Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!uflorida!novavax!proxftl!bill From: bill@proxftl.UUCP (T. William Wells) Newsgroups: comp.misc Subject: Re: R.I.P. BYTE: Open Letter to The Editor Summary: Some good words for BYTE Message-ID: <661@proxftl.UUCP> Date: 29 Aug 88 08:31:15 GMT References: <6646@well.UUCP> <5479@ecsvax.uncecs.edu> <717@mcrware.UUCP> <606@unh.UUCP> <6756@well.UUCP> <1909@looking.UUCP> <513@afit-ab.arpa> <479@Aragorn.dde.uucp> <3047@teemc.UUCP> Reply-To: bill@proxftl.UUCP (T. William Wells) Organization: Proximity Technology, Ft. Lauderdale Lines: 88 Expires: Sender: Followup-To: Distribution: Keywords: In article <3047@teemc.UUCP> wayne@teemc.UUCP (/\/\ichael R. \/\/ayne) writes: : [A lot of BYTE trashing] My first comment is that a lot of what he says is just plain noise: it isn't true of BYTE. Please, guys, if we are going to bash at someone, lets do it for the right reasons! : USENET? What's that? Must be some newfangled thing that some new : company dreamed up. They're not that stupid. : The editors at BYTE can not be expected to keep up : with every new product that comes along, you know. It takes a lot of : time to chase down all those C compilers for MS-DOS and write those : clone articles. Bull. As you ought to know, they *do* make quite an effort to keep up with the industry. Call them up some time and ask them about Usenet. If you get the right person, I'd imagine that he could tell you things *you* don't even know. Keep in mind that they can't publish even a *tiny* minority of the things that can be published. As for why Usenet isn't mentioned: ask yourself what percentage of the personal computer *hackers* are on Usenet. (My guess is less than a percent.) Never mind the computer *users*. : Oh, it's a network you say? Well, they never got the : free AT-compatible card, software, manual and cables to hook it up on the : 47 PCs in the office (or maybe it got lost in the mail?). Oh, a conferencing : type network. Well, they know all about that. After all BYTE was responsible : for the finest, best, most user-driven, most revenue-generatig (oops, strike : that) conferencing network around: BIX! EVERYone knows that there is : nothing better than Bix! Why USENET probably doesn't even RUN on a PC/AT. : Who could possibly be interested in it? After all, if Jerry didn't write : about it in his column, it can't be worth much. 1/2 :-) You can't be serious. Obviously you aren't. You know and I know that they aren't that dumb, or that ignorant. So why do you expect us to take this criticism seriously? And if you didn't, why did you post? : Well, considering that their market segment is PC-based (And this : month, we spend 150 pages teaching you how to identify which type of clone : you are looking at from 50 paces), why should they care if they have abandoned : the type of people who are responsible for the magazine being in existance? Look, they are in business to inform their readers, who are no longer just those who brought the magazine into existence. *Of course* they are going to shift their focus, since their reader have changed. It is legitimate to complain that the magazine no longer fills *your* needs. And to change magazines if they don't listen. It is not legitimate to comdemn them for it. : After all, they already got OUR money, they need to pump more hype to get : the new suckers, er, subscribers to pay them. Gotta be careful, don't : want to scare off those new users with any big words. Gotta run another : clone article this month, that'll sell more on the newsstands. Oh, don't be silly. If they weren't serving their existing readers, they'd be getting so many cancellations that their parent company would tell them to change. : > 3) They have no good arguments against what we say. : How can you argue against the truth? We don't like what the rag : has become. When a 350 page magazine takes < 20 minutes to read, the : information content must be pretty low. For you. And for me as well, but I'm not going to condemn them for it. I'll just read a lot of other magazines as well. --- On the more positive side, you might recall that I posted a gripe about a review they did of a product of ours. Well recently, they did a review of another one, Choice Words, a combination dictionary (you know, the thing with definitions) and thesaurus. (And yes, part of the product contains some of my work: the initial database structure for the thesaurus, and project leading for some of the thesaurus maintenance.) Well, I found *nothing* to complain about. Not even a minor quibble. And they complained about one aspect of the product. Correctly. Good for them. --- Bill novavax!proxftl!bill