Says t'mo:
Apparently you disagree. Why?
It's hard for me to come up with too many concrete examples,
because I threw all my issues of the magazine away, and
because towards the end I threw it away without reading it.
My recollection is that there were a lot of articles that were heavy
on buzzwords and short on technical information. One
issue I got was entirely devoted to ERP. But there was
no explanation of what ERP was. (It turns out that it
stands for "Enterprise Resource Planning" and has something to do
with inventory control.)
One day I said to myself "OK, I'm going to sit down and
force myself to read one of these articles all the way
through, to find out what it's about. But it wasn't
about anything; it was just blather. Afterwads it reminded
me of that episode in Richard Feynman's memoirs where he's reading
some paragraph-long sentence like "The individual
member of the social community often receives information
via visual, symbolic channels" and he eventually figures
out that it means "People read."
The ERP stuff was unusually heinous, but not out of character
with the rest of the magazine. Each month it would
arrive and clutter
my doorstep with a lot of blah-blah.
One particularly crapulent article that stands out in my
memory was an article about "distance education" which is
when people take college courses via video and submit their
assignments via email. This is something I am interested
in, and I looked forward to the article because it was advertised
as having the results of the authors' research into the efficacy
of distance education. But when I acutally read the article,
it turned out that this so-called 'research paper' contained no
actual research whatsoever---they had gone to few
undergraduates and asked them whether they
thought it had been
effective.
Even when the articles were on topics I found interesting,
there usually wasn't much of substance to be found.
I asked in comp.org.acm whether there was something
I was missing, and a surprising number of people agreed with me.
For example:
It's no Dr. Dobb's Journal, that's for sure. CACM's current
editorial policy seems to me unfocussed, insufficiently technical,
and too accepting of inconsequential vague generalizations.
In my opinion you'd probably be much better off investing in a
subscription to Economist magazine.
Hope this helps.
--
Mark Dominus
Perl Paraphernalia
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