I just got home from LinuxWorld Expo in the San Jose Convention
Center.
Here are some impressions, in no particular order. If it isn't
obvious, these are all my personal opinions. It should also be
obvious that I'm writing this for a varied audience, and parts of it
won't be interesting to everybody. Sorry.
General
===
Lots of Sony Z505 laptops and Picturebooks. Everywhere. Mostly in
the hands of Very Young Persons. Prior to today, I don't think I'd
ever seen anyone other than myself carrying one. Of the eight people
in the 10x10 perlmonks.org booth, four had Z505s and one had a
picturebook. (One person had some other kind of laptop, and the other
two people were playing a martial arts game on a Dreamcast.) I saw a
Picturebook in the linuxjapan.org booth (japanlinux.org? something
like that) running a video capture window (under Linux) from the
built-in camera. I asked the owner what app he was using, but he did
not speak English. I asked two other Picturebook users about it, but
neither knew how to capture video without resorting to Windows.
Speaking of packed booths, there was a booth called the Docking
Station. It had a power strip and an Ethernet hub, and was jammed
with people sitting, squatting and crawling over each other to plug in
their laptops and check their mail. I kicked myself for having
forgotten the camera -- it was a funny scene.
The Slashdot booth was similar. Lots of beanbag chairs and lots of
people using laptops. Rob Malda and Hemos sat in Aeron chairs and
played with their laptops and joked around while lots of people
lounged around and played with their laptops and pretty much ignored
Rob and Jeff. They just sat and hung out all day. I saw lots and
lots of 802.11 wireless LAN cards -- mostly Lucents (nee WaveLAN, nee
Orinoco). I think 60-70% of all laptops had one, and *everybody* had
a Linux laptop. I don't know whether the whole hall was on an open
802.11 net or what.
I've ordered WaveLAN cards -- our house will be "wired for wireless"
by this weekend. But today I was a wireless wannabe.
The crowd was younger this year, I think. Also better-dressed. Yes,
the suits have discovered Linux. The exhibit hall was at least twice
as big as last year, maybe thrice. The booths were generally
better-decorated (i.e., more expensive), too. The .ORG pavilion was
very poorly laid out, and didn't draw or hold a crowd. All the 10x10
booths were in a long row along the back of the hall. Of course, last
year, Slashdot was the biggest draw in the pavilion, and this year,
Slashdot was in the VA booth, 500 feet away.
I learned that Debian is pronounced "DEB-eeyun".
The most buzzword compliant booth was PocketLinux. I quote from the
brochure: "Capture the power of Linux, XML and Java with PocketLinux."
What that blurb doesn't mention is that their product runs on
handhelds. They had a couple of the new Compaq iPAQ handhelds running
Linux. Those are sweet. The size of a Palm, a brightly backlit
display, running Linux (or that dead-end proprietary OS). PocketLinux
also had some other very thin handhelds that I didn't recognize.
PocketLinux' product may or may not be vaporware, but the iPAQ is real
(but not yet released). There was yet another VAIO Z505 in
PocketLinux' booth, but it looked humongous surrounded by handhelds.
Wireless computing is a myth. Almost all the laptops (and the
abovementioned iPAQs) were tethered by their power cords. Even the
ones on wireless LANs were all plugged in.
SGI's booth (I used to work at SGI) was huge - 50x50. The first time
I went by, it was jam-packed. They had a stage performer, kind of a
carnival barker/magician type. The show had nothing to do with SGI or
Linux, though he did remember to mention the right buzzwords often. I
went back when he was between acts. Walked through the whole booth,
couldn't find a single person I'd ever seen before. Not one. At
least thirty people were working the booth. (SGI has had some
turnover in the last year.)
I did run into Dave McAllister who's at 3ware now, and Bill Earl whose
company I forgot, but they're a 3ware customer. Saw Scott Henry and
Bill Shannon, but did not talk. Ashok Yerneni saw me and offered me a
job, wanted to know if I knew anybody who wants to work on video w/
Linux. His company is building remote security camera systems or
something.
3ware has an IDE RAID product. Their button says "IDE rather not be
SCSI." Eight independent IDE buses and a CPU (x86 architecture, but
Dave wants to put a MIPS R5000 in the next gen for $3 more) on a
full-height PCI card for $500 list. Dave emphasized that that's NOT
the street price. They've benchmarked 101 MB/sec. They also have
2-bus and 4-bus versions for less money. Bill Earl says, "Storage is
a great place to be. It's about to really take off." Donna, if you
want to see Dave tomorrow, his booth is outside the main hall, near
the front stairs.
I stopped
