The Downfall of Print

EditorialsLeave a comment

It seems 2006 will be the year that everyone will have to face up to the fact that Print is dying and while you can choose to blame The Internet, cable tv, or even such technologies as RSS Feeds, the simple truth is that newspapers and magazines no longer compete on content alone. The one exception that I can think of are glam publications which are all about showing hot celebrities in bikinis like the psuedo-porn Maxim and FHM, but even the classic Playboy Magazine is a former shell of itself. Hardest hit though are technology magazines and newspapers which cannot keep up with the 24 hour world of the Internet, and whose editorials and opinion pages pale in comparison to the abundance of online blogs.

I for one cannot understand how MacWorld magazine chooses to become even more irrelevant with each passing year, when the Macintosh market is steadily growing now. Here is a magazine that had a long tradition of editorials and in-depth reviews that you could trust. Now MacWorld costs about $8 and has so little content that it is not even worth consideration. More often than not, I am picking up expensive copies of British magazines like WebDeveloper, WebBuilder, and GigaHertz. At least these magazines still have good content and honest product reviews.

If I became a tech magazine editor, I’d add more product reviews, more tutorials, and cover stories which no other magazine covered. It’s not hard. Why devote yourself to just writing another review of the lastest Mac laptop, when you can cover things like the top ten laptops not available in the US, or what schools are doing to integrate computers into the classroom (or even better a story on how they are integrating it wrong!), or go underground and do some real investigative reporting and dish out some interesting industry news.

Think Secret has a full story the decline of US based Mac magazines like MacWorld and MacAddict. Personally you can also add PCWorld and all the other PC related magazines in there too, except for CPU User which I find interesting still.

This all reminds me of something most grade school teachers tell kids all the time: you can’t expect an A, if you only put half an effort into it. The same goes for magazines and newspapers, if your content is not compelling enough, you probably can’t expect huge sales.

Mac OS X Booting

Tech TalkLeave a comment

As luck would have it I spent most of the weekend trying to fix my old B&W G3 Macintosh. She’s officially named Venus. In trying to install an update to an ATI video card, I somehow made things worse and ended up corrupting the main hard drive. At first I thought I had killed the video card, but as it turns out, the main hard drive was corrupted and would no longer boot into OS X. Since Venus has multiple hard drives, the other disk that has OS 9 began to boot up.

After trying to install OS X again onto the main drive, and not being able to have Venus boot up into OS X, I gave up and bought a new hard drive and set it up. It appears that even if I could select the old main hard drive as a start up disk, the fact that the directory was corrupt would not allow the Open Firmware system to load the bootloader file for OS X. It would have been easier if Mac OS 9 would have told me that the main drive was corrupt, because the OS 9 Finder saw the drive fine.

If you ever wanted to know more about OS X, read through KernelThread’s OS X Guide, which gives you a hacker’s point of view of OS X and how it works.

Most of all remember your startup keys:

  • SHIFT: to disable all extensions.
  • C: to boot from CD/DVD.
  • X: to boot OS X.
  • S: to boot OS 9.

The most surprising thing of having to use OS 9 again, was to realize there is no official 1.x version of Firefox that works for OS 9.

Time For A New Coach

NBA TalkLeave a comment

As I watched NBA Sunday on ABC, it became apparant that the Sixers need a new coach. Maurice Cheeks is not the right coach for Iverson and company. The Sixers are not without talent, even without A.I., they still have young talent and big men in the front court. They should be better than this! The problem comes down to defense and no matter how many times you say it, the Sixers still won’t defend. On the other side you have the Pacers who can pretty much match up against any team and still walk out with a few wins due to their defense. If Iverson is to be successful with the Sixers, then they need to hire a coach who teaches defense and who makes it a priority in every game, clearly Maurice Cheeks is just to laid back too toughen up this team.

In the Windy City, the Bulls seem to never get a break. They have a very young team, with Ben Gordon becoming their main star player. I like their energy, their heart, and their defense is usually what gets them by, but their offensive game needs work. They need another big man who can move and defend, a Ben Wallace, someone who can take a hit in the post. But even if they got the big man they need, something tells me that coach Scott Skyles is not the great coach that Chicago thinks he is. In key games, Skyles needs to rotate better, he seems to just let his players play through in critical minutes, and give up the game when perhaps doing something a little more unpredictable might give them the edge they need. If the Bulls get their big man, and they still perform at the same level next season, it’s time to start thinking of replacing the coach. Unlike the Sixers who can be a lot better, the Bulls are not too bad, they just need to execute a little better and change their matchups and they easily win a few more close games.

Props have to go to the Pacers who have the best coach in the league. Sure the Spurs might argue that point, but they have hardly had to deal with half of the drama that Indiana has gone through in the past couple of years. On the rise too are The Nets, who have the youngest coach in the entire league I think, but who is doing a great job. They beat Detroit last night at the Palace, so obviously their coach did something right.