rob@pcad.UUCP (Ralph Brown) (03/23/91)
I recently attended (for $150) a seminar put on by the Boston Comp Soc. with Charles Petzold as speaker. This was billed as covering "technical topics from program design through debugging ... current information about strategic issues". <FLAME ON> It was, IMHO, a total and complete waste of time. I am really sick of PC superstars exploiting the software community's information needs to feed their own egos by name dropping (people and TLAs). It seems to me that from several standpoints it is advantageous to have more and better Windows development information deseminated by people who know it. What I see too often is either the above ego feeding frenzy or the related Wizard approach of "Oh that's too complex for mere engineers to know". Often it seems these hide either lack of knowlege or really pathetic programming hacks. <FLAME OFF> Well, that helped a bit. The morning session (2.5 hours) was a personalized history (from Mr. Petzold's standpoint) of PC's, MS Windows and OS/2. Very little was covered that hasn't been in the industry mags. There was nothing new said about future directions that hasn't been in PC-WEEK etc. which actually isn't that suprising since non-disclosure agreements exist. The afternoon session switched gears very quickly to a detailed presentation of Windows Bitmaps. This included function calls, typedefs details, exactly how compressed bitmaps are stored, and a bit of programming advice over a period of 3 hours. This was interesting to me but not at that level of detail. That was it. The above comments are completely my personal opinions and don't represent those of my employer or anyone else.