First official day of the conference though we’ve had the two days of MiniConfs already.

Bruce Schnider’s keynote is available to listen to. I see it made Slashdot too.

The points which stood out to me were:

• security requires a tradeoff
• security-the-feeling (aka snake-oil) and security-the-reality
• in a lemon market – lack of information means the cheaper product will win,
• unless there is something that signals quality
• security-the-feeling is actually important, but needs to go along with security-the-reality.

I attended sessions on GTK+, kernel report, hardware vendors, and the consumers’ view of technology.

As an ex-Intel employee it was particularly interesting to hear Dirk Hohndel (Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist at Intel) talk on “making hardware vendors love open source”. Intel has come a long way since we worked for them.

Dirk was saying Linux has a small market share, but it isn’t insignificant: 25-28% of servers. Desktops has always been hard to measure. Gartner says it is about 0.8%, but the EeePC is accounting for 1.5% of new computer sales, so not even counting any other deployments the Linux desktop sales has just doubled.

People have been asking when there will be a version of Ghost for Linux. That’s a nice idea!

Tired, this timezone has me waking up early each morning.