post 34

By anders pearson 20 Jul 2000

i went to Macworld Expo yesterday. overall, quite disappointing. just a lot of companies all competing for your attention so they could try to sell you something. most of the booths were running product demos that all felt like infomercials to me. i spent most of the day biting my tongue when salespeople were trying hand the audience a bunch of shit. it was so hard to not just politely ask the filemaker pro people to kindly stop referring to their product as a ‘database’ (if you’ve ever used filemaker pro, and you’ve used a real database, you know what i’m talking about). i just stayed away from the microsoft booth altogether, lest they call security on me. i also had to put forth a great effort to keep from laughing out loud at the startups with completely idiotic business plans (i won’t even name names here. that’s just too cruel). and as a Free Software bigot, whenever i saw the companies selling programs that merely duplicated the functionality of various GNU utilities, or features that have been in emacs for a decade, i could only chuckle.

i also discovered that if you were a 2600 shirt to a computer conference, you get the weirdest people coming up to you and just starting to talk to you about the strangest shit. this one wacko just walked up to me and asked about the plausibility and legality of hiring a “hacker” to steal the backend of some online gambling site so he could put it up on a server in costa rica with a different interface so no one would know the difference. i informed him that he was an idiot and suggested that he should go fuck himself (in the politest possible way, of course).

but seriously, as far as computer conferences go, h2k kicked macworld’s ass all over the place.