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Linux Business

LinuxWorld Expo Day 1 Showfloor Reports 112

Posted by timothy from the what-goes-down dept.
Gentu writes "Here are the first reports from the first day of LinuxWorldExpo's showfloor: NewsForge discusses a few interesting 'off-the-record' tidbits among the announced news, while OSNews offers a report, too, accompanied by a number of pictures from the Expo."
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LinuxWorld Expo Day 1 Showfloor Reports More

LinuxWorld Expo Day 1 Showfloor Reports

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  • booth babes links please (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 03, 2004 @09:27PM (#9874605)
    pretty please with sugar on top.
    • How does this post get modded "Insightful"? "Funny" would definitely fit it ... or maybe "Underrated" ...

      • Re:booth babes links please (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        You don't get it -- modding that post Insightful makes it *more* funny. When I read it I laughed and thought: "Funny! Only on Slashdot such a post is Insightful!" You see?

    • Interesting (Score:4, Funny)

      by Pan T. Hose ( 707794 ) on Tuesday August 03, 2004 @10:07PM (#9874908) Homepage Journal

      booth babes links please pretty please with sugar on top.

      That is interesting that you have mentioned booths. Every time I visit a computer expo, I have a strong urge to switch from Linux [google.com] to BSD [google.com]. It is a very strange feeling which I absolutely cannot explain. I never have this feeling in my basement, though, so when I'm back in front of my computer, I usually forget about it and keep using Debian, but during every expo that urge comes back and keeps getting stronger and stronger. It is nearly irresistible, yet completely subconscious, beyond any reason and understanding. It would almost be mystical, if only my thoughts were pure and innocent... Could someone please explain it to me? Could that be Satan's temptations? With all of those daemons around, I'm not sure...

    • Re:booth babes links please (Score:4, Interesting)

      by cytoman ( 792326 ) on Tuesday August 03, 2004 @10:11PM (#9874930)
      Dude, out of the 125 speakers at this expo, *only* 9 are women!!

      I'm not in IT, but my field has a much higher representation from the fairer sex!!

      Does this ratio of 9/125 represent the actual number of female workers in the IT industry, or is it lower?

      It sure sucks to be in IT if you are a guy... but if you are a girl, you're in extreme demand and you get your pick... not that there's much to pick from there :-P.

      • That is about right. Their are not a lot of females in the Tech side of the IT industry.
      • There were more blokes called "Paul" in my course than women.

        My move to IT has at least been an improvement on that.

      • Re:booth babes links please (Score:4, Insightful)

        by geekoid ( 135745 ) <dadinportland&yahoo,com> on Wednesday August 04, 2004 @12:39AM (#9875821) Homepage Journal
        this is becasue most women are to damn smart to put up with the way IT professionals are treated.
      • I spent 3 years teaching course all over the states. These ranged from perl/C/C++/Java to Kernel Hacking. These were taught at various places such as IBM, HP, Boeing, USWest, MCI, AT&T, Lucent/Avaya, sprint, etc. At the entry level type classes, it was maybe 1/4 to 1/3 women. But when you get to the upper end of classes, it was at best 1/10 women. Sad set of numbers. On the plus side, almost all of the women in the upper classes were damn smart and worth spending extra time to help. You knew that they w
        • > On the plus side, almost all of the women in the upper classes were smart

          This is a well-known phenomenon. In strongly male-dominated fields (not
          fields where it's like 80%/20%, but more like 95%/5% or worse), the women
          you do find in those fields are some of the very best people in the field.
          This is an overgeneralization, but it's a *good* overgeneralization (i.e.,
          it's not true every time, but it's true WAY more often than it's false).

          I have a theory about why this is, and it goes like this: the wome

          • I would also have to say that most (but not all) of the guys that were in the top classes were pretty sharp cookies. What was interesting was the differences in the companies. You could tell which companies recuited for what. FWIIW, Avaya had some of the sharpest. IBM, and HP were no slouches, but Avaya had more of the edge for both men and women.

            • I used to work for Lucent/Avaya, out Alameda, then Dublin. Of those I've worked with, I would say that *most* of the female software developers were very bright. The dim ones were, sadly, very dim.
      • With women it's all take.. take.. take..
        They may have showed if there'd have been some hard cash being burnt.
      • > Does this ratio of 9/125 represent the actual number of female worker Does
        > this ratio of 9/125 represent the actual number of female workers in the
        > IT industry, or is it lower?

        It's probably very typical, within one standard deviation of average.

        > my field has a much higher representation from the fairer sex!

        Yeah. So does my workplace. I'm the (entire) IT department and am one of
        two male employees, the other being the maintenance guy. All my other
        coworkers are female. (I work at a libr
      • I think it has to do with the way women are edged out of math classes starting (no later than) with high school. Probably Junior High.

        Before junior high girls tend to be better at math than boys...and they still get shoved out. Your guess of why is as good as mine. (My wife tells of her first year algebra class where the teacher got the boys of the class together to talk football in class...so it's not exactly subtle.)

      • There are more women in IT than get invited to speak at conferences. There are more women in IT than get featured at major publisher's *coughoreillycough* blog sites. There are more women in IT than will put up with drooling k1dd33z and h4x0r wannabes.

        Then again, I like my booth babes middle aged, trim, tall, ponytailed, and bearded.
    • Sorry, but i'm working here in the exhibit hall, and I've only seen two (Pogo Linux booth) who qualify as booth babes.

  • Mono is cool. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by DAldredge ( 2353 ) <SlashdotEmail@GMail.Com> on Tuesday August 03, 2004 @09:30PM (#9874624) Journal
    Novell:
    The Novell, Ximian and SuSE booths were under the same roof at LinuxWorld. We talked with two Mono guys who showed us MonoDevelop running, and a program which is able to load the Gecko module and create a functional browser in under 35-40 lines of code.

    • Re:Mono is cool. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by pohl ( 872 ) on Tuesday August 03, 2004 @09:47PM (#9874752) Homepage
      35-40 lines of code is cool, but zero lines of code [macdevcenter.com] is cooler. And soon [apple.com] you'll be able to pull a similar trick to build something like GIMP.
      • Yes, that is cool. However it carries the additional cost of buying a Mac with it. And, due to the supply issues with the G5s they don't show any signs of becomming cheaper in the next 6-12 months.
      • I think you misunderstand what Core Image is for (and what a line of code is for that matter). You won't be building a Photoshop killer out of a "modern foundation for video services".
        • You must have not seen the demo at the keynote [akadns.net]. While it may be true that it also happens to sit architecturally underneath video services, it is a very general-purpose framework and certainly could be used to make something like GIMP or Photoshop. That is, in fact, the first thing that they demonstrated before they moved on to how it is used in the video services. Steve Jobs specifically mentioned in the keynote that he would like to see Adobe use this new framework in Photoshop, which struck many as a
        • ...(and what a line of code is for that matter)...

          I can only take this to mean that you must be assuming that there is some code-generation going on underneath the drag-and-drop mechanism that connects components together in InterfaceBuilder. That's an understandable mistake since so many other similar tools chose that implementation. (Most of them had to because C++ was too static to support the more elegant strategy.) When you're using InterfaceBuilder, however, you're actually working with live instant

    • We talked with two Mono guys who showed us MonoDevelop running, and a program which is able to load the Gecko module and create a functional browser in under 35-40 lines of code.

      Which is, I think, a silly claim to make. I mean, I can "load the gecko module and create a functional browser in just ONE line of code!"

      $ mozilla &

      Wow! Wasn't that F@!#ing KEWL!?!?

      I guess the real question is... SO? What are you going to do with this?

      I can just see it now...

      yambb - Yet Another Mozilla Based Browser

      yambb

      • Ok, I just discovered, that I'm not done ranting.

        I write applications using PHP. Sometimes LAMP, sometimes with PHP-GTK. With this toolkit, I get:

        1) Reasonable performance

        2) Cross platform (Win/Lin/Mac)

        3) Very rapid development times

        4) Language that lets me focus on the deliverable, not the "how to".

        Java comes pretty close to all these criterion, but I'm already most familiar with PHP, so it gets the brunt of my efforts.

        But, if I use the neat-o Gnome/UI/Whizbang application framework that can "do X i
        • Mono is crossplatform
          GTK# is crossplatform
          gecko#: is OSX/Linux with Win32 support being developed.

          • gecko#: is OSX/Linux with Win32 support being developed.

            No Win32? Sorry, but that's like 90% of my audience.

            I HAVE to support Windows. It's my philosophy to support Mac OS and Linux. (which I do with PHP and GTK) If a language/toolkit won't support Win32/MacOS/Linux, I won't use them.

            Now, that limits me to Perl (ugly), Java (boring) or PHP. (quick and elegant) C is too low-level to be meaningful in the space I work in. (customized, niche workflow management products for small-to-mid sized organizations)

      • Re:Mono is cool. (Score:4, Interesting)

        by mr_exit ( 216086 ) on Tuesday August 03, 2004 @11:23PM (#9875362) Homepage
        I dont know how interested you are in it but Alias's Maya (the 3d package most of the large effects houses use) not only runs under linux, it now has embedded Gecko.

        It is very usefull. I can use it to mix pages of HTML and Mayas scripting language MEL, previously making GUI's for scripts with MEL was a major pain up the ass, now you can just make a window with mel enabled links.

  • Quote about a gift horse and inspection... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Kunta Kinte ( 323399 ) on Tuesday August 03, 2004 @09:30PM (#9874626) Journal
    comes to mind when I read this quote from the newsforge article...

    IBM says it is making the donation to help spur Java database development that will eventually lead more users back to the WebSphere server line. On the other hand, Cloudscape was never a big seller in the enterprise market, and IBM was faced with either releasing it to the open source community or possibly dropping it entirely from its catalog.

    IBM did not have to do this, and the product still has lots of value.

  • Invitations (Score:4, Funny)

    by michaelzhao ( 801080 ) on Tuesday August 03, 2004 @09:32PM (#9874645)
    Was SCO invited?

    • Re:Invitations (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I didn't even know there was a squaredance and hangin' afterparty.

    • Re:Invitations (Score:1, Funny)

      by kfg ( 145172 )
      Invited? They're demanding a $699 fee from every attendee under the claim that they own the Expo because it has the word "Linux" in the title.

      KFG
    • As blatant violators of the GPL, SCO would be most unwelcome at the conference, and the hostilities would not be only from the attendees.
    • You can bet on it that they are there and wondering who to sue next, in spite of what they are saying these days.
  • From the article, about Sun buying Novell:
    However, Stone never came out and said Novell would not entertain a buyout offer. Stay tuned.

    Am I the only one who heard cheesy sinister music after that? Moderately sensationalistic. Just an observation, no need to take offense.

  • For the Embedded Penguins!!! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 03, 2004 @09:42PM (#9874723)
    On-going report with pictures over at LinuxDevices:
    http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS4827920836.htm [linuxdevices.com]
    Lots of cool gagets and other "embedded" stuff running Linux! Now, where did I leave the darn Pitch Fork???

  • Apple 2, Microsoft 0 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by cytoman ( 792326 ) on Tuesday August 03, 2004 @09:45PM (#9874746)
    Wow! Two speakers from Apple are featured at this expo, and nobody from Microsoft!

    What a difference! One company has active Open Source contributing employees, and the other discourages such people!

    • Oops! Correction... it's actually Apple 3, Microsoft 0.

      THREE speakers from Apple.

    • One company has active Open Source contributing employees

      Oh yes, they contribute the minimal amount they have to, considering their entire company relies on Open Source and that they make hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars from the work of others.

      How about them contributing something useful, like say, oh, the Sorenson codec, or an open source iTunes client ? How exactly have they repaid the Open Source community for the money they make from the contributions of others ?

  • Novell also released SuSE Enterprise 9 today - all that good stuff in the 9.1 desktop version, with even better hardware support. Not what I would call a typical laptop distribution, but it automagically detected my wireless network card in my Thinkpad and got the video right... Sweet 2.6 kernel goodness officially blessed now that an *enterprise* distribution supports it.

    Life is good...
    • I'm glad to hear that SuSE has taken the lead in deploying the 2.6 kernel in an enterprise environment. We use White Box Enterprise Linux (www.whiteboxlinux.org [whiteboxlinux.org]; it's an open-source, free clone of RHEL3) in production, and I'm anxiously awaiting the day when Red Hat (and thus White Box) will support 2.6. I know I could compile my own, but I'd rather wait for it to be official.

      I last read that RH planned to support 2.6 in 2005. Here's hoping that will be "late 2004" instead.

  • Lindows (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Nicholas Evans ( 731773 )
    This may be just a tad offtopic (It's mention in one of the links!) but Lindows has users always logged in as root? ...Are they CRAZY?
    • Yes you're offtopic and no they're not crazy, they're Lindows users.

    • Re:Lindows (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Why?

      The machine is no more or less secure to remote exploits simply because the console user is root. Most of Lindows' users are home users some it's unlikely that someone's going to physical access.

      If someone *does* physically get on the machine, then the user's home directory is where all of their important stuff is anyway, and killing that kills anything of use to them, and at that point who cares what happens to the rest. Any physical access means the machine is owned anyway, no matter what kinds

      • I find you rationale unreasonable, but you caveat is true.

        Personally, if I feel that I might be doing something in the slightest bit dangerous, I create a new unpriviledged user to do it as. Then if something gets loose, I wipe the user, with scant loss. (This has only happened a couple of times...but that's twice my neck has been saved.)

        Unfortunately, most Lindows users don't even think about the possibility of running as a non-root user. So they never find out about the possibilities and dangers. I
  • First quote:

    "I know what it is. Don't let the suit fool you."

    Second quote[s]:

    "So, how was her cleavage?"

    "I don't know, I had to keep my eye on the puck. Besides, it was her eyes that got my attention."

    "Welcome to the world of intelligent men."

  • LinuxWorld Expo = NovellWorld (Score:4, Informative)

    by BrianWCarver ( 569070 ) on Wednesday August 04, 2004 @03:28AM (#9876587) Homepage
    This LinuxWorld was better than last year's, or at least the three bags of free swag I got this year represents a larger bounty!

    If the Novell, SuSE, Ximian area were any bigger, they'd have to call it NovellWorld, which it just may be called by next year. If anyone was asleep while Novell was making these acquisitions, wake up, 'cause Novell is deadly serious about being the biggest baddest Linux company there is (and from their presentations they believe they already are.)

    Novell certainly gave out the best stuff. I got 2 tickets to a SF Giants game for Wed. night, 2 red Novell baseball jerseys, 1 Novell white t-shirt and a SuSE/Novell stuffed Gecko. Others got the Sharp Zaurus, Apple iPod, and $100 Amazon gift certificates.

    Also Novell was showcasing what they called the Novell Linux Desktop. I asked a lot of employees about this. They've taken the best of SuSE, the best of Ximian, combined Gnome and KDE and made a really slick looking desktop (which I think they will target at business users). But, it's so new they don't even know what they want to do with it yet.

    They had it running on tons of computers and had attendees go through forwarding an e-mail with Evolution and opening a Word document with OpenOffice.org Writer to show off how easy using Linux can be. I actually heard people next to me trying it out saying things like, "If a secretary sits down and it isn't Windows, there will be an initial fear, but this is not really that different, and is really easy to use. I think most people would pick this up in no time..." Duh. Welcome to 2001.

    Anyway, I thought this was Novell's LinuxWorld. They have a phalanx of people in brown shirts with red N's on 'em there. It will be interesting if by this time next year their tent is even bigger and merged with IBM's or Sun's. Or even more interesting, if their court cases work out such that they definitively show that they still own UNIX, they'll be one company that owns Netware, UNIX, and SuSE Linux. Biggest Baddest indeed.
  • At the RedHat booth they're passing out chapbooks of a sort titled "the nature of [choice]". This little inoccuous book is actually quite amusing. I think they're trying to show how clever they are or artsy? But it comes across as just idiotic. It's a cross between those old-time religious tract books popular in the 70s (perhaps an hommage to their bible-belt roots) and new-age jibberish. Here's a description:

    Page 1: "There is a choice in nature" [image of two red cicles A and B.]

    Page 2-3: "Where th

  • Why is it that everyone spends all their time focusing on the big corporate showings and not the other guys? I did not see a single picture or mention of anything in the ".org Pavilion" except for a mention that "the Fedora Project has its own booth"...

    I mean, come on people! Doesn't anyone else remember when we didn't care who was touting "Linux support" or "plans on shipping Linux pre-installed" but instead on the cool things people were DOING with Linux?

    • I find it sad that all of the exciting stuff is going on in the poor neglected .org pavilion. I'll probably be back Thursday exchanging GPG keys and learning about all of the projects.
    • Because corporations are based in India, home of the latest and greatest software. No-one wants to see what those other countries are doing.

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