Robin's Report From LWCE

For everyone who can't make it to New York, roblimo has posted impressions of LWCE's first day, in which he takes note of Start buttons, prods Dell about laptops factory loaded with Linux, and watches the Golden Penguin Bowl. I suppose he was also asking vendors some of your questions.

Comments

various answers

[tech_rich]

To answer various questions...

1. the number of gray-bearded, beer-bellied geeks in attendance is down dramatically from previous years. the number of suits is way up.

2. very poor swag. about all you're likely to get is a pen. hardly any t-shirts.

3. i don't know where anyone gets the idea there are booth babes here. perhaps with a ratio of 99 men for every female, some people think these are booth babes. The women working the show are your average marketing department types. None of them are wearing spandex. None of them are models. Nothing like you see at CES, Comdex or 99 percent of the average trade show in the U.S. Apparently some guys don't get to see women wearing makeup in real life.

4. The guys manning the Microsoft booth told me not a single person has hassled them. One guy said at the last LinuxWorld show, they had one guy giving them a hard time.

Overall, considering the frigid temps in NY this is a good turnout. Maybe as many people here as were at the last few Linux shows. But the crowd is way different: suits, not t-shirts. Hardly a ponytail in site.

Re:various answers

[signe]

2. very poor swag. about all you're likely to get is a pen. hardly any t-shirts.

You obviously haven't been looking. As far as decent swag goes, I have:

1) From HP's VIP day (free registration was required), I got a decent laptop backpack, several pens/pads of paper combo, a nice badgeholder with paper, pen, and compartments, lunch, and an offsite cocktail reception (with cast members from The Sopranos).

2) From IBM's Customer Day (again, free reg, don't have to be a customer): A heavy canvas bag, poster, crystal penguin paperweight, poster, and lunch.

3) SuSE is giving away stuffed lizards

4) RedHat is giving away red baseball caps (have to catch them during the 3 times a day they do it, posted times). And if you wear it around, they've been picking 9 people a day to get a copy of AS 2.1, or a choice of books.

5) SCO is giving away DVDs

6) HP has t-shirts, DVDs, and small penguins.

7) Mainline has foam penguin things

There are a number of other people using tshirts as prizes (one per session type of thing). And you have your normal assortment of pins, pens, and CDs. This is just a quick survey of what I have so far.

And if you work with a vendor a little, or even if you talk with them and engage them in a decent conversation, rather than just walking up and expecting them to hand you their best stuff so you can walk away and never speak to them again, you can get some decent stuff. I have a gyroscope, as well as a few other things.

Anyone who's seriously concerned about the level of swag is going to the conference for the wrong reasons. Same type of people who want Flash and Java over real content on a website. There are a lot of good vendors here to talk with. The conferences are actually on topics that you want information about. LPI's giving free certification tests (half of what's required for the certs). There's a number of smaller ".org" booths, that were sponsored by the conference sponsors, with good stuff like JBoss, LTSP, and LUGs.

If you want to pay to go get swag, save your money.

-Todd

snownets essid/WEP key

[Anonymous Coward]

In case you are at Linuxworld and would like to use the wireless "hotspot" here is the info:

ESSID: linuxworldny
WEP Key: aaaabbbbcccc00001111222233