Binand Sethumadhavan wrote [at 09:10 AM 2/22/2007] :
Mouthwatering stuff aside, how was the talk? What was the talk about?
Well-executed, but curiously....flat, to my mind.
The talk suffered due to the following things:
* Too many concepts to do justice to any one (a high level overview
of the last 35 years of internet growth, protocol design, the future
of protocol design and constraints thereof, mobile phones as the
first real alternative to the PC in terms of net access, why google
is interested in India, &c)
* The intended audience for the actual material of the talk, judging
from the level it was pitched at, appeared to be the 2-3 journalists
in the front row. There were some curious errors, such as one slide
prominently referring to "programming languages like python and
Ajax"; the notion of the Singularity being attributed to Kurzweil
instead of Vinge; and Cerf claiming in response to a question that
the Digital Divide was about "those who have laptops and those who don't".
* The whole event was a very blatant recruiting pitch. Nothing wrong
with that, but it detracted from the talk itself, as Cerf delivered
various thinly-disguised (and, in at least one case, not disguised at
all) pitches to the audience.
That said - it was, as I said, competently executed. I wish he'd
spent some more time on the interplanetary internet project.
Udhay
--
((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
