New magazine - LinuxFormat

[Bill Sconce]

On Thu, 06 Jan 2005 13:13:45 -0500
Cole Tuininga <colet at code-energy.com> wrote:

> On Thu, 2005-01-06 at 12:56 -0500, Bill Sconce wrote:
> > I was at Borders for lunch yesterday, a few minutes to read "free"
> > stuff (i.e., Python books from their shelves), and picked up a
> > copy of Linux Format.  Everything about it is true.  I plunked
> > down $15.  For a magazine.  
> 
> I'm very curious what convinced you that the price was worthwhile if you
> don't mind expounding on that? 


Oo.  I purposely kept the original post short, and I suppose the next issue
may disappoint (I certainly haven't SUBSCRIBED at their prices).  And I'm
not recommending that anyone else plunk down $15.  I only wanted to say
that I'd heard about the magazine, I looked at one for free over coffee,
it was worth looking at, as I'd been told.

But here's what happened.  I started reading, and found page after
page crammed full of stuff, MUCH more tightly written than Linux
Journal, stuff about half of which I'd heard about (I do try to keep up)
and another half which was new to me:

for page in magazine:
    if page == advertisment: continue
    
    for column in page:
        column.read()
        note_and_remark('Yeah, that's interesting, I knew about that.')
        column.read()
        note_and_remark('Oh, THAT's interesting, who knew?')
    # Time to turn page
    
    note_and_remark('I maybe ought to buy this magazine.  It's pretty good.')
    if observe('$15') > TOOMUCH: continue
    
    
# And that's how it went, clear down through a (large) cup of coffee.
# I kept observing, naturally, that $15 was more than I'd ever considered
# paying for a magazine.  Again and again I shrugged and turned the page.
# I didn't find _everything_ to be compelling, but even one item out of
# three would be way ahead of what's in our magazines (namely ads).  So
# I almost bought it several times, but not quite.  Until the end (to
which you may want to skip ahead)...
    
Traceback follows (ad pages omitted):
Page 3:
    didnt_know('Office of Government Commerce [UK] recommends Linux')
    knew('Magazine promotes Linux')
    didnt_know('Corporate Patron, FSF')   # Never heard of one before
Page 6:
    knew('Firefox launches with a splash')
    didnt_know('Spoofing attack vulnerability in tabbed browsing')
Page 7:
    knew('Novell to use patent portfolio to defend Open Source')
    didnt_know('Gambas - VB for Linux')   # And we have _perl_ wars??
Page 8:
    knew('Six desktop distro releases for Christmas')
    didnt_know('2.6 iptables DoS vulnerability, 2.4 not affected')
Page 12:
    knew("IBM's 36.01 Teraflop Blue Gene upstaged by Linux 'Columbia'")
    didnt_know('iRiver media players, Empower PDA based on Linux')

And so on.  (I'm looking at the magazine again now, page by page,
and it still does that for me.  You don't want to hear every page
tracedback (hey, go buy your own cup of coffee!) but it's that kind
of impression which made me post it.

And we haven't gotten to the articles.  Farther on it gets serious:
    A letter complains about an earlier article on JDeveloper, "clicking
    through odious licenses we don't really intend to keep is all a bit
    Windows, isn't it?", and the magazine answers, "Apologies.  That
    aspect of the review was misleading.  The software is available for
    free, but not for deployed .. software."  (They GET IT about Free.)
    
    Reviews
        Evolution 2.0  (Free, rating 8/10)
        Fedora Core 3  (Free, rating 9/10)
        Understand 1.4  (Proprietary, rating 8/10)
        SpamAssassin 3.0  (Free, rating 8/10)
        HP dx2000 P4/Celeron, value for money 10/10
        SUSE 9.2 Professional  ($$, rating 8/10)
        Cherry "Tux" Keyboard, includes SUSE 9.1  (value 10/10)
        Seapine SCM  ($$, rating 8/10)
        Doom 3  ($$, rating 8/10, multiplayer 6/10)  -- 6-page review (!)
        Foundations of Python Network Programming  (book, 6/10)
        Exceptional C++ Style  (book, 10/10)
        A Practical Guide to Red Hat Linux  (book, 8/10)
        Moving to the Linux Desktop  (book, 7/10)  "thankfully not in
          Gagne's more famous Cooking with Linux style, which would
          be rather overpowering for a book of this size"
        PHP and MySQL Web Development 3rd Edition  (book, 8/10)
        High-Tech Crimes Revealed  (book, 9/10)
    Roundup
        amaraoK - media player, 9/10
        Rhythmbox - media player, 7/10
        JuK - media player, 8/10
        Kaffeine - media player, 8/10
        XMMS - media player, 8/10
        Verdict, and cross reference
    HotPicks
        AutoScan network explorer (on the included CD)
        AfterStep window manager
        QEMU multi-CPU and system emulator
        OneFinger CLI-based GUI
        ClamAV anti-virus tool
        Bygfoot football management sim  (that's soccer, of course)
        Worms of Prey action game
        ReactOS open-source Windows clone
    And then into articles (we're only to page 64, halfway)
        Perl 6 and the Perl Foundation
        FINK
        64-bit computing - an 11-age article, with a sidebar at one point,
          "The [IBM] Xseries team has an Itanium box, and we are out to
          make sure Itanium doesn't survive" - Robert Amezcua, VP, IBM
        Real-time Linux (MontaVista) - 4-page article
        Novell - Indemnification and Open Source (2 pages)
        Are IT Managers Taking Security Seriously? (2 pages)
    Tutorials
        Added Extras For Your Browser - Firefox and Thunderbird, 4 pages
        Gallery Design using GIMP, PHP, and CSS - 4 pages
        KDE Development - 4 pages
        Practical PHP Programming - 4 pages
    Answers  ("If you are really stuck and the HOWTOs yield no good result")
        Upgrade or stick?
        External CDR (remember "cdrecord --scanbus")
        Camera tricks (ID should be 0x0a17, 0x0004; see http://www.teaser..)
        Boot magic (wants help with dual boot)
        PGP - a quick reference
        Sysadmin FAQ
            How do I create a new user?
            Can I give them a default password?
            Can I distribute authentication information?
            Can I stop users logging in?
            How do I set storage quotas?
            Can I limit the number of processes?  (ulimit)
            Can I limit CPU usage? ("fair scheduler patch, www.surriel.com..)
        Catux-USB confusion
        Dell and 54G
        Via drivers
        Intel only?
        Loaded laptop
        Burn time
        Account Admin (Rackspace)
        Server is sluggish (Rackspace)
        USB Storage
          Pen drives, unit numbers changing, hotplug woes I have suffered
          myself, and have suffered while trying to teach a class - an
          up-front-and-personal issue.  A good explanation, which would
          have saved me more than two days of my own time if I'd had the
          magazine when I was trying to get USB working.
          
          It was at this point that instead of
        
          if observe('$15') > TOOMUCH: continue
          
          it was
          
          break     # That does it.  It IS worth $15.  I'm outta here.


YMMV, but I promise that the cup of coffee will be worth it.