---

	FORUM ON BEER, HOMEBREWING, AND RELATED ISSUES
		Rob Gardner, Digest Coordinator

Contents:
  AHA conference cost (Dick Dunn)
  knowing where you are (Dick Dunn)

Send submissions to homebrew%hpfcmr at hplabs.hp.com
Send requests to homebrew-request%hpfcmr at hplabs.hp.com


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: 19 Mar 89 23:04:26 MST (Sun)
From: hplabs!utah-cs!cs.utexas.edu!raven!rcd (Dick Dunn)
Subject: AHA conference cost

Erik A. Henchal wrote:

> I received the registration information for the AHA conference in
> June.  I was a little taken back by the registration fee of $240
> for members and $290 for non-members.  Do others find this
> registration fee a little high?...

I do.  The actual low figure is $210 if you're a member and register by
the end of April (which is reasonable advance warning), so let's use that
as a basis for comparison.  This is for roughly three days of AHA stuff.
(The conference runs for four days, but the first day is minimal and the
last day looks rather light.)  There are really two days of technical
stuff.  Folks who are inclined to complain about value/dollar might object
to the Friday afternoon item of "Two-and-a-half hours of luxurious FREE
TIME".  (You pay for the free time as part of the conference cost,
right?:-)

For a very rough comparison, the last USENIX cost $150 for a full three
days of technical presentations.  AHA has two lunches and two dinners,
where USENIX has stuff at breaks (3 "continental breakfasts" and 3
afternoon liquids-only) plus one evening buffet-like event--this is either
a break-even or slightly in favor of AHA.  USENIX gives you the proceedings
with conference registration.  The USENIX presentations are short, but
there are a lot of them, and they have to do something to compensate the
authors, I assume.  (Anybody know what they get?)

I think Eric Henchal's idea of getting it under $100 is a little
ambitious, but I could see $150 as a reasonable target...and $210 is a lot
more than that.

One of the questions bearing on the comparison of conferences is whether
the conference is viewed as a fund-raising activity.  I don't think USENIX
_per_se_ is a fund-raiser...the tutorials might be, but they're separate.
I would hope that the AHA conference is not seen as a fund-raiser, because
they do other things (like the beer festivals) to raise money.
---
Dick Dunn	{ncar;ico;stcvax}!raven!rcd		(303)494-0965
			or	rcd at raven.uucp

Return to table of contents


Date: 19 Mar 89 23:33:12 MST (Sun)
From: hplabs!utah-cs!cs.utexas.edu!raven!rcd (Dick Dunn)
Subject: knowing where you are

Folks, we can do a lot to facilitate email for personal conversations with
a little care in addresses...Batte wrote:

> ...Although I can reach the network
> address MOST of the time, there are many of
> your home or commercial addresses which DO NOT
> link...

Part of the problem is that people don't necessarily know where they are!
The first thing to do is find out what your address is; the second thing
is to put that address in your signature, and religiously append that to
every piece of mail you send.  (I can't remember whether I appended my
signature to the last note I sent to `homebrew', but if I forgot, flame
away [by email:-] since I deserve it!)  The reason a signature is needed
is that even if your mail leaves you with a good return address, the
chances are high that it will get munged into uselessness if it crosses a
gateway.  Signatures, being text, aren't subject to the rewriting that
happens to the headers of mail.

People mistakenly assume that the mailing list operates on bitnet or
fidonet or uucp or whatever.  It doesn't; it comes by all manner of
combinations of networks.  That means you gotta have your act together
about giving an address.  It also means, alas, that there are some
addresses you'll never be able to reach because there are lots of bad
mailers managed by people who won't fix them, and these stand in your path.

I can give a few easy guidelines for a couple classes of addresses:
   - An address like joe at machine (with no "." in machine) is always wrong--
     this is a local address and is useless to the rest of the world.
   - If you can get to the machine `uunet', you can hand over a path for a
     uucp site (a "bang path", so called because the address is formed with
     ! as the separator).
   - If you can get to an internet machine, you can hand over a domain-style
     address (like fred at rock.boulder.edu).  Internet addresses are good if
     anything is.
   - Simple uucp addresses like raven!rcd are only useful for people who
     are on, or can get to, a machine with pathalias and routing software.
   - "UUCP domain" addresses, like rcd at raven.uucp, are technically wrong
     but have been made to work.
It would be nice if we had one standard form of address...but we don't.
We're no worse off than the rest of the [slightly] electronically-connected
world...which is small consolation.  Can someone tell us how to get to the
bitnet world, for example?

> By the way, Charlie Papazian and the AHA apparently are going to
> be available through a SIG on Compuserve soon.  I wish that they
> were simply tied into BITNET to participate in this forum which
> is obviously more active...

Well, yeah...BITNET or uucp or the Internet or...

Does anyone know more about this?  Why don't we see if we can at least
automagically gateway some of it into the mailing list.  It's interesting
that Charlie didn't try to do this, since there must be a couple dozen
people in Boulder who could have arranged it!
---
Dick Dunn	{ncar;ico;stcvax}!raven!rcd		(303)494-0965
			or	rcd at raven.uucp

Return to table of contents

---