I don't think this particular story is a harbinger of that. Rather, I think it's a story of monumental stupidity caused by a totalitarian government that didn't bother looking forward, and was too eager by half to waggle their technological penises in front of the world.
The rivers feeding the Aral Sea haven't dried up - just that most of it got diverted to other uses, and the Aral Sea was the unfortunate loser in that bargain.
I don't disagree that yeah, potable water is going to eventually be a problem as climate slowly shifts and population grows. The climate and population growth are debatable and mostly unknown as to rate, direction and cause, but change they will.
Really, you think professional 3d modelers don't know what a vertex is? Really?
They have an idea as to what it might be ('a mathematical point in cartesian space' would be the description given if you're lucky), but, say, how it behaves under subdivision and which SubD algorithm produces the best results for a given use case is another story entirely. That's why I put the word "really" in the sentence you took your question off of.
Let me give a more concrete example: Raytracing. Sure, they'll know how it would (mostly) behave in their given suite (depending on which render engine(s) they send it to regularly), but knowing how light (and more importantly, shadows and occlusions thereof) behaves, so as to produce a better result, especially when shooting for realism? A pro photographer likely has a better idea of how light works than most of the schlubs who push mesh around.;) Put it this way - I can count a very small percentage of folks who have done a good enough job of it to fool all but the most experienced eye.
Because it would involve asking DAZ or Smith Micro for the respective proprietary source codes first, then getting permission to release the results. Both applications are currently ongoing products (DS is at 4.6 now, and Poser at "Poser Pro 2013" last I checked.)
DAZ Studio is doable - I used to work for them as a dev back when 1.0 was released, and they IIRC still use C++ and Qt. Could likely pull it off the OSX branch with only a little effort.
Poser is not so doable; they use a wide variety of weird crap on top of C, including Adobe AIR and the nightmare libs spawned by Kai Krause if I remember right. Not even sure if Linux would accept half of it without a complete rewrite.
All that said, I don't really need to bother - both run just fine on OSX 10.9. I want to see them on Linux mostly for ideological reasons these days.
This, right here... and it ain't just Photoshop, either.
In the CG realm, you have people who learned "3DS Max", or "Poser", or "Modo", but few of them could tell you what a vertex really is, let alone half-edges, collision-detection, subdivision, and etc. A few folks do go out of their way to learn the fundamentals (which makes switching between tools less painful), but they're a distinct minority.
Part of the reason why you see so much of this is because every software house has their own oddball idea of what a user interface should do, and even how to approach a given task (NURBS modeling versus mesh extrusion for instance). It would positively scare you to learn one suite (say, 3DS Max) then get sat in front of another (e.g. Modo). The learning curve on each of them is astoundingly steep... Poser's ancient Kai Krause inspired interface, Blender's 48-mouse-button-inspired UI, Wings' (probably) EMACS-inspired sparse-as-hell interface... DAZ Studio's Qt-anchored one... they all approach most of the same things rather differently. It takes a lot of time to get comfortable with a given user interface, before you even take into consideration the behaviors and quirks.
Photoshop is no different in this regard, and that's why most folks who use it know Photoshop, but few of those users know the principles and concepts behind it.
...I went with GIMP years ago. I was able to use many of P-Shop's brushes and actions as-is, and I learned GIMP's actions and interface.
Mind you, I'm not a graphics pro by any means (though I am a heavy hobbyist in CG graphics, and GIMP is invaluable to me for postwork and touch-ups.) Even when I moved to using a Mac for most of my farting-around, the first thing I went for was GIMP for OSX. Just as most actual professionals stick with Photoshop (in spite of the brain-dead subscription model they have these days) because they learned on it, I do the same thing with GIMP... and it works just fine for me.
Now in the professional realm, PShop makes sense to have a Linux port. Strange thing though - a huge percentage of professional CG work is done in Linux nowadays, and has been for awhile, so I'm surprised that it's taken them this long to get around to it.
(now if only the hobbyist CG software shops (I'm looking at *you* Poser and DAZ|Studio!) would get off their asses and make a Linux port...
GP is speaking of global marketshare, not US. IIRC, Apple has a far higher marketshare in the US (not sure offhand what it is, but I think it's like 40% or so.)
Just note that the evil(tm) will be compounded by the crapware that some OEMs *and* carriers tend to slather onto the phones, on top of what Google is going to require.
At this rate, I hope that every new Android smartphone comes with at least 8GB of onboard storage... I say this as someone who tends to buy phones on the low-end (my little Huawei has maybe 512MB of internal storage + the 32GB micro-SD card that I cannot move the as-built apps onto...)
This is all well and good if you live in a city where one can rent a place with a shade-tree to practice your shade-tree mechanics, but many of us (like most of the of the country) live in areas with high populations and even less parking.
In that case, take public transit until you can save up and afford a more reliable car...
You're right in that a good $300 car would be damn tough to find nowadays, but factor in inflation, and $600 still isn't too hard to do in a couple of months for anyone who makes more than minimum wage, and the typical high-interest car loan will usually cost you around $150-200/mo.
Note that I haven't even touched on the required full coverage insurance of a vehicle under loan.
Owning my cars free and clear lets me keep just liability on the older Sunfire, and liability+a few useful additions (e.g. collision, glass) on the Soul. Insurance on both costs me a total of around $100/mo - full coverage on each under loan would likely cost way more...
They got rid of the "Buck Sgt." rank sometime at the end of 1991; I know this because I was in one of the very last classes @ Nellis AFB in the middle of that year (I was in what used to be the 37th FW up at TTR if that helps you figure out why and how that happened.) I did it with the intention of making a career out of it, but later events changed my mind; so no, that was not a typo.
I was recommended for it about a month after I made SrA.
...and this is why I have never made a car payment since the early 1990's, when I got a car repo'd while I was off serving in Desert Storm (once I pointed out that the bank broke the law by doing the repo, I discovered the costs of bringing the car back across two states --or a lawyer to fight that-- was way out of scope for an E-4 sergeant's budget.) It was then that I resolved to never, ever make payments on a car again... ever.
Since then, I've driven some outright piles of crap throughout the 1990s, but I've always owned my cars free and clear. I save up the money as best I can until I have enough to buy something newer in reasonably decent condition.
This has progressed from $300-400 hoopties, to a 1988 Mustang (in 1999) for $400, to a 1991 Jeep Wrangler (in 2001) for $4500, to a 2003 Pontiac Sunfire (in 2007) for $7200, to a brand-new 2013 Kia Soul for $14,200.
Each time, I saved my pennies and paid cash, which gave me a drastically lower pricetag, and I own the thing up-front. As a bennie, I still have both the Sunfire and the Soul (my wife drives the latter, and the former is still rolling along just fine at 150k miles), and the Soul is fully covered under warranty for the next 8 years. The Jeep finally died for good in 2013 (too much rust decayed the frame), prompting the new Kia. I gained the advantage of being very handy around a vehicle with tools and knowing junkyards very well, though most of that was self-taught over the years from turning outright shit-piles into decent running cars.
Long story short? Yeah it sucks that you can't drive some NewShiny that gathers all the babes, but start small and build up over time. Save, save, save... and always pay cash. You wind up paying less over the long run, the salesman suddenly wants to kiss your ass, and you get a better deal overall.
Oh, and in many of the cases up there, I managed to sell the older cars for more than I paid for them (though nowadays I figure I'll just drive the ones I have until they finally die for good.)
Since open source does not pay its developers (in most cases), developers don't get paid whether MS outsources or if open source products are used.
...actually, you'd be amazed at the number of OSS devs who do get paid; many are hired by OSS-based companies (e.g. RedHat), but many more are hired by large tech firms who find it in their interest to do so, such as Intel, IBM, HP, Dell (no, seriously!), and etc. Intel still has a sizable OSS dev group, for instance.
Yeah, I can picture the howling of "socialism" from the Tea Party and the Republicans now.
Because to them, if it means corporate profits, it's a good thing.
You may want to get out more, then, because I doubt that you'd find an actual conservative anywhere (who doesn't own a company) that would fit the sterotype you propose. Seriously - I'm very right-leaning in my ideology, but I can tell you right now that I'd love to see corporations get slammed in taxes for off-shoring (and if you actually looked beyond your circle of like-minded friends and pundits, you'd find that I'm not the only one saying it.)
The only difference we have is in justifying the levy, which in your case is faulty, and here's why - I do not *ever* want to have government policy based on anything like the nebulous (and TBH stolen from the Catholic Church) concept of "social justice" in any form.
Instead, I'd much prefer it be based on more objective measures, to wit: If you, as a corporation, move part of your operations overseas, then you proportionally lose your status as a full American corporate 'citizen', and should therefore be subject to tariff in equal proportion. The more jobs you move outside the US, the greater the proportion of a foreign corporation you become, and therefore the greater the tariff you should pay as a portion of your revenue (notice the tax-basis should remain firmly in EBIT, so as to avoid accounting tricks.)
See? No need to appeal to emotion, or to vague (and IMHO dangerous) reasoning like "the real costs". You only need to set and maintain one loophole-free tax rate, tied to a simple metric (percentage of employees of foreign nationality both contracted and on your payroll).
Same story here as sibling... here in Portland metro, I pay a private company to haul it off. I get three cans: yard waste (compost), recyclables, and garbage.
'course, there have been times when they've left the recycling can sitting un-emptied because they saw a plastic bag in it (no, seriously... isn't that shit supposed to be recyclable)? No big, it's amazing how little I actually do throw away (just me n' the spouse, no kids in the house).
Personally, I cannot wait to move into a completely rural area where I can either compost it or burn it. Saves $40/mo for as little as they have to do at my bit of the street.
,,,and here I thought it would be struck down because someone would point out that it was somehow funded by an oil company to justify profits.../me ducks and runs like hell
In all seriousness though, It'll be interesting to watch the scientific process at work in proving/disproving what the dude published, since there's no political figures who have staked their careers on the existence/non-existence of black holes. This should make it a fairly clean environment.
(OTOH, I think I heard Stephen Hawking howl in righteous in rage... Disturbance in the Force and all that.)
You do realize that bash is (nowadays) installed in damned near every *nix out there (though I think HPUX is still holding out.)
Hell, even Solaris started chucking it in at around 5.10 (Solaris 10) or so (or was it 9?), and I thought that would take an act of Congress or the Divine to happen.
(get this - you can even get bash for Windows, which might improve that OS by at least a factor of 20).
And RAM sizes are large enough that a "large" input is easily contained entirely within even smallish RAM.
/old-man mode:...and this is EXACTLY what's wrong with programmers today! No eye for efficiency!:old-man mode/
Cue endless round of arguments about how so-and-so wrote an app that only used one bit of RAM to execute four jobs, yeah - but in all seriousness, the attitude of 'RAM is cheap' has done more to create bloat than any other.
To top that off, Apple always reports actual sales, whereas Samsung reports shipment to retailers, which may not necessarily count as sales - at least not in the sense of sales directly into customer hands.
CFO: "We get to keep a productive employee doing the things he's been doing well, without having to pay for his continuing education and a networking opportunity that may wind up drawing him away from us. [...]
That only works until it's time for upgrades... then the company takes a massive hit in re-training time and lost productivity until their staff is up to speed.
Personally, if a company isn't willing to invest in me, then why the hell should I invest in it? Better to jump ship for a company that will invest in you than to sit on autopilot watching your skillset grow stale (and yes, for anyone not a developer it will grow stale, even if you train yourself or pay for your own training, because you'll never use it in a practical work setting. Devs have an 'out' in contributing to and maintaining OSS projects, though TBH it's a small comfort.)
The last sentence is key - OP may be able to go if he makes it contingent on writing a report afterwards detailing what he's learned while he was there. I had an employer do that at the last NetWorld I went to.
Hate to say it, but parent is almost completely correct.
There are some bennies to being on-site (hands-on labs with an expert on hand), but otherwise most conferences are just a big marketing push with a lot of hanger-on companies and startups vying for your attention on the main floor.
It wouldn't be so bad if the exhibitors had actual experts on hand to answer the tough questions w/o resorting to market-speak, but most of them don't, and are too busy evangelizing. If I wanted to get pounded with marketing-speak, I'd invite VARs to stop by at my office for that. If I want swag or bennies, there are plenty of local ones that local VARs are happy to give/throw (e.g. watching a Trailblazers game from a box seat while the VAR spends halftime talking to you about his product lines).
The last conference I went to was VMWorld in 1999, which had the hands-on labs and an opportunity to speak with the actual VMWare developers in an intimate setting about upcoming bits and existing problems (albeit the latter was restricted to certain big buyers/partners), but otherwise it seemed to be nothing more than a means to work over VPN interspersed with advertisement on-site, and more marketing disguised as after-hours drinking parties.
Seriously... They were fun as hell, and you used to learn a lot in the process, but the days of COMDEX and NetWorld are dead; you can thank the Internet for that.
Now classes or boot-camps? Different story, and still well worth going to depending on the technology and the depth offered. Conferences? Not so much.
I keep the wifi dead on my phone mostly for battery reasons, coupled with the fact that I have unlimited data on my plan, so it makes no real diff to me.:)
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I don't think this particular story is a harbinger of that. Rather, I think it's a story of monumental stupidity caused by a totalitarian government that didn't bother looking forward, and was too eager by half to waggle their technological penises in front of the world.
The rivers feeding the Aral Sea haven't dried up - just that most of it got diverted to other uses, and the Aral Sea was the unfortunate loser in that bargain.
I don't disagree that yeah, potable water is going to eventually be a problem as climate slowly shifts and population grows. The climate and population growth are debatable and mostly unknown as to rate, direction and cause, but change they will.
Really, you think professional 3d modelers don't know what a vertex is? Really?
They have an idea as to what it might be ('a mathematical point in cartesian space' would be the description given if you're lucky), but, say, how it behaves under subdivision and which SubD algorithm produces the best results for a given use case is another story entirely. That's why I put the word "really" in the sentence you took your question off of.
Let me give a more concrete example: Raytracing. Sure, they'll know how it would (mostly) behave in their given suite (depending on which render engine(s) they send it to regularly), but knowing how light (and more importantly, shadows and occlusions thereof) behaves, so as to produce a better result, especially when shooting for realism? A pro photographer likely has a better idea of how light works than most of the schlubs who push mesh around. ;) Put it this way - I can count a very small percentage of folks who have done a good enough job of it to fool all but the most experienced eye.
...and it even carries through to this day ...
Why don't you do it?
Because it would involve asking DAZ or Smith Micro for the respective proprietary source codes first, then getting permission to release the results. Both applications are currently ongoing products (DS is at 4.6 now, and Poser at "Poser Pro 2013" last I checked.)
DAZ Studio is doable - I used to work for them as a dev back when 1.0 was released, and they IIRC still use C++ and Qt. Could likely pull it off the OSX branch with only a little effort.
Poser is not so doable; they use a wide variety of weird crap on top of C, including Adobe AIR and the nightmare libs spawned by Kai Krause if I remember right. Not even sure if Linux would accept half of it without a complete rewrite.
All that said, I don't really need to bother - both run just fine on OSX 10.9. I want to see them on Linux mostly for ideological reasons these days.
This, right here... and it ain't just Photoshop, either.
In the CG realm, you have people who learned "3DS Max", or "Poser", or "Modo", but few of them could tell you what a vertex really is, let alone half-edges, collision-detection, subdivision, and etc. A few folks do go out of their way to learn the fundamentals (which makes switching between tools less painful), but they're a distinct minority.
Part of the reason why you see so much of this is because every software house has their own oddball idea of what a user interface should do, and even how to approach a given task (NURBS modeling versus mesh extrusion for instance). It would positively scare you to learn one suite (say, 3DS Max) then get sat in front of another (e.g. Modo). The learning curve on each of them is astoundingly steep... Poser's ancient Kai Krause inspired interface, Blender's 48-mouse-button-inspired UI, Wings' (probably) EMACS-inspired sparse-as-hell interface... DAZ Studio's Qt-anchored one... they all approach most of the same things rather differently. It takes a lot of time to get comfortable with a given user interface, before you even take into consideration the behaviors and quirks.
Photoshop is no different in this regard, and that's why most folks who use it know Photoshop, but few of those users know the principles and concepts behind it.
...I went with GIMP years ago. I was able to use many of P-Shop's brushes and actions as-is, and I learned GIMP's actions and interface.
Mind you, I'm not a graphics pro by any means (though I am a heavy hobbyist in CG graphics, and GIMP is invaluable to me for postwork and touch-ups.) Even when I moved to using a Mac for most of my farting-around, the first thing I went for was GIMP for OSX. Just as most actual professionals stick with Photoshop (in spite of the brain-dead subscription model they have these days) because they learned on it, I do the same thing with GIMP... and it works just fine for me.
Now in the professional realm, PShop makes sense to have a Linux port. Strange thing though - a huge percentage of professional CG work is done in Linux nowadays, and has been for awhile, so I'm surprised that it's taken them this long to get around to it.
(now if only the hobbyist CG software shops (I'm looking at *you* Poser and DAZ|Studio!) would get off their asses and make a Linux port...
GP is speaking of global marketshare, not US. IIRC, Apple has a far higher marketshare in the US (not sure offhand what it is, but I think it's like 40% or so.)
Just note that the evil(tm) will be compounded by the crapware that some OEMs *and* carriers tend to slather onto the phones, on top of what Google is going to require.
At this rate, I hope that every new Android smartphone comes with at least 8GB of onboard storage... I say this as someone who tends to buy phones on the low-end (my little Huawei has maybe 512MB of internal storage + the 32GB micro-SD card that I cannot move the as-built apps onto...)
This is all well and good if you live in a city where one can rent a place with a shade-tree to practice your shade-tree mechanics, but many of us (like most of the of the country) live in areas with high populations and even less parking.
In that case, take public transit until you can save up and afford a more reliable car...
You're right in that a good $300 car would be damn tough to find nowadays, but factor in inflation, and $600 still isn't too hard to do in a couple of months for anyone who makes more than minimum wage, and the typical high-interest car loan will usually cost you around $150-200/mo.
Note that I haven't even touched on the required full coverage insurance of a vehicle under loan.
Owning my cars free and clear lets me keep just liability on the older Sunfire, and liability+a few useful additions (e.g. collision, glass) on the Soul. Insurance on both costs me a total of around $100/mo - full coverage on each under loan would likely cost way more...
They got rid of the "Buck Sgt." rank sometime at the end of 1991; I know this because I was in one of the very last classes @ Nellis AFB in the middle of that year (I was in what used to be the 37th FW up at TTR if that helps you figure out why and how that happened.) I did it with the intention of making a career out of it, but later events changed my mind; so no, that was not a typo.
I was recommended for it about a month after I made SrA.
...and this is why I have never made a car payment since the early 1990's, when I got a car repo'd while I was off serving in Desert Storm (once I pointed out that the bank broke the law by doing the repo, I discovered the costs of bringing the car back across two states --or a lawyer to fight that-- was way out of scope for an E-4 sergeant's budget.) It was then that I resolved to never, ever make payments on a car again... ever.
Since then, I've driven some outright piles of crap throughout the 1990s, but I've always owned my cars free and clear. I save up the money as best I can until I have enough to buy something newer in reasonably decent condition.
This has progressed from $300-400 hoopties, to a 1988 Mustang (in 1999) for $400, to a 1991 Jeep Wrangler (in 2001) for $4500, to a 2003 Pontiac Sunfire (in 2007) for $7200, to a brand-new 2013 Kia Soul for $14,200.
Each time, I saved my pennies and paid cash, which gave me a drastically lower pricetag, and I own the thing up-front. As a bennie, I still have both the Sunfire and the Soul (my wife drives the latter, and the former is still rolling along just fine at 150k miles), and the Soul is fully covered under warranty for the next 8 years. The Jeep finally died for good in 2013 (too much rust decayed the frame), prompting the new Kia. I gained the advantage of being very handy around a vehicle with tools and knowing junkyards very well, though most of that was self-taught over the years from turning outright shit-piles into decent running cars.
Long story short? Yeah it sucks that you can't drive some NewShiny that gathers all the babes, but start small and build up over time. Save, save, save... and always pay cash. You wind up paying less over the long run, the salesman suddenly wants to kiss your ass, and you get a better deal overall.
Oh, and in many of the cases up there, I managed to sell the older cars for more than I paid for them (though nowadays I figure I'll just drive the ones I have until they finally die for good.)
Since open source does not pay its developers (in most cases), developers don't get paid whether MS outsources or if open source products are used.
...actually, you'd be amazed at the number of OSS devs who do get paid; many are hired by OSS-based companies (e.g. RedHat), but many more are hired by large tech firms who find it in their interest to do so, such as Intel, IBM, HP, Dell (no, seriously!), and etc. Intel still has a sizable OSS dev group, for instance.
Yeah, I can picture the howling of "socialism" from the Tea Party and the Republicans now.
Because to them, if it means corporate profits, it's a good thing.
You may want to get out more, then, because I doubt that you'd find an actual conservative anywhere (who doesn't own a company) that would fit the sterotype you propose. Seriously - I'm very right-leaning in my ideology, but I can tell you right now that I'd love to see corporations get slammed in taxes for off-shoring (and if you actually looked beyond your circle of like-minded friends and pundits, you'd find that I'm not the only one saying it.)
The only difference we have is in justifying the levy, which in your case is faulty, and here's why - I do not *ever* want to have government policy based on anything like the nebulous (and TBH stolen from the Catholic Church) concept of "social justice" in any form.
Instead, I'd much prefer it be based on more objective measures, to wit: If you, as a corporation, move part of your operations overseas, then you proportionally lose your status as a full American corporate 'citizen', and should therefore be subject to tariff in equal proportion. The more jobs you move outside the US, the greater the proportion of a foreign corporation you become, and therefore the greater the tariff you should pay as a portion of your revenue (notice the tax-basis should remain firmly in EBIT, so as to avoid accounting tricks.)
See? No need to appeal to emotion, or to vague (and IMHO dangerous) reasoning like "the real costs". You only need to set and maintain one loophole-free tax rate, tied to a simple metric (percentage of employees of foreign nationality both contracted and on your payroll).
Same story here as sibling... here in Portland metro, I pay a private company to haul it off. I get three cans: yard waste (compost), recyclables, and garbage.
'course, there have been times when they've left the recycling can sitting un-emptied because they saw a plastic bag in it (no, seriously... isn't that shit supposed to be recyclable)? No big, it's amazing how little I actually do throw away (just me n' the spouse, no kids in the house).
Personally, I cannot wait to move into a completely rural area where I can either compost it or burn it. Saves $40/mo for as little as they have to do at my bit of the street.
,,,and here I thought it would be struck down because someone would point out that it was somehow funded by an oil company to justify profits... /me ducks and runs like hell
In all seriousness though, It'll be interesting to watch the scientific process at work in proving/disproving what the dude published, since there's no political figures who have staked their careers on the existence/non-existence of black holes. This should make it a fairly clean environment.
(OTOH, I think I heard Stephen Hawking howl in righteous in rage... Disturbance in the Force and all that.)
You do realize that bash is (nowadays) installed in damned near every *nix out there (though I think HPUX is still holding out.)
Hell, even Solaris started chucking it in at around 5.10 (Solaris 10) or so (or was it 9?), and I thought that would take an act of Congress or the Divine to happen.
(get this - you can even get bash for Windows, which might improve that OS by at least a factor of 20).
And RAM sizes are large enough that a "large" input is easily contained entirely within even smallish RAM.
/old-man mode: ...and this is EXACTLY what's wrong with programmers today! No eye for efficiency! :old-man mode/
Cue endless round of arguments about how so-and-so wrote an app that only used one bit of RAM to execute four jobs, yeah - but in all seriousness, the attitude of 'RAM is cheap' has done more to create bloat than any other.
To top that off, Apple always reports actual sales, whereas Samsung reports shipment to retailers, which may not necessarily count as sales - at least not in the sense of sales directly into customer hands.
CFO: "We get to keep a productive employee doing the things he's been doing well, without having to pay for his continuing education and a networking opportunity that may wind up drawing him away from us. [...]
That only works until it's time for upgrades... then the company takes a massive hit in re-training time and lost productivity until their staff is up to speed.
Personally, if a company isn't willing to invest in me, then why the hell should I invest in it? Better to jump ship for a company that will invest in you than to sit on autopilot watching your skillset grow stale (and yes, for anyone not a developer it will grow stale, even if you train yourself or pay for your own training, because you'll never use it in a practical work setting. Devs have an 'out' in contributing to and maintaining OSS projects, though TBH it's a small comfort.)
The car depends on where I go... if it's Atlanta, I get a car or else. If It's SFO, I prefer to just hit BART and save the whole parking hassle.
The last sentence is key - OP may be able to go if he makes it contingent on writing a report afterwards detailing what he's learned while he was there. I had an employer do that at the last NetWorld I went to.
correction - 2009, not 1999 (stupid nostalgia anyway...)
Hate to say it, but parent is almost completely correct.
There are some bennies to being on-site (hands-on labs with an expert on hand), but otherwise most conferences are just a big marketing push with a lot of hanger-on companies and startups vying for your attention on the main floor.
It wouldn't be so bad if the exhibitors had actual experts on hand to answer the tough questions w/o resorting to market-speak, but most of them don't, and are too busy evangelizing. If I wanted to get pounded with marketing-speak, I'd invite VARs to stop by at my office for that. If I want swag or bennies, there are plenty of local ones that local VARs are happy to give/throw (e.g. watching a Trailblazers game from a box seat while the VAR spends halftime talking to you about his product lines).
The last conference I went to was VMWorld in 1999, which had the hands-on labs and an opportunity to speak with the actual VMWare developers in an intimate setting about upcoming bits and existing problems (albeit the latter was restricted to certain big buyers/partners), but otherwise it seemed to be nothing more than a means to work over VPN interspersed with advertisement on-site, and more marketing disguised as after-hours drinking parties.
Seriously... They were fun as hell, and you used to learn a lot in the process, but the days of COMDEX and NetWorld are dead; you can thank the Internet for that.
Now classes or boot-camps? Different story, and still well worth going to depending on the technology and the depth offered. Conferences? Not so much.
I keep the wifi dead on my phone mostly for battery reasons, coupled with the fact that I have unlimited data on my plan, so it makes no real diff to me. :)