John writes:

> You say "please allow me to have and state my opinion," but seem angry
>  that Wirt stated his.  Ok, so each of you has an opinion and stated it.
>  Where's the problem?

I suspect the problem is that I quoted duane when I wrote:

> Let me quote the person who said, "MPE is dead. Get over it." and say. "
> Interex is dead. Get over it."
>
> Physical user group meetings were on their way out long before the failure
> of Interex. In the final accounting, Interex may have failed for a hundred
> different reasons, but primary among them was that its audience and its
> reason-of-being evaporated.
>
> I perfectly well realize that people attended Interex meetings for reasons
> other than to listen to the talks. In fact, listening to the talks may have
> been the least reason to attend for most people. But it is the one part of
a
> user group meeting that can be maintained, and if people want to do it, the
> means are now available to do so.

If I had left the first paragraph off, I suspect that there would have been
no problem. And even if I hadn't, I certainly could have stated the premise
more graciously.

Nonetheless, it doesn't change the fact that wishing for a brick-and-mortar
user group meeting is an "if pigs could fly" sort of wish nowadays. User group
meetings were on their way out long before HP killed the HP3000. Local and
regional user group meetings had all but disappeared by 2001. The large national
meeting was all that was left, and most of its thunder had been stolen by this
list.  The internet really did change everything.

duane also privately accused me of hawking my newest product or service, in
this case QCShow, but I don't want that to stop anyone from considering the
idea of a virtual Interex meeting. There are alternatives to QCShow, probably the
most directly competitive is W3C's SMIL (synchronous multimedia integrative
language):

     http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-smil/

RealPlayer is the only commercial-grade player that I know of that supports
SMIL, and the very best example of a presentation done in SMIL that I know that
you can view on the web appears on this page:

     http://powerpoints.wri.org/longterm/sld001.htm

Click on the "View/hear narrated version of Thinking Long Term" hyperlink to
view the presentation. The downside is that the quality of image and sound of
the SMIL format provides at comparable bandwidths is substantially poorer than
QCShow, but that may not be a problem. Under any circumstance, it is free.

And although I have never investigated it, I'm sure that there must be a free
authoring tool for the format somewhere on the web.

Wirt Atmar

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