Slashdot Mirror
Preparation for LinuxWorld Heats Up
BoomZilla writes "Numerous stories abound regarding next week's LinuxWorld in San Francisco.
Reuters has published a report about Sun's upcoming
announcement at the show. Apparently Sun will be revealing its first
general-purpose, low-end Linux machine, and its own version of Linux. In another
article CBS MarketWatch
reports that IBM and RedHat/Dell will also be making major announcements." It'll at least be interesting this year with Microsoft
having a booth. I'll be there as usual, but without a booth, so maybe we can
russle up a party somewhere for Wed night? Anyone know a good place? Perhaps that serves Guinness & Bodingtons? Also, go see the Golden Penguin Bowl since
I'm a contestant this year and will undoubtedly embarass myself terribly.
San Francisco has some of the best nightlife anywhere, and you want to go to a chain restaurant? You can go to fucking Chuck-E-Cheese's anytime, get out and live a little while you have the chance!
"Zealots" (I prefer "advocates") such as RMS are not particularly likely to serve as an embarassment on such a scale.
Frankly, it is far more likely from some of Slashdotter-style crowd of pseudo-script-kiddies without the capacity for maturity, responsibility, world awareness or attention spans.
lNx r0xrz j00. mS iz teh suk
Bleh.
Most Sun customers won't even care what graphics card is in the thing - in fact, most won't ever log in. There are some Sun desktops in the universe (Hello to whoever posts a reply saying they use Sun on the desktop), but the vast majority are headless servers running back-end stuff.
Cheers,
Ian
It almost doesn't matter what happens at the MS booth, the result will be good for those guys.
.NET-based interoperability features and the goodness of XML. That will certainly reduce MS' tainted image of being a monopolist, they might even be starting a new niceguy campaign!
As has been pointed out in earlier posts: open source zealots attacking the booth will help MS to discredit the whole community and Linux as an operating system.
Maybe MS will even announce some
Perhaps the most stupid thing they could do is trying to sabotage the Expo with deconstructive criticism and blatant WindowsXP demos. The resulting uproar would bring them in on the frontpage of most internet news pages and make for some great indirect advertizing.
So there is not much that could turn out negative for MS at this. Maybe the best from a Linux point of view would be some sort of support by MS (e.g. Office suite), even though it is unlikely to happen. Anyway let's just hope the community won't embarass itself out there!
I don't quite agree with your suggestions for responding to MS, but that is a very accurate description of how Microsoft treats its competitors AND its customers. It goes from "well, you need a license, but who's checking, wink wink," to "you have one month to show proof of compliance." From "Here, have a free media player with your OS" to "Oh, by the way we have permission to disable competing products on your computer."
MS makes some very useable software, but their business philosophy of "shortest possible path to having you by the balls" is more and more unappealing every day.
The requested URL
The Hitler comparison is pretty nauseating. Did anyone else not find that funny? I don't like MS or use their products either, but Christ. . .
When you buy Sun hardware you get what you pay for. If you believe Sparc processors are slow then you have fallen for the Mhz myth. Raw Mhz doesn't equal a faster cpu. Any processor that still has the heart of the 8088 and the 286 in it will never be faster that a risc processor. Until Intel and Amd drop x86 backwards compatibility, x86 will never be faster that Sparc, or nay other risc platform.