5 Apr
2021
5 Apr
'21
9:48 a.m.
This hits home with me very hard. I have been a Usenix member since the
around 1984. Almost 40 years. I am finally letting my membership drop,
now that ";login:" is going soft-copy.
But for several years now I have been increasingly dissatisfied with the
research nature of most of the articles. Very few of them are actually
useful (or even interesting) to me in a day-to-day sense.
And this saddens me; I used to be proud to be a Usenix member; I no
longer feel like I get any added value. Especially as I live out of the
US, attending conferences is impossible. (The last annual conference I
went to was in 2004.)
Ah well. The only constant in the world is change.
Arnold
John Cowan <cowan(a)ccil.org> wrote:
On Sun, Apr 4, 2021 at 2:23 PM Clem Cole
<clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
An issue during the time you are discussing,
USENIX had evolved into "two
foci" between the practitioners (which included both FOSS community and
LISA types) and the more academic-oriented folks looking for respected
places to publish papers/develop their tenure files.
I think this is a long and accelerating trend, and not just at
conferences. There simply are no venues for "engineering" papers or
presentations any more, which doesn't bother me directly, but bothers me
very much indirectly, because I love engineering papers and have to read
academic papers, ummm, very selectively. (In particular, anything labeled
"formal semantics" just gets skipped.)
John Cowan http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan cowan(a)ccil.org
And it was said that ever after, if any man looked in that Stone,
unless he had a great strength of will to turn it to other purpose,
he saw only two aged hands withering in flame. --"The Pyre of Denethor"