OLS
Waaah, Mommy its over!
Actually, I have been building a few thoughts after OLS,
and I think that their may be a bit of insight that comes
from some of the things that I saw and observered over the
last week.
zeevon I was amused to see from one of
your
entries
that
you actually attended the same group of talks that I
was at on that day, and yet I have no idea concerning what
you look like. Thinking of that had me come to a
general conclusion, that was reenforeced by other entries
that I saw while at OLS.
For example dyork says: One of the
developers, who
had been at the office all day says, "Hey, Dan,
I
heard your talk went great." I ask how he had
heard that. He says, "Oh, I was chatting on IRC
with
people in the audience while you were
speaking!" Sheesh... welcome to the world of
the
wireless LAN! :-)
I got thinking about one of
ottawaDave's
entries from last week.
- He says that The people who make this
sub-culture are people that really like
communicating, reading and writing, with the written
word.
I looked around while I was using the telephone just
outside room C at OLS and I saw a large room filed with
folks all sitting down with laptop computers all connected
to the wireless LAN, all busily typing away. The major
sound in the room was in fact the clattering of keyboards,
rather than the hubbub of conversation.
When I mentioned that observation to my wife, she was at
first taken aback, because one of the traditional
meanings of a conference is as a gathering where folks can
interact face to face and share ideas. At OLS I was
seeing a virtual conference, that happened to have a large
number of people gathered in one room.
Walking by the couches in the room, one could catch a
glimpse of laptop screen, which generaly had 4 white
on black text windows, with at least one of them scrolling
franticaly. Beween my respect for privacy and the fact
that my eyes are not as good as they used to be, I did not
determine the contents of those screens, but the image
came back to me at Teds Keynote talk.
Ted did a history of Linux, and explained how close we
are, and yet how far from the goal of "World
Domination". His talk featured many places where our
systems have ugly edges that we have overlooked in
our quest to fix the major bugs. His sugestion to the
audiance was to work with non-techies to reach a point where
you could unleash your applications on your grandparents,
and expect them to be able to figure out how to use
them.
Of course when he said that, the image of all those
laptops with the DOS style text windows flashed back to my
mind, I would not be happy working that way, many of the
folks I know would consider that sort of interface
"Quaint" to say the least.
My summary of the symposium is that we are very close to
having a product that can take on the world,
Much closer than we were last year. On the other
hand last year we were not in the guns of M$, this year we
have a lot of technological cannons, starting with HailStorm
aiming at us.