From an audience member perspective:

It was very civil and informative.  Both gentlemen showed their road warrior
equipment - some necessary for business and some to help occupy those boring
hotel room and airline hours and help find your way when you get lost.
Since I've never owned a laptop, my objective was to learn what I might use
in my retirement (next year) when I'm doing more leisure travel. I learned a
great deal from them - the main thing - that a good laptop can now very
effectively be your only machine. That's how I'm leaning now.  I'll almost
certainly stay a Wintel user, not because of anything I heard from Denys or
Alfredo, just because that's what I've been using since I gave up my Apple
IIe many years ago.

Thanks Denys and Alfredo and GHRUG for the presentation.

Jack


 -----Original Message-----
From:   F. Alfredo Rego [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent:   Tuesday, November 14, 2000 12:02 PM
To:     [log in to unmask]
Subject:        The great showdown in Texas?

I just received a private message:

>P.S. What happened during the great showdown in Texas? Since neither
>you nor Denys is talking about I assume it was a draw.

There was no showdown, really.  Denys talked about his Laptop PC and
I talked about my Mac PowerBook.  It turns out that Denys and I have
more similarities (in terms of what we do with our portable computers)
than differences (in terms of the computers themselves).  I learned a
lot about Windows 2000 (which I run on my Mac PowerBook using Virtual
PC) and I hope Denys got something of interest about Mac OS.  I also
hope that the audience got a better feel for the differences and
similarities of both kinds of systems.

Denys was a very gracious host and he took me out to dinner the
evening before the conference.  I had the pleasure of enjoying his
wonderful digital photographic work because he brought some pictures
along.  Bits are bits and pixels are pixels, regardless of the
particular computers that we may happen to use to manipulate them.
The main difference, then, has to do with the eye of the photographer.
Denys is a very good photographer and his work will look as good when
done on a PC or on a Mac (well... perhaps slightly better when done
on a Mac, but that's another story :-)

We both agreed that travel takes a tremendous toll on us.  Denys
seems interested in continuing to travel whereas I am more interested
in staying at home, programming away in the nice development environment
that I have set up through the years.  This is the only significant
difference I see :-)

I was impressed to see Cecile Chi (of Pittsburgh fame in Pennsylvania)
in Houston.  You travel a lot, Cecile!


  _______________
|               |
|               |
|            r  |  Alfredo                     [log in to unmask]
|          e    |                           http://www.adager.com
|        g      |  F. Alfredo Rego
|      a        |  Manager, R & D Labs
|    d          |  Adager Corporation
|  A            |  Sun Valley, Idaho 83353-3000            U.S.A.
|               |
|_______________|