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Grand Tour: the Story of a Penguin and a Red Fedora
GaelDesign writes "The legendary Red Hat Road Tour 2002 is nearly at an end, and a good time was had by all. One of the most successful stops on the tour was the presentation at the O'Reilly and Associates headquarters in Sebastopol, California. Because the Red Hat RV's arrival was delayed due to traffic conditions, Tim O'Reilly gave a rousing speech beforehand that was well received by the audience. Read a detailed report of the event at The Idea Basket."
"Most of what was discussed wasn't all the exciting outside the context of the room...."
Okay, so then why dribble on about it for three pages? This was about the most boring, uninformative trip journal I've ever seen. The author got a good price on an O'Reilly book, heard O'Reilly speak, and saw a Red Hat 8 demo. Whoopeee. Drop by your local LUG and you can write a longer (and more interesting) synopsis of the goings-on than this author did. Don't waste your time on the link.
What's your damage, Heather?
Yea and if they did release it, then surely it'd just be an overview with numereous plugs in there for their other books such as:
p. 5, 10, 15, 20, 35
"We'll talk more about the chemical toliet in a latter chapter..."
p. 35
"The color of the Chemical Toliet is way beyond the scope of this book. Please refer to the 'OReilly Defininive Guide to Fecese and the thrones in which they are spawned'."
p. 6, 11, 16, 21, 36
"We'll talk more of the 'Red Hat Tour' in a latter chapter. For now, let's discuss other brief technologies that we have books about in which you can buy."
p. 200
"Although we mentioned 'The scope of the Red Hat Tour' in the title of this book, explaning it any deeper would be beyond the scope of this book. Lukily, we offer another book entitled 'Advanced Red Hat Tour description' in which you can purchase.
The Debian Road Trip was also planned, but no-one could figure out how to start the car for a long time. After reading thousands of pages of engine and transmission documentation they got underway, but then were stalled while the driver and passengers argued if a 4-wheeled vehicle was really 'stable' enough. Eventually it was decided that it was OK, but only if it ran on steam power and didn't include an FM radio.
At least they won't run out of toilet paper. Mmm, lay-flat binding...
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Road Touring Pengiuns For Dummies
Anybody got pages 2 & 3?
.NET. Tim had a lot of good points to make. In this brave new world, it's becoming increasingly apparent that the Internet is the computer. We're heading toward a time where in a functional sense there will be only one global computer, instead of a hundred million separate computers. Microsoft sees this coming, so what they're doing is basically building the operating system for this new "global computer". If we think of Web services as simply programming components distributed across many individual computers, then there has to be a set of easy-to-use tools and frameworks to build new applications for this platform. That's what Microsoft is trying to accomplish with .NET.
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Grand Tour: the Story of a Penguin and a Red Fedora
The Idea Basket > Articles
posted by Jared White on November 16, 2002 05:16 PM
Red Hat Road Tour 2002
Mission: to discover the state of Linux in America
Stop #16
The Place: O'Reilly and Associates, Sebastopol, CA
The Time: 7:00 PM (in fact, 7:50 PM, more on that later)
The Vehicle: a large red RV that was an amazing sight to behold
The Audience: members of the North Bay Linux Users Group, along with a few stray outsiders (like me)
Arrival
My friend and I arrived at the O'Reilly headquarters at around 6:35 PM (PST). For those of you who have yet to see O'Reilly's new digs just outside of downtown Sebastopol, they really are a striking set of buildings. Built in a country-cottage style with peaked roofs and gables, though large-scale and at least three stories high, they exude an old-fashioned, down-to-earth warmth and cheeriness that belie the ultra-modern high-tech activities commencing within their light grey-blue walls.
A fair number of people had already gathered in the conference-room-turned-presentation-center when we entered, but we were lucky to find seats relatively close to the front of the room. Nonetheless, it quickly turned out that pizza was on in another part of the building, and before you could count to twenty-three using only prime numbers, the room was deserted. However, since we had already eaten, it was time for us to take a look at the O'Reilly bookstore.
That was fun. Quite fun. Evil Geniuses in a Nutshell and books of a similar sort for sale were displayed on shelves covering an entire area next to the lobby in the front of the building. Thanks to the 20% off discount available to presumably anyone who bothered to show up, I left the store with O'Reilly's PHP Pocket Reference to give me great geeky reading pleasure in the cold wintery days ahead; and when my friend returned home later that night, XML in a Nutshell was tucked firmly underneath his arm.
An Unexpected Surprise
We got back to the conference room around 7:00 PM and were promptly informed that the Red Hat RV was quite late! Apparently, the lovely traffic problems of the San Francisco Bay Area had grabbed the folks from Red Hat and swallowed them whole, so we would have to wait a while. That was the bad news. The good news was that the time would be filled by a rousing little speech from none other than Tim O'Reilly himself! Since I had never seen one of Tim's presentations in person, this was quite a treat for me. As I would quickly discover, Tim's folksy, gentlemanly manner is well reflected in the buildings his business occupies. The subject of his speech, one presented by him a few times in the recent past (but one I'd never seen) was, at first, rather alarming: "Why Linux Doesn't Matter." You can be sure the audience laughed rather nervously at this strange topic for a geek gathering targeted mostly at die-hard Linux users. But what he had to say was, in fact, rather brilliant.
Tim's Speech in a Nutshell
Basically, the computer world is on the verge of a major paradigm shift. In the past, both users and developers have thought of computers in terms of what applications they can run and what system services are available to use. What is now beginning to change isn't that basic concept, but the definition of what an application or service actually is. Previous "killer apps" that helped accelerate the adoption of new computer systems were such apps as the first spreadsheet, or word processor, or even the Web browser. But now the killer apps are of a completely different nature. Tim said that he'd heard recently about someone who bought their first computer so that they could use amazon.com. Here was an "application" that didn't actually run on the computer locally at all. The computer was basically just an access point for getting onto the Internet, where all the really fun stuff was.
By now, Tim had brought up the (to some) unpleasant subject of Microsoft
Which brings us back around to Linux. In trying to think of what Linux and the Open Source heritage could bring to the table in the world of Web applications and services, Tim came up with an important idea. Linux from the very beginning embraced the basic UNIX philosophy of keeping everything modular and based on open communication. With a modular system, components can be replaced with different components by different developers, and because they all adhere to the same protocols, it works. Instead of using a philosophy of control to create a closed system, UNIX is all about communication and open standards. UNIX was the best platform to develop the Internet with because of that philosophy. Now Linux provides the best platform with which to develop new Web technologies and applications that can kick-start the transition to an Internet-based operating system environment.
In closing, Tim suggested that the more the Linux and Open Source communities focus on building this Internet OS using the UNIX philosophy of modularity and communication, compared with the Microsoft philosophy of control and complexity that places undue importance on tools in order to work with technology, the better. Instead of fearing Web services, we should be embracing them, albeit on our terms, not Microsoft's.
Elementary, my dear Watson
Just before the Red Hat RV finally arrived, Tim followed his speech with a short Q&A session. I won't go into all the details, but there is one thing I'd like to mention. With all this talk of Web services, I, of course, had to bring up Watson (and the copy-cat Sherlock 3 by Apple) as an excellent example of how data and functionality available on the Web could be repackaged in a more familiar desktop application form. Tim replied that he not only liked Watson a great deal, but wished there was a similar program for Linux! In addition, he mentioned Rendezvous as a good example of a simple technology "hack" will enable previously closed applications to open up their functionality to other computers and devices running on a network. For instance, a future version of iTunes will be able to share its playlists and music files with other copies of iTunes running on a local network. Bottom line from Tim O'Reilly: if you have a device or data that you think might turn out to be useful for someone else, make it accessible!
>Basically, the computer world is on the verge of a major paradigm shift...
Oh boy! I wish those damn paradigmns wouldn't keep shifting around like they do! They never stay still long enough so you can get a clean shot at them with a rifle. Hard critters to track too.
My Daddy shot a 80 pounder once! We had it stuffed and it nailed to the wall of the den.
Oh shit! Come to think of it, I think the critter was a *pangolin*, not a paradigm. Easy mistake to make tho.
I think paradigms make better eating tho.
The Red Hat road tour stoped at our University (SIUE) near St. Louis. For the most part almost everyone was very disipointed with the stop. It turned out to be more of a marketing ploy with them trying to sell the Red Hat Network, then a stop to realy explain the advantages of Linux and open source all together. I would have thought that they would have got it that a university is not the place for marketing, we want to hear from the Engineers, and talk about open source in general. The stop would have been more of a sucess if it's target audience would have been OIT(Office of Information Technology) then the students and faculty.
Grew up in Sebastopol. O'Reilly is a new arrival. Buildings weren't done last time I was in town. Very strange reading the description of my home town on Slashdot. Surreal. And I thought we were safe. More proof that safety through obscurity really isn't. Will have to check out the O'Reilly site over the holidays. They have a book store or do they just cut a break to the local independent (awesome) bookstore?
Part of the problem with any 'inside' Linux journalism (a big part of the reason I finally dropped my sub to Linux Journal magazine) is the 'yay for our team' mentality presented, exemplified in this article.
It reads like a marketing brochure written at Red Hat, not like an independent report. This seems to be a consistent problem with much Linux 'journalism' out there.
Writers have to learn to step out of their personal enthusiasm for the product being written about, or they come off like a proud dad describing Junior's last Little League game. Readers figure this stuff out, and it's not enough to preach to the choir.
Ok, this may well be off-topic, a troll, redundant, and/or flamebait, but...
The thing isn't even over and you're calling it legendary? Seems like a waste of a good word.
I don't have karma to burn, but my pre-coffee indignation wouldn't let this pass.
The editorial bias here goes from being obvious to absurd when nothing but a bit of marketing fluff gets described as 'legendary'.
Huh? It's still rpm (Redhat Package Manager). Admittedly it's a new _version_, Jeff Johnson has been slaving away making this thing kick ass, but it still behaves like rpm.
Now all you have to do is install synaptic and apt4rpm and you've got package-installation and management sewn up!
I knew we should have invited them to our LAN party (we had the room right after they left).
Fame has abandoned me again.
The Red Hat road tour stopped at our University (SIUE) near St. Louis. For the most part almost everyone was very disipointed with the stop. It turned out to be more of a marketing ploy with them trying to sell the Red Hat Network, then a stop to realy explain the advantages of Linux and open source all together.
It's logical for them to want to talk about that, since it's almost certainly going to be their main bread-and-butter product for the medium term. It works well enough, at this point, and is packaged exactly the right way for the business users it's primarily aimed at. I may or may not want to hear an entire presentation mostly to it, but it's understandable that they'd want to talk up its virtues.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com