Vint Cerf on Why Programmers Don't Join the ACM 213
jfruh writes "The Association for Computing Machinery is a storied professional group for computer programmers, but its membership hasn't grown in recent years to keep pace with the industry. Vint Cerf, who recently concluded his term as ACM president, asked developers what was keeping them from signing up. Their answers: paywalled content, lack of information relevant to non-academics, and code that wasn't freely available."
Re:Complexity (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, searching for "Reduction of inter-block artifact in DWT" should produce IEEE articles, most probably from the Transactions on Image Processing journal or Transactions on Signal Processing.
And indeed they do. My technical searches always include at the very top the most relevant academic papers from scholar.google.com
Blocking-artifact reduction in block-coded images using wavelet-based subband decomposition
H Choi, T Kim - Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, , 2000 - ieeexplore.ieee.org
Inter-frame wavelet transform coder for color video compression
S Zafar, YQ Zhang - US Patent 5,495,292, 1996 - Google Patents
Embedded image coding using zerotrees of wavelet coefficients
JM Shapiro - Signal Processing, IEEE Transactions on, 1993 - ieeexplore.ieee.org
Blocking artifact detection and reduction in compressed data
GA Triantafyllidis, D Tzovaras - Circuits and Systems for , 2002 - ieeexplore.ieee.org
Perhaps the solution is for you to make a Google Scholar profile and you will get those as well?
Low grade code monkeys don't need to know (Score:5, Insightful)
There is nothing in there that low grade code monkeys, which is the vast majority of the software industry, need to know. I mean, how much skills do you have to have to run a mom and pop web store, publish the jillionth fart app, or maintain a payroll system?
Of course, these code monkeys get swamped whenever the next major technology change comes along but, hey, we can't all be good enough to work for Google or Apple, etc.
ACM doesn't get it on (C) (Score:4, Insightful)
I am an ACM member, but I'm not happy with it. My biggest complaint about the ACM is their failure to understand why copyright is bad and needs massive reform or abolishment. Instead, they jump in bed, ideologically, with copyright extremists! $100 membership isn't good enough for access to the digital library, have to pay another $100 for that? What a total money grab, locking up knowledge and for what? To coerce membership fees from researchers? Aren't they supposed to be a non-profit organization? The digital library should be public! Freely available to all, including non-members. Some years, CACM has had a "special" issue in the summer devoted to intellectual property issues. Some of those CACM articles are downright shameful in their unquestioned support of the current system, preferring to dive into how to use copyright when they haven't discussed why. It's like the whole fake "teach the controversy" debate between Evolution and Creationism. Any science magazine that dared treat Creationism as if it was valid science would quickly lose all respect and become a laughingstock. But the ACM still soberly talks as if copyright can somehow still work. It's like listening to some cranks say that they can fix the problems with the Theory of Intelligent Design, just have to do more exploration and research.
It's embarrassing. On technological matters, the ACM ought to be one of the most progressive organizations in existence. Instead, they were slow to get on the Internet. Their early websites were garbage nearly devoid of content, seemingly made live only because it was even more embarrassing not to have a website at all! They were late to the party for online renewal of membership. Yes, ACM has done online renewal for years, but they weren't the first to do that, far from it. Now they're going to be late to the death of copyright.
Re:It Costs Money (Score:4, Insightful)
Programmers aren't academics. So, there's still really no reason to join the ACM for most programmers.
Re:"For Computer Programmers" (Score:4, Insightful)
You might want to learn the difference between its and it's
I know the difference, but how should I go about teaching this difference to the virtual keyboard of a mobile device? Or is there a key ACM paper on how to guess where "its" or "it's" should go in context?