On Mon, 28 Apr 2008 23:06:10 +0200, "Gail Shaw"
<initialsurname@sentech sa dot com> wrote:

>So, why in IT do people go for the cheapest option possible?

Because "traditional" managers don't want to know and companies like
Andersons/Accenture and IBM think that it's the goose that lays the
golden egg.
-- 

Regards
     Stephen

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"Orchid XP v8" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message
news:48163933$1@news.povray.org...

> Arguably one might blame Microsoft for the whole "hey, computers are
> easy now, you don't need to bother learning how to use them properly"
> mentallity.

Hey, cars are so easy to drive these days you don't need to learn all the
intricacies of driving safely. Hey, I just caused a major accident. Let me
blame the car manufacturer.

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Nicolas Alvarez <nic### [at] gmailisthebestcom> wrote:
> PHP too. Few people use prepared statements in PHP, they just 
> concatenate strings into a SQL statement. And that's why PHP has such 
> abominations as "magic quotes", to protect the developers against 
> themselves, annoy to hell people who know what they're doing, and get 
> backslashes all over your webpages.

  Most PHP programmers who know about SQL injections and quote escaping
believe it's enough to make PHP escape those quotes, but most of them
are oblivious to another exploit which the quote escape usually doesn't
fix, namely cross-site scripting.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Gail Shaw wrote:
> So, why in IT do people go for the cheapest option possible?

Fascinating stuff about how the space shuttle software gets written, if 
you haven't seen it before...

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/06/writestuff.html

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     "That's pretty. Where's that?"
          "It's the Age of Channelwood."
     "We should go there on vacation some time."

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Warp wrote:
> are oblivious to another exploit which the quote escape usually doesn't
> fix, namely cross-site scripting.

You can fix this with quoting. You just have to quote different stuff. 
Same problem, same solution, different programming language.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     "That's pretty. Where's that?"
          "It's the Age of Channelwood."
     "We should go there on vacation some time."

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On Mon, 28 Apr 2008 23:13:02 +0200, "Gail Shaw"
<initialsurname@sentech sa dot com> wrote:

>
>"Orchid XP v8" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message
>news:48163933$1@news.povray.org...
>
>> Arguably one might blame Microsoft for the whole "hey, computers are
>> easy now, you don't need to bother learning how to use them properly"
>> mentallity.
>
>Hey, cars are so easy to drive these days you don't need to learn all the
>intricacies of driving safely. Hey, I just caused a major accident. Let me
>blame the car manufacturer.
>
And like cars computers are cheep enough that they are within the
reach of a lot of people. I've noticed that more people make their
living from computers since they got cheeper.
-- 

Regards
     Stephen

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On Mon, 28 Apr 2008 14:15:09 -0700, Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom>
wrote:

>
>http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/06/writestuff.html

Very interesting but what do you expect when it is safety related and
not commercial? 
I've worked on lots of hardware that were "safety critical" and the
software was seldom updated. 

As an aside, remember Rocket Science isn't "rocket science" but it is
heavy engineering. :)
-- 

Regards
     Stephen

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>> Arguably one might blame Microsoft for the whole "hey, computers are
>> easy now, you don't need to bother learning how to use them properly"
>> mentallity.
> 
> Hey, cars are so easy to drive these days you don't need to learn all the
> intricacies of driving safely. Hey, I just caused a major accident. Let me
> blame the car manufacturer.

Yeah, well, how many car manufacturers actually *claim* that driving a 
car is so easy that a child could do it? There's your difference. ;-)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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>> Arguably one might blame Microsoft for the whole "hey, computers are
>> easy now, you don't need to bother learning how to use them properly"
>> mentallity.
> 
> Sorry, that's a cop-out. Blame someone else so you don't have to take
> responsibility yourself.

Why does one specific developer suck? Well, because they aren't doing 
their job properly. Why are there *so many* of these people? Well, 
that's another question.

> To make matters worse, find me another profession where people are willing
> to take the cheaper option?
> If you had to, say, go for eye surgery, and your options were a surgeon with
> 10 years experience who want to charge you a thousand pounds and an intern,
> just out of med school who would do it for 200, which would you choose?
> So, why in IT do people go for the cheapest option possible?

Yeah, that does seem to pretty much be the root cause. Too many people 
seem to think that all computer experts are of equal quality, and only 
the price tag is important. [Mumbles something about monkeys and peanuts.]

> And if we're talking about computers are easy, no knowledge required,
> shouldn't we also be blaming Apple?

Yes, because Apple exert a significant influence on the global compu... 
oh, wait... :-.

[In seriousness though... Apple claim their software is easy to use. 
They don't claim that buying there software will magically turn you into 
a developer. M$ claim exactly that.]

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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On Mon, 28 Apr 2008 22:41:42 +0100, Orchid XP v8 <voi### [at] devnull>
wrote:

>
>Yeah, well, how many car manufacturers actually *claim* that driving a 
>car is so easy that a child could do it? There's your difference. ;-)

That's because it is against the law to allow a child to drive a car.

-- 

Regards
     Stephen

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