Slashdot Mirror
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.
"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
...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?
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!
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.
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.
I googled for "Looking glass desktop" and the first result was "Install New Icons in Caldera's Looking Glass Desktop. Coincidence or not?
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.
There is a photo on http://www.gulker.com/ If you scroll halfway down.
click here
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.