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[Bill Vermillion]

On Fri, May 21, 2004 at 12:07:07PM -0400, Fairlight thus spoke:

> On Fri, May 21, 2004 at 10:04:53AM -0500, Mike Schwartz-PC
> Support & Services, the prominent pundit, witicized:

> > life, and ran into the same problem. Managers just don't
> > understand that, due to the rapidly changing technology,
> > computer people have much more urgent training and convention
> > attendance needs than most of the other people within the
> > company.

> They're called -books-.  :)

I have ton's of them.  Probably 200 in my computer cubby hole and
at least that many about computers scattered through this maze -
lost amid hundreds of others at times.

> Actually, I've only bothered with about 6-10 books.  I defer mostly to
> online docs as more convenient more oft than not.

> I've never understood this fascination-bordering-on-obsession
> with conferences, meetings, seminars, etc., when a good old
> piece of plain old documentation will do the job.

It can depend on the conference and the way it is set up.  There
are those that seem more intent on making money for the conference
giver and then there are those that are more intent on information
exchange.

The absolute best things I've ever attended where the Usenix
gatherings, and one SIGRAPH.   Others have gone from OK to waste of
time and money.

What I miss are the local tech computer groups where real things
happened.  I remember Bjourne Stroustup talking about a new
language he had invented that he called C++ - before the world had
heard of it, and David Korn talking Unix in general.  
And Xerox came and talked about a new thing they had called
'ethernet', and showed their Star.  Iomega demonstarting a new
8" cartrdige device that held 10MB data.  We could buy the drive
with no support and write our own drivers for only $1800/drive.

But computers have become commodity and the tech people have become
appliance salesmen, so what can you expect.

> Then again, I don't do the travel gig, and I don't like to mix
> vacation and business -at all-.

That term 'vacation' rings a bell from somewhere in the distant
past. :-)  [Averaging 77.5 paid hours week for well over 3 years in
the recording business gives you an idea of what I mean.]

> Most people -appear- to like to write off things like
> conferences on their taxes--at least the self-employed
> of the lot. Perfectly acceptable as a deduction, but the
> impression (perhaps erroneous) that I've gotten is that whether
> self-employed or not, many treat it more like a holiday with
> the learning learning coming "by the way". And I speak not
> necessarily of any courses in this community in specific--I've
> noticed the same in many areas, including linux.

I'd love to get to the Usenix technical coference in Boston next
month - very heavily Linux oriented.

> I really think that the same learning could be accomplished
> in less time with POD as opposed to much slower and more
> inefficient verbal discourse.

Keyword there is 'inefficient'.   

> One can read far faster than someone can talk.  One also retains the
> material for revision.

But the good speakers can explain what is not written down, and can
answer questions.

> Retention is quite often superior for the writtn
> word compared to spoken iteration.  Docs have far more upsides, IMHO. 

And in the ones I've attended you normally get printouts of the
slides that were used so you can make notes and use them for
later reference. Somewhere I think I still have printout from a
light and informational talk [sort of a relief from the heavy
stuff] about the only completely reversible language - where
the language defines the end result and you can look at the end
result and know the language. It was called Blazon - and it
defines heralds and coat-of-arms used in England/Europe. So that
fit the social side of things.

Doing a search on that I see there has been a book called "From
Blazon to Postscript" from a Very High Level Language sumposium.

There are a lot of very good and interesting things out there - but
they tend to be hidden or known primarily in the educational arean.

> No offense to anyone that actually does the conference thing,
> of course. Been to one myself, a long time ago. *yawn* Got more
> out of the docs upon my return than I did out of the trip,
> technically speaking. The biggest part of what I gained on the
> trip was a friend--but that wasn't what I was there to do.

It sounds like you made a bad choice of a conference to attend?

What was did that conference cover?.

Bill
-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com