Is attending a conference worth less today? | The Coffeehouse

Shaded
Mean ugly geek with axe

Why go to PDC? If you can see all the goodies from home...

Now downloading..... zzz

Scoble when are you guys going to torrent these bad boys?

Michael Griffiths
Fatalism.

Conferences are (or it's better to approach them as) networking opportunities; places to meet people who are creating and using these technologies.

The idea of the PDC is for industry people to come and meet Microsoft employees, and to interact a bit. It's also a preview of upcoming technologies, so developers know about them and can plan for them.

Simply going to a conference and watching the presentations is (fairly) useless. It's the people you get to talk to that's really interesting.

AdamKinney
Agent of Change

I disagree that watching presentations are useless. Its super useful to go to the presentation and then go talk to the person who gave it orhead up to the track lounges and discuss it with people on the team. Its like an instant info digestion and feedback cycle, much easier for grokking.

Cybermagellan
Live for nothing, or die for everything

AdamKinney wrote:
I disagree that watching presentations are useless.

Except when us here at home are blocked for "Proprietary reasons"

W3bbo
The Master of Baiters

Cybermagellan wrote:
AdamKinney wrote:I disagree that watching presentations are useless.

Except when us here at home are blocked for "Proprietary reasons"

You mean AOL blocks PDC streams?

jsrfc58

AdamKinney wrote:
I disagree that watching presentations are useless. Its super useful to go to the presentation and then go talk to the person who gave it or head up to the track lounges and discuss it with people on the team. Its like an instant info digestion and feedback cycle, much easier for grokking.

So how much would it cost me to bounce two hours worth of new language ideas off of Anders Hejlsberg? I'm not at the PDC, though.

Where's his blog, eh?

Cybermagellan
Live for nothing, or die for everything

W3bbo wrote:

Cybermagellan wrote:

AdamKinney wrote: I disagree that watching presentations are useless.

Except when us here at home are blocked for "Proprietary reasons"

You mean AOL blocks PDC streams?

No, the "Due to proprietary reasons we must stop audio and video" portion of Gates keynote.

jeffsand
Inch by Inch

Cybermagellan wrote:

No, the "Due to proprietary reasons we must stop audio and video" portion of Gates keynote.

This was during a spoof video of Bill and Napoleon Dynamite during the keynote. Unfortunately, we aren't always granted rights to distribute videos that we create on the Internet.

Sorry you missed the but this was outside of our control

Thanks.
-Jeff

Cybermagellan
Live for nothing, or die for everything

jeffsand wrote:

Cybermagellan wrote:
No, the "Due to proprietary reasons we must stop audio and video" portion of Gates keynote.

This was during a spoof video of Bill and Napoleon Dynamite during the keynote. Unfortunately, we aren't always granted rights to distribute videos that we create on the Internet.

Sorry you missed the but this was outside of our control

Thanks.
-Jeff

I'm not trying to argue the point...but instead you show hundreds if not thousands of developers the video? Also the product preview I think during Jims programming part was blocked out....that's lame.

irascian
Irascible Ian

Cybermagellan wrote:

I'm not trying to argue the point...but instead you show hundreds if not thousands of developers the video? Also the product preview I think during Jims programming part was blocked out....that's lame.

As Jonathan has pointed out on a separate thread the terms of the engagement of the actor are that his services are used at a business conference. Getting clearance for worldwide distribution would be far more difficult and expensive.