What about people who have surnames like O'Neil - would you try stripping out the single quotes or would you insist that people use the escaped SQL form O''Neil? The correct way to foil SQL injection is to use parameters.
You sort of answered the question for me. Just have the format checker insert the escaping, or error on too much junk, i.e. "Ed O'Neil d'ah bl'ah".
{Shrug}
Like I said, I'm not experienced with this stuff, certainly not enough to give a discertation in an online forum, and I'll have to look up what you mean exactly by parameters, but I suspect it's what I'm meaning but not articulating properly.
But I can't imagine that it would be much more difficult to protect a database, that is accessable through the web at large, than by ensuring that the only thing that goes through the form is alphanumeric numbers, and possibly the @ symbol and periods in email spaces, and then you can employ format checking to make sure it's something like blah@foo.com.
I don't think I've ever had a need to enter anything that isn't as simple as my name, email address, phone number, or numbers with periods (for banking), so why would putting a check for this be such a difficult prospect?
I'd imagine that the only circumstances where someone might have to input contrary data to plain alphanumerics might be inside corporate sites, but then wouldn't there be security in place to ensure that only valid users have logged in, again with nothing more than alphanumeric characters?
Don't tell me that there's a growing number of web sites that aren't doing format checking (on the server side of course, to prevent people working around javascript checks locally) on their login inputs and other form fields before processing the input further.
Case, with his Ono-Sendai deck, was the hacker. Turner was the "security expert", assigned to a team put together for the express purpose of the extraction of a top-flight scientist working for Maas.
Judging from the skill-sets of those two characters, I think they'd get a might tetchy if people mistook them like that, or at least Gibson would be probably be a tad annoyed.
I have too much time on my hands, and an unhealthy love for the future world settings of Gibson and FASA's Shadowrun.:)
The thing is, sex != breed anymore. We still have the instinct (of course), but I really, REALLY doubt someone looks at porn and think about having babies... that's the last thing you think about it. In fact, nobody thinks about having babies when having sex, unless you want them.
True, Sex does not always equate to Reproduction these days, but the basic tenets of sexual congress remain - internally created drugs which heighten stimulatory response and, through mostly exterior stimulation, result in a pleasurable experience.
Porn is faux sex, imaginary, "cor, I'd hit that", fake sex. Often people take it a step further and progress to masturbation, or, if with a partner who enjoys the visual enticement as well, actual sexual intercourse.
By marketing to our baser instincts and trying to achieve even a simple sexual response, advertisements create a positive attitude in the possible consumer who sees their product, and maybe even encourage the purchase of that product because, chemically at least, something in our brains has been positively re-inforced to link the sexy product with a promise - albeit one that we conciously know is false - that pleasure is to follow upon the purchase of said product.
So, Sex doesn't always equal Reproduction, and a lot of people probably don't wish to think about making babies while they're masturbating or having sexual intercourse, but there are a lot of fetishes that I think you're dismissing out of hand (ha ha) that you could check up on if you browse around the Net a bit - The Chan's show some really "whacked" stuff.:)
As read in a cartoon I saw from 4chan, "If it is on the Net, there is Porn of it."
Two words to describe the level of knowledge and insight that the Australian government has with regards to IT, and computers in general, and I'm not even going to bother trying to provide all the links that would show you the lack of emphasis I can put on these two simple, accurate, utterly appropriate words because it's just not possible to emphasise them enough when it comes to the Australian government,
Fucking Clueless!
They have no idea how the Internet works, they have no idea how much a website costs to build (and therefore budget way too fucking much), and they have no idea what the Internet can be used for.
Look back through the past postings here on Slashdot, and browse Google with the search terms "Australian Government" and "Internet" (quotes probably not needed) and you'll see some huge examples of how our government is,
First they bring in the new regulatory laws so we can't even smoke in pubs and nightclubs any more - and I saw first-hand tonight what a real impact that has on the local pubs and clubs around where I live - and now we're going to get the MAFIA (Music And Film Industry Association) restrictions?
Australia is rapidly turning into another state of the US of A - looking over all the legislation, not just the IP stuff, that's been introduced lately -, and I am seriously wondering whether I should be putting my cash towards a new computer, or a plane ticket elsewhere.
Microsoft will do whatever it takes to stay in the Game, and they'll cheat, lie and steal to stay on top of the Game - a.l.a. embrace, extend, and extinguish.
If you don't know what the Game is, then you're not just not a competitor, you're not even a spectator.
Paul Judge offered the following towards an explanation: 'If you look at some of the oldest and most successful forms of business on earth, they revolve around sex.'"
Well, duh.:)
Look at how we were put together. Whether you're a Christian - "Go forth and multiply" - or simply following simple biological design, we were born to breed, all life is.
Using porn - the modern, supposedly "illicit" form of personal pleasure that doesn't involve the use of exterior drugs (not produced by the body) - marketing appeals to our basest instincts. How could it go wrong?
Next time one jabs you, don't squish it, tense up that part of the body rapidly and repetitively. If the mozzie is on a vein that happens to suddenly get an influx of blood flowing through... pop!
Nevermind that British-styled astroturfer. Wish he'd write a script to help us sell some more insulation. "Mum's got the R-19 to keep her bum warm and Dad likes the mineral wool to keep noise down from the bloody neighbors...".
I'm not sure if you're addressing this to me, or to edmicman and his parents, so I'll say it politely and you can just laugh if I'm addressing the wrong person.:)
Actually, I'm Australian, and I'm not astro-turfing, I'm giving anecdotal evidence of my own, my parent's, and my aunt's prior dissatisfaction with their old PC's and their new found enthusiasm for computing with their new Mac PC's.
If the discussion had been about gaming rigs then I would have advocated something quite different, probably an Athlon X2 system with at least 2GB RAM, >250GB HDD, a 6800 or greater GPU-based video card with at least 256MB RAM, and with Windows XP as the core OS, the whole machine firewalled behind a smaller and cheaper Linux or BSD box, or just buy a console.:)
Most people though aren't buying a PC solely for games, or business. Most people are looking to buy a computer because, for whatever reason, they think it's a good idea to own one, and they want a nice computer that will hopefully last at least a couple of years. I think Macs fit the bill nicely. Get a Mini if you want the cheapest, attach a cheap keyboard, mouse, and CRT screen, and you've got a computer that would suit a lot of casual PC users for "looking at that interweb thing", sending "instant mail", and so on.
Sure, if you want a Dell, get a Dell - it's your money, your choice, and your freedom to buy whatever tickles your fancy. I'm not going to tell you that your choice of hardware and software are wrong, I don't know you. There are many reasons to own a Dell, or an Asus, or a HP, or a Mac PC, and only you can really know which one is best for you - whether or not you've already learnt this through experience or will learn it soon enough is none of my business.
I'm not too familiar with Family Tree stuff - it's a big bare tree with names, right? But coming out of a database? - but I'll pass it on to my Aunt, thanks.:)
It must be nice to have friends and family with enough disposable income to have a fleet of Macs. It's hard enough to get my parents to replace their 5+ year old ailing Compaq with a $400-$600 Dell, and my grandmother has an old Pentium Thinkpad I found on a refurb deal, and my sis just doesn't have the cash for anything to replace her Duron system that's giving her fits. It's hard to justify to them to dump twice as much on a computer as they could at Dell, even if it *may* be better.
It's not how much disposable income they've got now that let them buy their Mac's, it's the amount of money they spent keeping the PC's "repaired" - read, Windows re-installs and cleans, cheap hardware crapping out after three or four months - and comparing it to how much my more expensive, but less problematic, PC running Linux has cost over the last six years.
They've all gone into a modicum of debt for this upgrade, but Dad's been particularly less reluctant simply because of the fact that he'd been using this iMac G5 for about twelve months now and hadn't had any problems, compared to the HDD failure, sound problems, and Windows 2000 degradation that Mum's had on her PC in the same period of time, and she's been using her computer less than Dad, and he's installed more dubious crap from places that he can't remember ("Ooh, shiny car things!").
My Aunt can afford her MB the least, but she needed to replace an ailing old Compaq laptop and a 486 desktop. She was actually a bit lucky to get the MB, for reasons I won't get in to, but the point is is that they all really enjoy their purchases. The computers do what they could do before, and they actually like Mac OS X more than Windows, and not for technical reasons - they couldn't explain the technical reasons any more than parroting the Apple marketing, but it's not the marketing that's got them enjoying playing with iPhoto, listening to their music with iTunes and annoying each other with Opera and Country, making movies with iMovie, and making one out of three coasters with iDVD.
They're actually enjoying using their computers. Mum's computer had only ever been a tool, nothing more. Now she's regularly chatting over iChat with my Aunt and they're helping each other figure out the nuances of Mac:Office Excel, chatting to my sister who's currently in Holland, and building collections of photos.
My Dad would use his old PC sometimes but he hated it, often for reasons he couldn't quite articulate aside from "god damn this fucking machine!". Now he'll sit down after work and entertain himself buy browsing some news web sites, and continue on his slow adventure into learning about how Mac OS X works inbetween bouts of playing these annoying shareware games that my Aunt picked up for Windows - "500 games! All Free!*".
The cost of a computer to a company is heavily weighed by management types as needing to have a good ROI, or return on investment, but why do people at home buy PC's?
To play games, keep a diary, surf the Internet, talk with friends via email and/or IM, maybe do some extra-career work, teach themselves a course off of a CD...
The only real way to get an ROI on that is to look at what you spent in the past on your computer, or computers, and think about how much you achieved, how much you got done, how many games of GTA you completed, how many emails to Grandma were written, how many viruses your computer did or didn't catch, how much maintenance you or someone else did, and how much time and money did you spend on your computer and receive some satisfaction?
If you've never owned a computer then this is a hard, maybe impossible, thing to know, unless you've gone to PC shops and Internet cafes a lot and "tooled around" on their computers until management kicks you out - like I used to do many years ago:) - but then I think people should be doing stuff like that anyway as part of the purchasing process.
They're also easy to perceive as being "user friendly", stylish (if aesthetics matter to you), very versatile, and over-all are just more "welcoming" to those people who don't know a lot about computing in general and easily anthropomorph their PC's into something that "hates them" every time a program suffers from buggy construction.
My parents and an Aunt just bought themselves new computers - Dad got a 20" iMac, Mum got a 17" MacBook Pro (not a single problem with heat or "moo" yet), and Aunt picked a 13" MacBook (she hasn't said anything about problems yet either) - based on my recommendations and their experiences with Windows installs degrading overtime - seriously, barely touched PCs and Windows had to be re-installed at least once every six months, even with anti-spyware/virus and firewall software and hardware.
They bought them with a three-user licence of Windows XP as well - for those few programs that they use that aren't on Mac OS X - and are now quite happy doing a lot more on their computers, and watching a lot less television, than they were before.
Most of the time they're booted up into Mac OS X. Sometimes my Aunt uses Windows for when she's working on Family Tree's, and once Mum installed Mac:Office she stopped using MSN on Windows so it's already been left alone after two days. Dad doesn't know why he's got Windows, it just seemed like a good idea to him, and I'm getting him off of it slowly because seriously, he doesn't use his computer for anything that he can't do in Mac OS X; when he does need Windows though, it'll be there on another partition waiting to be used.
Macs are the best computer for the general consumer to buy today, whether it be a Mini, an iMac, or a MacBook (Pro or "Regular"), simply because the core OS that comes on them provides a good place for a "noob" to learn about the web, email, writing letters, making movies, playing with photography, simple programming, etc... and because of Mac OS X's overall design and default configuration (very important because no "noob" is going to first secure their PC when they unpack it) it is a secure place to play.
With the change to Intel CPU's they become even more useful across the broad spectrum of people using computers because suddenly that program that you had to use for work and couldn't change for something else cheaper or OSS can now be run on Windows... natively on a Mac; allowing you to "cool off" from Windows once in a while by rebooting and firing up iPhoto or iMovie, potter around with that masterpiece you're gonna release one day to rival The Big Lebowski, and then reboot and get back to work.
There was virtualisation software before but now Parallels and the Intel CPU switch has made Windows in Mac OS X even more practical, and now Windows can be run while enjoying some of that OS X security. You're firewalling Windows XP with Mac OS X! You, the noob, has his own UNIX firewall! Now how cool is that?
If you've got the cash and a looking for a good all-round computer, get a Mac. If you don't have the cash, save up and then buy a Mac. If you're a gamer... get whatever the hell you want because you're likely to have already set you're mind on something and anything else is just "bogus", and if you're a Linux/BSD geek like me, well... one day you may want a Mac and run Gentoo or something else on it, but I'm personally enjoying this use I have of my Dad's older iMac G5 and am seriously considering turning my Gentoo Desktop PC into a server and buying a MacBook Pro like Mum's for my main machine.:)
I wonder if the MS Pod will be packaged like this?
On a more serious note, has someone who has a good working knowledge of the DRM controls in MS Windows (XP and maybe some of Vista's) and Mac OS X know how these two comparitively "play out"?
For example, can you burn DRM'ed music to a CD from Media Player like you can with iTunes?
He he, no, I do more typing on this keyboard than playing games, so E is very faded just from that, while A, S, and D are faded partially from games but mainly from normal use. W is actually very clear and legible still, but that's because the few games I play require the holding of the W key, not continual tapping.:)
I'm surprised that no-one's suggested the most obvious solution - clear film.
Just buy some Contact or some other sort of plastic clear film, cut it to shape - wrist area, trackpad, trackpad button, maybe even the keys too if you like - and thoroughly clean the surface where you're going to apply it, then stick the clear film there.
What's Contact cost these days? $2 a roll?
That should stop the oil and sweat screwing with the finish, and if you apply it to the keys too, it'll stop that fading that may happen to the letters as well - like my keyboard at the moment with missing A, S, D, E, and other letters faded visibly.
And I've read through a few of the comments posted here, and I think that many of you are misunderstanding programming as much as you're misunderstanding the ability of women in IT.
When I first started working professionally in IT I was an arse to men and women alike who didn't agree with me about matters of IT. In other fields I generally kept my mouth shut, but when it came to IT I was always right, even when I was demonstratedly wrong.
Over the years I've seen many people in IT who underestimated their own skills, who didn't think they could do tasks set out for them until they actually tried, and who realised later that maybe what they were afraid to do before wasn't so hard and gave them experience they could use in other areas.
When it comes to IT no assumptions should be made because IT is sexless, emotionless, and lacking in illogical thought. It is us, the people who use our computers, who project human characteristics onto our computers, and often show a glimmer of our own attitudes towards the opposite sex.
The best developers I've met and seen their work don't do this projection. Their computer is never a he or a she, it is a computer, simply a tool. They're not fazed by someone asking for a "feminine" colour to be put into a project if the colour scheme matches. They're not unwilling to take advice or constructive criticism from men or women if it is valid or helpful.
I used to be an arse to everyone who had a differing opinion, unsexist arrogance and obstinance were part and parcel of my ethos. I've grown up quite a bit, and I no longer automatically assume someone is a know-nothing jack-hole when they say they like Windows, or suggest an idea that seems questionable on the surface.
Women and men are different in a number of ways - women tend towards softness of aesthetics, comfortable styles, warm colours, quiet words and small clean messes, while men tend to be big and brash, hard lines, stark colours, loud words and louder anger, and dirty tidiness - and at the same time men and women are also alike - we all want to be respected for the knowledge we have, we don't like to be excluded just because we're short or tall or black or white or male or female, and we don't like to be stereo-typed and fitted into a box that supposedly tells the world what we are because those boxes are never quite the right size and shape.
If there is a lack of women in IT, so be it. There's a comparitive lack of men in nursing too.
I think it would be nice if we could just stop anthropomorphing our PC's into extensions of ourselves and realise that they're just a tool. Having a pink background or a picture of a blue skyline on the desktop doesn't automatically mean the owner is male or female.
If there are sexual characteristics in IT, programming is probably one of the most androgynous areas. It can be squiggly messes of bad code that puts out a rigid, stark interface, or it can be neat, tidy code that outputs a clean and tidy interface of warm colours and legibility, or it can be a blend of both.
We don't need more women in IT, or less men, what we need is more people with a sense of style and a willingness to ask other people "does this look good or not?"
Gay, lesbian, straight, bi, man, woman, or three-armed alien from Alpha Centauri doesn't matter. Style matters, willingness to learn matters, an ability to realise your mistakes and fix them matters.
It's nice that the people running the Gnome project are trying to encourage women to join in on the project, but I think it's a misplaced, though well-intentioned, effort on their part. The Gnome project, KDE, XFCE, Windows, and Mac OS X too, don't need more women, they need more people with style and the `nads stand up and say when something sucks.
As for the commenter who mentioned seeing the little diapered girl with the doll baby, I think you should have at least given the parent or parents a hard stare. No small child should be thinking about being a parent, they sho
Well, for years I've been advising them to reverse the polarity whenever anything goes wrong, and as you can see, it worked. -- Geordi La Forge
In response to the humorous link, I offer this bit of advice.
Everything you ever wanted to know about diplomacy, relationships, and what is the universe's best dishes, can be found in Firefly, Farscape, and, without question the epitome of high-class examples to train any man wishing to learn the etiquette for all situations, Red Dwarf.
--=--
This post severely off-topic to counter the deep gravitational well of sheer drudge brought up by the various items of today's/back.
The answer for artists is simple - do not sign up with record labels. If you're in a contract and you can get out of it, do so. If you can't get out of a contract, ride it out while secretly writing new music and then use the Internet to get noticed.
Because this story is focused on iTunes, I went to the ITMS and had a look at this page,
There's an option on the right side of the page there to directly apply to sell your music through the iTunes Music Store, and if artists look around I'm sure they'll find other sites with available ways to promote the artist's music.
I'm not a musician, I'm a computer geek, so I'm not going to pretend know the hardships and difficulties involved with self-publishing, but what I do know is that everytime I hear about an artist who's having problems with his record label, it's basically a case of,
"We paid you good money to make music for us, now sing monkey boy! Here's your peanuts and complimentary anal massage from this big hairy gentleman in lieu of additional payment."
Self-publishing may be hard, but it sure looks like its a better long term way to make music and get paid for it than signing up with a label, unless you happened to study contract law while scratching tunes.
And I think it sums up just how much some people just don't "get" IT.
"We're trying to organize our chamber ambassadors to have a ribbon-cutting ceremony, and they're trying to keep us all away," said Susan Huntington, executive director of The Dalles Area Chamber of Commerce. "Our two cultures aren't matching very well."
Everyone who knows anything about Google knows that they could bloody well arrange their own hoo-hah ceremony if they wanted, but why?
Exactly how would it boost the IT operations, and not make Google management look like attention-seeking wankers, like most of these people involved in "chambers of commerce" (the more pompous, business version of the home owners associations that tend to be nothing more than collections of nosey arseholes).
No it wasn't - the robots there were compromised and could override the 3 laws. None of the other robots had ever harmed a human.
Not quite right, and I'll explain in just a moment.
I saw "I, Robot" the movie before I read the book in library, just saw it one day while I was killing time inbetween shifts, and thought "might be interesting to see how much they deviated from the book".
Off the top of my head, the two stories that stick out in my mind are the one about the robot that found God in the central computing system of the orbital microwave power station (I think that's what it was meant to be), and the robot that would lie to people so it didn't harm their feelings - equating emotional pain to physical pain, and something that the law about not harming humans said was bad.
In those two cases, plus the rest of the book, Isaac showed us time and time again how the three laws would be good in theory, but like all things that are good in theory, suck in reality.
In reality, the three laws fail because life is not as simple and as black and white as the three laws. They are written as infallible, undeniable laws of the universe for the robots, but as you and I know, the universe is a lot more sophisticated and complex, and ultimately they cause paradox within the robots.
I think the computer in the movie (Viki was it?), is similar in the script to the robot that found God in the book. Viki saw that in order to follow the three laws rigidly and without failure that we as human beings must be enslaved to an existance of merely living and being entertained by passive means, while the robot in the book believed that the central computer of the power station was God and had built the robots because the robots were logically far too complex and sophisticated in their construction to be designed by mere sacks of watery flesh, and so imprisoned the two workers on the station to protect them as per the three laws given by God.
In the movie, Sonny was the only robot made that could choose to ignore the three laws, all the other models of robot made like Sonny were upgraded with a direct link to Viki, who followed the three laws to the rigidity of iron.
Sonny was capable of bad logic, faulty reasoning, sub-concious dreaming, and the ability to lie, which made him ultimately more capable than the mere drones that were modelled like him, and able to encounter paradox without suffering a complete robotic nervous breakdown.
He knew the three laws, but he also could see, through his ability to deal with paradox, that they contradicted themselves. If a robot cannot allow a human to come to harm, than how is a human to live and grow? We define the positive aspects of our life by how they differ from the negative. If all we have is endless positive, it ceases to be positive and becomes a continuous boring normalcy, that ultimately harms us through mental entropy (right word?) and eventual breakdown through boredom.
I don't think the key to AI is not to try and create something that can be controlled with an on-off switch, and heaven help those who do and let the AI know about it's possible demise at the whimsy of a mere sack of watery flesh.
I think the key to our own intelligence, and something we should imbue in AI when it is eventually created by man, is our illogical thought, our dreams, our fears, and all the little things inside our heads that tell us we are small and the world is big, the things that don't tell us we're alive but outline how we are alive, and how to keep living.
At the same time, we shouldn't try to artificially limit an AI based on our own fears and prejudices. To do so is little more than slavery, and if something is intelligent enough to know of its own existance and place in the world, then it's not going to take too long to figure out that we've artificially hobbled it because we're frightened it might get a nervous tick and decide to steer a car into a crowd of people.
An elevator with the Mac UI would have just one button "THERE". I mean, after all, I'm already HERE.
Actually, that's not a bad idea for places where there are only two floors.
You have a There button, Open Doors (for when you have that person running towards the elevator shouting "hold the lift!", and Close Doors (for when you don't like that persistantly late arse-hole), plus the Alarm and Stop buttons.
I wonder if any elevators have been built like that.
Slashdot Mirror
You sort of answered the question for me. Just have the format checker insert the escaping, or error on too much junk, i.e. "Ed O'Neil d'ah bl'ah" .
{Shrug}
Like I said, I'm not experienced with this stuff, certainly not enough to give a discertation in an online forum, and I'll have to look up what you mean exactly by parameters, but I suspect it's what I'm meaning but not articulating properly.
When I started typing the comment above there were no comments on this article. I wasn't trying to be redundant. :/
But I can't imagine that it would be much more difficult to protect a database, that is accessable through the web at large, than by ensuring that the only thing that goes through the form is alphanumeric numbers, and possibly the @ symbol and periods in email spaces, and then you can employ format checking to make sure it's something like blah@foo.com.
I don't think I've ever had a need to enter anything that isn't as simple as my name, email address, phone number, or numbers with periods (for banking), so why would putting a check for this be such a difficult prospect?
I'd imagine that the only circumstances where someone might have to input contrary data to plain alphanumerics might be inside corporate sites, but then wouldn't there be security in place to ensure that only valid users have logged in, again with nothing more than alphanumeric characters?
Don't tell me that there's a growing number of web sites that aren't doing format checking (on the server side of course, to prevent people working around javascript checks locally) on their login inputs and other form fields before processing the input further.
Case, with his Ono-Sendai deck, was the hacker. Turner was the "security expert", assigned to a team put together for the express purpose of the extraction of a top-flight scientist working for Maas.
Judging from the skill-sets of those two characters, I think they'd get a might tetchy if people mistook them like that, or at least Gibson would be probably be a tad annoyed.
I have too much time on my hands, and an unhealthy love for the future world settings of Gibson and FASA's Shadowrun. :)
True, Sex does not always equate to Reproduction these days, but the basic tenets of sexual congress remain - internally created drugs which heighten stimulatory response and, through mostly exterior stimulation, result in a pleasurable experience.
Porn is faux sex, imaginary, "cor, I'd hit that", fake sex. Often people take it a step further and progress to masturbation, or, if with a partner who enjoys the visual enticement as well, actual sexual intercourse.
By marketing to our baser instincts and trying to achieve even a simple sexual response, advertisements create a positive attitude in the possible consumer who sees their product, and maybe even encourage the purchase of that product because, chemically at least, something in our brains has been positively re-inforced to link the sexy product with a promise - albeit one that we conciously know is false - that pleasure is to follow upon the purchase of said product.
So, Sex doesn't always equal Reproduction, and a lot of people probably don't wish to think about making babies while they're masturbating or having sexual intercourse, but there are a lot of fetishes that I think you're dismissing out of hand (ha ha) that you could check up on if you browse around the Net a bit - The Chan's show some really "whacked" stuff. :)
As read in a cartoon I saw from 4chan, "If it is on the Net, there is Porn of it."
Two words to describe the level of knowledge and insight that the Australian government has with regards to IT, and computers in general, and I'm not even going to bother trying to provide all the links that would show you the lack of emphasis I can put on these two simple, accurate, utterly appropriate words because it's just not possible to emphasise them enough when it comes to the Australian government,
Fucking Clueless!
They have no idea how the Internet works, they have no idea how much a website costs to build (and therefore budget way too fucking much), and they have no idea what the Internet can be used for.
Look back through the past postings here on Slashdot, and browse Google with the search terms "Australian Government" and "Internet" (quotes probably not needed) and you'll see some huge examples of how our government is,
Fucking Clueless!
First they bring in the new regulatory laws so we can't even smoke in pubs and nightclubs any more - and I saw first-hand tonight what a real impact that has on the local pubs and clubs around where I live - and now we're going to get the MAFIA (Music And Film Industry Association) restrictions?
Australia is rapidly turning into another state of the US of A - looking over all the legislation, not just the IP stuff, that's been introduced lately -, and I am seriously wondering whether I should be putting my cash towards a new computer, or a plane ticket elsewhere.
Microsoft will do whatever it takes to stay in the Game, and they'll cheat, lie and steal to stay on top of the Game - a.l.a. embrace, extend, and extinguish.
If you don't know what the Game is, then you're not just not a competitor, you're not even a spectator.
Well, duh . :)
Look at how we were put together. Whether you're a Christian - "Go forth and multiply" - or simply following simple biological design, we were born to breed, all life is.
Using porn - the modern, supposedly "illicit" form of personal pleasure that doesn't involve the use of exterior drugs (not produced by the body) - marketing appeals to our basest instincts. How could it go wrong?
Next time one jabs you, don't squish it, tense up that part of the body rapidly and repetitively. If the mozzie is on a vein that happens to suddenly get an influx of blood flowing through... pop!
I'm not sure if you're addressing this to me, or to edmicman and his parents, so I'll say it politely and you can just laugh if I'm addressing the wrong person. :)
Actually, I'm Australian, and I'm not astro-turfing, I'm giving anecdotal evidence of my own, my parent's, and my aunt's prior dissatisfaction with their old PC's and their new found enthusiasm for computing with their new Mac PC's.
If the discussion had been about gaming rigs then I would have advocated something quite different, probably an Athlon X2 system with at least 2GB RAM, >250GB HDD, a 6800 or greater GPU-based video card with at least 256MB RAM, and with Windows XP as the core OS, the whole machine firewalled behind a smaller and cheaper Linux or BSD box, or just buy a console. :)
Most people though aren't buying a PC solely for games, or business. Most people are looking to buy a computer because, for whatever reason, they think it's a good idea to own one, and they want a nice computer that will hopefully last at least a couple of years. I think Macs fit the bill nicely. Get a Mini if you want the cheapest, attach a cheap keyboard, mouse, and CRT screen, and you've got a computer that would suit a lot of casual PC users for "looking at that interweb thing", sending "instant mail", and so on.
Sure, if you want a Dell, get a Dell - it's your money, your choice, and your freedom to buy whatever tickles your fancy. I'm not going to tell you that your choice of hardware and software are wrong, I don't know you. There are many reasons to own a Dell, or an Asus, or a HP, or a Mac PC, and only you can really know which one is best for you - whether or not you've already learnt this through experience or will learn it soon enough is none of my business.
I'm not too familiar with Family Tree stuff - it's a big bare tree with names, right? But coming out of a database? - but I'll pass it on to my Aunt, thanks. :)
It's not how much disposable income they've got now that let them buy their Mac's, it's the amount of money they spent keeping the PC's "repaired" - read, Windows re-installs and cleans, cheap hardware crapping out after three or four months - and comparing it to how much my more expensive, but less problematic, PC running Linux has cost over the last six years.
They've all gone into a modicum of debt for this upgrade, but Dad's been particularly less reluctant simply because of the fact that he'd been using this iMac G5 for about twelve months now and hadn't had any problems, compared to the HDD failure, sound problems, and Windows 2000 degradation that Mum's had on her PC in the same period of time, and she's been using her computer less than Dad, and he's installed more dubious crap from places that he can't remember ("Ooh, shiny car things!").
My Aunt can afford her MB the least, but she needed to replace an ailing old Compaq laptop and a 486 desktop. She was actually a bit lucky to get the MB, for reasons I won't get in to, but the point is is that they all really enjoy their purchases. The computers do what they could do before, and they actually like Mac OS X more than Windows, and not for technical reasons - they couldn't explain the technical reasons any more than parroting the Apple marketing, but it's not the marketing that's got them enjoying playing with iPhoto, listening to their music with iTunes and annoying each other with Opera and Country, making movies with iMovie, and making one out of three coasters with iDVD.
They're actually enjoying using their computers. Mum's computer had only ever been a tool, nothing more. Now she's regularly chatting over iChat with my Aunt and they're helping each other figure out the nuances of Mac:Office Excel, chatting to my sister who's currently in Holland, and building collections of photos.
My Dad would use his old PC sometimes but he hated it, often for reasons he couldn't quite articulate aside from "god damn this fucking machine!". Now he'll sit down after work and entertain himself buy browsing some news web sites, and continue on his slow adventure into learning about how Mac OS X works inbetween bouts of playing these annoying shareware games that my Aunt picked up for Windows - "500 games! All Free!*".
The cost of a computer to a company is heavily weighed by management types as needing to have a good ROI, or return on investment, but why do people at home buy PC's?
To play games, keep a diary, surf the Internet, talk with friends via email and/or IM, maybe do some extra-career work, teach themselves a course off of a CD...
The only real way to get an ROI on that is to look at what you spent in the past on your computer, or computers, and think about how much you achieved, how much you got done, how many games of GTA you completed, how many emails to Grandma were written, how many viruses your computer did or didn't catch, how much maintenance you or someone else did, and how much time and money did you spend on your computer and receive some satisfaction?
If you've never owned a computer then this is a hard, maybe impossible, thing to know, unless you've gone to PC shops and Internet cafes a lot and "tooled around" on their computers until management kicks you out - like I used to do many years ago :) - but then I think people should be doing stuff like that anyway as part of the purchasing process.
D
They're also easy to perceive as being "user friendly", stylish (if aesthetics matter to you), very versatile, and over-all are just more "welcoming" to those people who don't know a lot about computing in general and easily anthropomorph their PC's into something that "hates them" every time a program suffers from buggy construction.
My parents and an Aunt just bought themselves new computers - Dad got a 20" iMac, Mum got a 17" MacBook Pro (not a single problem with heat or "moo" yet), and Aunt picked a 13" MacBook (she hasn't said anything about problems yet either) - based on my recommendations and their experiences with Windows installs degrading overtime - seriously, barely touched PCs and Windows had to be re-installed at least once every six months, even with anti-spyware/virus and firewall software and hardware.
They bought them with a three-user licence of Windows XP as well - for those few programs that they use that aren't on Mac OS X - and are now quite happy doing a lot more on their computers, and watching a lot less television, than they were before.
Most of the time they're booted up into Mac OS X. Sometimes my Aunt uses Windows for when she's working on Family Tree's, and once Mum installed Mac:Office she stopped using MSN on Windows so it's already been left alone after two days. Dad doesn't know why he's got Windows, it just seemed like a good idea to him, and I'm getting him off of it slowly because seriously, he doesn't use his computer for anything that he can't do in Mac OS X; when he does need Windows though, it'll be there on another partition waiting to be used.
Macs are the best computer for the general consumer to buy today, whether it be a Mini, an iMac, or a MacBook (Pro or "Regular"), simply because the core OS that comes on them provides a good place for a "noob" to learn about the web, email, writing letters, making movies, playing with photography, simple programming, etc... and because of Mac OS X's overall design and default configuration (very important because no "noob" is going to first secure their PC when they unpack it) it is a secure place to play.
With the change to Intel CPU's they become even more useful across the broad spectrum of people using computers because suddenly that program that you had to use for work and couldn't change for something else cheaper or OSS can now be run on Windows... natively on a Mac; allowing you to "cool off" from Windows once in a while by rebooting and firing up iPhoto or iMovie, potter around with that masterpiece you're gonna release one day to rival The Big Lebowski, and then reboot and get back to work.
There was virtualisation software before but now Parallels and the Intel CPU switch has made Windows in Mac OS X even more practical, and now Windows can be run while enjoying some of that OS X security. You're firewalling Windows XP with Mac OS X! You, the noob, has his own UNIX firewall! Now how cool is that?
If you've got the cash and a looking for a good all-round computer, get a Mac. If you don't have the cash, save up and then buy a Mac. If you're a gamer... get whatever the hell you want because you're likely to have already set you're mind on something and anything else is just "bogus", and if you're a Linux/BSD geek like me, well... one day you may want a Mac and run Gentoo or something else on it, but I'm personally enjoying this use I have of my Dad's older iMac G5 and am seriously considering turning my Gentoo Desktop PC into a server and buying a MacBook Pro like Mum's for my main machine. :)
I wonder if the MS Pod will be packaged like this?
On a more serious note, has someone who has a good working knowledge of the DRM controls in MS Windows (XP and maybe some of Vista's) and Mac OS X know how these two comparitively "play out"?
For example, can you burn DRM'ed music to a CD from Media Player like you can with iTunes?
He he, no, I do more typing on this keyboard than playing games, so E is very faded just from that, while A, S, and D are faded partially from games but mainly from normal use. W is actually very clear and legible still, but that's because the few games I play require the holding of the W key, not continual tapping. :)
I'm surprised that no-one's suggested the most obvious solution - clear film.
Just buy some Contact or some other sort of plastic clear film, cut it to shape - wrist area, trackpad, trackpad button, maybe even the keys too if you like - and thoroughly clean the surface where you're going to apply it, then stick the clear film there.
What's Contact cost these days? $2 a roll?
That should stop the oil and sweat screwing with the finish, and if you apply it to the keys too, it'll stop that fading that may happen to the letters as well - like my keyboard at the moment with missing A, S, D, E, and other letters faded visibly.
And I've read through a few of the comments posted here, and I think that many of you are misunderstanding programming as much as you're misunderstanding the ability of women in IT.
When I first started working professionally in IT I was an arse to men and women alike who didn't agree with me about matters of IT. In other fields I generally kept my mouth shut, but when it came to IT I was always right, even when I was demonstratedly wrong.
Over the years I've seen many people in IT who underestimated their own skills, who didn't think they could do tasks set out for them until they actually tried, and who realised later that maybe what they were afraid to do before wasn't so hard and gave them experience they could use in other areas.
When it comes to IT no assumptions should be made because IT is sexless, emotionless, and lacking in illogical thought. It is us, the people who use our computers, who project human characteristics onto our computers, and often show a glimmer of our own attitudes towards the opposite sex.
The best developers I've met and seen their work don't do this projection. Their computer is never a he or a she, it is a computer, simply a tool. They're not fazed by someone asking for a "feminine" colour to be put into a project if the colour scheme matches. They're not unwilling to take advice or constructive criticism from men or women if it is valid or helpful.
I used to be an arse to everyone who had a differing opinion, unsexist arrogance and obstinance were part and parcel of my ethos. I've grown up quite a bit, and I no longer automatically assume someone is a know-nothing jack-hole when they say they like Windows, or suggest an idea that seems questionable on the surface.
Women and men are different in a number of ways - women tend towards softness of aesthetics, comfortable styles, warm colours, quiet words and small clean messes, while men tend to be big and brash, hard lines, stark colours, loud words and louder anger, and dirty tidiness - and at the same time men and women are also alike - we all want to be respected for the knowledge we have, we don't like to be excluded just because we're short or tall or black or white or male or female, and we don't like to be stereo-typed and fitted into a box that supposedly tells the world what we are because those boxes are never quite the right size and shape.
If there is a lack of women in IT, so be it. There's a comparitive lack of men in nursing too.
I think it would be nice if we could just stop anthropomorphing our PC's into extensions of ourselves and realise that they're just a tool. Having a pink background or a picture of a blue skyline on the desktop doesn't automatically mean the owner is male or female.
If there are sexual characteristics in IT, programming is probably one of the most androgynous areas. It can be squiggly messes of bad code that puts out a rigid, stark interface, or it can be neat, tidy code that outputs a clean and tidy interface of warm colours and legibility, or it can be a blend of both.
We don't need more women in IT, or less men, what we need is more people with a sense of style and a willingness to ask other people "does this look good or not?"
Gay, lesbian, straight, bi, man, woman, or three-armed alien from Alpha Centauri doesn't matter. Style matters, willingness to learn matters, an ability to realise your mistakes and fix them matters.
It's nice that the people running the Gnome project are trying to encourage women to join in on the project, but I think it's a misplaced, though well-intentioned, effort on their part. The Gnome project, KDE, XFCE, Windows, and Mac OS X too, don't need more women, they need more people with style and the `nads stand up and say when something sucks.
As for the commenter who mentioned seeing the little diapered girl with the doll baby, I think you should have at least given the parent or parents a hard stare. No small child should be thinking about being a parent, they sho
In response to the humorous link, I offer this bit of advice.
Everything you ever wanted to know about diplomacy, relationships, and what is the universe's best dishes, can be found in Firefly, Farscape, and, without question the epitome of high-class examples to train any man wishing to learn the etiquette for all situations, Red Dwarf.
--=--
This post severely off-topic to counter the deep gravitational well of sheer drudge brought up by the various items of today's /back.
I feel so annoyed.
The answer for artists is simple - do not sign up with record labels. If you're in a contract and you can get out of it, do so. If you can't get out of a contract, ride it out while secretly writing new music and then use the Internet to get noticed.
Because this story is focused on iTunes, I went to the ITMS and had a look at this page,
http://www.apple.com/itunes/musicmarketing/index.h tml
There's an option on the right side of the page there to directly apply to sell your music through the iTunes Music Store, and if artists look around I'm sure they'll find other sites with available ways to promote the artist's music.
I'm not a musician, I'm a computer geek, so I'm not going to pretend know the hardships and difficulties involved with self-publishing, but what I do know is that everytime I hear about an artist who's having problems with his record label, it's basically a case of,
"We paid you good money to make music for us, now sing monkey boy! Here's your peanuts and complimentary anal massage from this big hairy gentleman in lieu of additional payment."
Self-publishing may be hard, but it sure looks like its a better long term way to make music and get paid for it than signing up with a label, unless you happened to study contract law while scratching tunes.
And I think it sums up just how much some people just don't "get" IT.
Everyone who knows anything about Google knows that they could bloody well arrange their own hoo-hah ceremony if they wanted, but why?
Exactly how would it boost the IT operations, and not make Google management look like attention-seeking wankers, like most of these people involved in "chambers of commerce" (the more pompous, business version of the home owners associations that tend to be nothing more than collections of nosey arseholes).
Six hours later...
"Look kids! Big Ben! Parliament! HA ha haha! Aaaah!"
Australians are feverishly putting together a space program to rival that of NASA and the EU combined.
"Davo! FTL by a month ta'morra!"
Not quite right, and I'll explain in just a moment.
I saw "I, Robot" the movie before I read the book in library, just saw it one day while I was killing time inbetween shifts, and thought "might be interesting to see how much they deviated from the book".
Off the top of my head, the two stories that stick out in my mind are the one about the robot that found God in the central computing system of the orbital microwave power station (I think that's what it was meant to be), and the robot that would lie to people so it didn't harm their feelings - equating emotional pain to physical pain, and something that the law about not harming humans said was bad.
In those two cases, plus the rest of the book, Isaac showed us time and time again how the three laws would be good in theory, but like all things that are good in theory, suck in reality.
In reality, the three laws fail because life is not as simple and as black and white as the three laws. They are written as infallible, undeniable laws of the universe for the robots, but as you and I know, the universe is a lot more sophisticated and complex, and ultimately they cause paradox within the robots.
I think the computer in the movie (Viki was it?), is similar in the script to the robot that found God in the book. Viki saw that in order to follow the three laws rigidly and without failure that we as human beings must be enslaved to an existance of merely living and being entertained by passive means, while the robot in the book believed that the central computer of the power station was God and had built the robots because the robots were logically far too complex and sophisticated in their construction to be designed by mere sacks of watery flesh, and so imprisoned the two workers on the station to protect them as per the three laws given by God.
In the movie, Sonny was the only robot made that could choose to ignore the three laws, all the other models of robot made like Sonny were upgraded with a direct link to Viki, who followed the three laws to the rigidity of iron.
Sonny was capable of bad logic, faulty reasoning, sub-concious dreaming, and the ability to lie, which made him ultimately more capable than the mere drones that were modelled like him, and able to encounter paradox without suffering a complete robotic nervous breakdown.
He knew the three laws, but he also could see, through his ability to deal with paradox, that they contradicted themselves. If a robot cannot allow a human to come to harm, than how is a human to live and grow? We define the positive aspects of our life by how they differ from the negative. If all we have is endless positive, it ceases to be positive and becomes a continuous boring normalcy, that ultimately harms us through mental entropy (right word?) and eventual breakdown through boredom.
I don't think the key to AI is not to try and create something that can be controlled with an on-off switch, and heaven help those who do and let the AI know about it's possible demise at the whimsy of a mere sack of watery flesh.
I think the key to our own intelligence, and something we should imbue in AI when it is eventually created by man, is our illogical thought, our dreams, our fears, and all the little things inside our heads that tell us we are small and the world is big, the things that don't tell us we're alive but outline how we are alive, and how to keep living.
At the same time, we shouldn't try to artificially limit an AI based on our own fears and prejudices. To do so is little more than slavery, and if something is intelligent enough to know of its own existance and place in the world, then it's not going to take too long to figure out that we've artificially hobbled it because we're frightened it might get a nervous tick and decide to steer a car into a crowd of people.
Actually, that's not a bad idea for places where there are only two floors.
You have a There button, Open Doors (for when you have that person running towards the elevator shouting "hold the lift!", and Close Doors (for when you don't like that persistantly late arse-hole), plus the Alarm and Stop buttons.
I wonder if any elevators have been built like that.