Tech Magazines going electronic.

Oh wow !

Wtf does it need to do that for anyway ? Just more dumb cutesy features.

Graham

 

I read in sci.electronics.design that Pooh Bear
<>) about 'Tech Magazines going electronic.',

Acrobat 6 calls home, too, for updates. Updating doesn't seem to work
all that well, but on balance I'd rather have the updates than the
security holes or the crashes.

 

I have a hypothesis about this decline in content. Last week I came
into possesion of a large stack of engineering papers from the 60's.
Within the stack were a number of engineering reports written by a then
well known engineering consultancy. They worked out a very complex
problem on paper in a very few pages using geometry and calculus. This
was a 3D problem that would be very difficult to solve in FEA. I rather
doubt that many Machine Design or Design News readers would even want
to tackle one of these reports. Yet this was how things were done and
many engineers and designers in the 60's would have little trouble
understanding them. 3D graphics and user friendly FEA have isolated
practitioners from needing to understand how they are getting the
answers they are getting. Magazine writers cater to this new crowd of
engineering wanabes with articles on features and user interfaces
rather than looking at the meatier issues of CAD, FEA or engineering in
general.

I ran across a prime example the other day in a question posted on
Eng-Tips. Somebody wanted to know how their canned FEA package really
knew a cylinder was going to buckle. Good question, but should this guy
really be using the software to design things till he understands the
answer? Red is bad and blue is good, right?

The long and short is that the engineering rags have to be careful not
to overwhelm their readers with technical content just like the CAD and
FEA software vendors are careful to isolate their users from the
reality of what they are doing. We are all becoming like soccer moms
driving 3 ton SUVs while completely oblivious to the implications of
controlling such a large vehicle and smug in the assurance that
whatever they do with it they will survive unhurt.

 

That's interesting, Ken. We re polar opposites. I barely notice the articles
in many of my engineering magazines and focus on the ads!

On the other hand, I really do enjoy a good article. When I can find one,
that is.

Jerry Steiger
Tripod Data Systems
"take the garbage out, dear"

 

Uh, no, Robert, Acrobat Reader calls home to the author of the page.
And as I said, any modern browser allows you to defeat html (actually,
javascript) call-home. But Adobe doesn't give the user that option.
With Reader you _have_ to use low-level tricks discovered by
sophisticated users, or a firewall (which, I emphasize, is a Good Idea).
Much worse than html.

John Perry

 

Both, if I understand your first question.

If so I

As you can with html. But with a modern browser you don't need to.

I worry about other capabilities of HTML.

Html is a text markup language, and that's it. Period. It's the other
things, javascript, java, visual basic, etc, that do the damage if you
let them. Adobe reader now supports javascript, just like html. But
Adobe Reader doesn't let you turn off javascript. Modern web browsers do.

http://lwn.net/Articles/129729/

John Perry

 

So do I, but the same principles hold there as well. Don't you love seeing
the misspelled words where the writer didn't know that the spell checker
gave him the write spelling for the wrong word?

Jerry Steiger
Tripod Data Systems
"take the garbage out, dear"