I'm not arguing, but yes it bothers me that you give a slanted report on what is today an insignificant aspect.

What, exactly, is "slanted" about a valid observation as to the vendors present at Warpstock? I expected there to be less vendors than I've seen in the past, but not to this extent.

Hell I was surprised that we had any vendors showup. That is the reality.

Well, next time I'll set my expectation level in accordance with that reality.

After four days of classes and sessions all you comment on was the lack of vendors.

Because it was the most glaring thing in my mind, based on past experiences at Atlanta, Phoenix (WarpTech 2000), and Philly. If you take someone whose last impressions of Warpstock was 4+ years old, what would you expect them to notice?

Did you not go to any sessions?

I went to a few sessions. I'll pull the relavant comments from my previous post, which you seemed to have missed:

I'm impressed with the progress made on the installer and Stan's session on networking made me aware of a couple of wireless devices I had not heard of. I also thought Lewis' session on wireless was a bit informative.

Wasn't there anything else you can report on (good or bad) from the event?

Oh, sure there is. I just thought it best to leave it alone, but if you want to go there, I'm game. I'll give you the codes used for the various sessions I attended and comment on them.


TUT-04: Lewis Rosenthal: Wireless Networking for Non-Geeks

Nice presentation with a speaker who knows how to entertain and inform. Make sure you get him to attend furture Warpstocks. He's a keeper. I was aware of a good number of things he talked about, but that didn't detract from the session.


CL-05: Samba on OS/2

Presentation seemed to be poorly structured and awkwardly done. Walked out of the session after 30-45 minutes because I wasn't getting anything useful out of the session. I use Netware here at the house, so Samba isn't on my radar, but I figured I give it a shot. Beside the language barrier, the speaker was too soft-spoken to be effective and I actually started to fall asleep. His work at Mensys is great, but I think he needs work to hone his presentation skills.


CL-09: Install/Maintain eCS

This is where I learned about the latest installer for eCS. Good presentation and good information all around. I did not know that hardware detection had progressed that far, but was pleased to see it. Alex has done excellent work on the installer program.


ADV-04: Mike Kaply: Mozilla: Past, Present, Future

Mike's always been good. The history of web browsers on OS/2 & eCS was entertaining. He's done a yeoman's job on keeping Mozilla/Firefox current on OS/2 & eCS. Glad to see we still have him on "our" side.


TUT-03: Stanley Sidlov: Networking for Non-Geeks

Stan's another good speaker who knows how to keep a room's attention. I knew a good bit of what he covered, but there were a couple of items that I didn't know. Wireless ethernet devices was one of them. Solves a lot of problems with wireless access for eCS. I might be looking into one of those, depending on how the genn-mac driver pans out. I have a completely unsupported Netgear MA-521 that works fine in Windoze, but nowhere else.


ADV-03: Peter Grubbs: An OS/2 Publication

Never met Peter before and found him to be a good speaker as well. I pretty much knew the fate of OS/2-Ezine. Found his ideas about getting it (or another publication) started again to be interesting, but not sure we'll ever see it rise from the ashes.


DEM-08: Arne Blankets: Tips and Tricks of the Mozilla Suite

Didn't get much out of this one because when Arne started talking about some sort of web development extension, I tuned out. I'm not interested in doing web design. Left that session in the first 30-45 minutes, I believe. Went to another session.


ADV-02 & ADV-01

These 2 were put together in the same room at sort of the last minute. Got there too late for the Future of Ecs, but did manage to get there for the Birds of a Feather part. Hard to give a good report on this combined session, since I missed the first half. What I did stick around for seemed to be ok.


DEM-03: Chuck McKinnis: Ecs Maintainence Tool

Chuck's work in REXX is amazing to me. The program he's come up with to keep updates installed is great. Be sure to keep him coming as well. Got some good information there.


Friday afternoon didn't seem to have much that interested us, so we went off to the Indian Echo Caverns and visited one of her old co-workers that lived in the Hershey area. We left on Sunday about 2:30 in the afternoon.

So, do you think I've covered enough ground now?

How about writing an article on it for VOICE so people that couldn't make it this year can see what they missed?

No thanks. I don't write articles. It's not me. It wouldn't be completely positive, that's for sure.

Besides, seeing the response here to a negative comment makes me wonder just how much of what I'd write would make it to print. It's obvious to me that some folks took what I've said personally.

While vendors aren't what makes Warpstock, their participation in the event (in my opinion) does make an impression on the health of the community in general, especially if you've been a past attendee.

If this was your first Warpstock, it went fairly well. If 2003 and 2004 were as bad as I've seen a couple people comment on, then this was definately a great year. Nowhere to go but up, and all that.

If I'm making a comparison of Warpstock 2000 to Warpstock 2005 based on vendor participation, I'm very concerned about how much longer the event can continue on. I don't think that's an unreasonable observation.

Now, maybe my opinion would have been different if I had attended the 2003 and 2004 events, but I remember things as they were in 2000. I expected a drop-off, but had no idea it was in its current state.

I'm a home user now. I don't do consulting work anymore. I've pretty much lost interest in the computer industry in general. It's just gotten too depressing to have to deal with Windoze environments to make a living. There's no joy in it. It's the same shit all the time. I'm also so far behind the curve that I couldn't get back in the game even if I wanted to.

I sit here day in and day out, using what I consider to be the best GUI platform out there. I use Windoze ocassionally. Linux has come a long way, but the UI still leaves me wanting. I always find myself back in OS/2 at the end of the day; sometimes, at the end of an hour.

I don't see a lot of sessions at Warpstock geared to the home user. They seem more in line with the computer professional and maybe that's where they truly belong. I'd still like to know there are things I can do with OS/2 other than business.

I'd like to see a session on installing the OS on things that aren't ThinkPads. Something on the order of user-built white boxes and how to solve install issues on them. Maybe even how to get multiple OSes on a box the user built themselves. That kind of session could go on for all 4 days, but I think it would be a hell of a thing to do.

I'd like sessions on MP3 players and rippers, Bit-torrent clients, DVD players, digtal camera interfacing, and what Mozilla / Firefox extensions are available and work in the OS/2 versions.

I just seems to me that if you're not into programming or keeping the system up & running, the list of "Fun Things To Do With eCS" sessions isn't very long. You can't work all the time, you know.

Anyway, I consider this chapter closed. Pardon my ranting. It's something I've gotten worse at lately.

Or better at. Depends on your point of view, I guess.