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Review Of LinuxWorld 2004
jamienk writes "I went to the LinuxWorld convention at the Javits Center in NYC again this year. This is where the post-post-industrial corporate complex flexes for us consumers and infrastructure staff to see. And the smell of Corps was thick in the air. So was the nerdy, curious, driven, hacker odor. Guess which vibe won?"
"Novel: SUSE is presented as completely separate from Novel, they're not even co-branded (yet?)."
the SuSE standard edition CD set was a co-branded distro, including both Novell and SuSE software.
If you install off of the UnitedLinux CD, its UnitedLinux. If you install off of the SuSE 1 CD, its Suse.
UnitedLinux is dead, thanks to Darl.
Maybe it will be revived after SCO (CalderaSCO) is dead.
Having left the show with such a distro, I can fully state (evidence in hand) that his point is wrong.
Pd
Well, I guess the difference is that scalability is used to impress managers, not laypersons.
I have misplaced my pants.
Just when I was ready to try linux again, I read this paragraph and remembered why I got rid of it last time.
To be fair, this was developer software under development, not something for your average desktop user. Here's more info.
Yeah, no poop.
My work life is predicated on all the motherhood issues of performance, sizing, architecture, availability, scalability, maintainability, operability etc. These certainly are not just meaningless buzz words, although they might seem that way to a poser.
This guy is really judgemental. Sheesh.
We were not playing Dance Dance Revolution, we were playing PyDance, a from-scratch DDR lookalike that was written by one of the guys on our mailing list; it runs off a Linux box. It's just so well done that you thought it was regular DDR.
But those are all perfectly useful words. You know how people make fun of us geeks because we make up all that jargon? (WIMP, GUI, IDE, SCSI, ATAPI, RS232, ...) Well we do it because we need words to describe the things we're talking about. Business is the same. "Enterprise" means something. It means a large company. "Engineer" is a good word for what I do, seeing as I have a degree in Software Engineering from an engineering university. I'm happy to be called an engineer. "Scalable" means something which can be expanded to handle more transactions per second, or more storage, or whatever, easily. That's not a common thing - I've worked on many older (and some newer) systems which certainly are NOT scalable. So using it as a differentiating factor when trying to sell me a product is GOOD. Of course, just telling me it's scalable isn't enough, but people sell cars by saying they're "comfortable", or "safe" or "ecnomical". There's no difference. It gets me kind of mad when I hear one bunch of smart people completely dissing another bunch of smart people just because they don't understand them, or think they're "better". It just shows you've got a closed mind and a serious superiority complex. Get over it. If it wasn't for big business paying the bills, there would be no software industry, and most /. ers would be working at McDonalds.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
The AMD people were surprisingly clueless. I asked a few of them which socket a particular opteron system on display was using (Looked like it was 939), but most of them started mumbling "socket? what do you mean?", or worse. Some of the systems they had up were pretty cool though, like the dual opteron rackmounts with watercooling. .ORG section we had the usual debian, BSD and Linuxboot people, fun to talk with as always. Didn't get a conversation going with the Gentoo or KDE guys, but the projects were still pretty interesting. EFF wasn't here this year, unfortunately, meant to buy some stickers.
The sun booth was another disappointment in terms of the staff. I wanted to see how reponsive the Sun Rays were, so I walked up to one of their public terminals and started looking around, starting a couple applications, etc. The nearby sales drone stood and glared at me, as if I was going to steal the bloody thing, the entire time (after asking "May I help you?" in that "What the fuck are you doing here, kid, get lost!" tone). I just walked away.
Other corporate booths were similar; either the staff didn't know that much beyond their script, or they didn't want to talk to me, by the benefit of me being a high school student (i.e. a PFY). It's appropriate, I suppose, since I'm not going to be making any million-dollar purchases anytime soon, but still not cool. The IBM booth was a notable exception; one guy showed me GeoProbe, a very neat visualization system. The program had two sets of seismological data loaded from an oil field in England (several square kilometers), and it could be manipulated in real time in various ways. It was running under RHEL 3.0 on a prototype opteron with only 4GB of ram; pretty impressive, considering the complexity of the model. In the mainframe section, two engineers showed me the new zSeries servers, and explained how the hardware worked. Really cool guys (both the mainframe and GeoProbe people), knew their stuff and were really friendly. Otherwise, Oracle's grid seemed promising, but I wasn't able to get too many technical details.
In the
O'Reilly had a pretty good deal on books, 25% off and a free shirt (the shirts only lasted through the first half of the day). Honeynet gave a pretty interesting presentation in the back of the O'Reilly booth.
There was also a robot rolling around the show floor, Sprocket (not sure of the spelling, it might have been different). It demonstrated pretty impressive speech recognition capabilities, talked to the presenters, made crude jokes and movie references. It seemed pretty capable of sustaining normal conversation and was able to recognize people based on their clothing (although it misinterpreted blue lettering on my t-shirt as a blue jacket). Unfortunately, I didn't get to talk to it for more than a couple of minutes.