Danny O'Brien saves Wednesday morning's ETech

Today's agenda looked great on paper, starting with Microsoft researcher Marc Smith, followed by Nokia's chief technology officer, Perti Korhonnen, as the day's two big keynote speeches. Marc Smith was outstanding last year, which is no doubt why O'Reilly brought him back and promoted him to the top of the order. Unfortunately, this year's speech was pretty much the same a last year's. As for Pertti Korhonnen, I'm not sure what he said: my eyes and ears glazed over after about five minutes. Danny O'Brien of Need To Know saved the morning with a very funny talk on Tech Secrets of the Overprolific Alpha Geeks. Briefly, they do most things via command lines (shell, shell) and keep all their notes a in plain text to-do list. My alternative explanation is that perhaps most Alpha Geeks learned their computing 20 or more years ago and have never adapted to anything newer....