Essays on Latinoware

[En-US]

  Late report again. Today I'm here to talk about something serious. It may not look like, you may think it's just some kind of stupid party, but no, it's way bigger than that and it really upsets me how little attention it gets from the media.

   Let's talk about Latinoware. Well, "what is it?", you might ask me. Latinoware is an Open Source Software related event/conference, promoted by Itaipu Bi-National at Foundation Itaipu Technological Park in Foz do Iguaçu, PR, Brazil. Its name is Latino-Ware because the projects and discussions regard the use of free software on Latin Countries, but their applications go way beyond that. People of all countries gather in Itaipu to listen or talk about solutions and Open Source technology, with the presence of some famous ones, like Jon "Maddog" Hall.
   In October 21st of his year, 2011, occurred the eighth consecutive Latinoware, but it was, actually, the first one I attended to. I must say I really enjoyed it. I got the opportunity to go "for free" - the University paid my subscription and four-star hotel fee, but I paid for the transportation -, visit Paraguay where we can buy products with low taxes, visit Itaipu itself and take a close look at the barrages and, of course, enjoy the event. There were also mini-courses on different areas like 3D modeling, musical production, smartphone apps development, etc. I attended to the 3D modeling one. We used Blender, a really nice modeling free software.

   There was a problem: the software was not installed on the machines at the time of the class, so we (yes, we) had to do it by ourselves. Well, the teacher (Cícero Moraes) asked for an IT manager to solve this problem, but this manager was really stupid. He did not know the root password (to use apt-get) and neither knew which was the computers' archtecture so we could run Blender without installing it. Well, I easly ran $uname -a and told them we were on i386 machines. Everybody downloaded from the same mirror (the first one) and only I clicked on the third. Needless to say my download finished as fast as a heart attack and I had to share it with everyone. Since they could not tell me their addresses, I couldn't scp the files. So people handed me USB drives and I had to transfer the files to each one and return the drives to their owners. Damn it. After that, the class went smooth. Well, actually, sometime later they finally told us the root password.... 2011. Yes, the root password was 2011. So me and a friend installed Hedgewars, but the graphics wouldn't work. We just gave up after even trying sshing into our private server at UFPR and running the game from there.

   On that day I also got the one-in-a-lifetime opportunity to talk to Maddog. Okay, he's been in every Latinoware since 2005 (not sure). But, anyway, it is always an honor to talk to an icon like himself. People are all about "omg bew gayts is such a genius, setephen blowjobs revolutionary". They just buy what is sold. Literally sold. While there are things for free that are much better. Things on which Jon Hall and Dennis Ritchie worked hard on. Maddog made a conference on the first day of this Latinoware talking about Project Cauã. He and his team are creating CPU integrated on LCD panels at low voltage. There will be no power cable. it will only use the ethernet one. The intention is to build small networks with dozens of these machines, starting in Brazil. They would all be connected via high-speed wi-fi and would be turned on day and night, spending very little ennergy. We (me and my friend) were wondering at the conferece if the processing would be enough to attend our daily professional demand. Maddog explained to us the machine will have two processors: a main one and a graphic one. The main users to this machine are actually home/end-users, but if a harcore process is needed, the main processor would ask help to the graphic one. But it will also use cloud computing. Since all computers will be connected and turned on (the idea is to have something like a network with apartments of the same building), while some of them are not being used at all, they will lend their CPU to the ones in need. While we were talking stting nicely at a bench, people gathered arund us and I noticed I wasn't the only one annoyed with that. I couldn't even say "thank you" to maddog and some homos got interrupted us to take pictures with him. He said "Fiiiiine, but I'd rather answer more questions than take pictures". That's why I didn't take a picture with him. Although I wanted to, talking to him was satisfying enough.

Picture not made by me

   Oh, yes, Dennis Ritchie. He is a co-creator of the C programming language and Unix. He died a few days after Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs used C and Unix to build his empire. Bill Gates used C and Unixto build his empire. I use C to write software. "At least 75%  of the web as you know it (60% Server Share, 13% client share, 93% of web servers), is powered by the developments of Dennis Ritchie over his lifetime. Apple, the World Wide Web, and iPhone probably wouldn’t even exist had Dennis never invented C programming language and the contribution to Unix." [8]. Furthermore, C++, PHP and Java were inspired on C. Everybody cried over Steve Jobs, who just recycled ideas and didn't help at all with software development; no one cared about Ritchie, who influenced the WHOLE-- FUCKING-- WORLD .
   Nobody paid attention to his death for the same reason  nobody pays attention to Latinoware nor FISL, while the whole Brazil talks about the shitty Campus Party. It's all about publicity and media. The broadcasting channels are paid to talk about Apple. They are paid to talk about Campus Party. Why would they care about Dennis Ritchie or Latinoware? Nobody pays them to talk about free software. So let's talk about a conference with lots of propagandas, half-naked women, concept cars that do not work, good looking computers and geek herp tha derp stuff. Then, all the bazzingers gather with their stupid hipster hardware to sit there tweet the same thing: I'm here tweetting with a lot of tweetting people around me, we are useless. With that, they think they are somehow a difference to the world, they are really confident to be up to date on technology and software development. Oh, of course, they just downloaded the new apple application for only US$2,99. They know everything about how to use it, but have know idea of how it really works. And, yet, they pay even more for a subscription to Campus Party to go there, use closed software and see commercials. Everything they could do at home. Place where they come back to without anything new to contribute to the society.


I feel kind of relieved after typing this last paragraph. As I stated before, I get really upset and even scared of how our society behaves regarding this subject. Computing is way more than little apps. As people turn their backs to the real matters, they get cuffed by the products they blindly buy.


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Appendix:

First day of conference

At the end of the 1st and 2nd days, there were some groups playing a nice rock and there were also free food and drinks

This guy didn't know how to operate a headphone (used for realtime-translation)

  

At the end, some stupid gibberish. The guy dressed in white was a total fag

Itaipu Barrages. We walked for 20min under the hot sun, and the guides of those busses stopped us saying they would call the guards because we were not allowed outside the event.

Paraguay is like China

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Links:

1. http://www.latinoware.org
2. http://www.projectcaua.org/
3. http://www.projectcaua.com.br/
4. http://www.blender.org/
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie
6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maddog
7. http://www.itaipu.gov.br/en
8. http://thinkclay.com/news/steve-jobs-dies-vs-dennis-ritchie-dies