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Re: Linux magazine
Hi, Ira Abramov!
On Fri, Jan 14, 2000 at 01:45:49PM +0200, you wrote the following:
> > I'm looking for a *good* Linux magazine to subscribed to,
> > any recommendations ?
>
> Linux Journal is one of the oldest, and is very professional in its
> professional articles, nicely balanced with some "community" articles
> trickled, and a nice help section.
I was subscribed to Linux Journal for two years; this February my
subscription runs out and I'm not going to renew it.
In my opinion, Linux Journal has stooped too low on the Linux advocacy
front. Just look at its recent "LJ Index" column in UpFront. They
apparently try to emulate the Numbers column of Time Magazine or
something like that. In the December 1999 issue they publish
well-known numbers about the dominance of Apache on the Net. How's
that for news. In the November issue, they conclude their list with
three "gematriot" -- the sums of ASCII codes for "Bill Gates III",
"Wnidows 95" and "MS-DOS 6.31" are 666. YeZ!!!!!11 (Why don't you grow
up a bit?) And the last number on that list is "Amount of money
donated by ex-Microsoft employee Bruce McKinney, to help legalize
marijuana in Washington state: $100,000 US". What the fsck is this?!?!
This is just a digest of what's going on in there. In my opinion this
journal is no more suitable for persons aged over 13. Besides that,
the "best of technical support" is anything but (example: "I get
connection refused when I try to telnet in! this is what I have in
inetd.conf: ..." "well, check out that inetd is indeed running." Wow,
what an insight!), "New Products" lists exclusively closed-source
software (really, it's only missing an "Advertisement" fine print on
the top to make it perfect), and generally apart from a few worthy
technical articles, the publication stinks of simplicity and
"consumerism", much like PC Magazine and most other computer mags, if
you know what I'm talking about.
Sad, but this looks like the path which all the computer magazines
eventually walk down. It has happened to Byte, it has happened to
Wired, and it has happened to the Linux Journal. Perhaps Linux
Magazine is worth checking since it's new and may still have the chic
that attracts the geeks, not the consumers, that we are.
--
Alex Shnitman | http://www.debian.org
alexsh@hectic.net, alexsh@linux.org.il +-----------------------
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