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Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference Will Now Be Online Only Due To Coronavirus Concerns (theverge.com) 40

Nvidia has announced it has shifted its GPU Technology Conference (GTC) to be online-only due to concerns from the coronavirus outbreak. People who had registered for the event, which was originally set to be held in San Jose, California, from March 22nd to March 26th, will get a full refund. The Verge reports: "This decision to move the event online instead of at the San Jose Convention Center reflects our top priority: the health and safety of our employees, our partners and our customers," the company said in a statement. Nvidia says company founder and CEO Jensen Huang will still deliver a keynote, and that it's working with speakers to begin publishing talks online. The online version of the event will still take place from March 22nd to March 26th. Other tech events cancelled due to the coronavirus include Mobile World Congress, Facebook's F8 developer conference, and the Game Developers Conference.
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Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference Will Now Be Online Only Due To Coronavirus Concerns

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  • by slashmydots ( 2189826 ) on Tuesday March 03, 2020 @02:44AM (#59790702)
    What are they going to do when the coronavirus mutates to be digital and spreads through the internet?
  • Excellent! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by melted ( 227442 ) on Tuesday March 03, 2020 @02:57AM (#59790712) Homepage

    Conferences are a waste of time anyway. You have to pay for them, waste a ton of time, and burn up a lot of kerosene to get there and back. I'm sure in this day and age we could have just an effective mode of communication without going anywhere.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Exactly. Kudos to Nvidia for making the right decision here. Hopefully many other companies take notice and make their own changes like this.

    • No one spends their own money to go to these things.
      • Whoever pays for it does not matter. It's a lot of time and energy wasted. Just stream your presentation online and reply to questions* via chat.

        * only official press/media/online reporters, maybe limit to one question per person, to avoid a flood of questions.

    • Well, to be fair.. my employer pays for them, not me... And they're really goddamn fun (at least when they're in Vegas or Hawaii)
      But ya, I get your point.
    • I could agree, but in this precise case not so much. First it's happening in silicon valley. A very large part of the audience is local. Second, the most important things happening at GTC are :
      The keynote (will happen online).
      The exhibition. Tons of live demos on AI, with robots, cars, ... And all the vendors presenting their servers. Plus NVIDIA presenting their GPUs and servers, of course. This unfortunately won't happen.
      The informal conversations between developers, users, partners, ... won't happen e

      • The informal conversations between developers, users, partners, ... won't happen either.

        In my industry, this is the actual value we derive from convention trips.
        Sure, 90% of it is mostly us having a good time...
        But I get to be face to face with engineers who work with vendors who I can then have discussions about their hardware that I could never ever have otherwise, and it has been absolutely invaluable.

    • Conferences are a waste of time for people that no one wants to talk to.

  • I'm serious with that title. The Corona virus is reducing travel, especially global travel. It encourages teleconferencing and working from home. This will do more for the environment than any number of marches and protests could ever hope to accomplish.

    • by sad_ ( 7868 )

      i saw a meme the other day, comparing greta vs the covid19 virus.
      the punchline was that the corona virus was able to do what greta couldn't.

    • Not only that, it forces people to think about why our products are made on the other side of the planet while our craftsmen are discarded for being "too expensive".
      • by Kjella ( 173770 )

        Not only that, it forces people to think about why our products are made on the other side of the planet while our craftsmen are discarded for being "too expensive".

        Or maybe why they're made by fragile meatbags at all. It's all part of Skynet's plan, I tell you... /s

    • Coronavirus decreases quality of life. It also decreases the side effects of that quality of life. That's a net loss. It's also temporary.

  • Would be interested to know what systems will be used, full stack.
    If I have a couple of Linux servers do I still need to sign up a conferencing service?
    I talked to some execs recently and one company is having their employees use Zoom.
    It would be very interesting if there is an easy to deploy suite or set of solutions that can be quickly deployed. Free software would be nice but would be good to know how robust.
    For small international meetings I liked Go To Meeting. I have been on some Zoom calls which are

    • Why mess around with any of that corporate crap when they could use a YouTube live stream and let the common folks watch their presentation too? It's not like nVidia is unknown to anyone who ever used a modern computer.

  • My wife hosts a large technology policy conference. They are having discussions about what to do about a forthcoming meeting. Papers are easy. What is difficult to virtualize is networking and relationship development.

  • I hope there are fewer real-world narrow-topic conferences in general. I have no objections to, say, E3. That still makes economic sense, for now. But I bet this conference was a money loser for nVidia anyhow, so if they can get it to work with an online-only format, I would expect they'll want to keep doing it that way.

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