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LWCE Wrapup
An anonymous reader writes "Extremetech.com reports that: 'Computer scientists from think tank SRI will present a novel take on distributed computing at LinuxWorld, all in a search for a little lost penguin.' For more information on Centibots, head over to the Centibots Project homepage." ReadthePaper writes "I just read a great interview with Jon "Maddog" Hall of Linux International." And finally, Hawkxor writes "Sun Microsystems VP Jonathon Schwartz demoed Sun's new desktop-oriented Linux distro 'Mad Hatter' and 3-D Desktop Environment 'Looking Glass' at LinuxWorld. Sounds pretty cool."
Some guy from SCO held a gun at my head, and said I had to pay $100 to leave the Linux conference. It felt like robbery, but he said it was just licensing. I'm not sure if I believe that.
Hahahha. Mod this up!
"The thing I worry about most with the open source community is the sentiment that open source is somehow different. It isn't," he said.
Sounds just like the typical Sun opinion about Linux (and open source) in general. They miss the point and focus on the free-as-in-beer part (and therefore focus on producing cheap solutions) instead of the free as in speech part (and cooperate with the developers a little more).
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Crudely Drawn Games
Who wants to bet that Sun is using OpenServer as their base distro?
...they should have programmed the bots to go looking for all that SCO-infringing kernel code.
Or beer.
(did I spell that right?)
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
Anyone else notice that garbage in the side bar...
And you expect me to belive anything else that page says after that?
Hmm 90% less then microsoft products.. thats still too much to charge.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
So would that be Kenny (or whoever wears red) from SouthPark as #5 there in the pic?
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
I clicked on the link, fully expecting to see robot centipedes. After all, it's called "Centibots", so what else could it be, right ? My excitement piqued when I saw the title: "Linux Powered Robot Swarm Descends on LinuxWorld". Excellent! Not just a single centipede robot, but a whole swarm of them, attacking LinuxWorld! Imagine my disappointment when I learned that these were not killer Linux centipede robots, but a rather ordinary swarm of peaceful robots, powered by Linux. Oh well, I guess that's pretty cool too.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
running on a proprietary SRI PacketHop network
Proprietary network closing in around the penguin - NOT an image that fills me with joy.
Any idea why this can't run on plain ol' 802.11?
to explore and map an area that is inaccessible to human, such as a building full of toxic gas or smoke.
"Thanks to the efforts of these robots, we now know that this building we couldn't enter due to its being filled with toxic gas does contain chemical weapons. And we've found that this other building we couldn't enter due to smoke is indeed on fire and has people inside; once the fire's died down, we'll know exactly where to go to get them out."
The coolest voice ever.
...who was responsible for the Tom Servo color scheme and the rather-fruitily-named "ROBOTO" in the second pic.
That dude standing in the hallway is my guess.
The coolest voice ever.
'Looking Glass' was the first commercial dekstop released by Caldera in Caldera Network Desktop 1.0 (though it was some commercial desktop that they purchased the rights to). Go figure.
This isn't the same Looking Glass released by Caldera/SCO around 1995, is it?
Sun has maintained an air of mystery about what specific Linux distribution will form the basis of Mad Hatter, and yesterday Schwartz declined to name the distribution that his demonstration was based on,
Let me take the aura of mystery away- it's obviously based on Red Hat. If it wasn't I'm sure Red Hat would take serious issue in the product name.
One fun thing that happened at LinuxWorld was this guy who decided to put up a Penguin Computing poster on Microsoft's booth without them knowing it. He walked over the booth with me behind him as camera-man and talked with the lady there for a while and I, myself, didn't even notice that he had put up the poster! See a close-up and the full metal jacket.
linux is still less useful and stability than XP. Why can't you losers just accept that?
Does anyone know of demo movies/images of Sun's "Looking Glass" GUI?
Man that guy was such a loser.
Face it you terrorists, Linux is illegal. It was stolen from SCO. Just a reminder, if you are caught using Linux you will be sent to a FEMA concentration camp. Linux does not have a place in the New World Order, so turn in your copies of Linux, along with your guns, at your local Office of Homeland Security.
Sincerely,
Herr Ashcroft
they're following the white rabbit
Please put my balls in your mouth.
Love Always,
News For Turds
Apparently those cool spikes on the helmets made cool targets in the trenches.
Oracle promoted their "Unbreakable Linux Pavilion". I considered trying to break it but figured Moscone Center security wouldn't like that, so I just sat down for a speech. As the guy was talking, one of the signs fell off the podium.
One booth (it might have been Computer Associates) needed a "grammar checker" that could remove "extraneous" quotation "marks".
Microsoft had a medium sized pavilion. Even with how crowded the place was, most people avoided it like the plague.
Novell is porting its products to Linux. This is the probably the most important development going on in the entire computer industry right now. Novell's administration tools are generally considered top-notch but nobody uses them because nobody wants to learn Novell's OS when they can use other tools available on familiar Windows or Sun. Novell is porting its client-side tools as well. They have a cross-platform Groupwise client in beta right now. For many organizations that stuck with Novell, Groupwise has been a killer app preventing desktop Linux deployment. With Novell filling the gaps of groupware and LDAP network administration, Linux becomes more suitable for the business desktop. Still, Novell has to learn to undercut Windows's price for equivalent functionality. One of the big reasons NT caught on was because it was cheaper than Novell.
Genaware is the only company I've seen so far offering GIS products for Linux. Unfortunately, the screenshots they had make their products look ugly as hell, and I can't tell if you can actually edit GIS data with them or just display it. They didn't have any leaflets, but gave me a demo disk that they had hidden under the counter.
Most of the displays were directed towards IT directors and engineers. There was very little there for desktop users. The KDE booth promoted Kolf, which kicks ass. There is a Knoppix for Kids distro which I haven't tried out yet. There is also a Knoppix DVD which includes more programs than the CD distro.
The Zynot Foundation (the Gentoo fork) was totally unprepared. They bought themselves a booth and didn't know what to do with it, so you basically had two guys sitting in the back of the booth playing with their laptops while people would intermittently come by and ask "Who are you?".
There was nothing from VA/OSDN/Sourceforge/Slashdot. I don't think CmdrTaco and crew even made it. I miss the old "relax and have fun" party-like attitude at previous conventions where Slashdot would be showing anime and you could deathmath other attendees at the Red Hat booth. A little of that stayed on in the Gentoo booth, which was showing off an RPG and the most crudely drawn anime I have ever seen (it looked like those Conan O'Brien sketches where he takes a picture of a celebrity and makes the mouth move). The booth was in an aisleway, though, so you couldn't actually sit down to watch the movie or play the game.
Copyleft did have two rest areas with their Penelope Penguin cartoons. In one of them, Penelope asks "where is Brian Aker when you need him?" Who the hell is Brian Aker, I thought. Turn the corner, see a nerdish fellow with long hair, look at his nametag: "Brian Aker / MySQL Developer". That answers that question. As far as other celebrities go, Bruce Perens was there but I didn't see anyone else whose name I was familiar with.
Now I have this big pile of propaganda on the kitchen table to go through and read.
Yes, the duct tape adds that extra bit of class to an already mature action! Next time at least use double-sided tape.
Tell me more about looking glass. It sounds very interesting. I've been looking forward to a 3D desktop for some time. It honestly seems like the natural progression. So far I think by far the best concept is croquet, but it seems so far from becoming something as runnable as today's linux desktops that something like looking glass, backed by a major company really catches my eye. Hopefully it is what croquet will be.
I do security
SuSE happened to have their area right next to Microsoft's. I attended a presentation for Openexchange (SuSE's answer to Microsoft Exchange). The presenter would occasionally say things like "and later I'll explain how Openexchange saves you money over SOME OTHER GROUPWARE PRODUCT WHO SHALL REMAIN NAMELESS", while staring at the Microsoft guys.
In the end I received a Geeko plush toy and a copy of their boxed professional desktop product. Yaaa swag.
And doing it right in public, so everyone knows he's clueless.
"The thing I worry about most with the open source community is the sentiment that open source is somehow different. It isn't," he said.
They like linux because somehow, the gods smiled upon it, and somehow - by magic - it's "better and it's cheaper". By adopting this attitude, you can see that they miss th eentire point - that Linux is cheaper and better because it's free, not in spite of it.
They show that if success in the IT world ever comes down to who can deploy, support and enhance Linux the best, IBM will wind up eating thier lunch, because they at least know when to keep thier mouths shut, and also know when to defer to an actual Linux company when necessary. Jonathan Schwartz may be disapointed to discover fairly soon that not only open source development is "different." The entire industry is "different" and Sun's not keeping up.
The globalization of IT is forcing the best of breed to appear from the U.S. technology sector, and I suspect it's similar in Europe. Those of us who are surviving have to show adaptability, flexibility, and a to-the-bone cost effectiveness that precludes both proprietary technologies and goofy language suites that are only popular because your CEO wants to beat another CEO and spent billions of dollars marketing them.
I've come to some realizations lately, and it's made me a better developer and admin. If I can't fix it, I won't use it -- everything breaks, and it costs too much to route around a piece of broken black box. If it can't be used to serve multiple purposes, I can't use it -- it costs too much to learn one-shot technologies, and even more to try and force generalization from them.
The freedom that open source provides makes it possible for me to adopt these two important stances, while providing customer satisfaction, the very best business value, and lower prices than my competition.
Sun does not live in that world of "better, cheaper, faster" and as long as thier VPs continue to announce they don't get it, I'll look for my tech elsewhere.
eWeek also runs an article on MadHatter and LookingGlass:
link here
does anyone know of photo's of the GUI?
you fail it !
asshat !
Anyone see Minority Report?
Linux creator Linus Torvalds may be the main mouthpiece for open source, but another open-source evangelist-John "Maddog" Hall-is working hard behind the scenes to spread adoption of Linux.
I would say that Maddog is the "main mouthpiece" of OSS, and that Linus is the one who works behind the scenes.
References
[1] Attended a talk by Maddog earlier this year. (Believe me, he enjoys talking)
[2] Read "Just for Fun", Linus' autobiography
For the few who don't know, Dodgson was in some ways the Douglas Adams of his day - the ideas in Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are as linked to cutting edge science of the day, and as riddled with social comment, as the Hitchhiker's Guide series. Dodgson was also a 19th C uber-geek, being a photographer of the sort that made his own photographic plates. In the absence of databases, he developed a cross referencing system for all his correspondence so he could keep track of everything. I guess he was born about a hundred and fifty years too early, but for which he would probably have been something like Chief Scientist at Google. He's a wonderful choice for names for elements of Sun's new desktop paradigm.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Yes, he would fit in very well today. His favorite photo subject was naked little girls.
Is that like Windows CE, only better?
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
I was at the keynote where Mr. Schwartz demonstrated the Looking Glass desktop. The major points:
That pretty much was the revolution of Looking Glass. There were gasps of wonderment and plenty of glee in the audience. Reminds me of when people were going to walk around in 3D chat environments and talk to each other in real virtual rooms. As for improving productivity or ease of desktop use, there's no hope here, it's just a bunch of useless eye candy.
If the keyboard and mouse are still the main input devices for a computer, you're much better off with switching virtual desktops and Alt+Tab and Alt+Shift+Tab. If you're shooting for Minority Report style stuff, I still think a layered/switchable mainly 2D with lots of semanticky associations will do better than a 3D environment.
- Victorian upper class attitude to young children - Dodgson was part of the culture
- Parents always present
- Everybody knew what he was doing- his pictures were publicly exhibited.
Like most geeks, Dodgson had some major hangups, but they were not as crude as you seem to want to make out.Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Direct link to the Looking Glass post... and a hi-res version of the jpg (it's a time exposure made from my seat of the projection screen... mileage may vary etc.)... just for /. comments readers.
Rules? We have no rules. We're trying to accomplish something. - Thomas Edsion
I have fewer problems with linux and bsd then i have with XP. Its as simple as that.
As a disclaimer i support approx 10000 users that are mostly running XP, as does one of my workstations.
The stablity of the XP machine is somehwat less then my other BSD based workstation. They use identical hardware.
I do admit however, as windows 2000 ( both server and workstation ) matured, it was useable and not THAT much worse, but in pure numbers *nix is still more stable if managed properly.
---- Booth was a patriot ----