_______________JUDGING COMPUTERS BY THEIR COVERS BY SCOTT ROSENBERG (01/08/99)
	Perhaps my idea of "breaking paradigms" is less radical than Scott Rosenberg's. Anyone who's been paying attention to Apple Computer's recent hardware and software strategies would see that the company has been doing a lot of pathfinding for a rather dull desktop computer manufacturing industry, using fresh approaches to advertising, industrial design and computing approachability. Apple's been making the personal computer quite a bit more fun to own and operate; that's a paradigm shift. I'm as concerned as the next Mac fanatic about the abandonment of slower legacy portage (like SCSI) in the new Blue & White G3 towers in favor of newer Universal Serial Bus (USB) and Firewire standards. But as an Apple fan and stockholder, I see the sense in anticipating the needs of the target market: the professional-level user, who appreciates (and will benefit from) the dramatically faster speeds of the newer standards. Many graphics professionals abandoned SCSI-1 and SCSI-2 standards long ago. USB ports have been gathering dust on Wintel machines for almost two years until the iMac's grand entrance last August (coupled with Microsoft's Windows 98 release) kick-started USB-compatible peripheral production. I'm convinced that if computers were automobiles, most of us are still driving all-black Ford Model As. Rosenberg's telling the reader that selling the unit in candy apple red and removing the crank handle from the front of the chassis isn't a significant innovation. -- Scott Douglas New York Scott Rosenberg neglected to mention some considerations that are important to me when choosing Macs: processor design and speed, for instance. The G3 400 chip runs about twice as fast as a Pentium II 450 and uses significantly less wattage. This has real-world advantages. He mentioned that there's a lot less software available for Macs than for Wintels. I use Digidesign's Pro tools audio workstations, which are available for both Macs and Wintel machines, and have found that third-party developers are not as supportive of the Wintel platform, refusing to develop plug-ins that they develop for the Mac. These plug-ins cost anywhere from $100 to $1,000 and extend the functionality of these audio workstations. I think that this situation might be similar for graphics software too. So in some important situations there is less software available for Wintel machines. Also, Macintosh computers, by virtue of the hardware and OS, have less processing delay when it comes to MIDI and audio applications (as has been reported in articles in Mix magazine and Electronic Musician), making them superior in performance for audio applications. Sophisticated Mac users are aware of the advantages that are alleged to be inherent in Wintel machines, yet still pay a premium for the Macintosh. Spending thousands of dollars is not a superficial decision for most people, and colors to the contrary, I doubt that people buy Macs without a careful analysis of their needs. -- Joe Egan Thanks for a cogent analysis of the Macworld goings-on. My only take on the color thing is that Jobs has intuitively figured out how to tap into a Microsoft-Intel-trained market: Give them bullshit and hope you keep them when they discover the substance of your product. Of course, the floppyless, SCSIless world of the new G3s surprises some of the new, more gullible customers (have you seen that the catalogs are already offering reconditioned iMacs for sale?), but why shouldn't Apple nail some of the sheep Bill and Andy have been living off of for years? -- Mark Gisleson
_______________ADVICE FROM A J-SCHOOL DROPOUT BY LEA ASCHKENAS (01/08/99)
	I'd like to comment on Lea Aschkenas' piece on the efficacy of getting a journalism degree. I couldn't help but notice the article's attendant soundtrack -- a high-pitched whining that seemed to emanate from somewhere near the author, who didn't finish grad school and didn't particularly want to be a journalist in the first place. I won't pretend that my interests lie in championing journalism as a profession, but I did get my undergraduate degree from the J-school that Aschkenas leads the story with. My experience with the journalism school at the University of Missouri was flawed, but certainly well worth the time and money if one wants to be a journalist. If, however, one holds the secret desire to be a poet, then my advice would be to go be a poet and let someone with the talent and drive to write news stories have a chance at the scholarships and internships the author apparently wasted. As for the unnamed source from the University of Missouri who told the author to stay out of the newsroom while attending the school, I can only say that my one semester in that newsroom was by far the most difficult and challenging of my stay at Mizzou. I was frustrated, as was every other student reporter, by the ridiculous rule that any long-distance phone call had to be approved and dialed by a higher-up who was rarely available each of the umpteen times I needed to call a source for a story. The source would naturally be out, so I would get voice-mail. Then, of course, when the source returned my call I was in some other class. Sources were reluctant to talk to me once I identified myself as a reporter for the J-school newspaper (which everyone was required to do), because any Columbia resident whose life retained any news value had already been burned by some previous semester's student reporter. If you can routinely get your stories in before deadline under those conditions, working at a full-time reporting job is a vacation. The newsroom, far from sucking the creativity out of a writer, presented a chance to experiment, to go beyond the basics of the inverted pyramid and the "nutgraf," to submit a story as accurate, compelling and beautifully written as you could make it. The managing editor in the newsroom, George Kennedy, encouraged students to find their own style and to go beyond the formula news story, as long as they did it well. Of course, there were lots of stories that demanded the inverted pyramid and a straight reporting style. If you expect to be able to bring your editor to tears every time -- or even once -- you are far too romantic to be a journalist. It seems to me that people who fall short of their own career expectations, for whatever reason, often need to blame the institution for failing them, instead of the other way around. Getting a journalism degree is a fine endeavor if you want to be a journalist. And if you want to discuss the observation that most students get through journalism school with little or no understanding of their ethical obligation as a member of the media, I'll gladly join. But please, don't disparage something you never respected enough to want in the first place. -- Kelly Scott N E X T+P A G E+| Learning to milk J-school contacts