Energize IT 2007

[Colin McGregor]

Hi all,

Well I spent Saturday down at the Energize IT 2007
event (which was sponsored by ... the evil software
empire (no, not SCO, the huge evil empire :-) )).

One point that was hammered on at length was how many
more security flaws were in Linux as opposed to how
few there were in MS Windows (ever see the big salt
blocks that cattle farmers will put out for their
animals? Would have been nice if tractor trailer loads
of those blocks had been available to pass out to the
attendees when those statistics were shown :-) ).

I got a hands on session with MS System Center
Operations Manager 2007, which seems to be a few good
ideas, so buried in a pile of @#$% so thick as to be
near useless. Sigh, someone should tell those folks
you don't need a GUI for EVERYTHING...

The food was not as good as the food served at the
last Microsoft event I attended (box lunches vs. a
buffet), and the swag was a lot more uneven (I came
away with a small courier bag, a MS mouse, a 256 MB
flash memory key and some demo/beta versions of MS
software which is a better combo. than I gather many
who were there got).

I did see a few familiar faces at the event, some of
whom are on this mailing list (so I will let them
speak up if the want to... :-) ).

I did tell one of the Microsoft folks about my
encounter with their PR people. On the morning of June
5th (a week ago Tuesday) I got a phone call from a
magazine editor (a magazine I have NEVER written for),
neat, but he wants two 1,500 word articles by end of
June 8th, each article to cover several issues.
Needless to say I said sure I can do this. So, I start
phoning and/or e-mailing local open source related
folks thinking cool, I can help them get some good PR
and they can help me quickly (which worked well, I got
good to great, quick to very quick answers). I also
touched base with Xandros and Microsoft re: their
recent deal. The Xandros PR person gave me a solid
enough answer to work with in about 2 hours. The
Microsoft people gave me a "we got your e-mail and
will get back to" response in about two hours.
Thursday morning I sent a follow-up e-mail noting I
hadn't heard anything and I noted I had a deadline (a
deadline made worse by a 2nd editor asking for a 3rd
article from me...). By end of Thursday I had an
incomplete answer out of MS.

Bottom line was an article that was by my standards
quite tough on MS, not out of a real wish to be tough
(when I write for publication I TRY to be nice :-) ).
But when I am hearing from the user community and one
of the firms in question isn't talking, well... Any
event the articles were sent in shortly ahead of
deadline. Now I wait for word if they have been
accepted.

I tried to tell the MS folks I spoke to that if they
want the press to be nice to them, they have to be
nice in return...

Other stuff, I was crazy enough to wear a (very small)
Tux pin, and I did make notes through the event on a
notepad with the Red Hat logo on it :-) . One of the
Microsoft people did make a neutral mention the Tux
pin, otherwise nothing:-) .

Some outside groups had booths at the event. I spoke
to one of the people at the TASK (Toronto Area
Security Klatch www.task.to) booth who noted their
group is OS neutral, they deal with issues on all
platforms. This leaves me to wonder what their
meetings are like, 4 hours of Windows problems,
followed by 2 minutes for the *BSDs and 2 minutes for
Linux :-) ?


Colin McGregor

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