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LWCE Wrapup
Okay, let's close out the Linuxworld Expo news as best we can. CNet has an article on the march on City Hall (there's also an AP article) to promote open source in government (some people even want to get Linux certified). CNN loves Linux. Bruce Perens, as we mentioned last night, is bailing out of Hewlett-Packard. And Newsforge has several stories from the Linuxworld floor: 1, 2, 3, 4. And finally, CmdrTaco and Chris Dibona (Gamara here on Slashdot) were on TechTV yesterday (and repeats today). Viewer discretion advised.
Sun, IBM, Oracle...
No wonder some of the people were complaining about nausea from too much corporate speak.
Internal MS reports from the show should be interesting, if ever made public.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
... the Million Geek March. If only we could get a million geeks away from their machines.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
then found out it was a racket. They only offered the first part of each test. To complete the certification you need to go to a test center and take the second half.
I hate when they don't give you the whole story up front.
So is Bruce going to have to pee into a bottle if he's going to consult at HP? Or are they going to make a special exemption?
This might well get in his way of being more politically active, and wanting to support HP Linux.
moderators, what's the point of modding this down as a troll? use your mod points to mod up the good posts, not mod down the stupid ones that no one will ever see anyway.
it was already at 0. anonymous cowards browse at 1 by default. so, the only people that could see a post like this are the ones that are actively looking for it. grr
While Cmdrtaco is hanging with the TechTV people, I would be greatly disappointed if he didn't try to get Megan Morrone to do an interview.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
I've yet to hear word on the actual experience of Microsoft in the belly of the beast? What sort of stuff did they have there? Did anyone approach them, or were they shunned? Did they "respectfully" keep a distance from people so as to not be exposed to the open-source cancer? Were they brutally GPL'd? Wha happen?
I know and you know that it would be completly impossible for government to go open source only, atleast for now. We need to do this is baby steps. What we should be preaching is open formats, then we can work on open source. Government has a responcibility that its public records can be read by anyone. And that its private records can be read at a later date. Push open formats, thats what government really needs. Nothing illogical about its requirement, and it will open to door to competition and open source in government IT purchases.
A million geek march... probably not. What about a Million Book March? The DMCA threatens the future of all digital media, and as Lawrence Lessig points out, Adobe eBook reader and its ilk threaten a lot more people than geeks. They threaten librarians, students, and academia. If we could each dump a book on the lawn of the capitol to symbolize the death of the Freedom to Read, now that would be something.
KWTCMA
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
They're all a bunch of socialists who have no concept of honest Americans keeping the money they earn.
Sorry that should be "Preaching an impossible message" :(
Shame
Jeremy was on a winning team for a change! The Geeks, in the Golden Penguin Bowl, soundly defeated CmdrTaco, Bruce Perens, and some guy picked from the audience with questions like:
(?; \d/) Line noise or Perl script?
Bonus question: what does it do?
RedHat handed out...red hats. Ximian was absent for some reason. The EFF seemed a little more sure of themselves this year. IBM didn't hand out t-shirts. Neither did HotLinuxJobs.com.
Anyway, way to go Geeks! See you next year! (and here's hoping Chris can check his repepetitive spelling mistakes)
Useless opinions, worthless observations, and more!
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What I can't understand is why they make the con during the work week? Not everyone can take off from work you know. Why not make it like Defcon? Like Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. A lot more people would probably show up. Just a thought.
CNN does apparently love linux, as that is all it is now running on its main site, cnn.com.
Quote:
But open-source guru Bruce Perens, who marched alongside Tiemann, lamented that most technologists simply aren't paying attention. "It's obvious only a tiny bit of people from (LinuxWorld) turned out, and that presents a problem," he said. "Either they don't understand the issues or they have a business partnership that doesn't allow them to talk about it."
I live in San Francisco and knew nothing of this march. My friends attending LWCE didn't know about this march. "Expected turn out of 20 to a 100" is bollocks. They didn't announce this in advance, or they'd had more participation. I could have gathered at leat 10 people to go with me. Yesterday I was working on a project *downtown*, so a stroll to city hall was very doable *if* we knew about it.
Sheesh...
Ehttp://eugeneciurana.com | http://ciurana.eu
Nobody, not even local Bangor TV/news sites, has anything about him dying (and they'd be the first to know).
Nice try.
Anybody knows where can I find pictures of this expo? There's nothing on the site. I'm particularly curious to see Microsoft's booth...
Bangor? I hardly know 'or!
PS I'm sorry that you live in a shithole.
I can't help but feel that all this "fighting" among the big companies (e.g. Sun, IBM, HP, etc) is not going to end up well. It seems to me that there is a lot more interest on Linux right now, than there should be. Is there really enough market for all these big companies to make money? It would be a pity if they got all cranked up, found out that there isn't enough money for all of them, and gave up altogether on Linux and Open Source.
The whole thing seems eerily familiar like the dot.com boom and subsequent crash.
"Stephen King dead at 54" is a well-known troll. This comment turns up at least once a week on /. Sorry you fell for it.
YHBT HAND
Anybody know if there is a streaming/downloadable video of the TechTV report? I don't get TechTV in my area.
Why would a Welsh news site have details of Stephen Kings death though?!
"While they're spending money suing the monopolist, they're also feeding the monopolist with the other hand," Tiemann told the crowd.
#include <MHO.o>
I just can't understand why even the thickest politician cannot comprehend this. Purchasing from a company that's under Federal investigation makes about as much sense as hiring R. Kelly as a Girl Scout troop leader.
/*drunk.. fix later*/
Wow, with such a low uid, you should KNOW the "stephen king dead at 54" troll. I mean DAMN its used a ton.
YHBT like a complete idiot.
hiphop artist.
sulli
RTFJ.
Somebody's trying to start a rumor. I heard this same thing on another board a few weeks ago. Some freaky people have way too much time on thier hands.
Actually, in some senses they're right about their influence in a lot of the open source projects related to GNU/Linux. KDE and Gnome have been heavily influenced by Microsoft's designs, even if they're not following the exact same APIs the principles behind the technologies tend to be "copy, and try to improve, but copy first", and there does seem to be an attitude amongst mainstream open source developers that if Windows does it, then that's the way it has to be done. Including really ugly hacks like using filename extentions to determine what application opens what file (why in Slashdot's name is file meta data still not a part of the Unix desktop?), or attempts to clone the registry as per gconf.
Whether I'd describe these as the "best" open source projects is another matter, however...
KMSMA (WWBD?)
Boy do you dirty GNU hippies have a major lack of a sense of a humor. Sheesh.
LOL! oh man! I think I'm going to wet myself! ^_^ Keep going! Keep going!!!
HAHAHA
ST CM
Quote from the article on the two dozen saddoes saunter...
At one point, marchers came across a historical plaque that was sponsored by Microsoft. They groaned and quickly papered over the software giant's name with a bumper sticker
Ah, Vandalism. Marvellous way to bring people around to your way of thinking...
"Information wants to be paid"
Due to excessive bad posting from this IP or Subnet, comment posting has temporarily been disabled. If it's you, consider this a chance to sit in the timeout corner. If it's someone else, this is a chance to hunt them down. If you think this is unfair, please email jamie@slashdot.org with your MD5'd IPID and SubnetID, which are "ebe8c67a1618cc03713c7f93dc3ea81a" and "0a7245123af6bd3ea6a389e34162ec02".
Linuxworld seemed like two conferences in one. There was the "Linux, the home-user and small office product" and then there was the "Linux, spend lots of money on this superduper mainframe".
.ORG pavillion. The folks there were mostly friendly and talkative, and seemed equally happy to talk with suits, end-users, or administrator types like me.
I'm small fry. I use linux at home, bug hunt for some OSS projects, administer linux & UNIX at a 60-person company. My linux world revolves around home users, small offices, and nonprofits.
I couldn't even get anybody at the IBM, HP, AMD or RedHat booths to speak to me. They just wanted to scan my card and send me info. But when I asked simple questions ("So, tell me about the s390" "Do you have any server products for smaller offices or for nonprofits"?), the salespeople got huffy and would go pursue some bigger fish.
It was like they could tell, just from my haircut, that I don't have $400,000,000 to blow on an s390 mainframe.
Sun was the exception here. Out of all of the Big Business booths the folks in the Sun booth were really excited to show off their products to everyone. The Gnome 2.0 folks were thrilled to talk about small office users. The Cobalt Qube guys really wanted to show off the Qube interface.
I spent a good amount of time in the
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
I don't want to dampen the Linux love fest at all, but I want to know if any attendees picked up a Mac OS X user's lunch tab while they were there.
:)
Lunch in SF can be pretty expensive, and Mac users have already given their shirt to buy a Macintosh, so...
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
Some of us don't read every comment posted on /. If I didn't work for a living perhaps I'd be able to read every single comment ever posted here. Fortunately, I have better things to do.
Next time they should use Linux/apache for their webserver not windows 98....
Check out netcraft.... www.linuxworldexpo.com
Is it just me or does CmdrTaco look alot like a bigger version of professional wrestler Spike Dudley? They seem to share the same facial type and expressions.
These are the same folk who fragmented Unix with all their infighting. But I have since come to the conclusion that it is the GPL which prevents fragmentation. *BSD are just as good in the big picture, yet don't get the press and publicity, and to some extent, don't get the community support. Methinks it is because the BSD license allows proprietary forking, the GPL doesn't. Sometimes I waver a bit and wonder how much personality clashes have to do with it, but there are just as "ownery" ones in the GPL camp. I always come back to the license. Long Live the FSF and GPL!
Infuriate left and right
They may not have been there to show anything.
At many conferences, exhibitors have access to the names and other information about ALL the registered attendees.
Ya know, I never thought much about who or what kinda person Taco is in real life cause, frankly, it really didn't matter that much. But, I decided to flip on the tube and catch the TechTV deal with Taco and Gamara, just cause it seemed kinda nifty after reading so much on
Note: I've setup Windows, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and various Linux distro boxes before, and the only major install problems I ran into were with some of the Linux and Windows boxes not recognizing some hardware (some normal hardware with Linux, and some oddball stuff with Windows). And Taco, if you're really having all sorts of troubles setting up an XP box, just bring it over to my house, I can get it going for ya, and I'll let you slide on the labor costs this one time.
If I were an employee at MSFT and someone asked me to go to LinuxWorld as an rep. ..I'm not suicidal"
I'd say "hell fuck no!
Were the poor MSFT guys that were forced to go to LinuxWorld shivering and wearing a bulletproof vests?
Give out free hardware.
They should've given out some Intellimouse Explorers. The whole conference would've flocked there, happy to receive one of M$'s few decent products.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
If I were an employee at MSFT and someone asked me to go to LinuxWorld as an rep. ..I'm not suicidal"
I'd say "hell fuck no!
Were the poor MSFT guys that were forced to go to LinuxWorld shivering and wearing a bulletproof vests?
They should get a balls award or something.
Ten to twenty people, many of whom aren't from San Francisco, "march" on the San Francisco City Hall for a state issue. Nobody from City Hall meets them there. That is so clueless.
It would be a lot more effective to find some application San Francisco is running, badly, on closed source, and help them out. (Hint: the City Assessor's office is a mess.) SF tax revenues are way down since the dot-com thing tanked, and some help might be welcome. Once you get one or two successes, hold a press conference.
Just publicly donating a copy of Red Hat (since Red Hat's CTO was behind this) to the city, with the explaination that "you can make all the copies you want", made with suitable press coverage, would be more effective.
I thought I should say this loud. Bruce Perens is becoming one of the public persons I respect the most. He is resigning from a comfortable position at HP in order to be able to be more active in politics, and he wants to be politically active in order to defend the public interest, and ideals like freedom.
:-)
Most people have unfortunately ethics a posteriori. They (we) do whatever benefits them (us), and then find an ethical justification for whatever we do or we are. He is going the other around.
Bruce, let me just say thank you. People like you make this world a little nicer
I'm getting awefully tired of hearing MS bitch about how the government shouldn't madate the use of open source in government offices. I wanted to point out that currently there are government mandates that force it's employees into the software that they use currently.
I'm annoyed that they are trying to make it sound like "*gasp* now government installations won't have a choice on the software that they use?!? Why that's unfair to other software vendors!" When the United States Marine Corps, for example, is required to run Windows 2000, (or get there as soon as financially possible) by mandate of something or another. Any variation has to be specifically approved.
But I suppose painting the picture like it truely is - They want to keep the MS mandate rather than OS - isn't a very strong or compelling argument and certainly doesn't gain my sympathy.
It's understandable to be too productive to be someone else's employee because you're not being most efficiently utilized, but being too political to be someone else's employee is a different story. Maybe you should look at the Santa Clara unemployment rate and figure out if political inclination is as underutilized as it feels, before resigning from HP.
Yes, it was a small step and probably had no effect on legislators -- but it was still a step in the right direction.
I think if there had been ten people walking the floor of the show either handing out flyers or just loudly announcing the march, a lot more people might have joined in. It needed to be better publicized!!
So next year, let's do it again and bring signs and bullhorns. There are really vocal paid lobbyists for the other side; it's time that we made some noise of our own.
And besides, it was a lot of fun!
OK, so it was posted on Sunday on /.
/. *once* on Sunday evening.
First, I don't believe it was posted on the main entrance screen. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't recall seeing it. And I did check
Second, why post it on a fsck -ng Sunday??? It would've got more exposure during the wk, with a gentle reminder on Slashback or somthing.
Third, there just wasn't more awareness here. The BALUG page didn't say a thing about it either.
Cheers!
E
http://eugeneciurana.com | http://ciurana.eu
It looks like Taco is no longer that skinny
obnoxious brat he once was.
Now he's a fat obnoxious bastard.
I think that if you're going to compete with somebody and try to prove your tech is better you should at least know what are you competing against!
Almost every Linux geek, excepting maybe the ones who only used other UNIX systems will be gladly rant for hours about the horrors of the WinAPI, MFC, the huge limitations of VB or the way it works. I think MS should have sent somebody who knew well both technologies and was able to answer serious questions. For example, if I came to the MS booth and asked if Windows had a mmap(2) equivalent and got a blank stare then I definitely wouldn't get a good impression.
What's the point of sending a bunch of people if they don't know enough about Linux to be able to say "See, this is why our system is better and it's worth spending money on it!"?
My company has done some market research for Sun, and we attended Sun's VIP Day presentations at LinuxWorld.
Here is some information I gleaned from the presentations, Sun's website, and the LX50 documentation:
Kernel version: 2.4.9-31
Apache version: 1.3.22
Tomcat 3.2.1
J2SE SDK 1.4
SunOne ASP (Chilisoft ASP) 3.6.2
Red Hat 7.2 ships with the 2.4.7 kernel and with Apache 1.3.20, so Sun has done some buffing of the distribution. It may be 7.2 with errata applied. 2.4.9-31 is Red Hat's recommended kernel for 7.2; it closes the zlib vulnerability.
The Sun/Chilisoft ASP support normally sells for $495.
For more information, see our market brief.
WTF...
Try again, using English that is understandable.
damn non-native speakers...
The simple solution (although expensive) is to get each geek a PDA with wireless internet access. That way they can keep in touch and check up on their machines... kind of like a baby monitor.
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
The reason they are intrested in linux is because IBM, and HP sell hardware. They are intrested in Linux because when software is free it becomes a commodity thereby increasing the value of the complement product, hardware, which they sell.
So the bigger and more user maintained the Linux community becomes the less it costs IBM, HP and Sun to make sure Linux is a viable option, and a good reason for them to cooperate.
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
So I'm curious if anyone else saw the girl with the BSD daemon tattoo, and if perhaps someone knows her name in the interests of tracking her down and proposing. :P
Andrew
Oh what a fucking surprise. Something does not go his way and he walks off, I am sooo shocked. _every_ fucking time the going gets tough Bruce starts running like a West Virginian teenage girl from her dad.
Sun doesn't require their contractors to piss in a bottle. Perhaps that's one reason why they have better people; and I've worked at both places, several times.
Thanks,
The Goatse.cx Troll
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fwiw one of the boxes at the microsoft stand was rooted and rebooted with red hat 7.3
pics of it all are floating around somewhere...