Thursday started off with a keynote by Stormy Peters titled “Would You Do It Again For Free?” Some interesting things came out of this talk. First, open source developers are mainly motivated by internal factors. Second, studies show that giving external rewards to people who are doing an activity and later removing the rewards tends [...]
A few notes on Wednesday…
Bruce Schneier keynote address today. Cool stuff, although nothing groundbreaking (due to years of reading Crypto-Gram and his blog). Some important security concepts
security is best viewed via an economic lens; specifically, we are in a lemons market, aka information asymmetry.
in this market, we are all security consumers, making economic tradeoffs (should [...]
The nerdlinger portion of Tuesday concluded with me wandering back over to the kernel mini-conf to catch the lightning talks and the kernel panel.
Nothing super interesting at the lightning talks (not to detract from them, but they were basically plugs of upcoming LCA events or brief overviews of patch sets or upcoming changes, so nothing [...]
Final mini-conf talk of Tuesday for me was tbm’s “Release Management in Large Free Software Projects”. The most interesting part of this talk for me was seeing all the parallels between shipping free software and shipping proprietary software.
It turns out that while free software development is radically different from proprietary software development, trying to ship [...]
I got away from the kernel mini-conf for the early part of the afternoon to check out the distro mini-conf. HP’s own Bob Gobeille gave a talk on FOSSology that turned out to be quite entertaining.
The basic problem they’re trying to solve can be described as: what content, exactly, is in a file, and does [...]
The second talk I attended on Tuesday was “Cache Efficient Data Structures” given by Joern Engel. Personally, I found this talk to be very interesting on several levels, but primarily because it focused on the nexus between theory and implementation that happens to excite me (yes, I am a dork. A good-lookng dork.).
The key takeaway [...]
Started off Tuesday at the kernel mini-conf. Unfortunately, due to a typo in the printed program, I missed a talk I was kinda interested in seeing (How not to invent kernel interfaces by Arnd Bergmann), and didn’t get there until hch’s talk on writing a PCI driver using qemu.
hch showed a lot of boilerplate code [...]
LCA is about letting nerds be nerds, and what’s more nerdy than a GPG keysigning party? (If there exists such a beast, I sure don’t know about it.)
The original plan was to use the Sassaman projected method, but the projector wasn’t so great (projected the everything mirrored, which made it rather hard to read the [...]
I was kinda disappointed with this talk. The first speaker basically just said, “big companies! give debian money!”, and as the audience tried to understand why, he couldn’t really give good reasons. The question “what, exactly, are your goals as regard to corporations — what do you want?” was posed several times in different forms, [...]
Presented by Dave Jones, another good talk. Some notes:
Fedora is going to start providing a vanilla upstream kernel in their yum repos to make reproducing bugs easier. This solves the problem of, “oh, you saw a problem in fedora? does it reproduce upstream?” Any distro that maintains custom patches should implement this solution.
Fedora 9 is [...]