Well, Linuxworld finally opened on Monday. I got there about an hour early, and there was my name on the board for who was speaking.
I had some time to kill, so I walked around outside and got some more pictures of sculptures (Can you tell yet that I like sculpture a lot?) and other things.
The conference began with a series of keynotes. All the speakers went over their time limit. The first one was, I am sorry to say, extremely boring and presented in Marketese rather than English. I can’t imagine what the translators were doing with words like “advantaging.” I could easily have played buzzword bingo with his speech.
Edward Tufte was right about PowerPoint. PowerPoint does not improve a presentation; it tends to dumb it down. There’s nothing like slide after slide of bullet points to make one’s eyes glaze over.
I got the books with the conference proceedings. With two or three
exceptions (my presentation being one of them), all the other
presentations use PowerPoint
or the Linux equivalent, and they all look depressingly alike.
That having been said, one presenter did overcome the hideous limitations of PowerPoint. Arnoud Engelfriet from Philips used slides with a very thin and unobtrusive banner with the Philips name at the top. The rest of the slide consisted of only a few words in plain black type on a white background, and, perhaps, a simple graphic. A slide about different forms of software licensing looked like this:
Free-for-all License
Examples: BSD, MIT License
Rather than read off a list of bullet points, Mr. Engelfriet put up the slide and then discussed the concept in detail. After the presentation, I told him I really enjoyed it, and that his use of PowerPoint was much more effective than most. He said he had picked up the technique from Lawrence Lessig, and the only problem was getting the timing exactly right, but he liked the approach a lot.
Here are a couple of pictures from the booths; I have a few other pictures but if you’ve ever been at a trade show, all the booths tend to look alike.
I went downstairs to the COEX mall to buy some souvenirs. As I made my way to the opening reception, some English as a Second Language students stopped me and asked if they could interview me. They asked where I was from, how long I was going to be in Korea, what my favorite Korean food was, and several other “small talk” questions. At the end of the interview, one of the students took a picture of me with the interviewer, so I took a picture of them.
Before the reception proper began, the hosts presented awards to people for Best Hardware, Best Software, etc. It was all in Korean, but the westerners present followed the Koreans and applauded at the appropriate times.
The reception itself was a very westernized affair, complete with ice sculpture and a small band of Westerners playing jazzed-up versions of standards at volumes that made it impossible to carry on any sort of reasonable conversation. Why on earth do party organizers get a band that will drown out any attempt at communication by the partygoers? The food was appetizer-ish, good, and again quite westernized.