On Sun, Jul 21, 2013 at 7:41 PM, Jim Mooney <cybervigila...@gmail.com>wrote:
> On 21 July 2013 18:18, Marc Tompkins <marc.tompk...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > But back in the late 1970s, no way in Hell did Gates see Linux on the > > horizon. He saw CP/M, and the choices that he (and MS in general) made > at > > that time were intended to be compatible with CP/M, not incompatible with > > UNIX. You wanna blame somebody, blame Gary Kildall. > > Good link - to think that I was going to buy a Timex Sinclair 1000. > Looked like a hot item at the time. Must have had good ads ;') And I > remember the Kildall business, of him flying about in a plane while > Gates stole a march with IBM. DOS sure was crippled, though, even > compared to drdos. And IE after it. I remember having resumeable > downloads on Fidonet with zmodem, well over thirty years ago, before > the Internet, yet IE couldn't do that for decades. Every time a > download failed I'd think "Why could ancient Zmodem resume and IE > couldn't?" Go figure. Then I became a webmaster and discovered IE was > not compatible with standards, and its own versions weren't even > compatible with each other - so you wrote one website for all the > other browsers, then three more for IE. Ugh. > > Zmodem was (and remains) a proprietary algorithm; the licensing to include it in IE would have been prohibitive*. AND incompatible with Internet standards; if we're going to rag on IE for lousy compliance with standards - and we should - we really can't complain about failing to introduce a proprietary file transfer protocol... Resumable downloads require the ability to tell the sender to (re)start sending from an arbitrary file location; you can't do that unless the sender (the Web host) understands what you're asking for - which means that, even if IE had supported resumable downloading from the get-go, it would only have worked when downloading from Microsoft IIS (the first version of which came out in 1996 or so), and working with IIS is already enough of a nightmare for the rest of us... To this day, resumable downloads don't work _evverywhere_ with ANY browser that I'm aware of; they _mostly_ work, but not always. This is not really a Thing we can blame Microsoft for, I'm afraid. * "Prohibitive" in this case is a relative term, since in 1995 Microsoft had more money than God. However, they were giving IE away for free - and paying per-copy royalties on something you give away for free is... counterintuitive to most business types. -- > Jim > > At one time if someone had a lame idea, you'd say, "That and ten > cents will get you a cup of coffee." Now you have to say, "That and > five dollars and forty-eight cents will get you a double > creme-de-menthe Grande frappe, with a touch of juniper, nonfat creme, > and low on the sugar." > > It just ain't the same. > Dunno about Arizona, but here in L.A. a 20-oz. (you don't have to call it "venti" if you don't want to) drip coffee costs $1.75 at Starbucks, same as at McDonalds. (You can still get a 10-cent cup of coffee* at Philippe's Original downtown - a place I highly recommend, for just about everything EXCEPT the coffee - but it tastes like industrial runoff. Freakin' Farmer Brothers.) http://www.philippes.com/ * On the on-line menu, it's 45 cents, but in person it's 10. Go figure.
_______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
