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LWCE Reports Continue
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!
Well, they are completely out of the linux biz, or so says their CEO, so no wonder they blew it off!
Linux is in the running to power the world's biggest computer, we learned this week at LinuxWorld Expo.
This is clearly really exciting news. If Linux ends up being used on the world's largest (or fastest, or sexiest, etc...) computer, it's reputation for being both A)A valid solution for high-load calculations and B)A superior solution, worthy of being used on expensive hardware.
If Linux is used on this largest computer, imagine what this will mean for managers choosing it for mere 'large' computers. The future looks good for 'Big' Linux.
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?)
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Ya. Look at what IBM has done for the desktop products they have aquired in recent years...(let them die horrible deaths..) anyone remember the Lotus 123 spreadsheet, Amipro word processor, et all...If it wasnt for a steady stream of cash they would find someway to kill Notes also...Read the article in todays USATODAY...They are in the Linux thing for servers only...They will spend a gazillion dollars on getting 5000 VM's to run on a mainframe -- but I bet you wont see them spend a dime on anything for the desktop...
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
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...
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.)
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
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.)
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
VA is still supplying network connectivity to Debian, not a cheap proposition given their bandwidth needs. Try a traceroute to www.debian.org:
13 s6-0.border1-7206.valinux.com (209.81.23.54) 102.552 ms 86.615 ms 86.868 ms
14 fe0-0.dist5-3662.vasoftware.com (198.186.202.86) 95.753 ms 134.836 ms 95.819 ms
15 e2-2.community8-bi8000.vasoftware.com (198.186.202.102) 124.682 ms 88.352 ms 114.626 ms
16 klecker.debian.org (198.186.203.20) 91.755 ms 96.514 ms 93.637 ms
The Edge Report has posted a series of pictures from the event. Every day until our 100+ pictures are exhausted, we will be posting a new set. Check out the first one at:
http://www.edgereport.com/article.php?sid=123
Yup, that debian company. I wonder what their stock symbol is...
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
(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.
Happy to burst your bubble on this one. "Linux users" are not the target of the companies at LW. Those companies know that you can't sell anything to people who are either too ideologically "pure" or just too damn cheap to spend money for anything except hardware.
Those companies are marketing to the people running big business systems, who see Linux as a very attractive alternative for small to mid-range servers. Whine all you want about commercialism and the lack of OSS purity and all that nonsense, but the bottom line is Linux is very significant success in the real world, even if not on your terms. Live with it.
The newly combined Bayonne / PreViking teams will also be working on www.phonestreamer.com, built on top of GStreamer.
Just to elaborate on this project a bit for those interested. The aim of the phonestreamer project is to provide an easy frame work on which to build telephony applications. The system works by having a series of modules linked together connect through sources and sinks. For example, a source might be a MP3 file pulled from a web site, it might then go through a series of modules that do various manipuplations that convert the audio stream to 8bit U-Law that can be played straight out on an ISDN line. The sink would then be an ISDN card or something similar.
The phonestreamer project will provide sources and sinks for many different types of hardware starting off with those already supported in GNU Bayonne and PreViking. For example, Dialogic, NMS, Capi and eventually SIP and H323. If someone then wanted to create GUI telephone applications under Linux most of their work would already be done and they could concentrate their efforts more on the application and the GUI functionality and wouldn't need to worry about the low level telephony programming.
There will also be source/sink modules for all sorts of audio conversion. Many of these have already been written for the GStreamer architecture anyway.
Those visiting the show, don't forget to come and check out telephony under Linux by making free International calls at booth #13.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10);'
Not likely. There may be one Linux distribution which gains general usage, but they'll still only be a distributor; they'll still take their software from "the wild" before packaging and QAing and selling it, and there will still be smaller companies which do better in other markets.
I work for a Linux company doing embedded systems work (MontaVista Software), and we have to accept patches from the wild. As it is we can provide and support a huge amount of high-quality software on a very wide array of platforms with a staff of under 200 people. To accept only in-house patches would either require a massive growth in staffing (and a corresponding growth in expense) and, further, would stop us from benefitting from the concurrent development done outside the company.
Indeed, there've been times when we've considered keeping work we did in-house between ourselves and our customers, and came to the decision that there was a very strong business case for merging our work into the community tree to ease the costs involved with software maintenance. Doing internal development is just too expensive, and the advantages to justify it just aren't there. This is true no matter who you are -- it would be no more cost-effective for Red Hat (or Microsoft) to work on an internal fork of some Linux distribution than it would be for us.
As for what I said about having smaller companies succeeding in niche markets, let me use MontaVista as an example. We have a fair number of experienced kernel coders working for us, and several very large companies have found our "money, reputation and knowledge" to be enough to justify purchasing our products and services. By the numbers (less than 200 people) we're small fries compared to what you'd think you need to run an OS company, yet we've been doing remarkably well. Largely, this goes back to OSS development methodology. Because we can take advantage of the concurrent work done elsewhere, we can focus on work closely aligned with our specialty -- embedded systems -- and not have expend undue time on software maintenance. Because we do embedded systems so well (due to our focus!), we win customers in that market over differently focused competitors. This demonstrates how smaller companies can survive and even thrive in an OSS environment despite the potential presence of a 900lb gorilla.
...but the true money to be made in gratis software...
Our customers don't care about gratis -- our product isn't gratis to them (though it is cheaper than many proprietary alternatives, particularly if they're producing a large quantity of units; Linux, of course, carries no royalties). Rather, they care about libre. Because of the GPL, they can take their existing product (including the software they got from us) and go to another embedded systems company at any time or switch to working in-house if they don't like the service they receive from us. Our customers have absolute freedom from vendor lock-in -- nothing to sniffle at. Thus, they're assured that they'll receive quality service and honest pricing -- or they really can just go somewhere else.