Concept cars give automotive designers a chance to let their imaginations run wild, often with outlandish results. But even by that measure, BMW has come up with something as strange as it is innovative — a shape-shifting car covered with fabric.

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One more spammer is heading off to jail, but not before he managed to bilk at least several hundred people out

of $400,000 or more. Michael Dolan, 24, has been sentenced to seven years in jail—the maximum he could have received—followed by three years of supervised release. Dolan and a group of co-conspirators ran a scheme from 2002-2006 in which they first trolled AOL chatrooms for user names, then bombarded these users with phishing attempts.

As Infoworld reports, the scheme ran as follows. Victims typically received a link to a false greeting card which, when opened, installed a malware package. The next time the target attempted to log on to AOL, the program would request credit card numbers, bank account data, or other personal information. Users who refused to enter the data were prevented from logging into AOL. As schemes go, this was a fairly novel idea at the time, and I actually remember running into several systems infected this way. Dolan also sent spam purporting to be from AOL’s billing department, asking customers to please reenter their billing details due to a server meltdown. As you can imagine, all of this left AOL feeling a bit perturbed.

Dolan himself has something of a history of bad behavior. He was first sentenced to two years of probation after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor count of accessing a computer without authorization. His probation was revoked in 2006, after the ruling judge discovered that he had taken several trips out of state, including at least one trip overseas. Dolan was then sentenced to nine months of imprisonment, and was charged in the AOL scam on September 28, 2006. Considering that the scam itself ran from 2002-2006, Dolan was likely making money from computer fraud both while on probation and in jail.

The federal government claimed that Dolan masterminded the scheme, but if he did, his intelligence appears to be confined solely to computing. Assistant US Attorney Edward Chang stated in a sentencing memorandum that Dolan attempted to variously bribe, coerce, and threaten various witnesses, and succeeded in convincing his girlfriend to perjure herself. Combined with his modus operandi of committing computer fraud while directly under the nose of the authorities, Dolan simply doesn’t seem to be the sharpest crayon in the box.

Sharp or dull, however, he’s headed to jail. Five years for fraud, two years for aggravated identity theft, followed by his supervised release, which is essentially probation. Judges are allowed to impose conditions during a supervised release, and can bar the individual in question from engaging in activities which are otherwise lawful. The judge in Dolan’s case has not set the terms of the release yet, but based on his record, it’s a safe bet that Dolan won’t be touching a PC until 2018.

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Digital Web Magazine posted a nice article comparing Photoshop to Fireworks through a debate by two groups of designers each supporting one of the programs. Photoshop has always been the industry standard for digital image editing, even though it was primarily made for creating print material, while Fireworks on the other hand was specifically made for creating web friendly graphics. It is possible in theory to do almost everything you do in one of these in the other, so which one should you use?

I have personally been a Fireworks user for years, I had never gotten into Photoshop and Fireworks never gave me a reason to force myself to go and try and learn Photoshop seriously. Fireworks was in fact made just for web design and it does that one thing extremely well. In addition to this, the introduction of CS3 has provided tighter integration between all of Adobe’s Creative Suite, so it is now easier than ever to juggle from one program to the next so you do not need to use Photoshop just because you are working on a project with other people using Photoshop.

I personally think its best for new web designers try using fireworks before photoshop, You would end up never trying photoshop. I’m not sure if you can say the same for photoshop most photoshop users tend to use fireworkws quite often.

What about you guys, do you use Photoshop or Fireworks, and why?

BTW Digg this post please

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There are plenty of free ways to build an average photoblog, but if you have dreams of creating one that meets your needs and not just the masses, check out Pixelpost 1.7.1. Updated earlier this year with a bunch of new features including an Install Assistant, this MySQL/PHP-based application is a free download and needs only a modicum of technical knowledge and some server space to use.

Everything is tweakable and functionality can be extended with a number of free downloadable add-ons for everything from the ability to use PayPal to let visitors buy photos to adding histograms to images to an Adobe Lightroom exporter. All of them have easy-to-follow instructions for installing them, too.

If you’re not the tweaking type, simply pick one of the available templates (also free) and start publishing your photos.

To see what I mean, pop over to GatheringOfPixels.com (click the skull above the photo at the right to see “before” shots) or any of the Pixelpost featured photoblogs.

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