Slashdot Mirror
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.
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...
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!
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
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...
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.
(sighs, rubs head)
And we wonder how the Linux community gets the reputation of being a bunch of arrogant, unapproachible assholes.
This is about as clever as the guy I knew in college who would go to Radio Shack and harrass the poor sobs working there for minimum wage about various electronic parts. He'd come out with a superior-looking smirk on his face, complaining that he had questions and *they* didn't have answers, as if the Radio Shack register monkeys should all have graduate degrees in EE.
I share the general feeling of unease at Microsoft's new attitude towards Linux (worry about a predator most when it's smiling at you), but harrassing the poor saps at their booth is akin to bothering your local Blockbuster clerk because you hate the MPAA.
Besides that, you shouldn't be so quick to trivialize MS. Remember, they can bring unimaginable resources to bear in a very short time, and just because they *haven't yet* come up with a way to crush, poison or outmode OSS doesn't mean that they *won't*.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
"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*/
Acutally they run Solaris and use linux for a number of their cgi boxes and real media servers.
_ __ __
They used IPlanet for their web server software and apache was making headway.
_______________________________________________
ACK
hiphop artist.
sulli
RTFJ.
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"
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.
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
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.
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?
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
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.
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
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.
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
The context of the post certainly implies that it was a few linux geeks intentionally mocking the MS boothers, with the implication that they were asking obscure (or, equally likely, nonsensical) questions, and then taking pride in not getting the answer they wanted.