readers' favorits media whipping boys: ZDNet, which is now part of CNET. If you look closely, you'll see that ZD is no more organized than rush hour traffic in Paris. There are dozens of publications listed on the ZD main page. Some of them deal with Linux all day long, some are pure Windows, others concern themselves with consumer electronics and are only interested in things like camcorders or stereo gear. Jesse Berst is often treated as if he is the boss of this whole thing. He's not. He is the front man for one little piece of it called AnchorDesk . Berst has nothing to do with PC Magazine or Yahoo! Internet Life or GameSpot , all of which are also part of ZDNet.

The people who write for all these separate publications never meet. Most of them don't even know each other. They have no idea what ads are going to run where, so even if they wanted to pander to a particular advertiser they'd have trouble doing it effectively. The guiding rule at a big media mill like ZD or CNET is to have usable copy to fill all the pages every day, and they have a lot of pages to fill. Editors at these places are help-short and constantly looking for new freelance and staff writers. They don't have time to sit there and say, "Oh my, we need more stories today that make Microsoft look good and Linux look bad."

Offline media workers are similarly rushed. In many publishing companies (including Andover.net) close contact between editorial-side employees and and business-side employees is discouraged. There are journalistic organizations that act as watchdogs to help keep editorial content free from business or outside influence. These groups avidly publish instances of improper behavior. Now and then, their work gets direct results, but more often the influence is subtle; a media outlet that gains a reputation among journalists for altering stories or trying to taint them to satisfy advertisers has trouble recruiting and retaining high-end writers, and almost always sets itself on a downward quality spiral.

Remember, the shortage of competent writers and editors, especially in tech-oriented fields, is almost as acute as the shortage of competent programmers. This has not always been so, and may not always be so, but right now there is no excuse for a tech media writer to accept conspiracy-level censoring from a publisher.

Now we'll talk about the biggest and most perfidious influence I believe does exist throughout media everywhere, even though it is not a conspiracy per se: denial of access.

Imagine a celebrity besieged by reporters. Imagine that you're the press agent for that celebrity. Your client has one interview time slot open this week. You have a dozen writers begging for that interview, all of whom have audiences of approximately equal size. One of those writers has always been "nice" to your client, six of them have been (in your opinion) fair but not necessarily nice, and five of them have written primarily negative stories about him or her.

Which writer gets the interview?

Twenty years ago there were hardly any celebrities in the computer industry. Even Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were thrilled to speak openly, off the cuff, to reporters from magazines that had only a few thousand or even a few hundred subscribers. Now the people at the top of the computer business tend to be as infected with celeb-itis as movie stars and top-end politicians, and as cautious about interviews as any other group of celebrities. It has gotten to the point where interviews with computer industry honchos are about as informative as Jay Leno's interviews with actors and acresses pushing their upcoming movies.

Worse, in many cases the hardware or software itself is the celebrity in question. A tech-news writer, like a political writer, is under a certain amount of pressure to break news ahead of his or her competitors. Getting pre-release access to new products can make or break careers in this field. And who gets the most "sneak peeks" at new stuff coming out of Redmond or Cupertino or wherever? Writers who are A) generally negative; B) generally fair and unbiased; C) usually full of "Golly! Gee Whiz!" praise for any new piece of hardware or software that falls into their hands?

Pretend, for a moment, that you're a PR person for Apple. You have only 20 demo/review units of the new G21, equipped with GNU/Hurd-based MacOS 40.2 and a 3.6 GHz Intelorola available. Of the 100+ reasonably well-known computer journalists who have requested pre-release units to review, which ones will you choose? If you don't select the Mac-boostingest people in that whole crowd, then you're not a good PR person.

Computer trade journalists know that this is how the game is played. I used Apple as an example, on purpose, because they have the worst reputation among computer journalists for playing the "If you want to see our latest stuff you'd better be nice to us" game. According to posts to some of the private online journalists' e-mail lists I'm on, Microsoft is evenhanded compared to Apple, and other companies vary widely in the level of journalistic favoritism they expect to have shown toward them in return for easy access to their latest products -- and easy interview access to their key people.

But none of this is a conspiracy. It's quite Randian, really, in that a whole lot of individuals are performing in ways they perceive to be in accordance with their own (or corporate) best interests. No one can plausibly argue that computer manufacturers or distributors have any legal obligation to hand out review products in an evenhanded manner. It's a fact of life that Tuxtops or Corel are going to send Slashdot editors their products before they throw demo units at Windows Magazine , just as Microsoft is going to display the exact opposite bias.

I have questioned the whole idea of using free, manufacturer-supplied review units more than once, even those that are short-term loaners instead of "keepers." I believe there's temptation on the corporate side to make sure review units are just a little better-tested than those sold to the general public. But while reviewers who stick to buying products anonymously through normal channels may give slightly more honest reviews than those who rely on company-supplied units, they will never get anything to review before it is released, so an ethically pure reviewer will often be left far behind those who are a little more (shall we say) flexible. This is especially true of magazine writers whose deadlines may be weeks or months before publication date. I have come to accept the incestuous relationship between computer product reviewers and the people who supply those products as a fact of life. I don't necessarily like this way of doing business (even when *I* do it), but I don't think it's part of any grand conspiracy to dupe the public.

Bigger companies also have a tendency to enclose "reviewer guides" with demo products to make sure reporters know all of the product's good points so that they can (hopefully) cover them in their articles. Indeed, you can just about write a credible-looking, if uncritical, "review" from most of these guides without ever actually testing the product yourself. I regard this as the worst thing that can happen, the equivalent of writing a "news" story about a politician directly from his or her press kit. And stories that are nothing but rewritten PR pieces appear every day in all kinds of media, about all kinds of topics. The sad secret of PR-rewriting is that it can be a bonanza for a free-lancer. Take (for example) a press release about a potential new cure for [insert disease here] from researchers at [insert university here]. A hungry freelancer can easily reword the statements in that press release to produce at least three or four stories for different media, ranging from the medical trade press to regional general-interest publications. Even at low-end freelance rates, a rapid typist who does this can crank out $1000 worth of stories in a single morning. Do this six or eight days a month, and you have a nice little income to support you, and still have most of your time free to work on your (inevitable) novel, go sailing or whatever else strikes your fancy. Again, no conspiracy, just individual greed. Editors are supposed to detect and prevent this sort of thing, but they are generally overworked and have "news holes" to fill, so lazy journalism often slips by their eyes -- and not only from freelancers. In-house writers, especially on small and understaffed publications, face the same temptation to cut corners -- and often yield to it.

And now, on to the great (gasp!) Slashdot editorial conspiracy. Real life around here is that this site is run, day to day, by about six people, all of whom are independent to the point of uncontrollability. We share many common biases, and CmdrTaco sets the overall tone of the site, but that's it. One editor might post a story another wouldn't. Jon Katz writes what Jon Katz feels like writing. Hemos is ... Hemos, and also determines which books whould be reviewed, and by whom. Timothy picks stories and SlashBack material on his own, Cliff chooses "Ask Slashdot" material, and Emmett decides what stories he should cover, all by himself. Sure, we kick stuff around and ask each other for advice, and CmdrTaco will sometimes issue general directives about kinds of stories he'd like to see more often and other kinds he'd like to see less often, and these directives get followed to a certain extent, but when you come right down to it the ruling principle around here is "Chaos is Better Than Order."

No human-run organization operates with Borg-like singlemindedness. People are incapable of that kind of groupthink. Not even the old Soviet Union achieved it. This is why I am leery of so many of the conspiracy theories touted here and elsewhere. Face it: once you get behind their public masks, Microsoft, "the mainstream media," the U.S. Department of Justice, and many of our other favorite alleged conspirators are no more organized than Slashdot, and are no more capable than we are of sustaining any kind of secret agenda for any length of time -- at least not without getting caught.