I think that if I was a photographer, I would be OK with Google caching full quality images as long as they put their own annoying watermark all over it with the URL where the image came from clearly visible.
I think if you were a photographer looking to have such a feature you should just hire a reasonably competent webdeveloper for a day and have them setup such a thing for you. Can't be more than 20 lines of python/perl/php code really.
You used to get traffic actually visiting your site.
You used to get people who grudgingly went to your site to click save as...
You now have less traffic (unique IPs hitting your site), but they're JUST downloading hi-res images which leads to a net increase in bandwidth.
You get the same amount of traffic (unique IPs), but they're just going to the image, not your webpage. Bandwidth use is hardly going to change. You're not going to see an influx of new users if your main source of hits was google image search.
If your content outside of the images was not worth the users attention, you'll get less actual visitors. If you don't like it, there's been ways to block this kind of use for years, but that won't increase the influx of users either. Most of the complaints about this feature are lazy webmasters who see easy money evaporate. And man, those ad revenues sure are worth so much moneys... Provide actual content, build up a community, offer features your community wants, et voila, you have recurring traffic that doesn't leech your bandwith via google image search.
Also, ads don't have to be shitty and annoying.
Don't worry, practically everyone is using adblock anyway. I'd like to repeat my sentiments on the whole "The income of my business depends on ad revenue" thing: if you are going to sponsor your hosting solely on the income provided to you by advertising, don't be surprised if you're at the mercy of the ad-network and the users not even downloading your ads. It's like all common sense has gone out of the window with website hosting.
In this case, don't be surprised if Google decides that it's in it's best interests to screw you out of ad income, because the chances are high that they're the ones providing you ad income in the first place. Make your site worthwhile to visit, and users like me will come back and even *gasp* turn off adblock or pay for some feature you have that's useful to us. If you had that kind of service, you wouldn't be bitching about ad revenue, you'd have more interesting accounting problems. But if you're just hosting lolcats image macros, good luck with that.
It would be more productive to build a nuclear baseload generator station
Nuclear simply isn't an option in Belgium at the moment. After Fukushima the usual scaremongering got far far worse, which isn't to say that some of the criticisms are valid, but the scaremongering extends into the realm of the unscientific at times. Of course the nuclear industry has been running save-face ad campaigns, but the power company exploiting the nuclear power plants has come under fire by the press for making record profits while refusing to pay the rather new nuclear tax. To add to that, after inspection several nuclear reactors had been found to have cracks in their housing and needed to be shut down for repairs.
So in short, our government bows to public pressure to shut down the plants, but does so in an unrealistic schedule (that is to say, without a significant price hike due to the need to import more power). Two reactors have been shut down and it is currently unknown when they will restart (last inspection revealed that the cracks were fixed, but the committee is scheduling another inspection soon, and I haven't followed the news surrounding this). Electrabel is currently playing a high stakes pokergame with our government regarding taxes and the continued operation of the nuclear power plants. There are other issues with the policy around our electricity network, which are mostly problems our government has created for itself such as "green power certificates" (for a lack of better translation) which boosted the sales of roof mounted solar power units, but ended up costing the taxpayers unable to afford these units far too much, as businesses starting installing a ton of these units, and many more of these kinds of issues that are not related to the whole nuclear debate...
Aside from that there is a heavy emphasis on uninformed misinformation from both sides through social media. It was only two weeks ago that I saw a map of the tidal effects of the march 2011 tsunami in Japan being passed off as a "fallout map" of Fukushima which covered the entire globe. To give you an idea of how ridiculous it was, it was NOAA imagery with a goddamn legend attached, which of course nobody bothered to read. It's much more fun to assume that the red part of the map is fallout. It's needless to say that the nuclear fans are spreading their own misinformation: such as fear of power shortages, blackouts, peak power usage causing overload to renewable energy resources, etc etc etc. While I'm not saying that people are not allowed to have their opinions on the matter, in fact I'd encourage it, but I'd prefer people to at least look at facts rather than the hearsay passed through social networks.
I can only applaud efforts to have more environmentally friendly power sources, and it is in my opinion important in the both long and short term to focus on developing better and more efficient technology and deploying it more widespread. For the short term, I think our government is trying to be too ambitious with their stance and it will end up costing Joe Average and small/medium sized business, only to prolong the date of our nuclear exit when faced with our powerconsumption. At the core of the matter lies that both businesses and homes are using a lot of power, and while price can significantly drop that power consumption I fear that many families who are currently already struggling to pay their bills will end up becoming the victim of this, a group slowly but surely on the rise.
Some would argue that my stance is wanting to have my cake and eat it, but I like to think of it as not putting all my eggs in one basket, especially not at an economically critical time like this.
And this interviewee doesn't seem to understand how Internet routing works.
But it's a university with two class Bs... Don't you get it? They're fucking PRO there in Israel. (pardon my french). Don't bother with that BGP stuff, he obviously doesn't know what it is, nor why Facebook isn't going to bend over backwards to accomodate him.
Did the interviewee not have a speakerphone? He mentions being unable to both type and talk... I think they solved that problem in the 1980's.
The speakerphone would've picked up the "Whaa Whaa Whaa" from the whaaaaambulance on his blog.
Don't get me wrong, but the following passage was telling:
My interview was finally scheduled three weekdays in advance, leaving me in fact one day to prepare, because I've already had plans for the other weekday and the weekend.
Why didn't he prepare in advance? If he knew it was coming any time soon, why not brush up on it in advance? Why wait until the company says "Well, next week" and bitch about having to cancel his plans, which he eventually doesn't do.
So allow me to simply summarize the entire blog in an all too familiar onomatope: Waaaaaaah
10 minutes to read the EULA multiplied by 80 million users per day simply equals 80 million user-minutes per day.
Sounds like every day project management, including the budgetted manhours. So... When the project goes over budget, and is only 1/10th finished, do you:
Report to management you goofed?
Break out the whip and start flogging developers while reading the Adobe EULA out loud?
Have you tried Common Sense 2012? I hear it works well in most sensible cases. Other than that on the cheap : Microsoft Security Essentials. It seems a bit contradictory to let MS handle anti-virus software, but at least it doesn't hog your system as badly as most other products.
reasonably competent CPU user
Yes, I know how you feel. I like to think of myself a I/O aficionado. I have a friend who's a memory expert. We know a guy who was pretty much a BIOS guru, but he's not feeling too well lately after hearing about the UEFI thing.
but I do download some music as a recent SoundCloud devotee
I hardly know anyone who downloads their music from SoundCloud. Most tracks are either demos (with a link to itunes, amazon, juno or whatever). And the few amateurs that are serious about their music have already joined one of the many netlabels where you can usually download entire albums from their own site or bandcamp.
Are you by any chance doing market research, trying to infiltrate into the tech crowd while looking young, hip, dynamic and social 2.0 web networking? You're doing a splendid job, I might add. However, please forgive my sarcasm if you're not, your post seems to read like a 55 year old police officer going under cover "buyin' da ganja mon, totally down with da 'erb an' ting".
You cycle through sockpuppet accounts faster than a d&d party through cheetos. Have you tried being less obvious about it, or does your employer not offer you that kind of training?
If they changed the way it works, then any program that relied on the existing (buggy) behavior would break as a result.
Surely you can deprecate a function after all those years. I mean they've broken code before between major versions... It's just unwillingness not to do so at this point.
Then you start one, because it's foolish to keep developing games outside of a business. If you can't afford to start a business you're way over your head in dealing with EA.
you can do Google Checkout/Amazon Payments.
If you're a business you won't have any trouble dealing with a credit card processor. They'll take a cut, but so does everyone else. It's a matter of making the right choice and spending some time with a spreadsheet.
Then there's the handling of the download - either have to do a login system so people can redownload
You do realize that the guy who wrote minecraft (and he's far from a genius, bless him) actually did all this... Right? Minecraft had sold well over several tens of thousands of copies before he even started pondering about moving his stuff to "the cloud". It was all a single webserver handling it with a credit card processor. Not some sort of magic. Anyone considering making a game larger in size than minecraft has already begun considering the distribution options before slavishly beginning development.
It's the payments and website downloads that are the hardest parts.
If you make a game and you as a company find this "the hardest part", I fear for your business. You don't go to Steam or Origin because you can't handle the traffic or can't delegate payment, you go there because they have a freaking huge userbase and the companies typically have all the credit card numbers of their users neatly stored in a database for impulse purchases. Then after the impulse purchases you wait for the stragglers to buy the game when it's offered in a discount. Go on steam during the weekend, and look at the sales chart and the discounts offered. That's why you use these distribution networks: a large userbase. Despite all that though, there's still plenty of indie devs who succeed in selling their stuff and distributing it without Steam or Origin (or Impulse and its measly marketshare) for that matter.
It's partly why the Apple App Store is very popular
The apple store is an entirely different beast. iPhones and iPads are pretty much walled off from using "typical" software installations. It's the Apple way or no way at all. It's not a matter of choice. And again, you don't start iOS development because there's a neat little platform to distribute stuff over, but because you think your product will have a large userbase and can benefit from the impulse purchases.
These platforms are not going to lower your cost, no matter how pretty they picture it. They have the same costs as you do: (virtual) server infrastructure, maintenance, and credit card processors. They may get a bit of a better rate, but not by much, and don't forget they're out to make a profit too (just like you are) so they are going to be in your pockets for that. So in the end the bill will probably be the same, if not higher because of overhead costs. Oh and there WILL be overhead costs. Don't forget they'll probably make you use their APIs as well, for a seamless integration (friends lists, chat, etc etc). Sure these costs aren't going to be the bulk your costs, but don't forget about that.
You've got to ask yourself when someone offers you this: where is the catch? And it's pretty obvious what the catch is, right? After 90 days those games don't stop existing. Once you're deploying patch 1.12 out on the origin servers they're going to say "Wellp, that's gonna cost you. Remember that contract? Did you read the fine print?". Plan on doing some DLC? Are you sure it's not an Origin exclusive? Bandwidth used by people reinstalling the game after those 90 days? What about your price? Do you get to decide when they offer the inevitable discounts?
I would be very cautious when approached by EA (or anyone for that matter) with such an offer, because you can be sure there's no such thing as a free lunch, and you can be damned sure that EA of all companies isn't doing this out of the kindness of their heart either. They're out to maximize THEIR profits, not yours.
Shelfappeal.com was reported blocked on 15th February 2012 on Orange. This is a blog that features items that can be placed on a shelf.
While at first this may seem innocuous, the truth behind this website is that it is a vipers nest of Al Qaeda militants, making money off of selling miniatures of the British flag burning and pictures of the queen with a bullseye painted on her. The proceeds of these shelf-items then go to an Al Qaeda trainingcamp hidden deep in the wastelands of Sussex where they are trained in operating micro-UAVs (preferably capable of resting on a shelf while not in use) aimed at miniature Big Bens (also preferably shelf sized).
Yes, laugh now, but you'll rue the day when someone told you about this vile plot to collapse British society as we know it and it actually happens.
I don't think I could justify dropping $1 billion on something like this given our current deficit.
You misunderstand I guess, they're just going to build an automated toilet hooked up to a money printing press and see how much money they can flush down the toilet per minute.
Seriously though, there has to be a more cost-effective method to do an experiment like this.
Of course it's error-prone, but how else can you avoid SQL injection in any language?
Most languages support prepared statements that properly handle strings for you. Take a look at the python API for databases (this is sqlite3, but other dbs use the same system).
Straight from that page:
t = (symbol,)
c.execute('SELECT * FROM stocks WHERE symbol=?', t)
Notice the lack of escape_my_strings_no_really_please_this_is_the_right_method("string");. Clean huh? People still using sprintf() or string concatenation for this sort of thing after all these years reap what they sow.
As for your post below:
Even if SQL wasn't an issue, you still have to sanitize other things like shell commands.
The fact that you're even contemplating on running shell commands based on user input is pretty much damning in my opinion.
I guess you're the type of person they sell those SQL-injection-protection proxies to.
Dear slashdot editors and admins,
Please google the term "Jumping the shark". It is a concept you might want to familiarize yourself with. Oh hell, I'll just link it for you, since using google might be too geeky. Note that it doesn't necessarily involve actual sharks (nor any laser attachments to said sharks).
Lose touch much with your core demographic lately?
It also features Dear Deidre defending the topless model on Page 3 of her own newspaper saying "the Editor of The Sun thinks it's okay" and "nine million people read it".
Well, gee, this internet thing is smalltime compared to those numbers. It's a pity cablemodems don't burn as well as books or newspapers, we could do with a good old fashioned bookburning, especially with those oil prices... Oh well...
Slashdot Mirror
Wireless systems can be made secure, you know, and we actually have a pretty good handle on it.
Yes, a splendid trackrecord to boot as well...
So passionate is their belief, they would happily choose suicide over spending the rest of their days rolling in hundred dollar bills naked!
It's the rolling naked in hundred dollar bills that has them scared really. The papercuts would be horrifying.
I think that if I was a photographer, I would be OK with Google caching full quality images as long as they put their own annoying watermark all over it with the URL where the image came from clearly visible.
I think if you were a photographer looking to have such a feature you should just hire a reasonably competent webdeveloper for a day and have them setup such a thing for you. Can't be more than 20 lines of python/perl/php code really.
You used to get traffic actually visiting your site.
You used to get people who grudgingly went to your site to click save as...
You now have less traffic (unique IPs hitting your site), but they're JUST downloading hi-res images which leads to a net increase in bandwidth.
You get the same amount of traffic (unique IPs), but they're just going to the image, not your webpage. Bandwidth use is hardly going to change. You're not going to see an influx of new users if your main source of hits was google image search.
If your content outside of the images was not worth the users attention, you'll get less actual visitors. If you don't like it, there's been ways to block this kind of use for years, but that won't increase the influx of users either. Most of the complaints about this feature are lazy webmasters who see easy money evaporate. And man, those ad revenues sure are worth so much moneys... Provide actual content, build up a community, offer features your community wants, et voila, you have recurring traffic that doesn't leech your bandwith via google image search.
Also, ads don't have to be shitty and annoying.
Don't worry, practically everyone is using adblock anyway. I'd like to repeat my sentiments on the whole "The income of my business depends on ad revenue" thing: if you are going to sponsor your hosting solely on the income provided to you by advertising, don't be surprised if you're at the mercy of the ad-network and the users not even downloading your ads. It's like all common sense has gone out of the window with website hosting.
In this case, don't be surprised if Google decides that it's in it's best interests to screw you out of ad income, because the chances are high that they're the ones providing you ad income in the first place. Make your site worthwhile to visit, and users like me will come back and even *gasp* turn off adblock or pay for some feature you have that's useful to us. If you had that kind of service, you wouldn't be bitching about ad revenue, you'd have more interesting accounting problems. But if you're just hosting lolcats image macros, good luck with that.
Just call it something else and don't pay.
For gods sake man, spoonfeed them some examples or we'll never see it happen. Like
Not to mention the all time classic:
It would be more productive to build a nuclear baseload generator station
Nuclear simply isn't an option in Belgium at the moment. After Fukushima the usual scaremongering got far far worse, which isn't to say that some of the criticisms are valid, but the scaremongering extends into the realm of the unscientific at times. Of course the nuclear industry has been running save-face ad campaigns, but the power company exploiting the nuclear power plants has come under fire by the press for making record profits while refusing to pay the rather new nuclear tax. To add to that, after inspection several nuclear reactors had been found to have cracks in their housing and needed to be shut down for repairs.
So in short, our government bows to public pressure to shut down the plants, but does so in an unrealistic schedule (that is to say, without a significant price hike due to the need to import more power). Two reactors have been shut down and it is currently unknown when they will restart (last inspection revealed that the cracks were fixed, but the committee is scheduling another inspection soon, and I haven't followed the news surrounding this). Electrabel is currently playing a high stakes pokergame with our government regarding taxes and the continued operation of the nuclear power plants. There are other issues with the policy around our electricity network, which are mostly problems our government has created for itself such as "green power certificates" (for a lack of better translation) which boosted the sales of roof mounted solar power units, but ended up costing the taxpayers unable to afford these units far too much, as businesses starting installing a ton of these units, and many more of these kinds of issues that are not related to the whole nuclear debate...
Aside from that there is a heavy emphasis on uninformed misinformation from both sides through social media. It was only two weeks ago that I saw a map of the tidal effects of the march 2011 tsunami in Japan being passed off as a "fallout map" of Fukushima which covered the entire globe. To give you an idea of how ridiculous it was, it was NOAA imagery with a goddamn legend attached, which of course nobody bothered to read. It's much more fun to assume that the red part of the map is fallout. It's needless to say that the nuclear fans are spreading their own misinformation: such as fear of power shortages, blackouts, peak power usage causing overload to renewable energy resources, etc etc etc. While I'm not saying that people are not allowed to have their opinions on the matter, in fact I'd encourage it, but I'd prefer people to at least look at facts rather than the hearsay passed through social networks.
I can only applaud efforts to have more environmentally friendly power sources, and it is in my opinion important in the both long and short term to focus on developing better and more efficient technology and deploying it more widespread. For the short term, I think our government is trying to be too ambitious with their stance and it will end up costing Joe Average and small/medium sized business, only to prolong the date of our nuclear exit when faced with our powerconsumption. At the core of the matter lies that both businesses and homes are using a lot of power, and while price can significantly drop that power consumption I fear that many families who are currently already struggling to pay their bills will end up becoming the victim of this, a group slowly but surely on the rise.
Some would argue that my stance is wanting to have my cake and eat it, but I like to think of it as not putting all my eggs in one basket, especially not at an economically critical time like this.
I'll be here all week.
upward mobility
That's ok, I've got an adjustable chair. It can go both up and down with the help of a lever.
Now, don't you have some TPS reports to file or something?
And this interviewee doesn't seem to understand how Internet routing works.
But it's a university with two class Bs... Don't you get it? They're fucking PRO there in Israel. (pardon my french). Don't bother with that BGP stuff, he obviously doesn't know what it is, nor why Facebook isn't going to bend over backwards to accomodate him.
Did the interviewee not have a speakerphone? He mentions being unable to both type and talk... I think they solved that problem in the 1980's.
The speakerphone would've picked up the "Whaa Whaa Whaa" from the whaaaaambulance on his blog.
Don't get me wrong, but the following passage was telling:
My interview was finally scheduled three weekdays in advance, leaving me in fact one day to prepare, because I've already had plans for the other weekday and the weekend.
Why didn't he prepare in advance? If he knew it was coming any time soon, why not brush up on it in advance? Why wait until the company says "Well, next week" and bitch about having to cancel his plans, which he eventually doesn't do.
So allow me to simply summarize the entire blog in an all too familiar onomatope: Waaaaaaah
10 minutes to read the EULA multiplied by 80 million users per day simply equals 80 million user-minutes per day.
Sounds like every day project management, including the budgetted manhours. So... When the project goes over budget, and is only 1/10th finished, do you:
perl -e 'while (1) { print rand() > .5 ? "/" : "\\" }';
Quick, claim it doesn't have a loop and write a book. :)
It's not the destination that matters, it's how you get there. Nothing stresses this as much as blowing up your destination when you get there.
Seriously, I was expecting at least 5 people posting the link by this time. Internet, I've known you wrong.
Here's a handy link for you : http://4chan.org/ . Don't bother with the back button, you'll fit in there better than here.
Have you tried Common Sense 2012? I hear it works well in most sensible cases. Other than that on the cheap : Microsoft Security Essentials. It seems a bit contradictory to let MS handle anti-virus software, but at least it doesn't hog your system as badly as most other products.
reasonably competent CPU user
Yes, I know how you feel. I like to think of myself a I/O aficionado. I have a friend who's a memory expert. We know a guy who was pretty much a BIOS guru, but he's not feeling too well lately after hearing about the UEFI thing.
but I do download some music as a recent SoundCloud devotee
I hardly know anyone who downloads their music from SoundCloud. Most tracks are either demos (with a link to itunes, amazon, juno or whatever). And the few amateurs that are serious about their music have already joined one of the many netlabels where you can usually download entire albums from their own site or bandcamp.
Are you by any chance doing market research, trying to infiltrate into the tech crowd while looking young, hip, dynamic and social 2.0 web networking? You're doing a splendid job, I might add. However, please forgive my sarcasm if you're not, your post seems to read like a 55 year old police officer going under cover "buyin' da ganja mon, totally down with da 'erb an' ting".
You cycle through sockpuppet accounts faster than a d&d party through cheetos. Have you tried being less obvious about it, or does your employer not offer you that kind of training?
If they changed the way it works, then any program that relied on the existing (buggy) behavior would break as a result.
Surely you can deprecate a function after all those years. I mean they've broken code before between major versions... It's just unwillingness not to do so at this point.
How about contributing to PHP and fixing what you're bitching about instead of, well, bitching about it?
A polished turd is still a turd.
Sorry if that insults your language of choice...
If you're not a business
Then you start one, because it's foolish to keep developing games outside of a business. If you can't afford to start a business you're way over your head in dealing with EA.
you can do Google Checkout/Amazon Payments.
If you're a business you won't have any trouble dealing with a credit card processor. They'll take a cut, but so does everyone else. It's a matter of making the right choice and spending some time with a spreadsheet.
Then there's the handling of the download - either have to do a login system so people can redownload
You do realize that the guy who wrote minecraft (and he's far from a genius, bless him) actually did all this... Right? Minecraft had sold well over several tens of thousands of copies before he even started pondering about moving his stuff to "the cloud". It was all a single webserver handling it with a credit card processor. Not some sort of magic. Anyone considering making a game larger in size than minecraft has already begun considering the distribution options before slavishly beginning development.
It's the payments and website downloads that are the hardest parts.
If you make a game and you as a company find this "the hardest part", I fear for your business. You don't go to Steam or Origin because you can't handle the traffic or can't delegate payment, you go there because they have a freaking huge userbase and the companies typically have all the credit card numbers of their users neatly stored in a database for impulse purchases. Then after the impulse purchases you wait for the stragglers to buy the game when it's offered in a discount. Go on steam during the weekend, and look at the sales chart and the discounts offered. That's why you use these distribution networks: a large userbase. Despite all that though, there's still plenty of indie devs who succeed in selling their stuff and distributing it without Steam or Origin (or Impulse and its measly marketshare) for that matter.
It's partly why the Apple App Store is very popular
The apple store is an entirely different beast. iPhones and iPads are pretty much walled off from using "typical" software installations. It's the Apple way or no way at all. It's not a matter of choice. And again, you don't start iOS development because there's a neat little platform to distribute stuff over, but because you think your product will have a large userbase and can benefit from the impulse purchases.
These platforms are not going to lower your cost, no matter how pretty they picture it. They have the same costs as you do: (virtual) server infrastructure, maintenance, and credit card processors. They may get a bit of a better rate, but not by much, and don't forget they're out to make a profit too (just like you are) so they are going to be in your pockets for that. So in the end the bill will probably be the same, if not higher because of overhead costs. Oh and there WILL be overhead costs. Don't forget they'll probably make you use their APIs as well, for a seamless integration (friends lists, chat, etc etc). Sure these costs aren't going to be the bulk your costs, but don't forget about that.
You've got to ask yourself when someone offers you this: where is the catch? And it's pretty obvious what the catch is, right? After 90 days those games don't stop existing. Once you're deploying patch 1.12 out on the origin servers they're going to say "Wellp, that's gonna cost you. Remember that contract? Did you read the fine print?". Plan on doing some DLC? Are you sure it's not an Origin exclusive? Bandwidth used by people reinstalling the game after those 90 days? What about your price? Do you get to decide when they offer the inevitable discounts?
I would be very cautious when approached by EA (or anyone for that matter) with such an offer, because you can be sure there's no such thing as a free lunch, and you can be damned sure that EA of all companies isn't doing this out of the kindness of their heart either. They're out to maximize THEIR profits, not yours.
Shelfappeal.com was reported blocked on 15th February 2012 on Orange. This is a blog that features items that can be placed on a shelf.
While at first this may seem innocuous, the truth behind this website is that it is a vipers nest of Al Qaeda militants, making money off of selling miniatures of the British flag burning and pictures of the queen with a bullseye painted on her. The proceeds of these shelf-items then go to an Al Qaeda trainingcamp hidden deep in the wastelands of Sussex where they are trained in operating micro-UAVs (preferably capable of resting on a shelf while not in use) aimed at miniature Big Bens (also preferably shelf sized).
Yes, laugh now, but you'll rue the day when someone told you about this vile plot to collapse British society as we know it and it actually happens.
Exquisitetweets.com
And nothing of value was lost.
I don't think I could justify dropping $1 billion on something like this given our current deficit.
You misunderstand I guess, they're just going to build an automated toilet hooked up to a money printing press and see how much money they can flush down the toilet per minute.
Seriously though, there has to be a more cost-effective method to do an experiment like this.
I guess this is why they haven't fixed all of those bugs in Skyrim. They were too busy making a browser-based Wolfenstein.
Nah man, this is the tech demo for the Elder Scrolls MMO. I shit you not.
Of course it's error-prone, but how else can you avoid SQL injection in any language?
Most languages support prepared statements that properly handle strings for you. Take a look at the python API for databases (this is sqlite3, but other dbs use the same system).
Straight from that page:
t = (symbol,)
c.execute('SELECT * FROM stocks WHERE symbol=?', t)
Notice the lack of escape_my_strings_no_really_please_this_is_the_right_method("string");. Clean huh? People still using sprintf() or string concatenation for this sort of thing after all these years reap what they sow.
As for your post below:
Even if SQL wasn't an issue, you still have to sanitize other things like shell commands.
The fact that you're even contemplating on running shell commands based on user input is pretty much damning in my opinion.
I guess you're the type of person they sell those SQL-injection-protection proxies to.
Dear slashdot editors and admins,
Please google the term "Jumping the shark". It is a concept you might want to familiarize yourself with. Oh hell, I'll just link it for you, since using google might be too geeky. Note that it doesn't necessarily involve actual sharks (nor any laser attachments to said sharks).
Lose touch much with your core demographic lately?
Have you considered building a Lack Rack? You could do a small stack. Then, you don't need to build anything into your house and it's relocatable.
Neat, now I can put my drink somewhere and enjoy the soothing whirring sound of a server running at full blast.
It also features Dear Deidre defending the topless model on Page 3 of her own newspaper saying "the Editor of The Sun thinks it's okay" and "nine million people read it".
Well, gee, this internet thing is smalltime compared to those numbers. It's a pity cablemodems don't burn as well as books or newspapers, we could do with a good old fashioned bookburning, especially with those oil prices... Oh well...