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Dr. Dobb's 38-Year Run Comes To an End

Posted by Soulskill on from the farewell-and-thanks dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Dr. Dobb's — long time icon of programming magazines — "sunsets" at the end of the year. Editor Andrew Binstock says despite growing traffic numbers, the decline in revenue from ads means there will be no new content posted after 2014 ends. (The site will stay up for at least a year, hopefully longer.) Younger people may not care, but for the hard core old guys, it marks the end of a world where broad knowledge of computers and being willing to create solutions instead of reuse them was valuable. Binstock might disagree; he said, "As our page views show, the need for an independent site with in-depth articles, code, algorithms, and reliable product reviews is still very much present. And I will dearly miss that content. I wish I could point you to another site that does similar work, but alas, I know of none."

110 of 156 comments (clear)

  1. Pretty sad by mingot · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Loved it growing up. I learned a lot from the al stevens run of articles where he built a terminal program.

    1. Re:Pretty sad by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I was a subscriber back in the day. Sad to see it going, but it's not too surprising, given modern trends.

      I have to admit, though, the content was a bit on the broad side to be really useful to me, since my focus was mostly on client-side application programming in C++ (I wanted to become a videogame programmer). I was still a student then, so about 90% of the content flew right over my head. As such, I found the C/C++ User's Journal more relevant. Even so, I enjoyed reading it and trying to figure out what they were talking about. Eventually, only about 75% went over my head, so I think I learned a few things, although I still couldn't write a database query to save my life.

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
    2. Re:Pretty sad by Austerity+Empowers · · Score: 4, Interesting

      That's kind of the problem and why I dropped subscription a while back. The explosion of computing and computing jobs means that their target audience is wildly diverse and I found maybe one article in a year would touch on a subject or topic that was remotely applicable to me, and it wasn't paying out.

    3. Re:Pretty sad by rudy_wayne · · Score: 1, Flamebait

      I was a subscriber back in the day. Sad to see it going, but it's not too surprising, given modern trends.

      Ah yes. the modern trend of selling out.

      From TFA:
      "Our parent company, United Business Media (UBM), has decided to sunset Dr. Dobb's."

      Like so many others, the founders were happy to collect a big pay day and walk away, leaving it in the hands of some other company who only cares about maximizing profits at the expense of all else. And when the profits can't be maximized to their liking they are happy to shut it down. Oh well, Dr. Dobbs lasted a lot longer than most, so I guess there's that.

    4. Re:Pretty sad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I was sad when I found out he wasn't really a Dr.

    5. Re:Pretty sad by ralphdaugherty · · Score: 1

      not shutting it down, sunsetting it. Content will continue to be available on static web pages for quite some time, and probably will find a home after that.

    6. Re:Pretty sad by ZipK · · Score: 1

      I was sad when I found out he wasn't really a Dr.

      He did get an honorary degree a few years ago.

    7. Re: Pretty sad by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 4, Interesting

      hrm, for me it was the wildly obscure articles that I thought expanded my horizons the most. I had other subscriptions (e.g. WebTechniques, JDJ) for narrow-focus learning.

      --
      My God, it's Full of Source!
      OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
    8. Re:Pretty sad by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Or the modern trend of obsolescence of old media formats.

      The simple fact of the matter is that Dr. Dobbs and similar magazines really aren't as relevant in the modern world, and that's why they're being mothballed. They've been replaced by a number of things. Online technical resources are increasingly abundant, and are often more than sufficient to learn about any topic you desire. Nearly every question I have as a professional programmer has likely already been asked and answered, often in considerable detail, on sites such as stack overflow. Various how-to topics are explored on both personal and professional blogs or other programmer-focused sites, and everything is nicely indexed and immediately accessible through the magic of Google search.

      The simple fact that Google rarely points to Dr Dobbs' site about things I search for (maybe your searches are different) tends to highlight its increasing irrelevance. As much as I enjoyed reading it a few decades ago, it's time to move on. The world has changed, and some things inevitably get left behind.

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
    9. Re:Pretty sad by Rei · · Score: 1

      Back in the day, Dr. Dobbs was giving the world invaluable stuff like Mode X. Your average programmer had to be a lot more connected with the hardware, and working with the hardware was somewhat of a black art. Nowadays there's still some black art stuff out there for getting good performance (even a lot of simple, important stuff is inexplicably obscure... I bet you that 90% of C/C++ programmers don't even know what the restrict keyword does, for example), and you still see the occasional inner loop of some high performance code use assembly, but that's not the general case.

      --
      "We consider that six courts and an asylum claim are a rather odd way of returning to Sweden within a month."
    10. Re:Pretty sad by RabidReindeer · · Score: 1

      The "old media format" that killed it for me was loss of the Dead Tree option, although in DDJ's case, much of the charm went out when they stopped "Running light without overbyte".

      I have the first several years of DDJ as collected volumes and a few more as loose issues. From back in the day when bare-metal programming was still common and we didn't have a vast universe of ready-made software solutions at hand. There's some interesting stuff in there.

      Once it shifted to other topics, I dropped my subscription and only rarely glanced at DDJ.

      I read fiction and a few reference manuals on my tablet. I don't like to read magazines there, since part of the charm of a dead-tree magazine is just flipping it open and seeing what's on random pages, piquing my interest in things that (at the moment) have no immediate practical application for me. The closest I can come to that sort of thing outside a magazine is a Wikipedia article, but I don't surf Wikipedia with that sort of spontanaity.

      It takes time to prepare, edit and produce a magazine article and to fit it into the publishing schedule. If I have a specific need to read on a given topic, I just go to the sources themselves or find a good blog. They're going to be more up-to-date.

    11. Re:Pretty sad by ruir · · Score: 1

      I still have that issue about the announce of the "secret" X mode, and all the issues about bootstrapping and building the FreeBSD kernel

    12. Re:Pretty sad by AmiMoJo · · Score: 1

      The internet is a wonderful resource but the one area where it tends to be a bit lacking is long form learning/tutorial type material. Japanese magazines make great use of this fact to remain relevant.

      I think it helps that in Japanese they use the same word for "book" and "magazine". Their technical magazines are more like textbooks, with each month having very long chapter like articles, complete with masses of heavily commented source code and related information. Unlike internet tutorials which are often little more than long blog posts the magazine articles are well edited, well planned and thought out, and comprehensive.

      Maybe you could learn the same stuff on the internet, but for 1000 yen you get it all nicely collected and checked in paper format, and you can trust it because it will have been properly tested out on real hardware/systems. For your money you get hundreds of pages too, with masses of content rather than 75% adverts.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    13. Re: Pretty sad by Ronin+Developer · · Score: 1

      I could not agree more. I cut my teeth on Dr. Dobb's starting in high school during the early 80's. Looked forward each month to receiving my copy in the mail and then, digesting it's contents from cover to cover. While some of the discussions and techniques covered didn't always have immediate impact, I have found that, over the years, that much of the older content was actually still relevant today.

      This view of "It isn't relevant to me today" will come, in time, to bit developers. The seemingly limited discussions which involved older tech, has opened the doors for the current generation.

      Sadly, when they went entirely online, they lost their relevance and I saw limited value to the once vibrant tech journal known as Dr. Dobb's.

      Goodbye, old friend.

    14. Re:Pretty sad by david_thornley · · Score: 1

      After a while, they seemed to develop into MS-specific articles, when I was working on mainframes and Unix of various flavors and using a Mac at home and generally avoiding MS-DOS and early Windows.

      --
      "When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
    15. Re:Pretty sad by Rei · · Score: 1

      g++ supports it with __restrict__. And if you're writing high performance code but not having support for the features of modern compilers, you're an idiot. In appropriate situations, the performance difference for using restrict or not is huge. Array-heavy tasks like image processing often get a 2-fold or more benefit with using restrict. There's very few places in the coding word where a single keyword can raise your performance that much.

      --
      "We consider that six courts and an asylum claim are a rather odd way of returning to Sweden within a month."
  2. It is an end of a era... by ndykman · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Can't think of any one source that had the breadth and depth of Dr. Dobb's. Always look forward to when it came in the mail back in the day, because I knew that I'd always would learn something.

    Seriously, I hope they can find funding or start a project to ensure their archive exists and is available to all. It'd be a unique contribution to computing history.

    1. Re:It is an end of a era... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      It seems to me like this might herald the end of a different era: the belief that advertising revenue is good enough to sustain a business model.

      Consider, if it cannot sustain a website of quality like DrDobbs then how is it meant to sustain a newspaper? or...?

    2. Re:It is an end of a era... by gl4ss · · Score: 1

      they just suck at monetizing.

      though more importantly, they suck at producing content you would pay for at this day and age.

      look at their jolt awards.. xcode, intellij..

      recent articles include stuff like how to debug xdk apps(xdk is a phonegap clone from intel, nobody cares).

      --
      world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
    3. Re:It is an end of a era... by onepoint · · Score: 1

      See and that is what is happening in the world, Dr Dobb's was a general knowledge publication, where you learned and gained insight from your peers. Now everyone is focused on a solution. Where just 20 years ago, 20 different solution would happen for a problem, now we just see 2 or 3, lack of creativity.

      So as I will advise you all, read, and read a lot, and about stuff you never tried. You would be surprised at the solution you will create.

      --
      if you see me, smile and say hello.
    4. Re:It is an end of a era... by kriston · · Score: 1

      I let my subscription lapse in the late 1990s after three straight years of 85% Microsoft .NET and C++ articles. The world had moved on. Dr. Dobbs' Journal did not.

      --

      Kriston

    5. Re:It is an end of a era... by kriston · · Score: 1

      Check that, the late 1990s was 85% C++ articles.
      The 2000s moved to 85% Microsoft .NET articles.

      I'm getting old.

      --

      Kriston

  3. Offline archive? by raddan · · Score: 3

    Anyone know if there's going to be an offline archive?

    1. Re:Offline archive? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      They sell a DVD with the 1988-2009 archives on the site. Maybe there will be a last update.
      https://store.drdobbs.com

    2. Re:Offline archive? by OrangeTide · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I ordered the current DVD up to 2009, so I have at least some of the articles. I still occasionally go back to old articles because a lot of the software I do hasn't changed much in decades. (Unix and embedded)

      Several years ago I ordered the CD collection of Small C articles, and found it pretty useful for grasping the essentials of compiler design. Even if the information is decades old, it was still relevant for the fundamentals of how C compiling and linking works. (at least on Unix/Linux, which is based on decades old designs)

      --
      “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
    3. Re:Offline archive? by laughingskeptic · · Score: 1

      The link for those nostalgic, but lazy: https://store.drdobbs.com/prod...

    4. Re:Offline archive? by greg1104 · · Score: 1

      Not lazy enough for me; here's a link with both the archive DVD and the Small C one: https://store.drdobbs.com/category/4/CDROM.

    5. Re:Offline archive? by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      Several years ago I ordered the CD collection of Small C articles, and found it pretty useful for grasping the essentials of compiler design. Even if the information is decades old, it was still relevant for the fundamentals of how C compiling and linking works. (at least on Unix/Linux, which is based on decades old designs)

      The overall compile-link step is roughly the same (although LTO changes it a bit), but the compilation process has changed hugely in the last 20 years. Dealing with code 'hand optimised' by people who still have a mental model of how PCC compiles code is a constant source of pain.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    6. Re:Offline archive? by OrangeTide · · Score: 1

      Well, I follow pcc development pretty closely and still use it for a few small projects.

      To be sure there are some pretty significant advancements in compiler design that are important for someone who is working on a compiler in a professional or research capacity. But for me it was more of an exercise in understanding enough to hack a little bit on pcc, lcc and now llvm. I really only got as far as graph coloring for register allocators, and type inference for non-C ML-like language (a flawed approximation of HM type inference).

      Some people are moving back to hand written compilers, at least hand written recursive descent parsers in place of compiler generators like yacc/bison. My own experiments formalized the grammar with PEG to generate and confirm test cases, then hand written recursive descent from the PEG (very easy to do).

      I don't think I hand optimize C to suit some ancient assumptions of what a compiler can do. A modern C compiler can do a lot of amazing substitutions to turn a well organized set of small functions into a very fast monolithic block of machine code.

      These days, pretty much the best thing when writing C is to avoid doing things that are undefined so the compiler can do optimization instead of falling back to some legacy behavior hacked into it.

      --
      “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
  4. Time to mourn another passing... by rnturn · · Score: 1

    Creative Computing...
    IBM PC Technical Journal...
    Byte...
    DEC Professional...
    UNIX Review...
    Perl Journal...
    Linux Journal...
    SysAdmin...
    And now Dr. Dobbs?

    What the heck am I going to do for leisure reading now?

    --
    CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
    1. Re:Time to mourn another passing... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      First the print magazines died, and now even the websites are dying. They said they had over 10 million page views last year. If only there was a simple, unhackable micro-payment system that could have delivered them 2 cents a page view they would have plenty of money for the content and delivery. Google should have delivered this years ago because they already have all the google stats on every page. You would just have to depost $10 or $20 to your account, then each click would show the cost and balance remaining. It could work on almost all websites. I guess everyone is waiting for Apple to come up with a solution. But their solution would end up being $1 per page view with 20 cents going to Apple. Just like their overpriced movies.

    2. Re:Time to mourn another passing... by cruff · · Score: 1

      Linux Journal is still around as an electronic only publication. They keep sending me emails to subscribe again years after I gave up on it for becoming too light weight. As far as leisure reading, track down the IBM z-Series and Unisys Clearpath architecture reference manuals and see how things are done in mainframe land. :-)

    3. Re:Time to mourn another passing... by bugs2squash · · Score: 2

      I don't see why Amazon could not do micropayments. One could access content via Amazon's web site, they could lend you, say, $5 when you enroll and when your usage adds up to $5 they bill your payment card, and they bill your payment card anyway at the end of the year. If you become a bad debt they pass the risk on to their content providers. Amazon takes a cut of the micropayment on each transaction.

      --
      Nullius in verba
    4. Re:Time to mourn another passing... by flowsnake · · Score: 1

      IEEE magazines. Still available in print, if you want to pay the extra, or electronic format if you like trees. IEEE Security and Privacy and IEEE Software work for me. And if these are too lightweight, there's always the IEEE Transactions on $SUBJECT.

    5. Re:Time to mourn another passing... by TheGratefulNet · · Score: 1

      agreed on needing micropayments. I hate ads and I block them. but I'd happily pay in uPmts for sites I like.

      it has just not happened. and not due to tech issues; its not a tech thing that stops this from being implemented.

      --

      --
      "It is now safe to switch off your computer."
    6. Re:Time to mourn another passing... by CohibaVancouver · · Score: 1

      You left 80 Micro off the list!

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8...

    7. Re:Time to mourn another passing... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 1

      Compute!
      Computer! Gazette

      Magazines for the 1980's "toy" computers (i.e., Atari, Commodore, Texas Instruments, etc.), as my middle school Apple ][ instructor snidely called them. Compute! was the general purpose magazine. Gazette was for Commodore 64/128. I subscribed to both back in the day.

    8. Re:Time to mourn another passing... by gbjbaanb · · Score: 1

      I don't know - Google seems to do very well indeed on advertising revenue, I can't think why the sites that display their adverts aren't doing nearly as well....

    9. Re:Time to mourn another passing... by rnturn · · Score: 1

      You're a mind reader. It's that time of year to re-up my membership and I was thinking of adding a couple of the Societies to the fee for this next year.

      --
      CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
    10. Re:Time to mourn another passing... by JimFive · · Score: 1

      2 cents per page view for 10 million views is a whopping $100,000. That is not anywhere near enough to pay for a year of content.
      --
      JimFive

      --
      Please stop using the word theory when you mean hypothesis.
    11. Re:Time to mourn another passing... by JimFive · · Score: 1

      Sorry, $200,000 still not enough to pay for content (that's about 3 full time people).

      --
      Please stop using the word theory when you mean hypothesis.
  5. Not really by Intrepid+imaginaut · · Score: 1

    "it marks the end of a world where broad knowledge of computers and being willing to create solutions instead of reuse them was valuable"

    No, it pretty much just marks the end of Dr. Dobb's. Them young whippersnappers are quite capable of their own innovations.

    1. Re:Not really by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Them young whippersnappers are quite capable of their own innovations.

      As long as they never have to leave the protective cocoon of a VM with GC.

    2. Re:Not really by Tough+Love · · Score: 1

      "it marks the end of a world where broad knowledge of computers and being willing to create solutions instead of reuse them was valuable"

      No, it pretty much just marks the end of Dr. Dobb's. Them young whippersnappers are quite capable of their own innovations.

      There is no denying that the true hacker is well on the way to becoming an endangered species, as we are making far fewer new ones than would be required to replace those who retire, much less keep up with the exponential pace of software systems growth. Great news in terms of income security for this increasingly elite niche, not such a great omen for the quality of future software.

      --
      When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
    3. Re:Not really by Tough+Love · · Score: 1

      Them young whippersnappers are quite capable of their own innovations.

      As long as they never have to leave the protective cocoon of a VM with GC.

      And lots of base classes written by somebody with a clue.

      --
      When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
  6. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  7. Why do people kill instead of scale back? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Why is it always outright KILL a project instead of scaling it back?
    How about less in-depth? How about occasional reviews? Why not move to a quarterly publication of content?

    There are many many things that can be done to keep something going.

    Damn shame.

    1. Re:Why do people kill instead of scale back? by iggymanz · · Score: 3, Insightful

      those don't pay steady salaries

    2. Re:Why do people kill instead of scale back? by TheRaven64 · · Score: 2

      The problem is that the costs outweigh the revenue. Reducing costs in a way that also reduces revenue is probably not a good solution.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  8. Hardly (and sadly) not a unique tale by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    There were some truly excellent magazines way back in the 70's and 80's. We had BYTE to set the standard, with excellent publications like Dr Dobbs, Computer Language, and even Nibble.

    As the PC arose, however, magazine after magazine seems to have been taken over by jerks at places like CMP who drained them of all their meaty technical content, flushed all non-PC-compatible content, and in some cases tried to convert them into industry rags. Younger computer users do not have that same joy of getting a monthly magazine with articles loaded with code and/or schematics and parts lists or (in the case of computer language) coverage of some new computer language that has some interesting featrures and might be just the right fit for some new project. The publications are sadly a case study in how hired-gun "interchangeable" CEOs with too many MBAs and no common sense or technical backgrounds can ruin a good institution. One would have thought the spectacular lessons of Scully at Apple (or Fiorina at HP) would have put an end to such screwups acress the entire computer industry...

    Dr Dobb's Journal of Computing Calisthenics and orthodontia running light without overbyte was among the very best, and you just cannot precisely reproduce that (or a half-inch thick issue of BYTE (from before about 1985)) with a web page...

    1. Re:Hardly (and sadly) not a unique tale by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I'm becoming increasingly convinced that holding a MBA is actually a compelling reason to not hire someone for an executive position.

    2. Re:Hardly (and sadly) not a unique tale by uassholes · · Score: 2

      Every word of your comment is right on. Not many here will understand that, and that's why DDJ is going.

    3. Re:Hardly (and sadly) not a unique tale by Gim+Tom · · Score: 1

      Thanks for giving the full title of the original publication! When I saw that on the shelf I KNEW I had to buy it! However, my path diverged and went more toward system design and analysis and less coding -- which I did miss. I subscribed to Byte till well after it was bought out by the corporate Borg, but I have something between 6 and 10 years boxed up down stairs. Haven't looked at them in years, but just can't bring myself to get rid of them.

  9. Former subscriber by jgotts · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I was a subscriber for a few years but I found their content to be too Windows-centric so I quit.

    It's sad to see them go but as a full-time programmer I haven't cracked a single book or magazine related to programming in over a year. My extensive library collects extensive dust.

    1. Re:Former subscriber by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      I was a subscriber for a few years but I found their content to be too Windows-centric so I quit.

      That's how I felt too.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    2. Re:Former subscriber by grouchomarxist · · Score: 1

      as a full-time programmer I haven't cracked a single book or magazine related to programming in over a year. My extensive library collects extensive dust.

      I'd suggest you read something, perhaps something outside of your professional area. Reading up on things outside of your area of focus can help you develop as a programmer, see things in a different light, etc...

  10. I guess we're just left with stack overflow by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Back in my day, we had to read books and articles to understand some of the current trends. You had to get some serious depth.

    These days, a lot of it is google leading to stack overflow for a quick pattern match of a fix.

    But at least it means the good (those with real understanding and real depth) will look different than those that build a career out of quick-n-dirty stack overflow searches.

    Note that I find stack overflow an amazing resource, however, when I ask current gen "unix-heads" how to do something and they google for a stack-overflow page vs doing "man bash" means the associated concepts were completely missed.

    1. Re:I guess we're just left with stack overflow by digsbo · · Score: 1

      Huh? If you are someone with a deep knowledge of Unix and thus know better that an answer can be found in the man page for bash, why are you asking people who don't know to look there? Are you saying you're trying to teach them to fish, and they don't get it?

    2. Re:I guess we're just left with stack overflow by Tunefix · · Score: 1

      That is a good analogy; Trying to teach someone to fish, and they just stare at you wondering why they should not be going to a supermarket.

  11. One of the cornerstones by Snotnose · · Score: 2

    Back in the day Dr Dobbs, Byte, Embedded Systems Journal, and Computer Languages were the 4 I read every month.

    1. Re:One of the cornerstones by NormalVisual · · Score: 1

      Same here. Still have a bookshelf full of old Byte rags.

      --
      Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
    2. Re:One of the cornerstones by Smerta · · Score: 4, Informative

      You guys know about sites like Computer Magazine Archive and Classic Computer Magazine Archive, right?

      (Got my start on Atari 800 w/ the 6502, never looked back... yes, I do have a lawn that I regularly chase kids away from!)

    3. Re:One of the cornerstones by BancBoy · · Score: 1

      Firstly, this is an underrated post!

      Secondly, thank you! I just spent three hours reading magazines from my younger days.
      I'll be back in a few years when I'm done reading and reminiscing.

      --
      [UID-HeinzIntel]
  12. Sunset Dr. Dobbs by smittyoneeach · · Score: 5, Funny

    Sunset Dr. Dobbs
    Ye nattering nabobs
    Who'd prefer cleanshaven
    Java refactoring jobs
    Burma Shave

    --
    Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
  13. Re:Is DVORAK safe? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    What an odd comparison -- people associated with these kinds of journals, versus something that has actually been inside a vagina.

  14. When nearly all of your readers block ads... by swillden · · Score: 4, Insightful

    When nearly all of your readers block ads, it's tough to make it as an ad-supported site.

    (Yes, I have AdBlockPlus installed, too.)

    --
    Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
    1. Re:When nearly all of your readers block ads... by bzipitidoo · · Score: 5, Informative

      No, don't make the ads so obnoxious. I wouldn't block them if advertisers wouldn't pig out on my resources and force me to turn off the sound so I'm not embarrassed or distracted by some loud jingle, with blinking text, frenetic animation, and a flashing background. When ads take more than 5% of my bandwidth, RAM, and CPU, and make my browser unstable, I do something about it. If I have to reposition windows to hide obnoxiously distracting animation, I'll block it. IF it's not easy to block, I'll quit visiting the website.

      --
      Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
    2. Re:When nearly all of your readers block ads... by zippthorne · · Score: 1

      I would even be willing to put up with all of those things, sometimes, if they would only serve the ads from the same servers as the website. It's the mid-tens. Navigating the web shouldn't be slower and more frustrating than it was in mid-nineties.

      --
      Can you be Even More Awesome?!
    3. Re:When nearly all of your readers block ads... by EzInKy · · Score: 1

      And they dont hurt that much...

      Are you kidding? Everytime I disable my ad blocker I cringe from the pain of being subjugated to animations and even sound designed to divert my attention away from the content I came to enjoy.

      --
      Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
    4. Re:When nearly all of your readers block ads... by dave420 · · Score: 1

      Then don't go to that site. It's that simple. If you like the content, disable your AdBlocker. It costs them money to serve the content which you clearly appreciate.

    5. Re:When nearly all of your readers block ads... by virtual_mps · · Score: 1

      I'll disable ad blocker when the ad industry starts taking responsibility for not serving up malware.

    6. Re:When nearly all of your readers block ads... by jbmartin6 · · Score: 1

      I agree. "Malvertisement" is a real problem and I see it almost every day working in security monitoring. In the old print days the publication vetted the ads and hosted them directly. If some site went back to this model I would be happy to have ads. But when the site has no way to vet the ads and they are all hosted by other domains which are tracking me and who knows what else, I will continue to block them.

      --
      This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
  15. Reason: drop in value of advertising revenue by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    From the article: ...
    Despite our excellent growth on the editorial side, our revenue declined such that today it's barely 30% of what it was when I started. While some of this drop is undoubtedly due to turnover in our sales staff, even if the staff had been stable and executed perfectly, revenue would be much the same and future prospects would surely point to upcoming losses. This is because in the last 18 months, there has been a marked shift in how vendors value website advertising. They've come to realize that website ads tend to be less effective than they once were. Given that I've never bought a single item by clicking on an ad on a website, this conclusion seems correct in the small. ...

    Makes you wonder how other websites that depend on ad revenue are surviving.

    1. Re:Reason: drop in value of advertising revenue by zippthorne · · Score: 2, Informative

      Wrong premise. Click-throughs were always dubious, and a silly way to measure the impact of an ad. When was the last time you bought something through a movie poster or billboard?

      --
      Can you be Even More Awesome?!
    2. Re:Reason: drop in value of advertising revenue by hermitdev · · Score: 1

      Personally, my inclination to watch "the Interview" increased more and more as the hacking went on and on. I am disappoint that I will not be able to see it likely now, in the theater. I will, however purchase it, in the very likely soon DVD/BluRay release.

  16. hrmf... by hitmark · · Score: 4, Informative

    seems to be the pattern of media in general these days...

    Deep articles are going the way of the dodo. Not enough ad impressions etc on those as they appeal to a narrow audience.

    Shallow product "reviews" and flame baiting on the other hand...

    --
    comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
  17. I know one.... by Prien715 · · Score: 4, Funny

    "I wish I could point you to another site that does similar work, but alas, I know of none."

    You mean you haven't read Bennett's high-quality journalism?

    --
    -- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
  18. Oh yeah, he was a orthodontist by Latent+Heat · · Score: 1
    I believe the original subtitle of the magazine was "Running Light Without Overbyte."

    Back in the day, the new "microcomputers" had limited speed, memory, and address range. The emphasis was getting those machines to do useful work.

    These days, we have thrown up our hands, and we smother the problem with more hardware.

    1. Re:Oh yeah, he was a orthodontist by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 1

      These days, we have thrown up our hands, and we smother the problem with more hardware.

      Maybe seven years ago when I last overhauled my PC with new motherboard, CPU and RAM. I rarely max out my AMD quad-core processor and/or 4GB memory. I don't have any software that can smoother the hardware.

    2. Re:Oh yeah, he was a orthodontist by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 2

      I rarely max out my AMD quad-core processor and/or 4GB memory. I don't have any software that can smoother the hardware.

      Bwahahahaha!

      Sincerely,
      A professional videogame programmer

      ---

      Kidding aside... For most types of applications on the desktop (e.g. business apps that spend most of their time querying a remote database), you can get away with suboptimal code, because programmer efficiency and maintainable code is more important than code efficiency. That's not necessarily a sign of shoddy engineering, although poorly optimized code for no good reason certainly might be. Over-optimizing code where you don't need it can also be highly problematic as well. Even as a C++ programmer, I still prefer to write my game tools in C# whenever possible.

      That being said, there are still plenty of specialized applications that demand top performance. Videogames, scientific computing, highly scalable server applications (efficiency = cost savings), and so on. We're also scaling down our computers as well, where you don't have the crazy power you have on the desktop. Examples include smart phones and even smart watches, where run-time efficiency translates directly to improved battery life.

      So, sometimes efficiency matters a great deal, and sometimes it doesn't. A good programmer knows when each is appropriate and their tradeoffs, and uses the correct tools for the job at hand.

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
    3. Re:Oh yeah, he was a orthodontist by hairyfeet · · Score: 1

      Yeah these programmers today are spoiled little brats! Multicores, thousands of MB of memory? trying having to PEEK and POKE because every single fricking BYTE costs! Looking at the specs of my first PC and you could a couple hundred emulated versions of it on your average dumpster dived PC.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    4. Re:Oh yeah, he was a orthodontist by expatriot · · Score: 1

      The pun subtitle was "Calisthenics and orthodontia" which was dropped fairly soon. So the Dr presumably referred to a dentist (although most denists are not doctors).

      First edition: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Journa...

    5. Re:Oh yeah, he was a orthodontist by gbjbaanb · · Score: 1

      You gotta be joking?!

      At work, I have a dual core i7 and 4Gb RAM and you know what - I spend my whole day staring at the damn applications while they think about swapping back in to run. I click Visual Studio and it thinks for a couple of seconds then pops into its usual full-screen view, then I click on SQL Server's management studio and ... it thinks for a bit before popping into view.

      As a developer I usually have 1, sometimes 2, VS instances open plus SQL plus firefox with the application services and client app open. 4GB just isn't enough to run these monster programs.

      And maybe that's the point, where I would easily have said 4GB is loads... that was before people started saying 4Gb is loads and therefore it doesn't matter how much of it I use up in shitty, inefficient data systems. Your program might run fine, but often I have to run 2 of them and that's when you see the problems.

      There's one thing about efficiency, and then there's another about not caring and stuffing your programs full of layer after layer of abstractions to the point where it performs like a dog and sucks up all the RAM there is available because "developer time is more important than user time". Pah.

    6. Re:Oh yeah, he was a orthodontist by RabidReindeer · · Score: 1

      Yeah these programmers today are spoiled little brats! Multicores, thousands of MB of memory? trying having to PEEK and POKE because every single fricking BYTE costs! Looking at the specs of my first PC and you could a couple hundred emulated versions of it on your average dumpster dived PC.

      I could say the same about my first mainframe.

    7. Re:Oh yeah, he was a orthodontist by RabidReindeer · · Score: 1

      More properly:

      Dr. Dobbs Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia

      "Running Light without OverByte"

      "Dobbs" was a synthetic name, not a single individual. They got rid of the "Orthodontia" part because they claimed too many Dentists were inquiring, thinking it was of professional interest to them.

    8. Re:Oh yeah, he was a orthodontist by onepoint · · Score: 1

      I knew, before even looking at your link, it was a Commodore platform. V-20, I had the C-64, and yes, knowing how to use the least amount of memory was just the start. Sprites and all the fun, tape drive, saving, until I bought the disk drive. (It was 8,1 to save right)? I think it was the most amazing platform ever, and it was the best investment of $ 896.00 ( on sale that September or October 1981 or 82 ) from my newspaper route.

      --
      if you see me, smile and say hello.
    9. Re:Oh yeah, he was a orthodontist by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 1

      I click Visual Studio and it thinks for a couple of seconds then pops into its usual full-screen view, then I click on SQL Server's management studio and ... it thinks for a bit before popping into view.

      Outside of Microsoft Windows and Office, I don't use Microsoft bloatware. Everything else is open source.

    10. Re:Oh yeah, he was a orthodontist by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 1

      That being said, there are still plenty of specialized applications that demand top performance.

      I'm in the process of rebuilding my FreeNAS file server. Running ZFS with 2GB RAM on old hardware doesn't make for a stable system. You need 1GB RAM per every 1TB of raw storage. Since I'm planning to expand the hard drive capacity to 8TB (minimum), I'll need a new motherboard that can handle more RAM.

    11. Re:Oh yeah, he was a orthodontist by kriston · · Score: 1

      In case nobody else got the joke, it was "jumping through hoops and pulling teeth" or, alternately, "twisting arms and pulling teeth."

      And it had nothing to do with the Church of the SubGenius.

      --

      Kriston

    12. Re:Oh yeah, he was a orthodontist by david_thornley · · Score: 1

      IIRC, "Dobbs" was a combination of two founders' names, except that the guy who made it up was mistaken on one of the names.

      --
      "When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
    13. Re:Oh yeah, he was a orthodontist by hairyfeet · · Score: 1

      Yeah IIRC it was 8,1 and you really had to squeeze every drop out of your programs on a VIC.

      I took a VB class for shits and giggles in early 2002 and the punk kid next to me ended up expelled because he tried to steal my code. The teacher was an old greybeard and when he told the punk he was getting an F for the entire class for being a cheat the kid claimed he wrote it, the teacher just looked at him and said "Oh really, what computer system did you start out on?" and when the kid said "Windows 98 the teacher said "get your stuff and get out of my class because you have shown yourself to be both a cheat AND a liar and I will now prove it to the class" and threw my code up on the screen

      He asked the class "What do you notice about this code that is "different" than what I have taught you?" and some girl in the back said "Why is all the lines numbered, and what is a GOTO?" and he laughed and said "Back in the days you would number lines of code and use the GOTO to jump between bits of code because it cut down on memory usage. If you didn't know what you were doing it would blow up in your face but if you did it was VERY efficient. This style of coding went out of style when the old BASIC computers quit being sold in the late 80s so that is how I knew he was lying, a Win98 user wouldn't write code in that manner". He then looked at the code for a second and said "Atari or Commodore?" and I laughed and said "VIC20 but how did you know?" and he laughed and said "Atari and Commodore BASIC lent itself to that particular coding style, efficient as hell but as subtle as a chainsaw". But the funny part is you can take the old Commodore BASIC syntax and it runs great on VB6, I was able to breeze through the class by just reliving my days on the VIC...no PEEKing and POKEing though sadly.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    14. Re:Oh yeah, he was a orthodontist by onepoint · · Score: 1

      Thanks for the memory...LOL
      but I have to ask,
      Why not a Gosub, I recall, I did everything with gosub's so I could keep the most used code near the top and the few used routines on the bottom?

      --
      if you see me, smile and say hello.
    15. Re:Oh yeah, he was a orthodontist by gzuckier · · Score: 1

      My first computer was an Apple 0. It didn't have 1s, just 0s.

      --
      Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
    16. Re:Oh yeah, he was a orthodontist by ConceptJunkie · · Score: 1

      Let me introduce you to a little hobby of mine called POV-Ray.

      --
      You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
    17. Re:Oh yeah, he was a orthodontist by hairyfeet · · Score: 1

      Because GOTOs ran faster on the VIC and honestly the programs we were writing in that VB class weren't complicated enough to really need subroutines.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    18. Re:Oh yeah, he was a orthodontist by SMSailor · · Score: 1

      There can't be many people left who remembered the original subtitle! The original full title was: "Dr. Dobbs Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia - Running light Without Overbyte"

    19. Re:Oh yeah, he was a orthodontist by PhotoJim · · Score: 1

      Also, Commodore BASIC lacked IF-THEN-ELSE, having only IF-THEN so sometimes GOTOs were necessary to do what you'd do using ELSE if you had it.

      Also, on the stock VIC-20 especially, with only 3,583 bytes of RAM free for BASIC programming (unless you bought a RAM expander), you were coding for efficiency first, not readability or understandability. It had to fit in 3.5kB or else it wouldn't run. Nothing else mattered unless you had spare space.

      Incidentally, decking out a VIC-20 to 32 or even 40 kB RAM is a lot of fun. It might still be awfully modest by today's standards but it sure makes for a fun programming environment.

  19. McGraw Hill and BYTE by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    When McGraw Hill put a stake through the heart of BYTE by eliminating Steve Ciarcia's articles (all those famously great projects with schematics and code) in the desperate effort to convert BYTE into a cheap clone of PC Magazine, Mr Ciarcia went of and started his own magazine: Circuit Cellar. IOf you love this sort of stuff, you out to subscribe and SOON. The magazine has been great for years for anybody who loves assembly code and solder, but it appears to be getting thinner and thinner at an accellerating rate, which may be a sign that it's not getting enough subscribers to keep the good content going. Warning: This sort of publication will simply never be replaced by here-today gone-tommorrow always-changing web sites loaded with obnoxious pop-up flash ads and bad javascript the bogs your machine down chatting with ad servers.

  20. From a C++ perspective, writing was on the wall by hermitdev · · Score: 2

    From a C++ perspective, the only lately useful articles are from Andrew Koenig, but how the release of the articles is done has pissed me off so much I removed it from my feeds. His most recent article series, is at part 9: Abstractions for Binary Search. How about write an article that can be released in a single piece and consumed as such. Trying to consume parts of something every few weeks is an ineffective learning tool. There doesn't seem to be any more single articles. The interesting ones are broken up into multiple parts released every week or two. FUCK THAT. Give me an article that I can read, start to finish. Don't make me come back next week. I'm a developer. I'm already being torn six ways to sundown by various issues, I don't need a publication compounding that. Give me single, solitary articles that have all the content in a single page and I'm happy (it also makes the googling easier).

    1. Re:From a C++ perspective, writing was on the wall by luis_a_espinal · · Score: 1

      From a C++ perspective, the only lately useful articles are from Andrew Koenig, but how the release of the articles is done has pissed me off so much I removed it from my feeds. His most recent article series, is at part 9: Abstractions for Binary Search. How about write an article that can be released in a single piece and consumed as such. Trying to consume parts of something every few weeks is an ineffective learning tool. There doesn't seem to be any more single articles. The interesting ones are broken up into multiple parts released every week or two. FUCK THAT. Give me an article that I can read, start to finish. Don't make me come back next week. I'm a developer. I'm already being torn six ways to sundown by various issues, I don't need a publication compounding that. Give me single, solitary articles that have all the content in a single page and I'm happy (it also makes the googling easier).

      I am of a different opinion. I prefer to see complex topics broken down into segments. Yes, it is sometimes advantageous to have the entire enchilada. But I don't have much of a problem digesting pieces on a weekly basis (even though, like you, I'm pulled in all directions on a daily basis.)

    2. Re:From a C++ perspective, writing was on the wall by hermitdev · · Score: 1

      I don't have a problem with a long/lengthy article being broken into a series (so long as there's a view as single page). Lately, I've gotten my choice Dobbs articles via redit & RSS, and they come in as just "Part 1", Part 2", etc. Not even "Part 1/9". I understand that, because they're probably publishing them as they receive them/write them and arguably don't even know how many parts there will be (which is probably due to an arbitrary editorial decision of number of lines/paragraphs). But, what I want is: on a 30-minute train ride, can I digest an article, not can I read a 5 minute snippet, then remember where that snippet left off a few weeks ago, and then a few weeks further yet remember those previous 2 snippets I read. I can really get behind a multisegment such as "we're going to design a scripting language interpreter", and every section is a logical conclusion of a part of it. But to beak mid-stream as a lot of the newish articles seam to do in order to "make you come back next week" is asinine and extremely frustrating from a user perspective, especially from a software developer perspective. I have this problem *now*. I do not want to come back next week to see how the second have can be solved.

  21. I really should turn off my adblocker by ip_freely_2000 · · Score: 1

    I originally set it up to reduce bandwidth limitations and then malware delivered through ads. Now, it just reduces clutter, but I have to admit I am part of the problem for sites that I truly do enjoy and appreciate the people who build content and publish. Bad on me.

  22. Re: ~Ok by TuballoyThunder · · Score: 1

    You probably are thinking of their post ~2000 stuff. It definitely got more windows and web focused (and thinner). Around 2005, I found it to be pretty unreadable. The pre-2000 issues were much better.

  23. If not for Dr. Dobb's by TechNeilogy · · Score: 1

    and similar publications like Computer Language, the (old-school) Byte, etc., I would likely not be a programmer today. I feel as though a mentor had passed on.

    --
    "The wisdom of the Patriarchs was that they *knew* they were fools." --Master Foo
  24. So long... however... by luis_a_espinal · · Score: 1

    Dr. Dobb's 38-Year Run Comes To an End

    I will miss it. I've been a fan of it since I got into CompSci back in 92. I remember fondly going through its articles. I had a subscription for it (alongside Windows Development Journal and others.) One would learn really nice stuff in these old school magazines. Hell, even catalog-like productions like "PC Shopper" would have great articles on software and hardware.

    One thing, however. Couldn't Dr. Dobbs have adopted a model similar to InfoQ (which seems to be doing rather well)? I wish they had (but maybe it wouldn't have been Dr. Dobbs anymore.) Regardless, I will miss Koenig et al articles.

  25. I am still grieving Byte Magazine (1998) by peter303 · · Score: 1

    Most of the current magazines are very machine-specific: Apple or PC. I liked the general software nature of Byte and Dr. Dobbs.

  26. Silly name by kriston · · Score: 1

    I believe they could have stayed on indefinitely if not for the silly name. We all know why it has that name, but I would never have discovered this magazine unless an adjunct professor in college pointed it out to us in 1990.

    --

    Kriston

  27. Running light... by whitroth · · Score: 1

    ...without overbyte.

    But with all the OOP being done, who cares about that anymore? Too big, too slow? Throw more storage and CPUs at it, and offload some of it to the user's machines, never mind that they've never tested their bloated crap on the generation or two old systems that most people use....

    In the nineties, when I changed jobs, and didn't have a company paying for my subscriptions, I had to chose between Dr. Dobb's and the IEEE Comnpute - that was easy, I dropped Compute.

    It's a real shame.

                  mark

    1. Re:Running light... by Tough+Love · · Score: 1

      Running light...
       
      ...without Byte. Or Dr Dobbs. Or PC Mag (good riddance).

      --
      When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
  28. Re:Still going? by Zaiff+Urgulbunger · · Score: 1

    I'm from the UK and I hadn't really heard of it either, but I ended up getting a few copies when EXE magazine folded and the remainder of my subscription was fulfilled as Dr Dobbs. I always kind of resented it though because I wanted EXE mag!