Your own laptop

When you give a presentation with slides you will either use your own notebook or some computer supplied by the organizers of the meeting. In the latter case there are several drawbacks: (i) the organization will have your presentation as a file and they can do with that file whatever they like, and (ii) the computer of the organization might not have all the necessary software installed or they might not have updated the presentation software to the latest version. Especially video material might be problematic: your video runs on your notebook and not on the computer of the organization (happened to me a month ago). So I always prefer to use my own laptop. Nowadays video projectors are so smart that they can handle both Windows and Apple laptops or notebooks.

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Last May I visited the first large scale international conference (CLEO) during my PhD. I was shocked about the enormous contrast with smaller scale (more specialized) conferences. In this post, I will discuss some of the advantages and disadvantages that struck me during this conference.

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Ten years years ago the major computer company Sun  Microsystems advertised in all media with the slogan: “The network is the computer”. And I must admit they knew where they were talking about. They saw the clouds coming. Sun has been taken over by Oracle in 2009.

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