LinuxWorld
2002-08-14 07:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mdlbear... is moving upmarket somewhat, but the geek/suit ratio still appears to be greater than unity, which is a Good Thing. It wasn't as small as I expected; not surprisingly the economic downturn is good for free software.
The biggest change is in the makeup of the big booths. Some of the formerly-big names like VA Linux are gone (though Penguin Computing was still there, passing out their ``Born to Frag'' and ``Hello Mr. Gates'' posters); HP had a huge ``double-large'' booth due no doubt to their merger with Compaq. RedHat was there, passing out red hats.
Had a couple of enjoyable (from my point of view, anyway) talks with people in the Microsoft booth. (I'm really not sure why they were there.) During one of those discussions I had the insight that it's Microsoft that's been playing catch-up all these years: Unix has always had the advantage.
The other high point was making a good work-related contact: a company that does Linux printer drivers for high-end printers (their booth was full of Canon gear).
They're talking to our US sales organization in NJ, but I was their first contact on the technical side. Needless to say, the sales and marketing guys are hardly in a position to evaluate Linux software...
My father always used to say that if you get one useful idea or contact out of a show or conference, it was worthwhile.
The biggest change is in the makeup of the big booths. Some of the formerly-big names like VA Linux are gone (though Penguin Computing was still there, passing out their ``Born to Frag'' and ``Hello Mr. Gates'' posters); HP had a huge ``double-large'' booth due no doubt to their merger with Compaq. RedHat was there, passing out red hats.
Had a couple of enjoyable (from my point of view, anyway) talks with people in the Microsoft booth. (I'm really not sure why they were there.) During one of those discussions I had the insight that it's Microsoft that's been playing catch-up all these years: Unix has always had the advantage.
- The Unix command line was there before DOS; the scripting language has always been far better and the selection of commands has always been bigger -- and unlike DOS is still increasing.
- X was there before Windows. It's always been networked, while Windows still isn't unless you add expensive extras. X ships with far more utilities than Windows does.
- Unix has been multi-user and multitasking since the beginning, and has always had virtual memory on the machines that support it. Windows still isn't really multiuser, down in its guts.
The other high point was making a good work-related contact: a company that does Linux printer drivers for high-end printers (their booth was full of Canon gear).
They're talking to our US sales organization in NJ, but I was their first contact on the technical side. Needless to say, the sales and marketing guys are hardly in a position to evaluate Linux software...
My father always used to say that if you get one useful idea or contact out of a show or conference, it was worthwhile.