Slashdot Mirror
Miscellaneous LinuxWorld Tidbits
The excitement of the LinuxWorld Expo simply cannot be expressed in words. We already mentioned that Mandrake and HP are working on Linux on the desktop (warning, manager-speak). The Open Source Development Lab is expanding its focus through the creation of a working group on "carrier grade Linux" for the telecommunications market. CNET has several LinuxWorld stories up. And let's throw in one more, only tangentially related: IBM has settled with San Francisco for spray-painting their sidewalks.
IBM broke the law ... and guess what? We're talking about IBM
OK, let's think about the target audience with this campaign. In my opinion IBM comes away with two victories here: not only did they paint cool little adverts all over the city, they also got in trouble with the law in an insignificant (to IBM $110k is nothing) way which in turn will up their status with the people who are likely to buy linux servers.
Of course that could be just the way I see things, but my liking of IBM has gone up 2 points because of that. I like the ads, I think they're funny, and they're not hurting anything. I also like the fact that they got in trouble for doing it, it makes the company as a whole seem like the same kind of carefree jokesters that my freinds and I tend to be. Anyway, that's my $0.02
~ now you know
Announced at Linux World HP has inked a deal with Dreamworks to replace their remaining SGI Irix machines with Linux.
Dreamworks has also announced Shrek 2, maybe there will be a penguin in it
http://www.kubuntu.org/
So, WRT the OSDN "Carrier Grade Linux" thread, I work for one of those companies that has 'Other' in there. Here are the some of the main things that general-purpose OS's tend to lack:
1. Redundant processors -- there are always two processors running. When one fails, control switches to the other processor. Meanwhile, the failed processor (actually, the entire board) can be replaced and brought back to life. Without affecting any application running on the system, heck typically without their even being aware.
2. Ability to add and remove peripheral cards in a running system -- so, you have a system that has a card with 8 T1 lines going into it, and you want to add another card -- just stick it in, configure it, and away you go.
3. Redundant links -- things like "If one lan interface drops, I'll switch to the other one and keep any connections up." (this requires support from your network), etc....
4. Seamless software upgrade -- if you have two processors, you run the current software on one, get the new software running on the other one, sync them up and then the new software takes control and doesn't lose track of what was going on.
5. Related to #4, above -- "Cutover". If you're running on system 'A' that's obsolete, you need to be able to switch over to using newer system 'B' and not lose anything that's going on. This isn't necessarily an OS thing.
All these requirements come from age-old regulatory requirements that said that ma bell could set her rates based on the quality of service that it provides, and which forced the bell companies to keep extensive records of outages and downtimes. So, not only were there the above software requirements, but there are also a bunch of hardware requirements (boards have to be hot-swappable, for example), and power requirements as well -- telephony companies have multiple connections to the power grid with battery backup and generators, and so on...
With all that in place, it's amazing that they still bury the redundant cable right next to the primary cable so some yutz on a backhoe can come along and take out the phone system.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Maybe she's not ready yet... more accurately, maybe Linux isn't ready for her yet. But my god, look how far things have come in a few years.
:)
When I first downloaded Linux, there were no CD-Recordable drives; I had to go out and buy 50 floppies and crash a university computer lab (no DSL or cable-modems, either) to download Slackware. I was thrilled to get it working, and decided that olvwm was king.
Now Red Hat is huge, IBM is running Linux on mainframes, and KDE/GNOME have made the desktop much friendlier. Seems like most distributions have graphical installers that autodetect and configure most of the popular hardware. I remember the labor-intensive process of configuring my X server for Slackware about 7 years ago. Times have changed.
So I hate to hear people bad-mouth Linux because it's not good enough for grandma yet. Because in a few years, I think it will be there. And that's what Microsoft is afraid of.
Am I anti-Microsoft? Maybe a little. I'm cool with the "use what works for the application" argument, but I also think that Microsoft as a business is sleazy and evil. Sure, they're job is to make money, but what happened to dealing fairly with consumers and, well, ethics? And the Linux community feels much more like that: a community. There must be countless Linux developers working for free, for the cause, for the fun of it, whatever. I'd rather align with them.
So hopefully in a few years, Linux WILL be ready for Joe Sixpack. And if you can't get your mom to double-click, maybe you should get her an iMac in the interim.
It was a blast. So many nerds in so small a space.
The irrefutible corporate might was a bit staggering at first. HP, Compaq, IBM, Sun, Intel, AMD, etc. all had huge booths extolling how much each of them loves the Linux community. General impressions:
Sun had TV-style ads running constantly in between presentations on Sun/Linux-happy technology. The iPlanet guys gave a really unnerving speech about how they were serious and want to be taken seriously and that they were "Sun's Children" or something. They were creeping me (and everyone else) out.
The guy pimping Intel's ultra-reet compiler was pretty excited about it. Showing a demo of the new SIMD optimizations versus without. Yay, 8x performance increase in a cpu-intensive demo. He wasn't much interested in discussing how this worked with me though--it took him 10 minutes, gladly accepting interruptions, to just say that it was using SIMD stuff to optimize loops.
Compaq was truly everywhere in that show. They had a lot of fun stuff available, including a play area (complete with bean bag couches and video games). I believe Compaq also provided all of the public terminals for checking email/ssh'ing to boxes, etc. If you were there, you also rolled your eyes when you walked past their gameshow/advertisement setup though (hosted by "Dave LinuxMan").
IBM was there, but didn't do much to catch your eye. If you were looking for them, you found them and hung out with them. Otherwise they were all kind of chill and laid back. Same goes for HP really.
The suits were thoroughly awestruck at the Ximian booth (complete with Jungle motif). Good for them.
I'm not sure what Computer Associates thought it was doing there.
AMD had some engineers there--I wasn't nearly competent enough with CPU architecture to have a good talk with them. AMD was definitely trying hard to get over the myth that their processors were incompatible/unreliable, and had a lot of partners there with them to show confidence in AMD. I wish them the best of luck, they were all very cool.
Red Hat's booth was pretty standard. They were showing an interest in embedded and high-end servers. Plenty of competent people there ready to walk the talk.
Despite the sheer eyecandy factor/booth size of the corporate forces at LinuxWorld, the real heart of the show was actually all of the booths lining the edges run by hacker groups, independent projects, charities, etc. That's mostly where the quality conversation happened.
The Window Maker guys put on an asskicking booth despite no significant corporate backing or flashy handouts. They must've had 8 or 9 boxes/laptops running a wide range of UNIXen all sporting wmaker. Their little ibook was even blasting 80s-cheese metal the entire show. They had a friendly rivalry with the GNOME crowd going.
Some NetBSD dudes were there sporting NetBSD on all kinds of hardware. No FreeBSD/OpenBSD people (er, except for BSDMall?). It was nice to see the FSF and EFF there receiving donations.
Only Covalent was giving out T-shirts this year, and you had to sit through a presentation on Apache 2.0 (put on by ryan@covalent, who did a great job), fill out a form, and swipe your card before they give it to you. At least it's comfy.
The Linux on Playstation 2 booth put on by Sony was gnarly. Some Sony rep even interviewed me and I babbled something about how I was insulted that the dev kit cost $200, but then I was less insulted when I realized the dev kit came with a hard disk and ethernet card and other goodies.
Apple who? Didn't see them anywhere.
Fun show. Highly recommended. I'm going to miss all those guys.
That's one of the tough concepts for new admins to understand. We're not only juicy targets because of our claims of security; but we're a lot more useful once we're owned.
Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!