Elektor Electronics new website

people

article

;-)

I've never done it before but threw Februarys issue in the bin . Had hoped the exotically named Svetlana would be offering a similar vision for the mag'. Not so, (fishing mag out of rubbish) ...

Potentia. "Digital tool warns against sytem power failure" Multiband OFDM Alliance. PHY 1.0 spec. Medea+. MPUs fall foul of Moores Law. Medea+. "European R+D. Medea+. EU R+D cooperation. Altium. Easy 32 bit processor for FPGA. DiBcom. DVB-H mobile TV Silicon *** Peregrine Semicon. Silcon on Sapphire. PICMG (PCI) group. Advanced TCA compliant products. ARC International. New 'platforms'. Biotech wetware. Future Electronics. ADCs (trivia). Lattice semicon. FPGA digital screens. LPRA. Patient care.

These and other paid for advertising 'puffs', made up most of what's now become a trade mag'. The 'articles' were the usual, moronic, unreadable BS written by marketing people. Svetlana's taken the advertising shilling yet has the cheek to try and charge me £3.25. I'll give her a couple more issues before I cancel the magazine. regards john

Yes, these titles do sound like industrial press releases (which can be read for free in the trade mags).

Mind you, I don't envy her position.

The readers are dwindling because there are fewer people interested in stuff like amateur radio or making hi-fi. Professional outfits have got the resources to develop sophisticated products.

The writers are dwindling because fewer of them have the time or inclination to write for a pittance. After Hood died, there was only the lunatic fringe left.

In the days when a radio was something you could make yourself, you could fit an interesting article into a couple of pages and a circuit diagram.

These days you need reams of source code and a very long explanation!

On top of that, if anyone has a project they think others might be interested in, they can publish it on the web themselves.

I think we need to write a list of what we want to read, then wonder who is going to write it.

K.

different

Heh-heh! Touche'!

It's a myth that Linux comes primarily from unpaid programmers.

At LinuxWorld Thursday I met many Linux programmers who earn good salaries to make their contributions to free software.

Companies like IBM, Sun, Novell, Red Hat, HP, Intel, and CA, to mention a few, have large staffs of free-software programmers. There are many other places with small, but important software engineering contributors. We even have one at the Institute.

We can add Cisco to the list above, given that they have already converted more than 2,000 of their engineers to Linux desktops, and have plans to move many more laptop users to the platform over the next few years. They say the driver for Linux on the desktop for them is not cost savings, but easier support.

One thing that happens when a company has many Linux users is that the company becomes motivated to work on areas in Linux that can use improvement, or they add features they need, which often end up back in the community. While we can think of many features or changes Windows needs, there's no effective way to bring them about.

That's right. I guess it was your 'probably not "well paid"' comment that set me off. Software engineers at IBM, Sun, Novell, Red Hat, HP, Intel, CA, and Cisco, to mention a few places where massive Linux programming is done, are probably quite well paid. Linux development is serious business now.

These days, a lot of open-source developers are sponsored by the various distributions. probably not "well paid", but paid nevertheless.

What I said.

Good point. But be careful, satisfaction doesn't buy homes or put food on the table. Somehow I doubt that many Linux programmers are "overpaid." There's lots of competition in that field.

And soon the Indian outsourcing community will make inroads. But my guess is Indian that outsource managers do better when a software spec has been written, or verbally spelled out by a hiring-company's developers. So perhaps the offshore-programming approach will not work well with the expoding free-software initiatives.

In the case of Linux development, the idea-generators will rule.

Yes, I guess it all revolves around what one considers "well paid". Maybe I should have said "overpaid"

He is well paid who is well satisfied ...

Amen to every word of that.

....and has been for a decade.

Now there's a stretch!

Yikes! That sounds downright commie!

Nope. "Satisfied" smacks of "he's paid enough". i.e. communist.

How do you excuse "overpaid", as in Fred's comment:

Yes, I guess it all revolves around what one considers "well paid". Maybe I should have said "overpaid"

Programmers "overpaid" by whose standards? The politburo?

Sounds more like "Market Forces" to me. Written over 400 years ago.

.........................................................

I can't, in all honesty, take credit for that phrase. It was written by a guy in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, about 400 years ago :-)

I'd call that level "adequately paid". "Well paid", I would put at a level that enables a moderate degree of luxury in addition.

I agree with you there.

As long as the bean-counters don't get too much of a hold :-(

Well, almost any sentence can be distorted to mean something unlikely (it's normal practice with standards!). But 'satisfied' here surely means 'what he agrees is sufficient'.

But then you go on to say:

Maybe I should have said "overpaid"

Which is worthy of a Cossack hat.

Other way round. The recipient satisfied with the payment that has been agreed. That's bargaining. The basis of capitalism.