Lists and Literature
... whut will hip you to the haps of cybertown
Lists
Getting on a listserv mailing list can let you in for quite an ordeal. I signed up for a joke list, for instance, and it took a couple of weeks for the stuff to start coming, and now it seems that one of the jokes is the idea of getting off the list. But there are well-managed lists, in profusion, and the ones that are either moderated or point-source can be pretty useful.
DaveNet
http://www.scripting.com/davenet/
Dave Winer is a prolific programmer as well as a verbose commentator on the Mac, the net, the web ... every time Apple snatches defeat from the jaws of victory, you'll hear a lot about it from Dave.
Mags
There are a zillion free magazines -- some overpriced, some great. Here's my short list.
Network World
mailto:nwcirc@nww.com
see also: http://www.nwfusion.com
In addition to good articles, reviews, columns, and buyers' guides, they have excellent cartoons by Frank and Troise. One of my all-time favorites had the following caption & dialog:
The harshest sentence ever recorded in legal history
is levied against a convicted computer hacker:
"I order you to wear a tie every day, take on a huge mortgage,
join the local Rotary Club and act normal in public!!"
"AAAAUUGGHH!"
Unix Review
which has changed its name to
Performance Computing
due to inroads made by Windows NT into Unix territory
http://www.unixreview.com, now known as http://www.performance-computing.com
About a dozen years ago a partner and I had a paid subscription to Unix Review ... then they decided to make it a free mag, which means we had to "qualify". We didn't! We had several months of a paid subscription left, and we got flushed anyway.
I have since requalified, but hey! They owe me something. Donuts when I visit? A chrome bit bucket? Anyway, it's a good magazine. BUT: it's run by bean counters nowadays, and my favorite column, "Devil's Advocate" by Stan Kelly-Bootle, is down one page. It's like trying to have a party in a closet. They should pay him double, cuz a short column is harder to write than a long one.
Others that I find interesting to skim: Communications News and Computer Telephony.
You can blame all this on me, at my home page.
And you can send bouquets, brickbats, and hints to me at ebear@zianet.com (Eric Bear Albrecht)