Technology

A few weeks back, Robbie Shepherd wrote an article about every web designers dream of telling the client where to get off.

I had just finished reading the article when I got an e-mail from a client wanting stupid changes to their project.

The project in question was a two page job to promote a live project we had just finished. The concept was to give the punters an idea of what the product would do before they parted with their hard earned cash. The pages were created, with the obvious banalities of click here removed from the page — word processor users just can’t seem to wrap their heads around hyperlinks.

You would expect the promotional site to look exactly like the live site, but with more branding and contact information — well, most people would, this client however just didn’t see that point.

On top of the dumb changes requested, was a major change to the live site. This is a project that has already been approved, signed off and paid for, yet the client is trying to sneak a major change through on a minor project. Yes, we can do it, but the client will pay for it to be done and should be going through the proper channels of organising a change request.

The whole process has just gone off into meeting land — I’m mostly banned from client meetings due to a lack of tact — and I’m hopeful of a reasonable resolution. The client will be educated and will learn what is and isn’t an acceptable course of action within a project. I live in hope.

Most of us have had to deal with brain donors like this at one time or another. In the field of corporate web design, no matter how cool or clued up the company is, the people you are dealing with usually fall into the realms of sales and marketing — both of which seem to have little idea of what their company actually does or how to deal with non sales and marketing people in the outside world.

These are people who can’t tie their own shoelaces and can’t hold a conversation that isn’t peppered with jargon and marketing speak. After half an hour in their presence you’ll be reaching for a blunt instrument to end the torment.

Also under the category of useless to mankind are movie executives who churn out film versions of dumb television programs, like The Beverley Hillbillies; anyone involved with reality tv; the designers of clothing who add fake pockets to their products; the upper management of corporate monopolies; the annoying, yet cheerfully vacant, people who try to convert you to their form of religion; media magnates who try to convince us that soundbytes, celebrity gossip and sports interviews are a substitute for news; and anyone who willingly works for Microsoft.

I propose the Douglas Adams’ solution of telling these twats that the world is about to explode, piling them into a space ship and launching their inanity off into the night sky.

I look forward to the day with much anticipation.

At a time when Internet literacy seems in inverse proportion to age, a new generation of students is faced with an old temptation made easier than ever: taking the work of others and passing it off as one’s own, welcome to the world of internet plagiarism

A 22-year-old British woman, calling herself The Pimptress, published photographs of her boyfriend wearing skimpy panties and a bra on the Internet to avenge his cheating ways. The page was picked up by major news sources, which was quite a nice deal for UBoot, the company hosting the site — especially considering the whole thing was a hoax to generate interest in its service

In a significant win for open-source desktop productivity suites, Sun Microsystems today announced that the US Defence Information Systems Agency would implement up to 25,000 units of its StarOffice 5.2 software

IBM has built the world’s fastest silicon-based transistor, a development that promises to make telecommunications chips run faster on less power

Internet users may soon have to contend with a new form of spam that turns their private e-mail correspondence into a billboard for online advertisers

A very verbose account of the recent denial of service attacks against Gibson Research Corporation committed by an illiterate and ill-informed 13-year brat

Have you ever thought it’d be cool if you could have an environmentally-friendly computer? How about a hand-powered web server?

The fate of the free Net may rest in the hands of a university student in Sweden making less money than a coffee slinger at Starbucks. While the first generation of file-trading technologies fights over Napster’s leavings, more radical Net programmers are still committed to building a wholly anonymous, virtually untraceable way of communicating and trading files online. Chief among these is Freenet, an open-source project viewed by many as the ultimate inheritor to Napster’s original promise of free online file swapping

Telstra said a core router linking Sydney and Los Angeles was causing degraded performance to Internet traffic between Australia and the United States. While their broadband service has had a 13-hour outage preventing BigPond Cable and ADSL customers accessing the most basic of Internet services — e-mail