White noise from a gearhead
Memories of Akademy 2009: Best talk ever
Those who know me also know that because of both my research career and my free software involvement I attended a lot of conferences and talks. And I really mean a lot. Still, I had to wait for the very first keynote of the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit to attend the finest, and brightest talk I ever attended.
It was very rich, didn’t simply stick to the technical side of things but got deep into various fields, most notably philosophy. Of course the speaker deserves credit. So if you see this man giving a talk near you:
Simply run and attend his talk. He’s also a very nice person, and since he uses free software, he probably matches perfectly his own quote from his keynote (which is getting famous):
Liberal software is software which a gentleman would use.
| Print article | This entry was posted by ervin on July 20, 2009 at 22:16, and is filed under Akademy. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site. |
about 1 year ago
“..since he uses free software,” well no, at least he didn’t when he gave his talk during GCDS, which was clearly seen on the screen: that was not free software, it was OS X
about 1 year ago
This was my favorite saturday keynote. It reminded me of a discussion we had in one of my CS classes at the liberal arts university I attended. The prof had been trying to justify the ‘liberal arts’ credentials of computer science to other profs by noting that its a synergy of many different traditional liberal arts (math being the foremost of course).
This guy did a good job of showing how instead she could have argued how CS is a liberal art in its own right, if taught correctly.
about 1 year ago
True, he unfortunately doesn’t exclusively uses Free Software. That also bothers me to see Free Software advocates using proprietary operating systems. Still the content of his talk was of a very high level.
about 1 year ago
is the video available somewhere on the net ?
I want to watch at least a part of his keynote.
about 1 year ago
Is there any vidéo or sound record of this presentation ?
about 1 year ago
So what’s the name of this guy? is he Robert Lefkowitz?
about 1 year ago
i didn’t liked it one bit, thought it missed the point all together, at least I don’t do what I do because of what he said, maybe I misunderstood most of it…
about 1 year ago
lol, you sure know how to give this man credit
about 1 year ago
@Mohamed-Ikbel and @Strash
Everything got recorded, now it’s up to the organization team to put that online. Not sure when it’ll happen though.
@Bogdan and @Diederik
Well, up to you to find out (not that difficult). I’m actually applying to him the exact same “giving credit without giving credit” approach that he used in his talk. Found it definitely interesting and well aligned with greeks approach to knowledge sharing.
@pinheiro
I’m kind of surprised that you didn’t like it. Could be some misunderstanding indeed. By seeing your other comment about Glyn Moody’s keynote I think that you rejected the “liberal software” naming, but it had to be compared to “liberal arts” (or “humanities”). In this context I think it’s really a good naming and much less ambiguous in english than the “free software” naming often mistaken for “gratis software”.
about 1 year ago
@ervin yes im prety sure i need to see it again, becouse he didn’t realy finished his talk, and the enfoucus on the gredit parts was to me not interesting.
In Glyn Moody’s keynote the focus was about us scratching our personal itches on the software and then needing to share it and the “needing” part resonates alot more to me than the “credit” part. Specialy has I think he did not finished his talk.
Any way liberalism, and Adam Smith were good and bad but lead us to for example the current crissis. Liberal professions are i think are caled LIberal couse they are self regulated normaly by some bar of peers. Dont think that conveys the essence of what freedom is in any way. To bad english dosent have the word “liberte, liberdade, etc”, its realy the best of words for it.
about 1 year ago
@pinheiro
Well that’s the point, he was comparing with “liberal arts” (from Wordnet: “studies intended to provide general knowledge and intellectual skills (rather than occupational or professional skills)”). Which obviously is a much older concept than the “liberalism” (as an economic concept) and has nothing to do with it.
And IMO if one misses this crucial difference, that completely ruins the understanding of the talk.
about 1 year ago
That was indeed the best talk of the whole conference. Very different (non-technical) and yet informative and entertaining. A real joy to listen to.
about 1 year ago
So what’s the point of posting this without a link?
about 1 year ago
@Wally
To let people do their homeworks.