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Comdex Mid-Week Quickies
We're rolling around the middle of the week for Comdex, and thought maybe people would like to hear some of the news. Linus was awarded person of the year by PC Magazine. Here at the Andover.net booth we've been doing Install Races - 4 PM everyday. The winner for the week gets a Herman Miller Aeron Chair. Rob and I went to the Spencer Katt party on Monday night (Thanks Tim!) and had a good time - but the Post had a funny write-up about it. We had a good time there, unlike the Caldera party that we were locked out of and had to come back later after walking three miles. Grrr - we get that as well as listening to their audience scream "E-Business" to try to get t-shirts. Which is giving everyone migraines in a two hundred mile radius. Starlady has done some general Comdex write-ups, as well as Linux Biz Expo specific stuff. Apparently, Global Media won best Linux product of show for their "streaming product". One of the funniest parts of the show was the kid who mooned Bill Gates - Gates is just out of the picture. Oh, and on another note, CowboyNeal loves his Cyberlegs.
What's especially scary is the Microsoft guy off to the left who seems to be enjoying the view :)
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My mom's going to kick you in the face!
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My mom's going to kick you in the face!
Who else clicked on CyberLegs and expected to find something naughty?
...anyone?
...just me?
...nevermind
Finkployd
For those who can't reach kurt.andover.net, check out the half-moon at this mirror. I do agree with the poster who noticed a naughty grin on the Microsoft booth guy to the left.
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Any brilliant-minded, emotionally-stable, obsessive with a streak of genius a parsec wide could do as well.
Seriously, though, Comdex is proving a landmard convention. There is a shift in attitude away from the corporate and towards the open, as demonstrated by the difference in reaction between Bill Gates' speech and Linus Torvalds'.
Once the dust has settled, and the history books are written in the mid to late 21st century, that may well be one of the most significant moments in the closing decade of the 20th century. It's a change from attitudes that have prevailed since the dawn of civilisation, that might (be it in the form of brute strength, or hard cash) makes right.
Of course, you could accuse me (probably correctly) for over-exagerating and being moronically pretentious. Go right ahead! I'm content to believe that this Comdex is as big a turning point as the British Peasent's Revolt, or the spreading of literacy from the priesthood to the commoner.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Didn't the Apple II have some software/hardware that could read a text file in the late 70's? Ask Sam or some such? I know the original Mac of 1984 was able to read a text file.
I used to recommend Macs to people with vision imparement in the mid 80's because of their ability to enlarge fonts and do local screen magnification, something that was tough to do under MS-DOS.
Accessability feature are an area that Linux is very weak at.
Funny how global media got an award for tweeking RealServer for Linux and providing a fancier package for RealPlayer. Global Media first and foremost sells CD's, competing directly with the free mp3 portals, and their repackaged version of RealPlayer isn't even part of their total business strategy.
> you don't have to be 18 anymore, do you?
Yes. 21, actually. They can make exceptions on a case-by-case basis, but it is still their policy.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
I liken the invention of BSD to the invention of writing - cumbersome & filled with proprietary symbols (did you know that anyone who read an AT&T licence became privy to AT&T secrets, and therefore anything they wrote belonged to AT&T?)
The Jolitz' did a very good job of porting BSD to the PC, but: (a) their development was too closed and slow, and (b) because of (a), it collapsed after the release of 0.2. It was too dependent on too few people. Later versions of BSD made use of their work, but with much larger core teams. The problem has always remained, though - they ARE core teams.
One poster on Usenet, around the time Jolitz' 386BSD 0.1 came out commented that Linux was growing faster, and that it would supercede 386BSD in every way, before BSD could reach a usable point. (This was before X11R4 would even RUN on 386BSD! You needed a whole bunch of extra patches to even coax life out of it.)
This isn't to say that BSD wasn't important, it was. Very! Without BSD, there would be no Linux. However, I agree with that Usenet poster of so long ago. Linux -is- growing faster, both in usability and popularity, and it's reaching critical mass.
-That- is the key to a revolution - who reaches critical mass first, and Linux (I believe) has done so. Yes, it's stood on the shoulders of giants, but so did Einstein. It makes neither him nor Linux any less revolutionary to have done so. Indeed, few historical revolutions could have succeeded, if the key figures hadn't been able to build on prior achievements.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Yes, it could 'read' text, VERY badly. There were also a variety of hardware add-ons for the Apple, most of them based on a Texas Instruments Digital Speech chip, with all the phonic elements in an EEPROM. I had something like that in my BigBlue XT; slid into an ISA slot and used a TSR to give you something to pipe into. You could understand it with a little training, even turned up full speed. (I think it would do up to ten elements a second; a little like saying a-b-c-d-e-f-g-h-i-j in one second)
Accessability features?
Magnification:Set the console text mode to something huge. Utilize the CtrlAlt- combo in X.
Braille terminals: There is a getty that likes them!
text->speech: Festival, with a good voice, is great!
Note: I am not physically-challenged, so I really have no clue how well these would work for the average, say, blind guy.
.sig: Now legally binding!
Would there be a full moon picture that isn't eclipsed by a black square? I'd imagine only Bill and the photographer got the ugliest view.
a.k.a. setting up a machine so you get it "out of the box" ready to run.
Think for a moment.
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1.You are a computer idiot.
2.You want to do neat things with a computer.
3.You are a computer idiot with money.
4.Somebody tells you they will set up your computer to do all the neat things you keep hearing about, for a fee.
5.You do neat things with computers.
People talk about the value of service in the Open Source paradigm. What many don't realize is that isn't only tech support and newbie questions, it also includes the setup and configuration of machines. A plug-and-play Real (or MP3, video, dynamic web) server is worth at least twice what the hardware alone is worth. The same could probably be said (although the ratio probably drops to 1.2-1.5) for home PCs, especially if they are loaded with functional software on an OS that doesn't crash. Service and simplicity, that's where the moneys gonna be.
+&x
Didn't the Apple II have some software/hardware that could read a text file in the late 70's?
I had something like this on my C64, of course, I was about 8 at the time so these are all the details I remember....
+&x
Anyway, Linux Today Radio shoutcast from comdex at www.linuxtoday.com:8000 or slashnet.org:8000. Join the fun on SlashNET IRC, irc.slashnet.org.
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This one?
It's amazing that anything get done there. Isn't COMDEX supposed to be cool toys and cool deals, but not to degrade to being a high school gym?
I'm not so sure that some of the vendors like TurboLinux, Caldera and Corel are putting out a positive image of Linux by being so over the top. Personally I'd be so thrilled to be there (I've never had the chance) that I'd suspect I'd be on my best behavior. Perhaps I'd party away from the floor, though.
Why is Linux in it's own pavilion? It's because we don't play well with others? Linus spoke in his keynote about "we do it because it's fun and challanging" but I don't think we would ever catch him mooning Bill G. though.