I don't use Mac OS X much any more, and one reason is that (while again, I know a lot of people *do* like them) I don't like iTunes or iPhoto. When using a modern UNIXy desktop, I'd rather navigate to files (whether GUI or CLI) and then choose an app with which to manipulate... whatever it is I want to manipulate. I might open a text file in any of a dozen programs, might open a photo with The GIMP or with a dedicated viewer program, or a slideshow program, or a browser.
Presumably you don't know about the idiom of right-click file, select Open With... ?
(Yes, real Mac users use multi-button mice. It's only Mac software developers who shouldn't...)
...it'll run on OS X under X11 with fairly minimal porting effort today.
If the companies haven't made that port available then the (trivial, from an application developer point of view) change from PowerPC to x86 isn't going to change that.
It's all about size of market and differential pricing. Not the CPU that happens to be in the box.
GoDaddy are also reported to terminate your domain on any complaint, and charge you hundreds of dollars to get it back. Even if that complaint is entirely frivolous. I've never used GoDaddy for various other reasons, but that's the reason I'd
never consdier them.
I use tucows to manage my domains. Works great, but the setup overhead probably isn't worth it for fewer than ten to fifteen domains.
If you want an honest, full service registrar you're probably going to have to pay more than bargain basement prices. There are a bunch of those around, including many of the corenic resellers. I've had mostly good experiences with netwiz in the past.
I never saw it in shops. I saw it mentioned somewhere and
looked at the website. There's nothing on the website to suggest it was released any later than, oh, '99 or so. It looked like some random shareware game released in the late '90s, and not a particularly good one at that.
My main machine is a mac. Apparently Ambrosia have a
mac port, but the main darwinia page doesn't mention that anywhere.
And it's not as though I spent hours investigating it. I heard about it, looked at the webpage, decided that this was clearly a horribly out of date game and looked as though it sucked and moved on in the space of a couple of minutes.
If you look as though you suck at first site, most people
aren't going to look further. The darwinia website makes it look
as though the game sucks. (And, honestly, I suspect any windows game that uses Alt-Tab as a control key is going to
suck badly, but that wasn't something I considered at the time).
I looked at it a while back. It wasn't clear from the website
exactly what the game was. Quoting from the game guide:
The Task Manager is designed to allow you to operate several programs simultaniously - eg Squads, Engineers etc. The Task Manager is accessed by holding down the ALT key
You can switch between all your running Programs in the Task Manager by pressing the ALT-TAB.
You can Terminate a running Program by pressing CTRL-C while it is selected.
If you scroll left by pushing the mouse to the left of the screen (or by pressing A) you will see a list of all available Programs, and their creation gestures. Scroll right for a list of Objectives.
Uhm... what? Sure doesn't sound like the description of
a game that's going to be compelling.
It also describes the requirements as "Windows 98". I do have a windows box set aside for games, but it runs XP. It
didn't look likely enough to run nor interesting enough to play to be worth downloading teh demo.
I know y'all can't stand marketing in any shape or form, but there are some basics that are really important. A website that
makes the game sound as though it doesn't suck and will run on my OS is a good start.
Re:This is not a suprise
on
TrollTech to IPO?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Sure, they've fixed a bunch. This is the first release
that'll run on OS X 10.4, for instance (so, yes, I've had production
releases of my code using pre-release snapshots of Qt3.3.5, as Qt 3.3.4 doesn't run on Tiger).
But if you report a bug to TrollTech - and I'm talking some
fairly serious bugs, like, say, QTabBar fails horribly in QAquaStyle
or drawing chords doesn't work at all or docked widgets cannot
be resized to smaller than 245 pixels high or... - then you'll be
told "It'll be fixed in Qt 4.1". When pressed they'll tell you that
their policy is not to fix anything other than critical bugs in Qt3.
Showstopper bugs in Qt3 are not even being worked on, let alone fixed. The stock answer is "it'll be fixed in a future release
of Qt4". Quite apart from the rewrite needed to move from Qt3
to Qt4 not being trivial, Qt4 doesn't work yet. The latest release
I have of Qt4 on my Mac... well... the included tools don't work, let alone the libraries. Assistant has appalling focus problems, such that the Index box doesn't work at all, just as one example.
(To be fair, I suspect that Windows and Linux users have a better situation, as Qt3 for those platforms is more mature than Qt3 for OS X - but given I'm paying for a TrioPack license I expect all three platforms to be supported).
Once Qt4 is finished it'll be nice, but the currently available versions are early-beta quality, at best. And developers using Qt3 are being told that bugs will not be fixed, ever, and they should migrate to Qt4, where the bugs will be fixed eventually.
Re:This is not a suprise
on
TrollTech to IPO?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Well, the quality of service has gone down and the price has gone up, so that would fit the IPO speculation.
They're a nice company and have a nice product, but Qt4 isn't
quite ready for prime-time yet, and (despite claims to the contrary)
they've discontinued support for Qt3 (if your bug doesn't cause
a SEGV, it doesn't get fixed). This is not a great situation if you're a paying Trolltech customer and have 100kloc based on
Qt3 to support.
And, right now, I'm waiting for a return call from their product folks that was promised "same day" over a week ago...
Really, what good is a warranty, other than it's DOA? Does anyone do backups anymore? How's that MTBF? A warranty is the least of my concerns if my drive dies in the first year.
Drives will die, eventually. Design decisions can affect the shape of the death curve, and how much you spend in QA can affect the number that will die within the first $X months.
A warranty provides a (strong) financial incentive for the manufacturer to make sure that very, very few die in that first few years. With a one year warranty there's no incentive to push the death curve out much beyond 18 months.
That doesn't mean that a short warrantied drive will die quickly, but it's likely that a drive with a longer warranty has
had more attention paid to expected lifespan.
Actually the IP address that's listed is store.yahoo.com.
Yahoo hosting is riddled with spammers, and store.yahoo.com is where most of them live, and where they accept credit cards for their purchases.
The SBL lists IP addresses that are involved in spam. 66.163.161.45 is involved in a lot of spam. It's not been removed from the SBL because, well, it's still actively being used by spammers.
Because countless spammers register domains on a daily basis, yet point them at the same IP addresses some people choose to resolve the URLs in incoming email and bounce the mail if any of them resolve to particularly filthy IP addresses.
66.163.161.45 is filthy. Blocking mail that has URLs pointing there will stop a fair amount of spam. Not an approach I'd use myself, but certainly a lot more effective (in terms of spam caugh and false positives) than many, many other approaches in widespread use.
Paul chose to host his website there, despite supposedly knowing a lot about the spam issue. That was probably not a good call.
...his website is hosted on the same IP address as a spammer (textileshop.com) was on yesterday, and because of that he's seeing some of his mail blocked.
There's certainly a need for thoughtful and hopefully
positive criticism of blacklist behaviour. This article is not it.
If she wanted to develop software as a passion she'd already be
doing it. The obsessive programmers amongst us can't stop doing it, and while they can learn a lot from a decent CS degree they'd be programming without one.
If her intent is to do so as a career... well, most of being a professional developer is communication, meetings, analyzing requirements, more meetings, more communication. It's not a job that is well-suited to 100% telecommuting, nor to telecommuting at all for the first six months or so at an employer.
There are also many, many mediocre programmers available, so most employers have lots of people to choose from in the stack of resumes (very few good developers - but you only get good by actually working for a few years). Someone who
isn't going to be able to meet with customers or show up at an office is not going to be at the top of the list. Bluntly, if her intent is to make a career out of it then there's going to be a lot of disappointment in the future, unless she has something a lot more specific planned than "being a software engineer".
So... what's the motivation for becoming a software engineer?
The details of how to learn to be a software engineer at home have been covered fairly well in other posts, but most of what you need to learn you learn by working with others in the field after you've done the academic side of things. But first she should ask
whether it's the most constructive thing she could spend several years doing.
99% of exploits require direct access to the machine? I don't think so, not even close.
Actually "Don't use IE. Don't use Outlook or Outlook Express." will protect you from the vast majority of Windows
security issues.
A port filter of some sort - any of the external Netgear
NAT boxes, say - will protect you from most of the rest.
Neither Windows or OS X are secure enough by default to
survive users installing trojans, which is the remaining attack
vector. It's hard to defend against that while still allowing users
to install applications. Not impossible - sandboxes, reduced
privilege users and so on - but not trivial.
We've heard many of the other comments from disgruntled Windows users before, but one that bears repeating is that Windows does tend to try to be all things to all people.
If only that were the case. Windows was always targeted at closed corporate networks. That's what all it's networking functionality was designed to support, and it does it extremely well.
But there's no such thing as a closed corporate network any more, pretty much. And all the design decisions that made some sort of sense for that scenario are what are behind many of the security, stability and configuration problems that plague both corporate and home users.
...and quite a few userspace apps were broken on Linux/Alpha (I spent quite a bit of time with Linux on EV5).
But not because of backwards compatibility issues so much
as bad code, written by bad coders.
The minor issues you're going to come across due to the
true development environment differences between 32 bit and
64 bit code will be fairly minor in comparison to the problems
with broken code that just happened to work in 32 bit mode.
All the world is not a Vax, not a Sun, and definitely not a 32 bit x86.
It's not just a possibility, it's a fairly widely accepted fact. Both CS Lewis and Tolkien were Christian and attempted to bring a Christian spirituality into a style of romantic story telling that more traditionally was a nature spirituality (what might today
be described, inaccurately, as pagan).
Propaganda might be a bit of a strong term, but the underlying currents and messages of the books are pretty strongly Christian.
Why do people mark messages as spam that they willingly signed up for?
Several reasons. One is that the AOL user interface is
pretty bad and it's easy to hit the button by accident.
Another
is that people tend to select large swathes of messages in their
inbox and mark them as spam in bulk, often mixing in the occasional legitimate email in the spam.
Another is that senders often don't make it clear enough
who their email is from and the recipient clicks the This-Is-Spam button before they register that they really wanted it.
Another is that many people use the This-Is-Spam button as an Unsubscribe button, and click it when they
don't want the email any more, rather than unsubscribing from the mailing list they signed up for. SpamCop gets used this way too.
(This all may or may not be related to the reason the mail was
filed in the bulk folder, though. It was bulk email, the recipients hadn't whitelisted it... it's something of a crapshoot whether it'll
get flagged as bulk in that case.)
Broken spam filters are a serious problem, but this isn't
really the best example of them (the fact that they catch personal, one-to-one email is a much more serious problem and harder to solve).
There are fairly well documented ways to help ensure that your legitimate email is not caught by spam filters at many ISPs. AOLs is one of the oldest and one of the simplest to sign up for. It's free, too.
Indian River County has chosen to A) not sign up for that
system themselves and B) send their email themselves rather
than using an outsourced provider that is experienced in sending bulk email. According to TFA they're now talking with AOL to fix their issues.
I strongly suspect that they're doing other
stupid things in sending their email that make it look just like spam, but without seeing the mail it's impossible to say for sure. If so, though, they really need to talk to decent consultant to fix their mail problems rather than going to the press.
This is the land of all-free, all-the-time. People are supposed to product content for free, and give it away to all and sundry with no revenue stream to, say, pay their rent.
If you're looking for an useful discussion, you're in the wrong place.
Re:Steve Atkins and Spam Kings
on
Spam Kings
·
· Score: 1
But when I tried in 2004 to get him to provide information about a couple of incidents in spam history (in order to "get it right"), he declined.
A half-truth. I chatted with Mr McWilliams online, but
declined to go into detail on some issues he wanted to
discuss. The main reason for that is that some of the information is confidential, and it's very difficult to discuss the non-confidential parts of an incident with a journalist without risking mentioning confidential issues.
He even threated to sue my publisher if his company (Word to the Wise) was mentioned in the book.
An outright lie. I did call O'Reilly and talked to one of their
editors. I told them that I had been told that there was some
untrue and libelous material in the draft at that point and that
I or my company may have been mentioned in the draft. I asked
for a copy of the manuscript to review. I never received that draft, nor a return call from O'Reilly. Mr McWilliams did follow up
with me, was very polite and professional and told me of the
mentions of myself, my company and my wife in the book.
In brief, Atkins declined to share his view of events. And now he's publicly complaining that my rendition departs from his (secret) interpretation.
I declined to share some private information primarily due to confidentiality concerns, but also secondarily because I was pretty sure, from the questions asked and the response to others, that it was not a book I wanted to be involved in. Tabloid journalism and hatchet jobs are seldom
pretty to anyone involved.
Re:SamSpade deserves its credibility
on
Spam Kings
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
There's nothing wrong with yet another blog about spam issues at all. At a brief look yours looks as good as most, better than some.
Reviewing a book that is simply not an accurate history of events and not commenting on that leaves the impression that you're not aware of the reality of what actually happened during the period the book attempts to document, and that you didn't notice from some of the obvious writing techniques used in the book that it's, at best, a fictionalised account. (Not that there's anything intrinsically wrong with a fictional account based in a real universe and mentioning some real character either, as long as it's not mistaken for an accurate description of history.)
None of which is a particularly big deal, but if you post a glowing review of a badly written book to the front page of slashdot, expect to get called on it.
I'm in the book
on
Spam Kings
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I'm only mentioned once, but it got your attention... Much more importantly I know a lot of people who are mentioned in the book, what they said to Mr McWilliams, and I know a lot of the reality behind the story it pretends to tell.
Spam Kings is bad fiction, created by a hack reporter. It bears no resemblance to reality, and contradicts statements that were made by those who were interviewed by Brian McWilliams.
It's something that should really be serialised by the Sunday Sport or the Weekly World News.
That a publisher like O'Reilly published it is very sad.
I'd never heard of spamroll before, which in itself says a lot about it given the business I'm in, but this positive review of a book
that's widely accepted to be badly written fiction says a lot about its credibility.
10.4 pre-release (which will have debugging code and will
likely be slower than the final release) is running as well as or better on my 800MHz iLamp than 10.3 release does on my 867MHz PowerBook.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't use Mac OS X much any more, and one reason is that (while again, I know a lot of people *do* like them) I don't like iTunes or iPhoto. When using a modern UNIXy desktop, I'd rather navigate to files (whether GUI or CLI) and then choose an app with which to manipulate ... whatever it is I want to manipulate. I might open a text file in any of a dozen programs, might open a photo with The GIMP or with a dedicated viewer program, or a slideshow program, or a browser.
Presumably you don't know about the idiom of right-click file, select Open With... ?
(Yes, real Mac users use multi-button mice. It's only Mac software developers who shouldn't...)
...it'll run on OS X under X11 with fairly minimal porting effort today.
If the companies haven't made that port available then the (trivial, from an application developer point of view) change from PowerPC to x86 isn't going to change that.
It's all about size of market and differential pricing. Not the CPU that happens to be in the box.
GoDaddy are also reported to terminate your domain on any complaint, and charge you hundreds of dollars to get it back. Even if that complaint is entirely frivolous. I've never used GoDaddy for various other reasons, but that's the reason I'd never consdier them.
I use tucows to manage my domains. Works great, but the setup overhead probably isn't worth it for fewer than ten to fifteen domains.
If you want an honest, full service registrar you're probably going to have to pay more than bargain basement prices. There are a bunch of those around, including many of the corenic resellers. I've had mostly good experiences with netwiz in the past.
I never saw it in shops. I saw it mentioned somewhere and looked at the website. There's nothing on the website to suggest it was released any later than, oh, '99 or so. It looked like some random shareware game released in the late '90s, and not a particularly good one at that.
My main machine is a mac. Apparently Ambrosia have a mac port, but the main darwinia page doesn't mention that anywhere.
And it's not as though I spent hours investigating it. I heard about it, looked at the webpage, decided that this was clearly a horribly out of date game and looked as though it sucked and moved on in the space of a couple of minutes.
If you look as though you suck at first site, most people aren't going to look further. The darwinia website makes it look as though the game sucks. (And, honestly, I suspect any windows game that uses Alt-Tab as a control key is going to suck badly, but that wasn't something I considered at the time).
I looked at it a while back. It wasn't clear from the website exactly what the game was. Quoting from the game guide:
Uhm... what? Sure doesn't sound like the description of a game that's going to be compelling.
It also describes the requirements as "Windows 98". I do have a windows box set aside for games, but it runs XP. It didn't look likely enough to run nor interesting enough to play to be worth downloading teh demo.
I know y'all can't stand marketing in any shape or form, but there are some basics that are really important. A website that makes the game sound as though it doesn't suck and will run on my OS is a good start.
Sure, they've fixed a bunch. This is the first release that'll run on OS X 10.4, for instance (so, yes, I've had production releases of my code using pre-release snapshots of Qt3.3.5, as Qt 3.3.4 doesn't run on Tiger).
But if you report a bug to TrollTech - and I'm talking some fairly serious bugs, like, say, QTabBar fails horribly in QAquaStyle or drawing chords doesn't work at all or docked widgets cannot be resized to smaller than 245 pixels high or... - then you'll be told "It'll be fixed in Qt 4.1". When pressed they'll tell you that their policy is not to fix anything other than critical bugs in Qt3.
Showstopper bugs in Qt3 are not even being worked on, let alone fixed. The stock answer is "it'll be fixed in a future release of Qt4". Quite apart from the rewrite needed to move from Qt3 to Qt4 not being trivial, Qt4 doesn't work yet. The latest release I have of Qt4 on my Mac... well... the included tools don't work, let alone the libraries. Assistant has appalling focus problems, such that the Index box doesn't work at all, just as one example.
(To be fair, I suspect that Windows and Linux users have a better situation, as Qt3 for those platforms is more mature than Qt3 for OS X - but given I'm paying for a TrioPack license I expect all three platforms to be supported).
Once Qt4 is finished it'll be nice, but the currently available versions are early-beta quality, at best. And developers using Qt3 are being told that bugs will not be fixed, ever, and they should migrate to Qt4, where the bugs will be fixed eventually.
Well, the quality of service has gone down and the price has gone up, so that would fit the IPO speculation.
They're a nice company and have a nice product, but Qt4 isn't quite ready for prime-time yet, and (despite claims to the contrary) they've discontinued support for Qt3 (if your bug doesn't cause a SEGV, it doesn't get fixed). This is not a great situation if you're a paying Trolltech customer and have 100kloc based on Qt3 to support.
And, right now, I'm waiting for a return call from their product folks that was promised "same day" over a week ago...
Here
- Three year warranty is good, but not the best
Really, what good is a warranty, other than it's DOA? Does anyone do backups anymore? How's that MTBF? A warranty is the least of my concerns if my drive dies in the first year.Drives will die, eventually. Design decisions can affect the shape of the death curve, and how much you spend in QA can affect the number that will die within the first $X months.
A warranty provides a (strong) financial incentive for the manufacturer to make sure that very, very few die in that first few years. With a one year warranty there's no incentive to push the death curve out much beyond 18 months.
That doesn't mean that a short warrantied drive will die quickly, but it's likely that a drive with a longer warranty has had more attention paid to expected lifespan.
Read this before you donate to the EFF. Some of their policies are good. Others you may disagree with.
The EFF opposes blocking or filtering of any spam sent by any charity, government, political party, political action group or private individual.
Actually the IP address that's listed is store.yahoo.com.
Yahoo hosting is riddled with spammers, and store.yahoo.com is where most of them live, and where they accept credit cards for their purchases.
The SBL lists IP addresses that are involved in spam. 66.163.161.45 is involved in a lot of spam. It's not been removed from the SBL because, well, it's still actively being used by spammers.
Because countless spammers register domains on a daily basis, yet point them at the same IP addresses some people choose to resolve the URLs in incoming email and bounce the mail if any of them resolve to particularly filthy IP addresses.
66.163.161.45 is filthy. Blocking mail that has URLs pointing there will stop a fair amount of spam. Not an approach I'd use myself, but certainly a lot more effective (in terms of spam caugh and false positives) than many, many other approaches in widespread use.
Paul chose to host his website there, despite supposedly knowing a lot about the spam issue. That was probably not a good call.
...his website is hosted on the same IP address as a spammer (textileshop.com) was on yesterday, and because of that he's seeing some of his mail blocked.
There's certainly a need for thoughtful and hopefully positive criticism of blacklist behaviour. This article is not it.
If she wanted to develop software as a passion she'd already be doing it. The obsessive programmers amongst us can't stop doing it, and while they can learn a lot from a decent CS degree they'd be programming without one.
If her intent is to do so as a career... well, most of being a professional developer is communication, meetings, analyzing requirements, more meetings, more communication. It's not a job that is well-suited to 100% telecommuting, nor to telecommuting at all for the first six months or so at an employer.
There are also many, many mediocre programmers available, so most employers have lots of people to choose from in the stack of resumes (very few good developers - but you only get good by actually working for a few years). Someone who isn't going to be able to meet with customers or show up at an office is not going to be at the top of the list. Bluntly, if her intent is to make a career out of it then there's going to be a lot of disappointment in the future, unless she has something a lot more specific planned than "being a software engineer".
So... what's the motivation for becoming a software engineer?
The details of how to learn to be a software engineer at home have been covered fairly well in other posts, but most of what you need to learn you learn by working with others in the field after you've done the academic side of things. But first she should ask whether it's the most constructive thing she could spend several years doing.
99% of exploits require direct access to the machine? I don't think so, not even close.
Actually "Don't use IE. Don't use Outlook or Outlook Express." will protect you from the vast majority of Windows security issues.
A port filter of some sort - any of the external Netgear NAT boxes, say - will protect you from most of the rest.
Neither Windows or OS X are secure enough by default to survive users installing trojans, which is the remaining attack vector. It's hard to defend against that while still allowing users to install applications. Not impossible - sandboxes, reduced privilege users and so on - but not trivial.
We've heard many of the other comments from disgruntled Windows users before, but one that bears repeating is that Windows does tend to try to be all things to all people.
If only that were the case. Windows was always targeted at closed corporate networks. That's what all it's networking functionality was designed to support, and it does it extremely well.
But there's no such thing as a closed corporate network any more, pretty much. And all the design decisions that made some sort of sense for that scenario are what are behind many of the security, stability and configuration problems that plague both corporate and home users.
...and quite a few userspace apps were broken on Linux/Alpha (I spent quite a bit of time with Linux on EV5).
But not because of backwards compatibility issues so much as bad code, written by bad coders.
The minor issues you're going to come across due to the true development environment differences between 32 bit and 64 bit code will be fairly minor in comparison to the problems with broken code that just happened to work in 32 bit mode.
All the world is not a Vax, not a Sun, and definitely not a 32 bit x86.
It's not just a possibility, it's a fairly widely accepted fact. Both CS Lewis and Tolkien were Christian and attempted to bring a Christian spirituality into a style of romantic story telling that more traditionally was a nature spirituality (what might today be described, inaccurately, as pagan).
Propaganda might be a bit of a strong term, but the underlying currents and messages of the books are pretty strongly Christian.
Why do people mark messages as spam that they willingly signed up for?
Several reasons. One is that the AOL user interface is pretty bad and it's easy to hit the button by accident.
Another is that people tend to select large swathes of messages in their inbox and mark them as spam in bulk, often mixing in the occasional legitimate email in the spam.
Another is that senders often don't make it clear enough who their email is from and the recipient clicks the This-Is-Spam button before they register that they really wanted it.
Another is that many people use the This-Is-Spam button as an Unsubscribe button, and click it when they don't want the email any more, rather than unsubscribing from the mailing list they signed up for. SpamCop gets used this way too.
(This all may or may not be related to the reason the mail was filed in the bulk folder, though. It was bulk email, the recipients hadn't whitelisted it... it's something of a crapshoot whether it'll get flagged as bulk in that case.)
Broken spam filters are a serious problem, but this isn't really the best example of them (the fact that they catch personal, one-to-one email is a much more serious problem and harder to solve).
There are fairly well documented ways to help ensure that your legitimate email is not caught by spam filters at many ISPs. AOLs is one of the oldest and one of the simplest to sign up for. It's free, too.
Indian River County has chosen to A) not sign up for that system themselves and B) send their email themselves rather than using an outsourced provider that is experienced in sending bulk email. According to TFA they're now talking with AOL to fix their issues.
I strongly suspect that they're doing other stupid things in sending their email that make it look just like spam, but without seeing the mail it's impossible to say for sure. If so, though, they really need to talk to decent consultant to fix their mail problems rather than going to the press.
For the truth about Mr Gibson, look here
This is the land of all-free, all-the-time. People are supposed to product content for free, and give it away to all and sundry with no revenue stream to, say, pay their rent.
If you're looking for an useful discussion, you're in the wrong place.
But when I tried in 2004 to get him to provide information about a couple of incidents in spam history (in order to "get it right"), he declined.
A half-truth. I chatted with Mr McWilliams online, but declined to go into detail on some issues he wanted to discuss. The main reason for that is that some of the information is confidential, and it's very difficult to discuss the non-confidential parts of an incident with a journalist without risking mentioning confidential issues.
He even threated to sue my publisher if his company (Word to the Wise) was mentioned in the book.
An outright lie. I did call O'Reilly and talked to one of their editors. I told them that I had been told that there was some untrue and libelous material in the draft at that point and that I or my company may have been mentioned in the draft. I asked for a copy of the manuscript to review. I never received that draft, nor a return call from O'Reilly. Mr McWilliams did follow up with me, was very polite and professional and told me of the mentions of myself, my company and my wife in the book.
In brief, Atkins declined to share his view of events. And now he's publicly complaining that my rendition departs from his (secret) interpretation.
I declined to share some private information primarily due to confidentiality concerns, but also secondarily because I was pretty sure, from the questions asked and the response to others, that it was not a book I wanted to be involved in. Tabloid journalism and hatchet jobs are seldom pretty to anyone involved.
There's nothing wrong with yet another blog about spam issues at all. At a brief look yours looks as good as most, better than some.
Reviewing a book that is simply not an accurate history of events and not commenting on that leaves the impression that you're not aware of the reality of what actually happened during the period the book attempts to document, and that you didn't notice from some of the obvious writing techniques used in the book that it's, at best, a fictionalised account. (Not that there's anything intrinsically wrong with a fictional account based in a real universe and mentioning some real character either, as long as it's not mistaken for an accurate description of history.)
None of which is a particularly big deal, but if you post a glowing review of a badly written book to the front page of slashdot, expect to get called on it.
I'm only mentioned once, but it got your attention... Much more importantly I know a lot of people who are mentioned in the book, what they said to Mr McWilliams, and I know a lot of the reality behind the story it pretends to tell.
Spam Kings is bad fiction, created by a hack reporter. It bears no resemblance to reality, and contradicts statements that were made by those who were interviewed by Brian McWilliams.
It's something that should really be serialised by the Sunday Sport or the Weekly World News.
That a publisher like O'Reilly published it is very sad.
I'd never heard of spamroll before, which in itself says a lot about it given the business I'm in, but this positive review of a book that's widely accepted to be badly written fiction says a lot about its credibility.
10.4 pre-release (which will have debugging code and will likely be slower than the final release) is running as well as or better on my 800MHz iLamp than 10.3 release does on my 867MHz PowerBook.