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cathyr19355 at 11:11pm on 22/02/2005
cathyr19355 at 11:11pm on 22/02/2005Since Red Hat was paying for Eric to fly to Boston to tell them exactly what's wrong with Fedora, and was throwing in two days at the Boston Copley Place Marriott to boot, that gave us an excuse to attend Boskone. All I needed to do was buy myself a round-trip air ticket.
Boskone is one of two science fiction conventions in the Boston area every winter (the other one is Arisia). It used to be a huge convention, over 4,000 people--but that was over 20 years ago.
When last I attended Boskone, a little less than 20 years ago, the con had been plagued with enough incidents of mischief and vandalism that the con comm was actively trying to make the con smaller. I don't know what positive changes they implemented for that purpose, but they managed to persuade me to stay away by adopting an official policy "discouraging" hall costumes. That, coupled with the distance and the decrease in my leisure time, meant that I hadn't been to a Boskone since they shrunk the con down. Until last weekend.
I should have stayed away. At least then I could have remembered it as it once was.
Boskone is now a nice little con of about 1000 people. This year, it was in the Sheraton Boston, which connects to the Hynes Convention Center, the Prudential Center (an upscale city mall), the Copley Place Marriott, and a few other buildings by a series of walkways so you don't have to venture outside in 20 degree (Fahrenheit) weather. Unfortunately, the setting (especially the presence of a nearby mall) was one of the few good points about the weekend.
I don't mind small conventions. Really I don't. ConFusion, in Detroit in January, typically is no bigger than Boskone 42 was. But there are lots of things to *do* at ConFusion, while there was precious little to do at Boskone. There was one programming track--a good one, but only one. There were the usual filkers. There was, so far as I was able to tell, no Masquerade. There was a gaming room, where Eric and I spent lots of time, even though the number of people actually gaming was small (we spent Saturday night playing two games of Settlers of Catan, one of which I actually won). There was no movie room, and I finally found the anime room Saturday night, too late to actually watch anything. Con suite, and most other function space, closed at 1 A.M.
There were all of four room parties throughout the entire con. All of them were on Saturday night. There was a kind of official party, a miniature carnival-type event of the same type as the Runway at last year's Worldcon (see my LiveJournal entry of Sept. 1, 2004 or so), with twin themes of Zombies and Mardi Gras. Ahem. Not my cup of tea. (Though I did let Esther Friesner, who was doing a kind of fortuneteller/"Cheeblemancy" shtick, persuade me to donate $7 to an anti-cancer charity. My door prize for successfully plucking a piece of paper out of a box with chopsticks was the chopsticks and a little yellow stuffed animal thing she swore was a hamster and that looked an awful lot like Pikachu. He is now keeping Tux, Dust Puppy, and Tigger company on the shelf above my desk at home.)
It was a very relaxing weekend (I spent quite a bit of it in bed, catching up on my rest), and the con was pleasant enough, but I was happy when Eric and I finally made it home Sunday night. Especially since Monday for me was a paid holiday.
Boskone is one of two science fiction conventions in the Boston area every winter (the other one is Arisia). It used to be a huge convention, over 4,000 people--but that was over 20 years ago.
When last I attended Boskone, a little less than 20 years ago, the con had been plagued with enough incidents of mischief and vandalism that the con comm was actively trying to make the con smaller. I don't know what positive changes they implemented for that purpose, but they managed to persuade me to stay away by adopting an official policy "discouraging" hall costumes. That, coupled with the distance and the decrease in my leisure time, meant that I hadn't been to a Boskone since they shrunk the con down. Until last weekend.
I should have stayed away. At least then I could have remembered it as it once was.
Boskone is now a nice little con of about 1000 people. This year, it was in the Sheraton Boston, which connects to the Hynes Convention Center, the Prudential Center (an upscale city mall), the Copley Place Marriott, and a few other buildings by a series of walkways so you don't have to venture outside in 20 degree (Fahrenheit) weather. Unfortunately, the setting (especially the presence of a nearby mall) was one of the few good points about the weekend.
I don't mind small conventions. Really I don't. ConFusion, in Detroit in January, typically is no bigger than Boskone 42 was. But there are lots of things to *do* at ConFusion, while there was precious little to do at Boskone. There was one programming track--a good one, but only one. There were the usual filkers. There was, so far as I was able to tell, no Masquerade. There was a gaming room, where Eric and I spent lots of time, even though the number of people actually gaming was small (we spent Saturday night playing two games of Settlers of Catan, one of which I actually won). There was no movie room, and I finally found the anime room Saturday night, too late to actually watch anything. Con suite, and most other function space, closed at 1 A.M.
There were all of four room parties throughout the entire con. All of them were on Saturday night. There was a kind of official party, a miniature carnival-type event of the same type as the Runway at last year's Worldcon (see my LiveJournal entry of Sept. 1, 2004 or so), with twin themes of Zombies and Mardi Gras. Ahem. Not my cup of tea. (Though I did let Esther Friesner, who was doing a kind of fortuneteller/"Cheeblemancy" shtick, persuade me to donate $7 to an anti-cancer charity. My door prize for successfully plucking a piece of paper out of a box with chopsticks was the chopsticks and a little yellow stuffed animal thing she swore was a hamster and that looked an awful lot like Pikachu. He is now keeping Tux, Dust Puppy, and Tigger company on the shelf above my desk at home.)
It was a very relaxing weekend (I spent quite a bit of it in bed, catching up on my rest), and the con was pleasant enough, but I was happy when Eric and I finally made it home Sunday night. Especially since Monday for me was a paid holiday.
regretful
(no subject)
I've thought that there have been good and bad Boskones in the recent years. Generally, there have been reasonably strong programming tracks, so the cons haven't been too boring. The last couple of years, they have restructured their gaming programming, alienating some of the previous gamers as well.
Personally, I liked the con when it was in a less expensive location, but at the Sheraton, with the parking costs, it generally isn't worth it to me.
(no subject)
No doubt. Since I live so far away, I didn't know any of the details until I read your post.
And the programming at *this* Boskone was quite good. The Higgins Armory people attended, and gave some of their famous demonstrations, and some of the panels looked interesting. But as I said, there was only one programming track and most programming ended by early evening. Since there were few parties, and not nearly as much gaming as I'd expected from the website, there really wasn't much to do after dinner, which is a shame.
And you're probably right that the con was better at some of the smaller hotels outside of Boston, but for a non-New-Englander those sites are enough trouble to get to that it really isn't worth it to go to.
(no subject)
(no subject)
If Penguicon was one of your first cons, Jay, I can see why you were disappointed. Few cons I've been to match the energy and inventiveness of ConFusion, Penguicon or Linucon. Thanks for the tidbit about ConVergence--I've never been to that one.
(no subject)
What's wrong with Fedora.
My biggest gripe is that they've gotten so wimpy about patents that they're yanking stuff BEFORE it becomes an issue. Stuff like mp3 playback (not encoding, _playback_) and xpdf. Nobody sued over it, they just yanked it preemptively. I suspect the only reason they haven't yanked the linux kernel on patent grounds is they couldn't use the name if they did that. Oh yeah, THESE people are going to fight the good fight over decss. Someday this distro will turn into a viable desktop solution where we can play DVDs. Yeah. Sure.
They happily shipped binary-only proprietary crap for years, yet they don't ship the free flash plugin or realaudio or things we might actually care about as end-users. (By all means, make "install binary-only crap" an install-time option for people who don't want it.)
I now have less of an idea who is in charge of it. I used to know who to report an issue to and get enough of an acknowledgement to be confident that if it wasn't fixed it was because they'd decided not to fix it. Now, I don't know whose responsibility anything is, since the fedora developers presumably dumped that responsibility on a community that doesn't even have CVS access...?
Knoppix autodetected all my hardware a year ago. I have never had a version of Red Hat that set up my sound card properly. This is because they don't care about the desktop.
I don't like Gnome, and I got tired of them shoving it down my throat. Forcing it to boot KDE and finding they'd replaced most of the kde apps with gnome apps _IN_KDE_ was just obnoxious.
They don't install OpenOffice, they install an OpenOffice installer that, when I click on it, wants me to agree to a license so it can download stuff from the net. Either you have an RPM that ACTUALLY INSTALLS OPENOFFICE, or you don't. Having an RPM I can install so I DON'T have openoffice is just _stupid_. What are they trying to do, taunt me?
I don't want to have to hunt around to pop up an xterm. They've been burying it deeper and deeper under nested menus for a while now.
They broke _little_ things, like installing a new kernel calls whatever that sbin/install-kernel script is that, for the past couple of years on redhat, barfed if /lib/modules/$KERNELVERSION didn't already exist. When the next revision came out, this still hadn't been fixed. (I don't even WANT an initial ramdisk.)
I bought a cheap "linux comes preinstalled and the 3D acceleration actually _works_" box as Fry's, and attempted to replace the strange distro that came on it with Fedora Core 2. The boot kernel on the Fedora CD wouldn't run, because it was optimized for a Pentium III. The box had a Via Samuel II processor, a low power 800 mhz processor that acts like a Pentium with MMX and 3DNow extensions, but not the full Pentium III instruction set. Yes, a Pentium with MMX and 3DNow extensions was too old and broken to run Fedora Core 2, even though the hardware was brand new and built for linux.
I could go on, but the yellow streak about patents is inexcusable. The rest just got me over the inertia of having been a Red Hat user since 5.something, but the patent stupidity is why I'm never going back. There IS no "safe position" to retreat to. EVERYTHING infringes because stupid things are patented that shouldn't be patentable, and other things are patented in blatent disregard of 50 years of prior art. Red Hat (and it is Red Hat: the Fedora group is a powerless figurehead) is backing down in the face of threats that HAVEN'T EVEN BEEN MADE YET. That's just crazy.
Rob
Re: What's wrong with Fedora.
As for installing "an OpenOffice installer that, when I click on it, wants me to agree to a license...." it dawns on me that the Fedora people may not have a lot of choice about that; the OO people may be insisting on that setup so that they can make sure their license is seen before OO is installed. (They can do that, since OO has a separate copyright from the rest of the distribution....)
By the way, my understanding of Eric's main gripe with Fedora as it stands now (which I may have gotten wrong) is this. Eric's real interest in Fedora was to make interim installs easier by not requiring him to do a full install. However, as it is configured now, Fedora simply stops installing if it encounters an app that requires libraries or some other kind of component in order to run that isn't present. It doesn't just refuse to install the app; it halts the install altogether, without telling you what went wrong, and you either have to install the entire distribution from scratch or figure out what went wrong and get the necessary components before attempting to do your interim install again. As Eric sees it, that destroys the value of being able to just download updates off the Internet.
(no subject)