SCALE conference

Some days ago was the SCALE conference. The list of speakers was quite impressive, and I felt once more sad about the fact that I still haven’t been to a linux conference of any kind

With that in mind I tried to look around for blogs or something about scale, but the most stuff I found was pretty disappointing – except one report in fedoranews.org which I accidentaly discovered.

It’s quite long, but shows a good overview about what happened, and what the content of the speeches were – and it’s the best scale overview so far.

One thing I want to highlight: there is a report about a speech about cinepaint: while talking about cinepaint there are several movies mentioned which were produced with Linux, and this list is pretty impressive – did you know that Star Wars II was partially produced on Linux machines? And that the movie industry is using more and more Linux boxes?

That’s quite “funny” because the media industry normally ignores Linux, and you are not allowed to play several media files legally on your Linux computer. Strange Hollywood…

Another very interesting summary is of the speech of Dan Kegel from google: I agree very much that there is the problem of a non-unified installer for linux with standard (!) implementations for stuff like asking for a user license agreement, etc.
But we will see how rpm will develop.

The whole speech addresses very clearly the weaknesses of Linux, and does not cover anything as far as I see it – but that’s pretty important because Linux is now in the stage where everything can work; the next step is that everything works easy and without problems – than we can start batelling Windows on the fileds where Linux is strong, and windows weak 🙂

Another interesting note is that he points out that OpenOffice is very, very slow. I cannot agree more: sure, I want to praise an alternative among my friends, but OO is so unbelievable slow on different machines compared to MS Office that it is a pain to work with it – or you have to take preloaders which fill up the memory – there are better things to drea of.
That reminds me of the fact that I once installed MS Office with Wine, and that it started fast than OO…
But, for me there is an alternative: KOffice – and it is a fast, lightweight and better and better integrated alternative 🙂

The report ends by the way with a note that there will be soon a Linux native version of Google earth – that’s pretty amazing because, as I previously mentioned, Picasa for linux is a little bit dumb, but Google Earth is almost a killer app!

At the end: there is one dark shadow on this report: there is no word about the talk of Aaron Seigo, so nothing about KDE – but you cannot have everything 😉