After watching his post here I just had to respond. Enjoy!

Having been recently laid up with a bum leg, I spent my forced recreational time away from my computer with my Kendal. I'd read the other two new books and was bored so I decided to pick up Zero Day and give it a read.

Now before I begin, let me say that Mark Russinovich is one of my all time geek heroes right next to Steve Gibson of GRC.COM (who still writes all his software in assembler), so reading this book I had a mixture of hope (tech fiction by someone who knows it!) and horror (he's going to fudge the facts). As it turns out, both were true.

When reading fiction, I'm a firm believer in the "willing suspension of disbelief." In my case, I use a hangman's noose with about 16" of slack on it. It's usually enough for the job. If something is so horrible in the story that it causes my disbelief to jump around so hard as to hit it's poor head (requiring my attention), then there's something seriously wrong in the picture.

This book was wonderful in that it only caused my disbelief to hit the roof once. There's a scene where a Boeing 787 is out of control, presumably because of a virus that was carried by a Microsoft machine infected the FCS. My only problem with this is that the flight control system (FCS) on the Boeing doesn't use Windows, so a windows virus couldn't affect it. It's a mix of custom systems. That would be like a virus for a Mac infecting a DEC VAX. It just can't happen. If I'm mistaken, please let me know as all my research says No Windows on that bird!

Fortunately that one event was the only item that triggered my disbelief to go nuts. Everything else in the book made very good sense and was reasonably well thought out. I did think that the bad guy hackers were incompetent that they did some partition/OS corruption to destroy a computer when it's trivially easy to trigger any SMART device to do a format of the media, but I guess everyone isn't as sadistic and evil as I am when it comes to destroying computer data.

The book is a good read and hard to put down. The plot moves along fairly smoothly and there are enough misdirection items to keep you distracted that you don't necessarily figure out the ending before it happens.

If you have $8 to spend, go out to Amazon and grab yourself a copy. You won't regret it.

I give it 4.5 out of 5.

Cheers!!

Thanks to Torakiyoshi for posting these.

Got a new cell phone. (Samsung Epic) and didn't transfer over contacts to trim the dead wood out of the 800+ I had. If you want me to have your phone#, send me a private e-mail or note.

Note, all comments are being screened, so they won't be visible.

Thx

Yesterday, level_head posted a video from Anzovin Studios. I figured I'd toss up one of my favorites!!

Enjoy!

Andrew Klavan's videos more often than not just make me shake my head and roll my eyes. This one, though, I think he did an excellent job.

Take a gander at it. It's well written and illustrated. Most entertaining. (If you don't like the politics, complain to him, not me.)