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UK Linux Expo: Growth, Suits And Vodka 79

Posted by timothy from the can't-we-all-just-get-a-drink? dept.
Frequent book reviewer and genuine Englishman Duncan Lawie sent us this first-person account of UK Linux Expo 2000. Proof (not that it was needed) that not only is Linux continuing to grow in the UK as elsewhere, but that the disconnect between suits and geeks remains as evident as ever. Read below for good news and medium news -- thankfully, that seems to be as bad as it gets for this transmission.

"Linux Expo 2000, running June 1 and 2 in London, is widely seen in the British IT industry as an indicator that Linux has come of age. It is now in its second year, with 35% more exhibitors than last year and expecting a 70% increase in visitor numbers. Despite such figures, it is not a huge show, with around 80 exhibitors. However, this Expo seems to be primarily an opportunity for Business to prove how net-centric it has become and to show how well it has embraced Linux whilst the Geek Evangelists struggle to remind the besuited visitor of the Open Source philosophy.

It was the usual uneasy fit. The Linux Professional Institute couldn't help referring to the sponsorship they had received from Mandrake who had the neighbouring stall. The LPI was part of a .org ghetto on the lower floor along with Debian -- selling a six CD set including source code for seven pounds -- and such other luminaries as the Linux User Groups. All around them, the commercial face of Linux in Europe was touting its wares.

The deals on show covered the spectrum from server co-location to the servers themselves and from Linux Utilities for a fiver to commercial packages which have been rapidly ported to the lively new Linux markets. A good selection of Linux distributors were available on-site. Red Hat had the largest stand while SuSe seemed to be getting the most visitors. My quote of the day had to be the SuSE guy at the prize draw: "This is genuine -- a guy with a German accent giving away software." SuSE's popularity may also have had something to do with the advertised appearance of User Friendly and the opportunity to get a Dust Puppy to take home, but some of the UFie comments were a little scary. Their headline quote was taken from a slashdot post and much of what they had to say seemed to suggest that userfriendly.org is in the process of "leveraging" their undeniably successful core product.

This seemed to be a theme of a number of other exhibitors, though Red Hat actively stated that there is only one Linux -- and I'm sure they were talking about the kernel rather than attempting to dismiss their competitors' market share. This is despite the appearance of at least two distributions I hadn't heard of before and the presence of a stall which had the primary purpose of selling downloads of other people's distros cheaper.

The Mandrake stand seemed quite popular while SGI definitely scored points with the best Quake setup at the show. SGI also had the most original attraction of the event -- an Ice Penguin. The ice carving stood on a plinth and had a hole drilled through from one shoulder and coming out the bottom of the belly. At appropriate moments, an SGI staffer would pour a stream of vodka in the shoulder which cooled and splashed into the lucky recipient's plastic cup. The choice of Smirnoff alleviated the potential problems of insufficient cooling which may have occurred if cheaper source product had been in use.

Towards the end of the day, Mailbox Internet -- who started off as the UK's primary Apple-friendly ISP -- started handing out beer to anyone who managed to maintain a serious conversation with their sales staff. This approach was far more rewarding than that taken by Pervasive. I asked their sales guy to compare his database product with mySQL and PostrgreSQL and his basic response was that you get what you pay for. Perhaps he would have tried a different tack if I hadn't been wearing a suit and a tie. This was the essential problem with the event -- over 80% of the exhibitors were commercial outfits but less than 20% of the visitors were Suits. The Geeks were there in force in the hope of finding Illiad and talking amongst themselves and I suspect that Lonix , the London Linux User Group, with its professed aim "to drink beer and have fun" was more successful at recruiting than many of the commercial exhibitors. Meanwhile, many of the exhibitors made me feel naked without a business card to hand over and one company was advertising MCSE training.

For all that, it was an interesting event and a reminder that there are ways of obtaining information without visiting google. In fact, this was a pretty good example of the Bazaar that ESR and cluetrain tell us about. It was an environment where small operations and large have an almost equal voice and where passion beats gimmicks -- which is where Linux began, is it not?

My score for the afternoon: 1 beer, 1 vodka, 1 T-shirt, 3 CDs and about a thousand brochures."

Daniel James also sent this report from the show floor, with some quick product descriptions and other Expo news:

"This mailing is coming to you from the LinuxUser stand at the Linux Expo in London. The exhibition is more than twice as big as last autumn's show, with stands on two floors and the European Linux Conference hosted by SUSE on the floor above. Here's the pick of the news from the show.

____________________________________________

Stronghold SSL web server
Stronghold 3 has been released by C2Net Software. It's a 128-bit SSL server based on Apache. It costs $995, but you can download an evaluation version from http://www.c2.net

_____________________________________________

New Alpha motherboard
The UP1100 has been revealed at the Expo - partnered with a 21264 Alpha processor, it's aimed at Beowulf clusters, web servers and development and rendering boxes. API have also announced a partnership with QSW which will develop Linux supercomputers. Check out http://www.alpha-processor.com and http://www.quadrics.com

______________________________________________

Mailbox Internet partners with SUSE
Mailbox claim to be the first 100% Linux ISP, and they've formed a partnership with SUSE to co-promote Linux on the desktop. http://www.mailbox.net.uk

_______________________________________________

New Silicon Graphics Linux boxes
SGI have been showing off their 230L Visual Workstation, preinstalled with RedHat 6.1 and OpenGL 1.2 graphics drivers. They've also announced that IBM's Web Sphere will be available on the new 1450 Linux server, to run alongside DB2. http://www.sgi.co.uk

________________________________________________

Best freebie at the show?
TurboLinux tatoos - we've all got one. They did promise that they wear off eventually ... More next week. Don't forget to send in your Linux-related snippets to me at daniel@linuxuser.co.uk"

For another voice covering UK Linux Expo, try mart's roundup of the event, linked from LinuxUK.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

UK Linux Expo: Growth, Suits and Vodka More

UK Linux Expo: Growth, Suits and Vodka

Comments Filter:
  • There posts our Signal 11
    He cares not that a haiku has rhythm
    He wants ref'rence to season
    If I only had reason
    "Ode to bitchslap in springtime": Quite humdrum!
  • Their headline quote was taken from a slashdot post and much of what they had to say seemed to suggest that userfriendly.org is in the process of "leveraging" their undeniably successful core product.

    I bet Stef wrote that.

    Zax

  • At the end of this month there is the "LinuxTag" (Linux-day) [linuxtag.org], a Linux exhibition/fair/event in Stuttgart, Germany. The LinuxTag has been growing so rapidly over the last years that the university of Kaiserslautern is now too small to host it any longer. Supposedly it is the largest Linux event in europe.

    The event consists of two threads, called buisiness to consumer and buisiness to buisiness. Maybe they want to keep geeks and suits away from each other ;-)?.

    Speakers are:
    RMS, Alan Cox, Miguel de Icaza, Matthias Kalle Dalheimer (KDE), Tony Guntharp (SourceForge) etc.
  • Perusing through the show yesterday and noticed that the chap walking up towards me all alone was Maddog. Had a very serious chat with him but I think he was phased when a chap, who obviously didn't know who he was, offered both of us a toy glider (I accepted but Jon refused).

    It got me wondering whether we've got a unique thing going here without all the egos and all, my mate who came down couldn't believe that he had met 2 of the most important people in the GNU/Linux community (Alan and Jon). Would I happen to see Steve Ballmer or Bill walking towards me lonely at an MS conference???

  • So after this [slashdot.org] they made it come out the SINGLE hole that birds have. I thought they were being sarcastic, oh well.
  • I think you are on crack. I have relatives in Southern Minnesota (farmers) who have heard of Linux. They regularly ask me whats the deal with this "Linux thing".

    If my grandma has heard of Linux it's far from obscure!
  • some V.I. people here [...] have very spoiled ideas - they just gotta make money on everything interesting, exciting and new. If they decide to rip off people with Linux, kiss Linux popularity good bye.

    I'm not so sure that follows. A few months ago I saw W.H.Smith selling software for £30 which will "test for and fix the millenium bug in your computer". This was bollocks of course, it just checked your BIOS, and almost no home users had a bios so shagged that it wouldn't have booted ok on 1/1/2000. However, people must've been buying it and I've not heard of any backlash.


    You only get a backlash if people *realise* they've been ripped off. I wonder how many people buying Red Hat for £50 know they can get it for £5? But anyway, if they do find out, that shouldn't put them of Linux as a whole, just make them more reluctant to shell out in the shops.

  • Mailbox could be of interest to me as well. My current co-lo outfit is too far away and their network availability is too low, so I'd like to expand elsewhere.

    What's parking and ease of access like at the Fulham NOC? [US readers will be aghast to hear that not every outfit in London has a 10-acre carpark.:-)] And how secure is it physically?
  • it is still yet to be shown that OpenSource is just as profitable as ClosedSource

    I don't believe the most successful open source company will be proportionally as rich as MS, simply because most of their income comes from a monopoly which could not be obtained by an open source company. That doesn't mean that closed source is better. No democratic head of state will ever have the power that Stalin had.


    OTOH the overall IT market may be more productive, efficient and competitive if open source continues to make an impact.

  • More photos at; http://photos.jml.net [jml.net] (recent additions) And my own pictures of Mailbox's after show drinks at http://www.highpoint.co.uk/photosite [highpoint.co.uk] (recent addition)
  • One of the best colo placves I know is http://www.ukcolo.co.uk [ukcolo.co.uk], they are very very good. I have a cpuple of servers there. They are located in Birmingham.
  • Oh, that' too funny!

    Ode to a bitchslap, he he...

  • Ahem. (Score:1)

    by pjc50 ( 161200 )
    Fortunately, they can't rip people off as the amateurs among us are still giving it away :)

    Linux is _already_ succeeding in the market here, and has done for a while. ISPs recognise its superiority; students get hold of it and find it's cool. We've got quite a lot of developers (e.g. Alan Cox, Ian Jackson come to mind).

    And we don't have quite as many blood-suckers as the US, either ;)
  • nope, he is just a jackass
  • The entry level services are not really intended for big operation where you are likely to be putting in 9 or 10Us worth of servers...

    The aim of the service I was describing is mainly for people who have a basic 4u box or whatever...

    As ever you get what you pay for. If you need the sort of space where you need loading bays etc you would be better off looking at their upmarket services.

    As it stands their entry level service is perfect the way it is. You don't run a multi mil operation out of their fulham noc.

    For the "rest of us" low cost is the most important factor. And you can't beat this for "bangs for buck"
  • No, the other way around.
  • Linux isn't quite that obsucure over here, I was having a look around Special Reserve (computer games mail order/retailer) and even *they* had SuSE, Rehat, and...linux games (including the metal cased linux quake 3)

    Also, Linux has even been talked about in detail several times on main news broadcasts and other programs...

  • Hi --

    I'm the MD at Mailbox, and yes the parking situation at Fulham is small. But the Fulham location is designed to be an inexpensive colocation facility and not a huge colo facility - again, you gets what you pays for and we've got a load of space at the Telehouses (both City and Docklands) for that sort of stuff.

    Most of the people who choose low-cost colo travel on the Tube or by taxi, or only have one box. We have quite a few Powersledges down there which get shipped to us via Citylink or somesuch, and we don't charge for plugging 'em in and turning 'em on.

    We're working on opening up another (larger) building in Putney, which is about half a mile down the road, and has a huge pile of carparking space not to mention things like generators and goods lifts.

    Take a look at the webpage [mailbox.net.uk] for cheap colocation for more info, or talk to Michael [mailto], Jerry [mailto] or Charlotte [mailto], who are our marketroids. They can all answer questions about it for people who want to know.

    Finally, there's about 300 photos of the show at photos.jml.net [jml.net], including the Mailbox Party on the Friday.

    Hope this helps,

    Joel.
    MD, Mailbox.

    --

  • As well as the Expo, Suse were also running a conference in the Olympia conference centre on the first day. This was a poorly advertised and poorly focused event - there were no titles given for the talks beforehand, and no real indication as to whether this was meant to be an introduction to Linux for those new to the phenomenum, or whether it was a development conference. In the end it was closer to the former, but with a good number of hardedned linuxers and even developers there....

    Where this becomes relevant to the subject line (wow - relevant - thats an oddity), is the Maddog gave the closing talk - his chosen subject (chosen in the previous 24 hours) was "Why under 21s should not be excluded from these events".

    Maddog spoke well, eloquently and amusingly on why he thought that the expo organisers were cutting themselves off from their own future by excluding people who may well already be making a significant contribution to linux development. Much of the background he gave is actually covered in the article [linuxjournal.com] in June 2000 Linux Journal.

    As a postscript I would strongly advise people politely taking this issue up with IT Events and other conference organisers - it worked when we took up the issue of Debian and other non-profits attending the show.
  • Hi all --

    I'm the red-shirted guy [jml.net] from Mailbox Internet [mailbox.net.uk] who was buying the beer on the Friday, and spent most of the Expo talking to people who didn't believe I was who I said I was because I was wearing a tie and not the usual ThinkGeek fare ;)

    On the subject of suits and geeks, I'm actually glad I had the shirt on - most of the geeks got hold of me because I was talking tech, and a lot of the suits gave me more time because I had a shirt and tie on - sad but true.

    Anyway, my personal score for the show:

    • Dust Puppy from Dark-Side Dave [jml.net].
    • £120-worth of books.
    • A 4ft-high penguin (yes, we were the ones who took it to the pub [jml.net]).
    • Squishy penguins from SGI and Alphanet.
    • The Walnut Creek set of Slackware [slackware.com] CDs.
    • Tux cufflinks for those "I've just been told to be smart" moments.
    • A new news peer for Mailbox [mailbox.net.uk], and several traffic peers with people in Telehouse.
    • Two consecutive hangovers, and a large bar bill.
    • Sore feet.
    Great fun folks. There's photos of Thursday [jml.net] and Friday [jml.net] (and some more here [jml.net]).

    Hugs to y'all,

    Joel
    MD of Mailbox Internet [mailbox.net.uk]

  • Ah yes. Often i have partaken of this sport on a boring Saturday afternoon. Best is usully a pretty clueless shop such as PC World. Ask clueless questions for a couple of minutes, then whack them with a nice, technical question (Such as, does the FSB run at 66Mhz or 100Mhz on this box?) Be sure to use a lot of abreviations and acronyms for best effect.
  • I think that Linux will have some hard time in Snobby UK. As my experience tells me, some V.I. people there (read: rich beyond any limit) have a very spoiled ideas - they just gotta make money on everything interesting, exciting and new. If they decide to rip off people with Linux, kiss Linux popularity good bye.

    On the other hand, there are so many charities in London alone, that it is a huge market for Linux. Will it be able to get into it? We'll see.

    It is simply not enough for people to feel good about Linux, they must be also defend it well enough from "capitalistic blood-suckers". And it is very hard.

  • It varies from place to place. Titan computers in Exeter suprised me when I walked past once. In their shop window they had BeOS, Linux and Windows running on their top of the range machines, so I popped in to have a chat and the showed off QNX as well.

    Better than another shop wher I asked for a 3dfx card and they got some lame 3d animation software out... I left hurriedly.
  • Actually Ive seen Linux available in quite a few stores near where I live (Norfolk, England). The PC World near me has actually got quite a few distros available, arbeit some of them out of date (they were still selling SuSE 6.1 when I last checked.. ucky), but recently they were heavilly promoting Corel. Also I've seen Game and such sell Mandrake and RedHat.

    But I do agree with you about most not knowing what a computer is.. the PC World near me almost takes an active stance against employing computer students...

    still, I've found it hard to beat www.linuxemporium.co.uk for all my needs :)

    ~Emmstah
  • What?

    Parked on the wrong side of the street?

    I know in Cincinnati you have to park with traffic, but in Delaware and Pennsylvania (at least philly) you park anywhere you damn well can.

    Ahh philly, the city of brotherly gunfire.
  • The fulham noc is basically their offices, but for about £35 pcm....

    I've never had a server stolen yet :-)

    There is plently of parking usually, but it's in the back streets on a parking meter... the more expensive services are at telehouse (AFAIK) so the parking is just as bad there :-)

    Seriously, though. I highly reccommend their services, totally outstanding availability, very quick.
  • Yow that first picture is nasty. I don't need to see the back of some guy's greasy head.
  • I've personally managed more than 150 trade shows across the country for our company and I can assure you they are quite expensive for the exhibitors. The goal at many of these trade shows is to atain valuable sales leads. These leads lead to sales and help to offset the cost of being at the show.

    When we set up a booth and fly in people to work the show, a well designed booth will try to make sure that the people coming in to the booth get attention and the people that are there to spend money get the most attention.

    There always needs to be a way to filter the people so that the exhibitors can tell who's a CIO, CEO, and VP and who are high schcool kids cruising for handouts. Both groups need access to the exhibitors, but for differant reasons.

    One east coast show did it right. They had "student only mornings". They opened the show early for 2 hours each day and asked exhibitors to make some people available to handle these students. This was a win win for everybody because the students got better access to the exhibitors and could ask them detailed questions. This made the students visit truly educational and not just a freebie grab fest (alltho we still gave away cool stuff). It was also a win for the exhibitors because during the show, you spent less time educating and more time concentrating on cultivating sales leads.

    Perhaps more Linux shows can use this format in the future to balance exhibitor cost and atendee access.
    ___

  • I expected to hear that parking was limited, maybe to a dozen cars in their courtyard say (this being in London), including some reserved spaces for incoming co-lo visitors with gear to unload.

    But to hear you say that there is NO parking space available would make their operation a total joke. You can't expect people to carry servers from a car parked at a side-street parking meter, with boots needing to be locked as you move back and forth, subject to kids swiping leads from your loaded trolley, or even mugging and car break-ins once the criminal community realizes that this is a computer-gear loading point.

    As for Telehouse, that's at the other end of the co-lo price and facilities spectrum. While parking used to be bad there, their new courtyard provides ample space when their main loading bay is full. That's beside the point though: the high price of up-market co-lo sites derives from their better housing and management facilities, not quality parking.

    If what you describe is true, it's totally ridiculous for Mailbox's intended business. They badly need to move their co-lo rooms to a better site, and it could be even cheaper and more expandable for them to do so outside of London --- even just 15 miles further out would make a big difference, without imposing a travel strain on staff.
  • By not encouraging a geek presence on their stands, companies are missing a golden opportunity to create a buzz which then attracts further visitors, and so on. You're more likely to get corporate visitors too that way, just to see what all the fuss is about.

    The price of raising the effective profile of your stand in this way is not high: you just have to print more leaflets and provide more fun exhibits and offer some lower-cost purchases, T-shirts and mugs if nothing else, and those can be offset against advertising budgets. A minimal-size booth will then probably not be adequate, but there were many larger stands at the show that were almost empty of visitors, a wasted opportunity.

    Next time, exhibitors should invite students and other geeks as well as corporates, as an exercise in marketing if nothing else!
  • This is a little bit offtopic, but does anyone know when the Japan linux expo is, i can't find any info at all about it, did they cancel it this year?

    you gotta embrace the suits, it's the only way to get the money flowing in.

    -"YOU NEED TO CHOSE TO LIVE LIFE AND THEN LIVE!"
  • Hey, I work for a living and *I* did/do this anyway. You can never have enough pens and there's all sorts of other cool bits and pieces to get.

    What annoyed me is that I went with my wife and they wouldn't let us take out daughter (15 months) in. I can understand not letting mobile children in but a baby? My wife had to spend a couple of hours wandering around Kensington as a result (fortunately a good area). As someone who has contributed to Linux (in a small way) I find this very insulting.

    Anyway, I got two bags full of stuff I now have to trawl through to get out the best bits. The show itself was OK but as with most of these events I've attended, mostly just a forum for people to attend stands covered in buzzwords. Didn't get to see the ice penguin and the only beer I got was somewhat expensive but it was interesting to see where the market stands on Linux (IMO, too many people selling distros/support/administration services and not enough developing applications) and I finally got to see a real live Beowulf cluster (The Suse stand I believe).

    Oh, and I didn't think too much of the Redhat keynote speech. A bit of a jab at Microsoft, IBM and Sun then some "R3DH42 1Z K3WL" type stuff then a sort of waffly "We're concerned about DMCA and UCITA" type stuff presumably intended to pander to the mob. (I think perhaps they paid a bit too much attention to Slashdot :) )

    Rich

  • Reminds me of a job I had, where we were writing a contact manager program (in Forth). On lunch hours, we'd pocket a disquette with the program, and go around hunting for a computer store, then subrepitously stick the disquette in a computer and run the program.

    After fiddling a bit, we'd grab a marketroïd and ask him about the program, if it did this or that, and about what price it was.

    The bullshit reactions we often got were priceless!!!

    --
    Here's my mirror [respublica.fr]

  • Thanks for the reply. As always, it's horses for courses, and these days a useful 19" server can be about the same size as a hungry person's pizza, so the lack of parking facilities needn't be fatal to business. Just damaging. :-)

    One certainly can't quibble with the 35 pounds/month price of the basic package, although prospective customers should note that 1 gigabyte per month is just 386 bytes/sec for a 30-day month, so they shouldn't expect to run any substantial web or mail services on that.

    386 bytes/s is less than 5% of the bandwidth of a single ISDN channel, so obviously this would not provide viable service for any substantial constant-rate applications. In other words, the application needs to be one that is inherently low-bandwidth or one that can make good use of the burst headroom for this package to make sense.

    "Corporate shopfront on the Internet" is probably not such an application, even for a tiny business. Worldwide 24-hour access, the roaming of search engines, and rapidly increasing expectations of end customers, all conspire to make such a miniscule average bandwidth unsuitable. And now that ADSL is finally starting to happen, the server bandwidth pricing of yesterday just isn't going to be of any use at all.

    There are however still a few low-bandwitch applications around, so I might well check out Mailbox in the future. Especially when the Putney site's carpark becomes available. :-)

    Cheers!
  • Top marks at the Expo must go to Maddog. He gave the conference closing speech, and chose to speak about the Expo organisers policy of not allowing young people or students in! He eloquently explained why this was a BAD THING. Best moment of the show for me was at the end of Maddog's speech when we in Lonix marched up to him and invited him to go for beers and a curry later on. The 'suits' just had to stand aside as this "Very Important Person" - Maddog - talked to the troops. Sorry to say it, but I loved the looks on their faces. Jon did come along later to the curry, and I'm sure he enjoyed talking to people. I'm sure he would have enjoyed the Lonix trip to Ivan of the Greater London Linux Uset Group, http://gglug.linux.co.uk also collared him, and he agreed to come to the meet in Docklands on Saturday! Sure enough, he turned up to the meet and had some beers with us in the evening. As I said (many times!) this is like Ronaldo coming out for a Sunday kick-about in the park (soccer reference). But hey - thats' what the revolution is all about. John Hearns
  • Strictly Speaking it was called eXpo Windows World (with the eXpo being the most prominent world on all literature etc. that I saw) but in past years it was just called Windows World.
    I actually spent 2 days on a stand there fielding questions on Linux, was roped into a Linux Q&A presentation and showing our systems to people.We see a wild variety of people with the most common questions:
    1. Can I use this instead of Windows?
    2. Why should I use this instead of Windows?
    3. Can I run my Windows programs on it?
    4. Can I use it on the same machine as Windows?
    5. Is this cd Free?
    6. Could Windows be any worse (yes, the flamebaiters try in real life too!)?
    So everyone wanted to know about Linux in relation to Windows. I think the fact that we were not at a Linux Show (I got bumped by a coin-toss at the last minute for going to the London Linux show to make way for a salesman) made it a far more worthwhile experience as people were insterested in holding the Linux world to the same standards as the traditional commercial world. The downside was we saw just how entrenched Microsoft had become, the only question I received that gave me hope was "Can I re-compile my programs written for SCO for Linux?" As long as these people are out there it can only be a matter of time before we can have a software show and stop nailing shows to operating systems.
    And I would just like to say that the only answer I hated giving was when I had to tell one person who wanted to ditch Windows that they had to keep Windows because he couldn't replace his Cubase.
  • Students were banned from attending this one. My friends and I had to make up a fake company name to get tickets.

    Abashed the Devil stood,
    And felt how awful goodness is
  • The use for the vodka is obvious!

    There always will be suits at the Linux Expo (and Software Development Conferences). That is how you can tell the sales people from the real people.

  • New Alpha motherboard The UP1100 has been revealed at the Expo - partnered with a 21264 Alpha processor, it's aimed at Beowulf clusters, web servers and development and rendering boxes. API have also announced a partnership with QSW which will develop Linux supercomputers. Check out http://www.alpha-processor.com and http://www.quadrics.com

    Just imagine a Beowulf Cluster of these!
  • It's great to see Linux doing well in the UK! Sometimes it seems that MS have a stranglehold here in the UK and Ireland that's unbreakable when I hear about how well Linux is doing in the USA (get it in all the shops, magazines everywhere, or so it seems) but things are taking off in Ireland too, take a look at http://cork.linux.ie/events/windowsworld/ [linux.ie] for my report about how we wooed the crowd in Dublin last month!
  • Was because to get one of the `VIP' passes to the event, you had to sign up on a web site that said that `sorry, we cannot accommodate students'. Oh, that's okay, I mean it's not like any students wrote the darned kernel in the first place or anything! I think the non-advance entry price was stated as £15; pretty pricy and not worth it to most students, assuming they were letting 'em in on the door.

    Given this perverse entry requirement, I was trying to fathom the purpose of this event from a friend on the Debian stand, and from his description it sounded like a corporate willy-waving competition as to who could sponsor the most number of pissed-up geeks :-)

    I was a bit miffed in that I got a pass sent to me as an `independent consultant', but about to start some ferocious exams, I couldn't go. Maybe that was part of their no-students drive too...?

    Hey ho; maybe next year.
  • Here are some pics I took:

    'The Great Linux Debate' [qmw.ac.uk]
    Outside the show [qmw.ac.uk]
    Mailbox Internet [qmw.ac.uk]

    Abashed the Devil stood,
    And felt how awful goodness is

  • It'll be good to see Linux at an event which suggests 'Windows' as the main theme.

    I was a little disappointed at the number of products on display which appared to be nothing other than windows boxes. However, there was some interesting hardware and a lot of knowledgeable people about.

    However, I didn't find what I was really looking for, which was products geared for the embedded market (we make a number of wierd and wonderful devices for data acquisition and processing, so we need just a little more than the typical thin-client PC has (the best I saw was a 233MHz pentium grade system). Guess I'll just stick with the ICP products for the moment.

    Glad to see the move to more floor space. Atleast you could actually see the floor this year.

  • As a representative of the White Boy Funky Music Playing Society (WBFMPS), I must correct you sir. There are over 23,000 CERTIFIED Funky Music Playing White Boys.

    As Chief Lead Engineer of the Funky Music Playing Certification Production Department, I can clearly assure you that there IS an ENTIRE SUB-CULTURE of Funky Music Playing White Boys. We are often-times hidden from public view, because we are just TOO Funky and Play That Funky Music too 'right'.

    I assume you are a representative of the Non-White Boy Funky Music Playing Association. Have your Non-White Boy Funky Music Player people talk to my White Boy Funky Music Player people. I think it is time for a new era of Funky Music Playing.

    Thank you,
    Jeff Zellner [mailto], Chief Lead Engineer of the Funky Music Playing Certification Production Department
  • Oh my holy Jane! The cars are parked on the wrong side of the road! Never seen a picture of England before...Kinda weird seeing them parked like that.
  • re: `The Great Linux Debate' pic-- what's Boy George doing in the background?
  • By the same token, a true limerick (AFAIK) is supposed to start with there "There was a man" (or woman, whatever).

    So something like

    There was a poster called Eleven,
    who though karma could get you to heaven,
    but little did he know,
    up there ACs run the show,
    so down is where he will be headen'.


    -
    We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
  • ...is that you simply will *not* ever see funky music played right.

    You may, however, (and many others may, too, in the right moment, with the right sort of all-too-infrequent awareness) *hear* funky music being played "right", as you put it, or, rather as I would put it, "correctly".

    See?

    t_t_b
    --

  • I would definitely never consider myself a suit, although I was wearing one...

    It was my first Linux show, and I was very impressed. The Alpha Linux hardware made my jaw drop as it zoomed a mandelbrot image smoothly and quickly. The guy I spoke to on the stand said that it was realtime but I can't confirm it. If it really was realtime then those machines are FAST! The SGI hardware goes without saying - very impressive. One of their stand techies reamed off the specs and but when I asked him what software took advantage of the [phenominal] 3D graphics hardware, he replied "Quake!". :-)

    One thing that was a bit odd was the "Great Linux Debate" (which was too packed for me to attend). It claimed to feature industry leaders, but the highest profile person, Alan Cox, was at the show (on Red Hat's stand), but wasn't at the debate. I know because I spoke to him when the debate was running. It's not everyday you get to meet a real Unix Wizard!!!![1]

    It was interesting seeing which companies sent people to the show - including some "traditional" sectors like the Ministry of Agriculture, and the Ministry of Defence.

    All told, it was a very good day - I've got loads of new distributions to try, and left with two bags full of stuff including a rather nice "stress" penguin. The "Can I have one for my girlfriend?" worked well for the cute stuff.... ;-)

    [1] I asked Alan about Linux at the highend (hot swap PCI etc). He said he'd seen it demoed, that Red Hat and SGI were involved in providing some high end stuff. He then talked about clustering, and how they evaluated Unix clustering, but decided that the VMS form of clustering was "right" and that's the way they're taking Linux. (apologies to AC if I misheard him).
  • The PC World near me stock quite a lot of Linux stuff. Several distros, other software and books. I didn't bother asking any of the sales staff about it though. What would be the point?

    I've also seen the Linux versions of Quake 1 & 2 on sale in Game and other games stores. Which makes you wonder why they can't stock the latest Loki stuff. I bet if people actually knew you could get Quake 3, or whatever, in their local shop, you'd see common attitudes about Linux disappear much faster.
  • Smirnoff is not the bottom-of-the-barrel stuff (like Taaka or McCormick). At the same time, it's not ridiculously expensive. It is a decent compromise between vodka that outright sucks and vodka that costs too much to give away free at a tradeshow.

  • I use mailbox for colocating my servers (just about to add another one to the rack)

    Their service is top notch, no outages, outstanding bandwidth and they are also the cheapest colocator in the UK..

    The best thing of course is that they are totally linux. I wouldnt want to place any of my penguins in a rack next to NT boxen for fear that they get contaminated...

    god damn borg with their nanoprobes...

    This is why I also wear a tinfoil hat.

    My wife uses windows sometimes. I fear that she may try and kill me in my sleep.

    This is why I eat three tins of penguin mints in the evenings....
  • At appropriate moments, an SGI staffer would pour a stream of vodka in the shoulder which cooled and splashed into the lucky recipient's plastic cup. The choice of Smirnoff alleviated the potential problems of insufficient cooling which may have occurred if cheaper source product had been in use.

    The idea is really cool, but dude, I totally disagree on your choice of vodka. Smirnoff's the ripoff; you'll want real Russian vodka such as Stolichnaya. Any decent bar that I frequented recently ([1] [courttavern.com], [2] [melodybar.com], [3] [koornbeurs.nl] and [4] [tudelft.nl]) has it. Smirnoff tastes even worse when it's warm, but of course that might just be me.

    Cheers,
    the Apocalyptic Lawnmower

  • Finally, a Slashdot topic I can get into. You're right, Smirnoff is pretty crappy, but it's still a step above junk like Skyy or Absolut, and way cheaper.

    You're from France, huh? Have you ever tried Grey Goose? The bottle says it comes from France and has become my new favorite when I drink martinis. My head still hurts from the five Grey Goose martinis I drank last night. It's too easy to drink, I think.

    Have you witnessed the explosion of vodkas from places you wouldn't expect in France? I was about my favorite bar a week ago and decided to start sampling some of the other vodkas.

    Mezzaluna, from Italy - Not bad but doesn't do anything to distinguish itself from the other high-end vodkas.

    Voxx, from England - The most expensive vodka I've seen yet. It says it's filtered four times. It seemed a little TOO flavorless for my taste.

    I also ran across one from Austria but I can't remember what it was called. It was more of a traditional Polish-style potato vodka. Not bad.

    My all time favorite is still good old Stoli, though.
  • The Smirnoff Citrus Twist isn't too bad, better than Absolut anyway. It's more of a martini vodka, though, rather than something you'd enjoy straight out of a vodka glass.
  • I think I might just be biased against Absolut because I was expecting it to be better when I tried it. I was probably just duped by their ad campaign and their fancy frosted bottle (I think they were the first to do something like that with their bottle). The last time I had some, though, I still didn't like it.

    Down here in the states Absolut is around $20 while Smirnoff is $13-14. Of course, Smirnoff is made here so there aren't tariffs to deal with.
    I know Canada tries to control liquor sales quite a bit more through their state licensed stores. It took me awhile to get used to looking for the standard grain and grapes signs the first time I was up there. I usually try to bring as much liquor as I can get away with when I go up there. Long live the duty-free shops!

    It's weird that Absolut is so cheap relative to Smirnoff because taking the exchange rate into account $20 CDN is right in line with what it costs here. I think the last time I saw Ketel One it was right around $15 at the right store.
  • I've worked in some big IT shops in the UK, and I am amazed by the level of cluelessness of some of the management in these places.

    IT policy is often dictated by who gives most sweateners to management, and never on technical ability.

    I saw one company replace a perfectly valid office email system with another which not only wasn't anywhere as integrated with their OS, but it cost a fortune, and required addtional servers and administration staff. The decision to go for this product was entirely due to the MD of this company sharing a flight back from abroad with the head of sales of this software house.

    I've also seen networks designed by management, and I had to remotely support a good number of them. Non-existant security, uneccesary traffic over saturated links, bad choice of hardware, the list goes on.

    One person I worked for even dictated that company policy forbode the use of Pentium Processors, dictating that 486 were the company standard for everything. He also preferred Arcnet over Ethernet, despite the fact that it ran at a quarter of the speed and had other serious flaws. He later relented on the Pentium dictate, but tried to get us to use the cheapest PCs possible as file servers. I had to smuggle a high-end Compaq *INTO* the machine room when it came to replace the server.

    UK management are *STUPID*. Why else has NT been adopted almost everywhere. Linux unfortunatly hasn't got a chance. And don't get me onto the subject of recruitment policy!

  • I was there too, (not wearing a suit), but I never met any famous gurus, mostly because I wouldn't know them by sight. I'm glad to hear there were a few.

    I have to agree about the Alphas - that Mandelbrot demo was almost hypnotic. I mean, we've all done a Mandelbrot program in C or BASIC or whatever, and know how long it can take to generate. (My fastest so far was a few seconds on the company's HP9000, in C). Maybe the Alpha has a "complex multiply" instruction? If you saw a scruffy guy standing there with his jaw dropping too, that was me.

    More impressive in a way was the Debian stand. They had Debian/Linux running on an old Sparcstation, 2 different Toshiba laptops, a Toshiba libretto palmtop and an Acorn RiscPC. I liked the latter 'cause I'm an old ARM fan from way back. I thought, Hey, is there anything you can't run Linux on?

    I bought the "Potato" CD set, of course. Unfortunately I f*d up the install a bit and haven't got X working again yet, but I was greatly impressed with the level of control Debian gives you (exemplified by the way it let me f* it up I suppose).

    I did make it to the Great Linux Debate, but I have to say you didn't miss much. There was little or no useful debate, partly because the panel weren't disagreeing, but also because some of the questions from the audience were disappointingly petty or ill-informed.

    There were a few stands touting web-enabled database solutions (my employer's main interest in the Expo), so I was disappointed there wasn't a Zope stand. IMO that would have blown the others away, and I couldn't honestly recommend any of the offerings I saw. If we want to actually pay for a database, we'll stick with Progress :-)

    Anyway, a good day out and well worth getting up at 5:30am.

    --- By the way, I work for a subsidiary of Jim Beam. Our bit makes proper Whisky, though. The company itself has no opinions I am aware of.

  • - Alan Cox mentioned that Alcatel (BT's chosen supplier of USB ADSL modems for their recently-launched OpenWorld ADSL service) are independently working on Open Source drivers for the modem.

    - SGI are totally Gung-Ho about Linux. Really. Linux will be the only OS to run on their IA64 (Merced) boxes. They're publically committing themselves to supporting their existing MIPS/Irix customers, but they definitely believe their /future/ lies with IA64/Linux. I do hope this strategy works out well for them. I'm slightly disappointed that their recent IA32 boxes have lost the innovative chipset that was included in their original Visual Workstations. Essentially the new models are well-built AT PCs, with a bleeding-edge nVidia graphics card.

    - VMware now have an office in Henley-On-Thames in the UK.

    - Debian emphasised the difference between Free Software and Gratis Software by charging 7UKP for their 6-CD distro set, but giving away Free Beer. I hope the irony wasn't lost...

  • Oh my god. He's never seen a picture of England...
    What's next? "England? Wassat?"
    Oh, and that's a picture of London, they weren't parked, cars just don't move there!!!
  • Would the new news peer be anything to do with the comments made by Gareth the other day :o) Oh and can you thank Erica for replying to my email.

    M@t :o)
  • An update on Linux availabilty in Leeds.

    Electronic Boutique and Game only appear to stock one distro, and that one is Turbolinux. Others have disappeared from their shelves. Seems that they use the same wholesaler. Staff are clueless even when it comes to games software. Linux experience none existant.

    Software Warehouse (or whatever they are now called) seem to carry a few distros. Also quake. Staffed full of suited prats!

    The small independent PC shops seem to have vanished, or be located out of town. One I used to visit was clued up, but I believe they are no longer trading.

    . The best deal I've seen, though, is in Borders bookshop in Leeds. Redhat, Mandrake, SuSe, Corel, Slackware and probably others. No Debian though, other than out of date current package with the book. Many, many books and the magazine section stocks Linux Journal, Linux Magazine and Maximum Linux. I even picked up the Perl Resource kit in a sale for £2.99.

  • Definitely not in the same league as many fne polish and russian vodkas.

    Indeed. My personal favourite at the moment is Polmos Wyborova. If you're in London, Gerry's off license in Old Compton Street sells a fairly decent selection of vodkas.

  • I was the person from API that showed you guys the Mandelbrot demo. It was the open-sourced Xaos package, recompiled with the Compaq C compilers for the most optimised images.

    We also showed Rasmol, Seti at home and POVray+PVM distributed across 2 processors in an SMP UP2000 system. If I had more systems (and I wanted more, but just couldn't get them in time), POVray would have screamed.

    The show was great. Lots of awesome attendees. LOTS of interest in the new UP1100.
  • Urm, no, but we got offered so we took it up. Hopefully in by the end of the week, hard disk space pending ;)
  • Yes, I'm ugly, well done ;)

    ps. I have a wife. ;)))

  • Haiku (Score:2)

    by 575 ( 195442 )
    British Linux show
    Penguin-fest across the sea
    Now invade Europe!
  • The choice of Smirnoff alleviated the potential problems of insufficient cooling which may have occurred if cheaper source product had been in use.

    Funny! The smirnoff is usually considered here (in France) as one of the cheapest vodkas out there (and in fact at least part of the production comes from Grenoble, in France). Definitely not in the same league as many fne polish and russian vodkas.
  • what doens't make sense to me is that there is almost an anti-linux feeling i the shops over here in the great uk. when i go out to a software shop and ask about what kind of linux software they supply, except for the few geeks that you can chat with happily, the staff seem to be angry that you asked. They really hate it. anyone have any interesting suggestions?


    "But Doctor, if they take away my head surely I'll die?"
  • Smirnoff is really not that great. Its better than the barely distilled crap that some claim is vodka, but still rather rough. I am an american so of course I prefer the western vodkas without as much character (well most of the time). Personally Ketel One is my favorite for sipping. And remember folks, vodka should be ice cold and served out of a tall fluted glass. That way one can roll it around and let the characteristics play out as they may. Man i love Vodka. Anyone drink citron flavored stuff. i tried my second last night, Tanqueray Sterling Citrus. Much better than the absolut junk but still seemed lacking. it went down but failed to leave anything I thought. Any suggestions on Citrus flavored vodkas?
  • Their headline quote was taken from a slashdot post and much of what they had to say seemed to suggest that userfriendly.org is in the process of "leveraging" their undeniably successful core product.

    It used to be that companies showered pre-med students with discounts and freebies in recognition of the fact that doctors had an incredible life-time earning potential (why some collect BMWs for a hobby) due to high entry barriers (AMA/professional colleges/guilds/quotas). With the high prominance of tech IPOs (ignoring the stupidity of recent dot-cons), I suspect that smart companies (e.g. LinuxCard) are trying to realise the potential of getting in geeks while they're still uncomitted to single branded materialism. The problem comes of course in separating out the potentially profitable geeks with IPO potential from the typically impoverished student looking for a free ride. I suspect the only solution is a long-term raising of the professional status (which means culling out the idiots) such that students (especially with OpenSource background) are welcome. Given the more sophisticated anti-commercial bent of today's generation, I suspect that organisations such as UserFriendly need to be less in-your-face about co-branding least they destroy their grass-roots appeal. People including cartoonists are entitled to a living (and let's face it, all companies need to generate cashflow) so perhaps leveraging is a not-so-subtle way of sorting out the geeks from the dorks.

    The big problem is that it is still yet to be shown that OpenSource is just as profitable as ClosedSource (e.g. through IPOs) and until then, participants won't be able to reap the spin-off benefits. However, one day, pre-IPOs will be considered just as attractive as pre-meds as a demographic marketing group.

    LL

  • Vodka should be drunk straight from a short glass IMHO. Preferably slightly chilled, but not overly so (keep it out of the freezer, people!). If you want flavoured stuff, I recommend either flavoring it yourself (take a bottle, stuff herbs and/or spices in there for a few days, then enjoy -- wormwood is a perennial favourite), or buy finished blends. Citrus (or other artificial flavouring) flavoured vodka tends to taste "off", like it's been sitting too long.

  • Yep, but what else do you expect from the 8-9 bucks an hour crowd?

    They've never had to do anything of actual purpose. If they did, they might take a better view of it after running Apache a bit.

    Really, I can see why they don't like it: job security. They probably don't like people buying online either. Oh well, I guess it's back to McDonalds...


    - Jeff A. Campbell
    - VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com [velocinews.com])
  • This was actually one of the reasons why I didn't want to go there this year.
    Last year SuSE let me down badly; as a previous fan of their distribution, I got peeved with the YaST license and very very peeved with all the exponential-growth bar-charts their MD kept on showing (so much for his topic, "is linux for everyone?" or whatever it was). Just *far* too commercial.
    This year, they were anti-student. Not pro-suit, but anti-student. If they'd said "this event is geared towards suits" I'd have let them off (and gone as an odd-one-out along with a few others ;) but instead it was the discriminatory line. Oops.

    Sometimes I get the impression the corporate world is running off with our Tux kickin' and screamin' under an arm..
    and I think, "face it Arthur, these bozos are not your ancestors. The human race is currently around the other side of this mountain making documentaries about themselves".

    Waaaaaaaaa...
    ~Tim
    --
    .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
  • Actually, its seems reasonable that there is more attention paid to linux here in the states because of the ongoing justice dept. trial of m$. Newspapers, whenever they report about Windows, they hold up linux as one of the alterantives to Windows.
  • THe SGI ice penguin [thisisnurgle.org.uk]

    IMNSHO, the show wasn;t that interesting, but I did go for the freebies (which you had to pay for.... grrr)....

    But I did notice that Computer Manuals were selling MCSE training guides.... hmmmm....
  • Obscure Fact of the Day: True haiku's require a reference to the season.

    The reason this fact is obscure is because you'll only be able to find it at -1 in a few minutes...

  • If you mention linux and they poo poo it, you have a good chance to do some salesman bating {sp}, providing they still think they know more than you. Take the chance to make an arse out of a clueless sales type.

    Simply play the cluless l-user until they say something really technically stupid (or just stupidly wrong) and go in for the kill (best to be done in a crowed store). Hell U might get banned from the store, but U weren't planning on going back any how.
  • Well, i'm sure i've seen boxed copies of Redhat in Software Warehouse stores. But i can't ever imagine walking into a Dixons or (God forbid) a PC World and finding a sales person who new what Linux was. Hell, must of them barely know what a computer is...

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