APC & Ubuntu

[Dave Hall]

On Sat, 2007-05-12 at 09:32 +1000, Andre Mangan wrote:
> We are lucky to have so many computer publications to choose from.
> One thing about APC magazine, their Ubuntu columnist sometimes gets it
> wrong.  For example, last month he complained vehemently that Ubuntu
> does not have a Garbage Bin and as a result he had not emptied it for
> a very long time and thereby slowed his system down to a crawl.  The
> poor man had to go to the command line and empty his trash folder from
> there.  I did write to him about it because the bad press he gave
> Ubuntu was not justified.  There was no acknowledgement in the June
> issue and I will have to follow this up. 

APC is a pretty good mainstream mag.  As a consultant I subscribe to it
so I know what is being pitched to power users and SMEs, I also have the
RSS feed in lifrea.

Unfortunately APC's follow up on criticism can be pretty poor.  On 2
occasions I have contacted them about glaring security issues with PHP
scripts they have published.  The first time I got a "we have discussed
it and noted the issues, but the code was not intended to be used in
production environments" type email, nothing in print, but I never saw
another article from the author.  The second time I never received a
response.  I think if APC ran corrections in the following issue,
sometimes it would take up half a page, maybe the other half of the page
could be taken up by a microsoft security product ad.

APC does do a pretty good job for a ACP (Packer press) tech publication
- they have their own site (hosted by internode, not hostworks), they
use drupal (not a MS/ASP.net product), they are linked from ninemsn yet
they regularly bag MS products and promote FOSS.

If they had a better way of dealing with reader feedback (other than the
HelpDesk Ed gun survey), then they would be one step closer to be a
perfect mainstream tech mag in my book.

Cheers

Dave

PS Hi list, sorry for my first post being one which bashes a supporter
of ubuntu.

Disclaimer: I "won" a cheap mynetphone USB phone from APC last year ago