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USENIX 2003 Report

Posted by timothy on from the wrapping-up dept.

BSD Forums writes "Dustin Puryear attended the USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC) this year in San Antonio, Texas and presents this report. USENIX offers attendees an interesting mix of papers and talks by academia, well-known industry professionals, and researchers working for companies across the world. What exactly did he really learn from this conference? He says research is as strong as ever within USENIX and open source communities. Samba is making significant progress with the ever emerging Active Directory networks. FreeBSD is emerging as one of the few key OSes of choice for web hosting. Finally, he says that Microsoft is competing for server business with their Microsoft Windows Services for UNIX products."

1 of 17 comments (clear)

  1. No one cares? No one can go! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    It's getting harder and harder to get excited about confrences... since most of the companies won't send their admins. The only person I know here that gets to go to USENIX regularly only does so because it was part of his agreement of employment. Something I very much wish I had done. I can muster the $100 or so bucks to keep my USENIX/SAGE membership current, but $600+ for confrences? I requested to go to FAST, which is only like $750 and was turned down, PLUS it's in the Bay Area so I don't need to travel...... couldn't go. Requested the Veritas Users Confrence in Las Vegas, only like $1000. Rejected. Requested USENIX and LISA, again, turned down. I can't hardly get my company to comp my BOOKS! With the cost of these confrenses most people are unable or unwilling to spent that kind of money out of hand, and the few people I do know who go to the confs even if they have to pay out of pocket do so only because they find it a good way to stay attached to the community and have found employement that way. And gambling 2 months of rent (in the Silicon Valley) against the cost of USENIX in hopes of finding a job is a serious gamble. The only 2 confs I've gone to in the last 2 years was Sun Network, because our VAR got me free admission (as many people did), and LinuxWorld San Fransisco, but only for the Expo, which is increasinly filled with M$ reps and suits who look down their noses at geeks and open source programmers unless they wear a suit.

    Hard times........ hopefully things get better soon. I can't even remember what it's like to get formal training.