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LWCE Wrapup 92

Posted by michael from the little-fuzzy-robots-with-big-sharp-teeth dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Extremetech.com reports that: 'Computer scientists from think tank SRI will present a novel take on distributed computing at LinuxWorld, all in a search for a little lost penguin.' For more information on Centibots, head over to the Centibots Project homepage." ReadthePaper writes "I just read a great interview with Jon "Maddog" Hall of Linux International." And finally, Hawkxor writes "Sun Microsystems VP Jonathon Schwartz demoed Sun's new desktop-oriented Linux distro 'Mad Hatter' and 3-D Desktop Environment 'Looking Glass' at LinuxWorld. Sounds pretty cool."
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LWCE Wrapup More

LWCE Wrapup

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  • My experience (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 08, 2003 @09:24PM (#6651894)
    Some guy from SCO held a gun at my head, and said I had to pay $100 to leave the Linux conference. It felt like robbery, but he said it was just licensing. I'm not sure if I believe that.

  • Typical Sun Quote (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Valar ( 167606 ) on Friday August 08, 2003 @09:27PM (#6651914)
    "The thing I worry about most with the open source community is the sentiment that open source is somehow different. It isn't," he said.
    Sounds just like the typical Sun opinion about Linux (and open source) in general. They miss the point and focus on the free-as-in-beer part (and therefore focus on producing cheap solutions) instead of the free as in speech part (and cooperate with the developers a little more).

    • Re:Typical Sun Quote (Score:5, Insightful)

      by __past__ ( 542467 ) on Friday August 08, 2003 @10:02PM (#6652136)
      Actually, they don't focus on any kind of "free-as-in-foo" part. They focus on the "good-as-in-reliably-solves-problems" part. Not the most stupid thing to base decisions on, and fortunatly some open source developers also consider that important, even if reading /. often suggests otherwise.

    • Re:Typical Sun Quote (Score:4, Insightful)

      by swordgeek ( 112599 ) on Friday August 08, 2003 @10:07PM (#6652169) Journal
      Oh yeah, Sun and their skewed idea of "free." They came up with crazy ideas like Free-as-in-NFS, and free-as-in-NIS. Evil dirty proprietary bastards!

      Sun wants to sell stuff (hardware and software), make money, and solve problems. They don't give a shit about the proper attitude to hold when approaching Linux--and they SHOULDN'T! There's nothing sacred about it.

      • Re:Typical Sun Quote (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Valar ( 167606 )
        Because it is important to the open source community that you have the proper attitude. If you take, and use open source software for commercial gains, and ensure that the actual open source versions stay one step behind you are basically stealing. Maybe not legally, but I think, to some extent, morally. You are using the efforts of developers that you do not pay for corporate. Now, that said, Sun does have a pretty decent record, early on, of contribution. However, lately, they are asking more what open so

        • Re:Typical Sun Quote (Score:5, Insightful)

          by __past__ ( 542467 ) on Friday August 08, 2003 @10:38PM (#6652292)
          If you take, and use open source software for commercial gains, and ensure that the actual open source versions stay one step behind you are basically stealing.
          Whoa. And I thought the RIAA was insane. It is stealing if you use software in compliance with the license the authors themselves chose to publish it under?

          However, lately, they are asking more what open source can do for them than what they can do for open source. Yes, this is a perfectly natural thing for a company to do, but we should hardly praise Sun for the idea of taking Linux, adding a couple of proprietary features and then using it on their workstations and desktops, so that they can get free development.
          Not to mention adding a couple of free features that Linux users (and vendors) get for free. You do realize that they contribute heavily to Gnome, for example? Of course they do it in their own interest - the first version of Solaris with pre-installed Gnome was just released a week or two ago. Still, everything that is not Solaris-specific is now part of mainstream Gnome.

          OpenOffice.org isn't exactly a small contribution either. Sure, they are probably quite happy about unpaid contributors that make their proprietary StarOffice better, but I'd say that this is quite a fair deal. And there are also some smaller projects, like XMLroff [sf.net], an XSL FO formatter that I personally consider very promising.

          So please, take your "proper attitude" elsewhere and don't talk about things you have no idea about.

          • To clarify what I meant by the stealing bit, I was referring to companies that basically take open source, make one or two small changes, and then use a huge name to make huge profits.

            Or even when companies use open source and pass it off as their own work. Remember when sections of some BSD utilities were found in microsoft utilities (i.e. the version of ftp in windows)? Sure, they were legally allowed to use those under the BSD liscense, but don't you think it is a little suspect that they never once me
            • /* then use a huge name to make huge profits. */

              Uh, who the fuck is doing that? Define huge profits. Redhat is making money, but NOTHING that could be considered huge. IBM? They're making money off hardware and support, they just happen to sell Linux as part of the deal (for some customers). SUN? HA! It must be SCO, then. Most companies/individuals that are making money off of Open Source are not making HUGE profits. Most are simply making a living.
        • " Because it is important to the open source community that you have the proper attitude."

          Oh, this is so cute I want to pat you on the head.

          The proper attitude? The proper attitude is to run your business and make a profit within the laws. The ONLY attitude a company (or anyone else) has to have is one that doesn't land them in court.

          That may or not be moral, but that's irrelevant. Utterly irrelevant.

          I mean, if a developer is going to write code and release it under the GPL (or any other free-ish licen

    • Re:Typical Sun Quote (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      They miss the point and focus on the free-as-in-beer part (and therefore focus on producing cheap solutions) instead of the free as in speech part

      *TWHAP*
      What company recently spend millions to acquire a mature desktop office software suite, and then released the source code open source? What company recently bought into Netscape when it was strapped for cash, on the ropes, and looking like it was MS road kill?

      I am SOOOOO sick of the slashdotters bashing Sun as somehow an evil unix corporation th

    • Re:Typical Sun Quote (Score:2, Interesting)

      by oldmanmtn ( 33675 )
      By referring to this as a "typical Sun opinion", it's pretty clear that you came to this with an pre-existing bias. I think you're reading more into this than is really there, and you're the one who is missing the point.

      I think the point he is trying to make is that in the end, software is all just bits on a disk. There is nothing about the development process that makes open source software magically better. Good software always takes hard work, thorough testing, and talented developers.

      It's pretty

    • Where are the real contribution from Sun to the *Linux* project?

      Always said OpenOffice, Sun Grid, JXTA, ...but, where are their contributions to the Linux kernel or core libraries??

      Is more easy to say: "Linux doesn't scale good" than work for "Enterprise" scalability on Linux. I know that they are join to OSDL recently. But when thay support and extend the Linux kernel (like IBM or HP for example)?
  • Who wants to bet that Sun is using OpenServer as their base distro?

  • Instead of searching for the penguin... (Score:5, Funny)

    by corebreech ( 469871 ) on Friday August 08, 2003 @09:30PM (#6651930) Journal
    ...they should have programmed the bots to go looking for all that SCO-infringing kernel code.

    Or beer.

    (did I spell that right?)
  • Anyone else notice that garbage in the side bar...

    And you expect me to belive anything else that page says after that?

    Hmm 90% less then microsoft products.. thats still too much to charge.
    • Yeah, I saw that too, and clicked through...it looks like what they meant was actually 'linux approaching XP ease of configuration.' Obviously, these are two very different things. Furthermore, the writers seem to not understand the difference at all. Can you really be a credible tech writer, if you confuse 'stability' with 'easy to use setup'?
    • Where did you see that?

      The only thing remotely resembling this in the IT world link is "Study: Linux nears Windows XP in usability", which was covered by slashdot very recently.
  • So would that be Kenny (or whoever wears red) from SouthPark as #5 there in the pic?

  • Misleading story (Score:5, Funny)

    by Zork the Almighty ( 599344 ) on Friday August 08, 2003 @09:42PM (#6652008) Journal
    I clicked on the link, fully expecting to see robot centipedes. After all, it's called "Centibots", so what else could it be, right ? My excitement piqued when I saw the title: "Linux Powered Robot Swarm Descends on LinuxWorld". Excellent! Not just a single centipede robot, but a whole swarm of them, attacking LinuxWorld! Imagine my disappointment when I learned that these were not killer Linux centipede robots, but a rather ordinary swarm of peaceful robots, powered by Linux. Oh well, I guess that's pretty cool too.
    • Imagine my disappointment when I learned that these were not killer Linux centipede robots, but a rather ordinary swarm of peaceful robots, powered by Linux. Oh well, I guess that's pretty cool too.

      From the site:
      The Centibots project, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), is aimed at developing new technology to support the coordinated deployment of as many as 100 robots for missions such as urban surveillance.

      I would hardly call them peaceful.... This is a project for war.
      • From the site:
        The Centibots project, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), is aimed at developing new technology to support the coordinated deployment of as many as 100 robots for missions such as urban surveillance.

        I would hardly call them peaceful.... This is a project for war.

        I think the grandparent to this was trying to say "peaceful as in non-flesh eating and unarmed" rather than "peaceful as in not used for any military purpose" - but since I'm not him, I could be wrong.

    • Imagine my disappointment when I learned that these were not killer Linux centipede robots, but a rather ordinary swarm of peaceful robots, powered by Linux. Oh well, I guess that's pretty cool too.

      On a more serious (but still pleasant) note, is it just me, or is there a little too much testosterone superimposed, in robot culture? Once in a while I see a documentary on Discovery about a lady scientist who is coo-ing daily at a baby emulation robot, only to discover that her software (amazing) and hardw

  • running on a proprietary SRI PacketHop network
    Proprietary network closing in around the penguin - NOT an image that fills me with joy.
    Any idea why this can't run on plain ol' 802.11?

  • Awards speech (Score:3, Funny)

    by Faust7 ( 314817 ) on Friday August 08, 2003 @09:49PM (#6652054) Homepage
    to explore and map an area that is inaccessible to human, such as a building full of toxic gas or smoke.

    "Thanks to the efforts of these robots, we now know that this building we couldn't enter due to its being filled with toxic gas does contain chemical weapons. And we've found that this other building we couldn't enter due to smoke is indeed on fire and has people inside; once the fire's died down, we'll know exactly where to go to get them out."
  • ...who was responsible for the Tom Servo color scheme and the rather-fruitily-named "ROBOTO" in the second pic.

    That dude standing in the hallway is my guess.
  • This isn't the same Looking Glass released by Caldera/SCO around 1995, is it?

  • Mad Hatter = Red Hat Distribution (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MikeD83 ( 529104 ) on Friday August 08, 2003 @10:01PM (#6652133)
    Sun has maintained an air of mystery about what specific Linux distribution will form the basis of Mad Hatter, and yesterday Schwartz declined to name the distribution that his demonstration was based on,

    Let me take the aura of mystery away- it's obviously based on Red Hat. If it wasn't I'm sure Red Hat would take serious issue in the product name.

  • Microsoft Booth Fun (Score:5, Funny)

    by mishan ( 146987 ) on Friday August 08, 2003 @10:14PM (#6652191) Homepage
    One fun thing that happened at LinuxWorld was this guy who decided to put up a Penguin Computing poster on Microsoft's booth without them knowing it. He walked over the booth with me behind him as camera-man and talked with the lady there for a while and I, myself, didn't even notice that he had put up the poster! See a close-up [debian.org] and the full metal jacket [debian.org].
    • That is funny, however I'm wondering what microsoft was doing there? Are they using or at least working with linux these days or was this just another chance to spread FUD?
      • Actually, they were selling some sort of "UNIX services" that would run on Linux. What was REALLY lame was that the HP bags that were given out in the lobby of the Moscone center were full of all sorts of crap including some "Oracle Unbreakable Linux" CD and "Microsoft UNIX Services" CD. I think they even had an issue of "Oracle Magazine" (I kid you not) bundled in the bag.

  • A visitor's wrapup (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 08, 2003 @11:15PM (#6652483)
    Oracle promoted their "Unbreakable Linux Pavilion". I considered trying to break it but figured Moscone Center security wouldn't like that, so I just sat down for a speech. As the guy was talking, one of the signs fell off the podium.

    One booth (it might have been Computer Associates) needed a "grammar checker" that could remove "extraneous" quotation "marks".

    Microsoft had a medium sized pavilion. Even with how crowded the place was, most people avoided it like the plague.

    Novell is porting its products to Linux. This is the probably the most important development going on in the entire computer industry right now. Novell's administration tools are generally considered top-notch but nobody uses them because nobody wants to learn Novell's OS when they can use other tools available on familiar Windows or Sun. Novell is porting its client-side tools as well. They have a cross-platform Groupwise client in beta right now. For many organizations that stuck with Novell, Groupwise has been a killer app preventing desktop Linux deployment. With Novell filling the gaps of groupware and LDAP network administration, Linux becomes more suitable for the business desktop. Still, Novell has to learn to undercut Windows's price for equivalent functionality. One of the big reasons NT caught on was because it was cheaper than Novell.

    Genaware is the only company I've seen so far offering GIS products for Linux. Unfortunately, the screenshots they had make their products look ugly as hell, and I can't tell if you can actually edit GIS data with them or just display it. They didn't have any leaflets, but gave me a demo disk that they had hidden under the counter.

    Most of the displays were directed towards IT directors and engineers. There was very little there for desktop users. The KDE booth promoted Kolf, which kicks ass. There is a Knoppix for Kids distro which I haven't tried out yet. There is also a Knoppix DVD which includes more programs than the CD distro.

    The Zynot Foundation (the Gentoo fork) was totally unprepared. They bought themselves a booth and didn't know what to do with it, so you basically had two guys sitting in the back of the booth playing with their laptops while people would intermittently come by and ask "Who are you?".

    There was nothing from VA/OSDN/Sourceforge/Slashdot. I don't think CmdrTaco and crew even made it. I miss the old "relax and have fun" party-like attitude at previous conventions where Slashdot would be showing anime and you could deathmath other attendees at the Red Hat booth. A little of that stayed on in the Gentoo booth, which was showing off an RPG and the most crudely drawn anime I have ever seen (it looked like those Conan O'Brien sketches where he takes a picture of a celebrity and makes the mouth move). The booth was in an aisleway, though, so you couldn't actually sit down to watch the movie or play the game.

    Copyleft did have two rest areas with their Penelope Penguin cartoons. In one of them, Penelope asks "where is Brian Aker when you need him?" Who the hell is Brian Aker, I thought. Turn the corner, see a nerdish fellow with long hair, look at his nametag: "Brian Aker / MySQL Developer". That answers that question. As far as other celebrities go, Bruce Perens was there but I didn't see anyone else whose name I was familiar with.

    Now I have this big pile of propaganda on the kitchen table to go through and read.
    • As far as other celebrities go, Bruce Perens was there...

      With black slacks and button-down white shirt. I would have fainted in shock but for the sugar rush I was having from the Microsoft Jelly Bellies.
  • Tell me more about looking glass. It sounds very interesting. I've been looking forward to a 3D desktop for some time. It honestly seems like the natural progression. So far I think by far the best concept is croquet, but it seems so far from becoming something as runnable as today's linux desktops that something like looking glass, backed by a major company really catches my eye. Hopefully it is what croquet will be.

  • SuSE rocks (Score:5, Funny)

    by fo0bar ( 261207 ) * on Saturday August 09, 2003 @03:45AM (#6653339)
    SuSE happened to have their area right next to Microsoft's. I attended a presentation for Openexchange (SuSE's answer to Microsoft Exchange). The presenter would occasionally say things like "and later I'll explain how Openexchange saves you money over SOME OTHER GROUPWARE PRODUCT WHO SHALL REMAIN NAMELESS", while staring at the Microsoft guys.

    In the end I received a Geeko plush toy and a copy of their boxed professional desktop product. Yaaa swag.
  • And doing it right in public, so everyone knows he's clueless.

    "The thing I worry about most with the open source community is the sentiment that open source is somehow different. It isn't," he said.

    They like linux because somehow, the gods smiled upon it, and somehow - by magic - it's "better and it's cheaper". By adopting this attitude, you can see that they miss th eentire point - that Linux is cheaper and better because it's free, not in spite of it.

    They show that if success in the IT world ever co
  • eWeek also runs an article on MadHatter and LookingGlass:

    link here [eweek.com]

    does anyone know of photo's of the GUI?
  • Anyone see Minority Report?

  • Other way round (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Linux creator Linus Torvalds may be the main mouthpiece for open source, but another open-source evangelist-John "Maddog" Hall-is working hard behind the scenes to spread adoption of Linux.

    I would say that Maddog is the "main mouthpiece" of OSS, and that Linus is the one who works behind the scenes.

    References
    [1] Attended a talk by Maddog earlier this year. (Believe me, he enjoys talking)
    [2] Read "Just for Fun", Linus' autobiography
  • Is that like Windows CE, only better?

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