Kymermosst's Journal: IEEE Spectrum, November 2007

From the you-have-got-to-be-shitting-me department:

The cover of IEEE Spectrum has a photo of CmdrTaco and the cover story is all about "The Slashdot Supremacy," "How a Michigan geek tamed the online masses."

Are you fucking kidding me? Of all the different things the "magazine of technology insiders" could have dreamed up to use as a cover story it's a story about Slashdot? Yeah, Slashdot is fun and all, but hardly worthy of cover story attention. Most of the engineers I know and/or work with don't read it, and they are some of the most brilliant people I know.

Slashdot is worthy of a story, but not worthy of a cover story in Spectrum, if you ask me..

(Funny enough, Slashdot is giving me 503 errors as I try to post this..)

hmm

[artifex2004]

Maybe they're turning into Wired. The older Wired, where most stuff was still interesting :)

The biggest problem with periodicals is the period

[Degrees]

It's easy to criticize periodicals for lame content, because they usually do come up with lame content. But it is fair to factor in why they come up with lame content. They do face the impossible to fill void, where yesterday's material is so much bird cage lining, and tomorrows deadline is fast approaching. And they can't really just run last month's story over again (and again. and again.)

The old cliche is "better to keep you mouth shut and let people wonder if you are a fool, than to open it an remove a

Re:The biggest problem with periodicals is the per

[Kymermosst]

It just strikes me that the monthly publication from the biggest professional society for engineers can't seem to find something better to write about. Of the hundreds of working groups, the various societies, and new and emerging technologies, they couldn't find a topic that was more interesting than Slashdot?

Sure, there is engineering merit to Slashdot's moderation system, but other than that Slashdot doesn't really have any relationship to engineering that is of general interest, if you ask me.

But, I do

Re:

[Degrees]

To be clear, I 100% agree with you - there have got to be electrical and electronic engineering progress stories that matter more to the membership of the IEEE. I was never a member of the IEEE (I was a member of the ACM for a while); but I was supposed to go into electronic engineering. I know enough about the field to know that Slashdot relates to EE as Dr. Phil relates to medicine.

I just have a tiny bit of sympathy for deadline-oriented media. It's not a whole lot of sympathy, because the deadlines are

Re:

[Kymermosst]

I do have that sympathy, too. I was an associate editor in print media [oregoncommentator.com] at one time. Of course, that particular publication didn't need to respect deadlines or have good story ideas all the time. That was somewhat the thing :).