[ale] AIIM Conference

[Glenn R. Stone]

Vaidhyanathan Mayilrangam wrote:
> 
> Hi All,
> 
>   I was away for the past couple of days.. But anything on what happened at the > AIIM conf with Linus & Maddog..

Yeah, I was there, so were Joe and Sara and Matt and some dude from 
KPMG/Peat Marwick (my comment: we ARE getting serious if Peat Marwick
is taking notes... and the dude was in line for autographs, no less.)....
and several hundred other folks, from sneaker-wearing hackers to somebody
from Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Virginia's MIS department.... 

The lineup for the panel was as follows:

Moderator, from           Linus    M*cr*s*ft   Maddog   D.H. Brown								
Wall Street Journal      Torvalds  Marketroid  (L.I.)    analyst

(as they were sitting on stage)

I have never, EVER seen a big-company marketing weenie look SO uncomfortable
as that M$ dude did... Here's Linus in his California berkies'n'sox and jeans
on 
one side, Maddog with all that fur coming out both sides of his head on the 
other, and this poor shill trying to look hip in his dockers and boat shoes 
between'em, with his arms and legs crossed, his head bowed, his shoulders 
hunched, just EXUDING "I DON' WANNA BE HERE NO MORE!"  He got in one score, 
the Mindcraft pseudobenchmark... but Linus blew him away on the support issue.

The M$ dude had been yammering about their big labs back in Redmond, how they
could reproduce big-system load factors, etc... when Linus chimed in with the
story of the lowly U.S. Postal Service.  Amazingly enough, they use Linux to 
read the barcodes on letters and sort them.  They had a nasty little
performance problem.  They called Red Hat.  Red Hat emails Linus.  Linus, who
is one of probably a goodly number of people (Alan Cox) on the planet who can
keep the
entirety of the kernel between his ears, traces out the bug, discovers a race
condition. and issues a patch.  Problem solved.  No NEED for big labs. 
Because,
Linus said, the problem can be UNDERSTOOD.  Not replicated.  Then he issued
the
zinger.   

"No one UNDERSTANDS NT."  

(Translated:  The Linux kernel is small enough that you can, with enough
exposure and practice, comfortably get your head around it.  It's forty meg of
code and docs that compiles into 400ish kb of kernel.  NT is *orders of
magnitude* bigger, *compiled*.  M$ has to resort to reproducing the problem
because the OS is *too big* to try to trace it down by brain power.  Far too
big.)

It was generally agreed by all there, including M$, that Linux was there
for the small to midrange server market, but needed a boost for the
desktop (which it got yesterday from Caldera), needed some scalability
for the really big whopper systems, and needed more support (which it was
pointed out that IBM, HP, Compaq, and Red Hat were feverishly working on).  
They said that Linux is today about where NT 3.51 was when it came out.  
Not quite there for mom and pop, but damn close.  (I think Caldera's
announcement of the all-GUI-install OpenLinux 2.2 may have pretty much done
that; comes 
with StarOffice, Netscape, and a few other bells and whistles... the disks
started shipping yesterday, get'em while they're hot...)

And Linus reiterated his master plan; he was making some sort of point,
probably about Linux' flexibility, and ended it with "... which is why we're
going to
take over the world," tossed off matter-of-factly and received with wild
applause from the true believers.... 

Yeah. 

Afterwards, fifty or sixty people (including myself) mobbed the stage for
autographs... "Happy Linuxing, L---- T-------" says the third sheet of my
notepad :)  An onlooker asked, "Linus, what ARE you doing at Transmeta?"
"Some really cool stuff," he replied.  

And Transmeta ain't the only one hacking Cool Stuff.

Personal impressions:

Linus is a very cool dude.  He's all but lost the accent living in Silicon
Valley; the only thing that shows a little is his sentence structure isn't 
precisely American hackerese.  He's not only good at hanging on to complex
ideas, he's also good at expressing them without technobabble.  He's even
somewhat modest; he was very polite to the M$ guy whilst all but shredding
his product.  (Something the Slashdot crowd finished later; they had an
arty on the Mindcraft thing...)  He was also very gracious about scribbling
on various bits of paper for us....

The M$ guy could be summed up in three letters.  F.U.D.

Maddog is one of these guys like gus was, been there, done that, shoots
from the hip and tells it like it is.  

The D.H. Brown guy was probably the most even-handed of them all; he poked 
Linux where it deserved it, praised it where it shines, and basically said,
look out, world, this could be big. 

(heh. Could be.  Uhuh. :)

My two bits'

Glenn
There are no dress rehearsals.
We ARE professionals, and 
this IS the Big Time.