Day 3: Evening Dinner for Speakers and attendees

This was a welcome change, my first night when I wasn't in bed at 19:00 with a fever and a stack of handkerchiefs

After a very nice dinner with all the conference attendees (you can see some pictures of a few tables in the picture library), Konrad went on stage and thanked all the people who made the show possible. He told us about how fun, unstressful and rewarding the whole experience was and was really sad that they had to hand out the torch to the poor SOBs, I mean the lucky people who are going to be next year's volunteers for organizing the conference to be

[picture]

He also introduced us, foreigners, to the all Australian "oath" game. The rules are really simple: every time someone says "oath", you gotta drink

That said, before things really got out of hand, and people retreated to pubs after dinner, Maddog gave us a little presentation about the state of linux's usability ore more specifically he gave us his "Mom and Pop" talk (up to date version of a talk he already gave at Digital for similar reasons)

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In essence, his parents aren't stupid (his Dad is actually quite handy with cars), but they're terrified of electronics. Maddog gave us a rundown of the tech toys he's given them over the years for Christmas:

Turntable, which they managed to "break" after messing with the 3 volume control buttons which they turned by mistake
Electonic watch, which ended up waking them up every night at 03:00 and chime every hour, including during mass on sundays
An automatic coffer maker with only two buttons, but that was enough to cause them problems
A break maker, which actually worked because "only one button, no instructions"
A VCR, which time they still couldn't use after one year, and two years later, he showed them how to tape more than one show on the same tape

[picture]

The point is that when it came to a computer, he got them one with windows since he knew they wouldn't be able to use linux, and that giving them the same system than what other people had around them made it simpler for them to get help.

The specific points he made after that were:

as he's mentionned before, there are only half a billion OS license out there, which means that 5.5 billion people haven't selected their OS yet
Linux has a lot of flexibility and ways to do things, but there is no standard default. For teaching and helpdesk applications, there should be some kind of fallback interface, even if it's boring, but it's something everyone could fall back on
There is still no binary standard
While there is some support for non roman languages, and KDE even supports right to left languages like Hebrew now, you still can't mix that with English on a single line.
We severely lack a style guide for applications. KDE and/or gnome might fix this, but having two is not the solution and it needs to be a very complete guide like what Macintosh came up with when MacOS first came out.
Generally target less computer savy users.

While Maddog made some good points, I think some people are already moving toward what he's preaching (for instance kppp versus writing a ppp command and chat script by hand), yet there is indeed work to be done because seeing what a hard time my Mom had with learning windows, I would not even dare putting linux on her machine and leave (whether it had KDE or not)

You can see all of Maddog's slides in the picture library (sorry, it was dark, even with flash all the pictures aren't great).

Picture library

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2001/01/28 (16:26): Version 1.0
2001/01/29 (00:24): Version 1.1. s/umph/oath/ (thanks to Andrew O'Brien)