March 2007 Archives
A public service announcement, for those of you who are interested: the sixth annual SambaXP conference will be held from April 23-25, 2007 at the Hotel Freizeit in Goettingen, Germany. This Samba developers' conference should prove to be an interesting one, given some of the licensing choices and technology breakthroughs coming for the Samba crew.
And while I am happy to put in a plug for a community event here and there, that's not the sole reason I am mentioning this particular conference. What interests me about this SambaXP is who's not (thus far) coming to the event: Microsoft.
A little over a year ago I purchased a new Nissan Murano. I know, it's like an SUV. My friends told me it would consume gasoline like a thirsty dog. I am happy to say, that over the 12,000 miles the vehicle has traveled it has been more fuel efficient than I expected. Driven carefully around town, it delivers a little over 19 mpg, and on the open road as much as 25 mpg. The original sticker said it should deliver 20 mpg on a city cycle and 25 mpg on the highway.
I have experimented with different grades of fuel to see how the octane rating might impact fuel economy. Put another way, I set out to explore if it is worth the extra cost to use high-octane fuel, mid-range octane fuel, or if financially it makes more sense to run the vehicle on the lowest cost fuel. The result was somewhat surprising.
I am going to make this a short entry, because basically I am just trying to get a question answered that's been sticking with me all day.
When I first read the new draft of the GPL v3 license this morning, I thought it would be a good idea to post the whole thing up on LT so people could comment on it directly if they wanted.
Today is the day at BrainShare that I get some learnin' done.
One of the things that intrigued me about this show was the depth and breadth of its education tracks. These were no high-level glossy look at the pretty pictures sessions; some of them seemed to be really down at the code level.
Thus far, I have not seen Novell spare a lot of expense on the glitz for this show. Massive catered meals, audio-visual extravaganzas, a concert by the Goo Goo Dolls. They certainly want to treat their customers and vendors right.
The proof is in the pudding, and the substance of the pudding was rolled out for the crowd of about 5,000 faithful on Monday morning, when the keynotes were presented in all their visio-technical glory.
For the first time, I decided to attend Novell's BrainShare conference. In the past I have been resistant to attending single-vendor sponsored shows, because once you attend one, you'd better get yourself to others, if only to avoid bias. I was able to get clearance for both BrainShare and Red Hat's Summit in May, so I figured I'd achieved my balance.
The reason I wanted to attend BrainShare this year, specifically, was to find out for myself if Novell was really a Linux company, or if they were just talking the talk.
Imagine my complete and utter surprise when I discovered I didn't need to actually attend the show to learn the answer.
As I wrote before, I had a problem with my 7 years old Matrox G400 video card under certain OS from Redmond. I am happy to report that Matrox tech support solved that for me quite quickly -- they provided a beta driver that worked fine for me, giving the much needed 1680x1050 resolution.
So, Matrox is doing a great job supporting older hardware for poor Windblows users. Is it generally the same with other hardware manufacturers. Unfortunately, not.