5 ms·

Would that this were true. There just isn't anything on the web that compares. (or if there is, please please tell me!) After writing my comment I did some re

Would that this were true. There just isn't anything on the web that compares. (or if there is, please please tell me!) After writing my comment I did some research and found this: http://www.halfhill.com/bytefaq.html http://www.halfhill.com/bytefaq.html It turns out that BYTE was shut down because it didn't focus on WinTel enough - which was the dominant platform at the time (late 90's). I had always suspected this. It wasn't some overt conspiracy though. Byte had above average circulation for a computer magazine, and far higher resubscription rates. The problem was that because it didn't cater to a specific well defined segment of buyers, it was less appealing to advertisers. Given that so much of the web is advertising driven, I don't see how it's immune from this. There can be a huge number of people who want a source of well written broad ranging tech material but it's the advertisers who fund the web and they don't want broad ranging. They want people neatly divided up into predictable segments of buyers. What gets funded on the web isn't determined by what users want - it's what advertisers will pay for.

kragen 16y ago
> There just isn't anything on the web that compares. (or if there is, please please tell me!) The breadth and depth of well-written technical information available on the web is far, far beyond what was available in Byte in its heyday. Consider: http://lwn.net/Articles/428530/bigpage http://lwn.net/Articles/428530/bigpage http://www.airs.com/blog/archives/category/programming http://www.airs.com/blog/archives/category/programming http://hackermonthly.com/issue-10.html http://hackermonthly.com/issue-10.html http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/ http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/ http://prog21.dadgum.com/ http://prog21.dadgum.com/ http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/ http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/ http://diveintomark.org/ http://diveintomark.org/ http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/ http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/ http://www.facebook.com/Engineering http://www.facebook.com/Engineering http://research.google.com/video.html http://research.google.com/video.html http://rentzsch.tumblr.com/ http://rentzsch.tumblr.com/ http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/ http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/ http://www.exampler.com/blog/ http://www.exampler.com/blog/ The big difficulty these days is not getting access to well-written, broad-ranging tech material; it's choosing which well-written, broad-ranging tech material you want to read out of all the immense quantity of material out there, and avoiding spending all of your time reading it. Services like HN, Reddit, Digg, Facebook, Delicious, and Slashdot basically exist to solve this filtering problem (although not, obviously, limited to the tech press). > What gets funded on the web isn't determined by what users want - it's what advertisers will pay for. That's true, but fortunately it's irrelevant, because what gets written about on the web isn't determined by what gets funded—it's what people want to write about.
- rbarooah 16y ago
  I respectfully disagree with you. There is obviously a far higher quantity of technical 'information' on the web, but almost none of it reaches the standards of the professional writing that was done by Byte. The articles I see on the sites you list are typically narrow, sensationalist, or self-serving. Some of them are informative but most of them lack perspective, and many of them are written to gain votes on these sites, which are themselves advertising driven. There are notable exceptions, HN obviously, and LTU for example. But most of what gets posted on HN is junk. Hacker Monthly is a gorgeously executed but frankly it reads like an 80's fanzine, and LTU is great but super-narrow. What you may not be aware of is that a well written technical magazine article takes weeks of research writing and careful editing, not to mention interviewing experts and preparing of graphics. Professional writers add breadth and perspective gathered from multiple domain experts and synthesize it to produce something with added value. That kind of activity only happens when there are professionals who are skilled and able to do it. Just wanting to write about stuff isn't enough. We do get some good stuff on business written by independently wealthy ex-entrepreneurs, and some deeply technical stuff written by domain experts, but we've lost perspective and sadly social news sites don't magically bring it back. They can only filter what actually gets produced. I would link you to some of the articles I am referring to, but whoever owns byte.com now has taken the archive off-line. Don't get me wrong, I'm not dissing the web - it's added a lot. But it's also taken stuff away that it hasn't replaced so far, and the everything is free but ad-supported model has a lot to do with that.
  - kragen 16y ago
    > The articles I see on the sites you list are typically narrow, sensationalist, or self-serving. I'm shocked that you would say that about LWN, or Ian Lance Taylor's blog, or Landon Dyer's blog, or James Hamilton's blog, or Google Research Videos. It's so far from reality that I feel compelled to ask if you've actually read them. > many of them are written to gain votes on these sites, which are themselves advertising driven. Or that. I mean, maybe Mark? Or Gruber? But can you seriously see James Hamilton or James Hague or Raymond Chen or LWN writing an article "to gain votes on these sites"? I mean, come on. > But most of what gets posted on HN is junk. True. But Byte published less than one article per day, and only a minority of its articles were of the high quality that we're talking about here. > What you may not be aware of is that a well written technical magazine article takes weeks of research writing and careful editing, not to mention interviewing experts and preparing of graphics. Professional writers add breadth and perspective gathered from multiple domain experts and synthesize it to produce something with added value. Well, I haven't written for Byte, but my limited experience writing magazine articles falls pretty far short of what you're describing there. Byte did have some pretty good stuff, it's true. But as often as not, professional writers synthesize those perspectives with errors and FUD. And I'd like to point out that in http://web.archive.org/web/20050101022330/http://www.byte.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20050101022330/http://www.byte.co... there were three articles written by Ernest Lilley in, I believe, the same month. So I think "weeks" may be an overestimate of how much time was normally spent on an article. Maybe in 1998 or something they had a much larger staff? Looking at November 1997: http://replay.waybackmachine.org/19980204071948/http://www.byte.com/art/9711/9711.htm http://replay.waybackmachine.org/19980204071948/http://www.b... This was close to Byte's peak of the 1980s. Yet what do we find? A 20-paragraph article cluelessly claiming that autoconf "neatly eliminates this work [of porting software between Unix variants]" and that most "public-domain software packages" use autoconf; an in-depth article about classes of ATM service by a guy who writes books about ATM and TCP/IP that somehow neglects to mention how people in the TCP/IP world solve the same problems, and fails to note the degree to which ATM and TCP/IP were increasingly in competition, to the point that ATM is today a minor niche physical-layer protocol; an editorial in favor of standardizing Java; reviews of 26 new MMX laptop models; a one-paragraph article about delays in the shipment of Tillamook; a competitive review article of cryptography software that pits PGP against Netscape and Microsoft Outlook; a competitive review article of web server software that reviews Microsoft IIS and Netscape SuiteSpot, but somehow failed to include Apache (despite noting that it was the market leader); an evaluation of the new Number Nine graphics card; and so on. The vast majority of this stuff is of essentially no lasting value. And, while competitively testing 26 models of laptop against each other may be expensive (well, I'm guessing that the vendors footed the hardware bill), it's not really in the same ballpark as http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/hybrid-incremental-mysql-backups/10150098033318920 http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/hybrid-in... or http://lwn.net/Articles/429086/ http://lwn.net/Articles/429086/ or http://www.airs.com/blog/archives/464 http://www.airs.com/blog/archives/464 or http://prog21.dadgum.com/87.html http://prog21.dadgum.com/87.html or http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2011/03/02/10135747.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2011/03/02/10135... — the closest current equivalent would probably be stuff like http://www.anandtech.com/show/4207/asus-g73sw-third-times-the-charm http://www.anandtech.com/show/4207/asus-g73sw-third-times-th.... > We do get some good stuff on business written by independently wealthy ex-entrepreneurs, and some deeply technical stuff written by domain experts, but we've lost perspective… Can you elaborate on what you mean by "lost perspective"?

kragen 16y ago

> There just isn't anything on the web that compares. (or if there is, please please tell me!) The breadth and depth of well-written technical information available on the web is far, far beyond what was available in Byte in its heyday. Consider: http://lwn.net/Articles/428530/bigpage http://lwn.net/Articles/428530/bigpage http://www.airs.com/blog/archives/category/programming http://www.airs.com/blog/archives/category/programming http://hackermonthly.com/issue-10.html http://hackermonthly.com/issue-10.html http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/ http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/ http://prog21.dadgum.com/ http://prog21.dadgum.com/ http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/ http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/ http://diveintomark.org/ http://diveintomark.org/ http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/ http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/ http://www.facebook.com/Engineering http://www.facebook.com/Engineering http://research.google.com/video.html http://research.google.com/video.html http://rentzsch.tumblr.com/ http://rentzsch.tumblr.com/ http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/ http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/ http://www.exampler.com/blog/ http://www.exampler.com/blog/ The big difficulty these days is not getting access to well-written, broad-ranging tech material; it's choosing which well-written, broad-ranging tech material you want to read out of all the immense quantity of material out there, and avoiding spending all of your time reading it. Services like HN, Reddit, Digg, Facebook, Delicious, and Slashdot basically exist to solve this filtering problem (although not, obviously, limited to the tech press). > What gets funded on the web isn't determined by what users want - it's what advertisers will pay for. That's true, but fortunately it's irrelevant, because what gets written about on the web isn't determined by what gets funded—it's what people want to write about.

rbarooah 16y ago
I respectfully disagree with you. There is obviously a far higher quantity of technical 'information' on the web, but almost none of it reaches the standards of the professional writing that was done by Byte. The articles I see on the sites you list are typically narrow, sensationalist, or self-serving. Some of them are informative but most of them lack perspective, and many of them are written to gain votes on these sites, which are themselves advertising driven. There are notable exceptions, HN obviously, and LTU for example. But most of what gets posted on HN is junk. Hacker Monthly is a gorgeously executed but frankly it reads like an 80's fanzine, and LTU is great but super-narrow. What you may not be aware of is that a well written technical magazine article takes weeks of research writing and careful editing, not to mention interviewing experts and preparing of graphics. Professional writers add breadth and perspective gathered from multiple domain experts and synthesize it to produce something with added value. That kind of activity only happens when there are professionals who are skilled and able to do it. Just wanting to write about stuff isn't enough. We do get some good stuff on business written by independently wealthy ex-entrepreneurs, and some deeply technical stuff written by domain experts, but we've lost perspective and sadly social news sites don't magically bring it back. They can only filter what actually gets produced. I would link you to some of the articles I am referring to, but whoever owns byte.com now has taken the archive off-line. Don't get me wrong, I'm not dissing the web - it's added a lot. But it's also taken stuff away that it hasn't replaced so far, and the everything is free but ad-supported model has a lot to do with that.
- kragen 16y ago
  > The articles I see on the sites you list are typically narrow, sensationalist, or self-serving. I'm shocked that you would say that about LWN, or Ian Lance Taylor's blog, or Landon Dyer's blog, or James Hamilton's blog, or Google Research Videos. It's so far from reality that I feel compelled to ask if you've actually read them. > many of them are written to gain votes on these sites, which are themselves advertising driven. Or that. I mean, maybe Mark? Or Gruber? But can you seriously see James Hamilton or James Hague or Raymond Chen or LWN writing an article "to gain votes on these sites"? I mean, come on. > But most of what gets posted on HN is junk. True. But Byte published less than one article per day, and only a minority of its articles were of the high quality that we're talking about here. > What you may not be aware of is that a well written technical magazine article takes weeks of research writing and careful editing, not to mention interviewing experts and preparing of graphics. Professional writers add breadth and perspective gathered from multiple domain experts and synthesize it to produce something with added value. Well, I haven't written for Byte, but my limited experience writing magazine articles falls pretty far short of what you're describing there. Byte did have some pretty good stuff, it's true. But as often as not, professional writers synthesize those perspectives with errors and FUD. And I'd like to point out that in http://web.archive.org/web/20050101022330/http://www.byte.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20050101022330/http://www.byte.co... there were three articles written by Ernest Lilley in, I believe, the same month. So I think "weeks" may be an overestimate of how much time was normally spent on an article. Maybe in 1998 or something they had a much larger staff? Looking at November 1997: http://replay.waybackmachine.org/19980204071948/http://www.byte.com/art/9711/9711.htm http://replay.waybackmachine.org/19980204071948/http://www.b... This was close to Byte's peak of the 1980s. Yet what do we find? A 20-paragraph article cluelessly claiming that autoconf "neatly eliminates this work [of porting software between Unix variants]" and that most "public-domain software packages" use autoconf; an in-depth article about classes of ATM service by a guy who writes books about ATM and TCP/IP that somehow neglects to mention how people in the TCP/IP world solve the same problems, and fails to note the degree to which ATM and TCP/IP were increasingly in competition, to the point that ATM is today a minor niche physical-layer protocol; an editorial in favor of standardizing Java; reviews of 26 new MMX laptop models; a one-paragraph article about delays in the shipment of Tillamook; a competitive review article of cryptography software that pits PGP against Netscape and Microsoft Outlook; a competitive review article of web server software that reviews Microsoft IIS and Netscape SuiteSpot, but somehow failed to include Apache (despite noting that it was the market leader); an evaluation of the new Number Nine graphics card; and so on. The vast majority of this stuff is of essentially no lasting value. And, while competitively testing 26 models of laptop against each other may be expensive (well, I'm guessing that the vendors footed the hardware bill), it's not really in the same ballpark as http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/hybrid-incremental-mysql-backups/10150098033318920 http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/hybrid-in... or http://lwn.net/Articles/429086/ http://lwn.net/Articles/429086/ or http://www.airs.com/blog/archives/464 http://www.airs.com/blog/archives/464 or http://prog21.dadgum.com/87.html http://prog21.dadgum.com/87.html or http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2011/03/02/10135747.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2011/03/02/10135... — the closest current equivalent would probably be stuff like http://www.anandtech.com/show/4207/asus-g73sw-third-times-the-charm http://www.anandtech.com/show/4207/asus-g73sw-third-times-th.... > We do get some good stuff on business written by independently wealthy ex-entrepreneurs, and some deeply technical stuff written by domain experts, but we've lost perspective… Can you elaborate on what you mean by "lost perspective"?