Suppose you run a company that makes and sells WidgetX. [...] It would definitely be to my benefit if I could make you pay out excessive amounts of your advertising budget by repeated clicking on your ad
Yeah, please stop doing that my WidgetX sales have gone down a two thirds last quarter.
He complained and Google gave him this totally bogus, highly-technical explanation about referrer logs and that he may not be able to accurately track how many visitors were coming from them.
Actually many browsers now enable you to disable the referrer header in a HTTP request (these would not show up in your logs as originating from Google), that said 100 seems to high for that to be the only explanation.
As I've said before most libraries available (I'm talking about C/C++, I don't know what this screensaver is coded in) which have a HTTP request function do follow the location directive (as default behaviour). I think you are giving Lycos too much credit, in thinking they coded it all from from scratch, instead of using a commonly library which would offer the functionality they need.
Actually I wouldn't be surprised if they used some sort of common library instead of coding the entire client from scratch. If that's the case I wouldn't be surprised if it does follow the redirect. Also, I never said it would definitely follow it, dumbass.
Interesting, but I don't think the screensaver actually renders and executes HTML code, it just does a GET, meaning the redirect would do nothing, right?
It depends how the redirect is implemented, a META refresh would probably not work, but a HTTP "Location:" header might.
Commercial software never lives up to it's hype, did you really expect anything better?
Drug companies don't want to cure you; they want you ill; so you can continue swallowing their crap, commercial software sucks to ensure your displeasure with what you've got; and to encourage you to purchase the deluxe suit or next release.
Maybe it's because slashdot is US-centric, in the US, US transportation is dominated by automobiles, and therefore the metaphor is more widely understood.
I can understand that, but I'm sure plenty of other widely understood things could also be substituted. Besides, it was simply an observation, I didn't expect to start a debate on it.
> The "average" computer user is a lazy, uninformed moron.
If you stuck Albert Einstein (presuming he was still alive) in front of a modern computer, the chances are he wouldn't have a clue, is Einstein a moron also?
WOuld we pay for a car if every billboard we passed was capable of taking control of the vehicle and making it drive to other billboards? I don't think so. Why then will we pay for windows.
Why does every/. analogy involve a car?
One of the fallacies in this analogy is that car hijacking billboards will probably kill you, where as spyware probably won't.
Do Microsoft have any standards when it comes to (X)HTML documents? they use single quotes, double quotes, and no-quotes to delimit HTML attributes, indentation ranges from tabs, to spaces, to none at all, and CSS ranges from being specified in-line tag attributes, to being specified inside style tags, to including it from an external file. And their span ridden excuse for semantics certainly is not XHTML compliant.
If they can't unify simple HTML documents, how the hell the they organize code for an entire OS? Oh yeah, that's right, they don't.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, please stop doing that my WidgetX sales have gone down a two thirds last quarter.
> It's an easy fix... pay per unique visit, per time period that you care to filter by.
I think if you read their terms for the program, they are already doing this.
Sorry I misread your post, please disregard the above post. I thought you where talking about referred hits, not total hits.
Actually many browsers now enable you to disable the referrer header in a HTTP request (these would not show up in your logs as originating from Google), that said 100 seems to high for that to be the only explanation.
*click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click*
What was the story? I wasn't paying attention
> enough of them have died that compensation may now be in the works.
Just wait a short while longer, and they won't have to pay anyone
As I've said before most libraries available (I'm talking about C/C++, I don't know what this screensaver is coded in) which have a HTTP request function do follow the location directive (as default behaviour). I think you are giving Lycos too much credit, in thinking they coded it all from from scratch, instead of using a commonly library which would offer the functionality they need.
Actually I wouldn't be surprised if they used some sort of common library instead of coding the entire client from scratch. If that's the case I wouldn't be surprised if it does follow the redirect. Also, I never said it would definitely follow it, dumbass.
In theory you need a 302 response, but I have yet to see a browser, or other common HTTP client which doesn't work without it.
I have on the other hand seen badly designed clients which will only accept a 200 response, and reject any other response code.
The parent (to my post) was suggesting that all clients will ignore a location directive unless told to follow it, which is not true.
> Err ... I think you're wrong.
No you are wrong. If you alter the Location directive to point to a page other than the page requested, *most* clients will follow it.
Nothing wrong with that.
Of course not! So long as you're ready for more guys with baseball bats paying you a visit (since you are now a murder).
It depends how the redirect is implemented, a META refresh would probably not work, but a HTTP "Location:" header might.
All those links are down, do you have any mirrors?
> With the IP addresses still out there, wtf is the point?
If your computer has a IP address; your Microsoft is probably infected with a virus horse from one of the internets.
Why don't they just go ahead and send a high voltage spike down the cable line, that would "fix" the Tivo.
I love slash dot's new game
Super Mario Bros. was such an groundbreaking, and incredible movie. Do they really want to risk lose tainting their reputation in movie making?
I didn't post this. A friend thinks it's funny to destroy my karma, when I leave my account logged into /.
Commercial software never lives up to it's hype, did you really expect anything better?
Drug companies don't want to cure you; they want you ill; so you can continue swallowing their crap, commercial software sucks to ensure your displeasure with what you've got; and to encourage you to purchase the deluxe suit or next release.
This is hardly news.
> And yes. the site has gone dramatically down hill in terms of it's negativity..
So its had a positive improvement (it's a double negative).
I can understand that, but I'm sure plenty of other widely understood things could also be substituted. Besides, it was simply an observation, I didn't expect to start a debate on it.
> The "average" computer user is a lazy, uninformed moron.
If you stuck Albert Einstein (presuming he was still alive) in front of a modern computer, the chances are he wouldn't have a clue, is Einstein a moron also?
Why does every /. analogy involve a car?
One of the fallacies in this analogy is that car hijacking billboards will probably kill you, where as spyware probably won't.
There are already many examples of this, spyware companies do it to destroy their competition (i.e. remove competitors spyware, but not theirs)
Do Microsoft have any standards when it comes to (X)HTML documents? they use single quotes, double quotes, and no-quotes to delimit HTML attributes, indentation ranges from tabs, to spaces, to none at all, and CSS ranges from being specified in-line tag attributes, to being specified inside style tags, to including it from an external file. And their span ridden excuse for semantics certainly is not XHTML compliant.
If they can't unify simple HTML documents, how the hell the they organize code for an entire OS? Oh yeah, that's right, they don't.