CeBIT Tidbits

MadMan2 has sent us a report from CeBIT. Little bits about bigass Samsung Dimms, Not so upgradable Palm Pilots, SuSE, AOL-Scape and Applix. Hit the link below to read MadMan2's machine gun of little bits to read. MadMan2's report from CeBIT:

• Siemens offers Linux servers with a free tux!
• more than half of the Intel people present never heard of Merced (one thought it was a new product in cooperation with Mercedes (g)))
• I was not allowed access to an online machine, otherwise these tidbits would have arrived sooner :( ). They say they all fear hackers. They are: UUNet, Netscape, aol, M$, compu$serve, Telecom Deutschland and various smaller companies. Oh yes: I found no cybercafes, even amidst the companies who sell them.
• AOL, Sun and Netscape all officially refuse any comments on the future of netscape server products. About the browser Netscape ackowledged the cooperation with mozilla.
• 3Com officially denies it will offer a hardware upgrade or trade-in to Palm IIIx and V. They claim a memory upgrade of 2M is the same (I don't know about the US, but in Europe the upgrade is more expensive than the Palm III. There was a company who offered 8M simms for Palm III, but I forgot who it was.
• Samsung displayed a working 1 GB dimm on a dual Xeon motherboard. Not bad for a workstation *g*
• The suse stand was very popular because they were distributing the 6.1 beta for x86 and alpha
• Linux International as well as MadDog can be visited at Hall 6.
• While speaking of Linux: only free Suse and Caldera CDs can be found. Redhat said the forgot to ship the CDs in time
• The linux Sap demo wasn't working quite well
• The German word for gridlock is "stau"
• according to the German keyboard manufacturor Cherry a company called "Linux" will be ordering Penguin keys. When I made a note of this on my palm a Cherry technician told me he was amazed that "thinghy" worked without a keyboard ;)
• HP Belgium is according to HP International Supplies "just a local distributor"
• According to StarOffice the world still exists of the USA and Germany.
  StarOffice still doesn't have presentation runtime viewsers because they don't see a need for such an program! Not really nice of them, is it?
• Almost all of the exhibitors seem to forget that CeBiT is an international expo. German docs by the millions, English specs are very hard to come by.
• People at SCO acknowledged they will be capable of running Linux binaries. But they still didn't know whether one has to compile the programs on a linux box or on a SCO machine
• General impression: not enough gadgets & freebies, too many visitors, not enough nice babes.
• Buzzwords were: erp, ewe, superb superior sales system solution (I guess they forgot "silly")
• Next year's CeBit will be in coorperation with Expo 2000. It will be from February 24th till March the 1st.

Comments

Cebit tidbits enhancement

[Candy]

• The Compaq (Digital) technician was very satiesfied with the Compaq Linux offerings. He confirmed a high customer demand for Linux-based server systems. The revealed that the German TÜV (Institutuion responsible for German cars having a certain security standards. Should be introduced in the US. ;-) ) ordered 150 Linux-based servers. AFAI remember even Alphas. So far they are running Redhat on their machines but Alpha SuSE is probably not too far away.
  
• Informix also confirmed a great demand and customer interest for their Linux offerings.
  
• A SuSE Technician confirmend that early SuSE 6.0 had serious glibc2 signalling problems. Might this be solution for my Staroffice crashing over and over again? Therefore upgrading to 6.1 could be reasonable. The international version of 6.0 should not be affected.
  
• The englisch expression for the German word "Stau" is "Gridlock"
  
• All over all, the exhibitors are very satiesfied with the Cebit so far.
  
• IHMO the SuSE booth was disappointing small. In the booth people could be piled up 10 feet high, and oxygen level was dangerous low. (What really didnt matter that much, as you had to space to breath anyway.)
  
• NOT MANY FREEBIES???? Confirmed

8M upgrade for the Palm V

[stripes]

Is offered (or soon to be) by efig (see wfig.com, or www.efig.com, or something like that). They claim they'll charge about $150 to upgrade V, and very short turn around, or you can buy a "new" V from them (no price listed).

The upgrade does void your warentee, but efig will offer their own (apparently on the whole unit), no details on that yet.

So apparently it's a little early yet to decide to buy the upgrade, but it is coming...

Pity 3COM didn't offer a $600, or $550 Palm Vx with 8M. Maybe they will now.

Don't forget!

[bagel]

Probably the most important news, KDE winning the award for best software! Deserved more than a quicky post, considering that it beat every commercial vendor...