AdHoc is the new name for MacHack, the annual Mac programming/hacking conference. It’s being renamed for 3 reasons (if I remember corectly):

1. The MacHax Group is no longer sponsoring the hack show, and so they don’t want the MacHack conference using their trademark.
2. Employers may be reluctant to send their employees to a “hacking” conference, and changing the name is significantly easier than educating the world on the “true” meaning.
3. In recent years, it’s been drifting towards other platforms aside from the Mac, i.e. Linux and Palm (but not Windows!).

AdHoc, by the way, stands for Advanced Developers’ Hands On Conference.

Something interesting is that in the title of the page: http://www.adhocconf.com It says “ADHOC / MacHack 19”. So maybe “MacHack” is going to be the sub-title now, just like “The Advanced Developers’ Hands On Conference” was the sub-title before? I hope so, because I like the name “MacHack” better.

As far as I know, the general structure is going to be the same. Three sleep-deprived nights in Dearborn, Michigan, hacking in the Machine Room (iCafe) and the Atrium, and a great Hack Show and Award Banquet at the end.

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If you’re going and want to share a room, check out ShareARoom

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Sad news for the Mac hacking community… The conference organizer, CarolLynn of ExpoTech, announced that ADHOC 2005, which concluded the evening of July 30, will be the last MacHack. (Everyone still calls it “MacHack,” the “Hack Show,” etc. including the organizers. The ADHOC name is nothing but a legal technicality.) This was for a few reasons that I’ve heard:

• Attendance in recent years had declined to the point where holding the conference caused ExpoTech to lose money.
• Attendance had declined to the point where it just wasn’t worthwhile for the majority of attendees – this year there looked to be only around 80 people.
• Sponsorship had also been waning. This year it was sponsored by Google and RealSoftware, both of whose presence was greatly appreciated, but they apparently weren’t enough to sustain the conference.
• Personal reasons on Carol’s part?

:’(

• AdamAtlas

P.S. Am I the only one who thinks this wiki’s formatting commands are brain-damaged? Yes. Ok, then. Aside from bold and italic, with their little apostrophe notation, all the commands are much larger and uglier than necessary. I do not believe it would be terribly difficult to let the wiki recognize certain HTML tags, like <ul> and <li> and <hr>, while replacing others with the HTML entity escaped equivalent. My only objection to the current way is that it doesn’t make a lot of sense to have a formatting notation that is substantially larger and harder to read than its HTML equivalent. Good formatting notations, like Markdown (http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/), go the other way, being shorter and easier to read.

I was just being facetious. :-)