Cubic

Amazing. My book has only been out for a couple months and someone has the audacity to ask me directly if they can pirate it. Here's the message I received:

-------------------------------------
hi,
i m new to this group...
May i know , from where i can get the following books
for free ?
Is there any site , from where i can download ?

Thanks in advance
Manish

>"Accelerated C++" by Koenig and Moo
> "Safe C++ Design Principles" by Thomas Hruska
> "The C++ Standard Library" by Nicolai Josuttis
> "Effective C++" by Scott Meyers
> "More Effective C++" by Scott Meyers
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Basically, this person stuck their hand in the cookie jar while I was already getting a cookie. Figuratively speaking. I don't think it gets any more blunt than that.

The thing is, I am a fairly lenient person. If someone can't afford my book "Safe C++ Design Principles", then they need to e-mail me and propose a c…

Seth Godin has a blog worth reading if you like my style of writing. He's opinionated. I'm opinionated. He's right. I'm right. He talks about business. I talk about software development. He gets to the point. I blab like a journalist. Or an idiot. Pick one.

Anyway, a recent article on his blog caught my eye:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/03/
the_return_addr.html

In the article (albeit very short), Seth admits having no clue why mail scams work. Unfortunately, I know exactly why they work. Here's the lowdown:

Once upon a time a relative of mine received some junk mail. Now this relative was the type of person who had to have two of everything. This sort of behavior is also known as the packrat mentality. It is important to note that if someone who has packrat mentality can't immediately locate at least two items, they will buy another one just to be sure.

Now this particular relative was also an elderly person. It is important to note that as a person g…

I like to know that when I make food that it will have the same taste and texture 100% of the time. That is how I know something is done right.

I don't know if you have ever experienced this, but I can taste subtle differences in both taste and texture. I am every food company's worst nightmare - from cereal to ice cream to even rice. Don't mess with my choice in rice.

Which is exactly what Uncle Ben's recently did. In fact, there was no warning that it was "New and Improved" - they simply changed it. And for the worse. See, I like their Fast-Cook (5 minute) Long-Grain and Wild Rice with Chicken Kiev (and I'm kind of picky about that too). However, a couple weeks ago I had some and it tasted terrible. Of course I'm not one to judge instantly - I gave them a second chance before deciding to contact the company. The taste was awful. The texture was terrible. And it didn't absorb the butter sauce of the Chicken Kiev like it used to.

Actually,…

At the recent RSA conference, Bill Gates said, "Today, we're using password systems, but they simply won't cut it." This was after he presented Windows Vista and its new supposedly-secure architecture.

Uh huh. I don't buy it. For one simple thing was overlooked at the conference: Vista's core graphics engine is based on DirectX (specifically Direct3D). Game developers and programmers have been using DirectX since it practically came out and it STILL is not stable. For example, some of the best minds designed, wrote, and released the Half-Life game engine (a.k.a. "Source") - and it took them all of five years to make ONE game...and it crashes randomly (can even freeze up the PC so that a hard reboot is required)! Microsoft is making claims that it can shift a fairly stable graphics architecture (GDI) over to DirectX in under two years. I don't care how many people Microsoft throw at Vista. The core of DirectX isn't being fundamentally re-writt…