Comdex

[J Corey <whoop@mtco.com>]

Well, fresh back from Comdex, and before I start playing with all these
CDs, I thought I'd give my impressions from it.  I'll probably beat
Steve/Kara home, so I can be first :).

I did go to Bill Gates' keynote, and it was overall dull.  They started
out poking fun at last year's catastrophe with the crash.  They brought
the guy out to do the same thing again, but one major difference.  The
system crashed when they plugged a USB scanner in, and Windows
automatically started installing drivers.  This time, they had the
drivers already installed apparently (there was no dialog box like when
it goes through adding new hardware, and like the video they showed from
last year).  Oh, and Windows 2000 will save your life, blah, blah, blah.

Afterwards, I headed straight for Linus' keynote.  They booked a room
that holds 75 for it, and had to move it to a larger one (850 seats). 
It was jammed to say the least, certainly a few hundred standing around
and outside the room.  A couple other sessions had to be moved from
those smaller rooms as well.  I guess ZD just didn't figure there'd be
any interest.  I caught Slashdot a couple times while I was there, and
saw that they had his speech in real audio, it may still be available...

The other sessions were fun, but some were geared towards suits who
don't know what Linux is exactly, and counter the FUD that's out there. 
Jon "Maddog" Hall certainly brightened up the drier ones.  My only
complaint was the people with the Microsoft paper bags.  I think MS made
them so loud when you put your hand in them on purpose. :)

The exhibits were very nice.  There were thousands of CDs being given
away.  I was surprised at how long the lines got at the distributions'
booths.  There's even a new magazine (Linux Magazine), so we have more
than just the Journal now.  And Linuxmall's booth area needed more
floorspace to say the least.  There were lots of people gobbling up the
stuffed penguins and $3 cds they had.

Now, should I sleep, or give this new OpenLinux 2.2 a try?  The
installer certainly looks millions of times better than so long ago,
when I had my stack of floppies for Slackware.

Now, if only we could get a LinuxWorld or something closer to home.

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