Conference hydra::amiga_v1

    Who is Jerry Pournelle?
    
    ignorant of Reading
    :-)

>    Who is Jerry Pournelle?
    
A guy who writes great fiction.  Most of it for Byte magazine.

    He tries to make the ibmpc & Mac readers that Byte loves so much
    aware of "other computers" in addition to presenting a biased
    end user view of computing.  He loves the Atari ST, and has a history
    of dumping on the Amiga.  He now has a dealer demo Amiga 2000
    with a bridgeboard, harddisk, etc. from CBM.  And Amiga folks from BIX
    to help him understand how to use it :-)  But he still finds ways
    to dump on it.
    
    -Dave
    

re:.2
>>    Who is Jerry Pournelle?
>A guy who writes great fiction.  Most of it for Byte magazine.
                  ^^^^^ ^^^^^^^
I know this isn't a science fiction review note, but I beg to differ with
the above. I've read his fiction, and I sure wouldn't call it "great".
Maybe I've been missing the best of it, since I don't read his Byte column...

John O.

    I took a look at the article (it is in Analog, not IASFM), and it's
    about the use of computers in schools.  Mostly it raves about the
    Atari ST, but it does mention the Amiga at one point.
    
    len.
    

    
    Um, what's not too common knowledge is that Jerry's son and wife
    both are involved in companies that make or made products for the
    ST.  Now, I'm not accusing Jerry of nepotism, but he does rave on
    endlessly about the ST in a manner all out of proportion to how
    good it really is.

    Jerry, HA HA,
    Has he managed to get rid of his much loved eight-bit CP/M word
    processor yet (was it ZAC,or LUCRETIA or MARMEDUKE)? Or is that what
    the Atari is doing? 8^D
	I always had the impression that Jerry actually had techno-fear
    and all the science-fiction & Byte stuff was his Analyst's (no,
    not System) attempt at forcing him to face facts.
    	Anyway, the layout of one of his Byte articles is usually:
    1st paragraph: Oh boy, have we been busy at Cretin Manners, added six
    		rooms and spent the other 28 days unpacking FREE demo-stuff
    		to keep forever from my good friends at........
    2nd paragraph: Geez what a great game my wonderful friends at Vomit
    		S/W have come up with, runs on Grunthos, our monochrome,
    		64K, 8-bit, machine 2 MHz CP/M machine.
    3rd paragraph: This Amiga machine has a very poor word-processor
    		called XXXXXX, its spelling checker couldnt even find
    		the word Transveritabilizationality. This is indicative
    		of the quality of ALL S/W for this machine, you can
    		just tell.
    			..........................
    { more folksy us-users-against-the-known-computing-Universe stuff}
    			..........................
    last paragraph: Better quickly give short-shrift to heaps of good
    		stuff after spending most of the time talking about
    		my dog (who is a music teacher), the real estate situation
    		around Cretin Manners, the faucet I just repaired & oh
    		yes the computing junk I mentioned.

    {BTW (Bed the Wet), did they ever put BIX stuff on Amigas back into
    	Byte? I stopped reading in silent protest after that}
    
    John

    
         Everyone Please no Atari ST Bashing.  Some of us readers of
    the Amiga notes file are Atari owners unfortunately.  ;^)   The
    ST isn't really that bad, if it only had a decent OS, instead of
    a brain damaged one, it would be an excellent machine.
    
    Bill Powers

    
    Actually, the intent of this note was Jerry-bashing, which shouldn't
    offend anyone.   Except Jerry.  Which was the purpose of this note.
    
    

You forget the paragraph where he beats up on DEC for out unreadonable
keyboard.

    Who is jerry???
    
    
                                                      M.A.H
    

re .10

That reply was a little "unreadonable", if I understood that correctly :-)

- Z

    Re:  BIX in Byte.
    
    The mag stopped running Best of Bix months ago, but puts a BofB
    digest on its monthly listings disk corresponding to the disk format.
    I.E., Amiga digest on Amy diskette, IBM digest on PC diskette, etc.
    
    But the software!  In June, Byte came out with their revised, "open"
    (their word) benchmarks.  So, I sent off for the Amiga diskette,
    assuming that it would contain the Macintosh versions of the
    benchmarks, and Mac version Small C.  (Byte uses Small C to remove
    the effect of compilers from benchmark performance.)  Well, 6 weeks
    later, the disk comes with PC versions of the benchmarks, complete
    with lots of 8086 assembly language!  And not even reformatted from
    PC file format -- had to use TxEd to get rid of carriage returns
    and null padding!  A letter and a call to Peterborough produced
    no response whatsoever.
    
    (Finally a reader of the DEC Mac notesfile (where, as well as
    here, Amy- and Mac-bashing have been going on moderately) unpacked
    the Mac versions to plaintext files.)
    
    Add to this the multitasking article showing the cost of "Amiga
    Workbench 2000" as $1995, and the C compiler article showing Manx
    Aztec C only for the Mac.  In my opinion, Jerry's column is in there
    to show the influential readers of the magazine that if their machine
    does not run MS-DOS or is not a Mac, it must be on the fringe.
    
    Enough grumping.  I miss my old-style Byte.  For real entertainment,
    try to find a tape of the Boston Computer Society 10th anniversary
    meeting, about a year ago, with Jerry on a pundits' panel.
    
    Wes 

    One of the advantages of owning an Amiga is that there's tons and
    tons of PC and Mac lit that you don't have to look at.  Any junk mail
    that comes that has the word "PC" on the envelope you know you can
    forward directly to the fireplace.  Unfortunately, Byte fits into
    this category now, too.  Dr Dobbs' Journal is still pretty good, but
    a few months ago Mike Swaine stepped down as Grand Exalted Editor and
    was replaced by a guy who was an editor for Byte.  Makes you wonder 
    whether DDJ will be going the same route.  I don't think you can get 
    DDJ code on Amiga format disks.

    - Cliff

    The only decent science fiction Jerry produced was in conjunction
    with Larry Niven. 
    
    Though these days I'm of the opinion Niven's work without Pournelle
    is better than that of the combined efforts.
    
    As for Jerry's byte column - well it's amazing what people get paid
    for !
    
    I too  mourn Byte, I ceased buying it a few years back.
    
    	Mike
    

From:	ASHBY::USENET  "USENET Newsgroup Distributor  09-Sep-1988 1734"  9-SEP-1988 15:15
To:	@SUBSCRIBERS.DIS
Subj:	USENET comp.lang.misc newsgroup articles

Newsgroups: comp.lang.c,comp.lang.c++,comp.lang.misc,comp.sys.ibm.pc,comp.sys.apple,comp.sys.mac
Path: decwrl!amdcad!indra
Subject: Allen Holub on DDJ & C-Chest (long)
Posted: 8 Sep 88 18:05:29 GMT
Organization: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., Sunnyvale, Ca.
 
Xref: decwrl comp.lang.c:13074 comp.lang.c++:1677 comp.lang.misc:1905 comp.sys.ibm.pc:22418 comp.sys.apple:8019 comp.sys.mac:22863
 
 
I have been a casual reader of Dr. Dobbs Journal of Software Tools
for some time now. When I saw a recent issue of DDJ I noticed that
the C Chest column was missing. I wondered but did not think too
much about it - until I had the opportunity to meet Mr Allen Holub
in person at a UC Berkeley gathering.
	While speaking to him I found out that the disappearance of
the C-Chest had more to it than the casual (or even regular) reader
would know.  I did not think Mr Holub got a fair shake from DDJ so
I offered to post his final column for him.
	What follows are his own words, unedited. Like he says, feel
free to distribute it. The opinions expressed are Mr Holubs and do
not have any connection with me nor with my employers. Please treat it
as such. 
--
Indra K. Singhal                      
{ucbvax,decwrl,allegra}!amdcad!indra 
[email protected]                
----------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 6 Sep 88 17:12:18 PDT
From: [email protected]
 
Indra, Here's the editorial that I promised you at the Extension seminar.
I hope you find it entertaining. Feel free to spread it around.
	-Allen
 
The following editorial was supposed to appear in the August Dr. Dobbs
Journal. It did not. I'll let you read it and then make a few more comments.
 
--------------------------------------------------------------
Running Light
Allen Holub
 
This month's issue contains the last C Chest column. The decision to terminate
the column was made over my objections, and without any reason given to me.
In fact, the decision was so precipitous that two C Chests that I've already
written will not appear in DDJ. It's a decision that I can't say I'm very
happy about. I can only conjecture about the reasons for the termination,
so this editorial will discuss the economics of the publishing business.
You can draw your own conclusions.
 
You may not have know it, but you, the reader, are a commodity that a
magazine sells to its advertisers. A magazine, in the mind of a publisher,
exists only as a vehicle for advertisements, and it is in the interests of
the publisher to maximize the amount of advertisements. Enough editorial
material must be presented so that you'll buy the magazine, but that's the
only purpose of this material. (In fact, you may have noticed that the
percentage of DDJ that's devoted to advertisements has been getting larger
and larger.) In a programming magazine, the other thing that's for sale is
the code. The magazine can sell the code directly, or it can sell it indirectly
by giving it away in order to sell more magazines. Finally, it's in the
interests of the publisher to pay contributors as little as possible. A penny
saved is a penny earned.
 
How does all this relate to the C Chest? Well, first of all, the programs
in C Chest were significant (and useful) programs. Unfortunately, these
programs were sometimes relatively large (at least by magazine standards),
and the space used for listings can not be used for advertisements.  The fact
that looking at significant programs is a useful exercise, even if you're
not going to use the program itself, is immaterial. Similarly, the fact that
a large program may contain many useful subroutines is not germane.
Your needs don't count, as long as you continue to buy DDJ and read the ads.
Another economic issue is payment to the author. It takes time to write a
program. I was paid for the time it took to write an article, but the code
was developed on my own time for all practical purposes. Since I have to eat,
I would occasionally sell a program for a small amount of money (usually
$20-$30) in order to supplement the small amount I was paid by the magazine.
It was this supplementary money that made it possible to give you the quality
of code that I did. The printed listings were there for the majority of you,
who didn't need an entire program. The listings were available electronically
(often for less than the download costs) if you didn't want to type. Everybody
benefited. Money that I get by selling my own code, however, is money that
doesn't go into the coffers of M&T publishing, and the publisher is evidently
unwilling to pay for the development time required for even a small program
--at least that option was never presented to me.
 
As I said, you can draw your own conclusions. I am sorry to be giving
up the C Chest. It was fun. I especially enjoyed sharing my own code with you
and I hope that the programs were as useful to you as they were to myself.
I'm truly sorry to go. As they say in the village, "be seeing you."
 
---------------------------------------------------------------
... end of editorial. I want to add some more comments though:
 
First, DDJ is no longer a magazine "by" programmers.  There was
a time when programmers ran the magazine, but the people now in charge
are just MBA's with little or no real interest in programming or programmers
other than exploiting them to make a buck. The current publisher is an ex ad
man. As such, they have no real understanding of what's important to a
programmer, or what a useful program even looks like. For example, the last
(and unprinted C Chest) was a troff preprocessor that let you create drawings
with a WYSIWYG drafting program on an IBM-PC (it generates troff primitives that
could be imbedded in any troff document). Anyone who uses troff (and tries to
use PIC) immediateley understands how useful this program is, and a significant
percentage of DDJ's readers are Unix users. Moreover, as usual, there were
a lot of useful parts to the program--subroutines that would be useful in
many applications other than troff preprocessors. The editor didn't know
what he was looking at, however.
 
You can really see the problem in the column that replaced C Chest. It is
written by someone who, by his own admission, doesn't know the C language.
He spent most of the first column talking about pretty basic stuff that's
of little interest to someone who's as technically competant as most of DDJ's
readers. Since the current editor, Jon Erickson, has said publicly (on
CompuServe among other places) that he is not downgrading the quality of the
magazine, I can only surmize that he doesn't know enough to recognize quality
(or lack thereof) when he sees it.
 
I realize that the foregoing sounds bitter, but I'm pretty bitter about what
happended. I was fired in the sleazyest possible manner, for no reason and
without notice. (In fact, Ericson had had lunch with me a week earlier, and
he was telling me how much of an asset the C Chest was for DDJ, he then
turned around and fired me the next week without a word of explanation).
Moreover, my  readers were not told what happened---quite the contrary: the
last paragraphs of the new column (that replaced C Chest) imply that I left the
magazine on good terms and that I just wanted to move on to other things.
To my mind, this is an outright lie. It's not fair to me and it's not fair to
you, but it seems indicative of the level of honesty that's at work. It seems
likely that Erickson thought that if enough people found out what really
went on, that subscriptions might drop. To that end, please spread the word
about what happened. Your welcome to distribute this letter as you see fit.
 
	-Allen Holub

    
    Re -.1  An interesting note, thanks for posting it.
    
    I can add my own amusing story here... this illustrates what the
    magazine publishing business has become...
    
    A few years ago I purchased a 6 month subscription to Time magazine.
    The subscription cost something like $24.00.  As a gift, I received
    one of those bogus phone/clock/blender/microwave oven/lawnmower/garage
    door opener gadgets that they spit out in some godforsaken place
    where they eat housepets.
    
    I did not renew my subscription.  After receiving about a dozen letters
    pleading with me to reconsider, I actually received a long distance
    phone call from a gentleman representing Time magazine. 
    
    He tried every high pressure tactic in the book to get me to re-up,
    offering me a ridiculously low rate, and more free gifts.  I was
    so amused that I decided to play a game.  I wanted to see how much
    money Time would spend on a long distance phone call to try to get
    my lousy 24 bux.  
    
    I started discussing politics, religion, equal oppurtunity, Reagan, the
    Iran-Iraq war, anything that came to mind just to keep this guy talking
    and to keep his hopes up that I'd resubscribe.  I managed to keep
    him going for 20 minutes or so.  My wife was dying of laughter,
    since she knows full well what a complete jerk I can be when I set
    my mind to it.
    
    Of course I had no intention of resubscribing, and I never did.
    To this day I still receive 'special offers' from Time.  I guess
    their hyper-spatial galactic database still has me as a hopeful
    customer.
    
    Anyway, I try not to take it personally when major publications
    ignore my favorite computer.  I am now fully convinced, as .15
    illustrated, that the non-advertising content of most publications
    is purely coincidental.
    
    Ed.
                                        
    

Re: .17

Well, if Ed can confess his magazine subscription sins, so can I.

Last January, Byte Magazine sent me a "plu-ezee try a no risk,
no money down, trial subscription" card.

I thought, "Well, I use to read the 'Best of BIX' section in the
Bytes in the ZKO library, and I was pissed that they dropped the
Amiga section.  Since I cannot cancel the library's subscription,
this seems like an ideal chance to make myself heard."

I sent back the card.

The deal was that I would get a copy of the magazine, I would have
a month to look it over, and when the bill for the subscription came,
I could write canceled and owe no money if I was not absolutely
delighted.

Well, the bill came.  No magazine.  I waited (just suppose the next issue
was filled with Amiga articles: I couldn't just cancel without seeing it).

The magazine came.  Nil Amiga coverage.

I wrote "Canceled" on the bill, and enclosed a letter stating the
lack of Amiga coverage made subscribing to their magazine unattractive.

Two days after returning the first bill, I got a second bill.  It had a
general "Perhaps your forgot to send us our money" tone.  I wrote canceled
on the bill, and enclosed a second copy of my letter.

Two weeks latter, another issue of Byte.  Two weeks after that, a letter
carefully explaining that I owed them money.  I returned the bill marked
canceled, with a one line "Not enough Amiga coverage" in the margin.

I got four issues (and five bills) before Byte gave up.  The last bill
was in the "More in sorrow than anger we are canceling your subscription"
tone.

As it turns out, someone posted a story very similar to mine in comp.sys.amiga.
I guess that Byte just doesn't handle rejection well.

    Re .18:
    
    By any chance, does Byte handle its subscriptions through an outfit
    in Harlan, Iowa?  If so, it may be MONTHS before your subscription
    (or lack thereof) gets straightened out.  The Bozos in Harlan even
    went so far as to turn my son over for collection when we didn't
    pay for an unrequested second year of Omni magazine.

        This came over the Usenet today.  I thought that some folks here
        might be interested.
        
        Bob
        ================================================================
        
There already exists such a magazine (for almost 3 years yet!).  It is called
'The Amigan Apprentice and Journeyman'
It is published 6 times a year out of Hatteras NC.  Dick Barnes edits it
(and does a darn good job at it) from contributions from all over.  I
write a regular C column in it while Bill Hawes (of Conman and ARexx fame)
does an Assembly column.
 
Than magazine accepts no advertisements and does not pay authors.  It is
printed on 3 hole punch paper so that you can build a reference guide out
of it.  Additionally it gets an index once a year as part of the issue to
allow you to locate articles quickly.  Unlike other Amiga magazines, it
is possible to sit down and read it completely from cover to cover.
 
For those interested, the address is:
    The Amigans
     Box 411
     Hatteras, NC 27943
Rate is $24.00 a year.
 
Plus - they are ALWAYS looking for good articles.
--
 |_o_o|\\   John A. Toebes, VIII       usenet:..mcnc!rti!sas!toebes
 |. o.| ||
 | .  | ||  Coordinator of ...
 | o  | ||    The Software Distillery
 |  . |//     USnail: 235 Trillingham Ln, Cary NC 27513
 ======       BBS: (919)-471-6436