At a Crossroads: peer review

Recently, it seems that there is a growing number of complaints coming out of academia regarding getting work published at good venues and the importance of having a high publication count. I am sure many of us have heard the phrase "publish or perish" before. In fact, there has been a case of a professor leaving his field of research (http://www.cs.utah.edu/~michael/leaving.html) over these issues. He criticizes the peer review process as being both fallible and corrupt in his explanation of why he left. He also discusses what he believes to be misplaced importance that many people have put on publishing at top conferences.