Date: Sun, 7 Mar 1999 14:59:39 -0700
From: Sean Reifschneider <jafo@tummy.com>
To: NCLUG Mailing List <nclug@nclug.org>, lug@lug.boulder.co.us
Subject: [lug] LinuxWorld Day 2, March 2, 1999


Images at http://www.tummy.com/reports/LinuxWorld99/

LinuxWorld Day 2
March 2, 1999

The most surreal event of the day, for me, was this evening at the party
put on by RedHat and others.  It was an odd combination of a reception
party and exhabition.  There were some tables set up along the walls
that vendors were showing their wares at.  One of them was Oracle with a
HUGE Tux they were giving away in a drawing later.

I pulled out three of the little Tuxs that Mike had ordered for NCLUG a
few months ago, I was going to juggle them to entertain the folks at the
Oracle table.  Well, as soon as they came out of my back-pack, Oracle
started accusing me of taking the stickers off their tummy ("and how did
you get three of them?!?").  Apparently Oracle was giving out defaced
Tuxes from their booth...  It was even worse because Oracle got their
Pengiuns from WaiYip (sp?) Toys, the same place that Mike got them.
Weird...

The trio of Tuxes were there to attend our Python tutorial.  "How is
a platform-independant programming language involved with Linux?"  It all
became clear when I brought out and started juggling the Tuxes.

After the tutorial, I went back to the speakers lounge.  Tom Christensen
made a good point that it's easy to notice the inaccuracies in the press
relating to Linux because we're in the middle of the Linux community.
However, it's not beyond consideration that ALL reporting has a similar
level of inaccuracies.  I explained that was why I only read the comics.
:-)

It sounds like Liz's tutorial on QMail was very well received.
Unfortunately, it was scheduled at the same time as ours.  Liz implied
that we may be able to talk her into giving the presentation to BLUG.
It looks pretty good...

I only made it through about 70% of the exhibition hall today, and then
only because I didn't stop at most of the booths.  Compaq was handing
out some "Linux -- Live free or die" license plates.  SuSE was giving
out CDs of their distribution.  The Boulder Software Foundry was giving
away multi-colored Slinkys.  It sounds like they may be coming to the
next BLUG meeting...  I plan to take a bit more time in the hall when
it's hopefully a little less crowded.

The line for Linus's keynote was AMAZING...  They didn't let anyone in to
be seated until 7 minutes before it was scheduled to start.  The line went
from the doors, a few hundred meters down the hallway, looped and came back
then went outside!

Linus' Keynote was well received.  He revealed his plans to continue
targeting development towards the average X terminal/workstation/desktop
box of the quad Xeon variety like he has.  Did I mention that Compaq
awarded him with a nice SMP Alpha machine a couple of hours before this?

He's gotten a bit more patient these days.  He'll now accept world
domination in a few weeks, but is sure it's imminent.  Have I mentioned
that the popular button at this confernce reads "Torvalds for President"?

IDG then presented $12,500 each to Jay Sulzberger and the Stampede project
as the "Linus Torvalds Community Achievement Award".  Jay and his team have
been deploying Linux in schools in the New York City area (explaining that
they need free solutions because they've already been taken to the cleaners
on the hardware to run another operating system), and Stampede has
an apparently nice distribution (though I've not yet used it).

After the keynote, there was a reception scheduled.  I took the
opportunity to join the Linux Weekly News folks and upload a bunch of
pictures before heading over.  We arrived shortly after the band cranked
the music up to 11 and emptied much of the hall (Hello!  People are here
to *TALK* to eachother).  It seems most of the folks moved over to the
reception mentioned above...

While it does seem that this conference is less oriented towards the
technical folks, it seemed like we were seeing more familiar faces today.
The fact that they're holding the next one in August at the same time as
the O'Reilly conference is just likely to drive this venue even further
away from being a technical conference.  However, it would seem that
there's plenty of room in the community for a more business-oriented
conference.

I was a bit skeptical about how the conference would turn out, especially
with a lot of the confusion a few months ago (as reported by slashdot and
others).  While IDG does seem to be lacking a few clues, in general the
conference has been fairly nice.  If you can only make one Linux conference
however, I still recommend the Linux Expo in North Carolina coming up in
the next couple of months.  It does sound like they will be moving to be
even more technical, if you are interested in that kind of conference.

We've noticed in the last quarter that our business has picked up an
incredible amount.  From speaking with other Linux folks, it seems that we
aren't just lucky...  *EVERYONE* is seeing huge growth now.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again...  It's a good time to be a
geek.

Sean
-- 
 A little help at the right time is better than a lot of help at the wrong
 time.
Sean Reifschneider, Inimitably Superfluous <jafo@tummy.com>
URL: <http://www.tummy.com/xvscan> HP-UX/Linux/FreeBSD/BSDOS scanning software.
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