The Times, They Are a'Changin'

by Andrew Hume
<[email protected]>

President, USENIX Board of Directors

 



Does it seem like the world is changing too fast to you? It seems trite, but every day brings fresh reminders of the increasing pace of life in general, and our computer world in particular. I'm still surprised when my 11-month-old daughter has noticeably more hair than the day before. And I am in awe of the perceived value of Internet stocks, and that AOL was able to buy something real with its funny money. And although I thought I was inured to disk price sticker shock, I was (very pleasantly) surprised to see how much disk storage costs now.

I believe that cheap disk is far more an enabler of the Webification of everything than CPU speed, and is only exceeded in importance by consumer access speed. Three years ago, one of my projects bought commercial RAID 5 storage at $300K/TB. I just bought a 4U high rack-mounted RAID 5 box yielding 350GB at a rate of about $42K/TB. In six months, I expect the cost to dip below $30K/TB (and this is RAID 5 storage, not raw disk). Just amazing.

USENIX, too, is changing. Over the last few years, our membership has changed in both job distribution and interests. Over 50% of our membership self-identify as sys admins of one flavor or another. There is much more interest now in Web-based computing (our USITS and NETA conferences are good examples) and in UNIX-style environments for commodity PC hardware (such as the various *BSD systems and Linux). In fact, this year we expect to form a second STG (SAGE is our first) focusing on Linux. (We'll form more if you want one!)

As a result of these forces, the USENIX Board has been trying to map out a strategy for our Association for the next few years. An integral part of this process is clarifying what USENIX is and what it wants to be. The normal technique for this is articulating a mission and a vision for our organization. This is very much in progress and a report will be coming soon in ;login:. So far, there is consensus on some things: we work a lot on issues near the bleeding edge of technology, we are very interested in practical applications of theory and technology, and we interact a lot with academia, especially computer science education.

For something as important as this, we need input from you, our members. Are there things you consider essential to USENIX? Are there activities so abhorrent we should never do them? For example, should USENIX be concerned with technology in the community, such as funding experimental projects around computer technology in disadvantaged areas? Please let us know your thoughts about what USENIX should be and should do. You can email me ([email protected]), the Board ([email protected]), write to the editors ([email protected]), or even post to comp.org.usenix.

P.S. In the upcoming elections, please consider the importance of having people on the Board who are academics or closely allied with the academic scene. Each year, we spend several hundred thousand dollars on research grants and other academic-related activities, and I consider it vital that we have a strong academic presence on the Board in order to best spend that money. We have been blessed with such a presence in the recent past with Margo Seltzer and currently Peter Honeyman; we need to continue that tradition of excellence.