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."
It Costs Money (Score:5, Informative)
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If you're an academic and you're writing a paper you have to check on the accuracy of the quotes you used. If the quote happens to be in a premium paper you're screwed.
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Not necessarily. In most cases at least respectable researchers have a tech-report variant on the web. Also, who checks quotes in CS?
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I do.
Sorry, but if you aren't checking quotes, you are probably being mislead in most conversations.
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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.
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But how many professional programmers are academic?
Most of us work for business, government, ngo, not for profit. Where we really don't need to cite your work, just as long as it works and you are not stepping on someones patent or license you are OK.
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1) Looks good on a resume
2) They have actual course to learn something instead of groping around the internet looks for some code snippet to use
3) They have a ton of reading material
4) Good publication hat aren't on google.
5) Research done by professionals
6) Contacts
7) SIGs
8) Scotch? Wait let me guess..you have a beard, and you wear a trilby.
Not that you need to join just pointing out some advantages.
You can keep getting your snippets of VB code from the internet, and I'll keep reading latest research on A
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Every resume needs a good publication hat.
But never admit to groping snippets, even if you learned something in due course.
Nerds don't wear contacts, they wear real glasses.
All published research is done by professionals, not just the paywalled kind. I'm not convinced CS has useful research, though. Useful engineering, certainly. The problem with paywalled engineering is that if you learn how it works, now you're never allowed to do things that way because of copyright and patents. If you only use freely av
Re:It Costs Money (Score:5, Funny)
Expensive and irrelevant (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Expensive and irrelevant (Score:5, Informative)
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Same here. As a student, I helped organize the EMU (Eastern Michigan University) chapter of ACM, but since entering the workforce, it ceased to remain relevant.
It's far too focused on academic concerns and CS pedagogy (I.E. broadening the appear of computer science programs). There is literally nothing in their monthly Communications that acknowledges that practitioners actually exist, let alone that we're actually important to the field as a whole.
I'm considering joining IEEE instead, but I fear they m
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IEEE is both historically and contempraneously a completely practitioner-oriented organization. It's raison-d-etre is to serve enginers. Some of those engineers happen to do engineering research, but that's but a fraction of its membership.
Re:Expensive and irrelevant - don't think so (Score:4, Informative)
IEEE? Their Computer Society is marginally OK, but only for the Hal Berghel articles, as far as I'm concerned. IEEE Spectrum has become an exercise in suckitude, the bastard child of Wired's graphic design and Popular Science's "in depth" examination of current topics. Tired of this and their pimping life insurance, I've lapsed on IEEE membership and may do so for the Computer Society too in the near future.
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Great when you're in school (Score:5, Interesting)
While you're taking CS courses in a university, ACM membership is great! But in the corporate world there's often not a good reason to join.
I was president of my university's ACM chapter at one point, but I've let my membership lapse. The value proposition just isn't worth it to me at the moment.
Re:Great when you're in school (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, but then just try leaving.
I joined while working on my MSc, and used some of the articles as sources of research for my master's thesis. I was immediately bombarded with irrelevant newsletters, and their byzantine website made it all-but-impossible to cancel subscriptions to said spam. You'd think that those in charge of the Association of Computing Machinery could manage to build a good website, but apparently not. Once I let my membership lapse, I was bombarded with requests to re-subscribe. It just doesn't get any worse.
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Yeah, same for me. The ACM journals IEEE Transactions were really useful reading while I was working on my Master's. By the time I got to my PhD work though, the combination of Google Scholar, CiteSeer, and papers being available over the internet (probably in contravention to author's agreements with the journals that published the paper) made ACM and IEEE irrelevant.
It seems to me that the only part of ACM's publication system that's still relevant is the selection and vetting of good papers for their j
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1) Contacts.
Why would I? (Score:2)
I haven't heard about ACM since I left school and I wasn't interested then.. so why join now?
"For Computer Programmers" (Score:5, Interesting)
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I suspect also that "Machinery" suggests a society for hardware nerds rather than software nerds
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The problem is that people on the internet in their garages are doing more for the advancement of "machinery" than the ACM has ever done in it's lifetime.
The ivory towers are crumbling, the staunchy University model is becoming irrelevant.
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You might want to learn the difference between its and it's before commenting about crumbling ivory towers. Oh, and "staunchy" isn't a word.
staunchy (Score:2)
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http://www.urbandictionary.com... [urbandictionary.com]
It's a *great word :-)
As for the author's intent I think they meant something a bit different...
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?
Re:"For Computer Programmers" (Score:4, Informative)
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You might want to learn the difference between its and it's before commenting about crumbling ivory towers. Oh, and "staunchy" isn't a word.
You might want to learn some basic facts about the English language before attempting to get pedantic.
English isn't a controlled language. Words are not words because they appear in a list. Words are words if they are used. There are lots unused words that are perfectly valid words even without ever having been seen before. For example you can take any base word, and attach various prefixes and suffixes. As long as they don't contradict each other, no problem. And -y has been a suffix since Shakespeare!
So p
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"Machinery" is from 1947. Back then you didn't type your code, you wire-wrapped it.
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And you debugged it with a paint scraper.
Complexity (Score:5, Informative)
My issues are simple.
1) I'm self educated. ACM discriminates against people like me. It doesn't matter that I have 20 years experience in protocol and codec design or that I've designed algorithms which they have published articles analyzing.
2) price. ACM is too expensive for individuals and programmers who are actual scientists and actual engineers as opposed to Python coding web site developers have a hard enough time getting bosses to pay for RAM upgrades. Things like "club memberships" are generally out of the question.
3) Too many journals to choose from and each one costs more. Professional programmers probably want 3-5 different journals. I haven't checked in a while, but I would want the journals on compilers, machine vision, signal processing and probably AI (if those are all categories) but I wouldn't want to pay for all 3. A downloadable printable version of the actual journals or at least an ebook would be welcome. Last I checked, they only offered article by article.
Finally, I never see ACM articles linked from Google. You'd imagine searches for things like "reduction of inter block artifacts in discrete wavelet transforms" should nail 5 ACM articles on the first page. Instead, I see mailing lists.
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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-
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Finally, I never see ACM articles linked from Google. You'd imagine searches for things like "reduction of inter block artifacts in discrete wavelet transforms" should nail 5 ACM articles on the first page. Instead, I see mailing lists.
They'll show up if you use Google Scholar. If you're using the main search engine to find papers, then you're probably doing it wrong...
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SOoooo...shouldn't the first link in the regular search be a link to the results from Google Scholar?
If the information itself was valuable from the perspective of teaching the techniques, then yes. But if their utility is entirely based on their use inside academia, then no.
If I want to learn a programming technique I'd rather learn it from code on github than try to parse out the tiny bit of signal in an academic paper. But then, I'm allergic to fluff.
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The few times that I have needed to read an ACM or IEEE article for something, I have visited my alma mater's library.
I have usually found the article using a web search engine or in some article database.
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I've got an answer! (Score:3)
Because of Internet.
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.
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They don't even know what they're offering (Score:5, Interesting)
Turns out some recent conferences have their presentations recorded in HD video. An example is POPL. OK, so I went and downloaded a few videos on formal methods hoping to see something I cared about. I downloaded some 5 videos in one day. Next day I get an e-mail saying my ACM DL subscription has been frozen due to excessive use and I need to contact membership services to get it reopened.
In addition to this, the ACM DL terms of use still prohibit "systematically downloading" articles which according to them means downloading all articles of an issue of a journal or all the articles of a conference. This is just plain stupid.
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Write to them, using snail-mail, sent registered and with receipt confirmation. Tell them what you think. Tell them that they are to serve you, their member, not the other way round.
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Benefits ? What benefits (Score:4, Interesting)
Most of these organizations and associations completely fail to understand how they would be able to create added value for their potential members. As an electronic engineer I'm supposed to be a member of IEEE. I can't think of a single reason why I would subscribe, and the people and letters of IEEE didn't make things better. On the contrary.
Re:Benefits ? What benefits (Score:4, Interesting)
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Here's a quick list of Wikipedia articles which probably cite ACM publications:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/ind... [wikipedia.org]
Value for money (Score:2)
Paywall (Score:3)
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Same thing for me. I'm naturally biased against paying exorbitant prices for papers that the publisher received for free. So for my PhD work I basically avoided using papers that were only available by paying ACM, IEEE, or Elsevier.
Fortunately, in the age of CiteSeer, Google Scholar, and authors who publish their own papers even if they've submitted them to journals, I was able to boycott those publishers and still get my PhD done. Also, having a good team of technical librarians goes a long way.
5-10 yea
open access journals, not F'in guilds (Score:2)
We've got a hard enough time keeping the brutals at bay as it is.
What are these guys a bunch of scientologists?
Why I joined: (Score:5, Interesting)
I listed my membership on my résumé, along with the ACM logo.
This was 15 years ago and I was a contractor around Washington, DC, doing many short-term contracts.
Yes, it was effective.
In the course of interviews, the interviewer would often tell me that they had been meaning to join, or had heard of it, but not once that they were themselves a member. Just a little psychological advantage, I guess. This helped,too, because I never went to college.
That said, I got absolutely nothing from their articles or other content.
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I listed my membership on my resume, along with the ACM logo.
LinkedIn has a new feature to list your certifications and corresponding badges on your profile page. While checking it out, ACM was listed in the pulldown. I had an ACM membership while in college. I was wondering if becoming a member again and adding ACM to my resume would make a difference.
Still a member (Score:2)
I agree with a lot of the comments here about how it's got declining value. I usually catch up on issues during vacation each year and it's always enjoyable to read some RMS or PHK rant. That said, it's not really worth the $100 for the digital library on top of the yearly dues. I only have it at this point because some of the old content is helpful when working on my hobby.
Money and professional organizations (Score:2)
I'm a member of a few professional organizations. Most of them are kind of money grabs when it comes to anything education related. To maintain a certification I have to get 30 hours of continuing education each year and wouldn't you know that the professional organization is just all too happy to sell it to me for vaguely unreasonable amounts of money. Or I can attend about 15 meetings and conferences a year, also costing $ each time. I try not to get too worked up about it but it isn't cheap even if i
2006 Safari (Score:2)
Member of IEEE & ACM (Score:2)
I'm a member of IEEE (Computer Society) & ACM. My employer pays for the first, I pay for the second (although being in each gives a small discount to being in the other). I'm not an academic, but I usually find an article or two worth reading each month in both Computer & in Communications of the ACM.
Of course, since I primarily design hardware rather than software, this might not count as a programmer joining the ACM:).
The prices for each don't seem out of range for the quality of the publications,
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The "research highlights" section contains selections from the journals that are sometimes pretty good. I also like the pieces they pulled from Queue like Kode Vicious with is usually entertaining (granted, that's free through Queue). Armour's column is often excellent and occasionally when passed to a manager will lead to an improvement in scheduling sanity. The column Legally Speaking does a good job of digesting things to my non-expert level of comprehension on what's going with how the law affects compu
Professional body... (Score:2)
I've recently thought again about potential membership of professional bodies. I used to be a student member of the ACM - and, despite a steep discount, I felt there was little value there... so dropped it as soon as my discount eligibility changed.
The idea that a professional body should prosper by restricting access to content might work in academia, but it does not represent a compelling proposition to me.
I would consider joining a professional body if it were:
1. Relevant to professionals who work with
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.
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Amen. When I was at University, I used our library's ACM and IEEE access to get to lots of useful articles, so I know the value of having that access. But once I graduated, up came the paywalls, and up came my revulsion. It's not about the money - I waste more than the ACM membership fees funding offbeat kickstarters. While I'm still tempted every year by those ACM offers. I'm not going to support an organization dedicated to preventing the dissemination of information, not at any price.
There are still
Been programing for 28 years, never heard about it (Score:2)
I've never heard about this ACM thing. From the looks of the website it seems like some academic oriented CS club or something from the US. They even got a "german chapter" - suprised much I am. Don't know if I need to be in that club though. I doubt any programmer of importance I look up to is a member either. Linus Torwalds? RMS? Projekt Lead of Node.js? Don't think so. ... For example, I'd be suprised if more than 10% of the Blender crew even heard about this, let alone were a member.
My 2 cents.
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The problem the ACM has is that joining has little incentive if you don't go to a conference. If
For starters, their magazine format is terrible (Score:2)
I can't speak for programmers as I'm more on the sysadmin side of things but joined initially when I came across some really interesting articles on virtualization from their magazine. Then I started to get the magazine regularly and it was a horrible, horrible read. It's not designed for effective data transmission. It just felt like a way to allow fellow-nerds to get published. I'm able to gain more information from an issue of Wired than I was from an ACM mag. But that could just be me and my background.
lack of information relevant to non-academics (Score:2)
That sounds like some schools that are loaded with theroy and lacking real skills.
I know this programer who went a to a state school and I have spotted quite a few bugs / coding errors in there code when it's running and I don't even work in QA or work at the place they work at.
Political Agenda (Score:2)
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In never heard about this. Can you give a little more info?
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ACM are inveterate spammers, that's why (Score:2)
The main reason not to join ACM is that they spam the hell out of their members (and even prospective members and former members). Here are just some examples of recent complaints from computing professionals:
I have never been a member of ACM myself, but my e-mail addresses are (or were, the last time I checked) regularly bombarded by their solicitations. Now everythi
generational thing (Score:2)
The majority of programmers are under 35.
On the surface ... (Score:2)
Never heard of them... (Score:2)
I've been programming professional since 1995, never heard of them. I work primarily on open source systems and it seems like this organization is not really aimed at that group, at least based on the 'no code, behind a paywall' thing.
I contribute and volunteer on several open source projects, that's what I do to promote my interests and the interests of projects important to me and my career. Not sure how spending time and money on this ACM group would accomplish anything for me.
Response of Suresh Venkatasubramanian (Score:3)
Re:where's the money?! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:where's the money?! (Score:5, Informative)
There is as an academic. Apparently being a member of the ACM has a negative value, because in exchange for the $99/year membership fee I typically get a $100-150 discount on attending ACM conferences. If you go to a couple of conferences a year then that's a good deal. For people outside academia, there's less relevance. ACM Queue [acm.org], which provides material for 'practitioners' section of Communications of the ACM, generally has some good material, but it's all free whether your an ACM member or not.
I like the ACM as an organisation, but they're hard pressed to justify the cost of membership.
Re:where's the money?! (Score:5, Informative)
I am a long time member of the ACM, and I've always thought the value for money was excellent. I'm not an academic and I don't go to conferences. The Safari and 24/7 Books Online subscriptions, plus the skillsoft training is where I see most of the value.
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I am a long time member of the ACM, and I've always thought the value for money was excellent. I'm not an academic and I don't go to conferences. The Safari and 24/7 Books Online subscriptions, plus the skillsoft training is where I see most of the value.
That's good to know for future reference, though every company I've worked for has offered those things to its employees and contractors.
Re:where's the money?! (Score:5, Informative)
I thought about joining a while ago for the group health insurance plan, but they dropped that. So I did not join.
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I'm not an academic, but I am a member of ACM. There is some great content there.
I get more then my money's worth.
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Re: where's the money?! (Score:5, Funny)
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True Dat.
Before money, the world population was less than a million. Now it is growing by millions a day.
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> Now it (worldwide population) is growing by millions a day.
http://www.ecology.com/birth-d... [ecology.com]
400k/day. But gettin there..
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Thank God money evolved before humans or else we would never exist.
True Dat.
Before money, the world population was less than a million. Now it is growing by millions a day.
Straight-up barter is not money. "Money" arises when there comes into being a standardized unit of exchange that is independent of the commodity being exchanged. Evidence for that only shows up around 3000 BCE at the earliest, at which point the world human population amounted to tens of million, not "less than a million". The early records of exchange though only involved standardized weights and measures of commodities, not an actual currency of any kind. This shows up around 1000 BC for the first time, a
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The android anthropologists then went back to university and learned traits which benefit the survival of the group do not necessarily benefit the survival of the individual.
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What the hell is ACM and why would it benefit me to join them?
If you were a halfway competent software developer, you'd already know, and if you were an elite software developer, you'd already have joined...
I'm no elite, but as a competent software developer, all I know about ACM is that they are a paywalled website.
Why would I chose to spend time investigating one particular paywalled site over the dozen others? They all look the same to me.
Most of computer science research is published publicly on Internet anyway. On several occasions, when my friends from universities were getting paywalled articles printed for me, I was finding out that I have seen the article already freely before on the internet.
Us
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What the hell is ACM and why would it benefit me to join them?
If you were a halfway competent software developer, you'd already know, and if you were an elite software developer, you'd already have joined...
If you were an elite software developer, you'd be too busy to join a jumped up organisation like the ACM.
You have to do more than pay the membership fee (Score:2)
I do not see any value at all joining all of these organisations, much less paying for the privilege.
There can be lots of value to them but getting that value requires actual work on your part. If all you are doing is paying the membership fee to list it on your resume then there is no point to joining. However if you actually attend events, meet colleagues and talk with them, get involved in the organizations, etc you can actually get a ton of value out of them. I'm a member of two professional organizations (not ACM) which I actively participate in. I've gotten job interviews, excellent contacts for
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Same story, with the addendum that my obvious lack of interest hasn't stopped them from spamming me every 3-6 months to try to sign up again.
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No.
As a member of ACM, and former member of Mensa, I assure you the people at ACM are far more professional and nice.
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No.
As a member of ACM, and former member of Mensa, I assure you the people at ACM are far more professional and nice.
Talk about damning with faint praise. LOL If the main difference is in how nice or professional they are, then yes, you're confirming that they are very similar.
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I think you missed the point of Vint's complaint - They don't, thus their steadily declining relevancy to anyone outside of academia.