There is a fourth question - whether the US government is helping to create police states in other countries.
If you live in a 'unstable' country friendly to the US, then your every communication may be monitored, not by your local dictator, but by the NSA on their behalf. Personally, that's not necessarily a bad thing, but there is absolutely no legal responsibility for it - it's effectively an "outsourced police state".
We do build automated helicopters - I think the news reported that a US helicopter drone was shot down over Libya during the uprising... and that small drone used by the US army (I think) seems to have similar flight properties to a helicopter.
The boring, but obvious reason seems more likely to be:
"Hi, My name is Hutz, I represent a group of people suing company X for producing drug Y which caused horrific side-effects. If you want to join this action...."
A review points out the positives and negatives of a product. If a review is entirely positive, then people will immediately assume it's not real.
In this case, accompanied with a lead-in that is clearly the product of a marketing department, it is entirely correct to call this astroturf.
The basic problem is this:
- I know about OOXML, simply because people took notice on this occasion. The methods used to pass this standard are, what most people would call, corrupt.
- I don't know much about the other standards that ISO pass each year, and I doubt many people take much of an interest.
- given that ISO apparently have no problem with the way OOXML was published, we can assume that the horrendously/obviously screwed up process is 'fine/standard'?
In short, ISO's leadership has 'standardized' a method of simply bypassing the relevant processes, buying/pressuring the right people and getting something published without any real chance to stop it.
Maybe propose a new standard for ISO - 'Method for getting an ISO stamp on a donkey'. I guess since it would be based on ooxml, it's already got one foot in the door?
After some checking logs today - the beauty of this mess, is that linkscanner doesn't send accept-encoding and it also seems to 'support' the caching header in a quite hilarious manner.
If your homepage is 100k, browsers will see a page maybe 15k in size, linkscanner sees a page 100k in size.
If you regularly update and set a low/negative expires, then a browser will see the page once (when they visit it), whereas linkscanner seems to re-download the page every time it sees a link to it.... combined with a page that is SEO optimized, and you can see insane bandwidth usage.
*IF* page scanner avoided re-downloading pages with "don't cache" set (since it's bloody pointless), AND supported gzip encoding - then I wouldn't be quite as pissed as I am. Honestly, this is not only a bad idea, it's half-assed coding on top of that.
Well if you want to open an ISO 29500 document, then yes it's deprecated. However, MS word doesn't & won't use the version accepted by ISO - making changes like that utterly pointless.
In summary, it really doesn't matter what the spec says. You have to follow what MS does. It's a great spec - you can print it out, tear it up and use it as toilet paper, along with ISO's reputation.
If anyone involved in the spec reads this, for the love of god PLEASE include a 'value' on the "select" tag.
'as an alternative to flagging an option tag with selected="selected", a select tag may have a 'value' attribute. A renderer should select the first child option with a matching value attribute.'
Please, my servers are getting fed up with rendering an entire country list just to flag one with selected="selected".
But it doesn't actually prevent you from installing it each of the 50 times you wipe your OS. Firstly, this doesn't work if your connection is down/not available when you uninstall (if anyone could explain how that could ever work, then I'd love to hear it - because logically it doesn't, and according to their forums that's exactly what happens).
Secondly, imagine this becomes popular... you uninstall windows, but first uninstall 10 games? given the size of AAA games, that's maybe 30 minutes to an hour of uninstalling? and if something goes wrong, you instead have to phone up to 10 different helplines and wait in queues to re-enable all the games... maybe have to scan in your original disk and email the image to the company involved and then wait/hope they get back???
This isn't "bad" it's [bleeping] insane. And that's ignoring the point that people tend to reinstall windows when something goes 'bad' - the odds of being able to uninstall in those circumstances really isn't so great.
Still, kudos to whichever securom salesman managed to sell someone this screwed up concept.. I guess he forgot to mention the "your tech support/call center costs worldwide are going to go through the roof until you remove this piece-of-junk from the game".
"The end result is a system only marginally more secure than before."
According to the article they'd need ~ 24 hours to crack each passport (assuming a 5 digit code), so in that respect it's a hugely more secure?
IMHO, there are 3 things that are gained:
a) a little bit of security.
b) the ability to scan passports in/out of a country more quickly.
c) a chip in a passport that could be extended to contain other bio-identity information without loads of pointless scare-mongering (fingerprint/iris scan/brain dump/whatever).
"Or that referring to an object by ID returns one whose name is the ID you're looking for"
Oh yes, the joy of debugging "document.getElementById('description')" - how I laughed when I found out that on a live site it usually returns a meta tag...
"#3. They didn't bother to find WHERE the differences were. Is it in the IP stack? Is it in the OS? Is it in the scripting language? Is it in the app?"
If there's a 7x difference in performance between linux and Win2k3, then the difference is almost certainly nothing to do with systems themselves, and everything to do with configuring it.
LAMP is very susceptible to speed-ups by optimizing the configuration, and if they picked the right 'WAMP' stack it would come pre-optimized without their knowledge?
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There is a fourth question - whether the US government is helping to create police states in other countries.
If you live in a 'unstable' country friendly to the US, then your every communication may be monitored, not by your local dictator, but by the NSA on their behalf. Personally, that's not necessarily a bad thing, but there is absolutely no legal responsibility for it - it's effectively an "outsourced police state".
We do build automated helicopters - I think the news reported that a US helicopter drone was shot down over Libya during the uprising... and that small drone used by the US army (I think) seems to have similar flight properties to a helicopter.
The boring, but obvious reason seems more likely to be:
"Hi, My name is Hutz, I represent a group of people suing company X for producing drug Y which caused horrific side-effects. If you want to join this action...."
A review points out the positives and negatives of a product. If a review is entirely positive, then people will immediately assume it's not real. In this case, accompanied with a lead-in that is clearly the product of a marketing department, it is entirely correct to call this astroturf.
The basic problem is this:
- I know about OOXML, simply because people took notice on this occasion. The methods used to pass this standard are, what most people would call, corrupt.
- I don't know much about the other standards that ISO pass each year, and I doubt many people take much of an interest.
- given that ISO apparently have no problem with the way OOXML was published, we can assume that the horrendously/obviously screwed up process is 'fine/standard'?
In short, ISO's leadership has 'standardized' a method of simply bypassing the relevant processes, buying/pressuring the right people and getting something published without any real chance to stop it.
Maybe propose a new standard for ISO - 'Method for getting an ISO stamp on a donkey'. I guess since it would be based on ooxml, it's already got one foot in the door?
After some checking logs today - the beauty of this mess, is that linkscanner doesn't send accept-encoding and it also seems to 'support' the caching header in a quite hilarious manner.
If your homepage is 100k, browsers will see a page maybe 15k in size, linkscanner sees a page 100k in size.
If you regularly update and set a low/negative expires, then a browser will see the page once (when they visit it), whereas linkscanner seems to re-download the page every time it sees a link to it.... combined with a page that is SEO optimized, and you can see insane bandwidth usage.
*IF* page scanner avoided re-downloading pages with "don't cache" set (since it's bloody pointless), AND supported gzip encoding - then I wouldn't be quite as pissed as I am. Honestly, this is not only a bad idea, it's half-assed coding on top of that.
Well if you want to open an ISO 29500 document, then yes it's deprecated. However, MS word doesn't & won't use the version accepted by ISO - making changes like that utterly pointless.
In summary, it really doesn't matter what the spec says. You have to follow what MS does. It's a great spec - you can print it out, tear it up and use it as toilet paper, along with ISO's reputation.
If anyone involved in the spec reads this, for the love of god PLEASE include a 'value' on the "select" tag.
'as an alternative to flagging an option tag with selected="selected", a select tag may have a 'value' attribute. A renderer should select the first child option with a matching value attribute.'
Please, my servers are getting fed up with rendering an entire country list just to flag one with selected="selected".
Secondly, imagine this becomes popular... you uninstall windows, but first uninstall 10 games? given the size of AAA games, that's maybe 30 minutes to an hour of uninstalling? and if something goes wrong, you instead have to phone up to 10 different helplines and wait in queues to re-enable all the games... maybe have to scan in your original disk and email the image to the company involved and then wait/hope they get back???
This isn't "bad" it's [bleeping] insane. And that's ignoring the point that people tend to reinstall windows when something goes 'bad' - the odds of being able to uninstall in those circumstances really isn't so great.
Still, kudos to whichever securom salesman managed to sell someone this screwed up concept.. I guess he forgot to mention the "your tech support/call center costs worldwide are going to go through the roof until you remove this piece-of-junk from the game".
"The end result is a system only marginally more secure than before." According to the article they'd need ~ 24 hours to crack each passport (assuming a 5 digit code), so in that respect it's a hugely more secure? IMHO, there are 3 things that are gained: a) a little bit of security. b) the ability to scan passports in/out of a country more quickly. c) a chip in a passport that could be extended to contain other bio-identity information without loads of pointless scare-mongering (fingerprint/iris scan/brain dump/whatever).
"Or that referring to an object by ID returns one whose name is the ID you're looking for" Oh yes, the joy of debugging "document.getElementById('description')" - how I laughed when I found out that on a live site it usually returns a meta tag...
"#3. They didn't bother to find WHERE the differences were. Is it in the IP stack? Is it in the OS? Is it in the scripting language? Is it in the app?" If there's a 7x difference in performance between linux and Win2k3, then the difference is almost certainly nothing to do with systems themselves, and everything to do with configuring it. LAMP is very susceptible to speed-ups by optimizing the configuration, and if they picked the right 'WAMP' stack it would come pre-optimized without their knowledge?