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Postcard From Seoul: Global Linux 2000
Back from Korea and Global Linux 2000 with a killer case of jet-lag. All I gotta say is: it was an amazing experience. The show started with a ribbon cutting ceremony: Cliff Miller of Turbo, Tim Ney, the U.S. ambassador, the Korean minister of information and communication, among others, were all handed white gloves and a pair of scissors by a group of young women dressed in traditional Korean dresses. On the count of three, everyone cut the ribbon at once -- in front of a huge crowd of people and a corps of press.
In fact, that has to be one of the most incredible things about Global Linux 2000 -- Here we are: the North and South are reconciling after 50 years, Bill Gates is in town and the media kept showing up over and over in droves to cover the show and conference. It was a media flack's wet dream -- believe me, I know. It showed the enthusiasm of the Koreans for Linux.
But that wasn't the only miracle: ESR and RMS sat together briefly at a dinner reception for the participants in the Linux Greenhouse and friends. It was my birthday and after everyone sang "Happy Birthday," Richard stood up and did his own version -- only to be followed by Eric. I was sitting there, listening to them both sing to me and all I could think was "This is a oner." But it got better ...
The Greenhouse was going fab. The reason I got into this - why I love it (besides the obvious -- the pure genius of the hackers, basic principals of it) was for the enthusiasm. It's catching. And the Greenhousers are no different. This is a multi-national group of people who have companies that are doing everything from programming GNOME for PDAs to teaching GNU/Linux to more than 700,000 adult students in Sweden. They had meetings, they hacked, they danced together on the dancing machines that are the big thing in Korea -- kind of like karaoke for your feet.
Speaking of karaoke -- a bunch of us piled into this bus to go to the night market in Seoul and discovered that the bus was a KARAOKE bus. ESR sang "Deeper Shade of Pale" (he can really sing), and we all sang "We are the Champions." Eric changed the lyrics to "We'll keep on hacking to the end." It was wrong -- very, very wrong.
The night market is a giant, monolithic monument to entrepreneurship that's open all-night, every night. Hundreds of little stalls hawk everything from dried fish to Linux Sport tennis shoes. I do not lie -- someone in Korea named their shoes 'Linux Sport.' We had to buy a pair, really we did.
Did I mention that EVERYONE has a cell phone? Little old ladies, ten-year-old kids -- the young kids decorate them with 'Hello Kitty' charms and costumes (think Halloween for your cell phone). The food was completely wonderful - except the kimchee. I know, I'm a traitor -- but I have a very hard time getting behind rotten cabbage in hot sauce.
Photos will be posted soon on the Greenhouse site and ESR is threatening to add this trip to his travel diary -- where he'll put this little postcard to shame.
Apart from ESR & RMS singing merrily away while the rest marvel at traners and people with mobile phones, did anything news worthy actually happen at the Expo? :)
Syllable : It's an Operating System
Don't let them on tour... Please, please, please... Particularly not with the title Oops, I Hacked It Again
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
The food was completely wonderful - except the kimchee. I know, I'm a traitor -- but I have a very hard time getting behind rotten cabbage in hot sauce.
Remember when you didn't like beer?? Kimchee grows on you after a while. The cabbage isn't rotten - it's preserved - sometimes it's practically fresh. There are about 1,000,000 different kinds of kimchee. Kimchee is prepared in every imaginable way as well - my favorite is Kimchee Chonggul, a hot soup with ramyun noodles, pork and of course kimchee, shared between as many people as possible - you have to try it.
In Korea, you know you've been assimilated when the realization suddenly dawns on you: "I *like* kimchee!"
--
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
Kim-chi is not rotten! It is made of pickled cabbage that is fermented, much the same way that sauerkraut is made, and thus it last a long time. It is a staple Korean food, and it very worth trying, especially if you ever plan on eating Korean food.
He. Here in Sweden, which has a pretty high penetration of cell phones, the proliferation of hands-free kits (which typically consist of a single head phone with a wire to the phone in your pocket, and the mike attached to that wire) has made it a lot more difficult to identify drunks and mentally unstable people. It used to be easy: people who talk loud and clear into empty space are best left alone. These days, however, they might just as well be talking into their phone, which you can't see. Oh, and the combination of hands-free telephony and urban bicycling is also amusing; people zip past on their bikes, while yelling wildly...
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
And about your second paragraph:
You can't tell me that countries with lots of manpower and very little money wouldn't benefit from what amounts to essentially free computing power. If nothing else, Linux can help countries like Niger and Djibouti keep up in the technology game. You think they'd have that chance if they had to pay per seat to get Windows servers up? They'd have a much, much worse chance wihtout Linux around.
Take a look at the Linux Medical Research HOWTO and then tell me Linux isn't helping cure disease. I'm sure that someone else here can give you first-hand experience on what Linux is doing in the medical community.
I'm not saying Linux is a panacea, and anyone that does so is a certifiable moron who has no idea what (s)he's talking about (at least they'll be easy to identify and avoid). But to say that Linux isn't helping make some really wonderful things happen is extremely short-sighted. In fact, I'm still not convinced that you weren't joking. If I hadn't replied in this thread, I probably would have moderated it up as "funny".
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
No, Stallman releasing his version of Happy Birthday would be a very Bad Thing. Listen to his Free Software Song, available from http://www.gnu.org/music/free-soft ware-song.html and you will agree that the world is not yet ready for his unique vocal talents. And the less said about his lyrics, the better...
I have recently been in Japan and Korea for a while, so I know Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) all too well ;). As others have pointed out, its a game in which you stand on a stage whih has four arrows on it in the N, E, S, W positions. Arrows scroll up the screen and you have to stomp on those arrows on the stage in syncronisation with the arrows as they leave the top of the screen, to techno-ish dance-ish music. Hence, you end up dancing. Along similar lines are games such as Drum Mania where you play an electronic set of drums in synch with scrolling lines or Beatmania, a 'DJ simulator' where you press keyboard keys and scratch a fake turntable in time with the music, in synch with the scrolling lines.
;).
:P You control it with the arrows on your keyboard. One of those hacked-up PSX pads would do very nicely here.
:).
There are also a few DDR clones around - one called 'Pump' in which the arrows are in the NE, SE, SW, and NW positions and also another one I saw in Korea (which I can't remember the name of) which has 6 circular pads on the stage, arranged in a circle. I think they're really fun - actually they're the first video games I've played that have caused me to break out in a hot sweat after playing them for a while (and I'm pretty fit too).
You can also by vinyl pads (similar to Twister pads but smaller of course) with sensors inside them that you can plug into Playstations. They cost about 20,000 ~ 30,000 Won (roughly AU $30~$40). Otherwise you have to just press the directional arrows on the PSX contorller. I was reading a Korean computer magazine once and it had a detailed guide of how to hack up these Playstation controller mats to plug into your parallel port (or was it joystick port...) and use them on your PC. Cool stuff - I wish I'd photocopied it
You can get a really good DDR emulatory-type thing for Windows here: http://www.d-d-e.net. You will also need to pick up the song files which are available at the same site. The site's mainly in Japanese but English speakers should be able to find their way around (especially if you mouseover the hyperlinks, as the page filenames are usually in English). Anyone working on a Linux version?
That program can also play 'Beatmania' emulator files. There are quite a few sites around the net that deal with Beatmania emulators such as 'bm98'. A good site for them is http://www.bms.ne.jp (Japanese).
As you can tell I really love this stuff - I play it all the time where I can here in AU
The ingredients are:
napa cabbage
salt
red pepper
garlic
ginger
sardine juice (sometimes)
The cabbage is diced and salted, then mixed with all the other stuff and placed in a cool, dry place for fermentation. Traditionally it's buried in a pot to keep the temperature in the right range.
It's basically sauerkraut with a lot more flavor.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
Don't be so surprised that the Linux Expo got so much coverage in Korea. I'm an Australian but have recently been in Korea, and I was amazed by how mainstream technology stuff is. It's like a geek's paradise!
:)
;). Believe it or not, hanging out and playing Starcraft in PC bangs is a good way to meet ladies! My friend met his girlfriend in one!
:).
While I was shopping in Tongdaemun (one of the hip, trendy, young areas) I saw popular-type teenagers walking around with linux t-shirts and bags from Linux related shows etc. Books on linux are everywhere, and many people know of it. As another poster pointed out, a large proportion of people on the Linux Counter are Koreans (and the counter is a foreign-language site!).
It seemed to me that computers and geekier things are much more mainstream there, than in AU (and supposedly the US). check out this photo I took, and observe the gratuitous advertising of computer games. On TV, there are championships of the top people playing the 'Dancing machines' (DDR) video games. The Koreans are mad about Starcraft, and the Korean Battle.net champion is somewhat of a celebrity - I often saw him in TV commercials. And he's a geeky looking guy with glasses too
MP3 players are also HUGE there. I was in a specialty MP3 player shop once, with about 10 different varieties of players, including one that could actually be put in a cassette deck and used in a way similar to those car radio-discman adaptors, and also one about 3x3x1cm which was a keyring!
Not to mention the 'PC bang' ( translation --> 'PC store/room' , similar to a net cafe). Even in smallish towns, its hard not to see quite a few (The smallish place I was mainly staying at had roughy 4 or 5 per square Km around the town centre). They usually consist of a room with about 30 or 40 computers, networked with fast net connections, which are mainly used either for surfing / downloading, or playing games (mainly Starcraft
Add to that the way EVERYBODY carries a mobile phone (as other posters have already elaborated on). Many people use them to surf the web, and heaps use it to send email (not necessarily SMS - I receive email all the time from phones in Korea).
So anyway, Korea is a very cool place for the technologically inclined. I'm planning to go there and work when I finish uni. I'm sure Timothy, ESR and RMS thoroughly enjoyed it
When I was in indonesia 4 years ago, EVERYBODY used linux.. they had no money.. windows was expensive, linux was free.. hotels, corporations.. When people in america are doomsayers about linux, they forget about the other 90% of the world which is emerging into technology..
"And how can this be? For he is the
Yet again I see Linux making headlines, and yet again it is for naught. If Linux actually was such a strategic solution, we as a community would be overwhelmed with reports such as this. Linux must be integrated into every market if we are to see more than singular successes such as this one. Linux must deliver in the e-business sector for this to happen. A massive grassroots campaign must be employed as a whole to start seeing less talk, and more action for Linux.
I suggest the following:
1) Remove the multi-user aspect of the kernel. But faeryman you exclaim, Linux must have the multi-user nature in order to be Linux! And I ask why? khttpd is a viable alternative to Apache, thereby aiding Linux in end-to-end applications. The addition of more than one user adds extra security risks, and would you trust your data on an insecure B2B e-service? I think not!
2A) Remove all support for multiple architectures excepet x86. Again I am sure you are shocked at this notion. Let me explain. Firstly, the kernel sources are taking up over 1MBs of storage compressed. I shudder at the notion of how many inodes and blocks would be used if I were to uncompress it. This space is better suited to both extend customized bandwidth and empower e-commerce database. Ask yourself, would you want to know you could not complete that one extra e-business transaction beacuse your disk was full? Even though we are talking about terabytes worth of data, 2 megs can make or break your "clicks-and-mortar" architectures.
2B) Secondly, there is no need for your server OS to run on more than one platform. Linux is prized for running on old hardware. It does not make finacial sense to purchase new computers running non-x86 CPUs when your 486 will work fine for dynamic systems.
3) Remove all piping, inter-application communication, and windowing systems. These "features" have zero use for you to leverage front-end applications. There is no point in piping your e-commerce database through 'grep' or to a shell script. None. Applications have no need for communication if there is not multi-user aspect anyway. Would you want a hacker to run a DDoS in the background from your database server? I think not.
After these 3 crucial steps, I think it clear. Linux is not a viable option in either B2B markets or e-commerce applications. My recomendation is to run MS-DOS for the time being on your backend and big-iron servers. It meets the three above criterion for success, and has backing by a proven software company behind it. I have found that legal copies (not these pirated linux CD-R's by a man named 'RedHat') of MS-DOS 6.22 can be purchased for less than $25US at most stores.
Please consider my points Mr. Torvalds. Your customers will thank you in the end.
,
faeryman
I Think Slashdot trolls are really a huge problem
I Think ex-Windows-users are too much on my mind
I Think Slashdot trolls have got a lot to do with why the world sucks
But what can you do?
Like a black rain, beating down on me
Like a Richard M. Stallman line, which won't let go of my brain
Like Linus Torvalds's ass, it is in my head
Blame it on Linux
Blame it on Linux
Blame it on Linux
I Think script-kiddies are gonna drive us all crazy
And Anonymous Cowards make me feel like a child
I Think Linux losers will eventually be the downfall of civilization
But what can you do? I said what can you do?
Like a black rain, beating down on me
Like a Richard M. Stallman line, which won't let go of my brain
Like Linus Torvalds's ass, it is in my head
Blame it on Linux
Blame it on Linux
Blame it on Linux
Like a black rain, beating down on me
Like Linus Torvalds's smile, cruel and cold
Like Richard M. Stallman's ass, it is in my head
Blame it on Linux
Blame it on Linux
Blame it on Linux
According to the Linux Counter, Korea has registered 4.529 Linux Users - this in spite of them having to go to an English-language site to register.
And unlike the US, registrations are growing by more than 100% per year. (the US showed only 33% growth last year. Not much!)
Linux overseas
OS-Labeled running shoes
But the kimchee sucked
"I'm not even supposed to BE here today!"
There are also 4.5 million WAP enabled phones now in circulation. Yeah.. try beating that in Malaysia. We're talking nation wide penetration (now.. now... lets not get peverted about this) of cell phones, not just KL. :)
Instead of quoting part of the article in an attempt at Flamebait, let me explain it to you. Lets start with the whole quote:
In fact, that has to be one of the most incredible things about Global Linux 2000 -- Here we are: the North and South are reconciling after fifty years, Bill Gates is in town and the media kept showing up over and over in droves to cover the show and conference.
Now if we actually read that, what the writer is trying to say is:
"Lots of mainstream, news worthy things are currently happening in Korea (Such as the peace talks between North and South, Bill Gates currently visiting the country), and yet the media still choose to come and cover this relatively small Linux expo. This is good, it means the media are taking notice of us"
See? It's very easy, if you stop jerking your knee at the first oppurtunity.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
I believe the writers of 'Happy Birthday' still have some rights on the tune and the lyrics - I would have thought Stallman would know this!
Of course if Happy Birthday was GPLd, Stallman would have to release his version too. Would that be a good thing?
Baz