2006-04-04
You already saw my April Fool entry and, besides, this is the 4th already. Regretfully, the picture on the right is real.
I was a subscriber from the start, and still have my Vol. 1, Issue 1 (see picture). It was important to me in the early 80s, as my partner and I tried to get our little company, Emerging Technology, off the ground with a text editor called EDIX. It was reviewed in one of the very early issues, which made it one of the first software products for the IBM PC to get reviewed.
Lately, PC Magazine has gotten very boring... while utilities for spyware, spam, viruses, and firewalls may be important, they're really just cures for a problem. Very different from software that actually gets you someplace, rather than just digs you out of a hole.
And just today I got the last issue (see picture). Actually, it's not really their last, but the cover speaks for itself. Even the editors think PCs are just too boring for PC Magazine.
It's not a Mac vs. PC thing. I get MacWorld, too, and most times don't bother to even read it. Unlike PC Magazine, which had some real technical meat to it, MacWorld's idea of technically deep is to explain how the UNIX ls command works. Do those guys realize that ls is 36 years old, almost as old as some of the magazine writers' parents?
Maybe the problem is that, with the internet, nothing in a computer magazine will be new to the reader, so one reads the magazine only for depth. But there is no depth!
I'm reading more books than ever, some technical ones, but mostly non-technical (The World is Flat, Come Hell or High Water, The Assassin's Gate, and I just ordered The Battle for Peace: A Frontline Vision of America's Power and Purpose). And, I read blogs and newspapers on the web every day.
The problem with magazines, I guess, is that they're in-between: The shallowness of the internet without the immediacy. Still, it's sad that PC Magazine is now brain-dead.
One more thing... from time-to-time I need to remind everybody that I went to Maryland.
Born and raised there, too.
(They won the Women's NCAA Basketball Championship a few hours ago, in overtime... after being down by 13 at one point, playing worse than the PC Magazine editors edit.
But, fortunately for us, Duke started playing like they had it won.)