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PC Expo '99 Coverage
Reporting live from New York's Javits, Ars Technica has gone the latest round of coverage, with info about Quake III and BeOS, amongst others , including Simcity 3000 on Be, along with the sorry state of the Linux "pavilion". That's one of those down sides - the Linux shows themselves are usually pretty rocking, but outside of that turf, the showcasing is pretty lacking - preaching to the choir situation.
"Linux shows themselves are usually pretty rocking, but outside of that turf, the showcasing is pretty lacking "
Well that sounds like Linux to me. just like the user interface "it's pretty lacking"
I'm really happy that games are coming to the
BeOS. This will attract people to try the system out and see what a stable and fast system Be Inc
have done.
I want. I want now!
The only trade show I've been to was the LWCE back in february. For the most part, the booths were dull, just companies with young guys (and a token woman or two) dressed in business casual.
But back in a corner, they had the Debian folks, the slashdot booth, and the FSF all crammed together. That was the only really interesting area. The debian booth had music blaring from that car mp3 player, controlled by an SE/30 running Debian. The slashdot guys were busy haggling over shirt prices.
The FSF was truly consistently entertaining, especially when RMS would go from talking insightfully about sociopolitical issues to yelling "Get out of here! GO!" to anybody who dared to suggest that maybe not all corporations would eventually move to free software. Still, it was interesting and thought-provoking stuff, certainly more so than the lame Ron Popeil-style WordPerfect advocacy Corel was doing. No wonder the Linux showing at the PC Expo was lame -- only the lamers were there!
You are a dumbass.. i've been going to pcexpo since age 15.. that's 5 years.. if u shut your mouth flash.. you badge.. no one EVER cares if you go in or not
those guys get paid minimum wage.. they could care less
You are a dumbass.. I've been going to pcexpo since age 15.. that's 5 years.. if u shut your mouth.. flash you badge.. no one will say a word.
Those guys get paid minimum wage.. they couldn't care less
At 16 I bet you don't know your head from a garbage can as a programmer. Don't forget that the people that are actually designing and building all this hardware and software have degrees and years of experience. Which of course means they are generally twice your age or older.
BTW my name is Robert Young
Pretty Lacking is true.
My favorite is the perpetual lie about how "unstable" the Windoze operating system is. My company has several NT servers that have never crashed and have only been shutdown for upgrades to reboot. Months at a time.
As an "IT suit" as so many of you like to put it. I can only say that I will never bet my career recomending a free user supported OS. And after the behavior of so many of the clowns in the "Linux Community" Linux will never get a good word from me until hell freezes over.
Saying that the system is free has No impact on an IT manager that considers that open source code is in essence giving every hacker on earth a road map to every weakness in the system. One service (Daemon) one stupid mistake in hundreds of thousands of lines of code. What a nightmare. goto rootshell and look at the number of exploits by OS Yeah sure, NT sucks. Not.
Its rude, but I have to agree:
Only a dumbass would tell the guards/registrars that you're under 18, especially since they don't check for age identification.
Compound that, you probably payed the entry fee didn't you? Couldn't glom a 4 key code...
Programmers need to be able to get things done, improvise, and are generally concerned with only physical reality, not some arbitrary set of rules that the screws try to impose. You show no proclivity to those personality traits. Keep your grades up, especially in English Lit...
"preaching to the choir situation."? Do you even know what "preaching to the choir" means?
Also, there are a lot of computer shows around, Comdex, Interop, PC expo, beyond the Linux shows. Most companies probably don't have the resources to do to all of them. Even with RedHat IPOing, they still don't have the resources of an Oracle or IBM to hit every major show they would want to sell at. What might be a better idea is if the Linux companies pooled their resources under say Linux International, and sent one rep from each company to sell the Idea of Linux. Then they can be sold on VA or RedHat or SuSE.
Finally, If the audience of PC Expo is IT professionals, then maybe a less glitzy presence is what they want. Selling to the Linux Community is different than selling to the Suits, even if there is some cross over at both kinds of shows.
Chris
I'm not speaking for any Linux Comapnies or any Linux shows here. Just tossing out stuff to think about.
--
3rd Annual Atlanta Linux Showcase
-- www.primeharbor.com
The Linux "pavillion" was kind of a farce. A handful of booths - Red Hat wasn't very big, either. No cool demos, no publicity going on...
Helilame.
The Linux pavillion at PC Expo was definitely disappointing. I expected to see the biggest and best support yet for Linux and, as mentioned in the original post, there were just a couple of undermanned, small booths that weren't showing much. Where was VA Linux Systems with all of their recent backing?
My first thought was maybe Linux won't make it to the big time after all.
My second thought was that I better not pour my life savings into RedHat stock.
Ralph Alberti
I visited the show on Wednesday. There really wasn't anything new from last year's show.
:-) However, the Compaq booth wasn't all bad--you could sit for a few minutes, and they handed out Compaq chocolate bars.
:-)
While I didn't have much time to visit the BeOS booth (I was at the show with my boss) what I did see wasn't flattering. They had some video playing on BeOS and quite frankly, the quality stunk. The framerate didn't seem very high, and it seemed quite jumpy. This wasn't the BeOS I remembered seeing last year at this show.
I haven't seen anyone mention it before, but Castlewood was there in a big way (for a small startup). They had some corny comedian handing out plastic noisemakers and getting people to make lots of noise. (They were located in the very back of the first floor and needed something to draw crowds.) I got to hold the Orb (SCSI external). The drive itself seemed sturdy as well as the cartridges. I think I'll purchase one as soon as I'm sure they're not going to break after a month or two like SyQuest's 135MB and 230MB drives did.
The Compaq booth was just plain stupid. They had some dancers doing a jazzy routine singing about "e-biz city." They also had this corny guy they called "Dr C." (I think) talking about how Compaq invented everything from the first firewall to who knows what else. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Compaq hasn't done anything extraordinary since they produced the first IBM compatible machine. Since then they've just purchased companies which have done extraordinary things. (And lets not forget their valuable input into debacles such as EISA!
Perhaps the most amusing portion of the show was watching the herds of people going crazy at the Iomega booth. Here is a company who is raping its customers by charging $10 for 100MB. They make it up with colorful marketing, and people love it. Most of the rest of the world uses MO drives. I guess, and I can say this because I am one, most Americans are idiots. (I'm American, not an idiot
And yes the Linux Pavilion was a sorry sight. RedHat had a guy and a girl running a very tiny booth. Both of them looked like they wanted to run out of there quickly and get away from the crowds hording around their tiny space. Caldera had a much more professional offering, but still wasn't all that impressive.
I belive this show is dying. Last year the lower floor was full. This year it was half empty. Companies like Dell didn't even attend. Perhaps Miller Freeman (the company that runs the show) has been charging too much. Perhaps companies who already do plenty of marketing (like Dell) can't be bothered with the expense? Does anyone have any better reasons?
You are pitiful man/woman/whatever!
The kernel needs a Gtk/Gnome-based post-install device configuration tools "a la" make xconfig. (Better sig coming soon
Man, I don't know what Expo this guy was at, but he pegged it all wrong.
I seem to remember talking to the guy who actually did the Be port for quake III. Hmmm... IdSoftware is in charge of it? I don't think so. And I find it very hard to believe that anyone at the booth told him that, perhaps he misheard someone. Unlike most of the other booths, the Be people there were some of the most important parts of the company. There was no one there who would have told this guy that Id was doing the port.
I don't remember the guy's name off hand, but when I asked him about the Be port being multi threaded he said:
"Yes, I just got the code from Id a week or two ago, I worked on it a bit and now the Be port is multithreaded"
Or something along those lines.
And the comment about the Word processing capabilities for the iToaster, Everyone there was more than willing to tell you about it. I didn't even need to ask, they just said: "yeah, it's running Gobe"
Over all I think the Be booth was the best one by far, and any comments otherwise are misinformed or just wrong. As for available software they told me that their PR department works faster than their engineers, so the signs up were a little to optimistic, (meaning, not everything listed is done being ported over).
Yes, the linux booth was rather sad. Redhat did a piss-poor job on that one.
And the Alpha Booth, what was wrong with the skit? I found it one of the best booths at the show, and was upset that it was on the bottom floor and not up with the bigger players. Unless IT managers become zombies when they go to these shows, (which isn't the case according to the ones I know), a company trying to make themselves seen and have fun at the same time is a good thing to do.
Now Viewsonics dancing birds, that was lame... but what are you going to do?
Troll much?
You've managed to take the point ARS was making and spin it 180. Ars was complaining that the vendors at Linux shows don't show their wares at the mainstream shows.
In other words, they were complaining about a LACK of promotion.
That's right, it's only more stable than windoze, and completely free. The fact that companies like RealNetworks, Intel, and IBM are supporting it doesn't hurt either.
"I don't like this deep shit about crazy crap"
(Just to put this in perspective, I'm 16 years old, so I don't have a driver's license yet.)
Thrusday morning, my father and I drove all the way out to the Javits Center in the city (from Long Island) for a fun afternoon of browsing around at various exhibits and various other stuff. We get there at about 11:00, and proceed to the registering booths to pick up ID tags. Around this point, we see on the bottom of the registration form that no minors below the age of 18 are allowed on the floor. That doesn't sound good. So we go ask a person at the information booth if that means I can't go in. It does. So we go up to the show managers section, or whatever its called. Due to insurance reasons and other things, it's their policy (dictated by their parent company in England) that nobody under 18 can be on the exhibit floor. No exceptions. Period.
Well. That sucks. That day was pretty dissapointing, as you can imagine. Does anyone understand why they have these strange policies? I've been to other computer shows at the Javits Center, and they don't have any age requirement or anything. While I was there, I also saw a man and his young daughter that had the same problem. I'd assume they went home dissapointed too. I saw a pair of 14-15 year olds walk up the stairs to the registration section and back down again without name tags. FWIW, I'm a programmer and have set up a local network at home for shared internet access and I'd guess I know more about comptuers, etc. that a good deal of the people there. Anyone have a similar experience anywhere?
Does anybody know of intentions to port SimCity to Linux? I'm having a "Hey, me too!" reaction...
--t
Likux is not in a sorry state. When you get up close I've seen countless people go "And did you say this stuff was all free?" Then that's usually followed by comments on how robust this OS is and how it's really in a postition to start compeating w/ the enterprise Unixes (Solaris, IRIX, Tru64, ect.) out there. These are pople who though Linux was not ready for enterprise untill theay really took a good hard long look at it. So in my experence the reverse is true. There's not enough publicity and when people who know what it is there looking at take a closer look theay are usualy plesently suprised at the power and comunity support behind Linux.