Sorry for not quoting. Jack Daniels is influencing me to be lazy...
Many years ago, just a few days after archiving an article about Douglas Engelbert (try the Internet Archive for articles from San Jose Mercury News' website), where he'd developed what was certainly the precursor to Web interaction, including even a 3 button mouse back in the late '60s, I came across some Microsoft (somewhere in Europe) website which claimed that they'd innovated the freakin' mouse!
Sorry, but, like I said, JD has got the better of me right now, or I'd dig up the pertinent info from some hard drive partition info I've got stashed somewhere, but am otherwise too lazy to do...
The utter gall those idiots in Redmond have is enough to piss off just about any otherwise-reasonable person to instigate another world war.
[MSFT] hold $28,900,000,000 in cash reserves... And it's only dropped to that level because Microsoft, after it won all the antitrust battles, instituted a stock buy-back. (emphasis mine)
Which antitrust battles have they won? They're still ongoing globally last I understood (not that I follow, or even care about them, really).
Personally, I escaped Microsoft Hell in the 3.1 / i386/25 days (Slackware rules!), and don't even think about them apart from sheer hatred/disgust (which is renewed afresh each and every time I have to suffer through interaction with their crap for whatever reason).
Once I went to Target and bought a box of Sony floppy disks. Just for kicks I was looking through them before re-low-level-formatting them for proper throughput and found that most of them (I think it was 6 of the 10, but don't hold me to that) had Roman numerals inscribed on them with what looked to be a Pentel 0.5mm pencil. Those disks contained the Windows 3.11 system installation package. I'd thought that MS might be interested in hearing that, so I dropped the dime and called their headquarters, thinking that at least they'd offer to send me a hat or T-shirt, something, anything (not that I'd wear it anyway). All I got was utter indifference, so after raw-copying them for posterity, I dutifully performed the appropriate low-level formatting and better used them for other purposes.
Anyone want copies? I'm sure I can find them on some hold hard drive partition image somewhere...
Anyway, and I realize I'm preaching to the [educated] choir here, but MS sucks; hard. Always have and always will. I welcome their demise with open arms.
Goodbye, Bill. Remember: you can't take it with you. And what's more, anything you have in your possesion beyond what you came into this world with, on your way out, will probably work against you in whatever follows. I recommend an heart-felt apology and full rebate (plus damages) to anyone who's ever paid for any or your crap.
Off-topic, but that reminded me of the time I wanted to get dial-up for a week while house painting/sitting for my folks. I went to the telephone office in their town and asked them about it. They cheerfully handed me a CD-ROM. I looked at it and said "I can't use this, I run neither Windows nor Mac." The gals just shrugged their shoulders and sent me on my way.
I eventually got to talk to someone at the main office upstate and told her all I wanted was a local access number to dial and an account name/password combo.
She said "Sure." While asking me for billing information, she realized that the duration would be shorter than their billing cycle so they would not be able to send a bill. Preparing for the dejection, I was pleasantly surprised to hear "What account name would you like?"
Also, it's adviseable to pre-partition the hard drive, assigning the available-for-Windows area to the tail (slow) end of the disk, whichever order you install the systems. After all, why relegate the better system to the slow(er) part of the media and allow the junk (which is pretty much kept around mainly for BIOS updates anyway) to occupy the best part of the platter(s)?
Thank you for the reply. We're actually in agreement for the most part. My knowledge of the intricacies is obviously much more cursory than yours, and I thank you for stating so clearly and well-reasoned that to which I was alluding.
Intelligent (or at least not lazy) site operators have and do provide well-executed "experiences" in terms of caching proxy usage (which was more my thrust than the dual-mode cache employed by a browser). When I spend time at forum sites such as http://www.treebuzz.com/ it's a nice feature to have indication, say, of how many times an attachment has been fetched. It's also nice when the request does its thing with the database and eventually results in an "actual" item which is itself cacheable.
On the other end of the spectrum is (was, at least, until AMD took over and made some changes) ATI's web site. Everything was sent straight from the database with all manner of directives to not store the information. When on dialup (as I'm stuck where I live) and trying to improve things with squid this side of the modem it was completely maddening to follow links around their site.
I believe you'll find in the RFC you referenced a section on browser history mechanisms. I also touched on that briefly earlier. In it (a cache) everything must be saved during the session to provide an exact reproduction of that which was seen, if I understand it correctly.
Netcraft says the server we "speak" to is running on Lyenucks, nevertheless, go to http://www.linksys.com/products and when the page fully loads, select one of the product line links. Hit the back button, then the forward button. All's well. Then hit the back button and select the same link again so you can watch all the images get sent afresh from the server. Even if they didn't have a "Cache-Control: private" header (note the use of the MIME Content-Disposition header in an HTTP transaction!) they would not be cacheable due to being ever new.
I just don't get it. These outfits must have unlimited bandwidth to burn (and think I do too).
If you're talking about the browser "history" "cache" (used for the back button; page print; etc.) then/everything/ should be so "cached". If, however, you're talking about just a cache, then dynamically-generated pages should never be cached since by their very nature they're ever new and require a fresh look whenever they're accessed.
Yes, you can make squid, et. al., go ahead and cache them anyway (it's awfully tempting sometimes when sites insist on going to a database-driven backend even for stuff that has not changed for some length of time). Idiotic sites (most usually running some version of whatever MS is currently calling their webserver software, it seems) which send multiple headers denying cacheability of page layout images and stuff almost require shenanigans with web cache configuration, but the best/easiest thing to do is ignore the sites and surf elsewhere.
Yes, one can cache anything, but that's a rather microsoftian way to do things. There are standards for a reason and when they get ignored, well, what's the point?
So, a URI with a "?" in it (which calls for the one base item along with environment variables; not making multiple GETs) should not be cached, even though it's technically possible to force it done.
When I started reading your post I couldn't remember having submitted it! Actually, I got the (that very?) Infomagic set for myself. I installed all three systems - I believe I still have them stored somewhere - and very quickly settled on Slackware as the best way to actually learn "Linux". The other two required way too much learning-the-cruft before I could get to what was ultimately happening. Slackware just let me get right down to it.
I heavily modified that installation through the years and still chroot to it on a fairly regular basis. The partition image has been on several hard drives and in several boxes. My Windows acquaintances can't fathom how that could be done...
I use Slackware for all primary OS purposes to this day. I've played with some of the others through the years but they all suck in comparison. Though I have been advocating and having great success with Ubuntu for non-tech-head conversions from Windows lately.
I wouldn't know about any problems with javascript; I never have it enabled as a general rule. The problem is the fonts. They're butt ugly and way too small (try opting for the simplest/plainest presentation and you'll see it's worse than you think it could possibly be). I've asked Rob to fix it and he said they would. They've got about half the stuff working okay again but the fonts are still shoddy. That and serving the style sheets (what is it, about 30K per page?) with a URL containing a '?' when they don't need to. That simple little character makes it so the css files can't be web-cached and it further suckifies being stuck behind a modem.
I'm really sorry they gave away a laptop or whatever it was for the new design. They should have just left well-enough alone.
That group of response headers was for the file "hbx.js" (created by websidestory.com [hitbox.com], with two U.S. patent numbers prominently displayed in the first line). Note the Last-Modified date; how the Expires date exactly equals the current Date; and if that weren't enough, the two other lines unequivocally instructing any and all to not fucking cache the item.
It was just one of 29 files fetched, 217,085 bytes in total, for the site's [ati.com] main page. Only the 36KB main page HTML content itself was created anew out of the database "just for me" (I didn't note any difference in content from when I visited it a week ago, either, though I guess there could have been). Everything else had a median Last-Modified time of approximately 1 year ago. Every item has the cache control mechanism exactly as shown.
All of the "Products", "Support", &c. "buttons" across the top of the page, among many other common graphic elements, have to get fetched for every stinking page in the site. They must have unlimited bandwidth is all I can figure.
There are 8 javascript files taking up 64 KB of filesystem space here now as a result of wgeting the page and its requisites. You'd think since they're scripting the page out of a database that an initial javascript query failure would have saved them the trouble of sending all that crap.
As far as stuff like google maps, the last time I visited them the Back button (and I think Print as well) didn't work as expected of a web site. Neither could I bookmark the "page". If that's the way "web apps" are going to work they'll need a different interface than the web browser.
These Javascript compiler products are increasingly necessary for companies like Google, with the high use of Ajax on today's Web and the associated complexity of programming in Javascript.
The high use of complex javascript is further fuel to the fire of reason to just leave the crap disabled in the browser in the first place. I guess I'm in the dying minority anymore of those who don't go to the WWW in search of a web page "experience".
Some of the damn-fool web designers seem to forget, while they're pumping 30kb of idiotic 'script down the pipe for what should be a simple presentation, that yet half the private Web users (at least here in U.S.A.) are still limited to dial-up connectivity for one reason or another.
It's almost as bad as the idiots (mostly serving via IIS, it seems) who feel their content is so precious that my local squid cache is unable to keep a copy of the many images/scripts they repetitively use to form each and every one of their pages.
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
Content-Type: application/x-javascript
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Last-Modified: Tue, 31 May 2005 19:03:56 GMT
ETag: "1bc4e17e1366c51:c72"
Content-Length: 13981
Expires: Wed, 31 May 2006 10:41:56 GMT
Cache-Control: max-age=0, no-cache, no-store
Pragma: no-cache
Date: Wed, 31 May 2006 10:41:56 GMT
Rather than teaching particular program details, just teach what the different types of programs do; how they all basically operate the same within type if well-designed.
A person cannot be considered "computer literate" unless they can sit down in front of just about anything they might reasonably encounter and be able to get at least rudimentary stuff done. Learning just how to drill down a specific system's menus (or across "ribbons" if they ever appear) to the exclusion of alternate methods is almost worse than no education at all.
I was one of the lucky 15 in my town who got an HP ze2000 from Wally-World the morning after last Thanksgiving, for $400 out the door.
Ndiswrapper works the Broadcom wireless nicely, the ATI driver gives me 3D screensavers, the sound works, and I even spent a couple of hours getting the modem working just to see if I could.
I sprung an extra $50 for another 512MB of RAM. I'm loving the crap out of this thing...
It would also be nice if the in-document search worked within about:config since that's the only way to get to the bulk of the configurability.
One other "feature" the browser used to have (long before it was Firefox) was scrollbar/sliders that actually worked as expected in a unix environment. Namely, the function of continuing paging past the pointer while the mouse button is held above or below the slider in the trough. I forget the bug number, but several years ago one of the Mozilla engineers so much as told me "tough shit" that it doesn't work like every other application in my environment in that respect; that it had been that way originally but they'd gotten some complaints (they must have implemented it in the Windows builds too) and that he'd thought it was stupid anyway. I did some diligent research and discovered that both Windows and Mac users got their different-but-expected behavior so there was obviously an #ifdef in the source already. He wanted me to download over my modem the 50MB of code and submit a patch since he wasn't going to devote any engineering time to the task. I reminded him that he already knew where the routine was and that he'd spend a greater amount of time vetting my patch submission than simply inserting another #ifdef possibility.
That pretty much sealed Mozilla's fate for me. I don't use Windows by choice and I'll be damned if I'm going to have Windows-type behavior shoved down my throat. Which is also why I don't use GNOME crap.
Just wait until all those people who clamored for the feature actually get a chance to try it. I predict there will be an uproar to either revert or at least provide a prominent optional choice.
Either that or yet more bloat will be required to immediately recall recently-closed tabs.
Konqueror has been an absolute dream for so long now that Firefox isn't even on my radar.
its proponents promised up and down that the SSN would never be used for anything but keeping records of individual retirement accounts
Well, there's that and the text of the law which states the number cannot be used for any other identification purposes. It's quite interesting to read it and discover that procurement of such a number is not even compulsory and what the possible repercussions are of using an incorrect one (hint: none beyond verbal and written reminders of the importance of using a correct one).
Has anyone here ever seen one of the Social Security Administration forms requesting confirmation to them of a number? On the back it states that the Privacy Act of 1974 requires them to inform that divulging your number to them is not mandatory.
How the hell do states come up with laws, or other entities come up with policies requiring one to supply them with a SSN as a means of identification when the SSA itself cannot even require you to get one, let alone tell them what it is if you have?
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry for not quoting. Jack Daniels is influencing me to be lazy...
Many years ago, just a few days after archiving an article about Douglas Engelbert (try the Internet Archive for articles from San Jose Mercury News' website), where he'd developed what was certainly the precursor to Web interaction, including even a 3 button mouse back in the late '60s, I came across some Microsoft (somewhere in Europe) website which claimed that they'd innovated the freakin' mouse!
Sorry, but, like I said, JD has got the better of me right now, or I'd dig up the pertinent info from some hard drive partition info I've got stashed somewhere, but am otherwise too lazy to do...
The utter gall those idiots in Redmond have is enough to piss off just about any otherwise-reasonable person to instigate another world war.
Which antitrust battles have they won ? They're still ongoing globally last I understood (not that I follow, or even care about them, really).
Personally, I escaped Microsoft Hell in the 3.1 / i386/25 days (Slackware rules!), and don't even think about them apart from sheer hatred/disgust (which is renewed afresh each and every time I have to suffer through interaction with their crap for whatever reason).
Once I went to Target and bought a box of Sony floppy disks. Just for kicks I was looking through them before re-low-level-formatting them for proper throughput and found that most of them (I think it was 6 of the 10, but don't hold me to that) had Roman numerals inscribed on them with what looked to be a Pentel 0.5mm pencil. Those disks contained the Windows 3.11 system installation package. I'd thought that MS might be interested in hearing that, so I dropped the dime and called their headquarters, thinking that at least they'd offer to send me a hat or T-shirt, something, anything (not that I'd wear it anyway). All I got was utter indifference, so after raw-copying them for posterity, I dutifully performed the appropriate low-level formatting and better used them for other purposes.
Anyone want copies? I'm sure I can find them on some hold hard drive partition image somewhere...
Anyway, and I realize I'm preaching to the [educated] choir here, but MS sucks; hard. Always have and always will. I welcome their demise with open arms.
Goodbye, Bill. Remember: you can't take it with you. And what's more, anything you have in your possesion beyond what you came into this world with, on your way out, will probably work against you in whatever follows. I recommend an heart-felt apology and full rebate (plus damages) to anyone who's ever paid for any or your crap.
Off-topic, but that reminded me of the time I wanted to get dial-up for a week while house painting/sitting for my folks. I went to the telephone office in their town and asked them about it. They cheerfully handed me a CD-ROM. I looked at it and said "I can't use this, I run neither Windows nor Mac." The gals just shrugged their shoulders and sent me on my way.
I eventually got to talk to someone at the main office upstate and told her all I wanted was a local access number to dial and an account name/password combo.
She said "Sure." While asking me for billing information, she realized that the duration would be shorter than their billing cycle so they would not be able to send a bill. Preparing for the dejection, I was pleasantly surprised to hear "What account name would you like?"
Also, it's adviseable to pre-partition the hard drive, assigning the available-for-Windows area to the tail (slow) end of the disk, whichever order you install the systems. After all, why relegate the better system to the slow(er) part of the media and allow the junk (which is pretty much kept around mainly for BIOS updates anyway) to occupy the best part of the platter(s)?
What's a "low UID"?
Thank you for the reply. We're actually in agreement for the most part. My knowledge of the intricacies is obviously much more cursory than yours, and I thank you for stating so clearly and well-reasoned that to which I was alluding.
Intelligent (or at least not lazy) site operators have and do provide well-executed "experiences" in terms of caching proxy usage (which was more my thrust than the dual-mode cache employed by a browser). When I spend time at forum sites such as http://www.treebuzz.com/ it's a nice feature to have indication, say, of how many times an attachment has been fetched. It's also nice when the request does its thing with the database and eventually results in an "actual" item which is itself cacheable.
On the other end of the spectrum is (was, at least, until AMD took over and made some changes) ATI's web site. Everything was sent straight from the database with all manner of directives to not store the information. When on dialup (as I'm stuck where I live) and trying to improve things with squid this side of the modem it was completely maddening to follow links around their site.
I believe you'll find in the RFC you referenced a section on browser history mechanisms. I also touched on that briefly earlier. In it (a cache) everything must be saved during the session to provide an exact reproduction of that which was seen, if I understand it correctly.
Well, this has been fun...
Netcraft says the server we "speak" to is running on Lyenucks, nevertheless, go to http://www.linksys.com/products and when the page fully loads, select one of the product line links. Hit the back button, then the forward button. All's well. Then hit the back button and select the same link again so you can watch all the images get sent afresh from the server. Even if they didn't have a "Cache-Control: private" header (note the use of the MIME Content-Disposition header in an HTTP transaction!) they would not be cacheable due to being ever new.
I just don't get it. These outfits must have unlimited bandwidth to burn (and think I do too).
This was the best response to respond to...
/everything/ should be so "cached". If, however, you're talking about just a cache, then dynamically-generated pages should never be cached since by their very nature they're ever new and require a fresh look whenever they're accessed.
If you're talking about the browser "history" "cache" (used for the back button; page print; etc.) then
Yes, you can make squid, et. al., go ahead and cache them anyway (it's awfully tempting sometimes when sites insist on going to a database-driven backend even for stuff that has not changed for some length of time). Idiotic sites (most usually running some version of whatever MS is currently calling their webserver software, it seems) which send multiple headers denying cacheability of page layout images and stuff almost require shenanigans with web cache configuration, but the best/easiest thing to do is ignore the sites and surf elsewhere.
Yes, one can cache anything, but that's a rather microsoftian way to do things. There are standards for a reason and when they get ignored, well, what's the point?
So, a URI with a "?" in it (which calls for the one base item along with environment variables; not making multiple GETs) should not be cached, even though it's technically possible to force it done.
Ever load a URI which contains a "?"? They're uncacheable.
When I started reading your post I couldn't remember having submitted it! Actually, I got the (that very?) Infomagic set for myself. I installed all three systems - I believe I still have them stored somewhere - and very quickly settled on Slackware as the best way to actually learn "Linux". The other two required way too much learning-the-cruft before I could get to what was ultimately happening. Slackware just let me get right down to it.
I heavily modified that installation through the years and still chroot to it on a fairly regular basis. The partition image has been on several hard drives and in several boxes. My Windows acquaintances can't fathom how that could be done...
I use Slackware for all primary OS purposes to this day. I've played with some of the others through the years but they all suck in comparison. Though I have been advocating and having great success with Ubuntu for non-tech-head conversions from Windows lately.
Konqueror user here...
I wouldn't know about any problems with javascript; I never have it enabled as a general rule. The problem is the fonts. They're butt ugly and way too small (try opting for the simplest/plainest presentation and you'll see it's worse than you think it could possibly be). I've asked Rob to fix it and he said they would. They've got about half the stuff working okay again but the fonts are still shoddy. That and serving the style sheets (what is it, about 30K per page?) with a URL containing a '?' when they don't need to. That simple little character makes it so the css files can't be web-cached and it further suckifies being stuck behind a modem.
I'm really sorry they gave away a laptop or whatever it was for the new design. They should have just left well-enough alone.
rezonk all over again
Should be 5 Mbps down, 512 Kbps up - 600KB/s down, 60KB/s up
? Try 3 Mbps is around 400 KB/s
No wonder there's so much confusion about this. Even though you seem to "get" it, you're perpetuating the error.
b = bit
B = byte
That group of response headers was for the file "hbx.js" (created by websidestory.com [hitbox.com], with two U.S. patent numbers prominently displayed in the first line). Note the Last-Modified date; how the Expires date exactly equals the current Date; and if that weren't enough, the two other lines unequivocally instructing any and all to not fucking cache the item.
It was just one of 29 files fetched, 217,085 bytes in total, for the site's [ati.com] main page. Only the 36KB main page HTML content itself was created anew out of the database "just for me" (I didn't note any difference in content from when I visited it a week ago, either, though I guess there could have been). Everything else had a median Last-Modified time of approximately 1 year ago. Every item has the cache control mechanism exactly as shown.
All of the "Products", "Support", &c. "buttons" across the top of the page, among many other common graphic elements, have to get fetched for every stinking page in the site. They must have unlimited bandwidth is all I can figure.
There are 8 javascript files taking up 64 KB of filesystem space here now as a result of wgeting the page and its requisites. You'd think since they're scripting the page out of a database that an initial javascript query failure would have saved them the trouble of sending all that crap.
As far as stuff like google maps, the last time I visited them the Back button (and I think Print as well) didn't work as expected of a web site. Neither could I bookmark the "page". If that's the way "web apps" are going to work they'll need a different interface than the web browser.
I ain't trolling; just venting.
These Javascript compiler products are increasingly necessary for companies like Google, with the high use of Ajax on today's Web and the associated complexity of programming in Javascript.
The high use of complex javascript is further fuel to the fire of reason to just leave the crap disabled in the browser in the first place. I guess I'm in the dying minority anymore of those who don't go to the WWW in search of a web page "experience".
Some of the damn-fool web designers seem to forget, while they're pumping 30kb of idiotic 'script down the pipe for what should be a simple presentation, that yet half the private Web users (at least here in U.S.A.) are still limited to dial-up connectivity for one reason or another.
It's almost as bad as the idiots (mostly serving via IIS, it seems) who feel their content is so precious that my local squid cache is unable to keep a copy of the many images/scripts they repetitively use to form each and every one of their pages.
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
Content-Type: application/x-javascript
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Last-Modified: Tue, 31 May 2005 19:03:56 GMT
ETag: "1bc4e17e1366c51:c72"
Content-Length: 13981
Expires: Wed, 31 May 2006 10:41:56 GMT
Cache-Control: max-age=0, no-cache, no-store
Pragma: no-cache
Date: Wed, 31 May 2006 10:41:56 GMT
Who's got a low slashdot ID?
Pretty much "ditto that" in my opinion.
Rather than teaching particular program details, just teach what the different types of programs do; how they all basically operate the same within type if well-designed.
A person cannot be considered "computer literate" unless they can sit down in front of just about anything they might reasonably encounter and be able to get at least rudimentary stuff done. Learning just how to drill down a specific system's menus (or across "ribbons" if they ever appear) to the exclusion of alternate methods is almost worse than no education at all.
I was one of the lucky 15 in my town who got an HP ze2000 from Wally-World the morning after last Thanksgiving, for $400 out the door.
Ndiswrapper works the Broadcom wireless nicely, the ATI driver gives me 3D screensavers, the sound works, and I even spent a couple of hours getting the modem working just to see if I could.
I sprung an extra $50 for another 512MB of RAM. I'm loving the crap out of this thing...
My bad. Must've been a link provided in a reply to another take on the topic.
Same article as posted here from earlier. His name is the updated part.
Do you follow this site at all, Zonk?
It would also be nice if the in-document search worked within about:config since that's the only way to get to the bulk of the configurability.
One other "feature" the browser used to have (long before it was Firefox) was scrollbar/sliders that actually worked as expected in a unix environment. Namely, the function of continuing paging past the pointer while the mouse button is held above or below the slider in the trough. I forget the bug number, but several years ago one of the Mozilla engineers so much as told me "tough shit" that it doesn't work like every other application in my environment in that respect; that it had been that way originally but they'd gotten some complaints (they must have implemented it in the Windows builds too) and that he'd thought it was stupid anyway. I did some diligent research and discovered that both Windows and Mac users got their different-but-expected behavior so there was obviously an #ifdef in the source already. He wanted me to download over my modem the 50MB of code and submit a patch since he wasn't going to devote any engineering time to the task. I reminded him that he already knew where the routine was and that he'd spend a greater amount of time vetting my patch submission than simply inserting another #ifdef possibility.
That pretty much sealed Mozilla's fate for me. I don't use Windows by choice and I'll be damned if I'm going to have Windows-type behavior shoved down my throat. Which is also why I don't use GNOME crap.
Ha! Ha!
Just wait until all those people who clamored for the feature actually get a chance to try it. I predict there will be an uproar to either revert or at least provide a prominent optional choice.
Either that or yet more bloat will be required to immediately recall recently-closed tabs.
Konqueror has been an absolute dream for so long now that Firefox isn't even on my radar.
WTF!
Well, there's that and the text of the law which states the number cannot be used for any other identification purposes. It's quite interesting to read it and discover that procurement of such a number is not even compulsory and what the possible repercussions are of using an incorrect one (hint: none beyond verbal and written reminders of the importance of using a correct one).
Has anyone here ever seen one of the Social Security Administration forms requesting confirmation to them of a number? On the back it states that the Privacy Act of 1974 requires them to inform that divulging your number to them is not mandatory.
How the hell do states come up with laws, or other entities come up with policies requiring one to supply them with a SSN as a means of identification when the SSA itself cannot even require you to get one, let alone tell them what it is if you have?