CodeCon, FOSDEM Both Around The Corner

An anonymous reader writes "The program for CodeCon was quietly announced a few days ago. The third edition of this groundbreaking programmer's conference, which adheres to a strict set of rules geared to providing a high-content event (such as requiring working demos of projects presented, and all presentations to be given by an active developer) is well stocked with interesting p2p, crypto, coding, and open source projects. Some of the highlights of this year's con include Audacity, Bram and Ross Cohen's Codeville, The U.S. Navy's Onion Router, and PGP Universal. Other notable applications, like Bittorrent, the Invisible IRC project, GNU Radio, and Mixminion all made their public debuts at past CodeCons. Produced by cypherpunk Len Sassaman and BitTorrent programmer Bram Cohen, this grass-roots conference is a must-see." CodeCon runs Feb. 20-22 in San Francisco, while FOSDEM (the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting) is taking place in Brussels on Feb 20-21.

FOSDEM and Gnome?

[Simon]

The Gnome guys/gals don't seem to have a dev-room or much in the way or offical talks. Anyone know what is it going on?

--
Simon

SOLIPSIS

[Sklivvz]

Both the convention site and the project homepage [netofpeers.net] seem to go little way in explaining what this interesting project is about.
For those who don't know anything about the project is a cross between a P2P application and a MMORPG. Basically it's a distributed MMORPG of sorts.
That's all I could gather from the official pages. Does anyone know more about this?

Re:SOLIPSIS

[joaquin.keller]

The solipsis project started with the idea of building a Metaverse-like (Neal Stephenson "Snowcrash") virtual world that could be experienced by several millions of users. But only a totally decentralized system with no intrinsic bottlenecks (like central servers) can achieve this goal. Moreover, we have no ambition to be gods and force all users to experience exactly what *we* might desire (not like in actual MMORPG). Rather, we expect that users will contribute to the project, creating their own implement

Re:SOLIPSIS

[Sklivvz]

Very interesting, but what do you mean in practice? Looking at some (albeit preliminary) screenshots it seems to me that it's very similar to a distributed chat client.
What is this parallel universe made of (files, sites, shards)? Which kind of data is contained in it? How is it different from VRML? How and what does a user contribute to it?

Re:SOLIPSIS

[joaquin.keller]

> Very interesting, but what do you mean in practice? Looking at some (albeit preliminary) screenshots it seems to me that it's very similar to a distributed chat client.

good question:
it looks like a chat client because you can chat, but there are big difference with:
1. IM clients (jabber-like)
with IM you chat (mostly) with your friends
in Solipsis you can meet people
2. Chatrooms (IRC)
most chatrooms are empty, most populated chatrooms have tens of chatters
Solipsis is like a huge chatroom that can a

You should attend!

[Bert690]

Having attended the last 2 code-cons, I can highly recommend the event. The focus is on working or near-working applications in p2p, privacy, encryption, and other topics most Slashdotters know and love. The crowd is also great... you'll learn a lot simply talking to people between presentations. Bram and Len have done a great job with the program and this year looks to be no exception.

Info on previous conferences

[PureFiction]

To get a feel for the conference you can listen to the CodeCon 03 audio recordings [peertech.org] or review the CodeCon 02 write-ups for day one [infoanarchy.org], day two [infoanarchy.org], and day three [infoanarchy.org].

As a developer who has gone to the previous conferences I can say without hesitation that they are well worth the time and cost.