12/18/2009

12-18-09 - The ACM

There's a bunch of hubbub lately in the game/graphics community about the anti-scientific actions of the ACM.

I find it all much ado about nothing. Of *course* the ACM is a bunch of cocks that are against scientific progress and dissemination of information. Ooo the group of evil bastards who claim all the rights to the paper that you yourself wrote are being dicks !? Well big fucking surprise. Woop-tee-do.

Everyone should boycott the ACM and the IEEE. Duh. The paper publications have absolutely zero purpose now. The conferences have almost no purpose, it's just a bunch of hob-nobbing and back-slapping. The internet is how real information is conveyed. I'm not quite sure why people are so enamored of conferences. I can get way more information in 10 minutes reading papers on the internet than you can get from a 4 day conference, because I am pulling the information I want at the pace that I want, not having it pushed to me.

Now, peer review and collection of papers does in fact provide a service. You don't just want researchers putting up papers on their own web sites with no organization and no peer review. (for example, Arxiv is great and all, but the lack of organization and peer review makes it weak as a primary publishing location).

If you actually cared about getting away from the evil iron grip of the ACM and IEEE bastards, you should work harder to organize and promote the free online journals, of which there are many, but they haven't caught on because the majority of major researchers are smitten by the prestige of the ACM/IEEE names.

Go to DOAJ , pick a journal, support that. Or you know, start a new one focused on higher performance / realtime computer graphics.

old rants