Deductible Junkets
September 15-17
Telecosm
Lake Tahoe, California Qwest's Joseph Nacchio, Bay Networks's David House, Oracle's Larry Ellison, IDG's Robert Metcalfe, and too many other heavyweights to mention are scheduled to wrestle with George Gilder's prolix metaphors at this meditation on the marriage of silicon and fiber. Titled "Bandwidth Blowout" and presented by Gilder and Forbes, this conference assumes a world of unlimited bandwidth. Qwest's rise is big-time proof of concept for packet-switched networks, but which company will take Intel's place as a high tech titan and become the brains of tomorrow's network? Is it any wonder organizers chose Lake Tahoe, a favorite lair of the Godfather in Coppola's films?
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September 17-19
Portland Creative Conference
Portland, Oregon From gargantuan Powell's City of Books to Gus Van Sant, the cultural import of the riverside city of Portland has been extensive. It's here that a dozen big names meet every year to share their thoughts on creativity in film, television, advertising, and new media. Van Sant will speak about his directing canon – from Drugstore Cowboy to last year's Good Will Hunting. The English Patient producer Saul Zaentz and performance artist Denny Dent will talk about what drives their art. Celebs suffer Q&A sessions gladly, take part in panels with other artists, and sometimes mix with the crowd over gin-and-tonics.
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September 23-26
ICES'98
Lausanne, Switzerland Many conclaves touch on the software side of creating evolutionary machines, but the International Conference on Evolvable Systems deals with actual hardware. One focus of the event, and the engine of evolvable hardware, is the field programmable gate array, or FPGA, a chip whose many logic gates can be reconfigured depending on the result of software trials. In the lab, the FPGA gets smarter after each test run. ICES attendees can also enter a US$1,000 contest to create and demonstrate a self-replicating gadget – mechanical or electronic.
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October 5-9
Fall Internet World
New York City Picture yourself coming home from Fall Internet World. The takeaway: sore feet and a worn-out plastic bag full of demo CDs. But you'll probably have scrawled some good notes from the Web Developer's Summit or brought back some intriguing ideas from the Enterprise Internet Forum. The sponsor, Mecklermedia, has focused its biggest event of the year on the business side of the Net – with 50,000 Web pros at the show and keynote addresses as intimate as arena rock. But with headliners including Sun's John Gage, AT&T's C. Michael Armstrong, and Netscape's Jim Barksdale, you'll be as glad that you went as you are that it's over.
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October 9-11
CPSR Annual Conference
Cambridge, Massachusetts Public television once promised to carve out a space for the public interest. And now, as the Internet morphs into a profit-driven zone, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility aims to define something like a PBS for the Net. "In reality, PBS didn't work out to represent the public voice in TV," explains CPSR executive director Duff Axsom. "But one of the things we're trying to ask is: What part of this territory do we need to stake out? It's not so much against the commercial interests, but what are the interests of the people who're not represented?"
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