There wasn't even enough content to be creative in how you played it though.
Even your example of CS had countless different weapons including multiple weapons for each weapon type.
The game didn't flow well because of the stupid safe room idea, the levels were too small and relatively linear (yes there was a few areas where you could follow a different route, but barely so).
If you look at coop games where you can create your own story, it tends to be games like Crackdown and Saints Row 2 and it works because there is a silly amount of content and you can mix and match that content. The point is with L4D there isn't even enough content to do that. About the only example in the whole game I can think of is using the petrol canisters to shoot, but that gets pointless and boring very quick.
Even really old games like Duke Nukem 3D had the trip mines and such which were infinitely more fun.
The original game had like 6 guns, 4 levels and about 5 types of enemies.
You could do justice to that in about a month with a mod team, let alone in a year with a full blown dev team.
I was really looking forward to L4D when it was announced, but as games go, L4D was probably the one game I can point to with the most dissapointingly small amount of content I've seen in the last 5 years.
It really did feel like an HL2 mod and nothing more. The idea is fantastic, but the execution of it left a lot to be desired IMO.
I understood why Valve didn't bother with a storyline, but generally if you're not going to bother with that you make it up by making sure there's a ton of levels, game modes, weapons, enemies and so on to deal with. The problem with L4D is that it was devoid of any meaningful amount of any of these things. It had few maps, few enemy types, few weapons, few gameplay modes.
Out of interest, do you feel we should have a longer term goal over and above HTML5 that does work to provide a markup language that really is actually good rather than good enough then?
I guess I just follow the school of thought that if you're going to do something properly you should do it right the first time if time permits and I do not personally see any urgency in getting a new spec out there when we have XHTML1 which is extensible enough.
I do not feel HTML5 actually brings anything to the table. HTML to me should define document structure, CSS should define presentation, and Javascript should provide scripting and dynamic content to a site, simply because this is what the 3 things are good at. I do not like the idea of using Javascript for presentation for example, even though it's been used to solve the equal height columnar divs problem in the past and that sort of thing - ultimately it can be solved in CSS and it seems better to do so. This is effectively my main reasoning for disliking HTML5, it seems to be branching away from what HTML is actually good for into areas where we already simply have better solutions cleanly separated as separate tools and standards.
Congratulations on resorting to insults, it's always interesting to see people do that - it makes it easy to tell who didn't actually have a point in a discussion.
"Sine the post stated they were making money with advertising and searches, they are doing something useful. Or at least as useful as Google did when they started."
No, Google did search from the moment they started. They provided something useful, and ads were provided alongside sites that were actually useful, instead of on domains where people would expect to find something else.
"Why must there be a plan to grow as oppsed to just making a little money? why does that suddenly legitimatize a business?"
Because they're making money from people visiting a site at which they expect to find something completely different. They're making by gaining ad revenue from tricking people to visiting ad farms when they look for something else. Not only are they not doing anything people want, they're doing something people do not want, and profiting from it.
"There is NO difference between what the poster said then what google did at the beginning. Created a web sight for searches and selling advertising."
Well yes there is then, because they haven't created a web site for searches, they aren't selling advertising, they're creating web sites people might type in to find something and then not giving them what they want but forcing ads on them instead and farming in the ad revenue. Effectively, these sites exist do nothing other than piss people off, and earn the company money for it.
Consider your points countered, just as they were last time, but apparently you missed that.
I guess you've never heard of domain parking and can't understand how that differs from actually doing something useful with a domain that actually benefits the web.
If they actually planned to do something useful with it eventually and it was parked for that purpose it would be one thing, but seeing as they admit this is not the case explicitly on their site then they are merely squatters.
Really, it's not that hard to see the difference between legitimate domain use and squatting, I truly hope by suggesting Google are the same as these people that you are intentionally playing stupid. I'd like to think that human intelligence hasn't devolved quite that badly.
I'm not convinced they do. Certainly there's absolutely no reason they need to store your credit card details for example unless you explicitly ask them to for your convenience, yet some do store them.
There's also little reason stuff that needs to be stored for archive reasons can't be shipped off to an offline system. At very least, a backend providing data to the front end should limit the amount of data that can be pulled so that if suddenly the web server requests massive volumes of customer data (i.e. an obvious hack) it refuses. It doesn't need to be stored on an internet accessible system and it certainly doesn't need to be stored unencrypted.
None of these solutions are cost prohibitive for small companies and yet time and time again companies manage to get this data pulled from their servers en-masse.
There's still a lot of data that doesn't need to be stored out there that companies aren't held liable for when it goes missing, and the data that is stored is still often stored in an unacceptably insecure manner.
How do you go about aquiring domains that are simply held by squatters that don't want to sell because they're convinced they're making enough ad revenue from the sites to make it worth it (even though on the domain you tried, there's no way in hell they really will be) like this company here:
But isn't that just the same problem I mention? The idea you can get away with something as long as it's in the rules even if the results are extremely damaging as per the MP expenses scandal in the UK?
Should we really have to expect the government to legislate everything? Isn't it better that companies are running scared over this sort of thing, such that when they can't be bothered to do the important things properly - like security and something goes wrong, that they're held liable?
I fear if we let companies get away with things just because the government hasn't legislated on them we're going to end up in a world of shit.
Both individuals and companies should be kept responsible for effects of their actions or inaction.
I think you're largely missing my point in the context of your responses.
In real life, the situation with elevators and planes work precisely because the companies are held responsible when something goes wrong as I stated.
But this isn't what's being suggested. What's being suggested is that a company should be able to pay for infrequent checks on something that needs to be checked frequently and blame the person who performs those infrequent checks because the infrequent checking led to an unacceptable outcome.
I advocate the model used in the airline industry, where things that are critical and important should be checked regularly and that companies should not be able to cut costs by avoiding infrequent checks whilst avoiding responsibility for this.
Again, airlines pay people to check frequently enough to avoid issues, this is not the same as what the bank in TFA is doing - they paid them once to certify them as following a set of standard procedures, they didn't pay them to come in and ensure they're following them every single day.
You're right, it can work in software and auditing, but not on the cheap as most companies are trying to get away with. It's going to cost just like it does in the airline business to have their own set of technicians doing the checks round the clock, they have to accept that.
"All of that being said, there's no reason an inspector should sign off on a system with open shares and no firewall or a bridge with eroded foundations."
Well, as I say, I guess that depends if he's being paid to do a general security audit, or if he's being paid to ensure the company adheres to a specific standard, and the standard in question doesn't specify that he should check that. I think as I say, the issue is, a lot of standards are quite weak, although maybe not to that extreme, some companies seem to think they can adhere to standard X and then avoid any responsibility without actually evaluating how useful standard X really is in achieving the goal.
It's a little like in the UK, the whole MP expenses scandal where we keep being told by the MPs "but it was within the rules". That doesn't cut it with me, and a company losing my personal details to criminals saying "yeah but we followed standard X" doesn't cut it with me if standard X wasn't truly sufficient to protect my details and more could reasonably have been done.
"Then that would be a poor standard. I don't see what that has to do with the HTML5 draft."
Because defining a specific standard for a media format puts us in exactly that situation. So we define Theora as being the standard to be used for video, what if Theora fails to successfully support 3D technology as we're seeing come to prominence in cinemas and no doubt soon to computing too. The video tag is no longer fit for purpose and has to be bypassed anyway. This is what I was referring to with the example of not being able to use animated GIFs. We need to be able to define the formats we use on the fly and based upon our needs. It should not depend on changes in the standard as standards should not change, only be replace by new versions on an infrequent basis, which is again unacceptable.
I found those links interesting. Ironically the first link seems to explain why HTML5 is such a bad spec.
"Simplicity-the design must be simple, both in implementation and interface. It is more important for the implementation to be simple than the interface. Simplicity is the most important consideration in a design."
This outlines my problem with the fact HTML5 doesn't require strict adherence to XML, in not adhering strictly to the XML format there is ambiguity as to how a document can be formed. Where there is ambiguity there is duplication - things can be done in different ways. This is not simple, simplicity means having the most simple, straightforward way of doing things and that's having one way.
Of course, HTMl5 introduces a lot of stuff in an explicit manner that was already supported in a generic manner, it brings back the likes of b, i, u tags. This adds complication to the spec where it is not needed.
HTML5 is a step backwards in terms of simplicity.
"Correctness-the design must be correct in all observable aspects. It is slightly better to be simple than correct."
As a spec defines correctness for whatever it is specifiying it's hard to argue that HTML5 is not correct, so this is an area HTML5 is fine in.
"Consistency-the design must not be overly inconsistent. Consistency can be sacrificed for simplicity in some cases, but it is better to drop those parts of the design that deal with less common circumstances than to introduce either implementational complexity or inconsistency. "
HTML5 markup will be inconsistent. You can have footer tags for your footers now, header tags for your headers and so on but if you then want comments you have to have div tags with the class parameter set as comments or whatever. This is inconsistency and this is bad development practice. If you find Theora unacceptable which many do and will because it's simply not very good then we'll see further inconsistencies in people not using the video tag for video anyway. It's much better that content is defined in a generic but consistent manner as in XHTML.
"Completeness-the design must cover as many important situations as is practical. All reasonably expected cases should be covered. Completeness can be sacrificed in favor of any other quality. In fact, completeness must sacrificed whenever implementation simplicity is jeopardized. Consistency can be sacrificed to achieve completeness if simplicity is retained; especially worthless is consistency of interface."
XHTML was already complete, it was by definition extensible. HTML5 simply adds bloat.
I appreciate the links, but really, the former just acts as a good description of what is wrong with HTML5.
The problem is that auditors only check something at that point in time. They can't check that things are correct on an ongoing basis and they can't help it if what they're checking against isn't foolproof.
I used to support IT in schools, and was sent on a PAT testing (http://www.pat-testing.info/) course so that I could PAT test equipment in schools. One thing that was made clear on the course was that if we are not willing to do PAT testing we do not have to even if our employer tells us to. Why? Because if you sign off a piece of electrical equipment as safe and someone injures themselves because it wasn't safe a day later you could be liable - that sounds fair enough at first read through, but what if it really was safe when tested but something happened after testing, before the incident that led to it becoming unsafe? How can you as an tester foresee that? I actually refused to do PAT testing because of this, I simply was not willing to sign myself as liable for something I could not control.
Furthermore, many auditors for example, security auditors can check to ensure a company is complying to security policies, but what if those policies are flawed and a breach occurs because of that? The auditor was paid to ensure policies were followed, and it is the company that is paying for that who is at fault IMO if the policy wasn't enough. Say an IT security policy states that all security patches should be applied immediately, that's great, a security auditor could check that, but what if then there's a breach using a vulnerability for which there was no patch? Is it the auditors fault?
To me it's the company's fault again, the real problem is this, companies don't want to spend time and money on things they see no instant benefit from such as following security policies and procedures. They do the bare minimum they can and comply with the policies and procedures they have to - knowing full well that these policies and procedures are the bare minimum and insufficient for real security and good practice. There's always more that can be done, allowing them to shift the blame just means they'll struggle to find auditors.
Auditors do what auditors are supposed to do, if auditors do their job wrong then sure they should be liable, but I do not see how you can make them liable for something outside their remit. If you pay someone for a full security audit it's one thing, if however you pay them to ensure you're BS7799 compliant and you don't do anything over and above that but suffer a breach as a result of the fact there are things you can do over and above BS7799 then it's your companies fault.
The answer has to come down to the auditor's role, and if the auditor has audited what he's supposed to he should not be at fault. It is only when the auditor has accepted to do an audit and signed it off and that his audit was found to be at fault that he should be liable. In the example of the lift you state though, there is no way that we can know if the auditor was at fault, if he tested it and it really was safe, how could he be at fault if say over night a minor earthquake occured making the lift not safe? What if because of the nature of it he can't prove that it wasn't like that when he tested it? Should he be jailed for manslaughter? When he did nothing wrong at all, should he even have to suffer having his name dragged through the mud, possibly being suspended from work/losing his job in the process until he's finally found not guilty even though his life is wrecked anyway?
Companies should be held liable anyway, if a company gets screwed by a bad auditor it should be on the company to prove the audit itself was faulty. In other words, let's stick to innocent until proven guilty. If a company feels the auditor is guilty, let them prove it, not vice versa.
Actually, I've seen some RC airplanes do some pretty amazing stunts, being able to flip back to face upwards and hover on their propeller for long periods. There's some videos on YouTube of that sort of thing. There's no reason fairly cheap kit couldn't be made to land using a similar technique.
$10million is quite a bit to make it land properly on it's tail, to add surveillance to it and make it a bit more stealthy.
It's not going to be anything super long range, or anything, but at $10mill I'm betting they're not expecting anything with the surveillance features and range of a Predator/Reaper or whatever.
"If you actually read the spec you'd have known that they are redefining such elements to give them semantic value."
Which in itself is a bad thing. Changing the purpose of tags is bad for maintability of web applications.
"This isn't as much of an issue as XHTML advocates like to think."
Great argument there.
"But they all produce crappy code with barely any semantic meaning. Great tools my behind."
And you think the people who use these tools are going to be able to produce quality markup thanks to HTML5? This is my point - the people who write bad markup might as well use tools anyway so we can have a markup language designed for people who actually develop applications rather than those who are happy with bad markup which HTML5 effectively caters for.
"You'll find out rather quickly that people don't care which codecs their video uses. This won't help."
They'll care if suddenly quality vs. throughput suffers, which, under theora, it will. Hypothetical scenario - who will go to say Google video if it were to start using only Theora when everything looks better in Flash video on YouTube for example?
"At least the WHATWG consists of the organisations behind the rendering engines."
The HTML5 was fairly complete when only a handful individuals from companies behind three of the rendering engines were on it. That hardly demonstrates the whole spec has been built with support of the full set of relevant people behind all the rendering engines.
"XHTML was going nowhere, and was not the right path to take. Have you tried looking at their XHTML2 spec? That showed how they missed the point."
Ah, so the solution is to take a step backwards and rather than fix the stuff XHTML2 did wrong, undo all the stuff XHTML1 did right? That's effectively HTML5
"As said above, the WHATWG represented the browser manufacturers. Stop spreading misinformation."
I'm not sure how facts are misinformation. You should consider checking yours. Mozilla, Opera, Apple aren't the only browser manufacturers, there are many others.
"*sigh* Spoken like a true XHTML fanboy that won't look further than his/her nose."
Oh cool, so I'm promoted from troll to XHTML fanboy now? Thanks for that. Perhaps you should consider reading back that comment as if it applied to yourself though.
The problem is, those arguing for HTML5 don't seem to be the people who will actually need to use it in large scale applications and it is those people we need to cater for as they're the ones building the web. HTML5 might be great for someone who wants to knock together the odd static page, but that's increasingly less what the web actually is.
Perhaps the most obvious is that the standard advocates the use of presentation elements such as b, i, and so on. These were deprecated in XHTML strict because presentation does not belong with document structure if you want to be able to manage these things indepently, which you will in complex web apps.
"Nonsense. HTML5 defines exactly how web browsers should parse the HTML, and describes how they should handle errors in the HTML (which was missing from previous versions, and sorely needed)."
I'm referring to the fact that you can't count on HTML5 documents being well formed like you can with XHTML. This leads to extra difficulties in developing applications to work with the DOM from browsers themselves, to agregators to accessibility tools such as screen readers. More complication inevitably results in more problems and greater inefficiency. All for the sake of people being able to write sloppy markup when such people would be better off (and almost certainly happier) just making use of applications to publish - applications such as Drupal, Wordpress or even simpler stuff like Facebook or MySpace
"Patches welcome. The open source community has pretty much given up on this."
I'm not sure what you're on about here, as stated previously, Facebook, MySpace, Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla are all great tools for letting the average user publish, hence why they've been so damn successful.
"We already had the browser wars. Did you forget already? It sucked and didn't lead us anywhere."
I'm not talking about arguing the core standards which is really what the browser wars were about, I've made it quite clear I advocate XHTML and CSS as standards. But for example we are able to support many image formats in our sites, using different ones for different purposes. Imagine if the JPEG format had been forced as the only format leaving no scope for animated gifs? How about if PNG had been forced with the rendering issues some user agents still have dealing with PNGs?
We've got an issue where a video format, that right now is really quite awful is being forced on us despite the fact half the web is quite happy using Flash already. What happens if this video format becomes obsolete when there's a realisation it can never be as good as what we want? Do we wait years for a new standard? Do we change the old standard? Or do we just stop using the video tag and go back to what we were doing with XHTML anyway?
I'm not saying I wouldn't like to see Flash replaced, but I'd like to see it replaced with a standard that has got their on it's merits - because people actually want to use it en-masse rather than because it was forced through as part of a standard. I'd like to also see that that format can be replaced with ease, without the need to re-write new versions of standards or god-forbid, edit old ones which goes against the point of having standards to start with.
"Like most trolls who bash web standards, you don't have a clue about the W3C at all. Organisations from all over the world have a membership with the W3C, including the organisations behind the rendering engines."
Yes, except this isn't a standard W3C wanted anything to do with until it realised that it was gaining traction amongst those who saw "Ooooh shiny new features" without understanding how bad these features were for good practice web application development. The W3C had to step in and start trying to make the best it could of a bad job. Really, it's WHATWG that has made most of the decisions on HTML5, WHATWG is a group that was setup by individuals, which is a far cry from the W3C which as you rightly state is quite well represented.
The W3C was on the right path - sticking to it's guns and following the good practice route with XHTML until it was cornered into dealing with the step backwards that is HTML5. WHATWG has effectively acted as minority pressure group pushing what the W3C as a whole really did not want, but was forced to embrace by the pub
Really? Flash based video players have been a resounding success in the last 5 or so years. Hell we even have sites like YouTube which are built entirely around it and have got into the top 10 most visited sites around the world.
Some are childless of course, but others not, suggesting that's skimping their parental duties is a bit silly though.
Families make a choice about who works, my sister works long hours and it's her partner that stays home and looks after the kid. Does that mean she's skimping on her parental duties, or is it only skimping if it's the male that does it?
The fact is someone in the family has to earn a good wage to provide a good life for a kid. Most families are happy that it's the male that does it and that's their choice. Females who have their husbands working those hours so they don't have to though so they can look after the kids cannot expect to go as far as males in other families who also work those hours that they're competing against for jobs. They either need to switch places with their husbands so that they can work the hours and have a career whilst the husband doesn't or accept that. The only alternative is if they can find someone to look after the kids for them and again, that's their choice.
I like the comment in the summary too about how the armoured version is separate. It seems to fail to mention that the company that produces the armoured version was taken over by BAE, a British company in 2007 (http://www.baesystems.com/Newsroom/NewsReleases/autoGen_107631191035.html). They're still produced in the US though I think at least.
But effectively this means US companies now own no rights to the Hummer armoured or not. One of the great symbols of Americanism is no longer well, American.
Slashdot Mirror
There wasn't even enough content to be creative in how you played it though.
Even your example of CS had countless different weapons including multiple weapons for each weapon type.
The game didn't flow well because of the stupid safe room idea, the levels were too small and relatively linear (yes there was a few areas where you could follow a different route, but barely so).
If you look at coop games where you can create your own story, it tends to be games like Crackdown and Saints Row 2 and it works because there is a silly amount of content and you can mix and match that content. The point is with L4D there isn't even enough content to do that. About the only example in the whole game I can think of is using the petrol canisters to shoot, but that gets pointless and boring very quick.
Even really old games like Duke Nukem 3D had the trip mines and such which were infinitely more fun.
The original game had like 6 guns, 4 levels and about 5 types of enemies.
You could do justice to that in about a month with a mod team, let alone in a year with a full blown dev team.
I was really looking forward to L4D when it was announced, but as games go, L4D was probably the one game I can point to with the most dissapointingly small amount of content I've seen in the last 5 years.
It really did feel like an HL2 mod and nothing more. The idea is fantastic, but the execution of it left a lot to be desired IMO.
I understood why Valve didn't bother with a storyline, but generally if you're not going to bother with that you make it up by making sure there's a ton of levels, game modes, weapons, enemies and so on to deal with. The problem with L4D is that it was devoid of any meaningful amount of any of these things. It had few maps, few enemy types, few weapons, few gameplay modes.
For £30 - £35 I expect a game, not a mod.
Out of interest, do you feel we should have a longer term goal over and above HTML5 that does work to provide a markup language that really is actually good rather than good enough then?
I guess I just follow the school of thought that if you're going to do something properly you should do it right the first time if time permits and I do not personally see any urgency in getting a new spec out there when we have XHTML1 which is extensible enough.
I do not feel HTML5 actually brings anything to the table. HTML to me should define document structure, CSS should define presentation, and Javascript should provide scripting and dynamic content to a site, simply because this is what the 3 things are good at. I do not like the idea of using Javascript for presentation for example, even though it's been used to solve the equal height columnar divs problem in the past and that sort of thing - ultimately it can be solved in CSS and it seems better to do so. This is effectively my main reasoning for disliking HTML5, it seems to be branching away from what HTML is actually good for into areas where we already simply have better solutions cleanly separated as separate tools and standards.
Congratulations on resorting to insults, it's always interesting to see people do that - it makes it easy to tell who didn't actually have a point in a discussion.
"Sine the post stated they were making money with advertising and searches, they are doing something useful. Or at least as useful as Google did when they started."
No, Google did search from the moment they started. They provided something useful, and ads were provided alongside sites that were actually useful, instead of on domains where people would expect to find something else.
"Why must there be a plan to grow as oppsed to just making a little money? why does that suddenly legitimatize a business?"
Because they're making money from people visiting a site at which they expect to find something completely different. They're making by gaining ad revenue from tricking people to visiting ad farms when they look for something else. Not only are they not doing anything people want, they're doing something people do not want, and profiting from it.
"There is NO difference between what the poster said then what google did at the beginning. Created a web sight for searches and selling advertising."
Well yes there is then, because they haven't created a web site for searches, they aren't selling advertising, they're creating web sites people might type in to find something and then not giving them what they want but forcing ads on them instead and farming in the ad revenue. Effectively, these sites exist do nothing other than piss people off, and earn the company money for it.
Consider your points countered, just as they were last time, but apparently you missed that.
I guess you've never heard of domain parking and can't understand how that differs from actually doing something useful with a domain that actually benefits the web.
If they actually planned to do something useful with it eventually and it was parked for that purpose it would be one thing, but seeing as they admit this is not the case explicitly on their site then they are merely squatters.
Really, it's not that hard to see the difference between legitimate domain use and squatting, I truly hope by suggesting Google are the same as these people that you are intentionally playing stupid. I'd like to think that human intelligence hasn't devolved quite that badly.
I'm not convinced they do. Certainly there's absolutely no reason they need to store your credit card details for example unless you explicitly ask them to for your convenience, yet some do store them.
There's also little reason stuff that needs to be stored for archive reasons can't be shipped off to an offline system. At very least, a backend providing data to the front end should limit the amount of data that can be pulled so that if suddenly the web server requests massive volumes of customer data (i.e. an obvious hack) it refuses. It doesn't need to be stored on an internet accessible system and it certainly doesn't need to be stored unencrypted.
None of these solutions are cost prohibitive for small companies and yet time and time again companies manage to get this data pulled from their servers en-masse.
There's still a lot of data that doesn't need to be stored out there that companies aren't held liable for when it goes missing, and the data that is stored is still often stored in an unacceptably insecure manner.
How do you go about aquiring domains that are simply held by squatters that don't want to sell because they're convinced they're making enough ad revenue from the sites to make it worth it (even though on the domain you tried, there's no way in hell they really will be) like this company here:
http://www.nameadministration.com/
But isn't that just the same problem I mention? The idea you can get away with something as long as it's in the rules even if the results are extremely damaging as per the MP expenses scandal in the UK?
Should we really have to expect the government to legislate everything? Isn't it better that companies are running scared over this sort of thing, such that when they can't be bothered to do the important things properly - like security and something goes wrong, that they're held liable?
I fear if we let companies get away with things just because the government hasn't legislated on them we're going to end up in a world of shit.
Both individuals and companies should be kept responsible for effects of their actions or inaction.
I think you're largely missing my point in the context of your responses.
In real life, the situation with elevators and planes work precisely because the companies are held responsible when something goes wrong as I stated.
But this isn't what's being suggested. What's being suggested is that a company should be able to pay for infrequent checks on something that needs to be checked frequently and blame the person who performs those infrequent checks because the infrequent checking led to an unacceptable outcome.
I advocate the model used in the airline industry, where things that are critical and important should be checked regularly and that companies should not be able to cut costs by avoiding infrequent checks whilst avoiding responsibility for this.
Again, airlines pay people to check frequently enough to avoid issues, this is not the same as what the bank in TFA is doing - they paid them once to certify them as following a set of standard procedures, they didn't pay them to come in and ensure they're following them every single day.
You're right, it can work in software and auditing, but not on the cheap as most companies are trying to get away with. It's going to cost just like it does in the airline business to have their own set of technicians doing the checks round the clock, they have to accept that.
"All of that being said, there's no reason an inspector should sign off on a system with open shares and no firewall or a bridge with eroded foundations."
Well, as I say, I guess that depends if he's being paid to do a general security audit, or if he's being paid to ensure the company adheres to a specific standard, and the standard in question doesn't specify that he should check that. I think as I say, the issue is, a lot of standards are quite weak, although maybe not to that extreme, some companies seem to think they can adhere to standard X and then avoid any responsibility without actually evaluating how useful standard X really is in achieving the goal.
It's a little like in the UK, the whole MP expenses scandal where we keep being told by the MPs "but it was within the rules". That doesn't cut it with me, and a company losing my personal details to criminals saying "yeah but we followed standard X" doesn't cut it with me if standard X wasn't truly sufficient to protect my details and more could reasonably have been done.
I hope it shits napalm, just for the coolness factor.
"Then that would be a poor standard. I don't see what that has to do with the HTML5 draft."
Because defining a specific standard for a media format puts us in exactly that situation. So we define Theora as being the standard to be used for video, what if Theora fails to successfully support 3D technology as we're seeing come to prominence in cinemas and no doubt soon to computing too. The video tag is no longer fit for purpose and has to be bypassed anyway. This is what I was referring to with the example of not being able to use animated GIFs. We need to be able to define the formats we use on the fly and based upon our needs. It should not depend on changes in the standard as standards should not change, only be replace by new versions on an infrequent basis, which is again unacceptable.
I found those links interesting. Ironically the first link seems to explain why HTML5 is such a bad spec.
"Simplicity-the design must be simple, both in implementation and interface. It is more important for the implementation to be simple than the interface. Simplicity is the most important consideration in a design."
This outlines my problem with the fact HTML5 doesn't require strict adherence to XML, in not adhering strictly to the XML format there is ambiguity as to how a document can be formed. Where there is ambiguity there is duplication - things can be done in different ways. This is not simple, simplicity means having the most simple, straightforward way of doing things and that's having one way.
Of course, HTMl5 introduces a lot of stuff in an explicit manner that was already supported in a generic manner, it brings back the likes of b, i, u tags. This adds complication to the spec where it is not needed.
HTML5 is a step backwards in terms of simplicity.
"Correctness-the design must be correct in all observable aspects. It is slightly better to be simple than correct."
As a spec defines correctness for whatever it is specifiying it's hard to argue that HTML5 is not correct, so this is an area HTML5 is fine in.
"Consistency-the design must not be overly inconsistent. Consistency can be sacrificed for simplicity in some cases, but it is better to drop those parts of the design that deal with less common circumstances than to introduce either implementational complexity or inconsistency. "
HTML5 markup will be inconsistent. You can have footer tags for your footers now, header tags for your headers and so on but if you then want comments you have to have div tags with the class parameter set as comments or whatever. This is inconsistency and this is bad development practice. If you find Theora unacceptable which many do and will because it's simply not very good then we'll see further inconsistencies in people not using the video tag for video anyway. It's much better that content is defined in a generic but consistent manner as in XHTML.
"Completeness-the design must cover as many important situations as is practical. All reasonably expected cases should be covered. Completeness can be sacrificed in favor of any other quality. In fact, completeness must sacrificed whenever implementation simplicity is jeopardized. Consistency can be sacrificed to achieve completeness if simplicity is retained; especially worthless is consistency of interface."
XHTML was already complete, it was by definition extensible. HTML5 simply adds bloat.
I appreciate the links, but really, the former just acts as a good description of what is wrong with HTML5.
The problem is that auditors only check something at that point in time. They can't check that things are correct on an ongoing basis and they can't help it if what they're checking against isn't foolproof.
I used to support IT in schools, and was sent on a PAT testing (http://www.pat-testing.info/) course so that I could PAT test equipment in schools. One thing that was made clear on the course was that if we are not willing to do PAT testing we do not have to even if our employer tells us to. Why? Because if you sign off a piece of electrical equipment as safe and someone injures themselves because it wasn't safe a day later you could be liable - that sounds fair enough at first read through, but what if it really was safe when tested but something happened after testing, before the incident that led to it becoming unsafe? How can you as an tester foresee that? I actually refused to do PAT testing because of this, I simply was not willing to sign myself as liable for something I could not control.
Furthermore, many auditors for example, security auditors can check to ensure a company is complying to security policies, but what if those policies are flawed and a breach occurs because of that? The auditor was paid to ensure policies were followed, and it is the company that is paying for that who is at fault IMO if the policy wasn't enough. Say an IT security policy states that all security patches should be applied immediately, that's great, a security auditor could check that, but what if then there's a breach using a vulnerability for which there was no patch? Is it the auditors fault?
To me it's the company's fault again, the real problem is this, companies don't want to spend time and money on things they see no instant benefit from such as following security policies and procedures. They do the bare minimum they can and comply with the policies and procedures they have to - knowing full well that these policies and procedures are the bare minimum and insufficient for real security and good practice. There's always more that can be done, allowing them to shift the blame just means they'll struggle to find auditors.
Auditors do what auditors are supposed to do, if auditors do their job wrong then sure they should be liable, but I do not see how you can make them liable for something outside their remit. If you pay someone for a full security audit it's one thing, if however you pay them to ensure you're BS7799 compliant and you don't do anything over and above that but suffer a breach as a result of the fact there are things you can do over and above BS7799 then it's your companies fault.
The answer has to come down to the auditor's role, and if the auditor has audited what he's supposed to he should not be at fault. It is only when the auditor has accepted to do an audit and signed it off and that his audit was found to be at fault that he should be liable. In the example of the lift you state though, there is no way that we can know if the auditor was at fault, if he tested it and it really was safe, how could he be at fault if say over night a minor earthquake occured making the lift not safe? What if because of the nature of it he can't prove that it wasn't like that when he tested it? Should he be jailed for manslaughter? When he did nothing wrong at all, should he even have to suffer having his name dragged through the mud, possibly being suspended from work/losing his job in the process until he's finally found not guilty even though his life is wrecked anyway?
Companies should be held liable anyway, if a company gets screwed by a bad auditor it should be on the company to prove the audit itself was faulty. In other words, let's stick to innocent until proven guilty. If a company feels the auditor is guilty, let them prove it, not vice versa.
Actually, I've seen some RC airplanes do some pretty amazing stunts, being able to flip back to face upwards and hover on their propeller for long periods. There's some videos on YouTube of that sort of thing. There's no reason fairly cheap kit couldn't be made to land using a similar technique.
$10million is quite a bit to make it land properly on it's tail, to add surveillance to it and make it a bit more stealthy.
It's not going to be anything super long range, or anything, but at $10mill I'm betting they're not expecting anything with the surveillance features and range of a Predator/Reaper or whatever.
Nowadays you'd need a separate transformer to be able to turn into a cassette player to play it back, good luck finding one elsewhere!
Something does amuse me about the fact an ultra-high tech. robot of the future would turn into a cassette of all things though.
Might as well have optimus prime turn into a horse and cart.
"If you actually read the spec you'd have known that they are redefining such elements to give them semantic value."
Which in itself is a bad thing. Changing the purpose of tags is bad for maintability of web applications.
"This isn't as much of an issue as XHTML advocates like to think."
Great argument there.
"But they all produce crappy code with barely any semantic meaning. Great tools my behind."
And you think the people who use these tools are going to be able to produce quality markup thanks to HTML5? This is my point - the people who write bad markup might as well use tools anyway so we can have a markup language designed for people who actually develop applications rather than those who are happy with bad markup which HTML5 effectively caters for.
"You'll find out rather quickly that people don't care which codecs their video uses. This won't help."
They'll care if suddenly quality vs. throughput suffers, which, under theora, it will. Hypothetical scenario - who will go to say Google video if it were to start using only Theora when everything looks better in Flash video on YouTube for example?
"At least the WHATWG consists of the organisations behind the rendering engines."
The HTML5 was fairly complete when only a handful individuals from companies behind three of the rendering engines were on it. That hardly demonstrates the whole spec has been built with support of the full set of relevant people behind all the rendering engines.
"XHTML was going nowhere, and was not the right path to take. Have you tried looking at their XHTML2 spec? That showed how they missed the point."
Ah, so the solution is to take a step backwards and rather than fix the stuff XHTML2 did wrong, undo all the stuff XHTML1 did right? That's effectively HTML5
"As said above, the WHATWG represented the browser manufacturers. Stop spreading misinformation."
I'm not sure how facts are misinformation. You should consider checking yours. Mozilla, Opera, Apple aren't the only browser manufacturers, there are many others.
"*sigh* Spoken like a true XHTML fanboy that won't look further than his/her nose."
Oh cool, so I'm promoted from troll to XHTML fanboy now? Thanks for that. Perhaps you should consider reading back that comment as if it applied to yourself though.
The problem is, those arguing for HTML5 don't seem to be the people who will actually need to use it in large scale applications and it is those people we need to cater for as they're the ones building the web. HTML5 might be great for someone who wants to knock together the odd static page, but that's increasingly less what the web actually is.
"the rest of us"
What all one of you?
But then isn't the easiest way to solve that to just do away with patents on input devices?
Unless that's the CEO, then one person in a company does not dictate company stance on an issue.
See here for Nokia's position paper and why they have been unhappy:
http://www.w3.org/2007/08/video/positions/Nokia.pdf
"Really. Explain how, because I'm not seeing it."
Perhaps the most obvious is that the standard advocates the use of presentation elements such as b, i, and so on. These were deprecated in XHTML strict because presentation does not belong with document structure if you want to be able to manage these things indepently, which you will in complex web apps.
"Nonsense. HTML5 defines exactly how web browsers should parse the HTML, and describes how they should handle errors in the HTML (which was missing from previous versions, and sorely needed)."
I'm referring to the fact that you can't count on HTML5 documents being well formed like you can with XHTML. This leads to extra difficulties in developing applications to work with the DOM from browsers themselves, to agregators to accessibility tools such as screen readers. More complication inevitably results in more problems and greater inefficiency. All for the sake of people being able to write sloppy markup when such people would be better off (and almost certainly happier) just making use of applications to publish - applications such as Drupal, Wordpress or even simpler stuff like Facebook or MySpace
"Patches welcome. The open source community has pretty much given up on this."
I'm not sure what you're on about here, as stated previously, Facebook, MySpace, Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla are all great tools for letting the average user publish, hence why they've been so damn successful.
"We already had the browser wars. Did you forget already? It sucked and didn't lead us anywhere."
I'm not talking about arguing the core standards which is really what the browser wars were about, I've made it quite clear I advocate XHTML and CSS as standards. But for example we are able to support many image formats in our sites, using different ones for different purposes. Imagine if the JPEG format had been forced as the only format leaving no scope for animated gifs? How about if PNG had been forced with the rendering issues some user agents still have dealing with PNGs?
We've got an issue where a video format, that right now is really quite awful is being forced on us despite the fact half the web is quite happy using Flash already. What happens if this video format becomes obsolete when there's a realisation it can never be as good as what we want? Do we wait years for a new standard? Do we change the old standard? Or do we just stop using the video tag and go back to what we were doing with XHTML anyway?
I'm not saying I wouldn't like to see Flash replaced, but I'd like to see it replaced with a standard that has got their on it's merits - because people actually want to use it en-masse rather than because it was forced through as part of a standard. I'd like to also see that that format can be replaced with ease, without the need to re-write new versions of standards or god-forbid, edit old ones which goes against the point of having standards to start with.
"Like most trolls who bash web standards, you don't have a clue about the W3C at all. Organisations from all over the world have a membership with the W3C, including the organisations behind the rendering engines."
Yes, except this isn't a standard W3C wanted anything to do with until it realised that it was gaining traction amongst those who saw "Ooooh shiny new features" without understanding how bad these features were for good practice web application development. The W3C had to step in and start trying to make the best it could of a bad job. Really, it's WHATWG that has made most of the decisions on HTML5, WHATWG is a group that was setup by individuals, which is a far cry from the W3C which as you rightly state is quite well represented.
The W3C was on the right path - sticking to it's guns and following the good practice route with XHTML until it was cornered into dealing with the step backwards that is HTML5. WHATWG has effectively acted as minority pressure group pushing what the W3C as a whole really did not want, but was forced to embrace by the pub
Really? Flash based video players have been a resounding success in the last 5 or so years. Hell we even have sites like YouTube which are built entirely around it and have got into the top 10 most visited sites around the world.
Some are childless of course, but others not, suggesting that's skimping their parental duties is a bit silly though.
Families make a choice about who works, my sister works long hours and it's her partner that stays home and looks after the kid. Does that mean she's skimping on her parental duties, or is it only skimping if it's the male that does it?
The fact is someone in the family has to earn a good wage to provide a good life for a kid. Most families are happy that it's the male that does it and that's their choice. Females who have their husbands working those hours so they don't have to though so they can look after the kids cannot expect to go as far as males in other families who also work those hours that they're competing against for jobs. They either need to switch places with their husbands so that they can work the hours and have a career whilst the husband doesn't or accept that. The only alternative is if they can find someone to look after the kids for them and again, that's their choice.
Is that the same NCIS building the goth chick, grey haired guy, ex-mossad agent, British medical examiner and two young blokes work at too?
Pretty much.
I like the comment in the summary too about how the armoured version is separate. It seems to fail to mention that the company that produces the armoured version was taken over by BAE, a British company in 2007 (http://www.baesystems.com/Newsroom/NewsReleases/autoGen_107631191035.html). They're still produced in the US though I think at least.
But effectively this means US companies now own no rights to the Hummer armoured or not. One of the great symbols of Americanism is no longer well, American.