I thought the CNet piece made some good points (anyone who dumps on PC/Computing and PC World can't be all wrong, as they've been running on sheer momentum alone for years now). But the author and most posters here missed the real reason why computer magazines -- and most of CNet -- are so boring and irrelevant: Computers themselves are boring and irrelevant.
The story today is the network (I avoid the terms "Internet" and "Web" advisedly), how to connect different devices together, how to run new applications, how to leverage the power of the new revolution. The problem with the old-line PC magazines is that they cover networks as if they were merely a giant, nifty peripheral -- folding in tests of NICs or something every few issues just to leaven their core tests of 147 Pentium III systems and "why you gotta get one today." For heaven sakes -- the difference between a modem and a DSL line is a lot more important than the difference between a 8-bit CP/M system and an Athlon (well, at least if it's information you want).
What the market needs is a magazine that takes connectivity as the given, the core problem, then covers devices as the peripherals they are. During its first few years, Wired tended to do that, which is what made it interesting then. Why isn't anyone doing a home networking magazine? (In the interest of disclosure, I'm an editor for a magazine that covers networking for enterprise readers.)
There are lots of other factors, of course. But when print magazines provide content that people want to read, that is relevant to the real issues, that is enjoyable (yes, some people read things because they WANT to) people will still come. Should print be allowed to die out due to neglect and terminal lack of trendiness, it will wind up having to be reinvented. It's portable, random access, high-resolution, high-bandwidth (advertisers won't be able to pump the number of bits involved in a glossy photo over the Web any time soon), the cache is always pre-loaded, and you can drop it in the bathtub without undue alarm.
Finally, I don't want to read any more s**t about magazines and how beholden they are to their advertisers. There are all kinds of magazines with all kinds of editorial policies, some good and some bad, just as there are all kinds of Web sites. There's *absolutely nothing* that would make a Web site more ideogically pure or loath to be influenced by ad money than a print publication, and in fact there are many reasons (the very interactivity that people have lauded, temptation to provide an instant buying opportunity, measurements of clickthrough, privacy considerations generally) that make Web-based publications much more prone to advertiser meddling.
What makes a few Web sites superior today is the lower cost of entry, and the fact that they can be put out by people who haven't taken a permanent berth on the likes of a Ziff or IDG corporate supertanker and resigned themselves to seeing everything they do get turned into glossy pablum. But that's another story.
All in all, it isn't the medium that's the problem, it's the content.
My minidisc recorder can export tracks onto my hard drive digitally through my Sound Blaster Live, but the tracks don't get split up, so there's no good way to export to CDR without babysitting the whole process or later splitting up massive WAV files.
This product sounds good but it's not as though there haven't been external battery upgrades for portables before (such as the offerings from AER).
The tragedy here is that vendors (and presumably their customers) are so uninterested is creating a machine that's really efficient in terms of power consumption. In fact with the latest advances from the FreePlay people (who make the wind-up radios) and real attention to power consumption, it ought to be possible to make a wind-up portable that works just fine. Yet people designing portables just don't seem to get it, and we haven't come very far, power-consumption-wise, since the Omnibook 300 or the eMate 300.
And why can't vendors produce a reflective TFT display that lets users work without power-draining backlighting when possible? I think Nintendo could produce a better portable than today's gang of me-too engineers.
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I thought the CNet piece made some good points (anyone who dumps on PC/Computing and PC World can't be all wrong, as they've been running on sheer momentum alone for years now). But the author and most posters here missed the real reason why computer magazines -- and most of CNet -- are so boring and irrelevant: Computers themselves are boring and irrelevant.
The story today is the network (I avoid the terms "Internet" and "Web" advisedly), how to connect different devices together, how to run new applications, how to leverage the power of the new revolution. The problem with the old-line PC magazines is that they cover networks as if they were merely a giant, nifty peripheral -- folding in tests of NICs or something every few issues just to leaven their core tests of 147 Pentium III systems and "why you gotta get one today." For heaven sakes -- the difference between a modem and a DSL line is a lot more important than the difference between a 8-bit CP/M system and an Athlon (well, at least if it's information you want).
What the market needs is a magazine that takes connectivity as the given, the core problem, then covers devices as the peripherals they are. During its first few years, Wired tended to do that, which is what made it interesting then. Why isn't anyone doing a home networking magazine? (In the interest of disclosure, I'm an editor for a magazine that covers networking for enterprise readers.)
There are lots of other factors, of course. But when print magazines provide content that people want to read, that is relevant to the real issues, that is enjoyable (yes, some people read things because they WANT to) people will still come. Should print be allowed to die out due to neglect and terminal lack of trendiness, it will wind up having to be reinvented. It's portable, random access, high-resolution, high-bandwidth (advertisers won't be able to pump the number of bits involved in a glossy photo over the Web any time soon), the cache is always pre-loaded, and you can drop it in the bathtub without undue alarm.
Finally, I don't want to read any more s**t about magazines and how beholden they are to their advertisers. There are all kinds of magazines with all kinds of editorial policies, some good and some bad, just as there are all kinds of Web sites. There's *absolutely nothing* that would make a Web site more ideogically pure or loath to be influenced by ad money than a print publication, and in fact there are many reasons (the very interactivity that people have lauded, temptation to provide an instant buying opportunity, measurements of clickthrough, privacy considerations generally) that make Web-based publications much more prone to advertiser meddling.
What makes a few Web sites superior today is the lower cost of entry, and the fact that they can be put out by people who haven't taken a permanent berth on the likes of a Ziff or IDG corporate supertanker and resigned themselves to seeing everything they do get turned into glossy pablum. But that's another story.
All in all, it isn't the medium that's the problem, it's the content.
I've wanted the same thing for some time now.
My minidisc recorder can export tracks onto my hard drive digitally through my Sound Blaster Live, but the tracks don't get split up, so there's no good way to export to CDR without babysitting the whole process or later splitting up massive WAV files.
Anyone heard of a software fix?
This product sounds good but it's not as though there haven't been external battery upgrades for portables before (such as the offerings from AER).
The tragedy here is that vendors (and presumably their customers) are so uninterested is creating a machine that's really efficient in terms of power consumption. In fact with the latest advances from the FreePlay people (who make the wind-up radios) and real attention to power consumption, it ought to be possible to make a wind-up portable that works just fine. Yet people designing portables just don't seem to get it, and we haven't come very far, power-consumption-wise, since the Omnibook 300 or the eMate 300.
And why can't vendors produce a reflective TFT display that lets users work without power-draining backlighting when possible? I think Nintendo could produce a better portable than today's gang of me-too engineers.