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On the Clue Trail at Comdex 99: Day OneWhenever I visit New York, I lament the passing of those old Sez You cabbies: guys who complained endlessly about Jersey drivers and the effing mayor while banging over potholes in failing yellow Chevies. Now New York cabbies all seem to be sullen guys with no vowells in ther names. But guess what? Those Sez You guys are all in Vegas. "Hey you! Mister. You. Hey you! Where you goin? You needa ride? Five bucks. Come on." This was the car service barker outside the airport. Sucker that I am, I took the deal, and got a nice forty-five minute tour of every hotel but my own, the execrable Imperial Palace, which, when I finally arrived, gladly sold me a room they wouldn't have ready until long after I could have used it for a shower. So I grumbled off to dump my bags with the bellman and find a cabbie to tell me where the hell Comdex was (which sure wasn't in this hole). I found one, unavailable (of course), but communicative. "This was a real town when the rackets ran it," he said. "A guy gets drunk and loses his money, the casino puts him up and gives him enough to get out of town. They were tough bastards, but they were gentlemen. These fuckers, Jesus. They're all Disney, y'know. They don't give a shit. They just want to build something bigger and uglier than the next guy." It went on like that for a while. Eventually he told me I could register at the Sands, which was nowhere near where I remember it. The Sands is a box about eight times the size of the average Costco. Facing a street in the back are about forty doors, all of which open to anybody who wants to enter and walk past the disinterested security people. Which I did. The hall was full of Asian companies selling boxes, boards, drives and other parts. Just like ten years ago, the last time I was here. At the far end of the hall I registered, got my badge, and went off to find the Hilton, home of the Linux Business Expo. In minutes I found myself caught in crowdlock. The spaces outside the exhibit hall were packed to the walls with people waiting to get in (there was still a half hour to go before the show floor opened). Through this pressed a a river of people cutting crosswise toward the exit and the shuttle busses. I was a log in this river, which failed to move any faster than, say, two or three feet per minute. Unreal. Surreal. But along the route Novell had placed hundreds of PCs with net connections and browsers. Bless them — even though their presence confounded the crowd even more. Men lined up three and four deep facing each one, as if at urinals during halftime. Ourside the river tuned into a line about a hundred yards long that fed into busses. More Sez You types herded us like cattle. "No, it don't go to da hotels. It goes to da Convention Centa. Da Hilton? Yeah, it goes to da Hilton." It was hot. The forecast was for a high of 63. It had to be 80. By the time I got on the bus I was soaked in sweat. Da Hilton is adjacent to Da Convention Center, which has several parts, each a box with the square footage of an airport. I spent half an hour looking for the Linux Business Expo in the wrong hall. When I finally found the right hall, which was somewhere under the Hilton, I joined the studio audience of Linux Today's live radio show, which was being broadcast on the Net in front of a live audience that consisted of me, two Slashdot guys and one a whole bunch of news by acquiring Cygnus. Finally, I thought, somebody agreed to get bought by this outfit. Rumors had been floating for months that Red Hat was trying to acquire all kinds of companies and getting nowhere, probably because all of them wanted to get rich the same way Red Hat did, with their own IPOs. Other news: Bob kicked himself upstairs, to Chairman, handing over his presidency to Matthew Szulik. It's always fun to watch and listen to Bob. He's so full of beans, so devoted to The Cause. I've never seen anybody who can be so vague and enthusiastic at the same time. No doubt this contributed hugely to the company's success with VCs and now with the Street. But I have to question Red Hat's instistence on repeatedly identifying Microsoft as The Main Competition. Sitting there, I wanted to point instructively to the smoking husk that was once Netscape, and say "see?" But I didn't. Instead I asked him what his new job was. "Same as the old job. Doing stuff like this. Being a spokesmodel for the company. We just slid the titles around." Or words to that effect. But he did agree to show up for the next Linux For Suits event. Later I sat in another audience, front and center (in a Reserved for Media chair), fighting sleep while Corel introduced their new Linux distribution and application suite, which now consists mostly of Wordperfect. Based on the Debian distribution and the KDE desktop, the OS looks pretty darn cool, I must say. So does the installation demo, which takes seconds. It was just hell for me to fight the effects of sleep deprivation over the prior few days. After the show several of us walked a couple miles over to the Venetian Hotel, where I had the best calzone outside New York (in a food court!), and joined 15,000 of the Linux faithful for Linus Torvalds' keynote. Linus' only news was about the hypersecretive Transmeta. Ready? They're making a "smart CPU": "the first micros=processor built with software." Details on January 19th. Also at the Transmeta site. I was too lazy to get up and ask the question Linus would surely not answer: why all the secrecy? Why deny us the clues? I just don't get it. The only bummer: getting busted for using a Mac laptop at a Linux event. Come on guys! I'm gonna load Linux on this thing any day now. (Like, maybe tomorrow. I saw that Turbolinux has a pretty-looking dual boot install for PPCs.)
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