Proceedings Of OSS Workshop Available Online

josephfeller writes: "Making Sense of the Bazaar: 1st Workshop on Open Source Software Engineering was held on May 15, 2001 as part of the 23rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2001). The full text of the 18 position papers and slides from the four presentations are available at http://opensource.ucc.ie/icse2001/."

Re:Cute.

[babbage]

:)

touche.

Cute.

[babbage]

An open source conference for which the presentations are primarily available as PowerPoint Slides [opensource.ucc.ie].

God I hate PowerPoint. What awful, awful software.

There was a great article about it in the May 28 issue of The New Yorker [google.com], but their website is impossible to use (tiny fonts, no search feature, and spotty access to the archives) and Google can only get me as far as this snippet [google.com]. Still, it gets the idea across:

"PowerPoint, which can be found on two hundred and fifty million computers around the world, is software you impose on other people," Ian Parker writes in "Absolute PowerPoint." Its use has become so pervasive, Parker suggests, that it is changing the way we think, not just about work but about life. One defense-industry consultant, Parker reports, put together a presentation entitled "Family Matters," when her daughters weren't cleaning up their bedrooms or doing their chores. It ran to eighteen pages. "The briefing was given only once, last fall," Parker writes. "The experience was so upsetting to her children that the threat of a second showing was enough to make one of the...girls burst into tears." This may be extreme, but it is not unusual. "PowerPoint also has a private, interior influence," Parker contends. "It edits ideas. It is, almost surreptitiously, a business manual as well as a business suit, with an opinion -- an oddly pedantic, prescriptive opinion -- about the way we should think." This was not the intention of the programmers, who originally designed PowerPoint to "get rid of the intermediaries ---graphic designers --- and never mind the consequences," Parker writes. As the use of PowerPoint spread, though, its programmers began to tinker with the content as well as the form of presentations. "We said, 'What we need is some automatic content!'" one former Microsoft developer tells Parker. "'Punch the button and you'll have a presentation.'" And the name that was chosen for this feature --- AutoContent --- "was meant as a joke," Parker reports. "But Microsoft took the idea and kept the name --- a rare example of a product named in outright mockery of its target customers."

Why people use PowerPoint over sadly unknown but clearly superior alternatives -- from simple HTML pages to WimpyPoint [arsdigita.com] to full blown Flash movies -- is completely beyond me. None of the three alternatives above suffers PowerPoints drawbacks: hugely bloated (ever try to put a presentation on a floppy? Hah!), fiercely constraining, and most importantly in this context (again, this rant was launched because of the presentations at an Open Source conference), spawn of the Beast From Redmond [microsoft.com].

So, why use it? I see no benefit.

Gah....

Anyway, I'd love to see these slides, but there's no way in hell I'm installing that damned software for it. Too bad that the Open Source speakers didn't think of the Open Source users....

My own paper...

[heliocentric]

Recently I took a graduate class on software engineering and I thought it'd be interesting to write a paper on open source software development. Knowing the prof never read it (grades due in the day after paper was due) maybe someone other than myself would like to read it...

href=http://www.zimwiz.com/research/openSourcePape r.pdf [zimwiz.com]

Re:My own paper...

[heliocentric]

Ok... so I left the href= on in the name... the link works fine I do not... operator error, replace user and press any key to continue... time for bed

Not all are being distributed in PowerPoint

[satch89450]

Not quite. Here is a quote from the page you pointed to:

Session Four: Taxonomy of OSSD (Nakakoji and Yamamoto). PDF of PowerPoint Slides.

Now, I find I can open this session just fine from a browser in Linux -- no CrushingLicenseWare required.

Now, I have prepared PowerPoint presentations from time to time, and when you shut off all the automation, it's not a bad way to throw something together for a client, and PDF the Notes pages means I can have THEM copy off the notes before I arrive. One time, when the damn projector wouldn't work, I was able (because I prepared transparencies just in case) to grab the ubiquitous overhead projector and make my presentation with no delay. The other presenters were so woebegone because the only thing they had was their laptops, and hadn't sent anything ahead.

There's more to presentations then how you present them, IMHO.