Fools paradise:A total revelation
(Moving target: The disillusioned donkey -source : Bobanum Moli)So I would like you to join this investigation, to verify whether, this has some credibility or was it just another de-ja-vu
Firstly I started counting the ads in the magazine. Believe it or not, 26 % of this magazine is full of untargeted ads - which really makes one feel, you PAY your hard earned cash on some stupid ads? These are full pages ads and I have not included ads that cover up over half the page or even 3/4 rth of it.Counting these, would increase the toll to even unbelievable higher numbers
Note that,you may not get the complete picture of what I am saying if you have lot of cash, and have no idea on how to spend it or you do not have even the faintest idea of whats happening in the tech world. So lets proceed further.
Looking further, we can see that, there are over 38 pages of reviews of software and hardware, which may seem interesting at first. But looking closely, one can find that most of these hardware/softwares are not even close to the budget that the common computer guy can afford to.
Just check this out. To avoid randomness, I have included the review in a series (in the order, they appear in the magazine).
It doesn't matter what product they have reviewed(because I don't want to do that product's advertisement here, again !!) I have only included the page number as well as the price.
Page Price
115 Rs 17,500 (434.67 $)
139 Rs 8213 (204.00 $)
140 Rs 100,609 (2499 $)
141 Rs 26,128 (649 $)
143 Rs 40,219 (999 $)
the list goes on,
On an average, most of the products reviewed comes over 15,000 and buying a couple of products in this category is just unthinkable. They have also allocated 11 pages for Vista(still not widely adopted) and Mac(least minority users in India) and 18 pages of reviews for games on Xbox and PS3 - note that Xbox and Ps3 accounts to very negligibly small percentage of computer users in India
All in all a whopping 115 pages(68 %) of stuff, which you can't either use or afford to. Now someone may argue that you shouldn't be reading this magazine in the first place, if you cant shell out 30,000 - 40,000 a month and that too on proprietary software, I agree with you dude. But I just thought of sharing with you something, that I learnt, thats all.
Even with the 30 % stuff which you MAY find beneficial, some of them are targeted at enterprise users, some at home users and so on. So think again,what does all these really mean?
And unfortunately this is the same case with most computer magazines available in the market, But there are some exceptions like Linux Journal and Linux for you and Developer IQ magazines(Correct me, if I am wrong)
I have made of completing listing of ads, the product price as well as the page numbers that they appear. 68 % of stuff, which I have quoted earlier is also fully documented. So anyone who would like to verify could just mail me and I will be glad to send you the details. My email id is
j-u-s- t-i -n -c- s- 4 -@ - g- m- a-i- l - d- o- t - c- o- m (without spaces and hyphens)
So lets keep our eyes open on things that we buy and things that we really get.
And Keep clicking
A "PC world " note
(PC world magazine with all the free goodies)Two days back I bought the latest edition of PC World computer magazine. Since they would be completing 1 year in India, they had lot of free goodies with this month's issue, Including 6 free booklets and a DVD with 12 softwares worth Rs 24,000 (596.12 $) ; FREE.
They also had this neatly published at the back of the cover in which the magazine came(see below) - that they are giving these softwares, costing so much, just free with the magazine. Great!!
But it made me wonder, whether anyone one of us really bother to see the value/cost/effort behind any one the free and open source softwares that we use and those that are taken for granted .....
Consider the softwares that we use daily including the Firefox, GIMP, Thunderbird, OpenOffice and java and thousands other such software;including the Apache, which powers most of the websites(66 million of them- source:netcraft) that you visit. People rarely publicize about the value and power of these softwares.
Imagine one of the computer magazines(substitute your favorite magazine here) decides to give away Vista with their magazine!!(I know its never going to happen!) and consider how much they would advertise, publicize to let everyone "know" that they are giving Vista with their magazine.
Now consider this, imagine how much this same magazine would publicize/advertise if they decide to give out a cool new Linux distribution with their magazine....
I think you get my picture, a stark contrast between the free world of open source /free softwares and that of proprietary software - In my humble opinion, one of the main issues that needs to be addressed.
Share your thoughts here.
As a side note, i decided to add a list of "Top 5 Free/Open source Applications" in my blog.
bye
Labels: free software, open source, pcworld
