[HPCC-Conf] Conference Report

[Tony Duell]

> Hello Everyone,
> 
> As most of you who attended the Conference know, the folks
> from HP had their slides - as quick as they were in some cases -
> marked HP Private.  Fred also told us that we should not

YEs, I noticed that. It was clearly visible from the front row anyway.

> publish what were heard.  I hope everyone will respect HP's
> wishes and this will be a good test of our being responsible.

I feel that we have to respect HP's wishes in this, but that we (HPCC) 
should never have got into this position in the first place.

You (Richard) say in your draft conference report (which I managed to 
read, I think, for all it was in a proprietary format) that information 
should not be secret. I agree 100% in general. We need to share 
information. It's the only way forward. 

But obviously commercially-sensitive information needs to be restricted. 

The solution (at least to me) is for conference orgainisers to make it 
clear from the start that they won't accept presentations if there are 
any conditions placed on recording or reporting them. If this means we 
miss out on on early information, so be it. The fact is that no sane 
person bases their decisions on that sort of presenation. In other words, 
if I want an RPN calculator, I am not going to wait to see what comes out 
if a few months time. I'll get something that's available now. I am also 
not going to change one of the current projects on my bench just beacue 
HP are coming out with something new.

Had it been a highly technical presentation on the internals of the 
machine that they'd not wanted recorded, I _might_ have felt 
differently. But to be honest, the HP presentation was relatively 
content-free. 

> 
> Do you like having HP attend meetings and Conferences?

As I've said before, I want HPCC to remain indepedant of HP. If HP wish 
to attend our meetings then it has to be on _our_ terms. If they don't 
like said terms, then they should stay away.

And FWIW, I would be totally against delaying an issue of DataFile 
because of this. Sure we can't publish this information before HP allow 
us to, but that just means it goes in the next issue. DataFile is not an 
HP publicity flyer.

-tony