Journal eno2001's Journal: WIRED Magazine is Total Shit 3
I must gripe about Wired magazine once again. I just forced myself to thumb through last month's issue as this month's issue just arrived yesterday. These mags are making it straight to the garbage as fast as I can get them in there. I would happily give the magazines to someone who was interested, but if I knew someone who actually LIKED Wired magazine, I don't know if we'd get along.
For starters, they had a snippy little comment about that Bram kid who created BitTorrent. They called him something like a "cowardly, arrogant bastard" or such drivel. My problem isn't that I support piracy, I don't. My problem is that a professionally published magazine (or rag in this case) shouldn't be making those kind of remarks about an individual. Did he create a tool that could be used for piracy? Yes. Did he do this with intent to promote piracy? Who knows and who cares? The fact is that the legitimate use of BitTorrent is much larger than the piracy being commited. Whatever.
Next we have their boring histrionic piece about Yahoo! and how they were meant to take the world by storm. But it's not really a celebration of Yahoo! as much as it is an anti-Google smear fest. What is it that Yahoo! really does in the first place? What did they EVER do that was reasonably useful? I've NEVER used Yahoo! as a search engine because quite frankly, it sucks the nuts off off of every man, woman and child on the planet. (yeah it sucks THAT bad) I was a devoted Altavista user until Google came along. The Yahoo! portal blows chunks. Let's just say that everything Yahoo! ever did, bites the big one. To top it off, they do a little comparison of Yahoo! vs. Google in various areas.
They make a big deal about the fact that Yahoo! has more patents. So what? Which service actually has a kickass map service that works better than anything else out there and is STILL IN BETA?? Yahoo! can take their patents and sodomize their litigous bastard lawyers with them. They point out that Yahoo! has far more employees than Google. Oh REALLY??? Then Yahoo! must have a generally lower standard to which they hold those employees because I haven't seen any evidence that their larger employee base has resulted in any tangibly better services than Google. If I was the investing type, I'd put my money on Google out of principle. Finally, they seem to think that the fact that Yahoo! still has more wealth then Google actually means something. Bzzzzt! Wrong again. Google provides several services with a decent interface (ie. simple but powerful), great search results, and innovative approaches to various problem domains and they do it with a smaller staff and less money. Yahoo!? A big fat bloated serving of zilch. Zero quality and hemmoraging money. Sounds like a den of scammers to me.
The obnoxiousness of Wired magazine is nauseating. They seem to have become a haven of non-geek, techno weenie, gadget humping, digi-fetishists with no clue about what really matters in technology today. I'll only give them one point out of several thousand missed in this issue: they had a story about biodegradable removable media made fro substances like paper and corn. I hadn't heard about this before, but to be honest, it wouldn't surprise me if it's already been duped on Slashdot twice. And that's not saying much as I think Slashdot sucks too. But, if you ever want to get a warm and fuzzy feeling about Slashdot, read a copy of Wired from cover to cover. On second thought, scratch that. I'm more interested in trying to up the collective IQ of folks I interact with. I would't want to be responsible for lowering their IQs a few percentage points. I'm going to have to find another use for these Wired magazines as they are not fit for reading. (Look in one of my older JEs for the reason why I'm stuck with a two year subscription to this sopping piss rag)
UPDATE: I just remembered one more thing that annoyed me about that issue while driving this morning. They had an entire feature story on "Black Globalism". They are referring to the growing trend of fake name brand items. Items such as designer purses, Nike and Reebok tennis shoes, etc... (IANAJ) Whoever wrote the piece needs a serious lesson in journalism. Even I can see that. Again, it wasn't decent journalism but more of a screed against the "filth" that are working to destroy capitalism. They make it sound like these people are evil cybergangsters from a Gibson novel. In reality, these people are more akin to snake oil salesmen. They are the epitome of capitalism run amok, where opportunism is encouraged as a coveted trait. The people who manufacture these goods are no more evil than an oily used car salesman with a ten car lot. They are largely cunning more than intelligent and definitely greedy more than purely evil. The next thing you know, the idiot who wrote the article will try to tie the commies in somehow... God Wired sucks even worse than I ever imagined!
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