Re: Trendspotting: The OReilly P2P Conference

From: Strata Rose Chalup (strata@virtual.net)
Date: Tue Jan 16 2001 - 09:30:26 PST


Having injected a little old-school reality into some of the P2P
discussions here, I was thinking of attending the conference. That is,
until I saw the registration fees.

This P2P thing *starts* at USD$1,295 for early registration! And it
seems to consist entirely of invited talks, with zero peer reviewed
refereed papers. Ironic for a P2P conference, wouldn't you say? It
certainly explains the reg fees, though.

For comparison, USITS (Usenix Symposium on Internet Technologies &
Solutions, http://www.usenix.org/events/usits01/), which is arguably THE
conference for cutting edge Internet technology research, has an early
reg fee of $495 for Usenix members, USD$595 for the public. IEEE WORDS
(Workshop on Object-oriented Real-Time Dependable Systems,
http://www.dis.uniroma1.it/~words/) is USD$350. NANOG (North American
Network Operators Group, http://www.nanog.org/mtg-0102/index.html) is a
max of $400 for walk-ins, $300 for early reg. All of these conferences
have folks presenting who are luminaries in their respective fields as
much as the folks presenting at P2P.

Some of the talks do look really interesting, particularly the standards
based stuff on Thursday. There are a few talks that I'd love to heckle
(politely, of course, during the Q & A part), since I'm convinced that
the Emperor is out in his skivvies again. I'm concerned that I don't
see even ONE session that seems to have a theme of "hey, is this just
hype?" The closest thing to a skeptic's panel seems to be Andrew
Mahon's talk, and given his position in Groove, I can't see any truly
hard questions coming up there-- they're believers. Christian Huitema's
talk will attempt to tackle some questions that could take up a whole
day of sessions profitably! Is this just a big love-in, or what?

Unfortunately, I really can't justify spending 2 - 3 conferences worth
of reg fees on ONE conference, even if it's local, especially since I'm
starting a several thousand dollar certification program in project
management. If there are any forkers out there with deeper pockets than
mine who've enjoyed my rantings on P2P and want to send me, mille
grazie! Otherwise, I'll leave the love-in to the folks whose companies
are sending them.

Cheers,
_SRC
 

-- 
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Strata Rose Chalup [KF6NBZ]                      strata "@" virtual.net
VirtualNet Consulting                            http://www.virtual.net/
 ** Project Management & Architecture for ISP/ASP Systems Integration **
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