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<H4>
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"Linux Gazette...<I>making Linux just a little more fun!</I>"
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<P><FONT COLOR="#66FFFF"><FONT SIZE=+2>Fall Internet World 98</FONT></FONT>
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<BR><FONT COLOR="#66FFFF"><FONT SIZE=+2>A View From the Show Floor</FONT></FONT>
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<BR><FONT COLOR="#66FFFF"><FONT SIZE=+2>By <A HREF="mailto:adler@bnl.gov">Stephen
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Adler</A></FONT></FONT>
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<HR WIDTH="100%"></CENTER>
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<BR>
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<P><BR>
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<BR>
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<P>I just experienced my first big league Internet show. And was it a doozer....
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The show was titled '<A HREF="http://events.internet.com/fall98/">Fall
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Internet Show 98</A>' and it took place in New York City's Javits conference
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center. There was a 4 day 'vertical' track on TCP/IP which was one of the
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motivations for going to the show. The other was to meet the commercial
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Linux people in person. So what follows is a 'diary' of what I can remember
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of the show.
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<P>Day 1) I live on Long Island NY and I have to take a 1.2 hour train
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ride in order to reach the Javits convention center where the show is being
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held. My day starts by getting up at 5:45 am, taking a quick shower, and
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trying to get to the train station, a good 30 minutes from home, by 6:30am.
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This first day, I got a call from the <A HREF="http://www.phy.bnl.gov/e787/e787.html">experiment
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where I work</A>, telling me that <A HREF="http://ssadler/~adler/chep98/chep98.html">data
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cannot be collected</A>. I'm the DAQ guy. I figured I would drive by work,
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fix the DAQ problem and continue on to the train station. The
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problem <IMG SRC="./gx/adler/longIsland.small.gif" NOSAVE HEIGHT=200 WIDTH=300 ALIGN=LEFT>was
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minor, but I missed the 6:30 train I wanted to take and ended up on a later
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train. What was the rush? According to the Fall Internet World 1998 web
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page, the keynote speakers were to start on Monday at 9am and I still had
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to register. I wanted to get into Javits, register and get a good seat
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for the keynote. I was rushing to get to NYC. The train ride in was uneventful.
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The weather was fantastic. 70 odd degrees that day, clear blue fall skys.
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Getting into Pen Station and out onto the streets of NYC, on a bright clean
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crisp fall day is hard to explain. You have to experience it yourself.
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Javits is between 34th and 36 or 37th street and 11th Ave. Pen Station
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on about 8th and 33rd. So I take off west, down 34th searching for Javits.
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I've seen it from the outside a long time ago and I'm not really sure where
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to find it. Found it, hard to miss. And yes, there was some kind of computer
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show going on there. The front of the convention center had these large
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banners draped with some message from Hewlett Packard for all to see. There
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were some other banners draped in front of the building which I cannot
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recall now.
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<P>In I go expecting to see thousands and the place looks rather empty.
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I peer into the show floor to find boxes and crates unopened all over the
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place. "Gee", I think to myself, "They have a lot of work to do in order
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to get setup for today". I go over and registers, there is no one in line.
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And again I think to myself "This is weird, the place is dead". I was worried
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that I would miss the key note address of John Gage, <IMG
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SRC="./gx/adler/fiw9801.small.jpg" NOSAVE HEIGHT=150 WIDTH=226 ALIGN=RIGHT>some
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science guru working for Sun. Well, it turns out that the show is really
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to get going on Wednesday. Ha, this explains all, I'm rushing around for
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no purpose at all. The good thing was that the sessions I wanted to attend
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did start today so waking up at 5:45am was not a complete waste of my time.
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Now all I had to do was blow off 1 hour waiting for my session to start.
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In the mean time, I went to get a cup of coffee from one of the show vendors.
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I spent 5 bucks on an oversized coffee and muffin. The coffee these guys
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sold me was so charged up, that I ended up running to the bathroom to pee
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at every break in my session.
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<BR>
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<P><BR>
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<CENTER>
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<P><IMG SRC="./gx/adler/fiw9810.small.jpg" NOSAVE HEIGHT=138 WIDTH=400 ALIGN=CENTER></CENTER>
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<BR>
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<P><BR>
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<P>10am finally rolled around, I went to my session titled 'The Infrastructure
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of IP' or something like that and spent the rest of the day listening to
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a rather polished man, (polished in appearance,) telling me about IP. I
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knew about 70% of what he was telling me and was gland to learn of the
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other 30% of which I've heard of but never knew the details. (What exactly
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is a class A, B, C, D or E type network and the details of the why's and
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whereof's of DHCP, a rather new protocol to replace bootp, (new in that
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I've just heard of it when RedHat 5.1 was released)) The other stuff he
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covered I cant remember now. What I remember most of this session was that
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this guy reminded me of a tele-evangelist. First off, the guy wore a very
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nice suit. You can't blame him, its his job, and working in the private
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sector, you have to look good. He worked for a training company and this
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explained why, at least I assumed why, he presented his material as he
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did. His style was as follows. <IMG SRC="./gx/adler/fiw9830.small.jpg" NOSAVE HEIGHT=300 WIDTH=155 ALIGN=RIGHT>His
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presentation tool was power point, jazzed up with animations. The slide
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could not just pop up. The letters had to roll in, high light streaks had
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to streak in, the bullet items came in, rolling in one after another with
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a nice time delay between bullet items of several seconds. Very slick.
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He would present his material in a way which was supposed to make you feel
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good about what you were listening to. He kept asking questions, not for
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the sake of the question, but to get the audience involved. He would walk
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up and down the isle talking about IP headers, the OSI networking model
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and always interjecting, "Do you feel comfortable with that? Is it all
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coming together now?", all the while I'm getting this weird feeling that
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I need to yell "Amen, the TCP/IP God is great and forgiving".
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<P>This went on for the rest of the day. Sitting inside this small room
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listening to the wonders of IP. At one point, I decided I needed to get
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out and look around a bit to see what the rest of the conference attendees
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were engaged it. I poked my head into one room, about 4 times the size,
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full of people, talking Web marketing strategies. I mean it was full. This
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pointed out to me one fact about the internet. Very few know how it really
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works, and the rest are trying to cash in using browser technology.
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<P>Day 2) Since my session didn't start until 10am, I didn't rush to catch
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the train. Instead I took my wife to work, and then had to run and catch
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the last train which got into NY at 10am. Meaning I would miss the first
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15 minutes of my session. <IMG SRC="./gx/adler/fiw9839.small.jpg" NOSAVE HEIGHT=200 WIDTH=125 ALIGN=LEFT>That's
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OK. After sitting through about 6 hours of Tele-evangelism I figured I
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could miss the 1st 15 minutes of the "Integrating Unix and NT", or was
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it, "Making Unix talk to NT" or something to that effect. The idea being
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that you were to learn how to setup a heterogenous Unix/NT computing environment.
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I got the same guy from yesterday giving this session, great guy, but I
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couldn't take it anymore. He ended getting hung up on setting up a DHCP
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server on his laptop running NT. Hey, I can fill in a widget form thing
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with IP numbers too... I figured I had enough and that this time, I wouldn't
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learn much. I wanted to see what else was 'out there'. So I wondered over
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to the ISP session. There was an interesting talk on setting up VPN's.
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That was new to me. Virtual Private Network. I still don't understand why
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it's such a good thing. To me, it has a bit of a snake oil man's thing
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to it. Look, we can setup this 'tunnel' between sites on your enterprise.
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Its secure, it uses the internet, it drives costs down. And I'm thinking
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to myself, "Well, I've got secure shell on my PC at home, if I've got secure
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shell on my PC at work and I ssh between the two, I must have a VPN!".
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I'm pushing the forefront of internet technology without even know it.
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I guess VPN's are for those who don't have access to ssh. Hmmm... I paid
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$0 for ssh, I wonder what it costs to setup a VPN? Do the ISP's give it
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away? I wandered from the ISP session to the Telephony session. I learned
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about VPN's in that session too. Here, there was a slick woman from 3Com
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who had even slicker .ppt files to dazzle you with. These .ppt files were
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in full animation. Cartoons would pop up and disappear, text would flow,
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arrow and pointers swooshed. I hope I don't get a .ppt deficiency complex
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next time I present my all too static transparencies. (Transparencies....
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(yes I do code in Fortran more often that I would like to admit. But I
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have written some c++ code, a crude as it was...))
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<P>Lunch came next. The day before I got a hotdog from a vendor across
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11th avenue for $1.50. With soda it cost me less than $3.00. Today, I got
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into the cafeteria line, pulled a rather bland ham and cheese hero looking
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thing from a shelf, a bag of chips and a soda. $10.00!!!! I grunted as
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I pulled out a $10 bill from my wallet but the cashier didn't seem to care.
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(Its not her fault I'm stupid.) I wandered around the tables, found one
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where only one guy was sitting at a table which fit 4. I sat down and munched
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away. After some time, I got to talking to the guy. He was a chap from
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Israel with a T1 connection out of his house and a 45Mbit connection coming
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in! Talking about an asynchronous plug into the Internet. My god. This
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guy was into testing some on demand DVD video app into his house. We'll,
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I'll be waiting form my 45Mbit connection coming from Bell Atlantic soon.
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Yea, real soon. It took 9 months to get ISDN into my house after Bell Atlantic,
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when they swore up and down it would be 3 weeks tops. Using Adler's law
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of monopolistic trends in hi-tech, I give Bell Atlantic 20 years before
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I see 45Mbits into my house, even thought this guy has it *now*. (I'll
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have more sarcastic comments on this topic later...) Ok that was lunch.
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I decided to blow off the rest of the Unix/NT session. At this point I
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cant remember very well what I did. It's all getting rather blurry. I do
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remember the last session I went to on day 2 of the conference. It was
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titled "The governance of the Internet" and was a panel of a bunch of rich
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guys discussing how the government should not intervene with regulating
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what is deployed on the internet and how its deployed. The unfortunate
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part was that too much of the discussion centered on 'adult material' with
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eyes rolling up on each mention of that dirty subject.
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<P>Day 3) Finally, the first day of the real conference. I got up at 5:45
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am, and rushed off to catch the train. The 7:05 express got me in about
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8:30 which would be enough time to walk over to Javits and catch a good
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seat for the morning key note. The deliverance of this keynote really set
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the stage for the next two<IMG SRC="./gx/adler/fiw9813.small.jpg" NOSAVE HEIGHT=175 WIDTH=268 ALIGN=RIGHT>
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day's of this conference. The key note took place in the 'special events
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hall'. A large auditorium with a low sealing which could seat about 1000
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people I estimated. The stage was setup with 4 projection size TV screens.
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(20 feet high by 30 feet long, I don't know if I have the aspect ratio
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correct there, but they were big) Above the speakers podium was another
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regular TV which must have been at least 48'' in size. The props which
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fit between these screens were black with fluorescent thin geometric design.
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(Predominantly orange fluorescent tones) As I walked in, some rather hyped
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rock and roll music was playing. Fast beat music. I'm glad I didn't have
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a cup of the coffee they served there in the Javits food stand because
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between the caffeine overdose they serve and the rock and roll, I would
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have shot out of my chair. So there I wait, rock and roll in the back ground,
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cool fluorescent stage props in front and tons of MecklerMedia adds on
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the TV screens, (All 5 monster screens of them). The music let up, the
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screens went blank and the show was about to begin. The first 2 or 3 minutes
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was dedicate to a rather glizy add of Sun Microsystems. More rock and roll,
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the 5 screens lit up with MTV style imagery dedicated to promoting Sun.
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After that, some rich guy, (member of the overclass), comes out and introduces
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himself. <IMG SRC="./gx/adler/fiw9812.small.jpg" NOSAVE HEIGHT=175 WIDTH=280 ALIGN=LEFT>(Head
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of MecklerMedia, the sponsors of the show.) He eventually gets around to
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introducing the keynote speaker, John Gage. John, from what I can tell,
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has a science background. I would assume he has a Ph.D. in physics or something
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since he is the science liaison for Sun Microsystems. Being that I'm a
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scientist, I figured this would be a good chance to see what us science
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guys are doing to help internet technology. He gave a very good talk. In
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the end, he ended up promoting Sun's alternative to corba called jini.
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And no, its not in the public domain. John had some guy who seems to be
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involved in the development of jini come out and tell us what jini is and
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how it would affect the world. The appliance world that is. Jini was going
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to be, dare I call it the OS, which runs in your cam-corder, cell phone,
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PC, coffee pot, refrigerator, steering and breaking system in your car,
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landing gear in the next plane you fly, in the stop light at your closest
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busiest intersection, in the elevator in the World Trade center... Wait,
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is this a Really Stupid Idea!!!! This is nuts!!!! I don't want my car's
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breaking system to be on the Internet! No Way! It's going to be break-in
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city. All the hackers (I don't mean to give all hackers a bad name) who
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dedicate themselves to testing system IP vulnerabilities are going to have
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a field day. I am sure there will be a web page with the IPv8 address of
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my breaking system and the buffer overflow code which you can down load
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into this jini thing in my breaking system which will cause the breaking
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system to invert. Instead of pushing the peddle in my car to break, I'll
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have to push the break peddle to release the emergency breaks in my car.
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Good grief, I thought the year 2K freaks were crazy about the end of the
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world. Jini will end it all. After this jini guy finished talking about
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the object'ivity of this code, (you should have heard him rant. "This cam-corder
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is an object. Its got methods! The record method. The 'upload your data'
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method") all while he was staring intently at the cam-corder. It was if
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he was looking into and beyond the cam-corder into every appliance on the
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internet, including the breaking system of my car. John finished off his
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talk in a brilliant fashion. he pulled up the 'coolest taxi in Colorado'
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web page for us to see. Some guy, I can't remember where in Colorado, has
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wired up his cab to the internet. the interior of his cab is totally wacked
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out. Its got a full complement of musical instrument, drums, key board,
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amplifiers etc. as well as some digital camera which he used to take pictures
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which he uploads to his web site. Here check it out. <A HREF="http://www.ultimatetaxi.com/taxinow.htm">Click
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here</A>.
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<P>After that bit of excitement I decided to pace myself and go to some
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sessions before hitting the trade show floor. The problem is that I can't
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remember what sessions I went to. But I do know that I only went to one
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of them. Because it was after that I was soon on my way to checkout the
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RedHat booth. My main calling to this show was to meet the RedHat team.<IMG
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SRC="./gx/adler/fiw9806.small.jpg" NOSAVE HEIGHT=200 WIDTH=299 ALIGN=RIGHT>
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I wouldn't call my self a Linux fanatic, maybe just an enthusiast. And
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I've gone through about 50 installations of RedHat on one machine or another
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since I started using it in the spring of 1996. I've been following the
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growth of RedHat somewhat on a daily basis since then and I've seen that
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they tour the world, meeting LUG groups and what not. So, needless to say,
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I did have a peak of curiosity to meeting someone from RedHat in flesh
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and blood. My search for the RedHat booth was frustrated by the poor documentation
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provided by the show. I went to the first floor, looking for booth 3368
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or something like that and found this empty booth space in the far back
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reaches of the first floor show area. I then found out that they were on
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the second floor. This was good since this was the main show area. Then
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I went to the second floor and wandered around looking for them. Again,
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the booth numbering is not quite random but close. I'm sure mathematicians
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have a name for its. Local Random Space, or local non-transforming functionals,
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who knows. I finally stumbled into them. There it was, the RedHat booth.
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I was expecting it to be mobbed by people, but it was not. It was rather
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empty. They had one or 2 PC's running RedHat Linux and the secure version
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of Apache. I went up and introduce myself to Melissa, the PR woman for
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RedHat, although she didn't want to refer to herself as a PR person. I
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guess there is some stigma attached to the PR departments of high tech
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companies which eludes me. Maybe is because I don't watch enough TV to
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see all the MS commercials. In any case, I told Melissa that I expected
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RedHat is going to get really big. I was curious to find out what was going
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on with the company. She told me that it was crazy right now. My guess
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is that the RedHat team is hacking late into the night. With the recent
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investment of Netscape, Intel and two venture capital firms, they are clearly
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booming. (I recently saw the announcement for two new positions at RedHat
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on their announcement mailing list.) As I stood round the booth, it was
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clear to me that people were continuously coming to the RedHat booth to
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ask questions. I was trying to stay out of their way. Or answer some questions
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for them if some people couldn't get to the RedHaters. After telling Melissa
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that I have a RedHat mirror site, she got excited and gave me a mouse pad
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and a poster. I hung around a bit more, found out that all the other Linux
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vendors were in the Oracle Partners pavilion. So I headed over there.
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<P>There I found the Pacific Hi Tech guy, the Caldera guy, the SuSE guys,
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and the VA guy. I spent some time with each. At that time, the VA guy was
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in a crisis situation. His PC had arrived broken. It was shaken up during
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shipping. Evesdropping in on the situation, it sounded like the disk drive
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was not properly screwed in to its bay and when the VA guy opened up the
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box, he found the system disk sitting on the bottom of the
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enclosure. <IMG SRC="./gx/adler/fiw9808.small.jpg" NOSAVE HEIGHT=150 WIDTH=225 ALIGN=LEFT>After
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putting the disk back where it belonged, it wouldn't boot. At that time,
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there was some guy from RedHat, trying to figure out how to get it back
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up and running. It was tense. The RedHat guy had a bead of sweat coming
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down the side of his forehead while he franticly typed commands at the
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console trying to diagnose the problem. I've been in similar situations
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but not as bad has having my system dead on the show floor of a major Internet
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conference. Instead of standing around looking over his shoulder adding
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to his pressure, I told the guy good luck and took off for lunch. (I stopped
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by some time later, and the machine was running fine.)
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<P>Lunch. Two hotdogs and a soda. All for under $5. Much better. Thank
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you street vendor. (Hmm... I see parallels here between open and close
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source development and lunch with the street vendor and at the conference
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cafeteria.)
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<P>After lunch came the Oracle keynote given by the CEO of Oracle, Larry
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Ellison. The only time I've seen him before was on a very good documentary
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by this Cringly guy titled something like "The Revenge of the Nerds" which
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tracked historically the rise of the SV power houses along with MS. The
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pre Keynote show or add, was really intense. All 5 TV displays were in
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full swing throwing up graphics and images of Oracle and the Internet.
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The music was very loud and fast. The adrenaline rush was mounting. After
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about 5 minutes of this extremely intense pitch, the noise gave way to
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silence. Then someone from the audience shouted "LOUDER!". Everyone laughed.
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And out came the CEO of Oracle. I don't know if he caught that, but I would
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have been rather emberassed. So off he goes ranting and raving about the
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future of computing. He ragged as much as possible on Microsoft. (There
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was an article in the NYTimes which talked about NT servers in every Burger
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King or McDonnalds and he thought that was a bad idea.) He then went to
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describe the power of the internet and how his product was going to take
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advantage of it etc etc... Its hard to take so much promotion of someone's
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software. The one thing that irked me was that he was confusing the internet
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with the browser. He kept saying things like, "You can access our database
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on the Internet" and he popped up Netscape and ran through some demo. I
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have a feeling that either he figures that the regular joe mo user considers
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the browser as the Internet or he is a regular joe mo user who doesn't
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know the subtleties of what he was ranting and raving about. In any case,
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while he was stepping through his demo, which was running on an iMac, the
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app froze and there was a frantic rebooting of the machine. The Orcale
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guy was able to talk his way through the rebooting of the poor iMac. This
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is life at the bleeding edge. Even Larry Ellison as to bleed a little.
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<P>After the key note, I turned my attention to a session titled, "Getting
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the most out of the Mozilla source code." Cool, open source, finally something
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about the real future. The guy who talked impressed me. He was an African
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guy who waxed well about web page development. I was glad to see that the
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field of Internet technology was not completely dominated by males of protestant/european
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decent. The session that followed was by some guys from real.com (I think
|
|
the name has changed) who talked about audio and video compression. The
|
|
topic of the session being multimedia in your browser. The technical stuff
|
|
they covered was good. I can now claim to be an expert in audio and video
|
|
compression. I know the jargon words, compress, equalize, encode, decode,
|
|
key frame, mpeg, and so on and so forth. With that, I can bullshit my way
|
|
through any multi-media discussion.
|
|
<P>I lost patience with the conference sessions and decided to go back
|
|
to the show floor, Instead of rushing off to the RedHat booth in mere panic,
|
|
I scouted out the various setups put up by all these forefront companies.
|
|
The companies who rented real estate from Javits was a who's who of my
|
|
life blood. HP, Sun, SGI, IBM, Motorola, Cicso, Microsoft, Bell Atlantic,
|
|
Computer Associates, O'Reilly, Oracle, Sybase, and on and on. The Big players
|
|
had Big booths and just as in the real world, the real estate proverb of
|
|
"Location, Location, Location" applies equally well here. All the companies
|
|
with big bucks were positioned right in front of the several entrances
|
|
to the main show floor. IBM bought the best spot, they were just behind
|
|
the main entrance. Microsoft had the second best spot, which was just to
|
|
the right of IBM. It's hard to describe the impression of some guy who
|
|
has never seen this kind of presentation before. Its BIG, Its LOUD, its
|
|
FLASHY, its CATCHY, its MTV, its exhausting. These Fortune 500 booths all
|
|
had big audio/visual displays advertising their merchandise. All screens
|
|
were BIG. Those cool Sony TV's where you put 9 or 16 of them together in
|
|
an NxM array and together they make up one big TV screen were all over
|
|
the place. IBM must have had 1/2 a dozen of these arrays setup. The detail
|
|
setup of all these booths has been lost from memory. Some exceptions linger.
|
|
First, is Motorola's Digital Diner.<IMG SRC="./gx/adler/fiw9805.small.jpg" NOSAVE HEIGHT=200 WIDTH=302 ALIGN=RIGHT>
|
|
Forget the elaborate array of video technology (gadgets), Motorola I think
|
|
out did everyone with their Digital Diner. As I strolled around the floor
|
|
trying to keep my mind from exploding from information overload, I saw
|
|
this diner looking structure with a bunch of people standing around rather
|
|
captivated by what was going on inside. I got a closer look and it took
|
|
a bit of focusing, (I'm brain is fighting these peak levels of information
|
|
infusion) and I realized that inside this diner, is a restaurant mockup
|
|
with a full Broadway cast singing and dancing to the hand full of show
|
|
attendees who caught a seat at one of the booths inside this Digital Diner.
|
|
They are sing and dancing to the Tune of IP Telephony no less. The cast
|
|
was a hoot. They had a cop, some sales guy, and 3 waitresses. And sing
|
|
and dance they did. From the outside of the booth, you could not hear the
|
|
music or what they were saying, but the visual of waitresses dancing around
|
|
with coffee pot and mug in hand, with those head held microphones was just
|
|
too cool. <IMG SRC="./gx/adler/fiw9817.small.jpg" HEIGHT=200 WIDTH=415 ALIGN=LEFT>VIVA
|
|
New York City! (My guess is that the cast is from Pasadena and they tour
|
|
the country going from Internet show to ISPCon singing and dancing the
|
|
IP Telephony tune, but NYC is the center of the Universe for Broadway shows,
|
|
and seeing this kind of production in Javits was special. At least to
|
|
me....) <IMG SRC="./gx/adler/fiw9818.small.jpg" NOSAVE HEIGHT=200 WIDTH=271 ALIGN=RIGHT>Not
|
|
to be out done, the folks at Computer Associates had their own production
|
|
going. Their theme was Jazz, and the stage was a funkie bar/cabaret setting.
|
|
Here they had a couple with the familiar head held mics, dancing around
|
|
singing about CA solutions for your corporate enterprise. They were supported
|
|
by another couple with no head mics but just danced around. Again, a type
|
|
of 50's be-bop as was going on in the Digital Diner. Very entertaining.
|
|
Trying to compete with this kind of message delivery were other booths
|
|
of smaller, lesser known (at least to me) companies were Magic shows, guys
|
|
on unicycle juggling swords. You thought Central Park on a sunny summer
|
|
afternoon was a zoo, then you haven't been to an Internet show lately.
|
|
<BR>
|
|
<P><BR>
|
|
<CENTER>
|
|
<P><IMG SRC="./gx/adler/fiw9819.small.jpg" NOSAVE HEIGHT=150 WIDTH=283
|
|
ALIGN=CENTER> <IMG
|
|
SRC="./gx/adler/fiw9828.small.jpg" HEIGHT=200 WIDTH=214 ALIGN=CENTER></CENTER>
|
|
|
|
<BR>
|
|
<P><BR>
|
|
<P>While wondering around, I got the both number for the NY LUG named LXNY.
|
|
Strange acronym for a users group. They were located on the first floor
|
|
show area way in the back. They could not have <IMG SRC="./gx/adler/fiw9809.small.jpg" NOSAVE HEIGHT=300 WIDTH=198 ALIGN=LEFT>been
|
|
further removed from the action. Ok, local users group, no money, perfectly
|
|
understood. I introduced myself to the guys, signed up to their mailing
|
|
lists and hung out for a chat with them. The guy in charge seemed to be
|
|
a reasonable chap. He tells me he is a perl nut, or something to that effect.
|
|
Cool, definite open source kind of guy. There was another guy working on
|
|
an install of SuSE on his laptop. I peered over his shoulder and saw some
|
|
of the installation pages as they flashed by while he selected this or
|
|
that to be installed. Looked nice, a bit more polished than RedHat's install.
|
|
There was another chap who told me how he partitioned his disk, (all wrong
|
|
according to my rule of partitioning disks, (/, swap and /home and thats
|
|
it...)) Then there was another guy who sported an old red baseball cap
|
|
with the RedHat logo on it. Looked rather well worn. He had a scruffy beard,
|
|
and we talked a bit. He told me that he knows Eric Raymond, the guy who
|
|
wrote that "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" net-paper, from some Sci-Fi shows.
|
|
He then goes on to tell me about his political slants. He's a libertarian.
|
|
He tells me that he and Eric, when not talking about open source, talk
|
|
about politics and guns. "Guns?" I say. Yes, guns. He then asks me if I
|
|
believe in the first amendment. "Yes", I say. "Do you own a gun?", he asks.
|
|
"No", I reply. "Then SHUT UP!", he snorts. Yup, guns and the first amendment
|
|
go hand in hand. He continues to tell me how the 10 amendments have been
|
|
eroded by the 'Government'. It's hard for me to carry on a conversation
|
|
with this guy. Especially when it turns to Y2K and stocking up provisions
|
|
for the aftermath.
|
|
<P>Day 4) Up and at'em at 5:45am. The day turns out to be rather gloomy
|
|
with rain forecasted. By now, my commuting routine is getting fine tuned.
|
|
I got to the train station in time to leisurely buy my round trip ticket,
|
|
coffee and bagel and have 1 minute to hang out on the train platform watching
|
|
all the other commuters who had equally well tuned commuting
|
|
skills. <IMG SRC="./gx/adler/fiw9820.small.jpg" NOSAVE HEIGHT=300 WIDTH=132 ALIGN=RIGHT>Getting
|
|
to Javits, I go directly to the special events hall to hear the keynote
|
|
which will start in about 10 minutes. The ambiance is much more subdued.
|
|
The usual MecklerMedia add stuff on the now more mundane 5 screens rolls
|
|
on unnoticed. (Its amazing the capacity of the brain to adapt to new levels
|
|
of sensory filtering.) The speaker was the Chairman/CEO of AT&T, C.
|
|
Michael Armstrong. What he had to say was rather boring compared to the
|
|
previous two speakers. He had no gizmo to show off, or web pages to surf
|
|
too. He basically announced one thing, the intent of AT&T to take over
|
|
the internet as we know it. Fair enough. He boasted the recent $48e9 acquisition
|
|
of TCI. He waxed about the quality and quantity of future AT&T cable
|
|
modem services. In all, he came across as the most fine tuned image projecting
|
|
CEO that I've met. (The only other CEO being Larry Ellison.) Still, I was
|
|
rather amazed at the skill of this guy to project the image of Stability,
|
|
Strength, Leadership. By the end of his speech, I wanted him to my grandfather.
|
|
(Not for the money mind you.) I recently met NY's senator from Long Island,
|
|
Al D'Amato. Al is on the opposite end of the spectrum to the CEO of AT&T.
|
|
When I met Al, the bit which struck me the most was his total arrogance
|
|
at the people around him and at the same time his attempt to try and look
|
|
caring. He would crack a forced smile when meeting the audience he was
|
|
going to speak to. When the cameras were on him, that forced smile would
|
|
pop back into his mouth, and all the while, we would have this strange
|
|
glare in his eye, trying to asses every one he shook hands with. Needless
|
|
to say, he blew me off when I shook his hand. (No forced smile for me.)
|
|
But he did have lots of smiles for my wife who was also in the hand shaking
|
|
line. (And a kiss on her cheek to boot!) In contrast, was AT&T's CEO.
|
|
This man had depth. Being around him gave you a sense of solemn. He was
|
|
a family man. He set the stage for his speech by telling a joke involving
|
|
his granddaughter. After he established himself as a caring family man,
|
|
with his joke, he plunged ahead with talk of how AT&T will be in everyones
|
|
home delivering those internet services to you via TV. I guess the big
|
|
difference between Al and this CEO is the amount of money they truly control.
|
|
Al controls his campaign funds. He really has little control over the US
|
|
government budget. In contrast, the CEO controls BILLIONS and is payed
|
|
mucho more for it than Al gets for voting in the US senate. So, the law
|
|
of capitalism dictates. You get the Al D'Amatos to run the country and
|
|
the C. Michael Armstrong's to rule the world!
|
|
<P>After the keynote, I decided to take a break from the show floor and
|
|
the TCP/IP sessions I came to attend, to listen to a discussion on the
|
|
'Adult Entertainment Industry' put on by the "Investing in the Internet"
|
|
session. The session was well attended and the speakers were an interesting
|
|
and diverse bunch in themselves. They had what I think was a technology
|
|
consultant for Penthouse. They had some guy who recently wrote an article
|
|
for Upside Magazine on the subject. Upside was sponsoring the session.
|
|
They had a woman who owned her own adult Web site. And there was a guy
|
|
from a research type firm who was trying to figure out how much money was
|
|
being spent on adult web sites. The consulting guy for Penthouse when first.
|
|
He groaned about the lack of payment for services rendered on these web
|
|
sites. The researcher gave a short talk on how hard it was to figure out
|
|
how much money was going into the Internet adult business. His conservative
|
|
estimates, and believe me, from what he said are very conservative, is
|
|
that close to $700,000,000 this year will be spent on guys looking a nude
|
|
girls doing weird things to themselves and others. This is conservative.
|
|
(i.e. looking at the volume of charges of 5 or so popular adult web sites.)
|
|
Then the woman, owner of her own adult portal, raved about the wonders
|
|
of the business. Its recession proof, it makes MONEY, (she broke even in
|
|
6 months, but she didn't say how much was invested up front), there are
|
|
plenty of models waiting to get into the business. Its safe and virtual.
|
|
And she thanked Bill Clinton for bring erotica into the main stream. She
|
|
claims to have lots of brunets posing with cigars. One thing which annoyed
|
|
me was this video camera which was filming this session. They had the audacity
|
|
of panning the audience. I had to keep hiding behind the guy between me
|
|
and the camera to make sure I would be seen on National TV watching this
|
|
adult forum and then trying to explain to my boss why he should pay $1.4K
|
|
for my registration fee. I know, its hypocrisy on my part, but that's just
|
|
the way I am. So between dodging the camera pan of the audience and listening
|
|
to panel mourn the difficulties of IPOing firms engaged in adult content
|
|
I got out of the session with this urge to run off and make a billion in
|
|
porn. Of course I'm not going to do so, but the guy sitting next to me
|
|
will.
|
|
<P>After my short diversion into the underworld of the Internet, I headed
|
|
back out to the show floor. I had in mind lining up to get into the Digital
|
|
Diner and perhaps get one of those Motorola burgers they were serving
|
|
up. <IMG SRC="./gx/adler/fiw9824.small.jpg" NOSAVE HEIGHT=200 WIDTH=303 ALIGN=LEFT>(I
|
|
do a lot of work with Motorola embedded real time systems, so that Motorola
|
|
burger would have been a cool fixture on top of my 21'' monitor.) But first
|
|
I wanted to stop by the SuSE stand to see if I could get a copy of their
|
|
distribution. I had picked up Caldera's and Pacific HiTechs. Nope SuSE
|
|
was still out and my guess is that they ran out on the first day and the
|
|
talk of getting more SuSE CD's for distribution today was just hype. There
|
|
was a lot of action around the Oracle partners pavilion where the minor
|
|
Linux distributors were being hosted. So I stuck around. I've heard a lot
|
|
of KDE and SuSE packages it with their distribution, so I was checking
|
|
out what the SuSE guy was demonstrating. After a bit I got engaged with
|
|
the SuSE guy. He introduced himself as Todd Andersen, the guy who claims
|
|
credit for getting the term Open Source accepted as the new term to replace
|
|
free software. What a character. His background is with the Department
|
|
of Defense. He rattled on for about 30 minutes about the spooks in the
|
|
CIA, how the NSA was a serious organization and other ongings of our defense
|
|
industry which I was trying to grapple with. I'm not sure how Todd got
|
|
into the Linux business coming from the Defense Department, I missed that
|
|
part of his introduction. Being a fair minded guy, and the fact that I'm
|
|
rather in the RedHat camp, I thought I would offer to mirror their site.
|
|
I'm currently mirroring RedHat's and spent $1K of the governments money
|
|
in doing so. (You need a large disk.) The disk is not totally full and
|
|
being that SuSE is making inroads into the Linux mainstream, I thought
|
|
it appropriate that I also mirror this site. Todd and Bodo, (Bodo is the
|
|
guy with green hair as described by Dan Shaffer on CNET radio's "<A HREF="http://www.news.com/Radio/Features/0,155,205,00.html">Project
|
|
Heresy</A>" broadcast of Thursday Oct 8, who came from Germany to help
|
|
out their US SuSE brethren.) got all excited about this, after telling
|
|
them that the lab I work for has a T3 connection to the internet. I then
|
|
proceeded to show Todd my Linux resources web page I've put up for people
|
|
at Brookhaven National Lab, or around the world as that goes, to get some
|
|
advice on how to get Linux installed on their machines. Todd was loosing
|
|
interest in my web page due to other show attendees coming around to checkout
|
|
their very nice KDE desktop setup. I bade them firewell and took off to
|
|
checkout how the RedHat booth was doing. Over at RedHat, they were fielding
|
|
many questions from a hand full of people. RedHat was going to get another
|
|
shipment of CD's which they were going to start giving out at
|
|
2pm. <IMG SRC="./gx/adler/fiw9825.small.jpg" NOSAVE HEIGHT=200 WIDTH=295 ALIGN=RIGHT>I
|
|
hung around with Melissa and some other chap who used to work for <A HREF="http://www.lanl.gov/external/index.htm">Los
|
|
Alamos National Laboratory</A> who got RIF'ed and is now playing a role
|
|
in this leading edge company. He made the right move. He was also the guy
|
|
who rescued the VA Research machine which arrived in a sorry state at the
|
|
show.
|
|
One side note I would like to mention is they guy from Adaptec who I met.
|
|
As I was hanging around the RedHat booth, I heard some guy say he is from
|
|
Adaptec. This caught my attention. To me, Adaptec is the premier provider
|
|
of SCSI controllers for the PC/PCI market. Most motherboards you get these
|
|
days have a built in Adaptec SCSI controller chip giving you an on board
|
|
SCSI port, much like the on board IDE channel all motherboards today provide.
|
|
With all the experience I've had installing Linux boxes, I've always run
|
|
into the Adaptec kunumbdrum. Great hardware, but bad driver. I've had several
|
|
instances where spanking new 23 Gig Seagate drives were attempted on a
|
|
SCSI bus hosted by an Adaptec controller which failed miserably to integrate.
|
|
My solution, forget the Adaptec built in Ultra Fast SCSI controller and
|
|
spend $300 on a Buslogic SCSI controller. A sure win. Great SCSI hardware
|
|
and an even greater driver to go with it. When I put my first Linux box
|
|
together, I pondered the SCSI question. What controller. After poking around
|
|
in the SCSI howto, I found that Leonard Zubkoff got direct support from
|
|
Myplex to help write the driver, the decision to buy the Buslogic card
|
|
was done. And true to the open source/Internet development environment,
|
|
it was never more than 24 hours before Leonard would send me a patch to
|
|
his driver when things went wrong. (At one point I had one differential
|
|
card and one single ended card installed in my quad Pentinum pro box and
|
|
things didn't boot right, and Leonard fix that problem quick.) So, back
|
|
to Adaptec. Not too long ago I read a bit of news from the RedHat web page
|
|
that Adaptec was going to embrace the Linux community, which meant that
|
|
it was going to release the full hardware specs to the driver writers.
|
|
Voila, I would finally count on being able to use all those on board SCSI
|
|
controllers which I've had to ignore. But since ever since I read this
|
|
great announcement, I have not been aware of any new Adaptec driver updates,
|
|
so as far as I know. So, I gave this guy from Adaptec a my long story I
|
|
just dump on you and he replied with some interesting inside info. First
|
|
of all, we was not with the SCSI development team. This guy was a sys admin
|
|
for Adaptec. But he did tell me that Adaptec has been going through some
|
|
hard times. With its success in the SCSI market, Adaptec decided to diversify
|
|
into a whole bunch of other high tech field, none of which they turned
|
|
out to be any good at. He told me that the Adaptec stock peaked at $50
|
|
something a share and now was down around $5 or so. This has forced Adaptec
|
|
to go back and concentrate on its core business. Along with that, he tells
|
|
me that Linux is really big inside the company. He tells me that there
|
|
are a lot of Linux peraphenalia, and he picked up the RedHat bumper sticker
|
|
which lay in front of us and pretended to tack it on to an office cubical
|
|
wall. "You see a lot of things like this, around the company", he said.
|
|
Just like the rest of us, the Adaptec employees saw the light in Linux
|
|
and my guess is that Adaptec's announcement to support the Linux effort
|
|
came from a movement within the company. From the employee's themselves.
|
|
I found that insiders view of Adaptec to be rather interesting.
|
|
<P>Melissa told me that the RedHat CD handout was going to occurs at 2pm,
|
|
being around 1:15 pm, I decide to go get lunch and then head for the afternoon
|
|
keynote. <IMG SRC="./gx/adler/fiw9827.small.jpg" NOSAVE HEIGHT=200 WIDTH=282 ALIGN=LEFT>It
|
|
was raining rather hard so the hotdog stand was out and I had to spend
|
|
lots of money on a rather simple barbecue sandwich in the overdone Javits
|
|
cafeteria. From there it was on to the special events center where I waited
|
|
for about 20 minutes for Jim Barksdale, the Netscape cheefo to give his
|
|
view of the Internet world. I thought I was in for a surprise when the
|
|
music which preceded the talk was a cool jazz piece. This is good, no need
|
|
for super hyped up rock sounds beating your adrenaline system into hyper
|
|
drive a-la Oracle. The problem was, as I found out within a few minutes
|
|
into Jim's speech, he was a total bore. He lacked everything. No charisma,
|
|
no attitude, no inner-drive, nothing. This guy reminded me of mashed potatoes.
|
|
Netscape, as far as I'm concerned, is the only browser one should use.
|
|
Maybe if there was a Linux port of IE, I would try it, but without that,
|
|
there is nothing else which is graphically based. So, here he is, talking
|
|
about The browser but has no charisma to put the punch into his presentation.
|
|
I, along with the rest of the audience, was losing my attention for what
|
|
ever message he had to deliver. The selling point of Netscape was the ability
|
|
to type a key word into the URL field and the browser would 'find' the
|
|
page you were looking for, and the 'what's related' button next to the
|
|
URL field. He spent some time, too much time, plugging this feature. He
|
|
then talked wonders of the customizability of the browser, either for ones
|
|
own personalification or to setup some 'portle' for some company too lazy
|
|
to higher a good webmaster with the proper Java skills to do the job right.
|
|
At the end of his keynote, James took off without giving the change of
|
|
the audience to approach him afterwards for a question or two and/or to
|
|
exchange business cards. Another flop move. So be it for Jim. Although
|
|
I could hardly sleep the night I found out that Netscape was going to release
|
|
the source code via their Mozilla.org site. Jim hooked his wagon to the
|
|
right company at the right time, nothing more. He talked about running
|
|
Federal Express before running Netscape. Somehow I can't see the connection
|
|
between the two companies except that there is something which went wrong
|
|
here. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates grew up with the field, Jim Barkesdale
|
|
seems to have dropped in like an uninvited guest. I guess its much the
|
|
same as the guy Steve Jobs hired to run Apple who eventually dump Steve
|
|
from Apple. Us technophites need to learn some lessons here.
|
|
<P>After being let down by the Netscape keynote, I rushed back up to the
|
|
RedHat booth to see how the CD handout was going. It was going well. There
|
|
was a line of about 20 to 30 people long waiting to get a RedHat CD. I
|
|
took the opportunity to take some pictures of the line of Linux users to
|
|
be. With that, I wished the RedHat team good luck in there endeavors and
|
|
took off to my last session, "Migrating to IP version 6." This session
|
|
was given by two IBM consultants out of North Carolina. My first tag team
|
|
seminar with that same tele-evangelist delivery. IPv6, Amen!
|
|
<BR>
|
|
<P><BR>
|
|
<CENTER>
|
|
<P><IMG SRC="./gx/adler/fiw9836.small.jpg" NOSAVE HEIGHT=172 WIDTH=500 ALIGN=CENTER></CENTER>
|
|
|
|
<BR>
|
|
<P><BR>
|
|
<P>I was expecting the session to go until 5:30 but ended an hour earlier.
|
|
I was planing to then roam around the show floor a bit more looking to
|
|
see if there were any after hour networking parties to go to. But somehow,
|
|
after getting to the main entrance plaza of Javits, with the rain coming
|
|
down, and not having much of a stomach for more Internet World show biz,
|
|
I canned my plans and made a bee line to Pen Station to catch the 5:22
|
|
train back to Long Island. Once on the train, I had an hour and a half
|
|
to ponder my last 4 days. I've only been to scientific conferences. The
|
|
last one, Computing in High Energy Physics, I found to be rather tedious
|
|
and left after two days. (I had a good excuse, the DAQ system for the experiment
|
|
I'm on was acting up and they needed their expert back in house. Although
|
|
I could have, and did, solve all their problems by walking the clueless
|
|
over the phone, through the various button clicks to get back into full
|
|
data taking mode.) After I put Linux on my first home grown PC, 3 months
|
|
after getting my Ph.D., my life has been so tied up with this OS that I've
|
|
often pondered why I continue working at a High Energy Physics Lab. I've
|
|
done my best to aid Linux gain inroads into the high energy and nuclear
|
|
physics community by porting a lot of Fortran code to Linux. I've also
|
|
leveraged my position at the lab to put together the first official group
|
|
of Intel PC's running Linux for the scientists to analyze their data. Being
|
|
in the DAQ subfield of physics give you a high point from which to watch
|
|
how the technology used to bring the Internet to life evolve through time.
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|
My work has been all internet, Unix workstations, data over IP, (Gigabytes
|
|
of Data and now going on to Tera bytes), routers, switches, e-mail, html,
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|
java, X11 and on and on since I first learned how to program a computer
|
|
back in my first physics lab when I was 18. Walking around the show floor,
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|
and going to the sessions brought my whole world around. Internet world
|
|
is really my world. I knew in depth or otherwise, every aspect of what
|
|
was being presented at that show. And with the Linux people there, this
|
|
added gravy to show. It was some 4 days. Friday I'll be back to helping
|
|
BNL users find their way through the Unix/Internet maze of the lab. Monday
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|
I'll be back worrying about why I can't sustain 20Mbytes/sec data throughput
|
|
in our DAQ, or rather why the clueless users seem to stumble all over my
|
|
DAQ system. But for now, on my ride home, I just let all those memories
|
|
of Internet World swirl around my head, as I looked out the LIRR train
|
|
watching Long Island sweep by.
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<BR>
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<!--===================================================================-->
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<P> <hr> <P>
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<center><H5>Copyright © 1998, Stephen Adler <BR>
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Published in Issue 34 of <i>Linux Gazette</i>, November 1998</H5></center>
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