Friday, February 6, 2009

Dr. Dobb's is Dying

My colleague Jim Holtman just informed me that, according to embedded.com, the illustrious software developer magazine Dr. Dobb's Journal will now be embedded(pun intended) in InformationWeek. Both are owned by United Business Media LLC.

Jim and I have been following the series of articles by Herb Sutter on multicore concurrency, starting with the one entitled "Break Amdahl", where he discovers Gustafson's law (see Section 4.3.5 of my GCaP book, Springer 2007). As expected, that title looks slightly optimistic in light of the recently observed lack of scalability on Sandia Labs supercomputers. Of course, the universal law of scalability accounts for all these effects and, unlike Sutter's articles, we are able to quantify them based on actual measurements.

Anyway, as with print newspapers, I suppose all this means that even though Dr. Dobb's is not exactly dead yet, it is getting buried alive.

1 comment:

Rob Weir said...

R.I.P., Dr. Dobb's. Unfortunately, after years of shrinking page counts, there isn't much left to bury (or embed).