[ Thanks to Stephen Adler
for this link. ]
“The show lasted 4 days, and I don’t want to give you a full
detailed account of what I saw, you’ll quickly be off surfing to
other sites if I did. What I’ll do is focus on what I considered to
be the highlights of the conference. And as you all now, I’m a bit
of a Linux/Open Source/Free Software enthusiast, (Maybe I should
rephrase that “Free Software/Open Source/Linux enthusiast
(FSOSLE)”, to give proper credit to Richard Stallman) and thus I’ll
tend to concentrate on those topics.”
“First of all, the bit which I find most exciting was that
Linux showed a major presence at the show. This is a direct fallout
of Donald Becker’s work on the Beowulf clustering software he and
others helped create. Super Computers on the cheap was quite
pervasive and most of the major computer vendors had some kind of
Linux box or other. These include SGI, IBM, Compaq, and a boat
load of smaller vendors. Noticeably absent was VA Linux, although
there was at least one rack of VA Linux PC’s on the show floor.
There were several Open Source oriented talks as well. Most notably
was Dr. Sterling’s lecture on COTS (Commercial Off the Shelf) super
computers, (I believe he’s Donald Becker’s professor who seems to
be the guy to give the COTS Super Computer talks,) and the Open
Source panel discussion which occurred on the last day of the
meeting. More on that later. It was really neat to walk up and down
the show floor and see all the stuffed penguin dolls siting on top
of booths, nestled between racks of 1U 1GHz AMD PC’s, and all the
GNOME and KDE desktops which adorned many flat panel LCD consoles
at the conference. One notable exception was Sun. No Linux
there.”