Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!nosc!ucsd!rutgers!att!whuts!homxb!ho7cad!ho5cad!wjc From: wjc@ho5cad.ATT.COM (Bill Carpenter) Newsgroups: comp.misc Subject: Re: R.I.P. BYTE: Open Letter to The Editor Message-ID: Date: 2 Aug 88 14:03:44 GMT References: <6646@well.UUCP> Sender: nuucp@ho7cad.ATT.COM Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories Lines: 37 In-reply-to: ewhac@well.UUCP's message of 28 Jul 88 04:57:24 GMT In article <6646@well.UUCP> ewhac@well.UUCP (Leo 'Bols Ewhac' Schwab) writes: > Unfortunately, I am of the opinion that, of late, your magazine has > not kept up with these changes. What was once a wonderfully diverse and > interesting publication has, in my view, degenerated into a Mac and IBM > proselytizer. You have, in editorials, vigorously denied that you have > lost your diversity. However, one needs only to look at the editorial > balance of your articles over the past three years to know that you have > heavily curtailed non-Mac and non-IBM material. > One place that tired PC fan magazine hasn't lost its diversity is in the "Programming Tips" (or tricks or whatever it is called) and the letters to the editor. To keep up the variety, these appear to be selected by a first-year Computer Science student. Does anyone else find it a bit aggravating to read/flip past articles like "The Turing Machine" (late '87), or the apparently unending series of articles on allegedly new sorts and searches for degenerate special cases? My most recent favorite letter to the editor goes on at length about how it will at least a few years before it becomes economically feasible to have virtual memory on any desktop machine (due, apparently, to several shortcomings in the fields of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science that will eventually be solved through innovation by Intel and Microsoft). Not that this sort of stuff doesn't have a place. There are plenty of folks sitting around thinking things like, "I agree with Pournelle. Why would I want multitasking?" Those folks probably don't have the reference materials (apparently due to a Microsoft documentation shortage which will eventually be solved through innovation) to judge whether a technical article is worth reading by asking if it can be replaced by the phrase: "See Knuth, vols I-III". Hint for people who find _Byte_ educational: :-) -- -- Bill Carpenter att!ho5cad!wjc or attmail!bill