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posted by martyb on Monday December 04 2017, @11:30PM   Printer-friendly
from the hope-they-archived-all-the-issues dept.

After the November 2017 issue, the Linux Journal will cease publication.

It looks like we’re at the end, folks. If all goes according to a plan we’d rather not have, the November issue of Linux Journal was our last.

The simple fact is that we’ve run out of money, and options along with it. We never had a wealthy corporate parent or deep pockets of our own, and that made us an anomaly among publishers, from start to finish. While we got to be good at flying close to the ground for a long time, we lost what little elevation we had in November, when the scale finally tipped irrevocably to the negative.


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  • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @11:50PM (17 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @11:50PM (#605406)

    When there's a Linux kernel installed in every teen girl's pants, you know Linus has achieved world domination.

    A techy magazine for filthy neckbeard basement dwellers is redundant at this point in time.

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  • (Score: 2) by crafoo on Tuesday December 05 2017, @12:17AM (9 children)

    by crafoo (6639) on Tuesday December 05 2017, @12:17AM (#605418)

    Yep, pretty much. Linux won the hardware war, if not the PC war. Intel is killing the PC in 2020 though so... yeah strange times. I like Linux but I've found I prefer BSD when I am allowed to escape the Windows machine.

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by janrinok on Tuesday December 05 2017, @09:23AM (8 children)

      by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday December 05 2017, @09:23AM (#605559) Journal

      I'm not sure that the PC will disappear quite as easily as you suggest, although I'm open to being convinced that I am wrong.

      When programming, I need a full size keyboard and a large screen or two. As someone who was trained to touch type, changing to a non-standard keyboard is not a trivial affair. I do not see tablets or even laptops replacing that quite so quickly, although of the two the laptop will stand the better chance. My guess is that PCs (i.e. computers in a tower case or smaller) will all but disappear in the home environment but that for many programmers and other technical areas the PC will become more specialised. Architects, aircraft designers, ship builders etc. will all want a multi-core (16/32 cores or more) computer with as much screen real estate as they can afford. The demand for raw computing power will continue to increase but will not be driven by the demand in the home - that demand is already easily met by today's offerings.

      Not everybody will be happy with a device that they can put in their pocket. I don't even own a smart phone or tablet - they don't offer me anything that I need. But the latest CPU offerings from AMD and Intel get me very excited about beginning to upgrade my PCs - in slow time - to new CPUs and motherboards. I program for a multitude of computer types, ranging from Raspberry Pi and Arduino to quad-core CPUs using 32GB of memory and 2TB of disk storage. I have, at various times in the past done this professionally, but now it is just for my own satisfaction or to support OS projects.

      In businesses, they need the ability to keep operating as efficiently as possible. A dead keyboard or a screen that suddenly goes blank can be quickly replaced and work can continue. Changing a laptop - while ensuring that all of the data since the last backup is still available - is just not good enough. If you leave it to the user to backup, it might simply never be done at all. And if the company wants to back it up, it has to be connected to their network. If it isn't going to be free to take home or away from the office, why stick with the smaller screen sizes of a laptop and their non-standard keyboards? And some companies are very protective about their proprietary software and they don't want it to go out of their control full stop! All of these problems can be solved, of course, but to a business that is extra expense when what they have today meets their needs perfectly well.

      All the different types of computing devices have their role to play. Tablets and laptops are an essential part of many business' IT infrastructure. But that doesn't mean that any of the other devices are no longer necessary or useful.

      I'm not yet convinced that the PC will just roll over and die quite the way some people think that it might.

      • (Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Tuesday December 05 2017, @12:27PM (1 child)

        by PiMuNu (3823) on Tuesday December 05 2017, @12:27PM (#605592)

        > My guess is that PCs (i.e. computers in a tower case or smaller) will all but disappear in the home environment

        But games have *always* driven the home pc market and for the foreseeable many still require beefy graphics cards. I don't see that changing.

        • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Tuesday December 05 2017, @01:22PM

          by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday December 05 2017, @01:22PM (#605604) Journal

          I agree to an extent, but dedicated games consoles do not require a computer tower. Perhaps a more specialised computer variant with the graphics capability of the latest beefy cards combined with the appeal of the games console will fill the gap? Maybe being upgradeable with respect to CPUs and/or graphics cards would also be an attractive option.

          Either way, I do not see the tower disappearing overnight, nor can I imagine that Intel will simply ignore a significant slice of the marketplace.

      • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday December 05 2017, @02:55PM (5 children)

        by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday December 05 2017, @02:55PM (#605643) Journal

        I need a full size keyboard and a large screen or two. As someone who was trained to touch type, changing to a non-standard keyboard is not a trivial affair. I do not see tablets or even laptops replacing that quite so quickly,

        It could. You're just not seeing it.

        What I hear you saying is that you need, just as I need, and many people need, a nice large comfortable workstation. Multiple nice big monitors. Nice keyboard and moose. Etc. Whether it is connected to a fixed box on the desktop, or to a dock that you put your phone into seems irrelevant.

        Imagine a few more years of computer improvements. It seems inevitable to me that pocket devices will have more compute power than today's desktops. At some point, the compute power in a pocket computer will be so high that desktop computers become the dinosaurs. (Not because desktops won't also improve, but because the improvement is irrelevant. A car that could do 400 mph doesn't make your life any better than a car that can "only" do 250 mph. Especially when everyone has a car that can do 250 mph and thus there is no novelty about it.)

        Imagine the benefits of everywhere there is a PC today, it is really a workstation with a pocket computer dock. Now you can sit down at ANY dock, in a hotel lobby or in your hotel room, at the library, at your friend's house, and drop in YOUR pocket device and have YOUR computer, development tools, etc at your fingertips on multiple big screen monitors.

        That kind of future doesn't seem so difficult to imagine to me. Never assume today's state of tech is the endpoint and that no further improvements will occur. Rather consider that things will improve radically and try to imagine how it could affect the ways people would use that power. What would be the natural shift in patterns of use? In 2000 who would have thought that everyone would use Linux powered HDMI sticks or very small boxes on their TVs to watch internet programming in their living room without a subscription to cable TV? Who would have imagined that smartphones and tablets would be sufficient to completely replace PCs for a portion of the population? (Not everyone, but definitely a noteworthy fraction.)

        --
        People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
        • (Score: 3, Insightful) by tibman on Tuesday December 05 2017, @06:49PM (3 children)

          by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday December 05 2017, @06:49PM (#605749)

          Imagine the benefits of everywhere there is a PC today, it is really a workstation with a pocket computer dock. Now you can sit down at ANY dock, in a hotel lobby or in your hotel room, at the library, at your friend's house, and drop in YOUR pocket device and have YOUR computer, development tools, etc at your fingertips on multiple big screen monitors.

          Walk around plugging your USB stick into random public computers. See how well this works to get a feel for your proposed future.

          The amount of computing power i need cannot be packed into a small device because the cooling solution alone exceed the physical dimensions. Hardware technology advances, yes, but so does the software (and thus the demand for more hardware). As a consumer you can use an under-powered consumer device. But developing the consumable takes significantly more hardware.

          Incremental hardware upgrades are a massive benefit of the desktop that somehow everyone waves away. I get a new graphics card roughly every 8 months or so as technology advances. Graphics cards are massive. Not because of the chips but because of the power and cooling to keep the chips running. Older graphics technology can be shrunk enough to fit in a phone but not the new stuff. The people that see their devices shrinking are people who are using yesteryear's technology.

          --
          SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
          • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday December 05 2017, @07:46PM (2 children)

            by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday December 05 2017, @07:46PM (#605779) Journal

            Walk around plugging your USB stick into random public computers.

            I am not talking about public computers. I am talking about public monitors, keyboard and mouse, with standard dock. No computer. YOU provide the computer. The public space merely provides a keyboard / mouse / monitor.

            The amount of computing power i need cannot be packed into a small device because the cooling solution alone exceed the physical dimensions.

            Yeah, I bet somebody once said that back when computers were WAY less powerful than present day smartphones.

            I NEED a souped up 486 with 100 MHz and 256 MB of memory dude! No pocket size device will ever match that!

            Older graphics technology can be shrunk enough to fit in a phone but not the new stuff.

            Somebody will be saying that again someday when today's graphics technology ALREADY IS shrunk and fits in a pocket. And I expect that someone said the same statement in the past.

            But you seem to miss my point that there will come a level where a pocket sized device provides all the power you need. I used the analogy of cars. At some point they became powerful and fast enough.

            --
            People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
            • (Score: 2) by tibman on Tuesday December 05 2017, @11:44PM (1 child)

              by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday December 05 2017, @11:44PM (#605891)

              Those pocket sized devices will be all you need to do old stuff. Your 720p TV will never do 4k. You have to buy new TV to do that. The PC won't die because if you want to keep doing the "new thing" then you'll need a PC. Gaming laptops are very expensive for a reason. You simply cannot get the same performance from a tablet form factor. Making new content for a 720p TV is not using new technology. Just like playing new phone games isn't using state of the art gaming technology. Some day a GTX 1080 Ti will fit into your phone. But PCs will all be using some crazy neural network card that creates quasi-sentient ai characters for your single-player RPG. Every plant and animal will be growing/decaying/breeding. Phones will be stuck using a shitty cloud version of the tech that burns through subscriber bandwidth and ai conversation stutter becomes a first world problem.

              Saying that at some point we have all the power we need is lacking imagination. Maybe you'll have all the power you need to do some existing task. Just like we could all still be watching 480p TV and listening to music on cassette tapes. But now you can watch 480p TV on a device the size of a cassette tape! Computing is not like cars. Speed is only one car metric. Cars have continued to get safer, lighter, and more energy efficient every year.

              --
              SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
              • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday December 06 2017, @04:17PM

                by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday December 06 2017, @04:17PM (#606182) Journal

                Maybe you'll have all the power you need to do some existing task.

                At some point the number of new tasks begins to drop off.

                Years ago, most people had all the computer they ever needed. For them, it wasn't that computers got more and more power, it was that the price got lower and lower. It would do email. Surf the web. Run a word processor. Watch videos online.

                For other users, computers reached a point of adequacy. It would run their business application. In fact, this is an argument that a large segment of desktop users already have adequate horsepower. All new business applications are web based applications. The place that changes your oil. The book store. The custom bakery software. Your accountant's software. The cabinet maker's custom software. In fact, there is a whole world of vertical market software that is virtually invisible but a gigantic market.

                I will go out on a limb: at some point, even gamers, will simply have more than enough horse power to play any game. Newer systems year over year won't bring any real advantage other than Apple like vanity and adolescent like bragging rights. I'm not saying we are at this point yet. But I will predict it will happen at some point.

                I used cars as an analogy No analogy is perfect. But the point was that a car that does 250 mph doesn't really improve your (or most people's) life over a car that does 90 mph. Therefore a car that now can do 400 mph still doesn't actually improve your life. The basic 90 mph car is good enough for the vast majority.

                If you truly are needing more and more computer power each and every year, then you are definitely an outlier and not the mainstream. There's nothing wrong with that. There are certainly applications, including probably games, which still require every drop of horsepower they can get.

                --
                People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
        • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Tuesday December 05 2017, @07:12PM

          by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday December 05 2017, @07:12PM (#605761) Journal

          It seems inevitable to me that pocket devices will have more compute power than today's desktops

          If, by a few more years, you mean until a completely new technology has been invented/discovered then you might have a point. But, as Tibman has stated in another response to your post, if you think that we are only a 'few years' away from shrinking today's graphics cards and 16 core CPUs into a tablet or handset that can run cool then I will argue that you are mistaken. What size of socket(s) will you have on this 'docking device' that will be able to feed 2 high resolution monitors at high frame rates? I'll also wager that this imaginary docking device will not be able to cope with calculating fluid dynamics in a useful timescale, simulating air flows around a racing car or an aircraft fuselage or lots of other things that my desktop is now able to do - after waiting many years for it to fall within the price range of the man in the street. Specialists will still need their specialist PCs and technology is not threatening to replace them any time soon. It may happen, but probably not in my lifetime, so the PC will still be around for just as long, IMHO.

  • (Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 05 2017, @12:36AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 05 2017, @12:36AM (#605424)

    When there's a Linux kernel installed in every teen girl's pants

    Ah, that's where Roy Moore, the Alabama child molester running for the Senate, wants to be.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 05 2017, @01:02AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 05 2017, @01:02AM (#605440)

      He's more of a burner phone type of guy.

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Tuesday December 05 2017, @01:52AM

        by Grishnakh (2831) on Tuesday December 05 2017, @01:52AM (#605462)

        I thought he'd be more of a landline phone type of guy. He probably doesn't even know what a smartphone is.

    • (Score: 5, Funny) by NotSanguine on Tuesday December 05 2017, @04:19AM

      by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Tuesday December 05 2017, @04:19AM (#605501) Homepage Journal

      When there's a Linux kernel installed in every teen girl's pants

      Ah, that's where Roy Moore, the Alabama child molester running for the Senate, wants to be.

      I always wondered why it was called "Moore's Law."

      I finally get it! Thanks AC!

      --
      No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
  • (Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Tuesday December 05 2017, @05:33PM (2 children)

    by kurenai.tsubasa (5227) on Tuesday December 05 2017, @05:33PM (#605719) Journal

    Kind of sucks now that women are finally calling out sexual harassment among the © Corporate Left™, doesn't it? Are you afraid that women might one day discover that there exists empowering software that does not require them to suck your patriarchy's dick (probably in a bathroom stall, nonetheless).

    Why not try seeing women as something other than sexual objects? Then you might see people who work on freedom-respecting software in some other way than as intimidating competition for your tiny, flaccid man-clitoris that must be relentlessly slandered. However, I know that you're even more intimidated by the idea of an empowered woman who does not need your assistance with her computer.

    Taking sexual potshots at men is surprisingly easy!

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 05 2017, @11:53PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 05 2017, @11:53PM (#605896)

      I can't think of a single someone who is tangled up in this mess who is connected to a worker-owned cooperative.

      The most "Left" person to get accused so far in the recent flurry is Garrison Keillor--who always ran a top-down/Capitalist (Right-Wing) operation.

      Perhaps you meant "Liberal" (someone who doesn't think Capitalism needs to be replaced but only thinks that Capitalists' wealth needs to be redistributed).

      -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

      • (Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Wednesday December 06 2017, @03:36PM

        by kurenai.tsubasa (5227) on Wednesday December 06 2017, @03:36PM (#606161) Journal

        Perhaps you meant "Liberal" (someone who doesn't think Capitalism needs to be replaced but only thinks that Capitalists' wealth needs to be redistributed).

        Ah yes, you're right. I did. Thanks.