[Tutor] slashes in paths

[Marc Tompkins]

On Sun, Jul 21, 2013 at 7:41 PM, Jim Mooney <cybervigilante at gmail.com>wrote:

> On 21 July 2013 18:18, Marc Tompkins <marc.tompkins at 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.
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