njr 2.0 14.6.2004

RAM vs. AirPort Express, and PowerBook upgrades

I had a tendency not to upgrade my laptops ever if at all—my PowerBook G3 still has the same 96 MB RAM it had when I bought it in 1998, and its predecessor PowerBook 540 didn't get upgraded at all, memory, disk or CPU, from 1994 to 1998. But my PowerBook G4 has moved from auxiliary to main machine since I bought it: instead of having my desktop Mac at my research office, I have it at home, and use my PowerBook at school with an external monitor and Linux box through osx2x. Overall, it works very well as long as I don't try to run simulations on it; but with 14 applications open, it bogs down a bit (Finder, iTunes, osx2x, Safari, Mail, Colloquy, Adium, Emacs, FileMerge, Terminal, OmniOutliner, Graphviz, Preview, BBEdit, to take an arbitrary sample).

If you're buying memory, make sure you follow a link from a price-comparison site such as dealram; the price for 512 MB PC133 SDRAM at one vendor went down by $15 when I did so. Just knowing that vendor X will have the lowest price isn't enough.

Update: my memory arrived yesterday; what a difference. With the above applications open, top reports PhysMem: 102M wired, 218M active, 355M inactive, 676M used, 347M free. Some room to run my memory-hogging research software. :) 02:34:24 | comment [] | trackback [] #

The incredible shrinking (disappearing?) Mac publications

I couldn't sleep tonight. I've been reading a lot of fiction this week, to the point that I had to put a book down because the imaginary world had become overpowering. I wanted to get back to planet Earth for a while.

In search of technical material, and having left my stack of research papers at school, I noted the lack of Mac publications I usually read in bed. I wasn't dreaming—there's a lot less than there used to be.

Consider MWJ. For a mostly-weekly journal (48 issues a year according to the Web site), it's not doing so well with 13 issues so far this year. I've been a subscriber since January 2000; here's what's happened to the output since then:

How about MacTech, the other publication for which I have a paid subscription? There hasn't been a MacTech issue since the Feburary 2004 one, the longest gap I can remember.

What's going on here? Are mediocre Web sites enough for everyone, to the point that even worthwhile publications are struggling? Weblogs have done a bit to give me a steady stream of interesting technical news, but the number of well-researched technical articles (of which the best example was BYTE, RIP) is tiny.

Updates: Thanks for the comments, folks. Avi reports that he received an April issue of MacTech, and John the March issue. I might have the March one sitting around somewhere, but what led me to believe February was the latest was that its cover appeared on mactech.com (still does in fact). Guess I should find out if my subscription has been “misplaced.”

The y axis of the graph above indicates kilobytes: it was generated from the “size” column in a Eudora mailbox window. (Earlier versions of the graph had the units labeled, but I had to try so many times to get Excel to do my bidding, that I forgot to include it in the version posted above.)

Sven-S. Porst wrote:

The last time I've seen an interesting technical article in a computer magazine was well back in the past millenium. As far as I am concerned the magazines deserve to die. While lots of web content are mediocre, the printed magazines aren't any better. In fact, authors often seem to be less informed than I am and 'technically challenged'.