Gordon Mah Ung has died

158 points
1/21/1970
2 days ago
by EA-3167

Comments


iFred

Learned about this last night and needless to say it was a gut punch. There is a whole generation of us that have Gordon to thank for our monthly pilgrimage to the magazine section looking for the latest edition of Maximum PC. Once a year we were treated to a buffet of hardware with amazingly high specs and prices to match with these Dream Machines later serving as mental checkpoints of the eras fastest personal compute. The. There was the effort that Gordon put into consumer advocacy in his columns, bad parts, badder corporate practices, and he was there fighting for us on the printed page.

Rest in peace Gordon.

2 days ago

MrGilbert

Steve from GamersNexus paid tribute to Gordon Mah Ung in a very touching remembrance video: https://youtu.be/Ty6hDR2UskM

2 days ago

parker-3461

Thanks for mentioning this here, I learnt a lot more about Gordon from the video there, and I think we all have something to thank Gordon for - both directly and indirectly.

2 days ago

newsclues

2 days ago

disillusioned

I was a hardcore MaximumPC subscriber for... I don't know, basically 20 years? I was a PC hobbiest basically from 4th grade onward, and MaximumPC was my bible. It helped me decide between the RivaTNT and the 3Dfx Voodoo. It got me obsessed with the Cambridge Soundworks 5.1 sound system that I owned for a decade. It was my touchstone for all things PC building and gaming, and it was fundamentally responsible for so much of my early PC/hacking/tinkering development, and I just remember seeing Gordon Mah Ung's bylines on _so. very. much._ of the content that I consumed and loved from MaximumPC over those years.

It's hard to overstate how important his contributions were to someone anonymous like me during those formative years, but they were. RIP, Gordon. Damn.

2 days ago

plasticbugs

So saddened by this news. I worked with Gordon. He had a wonderful sense of humor. Was a true believer, die hard technologist, uncompromising, witty and honest. Will be having a drink here in his honor shortly.

2 days ago

ChumpGPT

This is unfortunate.

Was he the one who took over from the hardware guy who died during the Boot magazine era and then went on to Maximum PC?

2 days ago

EA-3167

That's right.

> Gordon studied journalism at San Francisco State University and then worked as a police reporter for the Contra Costa Times in the late 1990s. In 1997, he joined Computerworld (a PCWorld sister publication) before I recruited him to join boot magazine (later re-launched as Maximum PC), where he would ultimately lead hardware coverage for 16 years.

2 days ago

stygiansonic

Sorry to hear this

A lot of my teenage years were spent building and playing with PCs and a lot of the knowledge and interest came from reading each and every issue of boot and maximum pc

2 days ago

mastax

I grew up on Gordon’s rant of the week on the Maximum PC podcast. I’ll miss him.

2 days ago

theandrewbailey

I probably have a folder full of those clips somewhere. Epic and hilarious.

RIP Gordon.

2 days ago

blindriver

Why are so many people dying of pancreatic cancer? What is going on with this, it’s terrifying that this disease is on the rise but it can’t be detected before it’s too late

2 days ago

BirAdam

With cancer, it’s exceedingly difficult to narrow down a cause unless someone was a smoker or was otherwise exposed to a very potent carcinogen or to abnormal amounts of radiation. Every day, humans are exposed to a variety of chemicals, metals, pollutants, and so on. For things that are suddenly increasing, we’d need hard and unbiased information about every common product, all nearby sources of pollution, everything in a persons normal diet, and so on. It isn’t easy.

2 days ago

ainiriand

WHO keeps a list of potential carcinogens. It is barely, if ever, observed. For example coffee or cured/red meats.

a day ago

dangus

And that’s not even taking into account non-exposure sources of cancer.

2 days ago

genocidicbunny

The pancreas is heavily involved with metabolism and the prevalence of metabolic diseases in general is higher than it was. It's also harder to treat via more traditional methods because it's an organ so involved with metabolism that you can't be as aggressive with treatment. And because it's also in close proximity to some very high energy pathways it tends to grow very quickly once it gets going.

I've lost a couple of friends to it, and it was always less than 12 months between diagnosis and death.

a day ago

pupppet

Yikes

2 days ago

tharmas

[flagged]

2 days ago

UltraSane

Do you have a plausible mechanism by which they could cause cancer?

2 days ago

pkphilip

Yep!

2 days ago

pkphilip

As expected the hivemind has decided to downvote me

17 hours ago

ok654321

[dead]

2 days ago