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Issue 32 is the last issue of Linux Voice as a stand-alone magazine as we have joined Linux Magazine. This newly merged magazine will bring the best bits of Linux Voice and Linux Magazine together into a single volume. All four of us Linux Voice founders will still be here contributing to the newly merged magazine – you'll find us in the aptly named Linux Voice section. We'll continue to write about the things that excite us in the world of open source software and we'll continue making our popular podcast.
Now that we're free of the day-to-day work of running the business, we can focus again on great technology. As well as us four, we're working with Linux Magazine to keep bringing great content to the Linux-using world, and this includes former contributors to Linux Voice.
The first issue of Linux Magazine done in tandem with Linux Voice (issue 193) is on its way to subscribers now and will be available in newsagents from 29th October 2016.
We're sure you've got a lot of questions, and we've tried to anticipate the most common ones below."
Frequently Asked Questions on the Linux Voice / Linux Magazine Merge:
- https://www.linuxvoice.com/merge/
- https://web.archive.org/web/20161028151636/https://www.linuxvoice.com/merge/
Which publications do you read to keep up to date with your own OS?
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Monday October 31 2016, @03:39AM
4-5 years ago I got maybe 5 magazines a month. Now I get Analog (for the stories), and Cooking Light (for the recipes)
Magazines I've dropped:
Car & Driver: I really miss this magazine. But after firing Csaba Csere they went from funny to serious, and I lost interest
Scientific American: Miss this one too, but a subscription snafu caused my 3 year renewal to take money from my bank with no magazines. Twice.
Forbes: Changed editors, renewal came around and I realized each magazine stayed in the "shit to read when I have time" pile.
Bon Appetit: I'm fat. I don't need a bunch of recipes that start with "take 2 sticks of butter and add flour". Tasty recipes, but I'm fat enough.
Linux Magazine: Realized I haven't written a Linux device driver since the 2.4 kernel, and the magazine wasn't helping.
Progression: Dunno what happened to this, it was always flakey. Had 2-3 magazines left but haven't seen a copy in 10 years or so.
Analog got a new editor a few months back, when renewal time comes up I'm on the fence about renewing it. Reading issues nowdays seems more like a chore to grind through instead of something I enjoy doing.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 31 2016, @03:53AM
Car & Driver was hilarious back in the '80s when David E Davis was running the show. It was like Sports Illustrated for car buffs - the writing was meant to entertain as much as to inform. He had a crazy stable of writers including P J O'Rourke and Jean Lindamood.
The Letters to the Editor section was great, people writing in usually tried to be funny and Davis would make snippy replies.
Then Davis took off to start a new venture with Automobile magazine, which specialized in luxury cars.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday October 31 2016, @12:07PM
Scientific American
The columns in the old days... I remember in the 80s there were a couple years (or maybe this is mythical and there was no overlap) where you'd have a Martin Gardner math column, a "computer recreations" column which boiled down to simple to implement experimental simulations resulting in emergent large scale something, and an amateur scientist column (which in the 80s was a sad, weak, low-T version of itself from the 60s). All in the same issue. And you'd get another in a couple weeks. That was some time to be alive!
The last editor of amsci got the republishing rights and has been selling a cdrom of the complete amsci collection for about a decade now. I have it, highly VLM recommended. Its still available, just a google away. Cheap too.
The MAA sells (sold?) a cdrom of all of Gardners columns AND books in various ebook formats for practically nothing if you play your discounts just right. Yeah yeah list price $100 or WTF and now marked down to $51 but I think way back when I got it I paid about as much for postage as the disk, some sort of purchasing deal combined with a sale combined with a coupon etc. Honestly it probably is about $100 worth of fun so no worries if you have to pay full price.
As for computer recreations, Dewdney is quite a character and I don't think theres any legal source of all the articles. There's some amazing mid 80s stuff in there.
I distinctly remember three directly related sci-am events.
One was getting a modern computer recreations magazine when as a kid before I officially in school knew about complex numbers and it was the Mandelbrot issue and using an 80s home computer and rom-basic using nothing other than that issue of sci am I wrote a complex number library in BASIC and then implemented a very naive mandelbrot render. Using interpreted basic it took hours to generate a modest resolution image. It was a lot of fun.
There's a 50s or so era AI article in mathematical recreations on the topic of making a tic tac toe playing machine that involved as many matchboxes as there are game states (correcting for reflection, maybe there were only 700 or so matchboxes?) and an algorithm for adding and removing marbles from the matchboxes to "teach" the state machine the right way to play tic tac toe. You could say it was a computer-free neural network. Which is weird because I think this was a 50s "perceptatron" era article or maybe it was the resurgent neural network fad in the 80s. Or it was reprinted in the 80s. Or at least I read it in the 80s. Anyway the point is I implemented this bastard of a project not in matchboxes and marbles but in interpreted rom-basic on an 80s home computer and creatively taught it to play against a slightly randomized version of itself, and it did learn rather quickly how to keep up with human players. It was kinda depressing, roughly a weekends work as a little kid to get this all working, then it worked and I'm done because really a tic tac toe computer is pretty Fing worthless even if the computer was AI or whatever.
Another experience back in Reagans first term or so, I discovered amsci column and attacked the microfilm readers at the public library for near an entire summer vacation, rows of microfilm machines with little old ladies doing genealogy research and one goofy little kid looking at hand drawn diagrams from the 60s explaining how to make home made electron microscopes and home made particle accelerators and my mouth hanging open. To this day I'm probably the only male under 65 to have ever used those microfilm machines. Bout then I decided when I was a big kid I'd make stuff like those columns. I have done stuff similar to that, however the sense of awe evaporates after investing say a couple hundred hours in a project and familiarity breeds contempt, well, sure to little me in 1982 making my own ham radio microwave radio gear would be kind of impressive but to me in 2016 sometimes its more a PITA than anything, well doesn't everyone program FPGAs and have a microscope with a camera and image analysis software and all that stuff? I mean, boring, man. I wonder if people submitting their life's work to the column in the 60s felt that way "here's my homemade plasma cutter, kinda boring but I thought you might like to see it anyway".