LWCE Reports Continue

Linux World continues, and reports from the floor continue to roll in; below are some more tidbits on what was on the floor or announced at today's show. Notably absent this year (besides a whole raft of companies, like formerly large exhibitors like Penguin Computing, Oracle, VA Software and subsidiaries like OSDN) were the sort of toys that crystallized dot-com risk-taking. On the other hand, companies like IBM, HP and Compaq seem as gung-ho as ever, with all sorts of info on how large customers will save (favorite trade-show words) Real Money with free software, and the dot-org booths where a lot of the show's spirit lives are happily sharing their projects' visions and toys.

wo1verin3 writes: "Trivia for geeks... and nerds. Or rather geeks vs nerds. Read about the contest of the people with oddly and randomly shaped heads here." This site also links to MoC chrisd's page of questions and answers.

abel wisman submitted news that GNU Bayonne and PreViking have merged into a single project, which will keep the name GNU Bayonne. Not familiar with either? Bayonne is a telephony application server, and PreViking is a telephony-switching daemon, both of which are open source. David Sugar of the Bayonne project also demonstrated an automated web-based callback system used to provide callbacks to form-based online queries. The newly combined Bayonne / PreViking teams will also be working on www.phonestreamer.com, built on top of GStreamer. The Bayonne booth at LinuxWorld offered booth visitors today free calls to anywhere in the world using these technologies.

red_gnom writes: "Linux is in the running to power the world's biggest computer, we learned this week at LinuxWorld Expo. A bid is being prepared to provide the computing power behind the US government sponsored Project Purple, which will pool a vast server farm to the three leading U.S. research labs, which is scheduled to come on stream by the end of 2004."

terrywin writes: "Apparently, the company that licensed Corel's Linux has indicated that the beta is now available. http://www.xandros.com/news.html, their home page has a link to the beta form. The last report I saw on this was back in September."

Finally, cnmill points to this story on CNET about today's announcement of version 1.1 of the Linux Standard Base. Congratulations!

Comments

VA Linux^H^H^H^H^HSoftware

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, they are completely out of the linux biz, or so says their CEO, so no wonder they blew it off!

Why no represent? - Karma to burn

[SomeOtherGuy]

How bad is VA and OSDN hurting to not represent at such a big event?? -- I guess 1 look at themes.org is a good example of how fast something can go downhill. (Saw the article on the Loki timeline -- will we see a VA/OSDN timeline?)

1st time conference attendee

[jamienk]

This was the first computer conference I've ever attended. Most of it was what I expected it would be -- a bunch of bullshit: the big companies and the little companies were hawking their wares, acting slick and SELLING SELLING SELLING.

There were a ton of proprietary software vendors, wholely clueless that Linux users may prefer Linux because of the Freedom. NuSphere, for example, was showing off their Linux port of the Windows PHP IDE product...acting like Linux was just another platform, like a port to a Mac. (The port was incomplete.) Compaq held an expensive-looking gameshow contest with questions like "Why is Compaq considered a leading expert in Linux?" and where all the answers were "all of the above." Ximian came accross as a slick, funded, bullshit corporation, selling their MS Exchange connector. I fear the future of GNOME in their hands. Best propritary software was the guy from Taiwan, selling a program that grabs all relevent Windows config files and translates them to the correct Linux equivs (Sendmail, Appache, SAMBA, etc.). He said his product was big in China.

The Hardware vendors seemed less bad -- at least they're selling a THING, not IP. Of particular note was the Sharp Linux PDA -- much better than I imagined, more like a little laptop than a PDA.

Best, though, was the small "ORG" section of the convention. The enthusiasm and lack of bullshit was palpable, and it put the salesmen to shame. It made the whole thing seem like two events, one of salesmen, and one of artists. In particular, the Linux Terminal Server guys were cool as shit. (http://www.ltsp.org/) The KDE guys (especially Ian) were also amazing. I was pleased that they all had fresh ideas, but were dedicated to the old-fashioned, core hacker concepts (client/server, language neutrality, extensibility). These guys had a VISION and were advocating, teaching, and arguing for it with great gusto and humor. The sales people, on the other hand, seemed insincere, ass-kissing, and downright dumb.

All-in-all, just what you'd expect...

Apple, Industry Shift, and Brazil Nuts

[d.valued]

I don't know if anyone here recalls the Brazil Nut theory of Economics. In a nutshell (unintentional humor), it parallels the unusual and easily reproducible fact that in a can of mixed nuts, if you shake it long enough, the brail nuts (the largest ones) rise to the top. I've seen this phenomenon in piggy banks as well. In economics, what this means is that certain companies eventually will rise to the top of the corporate world.

VA Linux^H^H^H^H^H Systems, IMHO, should've tried to duke it out a little more in the hardware market. Now it's a company basing itself on software and intellectual property (like, oh, Slashdot and other Andover.net aquisitions). Penguin is starting to feel the crunch of smaller margins in this commodity market. Oracle's probably taking a breather before Comdex, or maybe it's laying off the trade show circuit to save some $$ (after all, upholding a legally and ethically built monopoy takes a little work to hold together).

One of the things to keep in mind about trade shows is that, oh, they are intended FOR THE TRADE. They are pitching their products and services to organizations that could potentially purchase them. So you won't see the Linux-based PDA's except as an item to be resold or maybe as a remote network monitoring tool (think a Sharp Zaurus with an 802.11b CF card).

Something that slightly itches at me like an Asian Ladybug's bite.. Is Apple there? I know some people are belligerent over the BSD vs GNU/Linux thing, but right now Apple is the world's leading supplier of Unixish systems thanks to the miracle of OS X. (My next system is going to be an iMac2 with OS X.1 and PPC SuSE dual-boot.)

Re:VA Linux^H^H^H^H^HSoftware -- Oh so proud.

[SomeOtherGuy]

Just watched that. How ironic the ajoining "stock ticker" table cell to the left of the video reminded me of how proud good ole' Larry A. was to aquire the LNUX symbol and carry the Linux torch high (in what seems like just a few months ago.) The new video in the window in front of me (and just to the left of the LNUX symbol) was 6 minutes of good ole' Larry stressing (in not so many words) how they are "oh so past that yucky Linux thing" now. I don't know about you all, but that makes my stomache churn a bit. (Not quite in the "selling your own mother" category -- but not far off.)

ASCI Purple sample requirements...

[crt]

(from the 96 page requirement document.. btw - TiB = tibibyte - 2^40 bytes or so)...

Example: For a 60 teraFLOP/s peak system, requirement 2.1.1.2 specifies that the system shall
have at least 30 TiB of memory, 1.2 PB globally addressable user disk, 6.0 TB/s intra-cluster
network aggregate link bandwidth, 3.0 TB/s intra-cluster networking bi-sectional bandwidth, 30
GB/s system sustained productive disk I/O bandwidth and 75 Gb/s external networking.