Every time I come home from a conference, I'm tempted to write about how WiFi has changed technical conferences. The change is both positive and negative, but on the whole I think it's negative.
Luckily, I don't need to articulate why. Chris has done it for me. Go read what he wrote.
Posted by jzawodn at June 07, 2005 07:19 AM
In your experience: is it only WiFi's fault or does it exacerbate ubiquitousness of the portable computer?
Btw... I'm betting in lots of these places WiFi is not a secure one... :D
I am wondering if you have any material on the NDB engine that may be going into 2nd edition of HPMySQL? There seems to be a dearth of documentation on NDB.
sorry, i violently disagree with this perspective, much as i respect Chris, his opinions, and his capabilities as an interesting speaker / presenter.
1) A speaker's desire for attention & focus should be earned through interesting material & presentation, not mandated by the audience's lack of a wireless connection.
2) If the presenter does a good job, they might even juice my natural free-association abilities by inspiring an interesting concept -- whereby i may then want to lookup a URL, email or IM someone about the idea, or blog about it (real-time).
3) If the presenter doesn't have something interesting to say, then i can exercise my right to check out something else online -- w/o having to getup and walkout of a room full of people (and yes i have no problem doing that & have in the past, but in the middle of a crowded row it's tougher to pull off... and it's not very considerate of others who may find it interesting).
in short, i don't believe i should be mandated to live according to the presenter's and/or conference organizer's dictated philosophy about whether i should have access to a wireless connection.
like the rest of the world, speakers / presenters should face up to the fact that they have competition for my attention, and not force me to make that choice before i know what i'm getting into.
now give me back the needle, dammit -- i can quit anytime i want to...
- dmc
This does bring up a funny question, who decides what....the speaker who is speaking for free or the conference goer who is paying for a conference.
