UC Berkeley has finally started accepting electronic (PDF) thesis filing. The trees thank them. I remember, though, that shortly after I filed my (hardcopy) thesis, I quickly lost the ability to even regenerate the PDF from LaTeX sources: I didn’t have the right packages, some figures didn’t get tarred up properly, etc etc. And as far as trying to run the sizable chunks of software that I and others built and reported on…fuhggedaboudit.
But hey, with disk space being free now, if I was graduating now I would also “file” a copy of the VM images used to format my thesis and run the experiments. Some of my students are doing cloud computing research so some of their VM’s are already being stored as Amazon AMI’s, but why not snapshot a VM image of their laptop as well? We’d be one step closer to truly reproducible results in CS research.