rick@hanauma (Richard Ottolini) (08/26/88)
Could an attendee please describe the exciting new developements? Thanks.
burzio@mmlai.UUCP (Anthony Burzio) (08/26/88)
In article <23369@labrea.Stanford.EDU>, rick@hanauma (Richard Ottolini) writes: > > Could an attendee please describe the exciting new developements? Thanks. *** Opinions off the starboard bow, Capt'n! *** The most exciting thing to happen was HP brought out their widget set and donated it to MIT. Of course, if you like horror-thrillers you could count DEC and their "X is MINE MINE ALL MINE" attitude... Some notes on the vendors: HP - These guys seem to have their act together. Give them an A+ for cooperation with the X consortium. They mentioned the L (lawyer)-word once, but only to protect themselves, not in an attempt to grab profits from MITs' work... Their 3D widgets are tacky, but what the heck, they *DO* look like HP instruments. SUN - They are there because the others are. If X works, that's cool to them, but if not who cares, they have NeWs... DEC - I used to like these guys (I'm an old CMU'er) but I have gotten burned five or six times too often. Seems DECs' interest in X comes from the failure of their original window manager on the VAXStations. This company should be ejected from the consortium ( and OSF) until they behave. SPECIFICS: 1) Digital has it(you) now... (evil chuckle)... DEC will supply the X of the future and that is that. Seems they feel confident about controlling the OSF so who cares about all the work that has gone before. (Note: OSF has located in Boston. Will companies located in Palo Alto have an equal say?) 2) DEC states that they will contribue their work to OSF, but their REP had hearing loss when questioned about releasing it to the public domain. Hold on to your wallets! 3) DEC has "modified" their drivers. Groan. Lord knows what they have done now. 4) DEC is realeasing a "look and feel" document. That one should send alarms ringing throughout the land. The (grrr) Lawyers will have loads of fun patenting everything in sight... 5) Funny comment of the week: DEC: We (DEC) can make a profit selling standards. Ours has to have some "value added". (Greeted with general mirth and cat calls) Crowd: I thought DEC was submitting their work as a standard? DEC: That is true. Crowd: When all the other vendors follow the standard, how can you have "value added"? DEC: (long pause) We'll just have to do it that much better... The courses on the first two days for the technical group were pretty good. I'd suggest you get a copy of the course notes "Programming the X Window System" by Oliver Jones "Programming the Xt Toolkit" by David Burleigh These notes will allow you to reconstruct the lectures and are quite good as an X primer. The rest of the days were sort of slow. Most of the time was spent with the vendors telling us of their progress. A general note is my vague feeling that there aren't many programs written for X as yet that will wean people away from VT style terminals. The vendors will have to work on this. A MAC is a much cheaper box than a traditional workstation *AND* it does pretty pictures... Oh sure, I'll get flamed for these, but these are my opinions... ************************************************************************** Tony Burzio * Like DEC, * Martin Marietta Laboratories * These opinions are all MINE MINE MINE... * **************************************************************************
jkh@VIOLET.BERKELEY.EDU (Jordan K. Hubbard) (08/30/88)
Well, if you must call them "highlights"... I may be alone in my opinions, but based on discussions I had with other attendees, I doubt it. I have to be frank and say right out that I considered the Xhibition a fiasco, and that's putting it kindly. In a way, it underscored some of the potential pitfalls that await many small businesses eager to jump on the X bandwagon. In Unix's infancy, many of us were treated to an assortment of good and not-so-good conferences and seminars, all claiming to be "the place to be" if one wanted to join the growing unix fraternity. Being as just about everything I've seen so far in the X community has been of more-than-acceptable quality, I hadn't expected mediocrity to appear so soon, but looking back at recent history I guess I have to say that it's probably surprising that it took as long as it did. None of this, incidently, reflects back in any way on the efforts of M.I.T. or project Athena, their contributions appeared to be up to their usually high standards. If only they had had full control (and responsibilty for) this conference... Now that I've expressed my dissatisfaction, let me cite some reasons for it. First of all, the conference was far too expensive. This is probably my biggest single gripe. My company went through considerable expense to fly me all the way from West Germany, put me up in a hotel (which wasn't cheap either, by anyone's standards) and finally make sure I had some eating money. All of those expenses are standard, no gripes there. But then on top of all that we're socked with another $300 ($225 + $75) bucks to see the xhibitors and attend a few "strategic seminars." The exhibition hall itself was a joke with only about 20-30 assorted vendors hawking their stuff. For the typical attendee, only half of the stuff was interesting. I felt rather sorry for a number of the exhibitors (who in turn had to pay ** $1500 ** for the "priviledge" of attending) who spent the two (yes, only two) exhibition days sitting forlornly at their tables hoping someone would be interested enough in their product to at least speak to them. Incidently, the cost for this 2 day extravaganza was $75.00 alone. It's funny (like a rubber crutch), but usually vendors go through a lot of expense to get people to look at their new product(s) [DEC used to feed us catered food and give away coffee mugs, always at no cost to the customer]; now with Xhibition we've managed to turn it around. Yes! You have to pay money to see the advertising! If the folks at ICS had their way, we'd probably have had to buy dinner for all the vendors as well... The seminars weren't much better. A great chance to pay $225 to see more advertising, but in hot stuffy auditoriums instead. Seminars were limited to an hour apiece, so most of the speakers got to get about as deep as the color glossies available at the exhibitors hall. Most consisted of 1/2 hour of hurried explanation (which glossed over all the really technical stuff) and another 1/2 hours worth of Q & A where everybody tried valiantly (but usually fruitlessly) to ask the unanswered questions. Usually some novice would spend about 1/2 of this time asking questions like "Yes, but what *is* X exactly? I mean, in the metaphysical sense...". I went to HP's "New Wave" seminar which gave us all enough information to get interested but spent the rest of the time showing us a really neat film of waves crashing on a beach. Whatever sells, I suppose. Half the time, I found myself thinking that I could have gotten a lot more information by staying at home and hammering out about 20 letters to various friends at HP, DEC, Tektronix, etc... I'll refrain from saying too much about the scheduling snafus that were an everyday occurence. I missed several seminars that I was interested in because some brilliant mind decided to move them to some other time-slot without advertising the fact. At every turn, the organizers cited the much-larger-than-expected turnout when faced with any complaint. Sure, 1000 people turned up and they expected 500. That's no reason to juggle the schedule like a set of bowling pins. At the least they could have said "Hey.. This thing has gotten too large to be managable. Let's let people in for free (or some nominal cost) and tell them not to expect too much." As it was, I saw people arrive on the next-to-the-last day and *still* get socked with the whole $225 seminar fee. What kind of BS is that? Now some might say that the Xhibition was primarily a forum for the novice X user or businessman interested in finding out "what this X thing is" and that X hackers shouldn't have shown up expecting to learn anything. Well, that wasn't made clear at the outset and if the intention was to spread the gospel of X and train the masses, why were the classes $300 bucks apiece!?! I think that a "bargain" rate of $675 was available for those interested in attending more than one class, but I hardly consider that reasonable. To throw away $300 was one thing, to toss the better part of a thousand would have made me hopping mad. My girlfriend attended the Xlib class and wasn't exactly thrilled with it. For $300, she expected something more than an 8 hour summary of the manual. To sum up my complaints: 1. Too expensive. If this thing had been *free* (say, paid for by the advertisers) or some nominal fee ($50?), I would have forgiven just about everything. "It's their first time, they did the best they could, etc etc." As it was, I felt like I'd been taken by a shell game. 2. Poorly organized. Running around in the rain trying to figure out what the latest schedule was is not my idea of fun. Almost no effort was made to inform people of what was going on and I learned after the first day that you had to *poll* the conference folks every hour or so in order to keep track of everything. More often than not, you'd be left sitting in some auditorium waiting to see if it was your seminar or the "X11 Cobol bindings" one you'd planned to avoid the following day. 3. Small. Not much meat on those bones. What became readily apparent was that just about *everybody* is scrambling to cover the same ground but *nobody* is even close to finished. Some vendors were afraid to let users even move the pointer on their machines for fear that their server would crash. I understand the growth phase that everyone's in, so I'm not attacking the vendors, but this whole "conference" appeared to be very premature. Another 6 months and we might have seen some very interesting things. As it is, many of the smaller companies shot their advertising budget on this one and probably won't come out of their holes again for awhile. A real shame, and we have ICS to thank for it. My impression of ICS was that of an amateur company out to make a name for itself and perhaps a quick buck at the same time. At least RWS got a free clock out of the deal (he certainly deserves something), the rest of us should have been so lucky. I did try to make my feelings known (as did a few friends who felt similarly) to ICS, but made the mistake of talking to Peter Winston's father who reacted as if I'd attacked his entire family tree and referred to the Winston family as the missing links. Perhaps his family connection colored his judgement, but I found his attitude unprofessional to say the least. A friend practically bent over backwards trying to talk to him as diplomatically as possible and was rewarded with a personal attack. Sigh.. On the plus side, the 3 women there to "front" for ICS were as nice as could be and seemed geniunely concerned with the problems we were having. I would like to say that they were one of the few bright spots in the convention. One of the other bright spots was Ellis Cohen's ICCCM talk. The man's enthusiasm was infectuous and his talk clarified a few points for all of us. I would gladly attend a longer seminar with him as the key speaker when the ICCCM is finally solidified. (Ellis? You listening?). In closing, I would just like to restate the fact that X appears to be in a state of flux now more than ever. There will be ample opportunity in the future to pour vast sums of money into attending unproductive seminars and following dead-end "standards." While the leap into X is generally a "good thing," I would be very cautious about following some of the many forks in the road that are starting to appear. Small companies are especially vulnerable and should probably spend as much time as is practical carefully testing the waters before entering. Those that can make their software as "interface independent" as possible should definitely do so. The OSF, for example, raises more questions than it answers and should be watched with a jaundiced eye for the time being. As for the snake oil salesmen, well, that goes without saying... Jordan Hubbard
jkh@VIOLET.BERKELEY.EDU (Jordan K. Hubbard) (08/30/88)
Just in case... The opinions expressed my posting (<8808292345.AA16846@violet.berkeley.edu>) were *mine alone* and don't represent anybody else's. They are also, of course, only opinions. Just thought I'd point that out. Jordan Hubbard