Innocents with the temerity to run the William Gibson monikered Black Ice firewall are catching it big-time. Some wicked person hand-coded an amazingly teensy 900-byte Black Ice specific worm that burrows through a flaw in Black Ice and whacks PCs hard enough to ruin them and despoil their contents. Virus guys used to just write viruses. Now they’re bold enough to try to wreck corporations. Life gets a little more Gibsonian ever day — via Beyond the Beyond
Telstra faces a fine of $10 million — rising by $1 million a day — and possible legal action from rivals unless it cuts the price it charges competitors for its wholesale broadband internet service as a matter of urgency
Some people living in some of the most inaccessible areas of India are enjoying an improved postal service — thanks to the combining of e-mail with traditional snail mail
Design portal www.designinteract.com is featuring an article entitled Giant Sites: Designing the Un-Designable. The article talks about the pros and cons for working for a boutique web design agency with smaller clients, and firms who produce sites for larger corporate clients.
This quote is taken from a creative director: Everyone knows the best work comes from boutiques
. This article challenges this attitude, which is nice. I myself mostly do web design for larger corporates with far more attention focused on producing intuitive interfaces and layouts to help consumers get the information they want, perform transactions, etc. There isn’t always much room for creative abandon in these projects, and you do have to think about how this is going to be cut up into templates. Most of these sites deal with large amounts of dynamic info and you have to tailor your designs to accommodate this in the most elegant, code efficient way possible, while still maintaining an existing brand, and catering to your target audience. Phew!
There is of course the fact that mostly with larger corporate clients, there are many decision and stakeholders, who invariably can’t decide on a particular design, and most of the time will go with what is the safest
, or something similar to what their competitor has done/is doing. Which is understandable from a business perspective, if you know a particular solution already works well, then why not look at the core of what they’ve done and change it to your needs. It’s gotta work out cheaper in the end?
So boutique agencies have it easier? Depends on the projects and their individual needs (client temperment?), not just the size of the agency. I’ve often felt that in general they get more creative freedom, because of the nature of work they seem to get, like more brochure ware sites, newsletters, mini promo sites, etc. So do you equate creative freedom with easier? No you can’t. More enjoyable? For me yes, but depends on your personal tastes, like PC or Mac.
Corporate blandness doesn’t always have to be so bland though. You can get a bit creative if only through small subtle elements. Sometimes if you present a corporate client with something more interesting as well as bland version no.112, they can start to comprise. But only a little, and only if you change it brand X blue. But it’s a start.
Boutique design though seems to be where you want to be if your a designer. When you’ve decided to make a living as a designer, it’s super sexy slick sites/designs that woo you, the ones with pages of cutting edge graphic, photography and typography experiments bordering on art more than design, topped off with exquisite embellishments and more style than you can poke a cursor at. I can’t say that the Microsoft or Amazon sites inspired me so.
Sigh!
A British theatre group is to hold an unprecedented casting call for its next production. The experimental company requires a dead body to take a leading role in its latest show. The consent of the donor of the body is being sought beforehand and the production team aim to treat the subject of death with absolute seriousness, challenging modern taboos about a condition that comes to everybody at some point. Called Dead: You Will Be
, the play requires a dead body to lie in state
throughout the proceedings
Western Australian Premier Geoff Gallop has defended the State’s new cannabis laws which come into effect today. People caught with a small amount of cannabis, or with no more than two plants, will either be fined or will have to complete a counseling session, rather than incur a criminal record
AOL has decided to take a fresh approach to fighting spam and is now blocking the spammer’s web address. The philosophy is, if the customers can’t visit spammers sites, spammers will not be able to make any money
ARIA have released figures that show for 2003, album sales have reached an all time high. In fact, according to Peter Martin, who recently went on Australian radio, before file sharing and CD burning they were selling 10 million less. Total unit sales were also at an all time high at 65.6 million. CD single sales declined 1.9 million over the year, but as Peter said file downloading is doing a better job. Should help Kazaa’s legal problems. Some independent music stores are thriving despite the competition from illegal downloads on the Internet. The stores are finding that file sharing can help create a buzz online that can lead to more sales, according to a panel of independent music store owners who spoke at the South by Southwest Music Conference & Festival
The Panasonic ruggedised Toughbook, a laptop that, in its most extreme configuration, can survive being run over by a truck. Those boxes cost $5000, but a semi-ruggedised
version, which is speced with spill-resistant keyboards, hard casings, and gel-encased disk drives
is only 10% more costly to build than a standard machine. Analysts say 20% of mainstream laptops fail in the first year, usually because of accidental damage. That rises to 35% once a notebook leaves its docking station and to more than 50% for machines that are used outdoors or on shop floors. But the failure rate of rugged or semi-rugged machines is just 5%
Shallow Grave actor Christopher Eccleston has been named as the ninth Doctor Who to front the cult BBC sci-fi show when it returns next year — via Die Puny Humans
Some of the highlights of this list of peculiar band names include:
- A Cat Born In An Oven Isn’t a Cake
- Baby Shit Brown
- Biff Hitler and the Violent Mood Swings
- Butthole Surfers
- Candy Striper Death Orgy
- Damn the Bad Luck
- Dead Kennedys
- Electric Blue Peggy Sue and the Revolutionions from Mars
- Goldfish Don’t Bounce
- Horny Mormons
- Jehovah’s Witness Protection Program
- JFKFC
- Lorne Greene’s Wet Nipple
- Mary Kay and the Cosmetics
- Not Drowning, Waving
- Stop Calling Me Frank
- The The
- The Very Idea of Fucking Hitler
- Vic Morrow’s Head
- Zulu Leprechauns
Great to see some of my favourite bands made the list — via Die Puny Humans
Vocera Communications have an internal communication system working at their office that functions like the badge communicators from ST:TNG. The employees wear the system as a badge and touch it to start the connection. Then they speak the name of the person they want to talk to and the system connects them using VOIP for one-on-one communication
A handful of Bagle worm variants are attacking Windows users with an insidious new twist: They can infect computers without tricking them into opening a file attachment — opening an e-mail is all it takes
At 22mm, Toshiba’s prototype of its latest multi-gigabyte hard disk drive is the smallest in the world — at least as of this moment
Telstra will be forced to change its wholesale ADSL pricing or face fines worth millions of dollars for anti-competitive behaviour
NASA has developed a computer program that comes close to reading thoughts not yet spoken by analysing nerve commands to the throat. It says the breakthrough holds promise for astronauts and the handicapped. A person using the subvocal system thinks of phrases and talks to himself so quietly it cannot be heard, but the tongue and vocal cords do receive speech signals from the brain. Developer Chuck Jorgensen’s team at NASA’s Ames Research Centre, Moffett Field, California, found that sensors under the chin and one each side of the Adam’s apple pick up the brain’s commands to the speech organs, allowing the subauditory, or silent speech
to be captured
Why won’t John Howard admit that our participation in the invasion of Iraq increased the risk that Australia will be targeted for a terrorist attack? Pretty simple really. If he admits the obvious, as the AFP chief Mick Keelty did, then he’s back to square one in explaining his decision to go to war
Yes Strong Bads 100th email is truly an acheivement worthy of widescreen WOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!
Also contained in this momentous e-mail is how Strong Bad and Homestar Runner met and the birth of The Cheat. Stick around after Strong Bad says ’email’ 100 times and see well wishes from Marzipan, Homestar, Ye Olde Strong Bad, freaky Strong Bad and Limozeen!
Fashion according to Lucie.
Rule 1: You can NEVER have too many skull shirts. NEVER!
Rule 2: Skull shirts need to be BLACK! Red, deep purples and very dark greys are also acceptable, but NEVER under any circumstances is the shirt to be white! White skull shirts are right up there with white Metallica shirts, fucking wrong!
Reducing the cost of iPods, Aluminum displays?
Aluminium display to compliment your shiny G5 hey? Yeah that sounds like something Apple would bring out. As for the size, yeah 24 inch also sounds quite believable. I drooled over a G5 in person on Monday. It’s a huge beast truly worthy of an equally huge display, I mean the 20 or 23 inch cinema display (I can’t remember which one it was. ‘Twas big ‘n’ shiny) it was hooked up to was actually looking a bit small! (Nah man, for real! Yes I know a 20 inch display certainly dwarfs my piss-weak 17 inch Phillips thing running some mediocre graphics card at work, but… yeah…).
Anyhow, the lovely translucentness of the cinema displays don’t quite compliment the G5 as much as I’m sure it could, or at least that was my feeling after seeing this setup in person.
XServe and iMac G5s, Mac OS X 10.3.3, notebook displays
iMac G5s? Lets get the Power Books happening first shall we? But then again, Apple might want to hurry along the roll out of the Intel based G5 chip. Hmmm…
Sources comment on Power Mac, Power Book updates
Stop teasing already!
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