Anyway, I'm thinking of the few seminars I was sent to by my company.
The most recent one is one about developing software for 64-bit processor. Somehow, it was a seminar that lacked attraction.
The seminar was presented by 3 speakers from an HP branch in India. The Indian accent sounds so familiar. The first speaker's voice was 90% similar to by my former project supervisor in engineering school. That makes it hard for me to concentrate on he said, because my brain is used to ignore this voice :P
Perhaps because the seminar took 2 and half days, it was too long for many people. There were few people that stayed for the whole duration fo the seminar. I didn't attend the first day, I joined in the second day. The only person that stayed for the duration of the two and half day was the girl from my company. Because of that, the HP people gave her a "full attendance award". The award was a small shelf for a cellphone. It has HP's logo on it. However, it isn't useful at all. So the prize is abandoned on a desk in the office.
The speakers were enthusiastic and eager to interact with the participants. But the students are so quiet. Nearly everytime the speaker asked the audience a question. There was... silence. My colleague and I were the most enthusiastic audience in the room. So they probably kind of appreciate us for giving responses. I don't know why the audience were so quiet. Because they were shy? Or maybe because of the language difference? But there was a translator in the seminar that does instant translation so it shouldn't be too much an issue.
Another thing was this seminar required the participants to bring their source code to try to port to 64-bit platform. It would be a trouble for people to that. People have to try to edit, compile and run using an unfamiliar environment. I guess some people just don't bother to that. So that could be a factor to the lack of interest.
When we did the porting in the seminar, the speakers were enthusiastic to help us. They were friendly people. Their accent was a bit hard for my colleague, though. It was such a familar thing for me.. hehe :)
Another seminar I went to earlier was Microsoft TechEd 2005. That was a big event with many participants. It was a 3-day event with many simultaneous about various topics in different classrooms. I went to the second day of the event. Some seminars were interesting. However, our company use few of the technology it talked about. Personally I found the seminar about C# 2.0 most interesting. Well, probably because I used Java and C# during my year in computer science, and I'm quite interested in those languages. Also it was interesting to see the languages have developed similar features like generics, for-each loops, anonymous classes, iterators etc.
One feature of this event was the TechEd Girls. You can find their terrible photos here on the event web site. http://teched.ithome.com.tw/teched2005/techedgirls_show.asp
Some how the girl in my work team pays a lot of attention to the TechEd Girls. She thought the photos on the event web site turns people off. People would have no interest in going to the event.
Actually the TechEd Girls looked better on the day of the event with the clothes and makeups. See the photo.
OK, by now I'm too lazy to type. Anyway, I went an Intel multi-core processor presentation in the first month of my work. The topic was kind of interesting and related what I learned during my training period in the company. The food was nice. :P
Hm, by this point I don't know why I typed all these in the first place... hm..
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