Bang!inux report

[Arun Sharma <adsharma@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I was reading:

http://www.geocities.com/vijoc/linux/banglinux.html

(Did someone post this on LI too ? Some parts of it sound familiar).

> Afterwards, Dr.Mishra of Digital came up with a presentation on High
> Performance computing with AlphaLinux which also turned out to be
> more of marketing presentation for digital's products! He emphasized
> the power of compilers from digital, as though no one in the crowd
> was aware of a beast called "gcc"! He made it a point to compare
> digital's compiler with only VC++ and leave gcc alone :-) Worst of
> all, the presentation was made on powerpoint(TM) and he blamed it all
> on StarOffice.

The author clearly has no idea about the relative performance on gcc
and Compaq C compiler on Alpha. This is not a comment on the code
quality of gcc (which is pretty good) - but just the lack of some
feature. A 100 thousand programmers don't have access to Alpha boxes,
which leads to this situation.

> The main attraction of the day and of the conference followed- the much
> awaited talk by Richard Stallman. He spoke on the history and philosophy
> of Open Source. It ended by one listener calling him an evolutionary. At
> the end of the talk he sang the GNU song and introduced his alter ego.

I wish RMS talked more about code - documenting gcc internals would be
a great use of his time. Reminds me of the "shut up and code" article
I read somewhere.

Those of you interested in hearing the song:

http://www.jwz.org/why-cooperation-with-rms-is-impossible.mp3

[ the one on gnu.org is .au and is ~ 4 times as large ]

	-Arun