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Scenes From Bob Young's New Tech Circus

Posted by timothy on from the circuses-need-elephants dept.

Chris Strider writes "Bob Young has left Red Hat, but he's still been keeping busy. I recently went to his new venture, the Lulu Tech Circus. I have to admit some of the stuff there was pretty cool, especially the robotics. On the other hand, some of it was pretty weird, like the electronic band with the alien heads. Anyway, the local online TV station RTPTV.com put up some video scenes from the Circus if you want to watch it."

4 of 63 comments (clear)

  1. Bob Young left Redhat? by Troy+H+Parker · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Jesus, I need to keep a closer watch on the news, I never heard he left!

    1. Re:Bob Young left Redhat? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting
      I have it on good authority that the reason he left Redhat because he thought there decision to go with the metacity windowmanager was boneheaded. After working for many years to provide flexibility and power to linux users, he was dismayed that with the decision to take all configuration options away from the user.

  2. Re:Left Redhat? by SerpentMage · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Yeah we have been living under a rock, since I looked at the Redhat management team and I did not find Bob Young....

    When did this happen?

    --

    "You can't make a race horse of a pig"
    "No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
  3. Re:Hrmm by Patrick · · Score: 4, Interesting
    the presence of people dressed up in ridiculous suits, jugglers, and a square-shouldered man in drag does not make an event a 'circus'

    It just made the show corny. Everyone who went had to listen to a "ringmaster" speech about how great the circus was. Ick.

    At many stages it's unclear whether the robots are remote or ai-controlled.

    IIRC, every robot shown in the video was remote-controlled. The climber, the ping-pong ball grabbers, the volley ball grabbers, and the battlebot were definitely all controlled. The Triangle Ameteur Robotics club had some (presumably) autonomous robots, but they weren't showing them doing anything.

    One thing that was very cool was a robot climbing up a wall and what looked like looking for holes to put something into.

    Mindstorms, built by one of the guys presenting it. (And trying very hard to sell $200 Mindstorms kits to anyone who showed any interest.) My impression was that it was tuned for pretty specific hole locations. I don't think it was "looking" for holes.

    I must say, I am a bit surprised to see this on Slashdot.

    The Tech Circus was run by Bob Young, Mr. Red Hat. So I'm not surprised it got coverage at Slashdot.

    One last lame bit that wasn't shown in the videos: the computer cluster on the show floor, which was offline for most of the time I was there, was running Windows. I know Mr. Young is divesting himself from Red Hat as fast as he can, but you'd think there'd be at least some loyalty to Linux at his show. Nah.

    Overall: unpolished, unremarkable, and underattended.