As wave after relentless wave of business and tech mags wash over me I find that I’m being stretched in terms of time and money.

So in order to give you just a sample of what’s out there I’m initiating this news Short Scans Features. I won’t rate the magazines for two reasons: I lacked the time and two: I didn’t think the whole magazine was worth reading or some odd combination of the two.

By far, the American Scientist provided the best story of the month. Quoting such diverse and cool sources such as The Matrix, Doug Adams and Hans Moravec, the story called "Computational Creationism" dealt with the interesting and frightening prospect of being able to create your own simulated world. It’s a nice exploration of all of the issues involved.

He even quotes Stanislaw Lem (You could tell the writer was well versed in science fiction) and points out that if you create simulated worlds for your own whim and pleasure it brings the unsettling thought to mind that your own world might be the plaything of some guy outside the screen trying to solve a proof or two. It was elegantly written as well. You can tell that it wasn’t massively group edited or guided by marketing. It carried an authorial, uncontaminated feel, kind of like at the Sciences.

The Matrix, one of my favorite movies, also made an appearance in an essay written by dreadlocked, hippieish VR pioneer Jaron Lanier who wrote about Virtual Reality as Metaphor in this Fall’s edition of the Whole Earth catalog. He gave an interesting history as to how he came up with the term and how its meaning has evolved over the years.

Actually, the most interesting part of the magazine for me wasn’t the essay but the little side notes on the margins of the page. You may know by now that VR hasn’t exactly come on line yet, and Jaron tells us in the margins that’s because you still need less expensive equipment and greater processing power to do these things. But he predicts that within several years we’ll reach a point where the price and productivity match and then we’ll be seeing plenty of VR environments.

I must note, aside from the Lanier story, I was kind of disappointed with this issue. Kind of like Biz 2.0 or even Business Week, when Whole Earth chooses to write about science they’re usually pretty good at it. But aside from Jaron’s piece, the entire issue seemed to be about metaphor. In other words, the whole magazine seemed more annoyingly new agey than usual. Even though I will get around to reading that Salmon Rushdie interview when I get a chance.

As for the Big Two this week—PC World and PC Magazine—both had some interesting bits. PC World had the most interesting article on most of the desktop operating systems out there from Win 98 to the Win 2000 beta to both of the popular versions of Linux: Red Hat and Caldera.

Being that I kind of already work with a lot of Windows products I kind of glossed over those reviews, but I did pay attention to their Linux reviews. Like all the other judges of Red Hat and Caldera, PC World chose Caldera. They said it was much easier to set up and that the KDE Gui made computing fairly close to a Windows/Mac experience.

Frankly, all the reviews I’ve read say pretty much the same thing. CNET said Caldera was better and so did the Maximum PC special Linux issue. In fact, Red Hat didn’t even finish second. Debian Linux, a variation of Red Hat, came in second. I have both versions at home. I guess I’ll install Caldera first.