From an academic perspective it is absolutely worth to publish and to attend conferences.
The goals as a researcher are to get known and to announce your work.
In CS you don't submit your work to journals (as in Biology or Physics or Math) but you present your work at conferences. At conferences you meet other people and you also have a chance to discuss new strategies and new ideas. CS is a very open field and it is hard to get in contact with other people. Conferences are venues where you meet the people that you collaborate with.
One true fact is that conferences are not really worth it if you only go for the talks. Most talks are bad and it is sometimes hart to understand the speaker at all. Additionally you can read the papers after the conference anyway. But at conferences you have all these coffee breaks and the other opportunities to meet other great people in your field.
So you should see conferences as a possibility to meet a potential future advisor or collaborator.
As long as OpenOffice is not able to execute VisualBasic Macros and other Office Macros, OO will not be much of a choice.
They say that in OO 2.0 / StarOffice 8 they can (partially) execute VBScribt, but what about plugins?
In the firm I'm working we have a lot of excel plugins that connect to different databases, so a change to OO / SO is not possible (altough I would like to).
Slashdot Mirror
Well, this calls for decentralized DNS and some tor like network overlay...
From an academic perspective it is absolutely worth to publish and to attend conferences.
The goals as a researcher are to get known and to announce your work.
In CS you don't submit your work to journals (as in Biology or Physics or Math) but you present your work at conferences. At conferences you meet other people and you also have a chance to discuss new strategies and new ideas. CS is a very open field and it is hard to get in contact with other people. Conferences are venues where you meet the people that you collaborate with.
One true fact is that conferences are not really worth it if you only go for the talks. Most talks are bad and it is sometimes hart to understand the speaker at all. Additionally you can read the papers after the conference anyway. But at conferences you have all these coffee breaks and the other opportunities to meet other great people in your field.
So you should see conferences as a possibility to meet a potential future advisor or collaborator.
As long as OpenOffice is not able to execute VisualBasic Macros and other Office Macros, OO will not be much of a choice. They say that in OO 2.0 / StarOffice 8 they can (partially) execute VBScribt, but what about plugins? In the firm I'm working we have a lot of excel plugins that connect to different databases, so a change to OO / SO is not possible (altough I would like to).