I've tried many different solutions, and there is only one that "just works": Media Center. I know it's Microsoft and all, but the thing works. It doesn't do half of what MythTV is all about, but it just works. And with a careful set of codecs you can read pretty much anything.
Why is it so sad? The year of Linux on the desktop, if it ever arrives, will necessarily lead to some sort of compromise. You can't expect Joe Sixpack to be able to edit/etc files or install its own NVidia drivers.
Can't you install an app on android from a PC? This would solve the problem entirely, as none of the bits required to install an app would transit on the said telco's infrastructures...
To be honest, after having spent more than $400 in LED bulbs (that's not many bulbs trust me), most of them have died after a year or so. I'm talking about the bulbs, not the LEDs of course. I have no doubt they still have 25000 hours in stock, buit without the electronic to light them, it's very little use.
Around here in france, 100Mbps is pretty common in urban areas and DSL is spread around the rest. You mileage may vary with DSL though, but it is pretty common to have more than 5Mbps and I actually *know people* with 20+Mbps
The reality is that most of us can't tell the difference between MP3 and FLAC. In this quick and dirty test, a worrying preponderance of subjects rated the MP3 encodes higher than the FLAC files.
Rarely if ever you can find such a contradiction right in the summary. If most of us can't tell the difference, how come subjects rated the two encodes differently?
What you are building are not web sites. It may be a nice and clean user experience but it has to be problematic for other stuff that are assumed about websites....
On top of my head, how does Google indexes your content? How does your users Bookmark a specific page of your site? You know, all the side stuff that works well with websites? (I'll leave Lynx out for now;-)
If you are really keen on such a great user experience, you'd better do all that with flash. That way, in addition of not having cookies, you have a real UI....
Do you really think everyone shifted from AltaVista to Google because Google payed the top 1000 sites to stop being crawled by AltaVista? Come on...
I'm not saying the users are smart. I'm saying that if you want to give an incentive to people in order to shift their search engine, you have to cater something for them, not from the search results. 1000 websites off of Google's index (assuming it's even possible) are just going to make 10.000 competitors of those 1000 websites overly rich and happy (and a few slashdottings)
I consider that a bonus. NO hitting the back button for YOU!
Unfortunately, the websites I build are not catered for me...
Besides, you can always have the app run in a window without a back button. That's the preferred way.
And an unfortunate hi on the "Backspace" key just wipes all your data...
Looks more like an app, less like a browser.
Unfortunately, it lives in a browser.
Or do you think your online game experience will be improved by accidently hitting "back" and losing everything?
Precisely
You don't need to, since you don't leave the page when you're doing XHR.
Again, a few keys in your keyboard can wipe all your beautiful context away. I find that an annoyance for my users.
Make the request, get the response, update the current page. It's your comment that's really useless (unless it, hopefully, motivates you to check out doing httpxmlrequests:-)
It's not a shortcoming. If HTTP allowed for the connection to remain open continuously so that you could identify which client made the request from the socket id, web servers would quickly run out of sockets, and you could also steal data by just hijacking someone's connection.
Granted, http has been used for purposes it was not designed for. But it's the way it is and the way almost everyone does stuff on the internet.
Look, cookies are not all that great. They're abused, they're a security risk, and they're simply not needed. Use a cookie if necessary, but not necessarily a cookie.
The cookies that pose problem can be easily identified. They are the cookies set to your browser from a domain that has nothing to do with the domain your pages are issued from. Solving that should be enough.
Now, back on-topc - the EU is just saying they want the existing rfc about cookies and privacy enforced. What is so bad about that?
As vista has proven, popping a dialog box stating "are your sure" every other click ain't going to change anything. It's just going to make a lot of developers build firefox extensions to click on those warnings automatically... and we'll be back to square one.
Oh please. Inexactitude is *not* the same thing as not understanding why something works at all. We can build miles-long bridges *specifically* because we understand the underlying physics, and anyone who built a bridge without understanding the physics of why it stood under load would be drummed out of the industry.
I am assuming you refer to the modern physics that we are all so proud of. Let me tell you that in Europe, whenever you get a real serious flooding on a major river, only one kind of bridge survives with no bruises at all: Roman bridges. They are 2000 years old, but they're still up. The crap we're building today won't be up in 2000 years, I can bet on it. Look at the mess with the bay bridge, down twice in 50 years!!!! Ah ah ahah! Kuddos to modern engineering.
That said, I'm on your side for software development. The analogy is crap however.
What the heck is that all about? Google generates much much more than a million dollars to the top 1000 e-commerce websites, and in a few days. This has to be a joke.
Seriously, the USERS decide which search engine is best, not the website owners. And why in the world would the top 1000 sites listen to an anonymous rich fool instead of Google which has provided a decent flow of clicks to their websites for ages....
Session ID in a POST is a silly solution. No back or refresh is ever going to work anymore with your website, popping up questions about "resubmitting data" and scaring users away.
Also, how do you persist a javascript XHR object from one page to the next? And please avoid all forms of hidden frames. Short of this, it really is all useless.
Cookies are a way of connecting HTTP queries to a "session", hence allowing developers to fix a shortcoming of HTTP: its stateless nature.
Umm, assuming you are shopping, shouldn't you be using HTTPS and that would kill any caching.
For performance purposes, we decided to use HTTPS only on the checkout portions of our website. I know, silly. But the session is also active on the other parts of the website, so.....
And with unique url (which doesn't need to be ugly) would only kill caching for the actual html-page, all resources and images still would be nicely cached.
You are making the assumption that our images are not dependent on the session. This is not always true. In any case, most images are static content, so the cache only affects the bandwidth. dynamic HTML pages are the real problem here since it generates a lot of CPU (compared to static content). That is what the cache is all about.
And with correctly implemented url-rewrite-session-scheme, there is no security issues that cookies won't also have.
If you are on a webpage that has some authentication key in the URL, having a link to an external website is a security issue. Most browsers will transmit the URL they are on in their Referer field! That means your session token can be found in any of theses thrid parties website's acces logs!!!
A good session system has a counter that prevents reusing old urls, so they are always unique.
This is really disconnected to the session identification and can also be implemented while holding the session with a cookie.
The only thing you lose is the ability to autologin to a site, though this could be done by giving the user a HTTPS URL which he can then bookmark and hopefully not share with anyone. But in any case, it would be more secure if sites would always ask for a password rather than just let the user in if he happens to have the right cookie.
Security is something relative. My slashdot account doesn't hold much informations on myself. My bank account does however. Strangely, my bank account doesn't allow me to log in automatically...
And if you don't wanna use cookies, you could either use Ajax or frames. Both can store the information to variables whilst you browse around and don't lose it unless you go and press the back button or something of that sorts.
Designing a website in such a manner proves to be orders of magnitude more complex than the traditional way, for no benefit. Not mentionning the back and refresh button that would log you out in a whim. I'll avoid this until given a more compelling reason.
Or you could just have a form on the page with hidden field containing all the session information encrypted so that the user cannot decypher it, but your server can.
View source is not something beyond the abilities of the average would be script kiddie.
This way the server doesn't need to store any session data.
Do you propose that the amount of the order (you know, the amount that the user will pay) should be transmitted by the browser? Please enclose your e-commerce website URL so I can buy it all for free!
Just need some javascript to submit the form when user clicks a link. Or use form image buttons for graphical links.
Data coming from the client should NEVER be trusted. Users can tamper with it. This is the reason you should store any kind of sensible data on the server side.
There are plenty of options and in any case, I think you can use cookies as long as you ask the user for permission to use them.
You have an option in most modern browser to be prompted whenever a website requests the permission to set a cookie. This is not the responsibility of the website owner.
So with a webshop, no cookies until you add something to the shopping cart, then have a small dialog asking for the permission, and then begin usin
Reread my previous post (GGP) on why this is not only hideous but also a security hazard as well as a performance nightmare. This is what I called the "URL rewriting nonsense"
To get back on topic, if you have no cookies, how do you link your http queries to your cart (you know, so that the user can buy some stuff) ?
And please, no url rewriting nonsense that blows caches away and exposes your session tokens to every external website you link to with the referer field.
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I mean, My Movies 3 is probably the best thing since sliced bread for playing movies.
To be fair, sliced bread didn't help much for movies.
I've tried many different solutions, and there is only one that "just works": Media Center. I know it's Microsoft and all, but the thing works. It doesn't do half of what MythTV is all about, but it just works. And with a careful set of codecs you can read pretty much anything.
Why is it so sad? The year of Linux on the desktop, if it ever arrives, will necessarily lead to some sort of compromise. You can't expect Joe Sixpack to be able to edit /etc files or install its own NVidia drivers.
Well, I guess you're discounting Windows ME then, because in terms of stability, well, .... how shall we say .... IT SUCKZ!
For what I can gather, Ubuntu accounts for more than half of the Linux userbase on the desktop. Does that count for "most" ?
Can't you install an app on android from a PC? This would solve the problem entirely, as none of the bits required to install an app would transit on the said telco's infrastructures...
To be honest, after having spent more than $400 in LED bulbs (that's not many bulbs trust me), most of them have died after a year or so. I'm talking about the bulbs, not the LEDs of course. I have no doubt they still have 25000 hours in stock, buit without the electronic to light them, it's very little use.
My blog on the subject (in french...)
in france, 100Mbps is pretty common in urban areas
What the hell do you do with a 100Mbps residential connection?
640kb ought to be enough for everyone ;-)
More seriously, here's a couple of things I do at home:
- Streaming HDTV to several TVs in the house
- Hosting websites at home
There always is an application for more bandwidth. TV over DSL/Optical internet connexion is actually very common in france.
Around here in france, 100Mbps is pretty common in urban areas and DSL is spread around the rest. You mileage may vary with DSL though, but it is pretty common to have more than 5Mbps and I actually *know people* with 20+Mbps
There was a time when you couldn't get more than half a gig on a machine. Maybe he's using one of these dinosaurs.
(note: I don't own a Mac and run IE almost exclusively)
*Booooom*
Did you read my comment before replying to it? Your answer - which is otherwise fine - is just missing the point.
Ah ah ah!!!
From the story:
The reality is that most of us can't tell the difference between MP3 and FLAC. In this quick and dirty test, a worrying preponderance of subjects rated the MP3 encodes higher than the FLAC files.
Rarely if ever you can find such a contradiction right in the summary. If most of us can't tell the difference, how come subjects rated the two encodes differently?
No, it's slightly different crap now.
Ahhhh, thanks !
SourceSafe???!!! Please tell me it's not the same crap I was using in 1998 !!!
What you are building are not web sites. It may be a nice and clean user experience but it has to be problematic for other stuff that are assumed about websites....
On top of my head, how does Google indexes your content? How does your users Bookmark a specific page of your site? You know, all the side stuff that works well with websites? (I'll leave Lynx out for now ;-)
If you are really keen on such a great user experience, you'd better do all that with flash. That way, in addition of not having cookies, you have a real UI ....
Do you really think everyone shifted from AltaVista to Google because Google payed the top 1000 sites to stop being crawled by AltaVista? Come on...
I'm not saying the users are smart. I'm saying that if you want to give an incentive to people in order to shift their search engine, you have to cater something for them, not from the search results. 1000 websites off of Google's index (assuming it's even possible) are just going to make 10.000 competitors of those 1000 websites overly rich and happy (and a few slashdottings)
I consider that a bonus. NO hitting the back button for YOU!
Unfortunately, the websites I build are not catered for me...
Besides, you can always have the app run in a window without a back button. That's the preferred way.
And an unfortunate hi on the "Backspace" key just wipes all your data...
Looks more like an app, less like a browser.
Unfortunately, it lives in a browser.
Or do you think your online game experience will be improved by accidently hitting "back" and losing everything?
Precisely
You don't need to, since you don't leave the page when you're doing XHR.
Again, a few keys in your keyboard can wipe all your beautiful context away. I find that an annoyance for my users.
Make the request, get the response, update the current page. It's your comment that's really useless (unless it, hopefully, motivates you to check out doing httpxmlrequests :-)
It's not a shortcoming. If HTTP allowed for the connection to remain open continuously so that you could identify which client made the request from the socket id, web servers would quickly run out of sockets, and you could also steal data by just hijacking someone's connection.
Granted, http has been used for purposes it was not designed for. But it's the way it is and the way almost everyone does stuff on the internet.
Look, cookies are not all that great. They're abused, they're a security risk, and they're simply not needed. Use a cookie if necessary, but not necessarily a cookie.
The cookies that pose problem can be easily identified. They are the cookies set to your browser from a domain that has nothing to do with the domain your pages are issued from. Solving that should be enough.
Now, back on-topc - the EU is just saying they want the existing rfc about cookies and privacy enforced. What is so bad about that?
As vista has proven, popping a dialog box stating "are your sure" every other click ain't going to change anything. It's just going to make a lot of developers build firefox extensions to click on those warnings automatically... and we'll be back to square one.
Paying google doesn't get you at the top of the list. It gets you on the right hand side in the column dubbed 'Sponsored Links'.
Granted, there is one banner at the top at times. The bg color is different and you can hardly mistake it for a search result.
Getting your site removed from there is just giving away a substantial part of your revenue to your most direct competitors.
Oh please. Inexactitude is *not* the same thing as not understanding why something works at all. We can build miles-long bridges *specifically* because we understand the underlying physics, and anyone who built a bridge without understanding the physics of why it stood under load would be drummed out of the industry.
I am assuming you refer to the modern physics that we are all so proud of. Let me tell you that in Europe, whenever you get a real serious flooding on a major river, only one kind of bridge survives with no bruises at all: Roman bridges. They are 2000 years old, but they're still up. The crap we're building today won't be up in 2000 years, I can bet on it. Look at the mess with the bay bridge, down twice in 50 years!!!! Ah ah ahah! Kuddos to modern engineering.
That said, I'm on your side for software development. The analogy is crap however.
What the heck is that all about? Google generates much much more than a million dollars to the top 1000 e-commerce websites, and in a few days. This has to be a joke.
Seriously, the USERS decide which search engine is best, not the website owners. And why in the world would the top 1000 sites listen to an anonymous rich fool instead of Google which has provided a decent flow of clicks to their websites for ages....
Are we the 1st of April or anything?
Session ID in a POST is a silly solution. No back or refresh is ever going to work anymore with your website, popping up questions about "resubmitting data" and scaring users away.
Also, how do you persist a javascript XHR object from one page to the next? And please avoid all forms of hidden frames. Short of this, it really is all useless.
Cookies are a way of connecting HTTP queries to a "session", hence allowing developers to fix a shortcoming of HTTP: its stateless nature.
Umm, assuming you are shopping, shouldn't you be using HTTPS and that would kill any caching.
For performance purposes, we decided to use HTTPS only on the checkout portions of our website. I know, silly. But the session is also active on the other parts of the website, so.....
And with unique url (which doesn't need to be ugly) would only kill caching for the actual html-page, all resources and images still would be nicely cached.
You are making the assumption that our images are not dependent on the session. This is not always true. In any case, most images are static content, so the cache only affects the bandwidth. dynamic HTML pages are the real problem here since it generates a lot of CPU (compared to static content). That is what the cache is all about.
And with correctly implemented url-rewrite-session-scheme, there is no security issues that cookies won't also have.
If you are on a webpage that has some authentication key in the URL, having a link to an external website is a security issue. Most browsers will transmit the URL they are on in their Referer field! That means your session token can be found in any of theses thrid parties website's acces logs!!!
A good session system has a counter that prevents reusing old urls, so they are always unique.
This is really disconnected to the session identification and can also be implemented while holding the session with a cookie.
The only thing you lose is the ability to autologin to a site, though this could be done by giving the user a HTTPS URL which he can then bookmark and hopefully not share with anyone. But in any case, it would be more secure if sites would always ask for a password rather than just let the user in if he happens to have the right cookie.
Security is something relative. My slashdot account doesn't hold much informations on myself. My bank account does however. Strangely, my bank account doesn't allow me to log in automatically...
And if you don't wanna use cookies, you could either use Ajax or frames. Both can store the information to variables whilst you browse around and don't lose it unless you go and press the back button or something of that sorts.
Designing a website in such a manner proves to be orders of magnitude more complex than the traditional way, for no benefit. Not mentionning the back and refresh button that would log you out in a whim. I'll avoid this until given a more compelling reason.
Or you could just have a form on the page with hidden field containing all the session information encrypted so that the user cannot decypher it, but your server can.
View source is not something beyond the abilities of the average would be script kiddie.
This way the server doesn't need to store any session data.
Do you propose that the amount of the order (you know, the amount that the user will pay) should be transmitted by the browser? Please enclose your e-commerce website URL so I can buy it all for free!
Just need some javascript to submit the form when user clicks a link. Or use form image buttons for graphical links.
Data coming from the client should NEVER be trusted. Users can tamper with it. This is the reason you should store any kind of sensible data on the server side.
There are plenty of options and in any case, I think you can use cookies as long as you ask the user for permission to use them.
You have an option in most modern browser to be prompted whenever a website requests the permission to set a cookie. This is not the responsibility of the website owner.
So with a webshop, no cookies until you add something to the shopping cart, then have a small dialog asking for the permission, and then begin usin
Reread my previous post (GGP) on why this is not only hideous but also a security hazard as well as a performance nightmare. This is what I called the "URL rewriting nonsense"
To get back on topic, if you have no cookies, how do you link your http queries to your cart (you know, so that the user can buy some stuff) ?
And please, no url rewriting nonsense that blows caches away and exposes your session tokens to every external website you link to with the referer field.