This week Cebit Eurasia
was in Istanbul, the oriental offshoot of the world's biggest trade
show of any kind, and my pal Ercan and I went Friday to check it out,
particularly the Linux track. We caught 3 seminars, of which
Donald Karl
Rosenberg's talk about the economics of Open Source had the most
international angle.
Rosenberg reviewed a lot of what's going on with various national
governments and open source, including China, Peru, Venezuela, and
others who are trying to encourage open source as an alternative
to foreign-produced black box software. He listed a number of reasons,
including the FUDish implication that nobody knows what Microsoft
might have hidden inside Windows at the CIA's behest, although not
in so many words. Open source is also seen as a way to foster local
IT industry and keep government spending at home rather than pumping
it abroad.
One of Rosenberg's assertions that I disagree with is that companies
outside the US are less concerned with brand names and more interested
in engineering quality. My experience in Turkey is the opposite, the
"nobody got fired for buying [IBM/Microsoft/Oracle/HP]" mentality
dominates. He seems to have based this idea on Germany, whose culture
of engineering excellence is at the opposite end of the scale from
Turkey's, exceeding the USA by a good bit. (My favorite example
of this train platforms, where you can see a dozen clocks whose
second hands are in lock step). Developing countries are much more
prone to buying big name brands just for the prestige factor than those
in rich, self-confident nations like Germany.
Even Linux distributions suffer this, most Turkish geeks I know run
Redhat, and are only vaguely aware
of Debian. But the later seminar
by Debian project leader Bdale Garbee impressed Ercan enough that
he wants to give it a shot, so we're going to download and burn some
CD's and give it a go. I've used Debian before, but Bdale's talk
impressed me with the sheer quantity and quality of the work that goes
into Debian and its packages.
The other talk we attended was Don Marti from
Linux Journal talking
about good security habits. The title of the talk was "Linux security in one
hour a week", the idea being that practicing a few good habits in configuring
and monitoring your systems is enough to counter 99% of security threats.
Sound, basic advice like monitoring security announcement lists and keeping
your system patched, and disabling or removing unnecessary services. He shared
plenty of practical little tips; for instance, if you remove an unneeded app
by hand, your package manager might replace it later when an upgrade comes
out, so use the package manager to remove it instead.
I also heard that a certain major hardware maker who will be producing
a Windows tablet has got Debian Linux running on it, which answered something
I had wondered about before.
Another thing we did was check
out the new Nokia 7650
camera phone. This thing is advertised all over the place here in
Turkey, and I assume everywhere else too. Here's a picture of Ercan and
me at the show taken with the phone. I'm the one with the stupid look on
my face.
The quality is not as good as a full digital camera, just 640x380, but
if the camera feature is cheap enough (I don't know how much the 7650 costs)
it could be useful for spur of the moment shots - if you own one, you'll
always have a camera handy for a quick snap. The interesting feature for
me was being able to email the picture to myself, since it avoids the
hassle of local storage. Digital camera storage is getting better, but
it would still be handy to have a quality camera with the option to dump
its memory onto the Net.
A proper digital camera with bluetooth would be just the ticket, so you
could link with your phone to upload pictures, or link with a PC or laptop,
without having to remember to bring cables and connectors and such.
