More rants of a dead man

Is it just me or does anybody else also think that any publication that’s online only, isn’t as serious as something in print.

I’m sorry but there’s so much free shit and other pay shit on the net, why would I take your piece of shit any more seriously than just a list of links posted on facebook?

What makes it a magazine, and not just a bunch of pages that link to each other on a website?

It just seems lame and pathetic. Not cohesive at all.

If it was ‘an experience’ of some kind other than just linking from one article to another so easily pulled away by an errant ad placed here and there, I might be more inclined, but every magazine on the web is like every other magazine on the web. Just a bunch of free floating content to be found by google.

Which I guess makes the point: A print magazine is physically cohesive. You can’t accidentally look at an ad and end up reading a different magazine. You can’t find an interesting phrase and easily look up the phrase in the search bar and get drawn away by the wikipedia article on the subject. A magazine is a lot more than just a paper collection of articles. It’s a grouped pile of related information that is logically and physically tied together.

That exclusivity of grouping and physical attachment is what makes a magazine attractive over jumping from link to search box to link to search box.

Magazines that go online only do so because they can’t afford to print paper given that most of their readers are giving up paper for randomly flitting about … well, let’s face it… facebook. And it’s a dying art form and get used to it yada yada yada.

But I bet you won’t see the economist or the new york times going online-only until well after my generation is dead.

The other day I wanted to check out the new gnome 3 desktop for linux that everybody has been saying sucks so bad.
So I fired up a 4th vbox vm on my machine and installed it. Asking for another gig of memory for the vm I finally used up all 8gig of ram on my machine, and the most interesting thing happened…
It started using swap. I’ve had this machine for a year or two now I think, and I got 8 gig because I found swap annoying, and now I have proof. The problem is disk is getting bigger and bigger, and programs are getting bigger and bigger and memory is getting bigger and bigger, but the speed at which you can swap memory in to and out of disk hasn’t really changed much, certainly not in line with the memory and disk sizes, so what ended up happening was the machine would just freeze and the disk would spin for 15 seconds or so while a gig or two was swapped in or out of memory.

This made me realize that I think we’ve finally seen the end of swap. There’s no point. Memory is so cheap, you might as well just buy more memory and keep everything in it. Now I realize that using huge memory sucking vms is pretty much the worst case scenario, and there’s probably lots of small things that can be swapped out to disk due to lack of use, but when you start opening firefox (2gig resident at the moment) and chrome (another gig or two resident) you really run into the swap problem the same way, the VM just makes it worse faster.

Anyway, so along that stream, since I’ve decided never to use swap again, SSDs become a lot more interesting because you don’t have to worry about burning them out because of swap… So I found this.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227515