Wagner said:

>
>You know something... For more than 2 years I have being receiving a
>free magazine named "SMT something", every issue I read entirely (as I
>do with the others), and I never found nothing useful about solder paste
>codes, types, other chemicals, practical experiments and so on....  but
>yes, lots of advertisements of huge new automatic machines and lots of
>specialized software... I need to come here to get something useful,
>isn't interesting?
>

Wagner:

I receive the same magazine (along with dozens of other similar ones) and I
feel the same way.

[DANGER! Concentrated personal opinion ahead!]

Contrary to their fulsome editorials, magazines are not published for
readers, they are published for advertisers.

Case in point - maybe you share this long-standing personal pet peeve:
AFAIK no publisher is willing to put page numbers on every page, so that
articles continued on a later page can be found easily. That's because the
advertisers insist that their ad copy must be inviolable. Publishers could
leave a little blank border for the numbers but that would cost them
revenue. I think EET is one of the worst in this respect; there are often
many consecutive pages full of ads, without page numbers.

Of course readers DO benefit from the technical content of magazines,
though they should look carefully at incentives individual authors might
have to avoid telling them about a competitor's product that might solve a
problem better. And yes, I know this is the way the real world works. There
is no way to support a worthwhile technical magazine without advertising.
Ads can be a resource in their own right, too. I'm just saying that no one
should have any illusions about who is in charge.

So, Wagner, maybe it's not surprising that the PIC community can often be a
more useful resource for real-world problem-solving. Our advice may be
valuable or it may be worth just what you paid for it, but at least we're a
lot more likely to have been in your shoes than mfrs of expensive equipment
are; there are a lot of us; and we have no financial incentive to point you
in one direction rather than another. We are a community, we support each
other, listen to each other's problems, and have many of the same
interests. So far, there is no governmental intervention to screw it up,
and the commercial presence here is completely benign. Here, your age,
color, sex, station in life don't make any difference. The only thing that
counts is the quality of your ideas. This list and those like it in other
fields are one of populism's triumphs, IMO.

Glad to get that off my chest; I'd be interested whether others disagree....

Reg Neale
Frequent Tilter At Windmills