Issue #69
Last Update October 31, 2010
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Technology IT360 Computer Conference byPeter H. Salus June 16, 2009 The first week in April I attended IT360 at the Toronto Convention Centre [sic]. To put it bluntly, it was a disappointment. Attendance was far below where it had been, say, two years ago. At that time it was a two-and-a-half day event with several Linux (Jon 'maddog' Hall) and BSD (Dru Lavigne) notables in attendance.
In 2009 the prize exhibit was Michael Calce (= Mafiaboy), a 15-year-old who launched several very damaging denial-of-service attacks in 2000. He pleaded guilty and on 12 September 2001 the Montreal Youth Court sentenced him to eight months of "open custody," one year of probation, restricted use of the Internet, and a small fine. He has now ?€?co-authored?€? a book. His ?€?keynote?€? was an orchestrated PR event, devoid of content.
Once upon a time, a conference would have an eminent and informative principal speaker. Or someone who might be newsworthy. No more. I have seen ?€?opportunities?€? for keynotes at $10,000. So they are paid commercial announcements. Bah!
I wandered about, listened to several presentations, picked up 'free' toys. It was the IT world downsized and gone the way of a boat show along the Connecticut coast. Perhaps this is the hallmark of a post-mature industry.
Operating Systems are no longer interesting: -x has ?€?won.?€? The are over 300 Linux distributions. There are the three BSDs: FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD; plus Apple's OS X (which is based on BSD). There is MINIX 3 (in 1991 Linux was modeled on Minix). Nothing Microsoft does is anything interesting.
Languages are no longer interesting. Once conferences on COBOL or Fortran; on C; on C++; on Java; on Tcl/Tk; etc. flourished. No more. Perl? Apache?
Windowing systems? Fugeddaboutit!
Well, applications. For your iPhone, perhaps. But those are more product announcements than anything technical.
The days of going to these events to actually learn something is gone. And purely technical events appear to have withered. They are sere and shrunken. The USENIX Association where 3500 met to listen to Adele Goldberg speak about Smalltalk (San Francisco 1989) mustered a bare 250 in June 2009 in San Diego.
Yet the audience still exists. There were about 1000 geeks at the Ohio Linux Fest in Columbus last autumn. But the bally-hooed events are scarcely worth attending.
Coming full circle, I did attend a straightforward marketing talk at IT360 that was worthwhile. Dirk Brown, Senior Director of Product Management, Premiere Global Services, spoke on ?€?Leveraging VoIP to Enhance On-Demand Communications.?€? Brown's points (as I understood them) were:
-that VoIP can be leveraged effectively to deploy communications technology;
-that VoIP conferencing differs from traditional audio conferencing technology;
-and that VoIP enhances both the reliability and feature-functionality of on-demand communications platforms such as reservation-less conferencing.
If you spend a whole working day at a conference, you deserve at least one worthwhile talk, and this was it.
New York Stringer is published by NYStringer.com. For all communications, contact David Katz, Editor and Publisher, at david@nystringer.com