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Hohndel (pic below) spoke at the LCA in Melbourne in 2008, his topic being how one could make hardware vendors love open source.
The talk was delivered from the lectern, with masterful ease, demonstrating well that here was a man who knew his subject inside out, liked it a great deal and, what's more, actually understood everything that he was talking about.
There were no charts, no slides, no intrusion of lists with bullet points. Hohndel, quite literally, scaled the peak on his own. And he held his audience spellbound; nodbody even coughed right through that presentation.
And he was so aware of what he had spoken about that, after reading through my three-page report of his talk, he found one little error and tapped me on the back to point it out while we were waiting for one of the keynotes to start. It was one time when it was a pleasure to make a correction.
Hohndel, who works for Intel as the chief of technology for Linux and open source, is back at the LCA this year, but sadly he isn't presenting a paper. I use the word advisedly because it is a pleasure to see someone who can talk intelligently, instead of one who mumbles and depends on slides to make the point(s).
I ran into Hohndel at the 12th LCA in Brisbane this morning and reminded him of what some would term an anomaly - the fact that he is the only case I have encountered over the last four years who has abhorred those painful PowerPoint-like slides.
