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Comment by tiles | Hacker News Reader

The transparency with which Chrome did this was actually a problem for me. Google Docs/GMail did not work for months on my school's ethernet connection until I read about SPDY being implemented; sure enough, launching Chrome with SPDY disabled fixed the issue, and that requires a command line option. I wish Chrome were less transparent about this and added a few Preferences options, at least.

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Could you please give details about how this broke? What's special about your school internet connection? I tried hard to make SPDY upgrade not break anything and we've had very few reports of problems so I'm very interested in what when wrong in your case.

Email sent; I'll be happy to provide logging information where I can.

For the record, this may reflect my particular Ubuntu installation, or my room's ethernet port, as no other students have had this problem. Good to know I'm an edge case here.

I didn't receive it I'm afraid, not even in spam. Sorry to be a bother. agl at chromium dot org should work. Thanks.

I don't have the same issue as the original poster, but I also experience some issues with SPDY that don't seem to be a problem with HTTP:

For example, my ISP here in Austria drops my IP connection each 8 hours. After reconnecting a new dynamic IP gets assigned to my modem. In addition, the internal network is a NAT and the modem might have some default firewall rules that filter some types of packets.

After a new IP gets assigned to my modem Google applications like GMail typically hang for something like 10-15 minutes. I suspect that Chromium does not recognize that the TCP connection is essentially death and that control information that might tell Chromium that this is the case (TCP Reset replies?) are either not sent by Google or are filtered by my modem.

I have not experienced this issue with other websites yet, although a similar issue should occur when persistent TCP connections are used. Maybe the timeout for persistent TCP connections is lower or it was just a coincidence because I didn't yet surf on a given website will my connection was reset.

If interested I can try to provide some more debugging information or a login to a box within the internal network. See the link in my profile for contact details.

I don't mean to be pedantic, but the word "transparent", in this context, means "easily perceived or detected". I believe you're using it to mean the opposite.

  > the word "transparent", in this context, means "easily perceived or detected"

This definition doesn't make much sense to me. Transparent objects are less easily perceived/detected than opaque objects. In technology, transparent proxies/compression/encryption are designed to have little/no impact on their contained data.

I think this word uses the assumption that between you and them is an object. If the object is transparent, you can see what they are doing. If it is not, and it is a cloak of some sort, you cannot see what they are doing.

Agreed: "this feature works so transparently that I didn't even know it was there"

Not knowing was a bad thing in this case.

My team often speaks of operating transparently, and by this we mean that management can easily see what we're doing and why. So think about the transparency if actions rather than some object.

Indeed, that is how tiles used the word:

The transparency with which Chrome did this

(but meant the opposite)

This has actually tripped me up a lot. In many figurative contexts, like "transparent government" for instance, transparent means the mechanisms are apparent or not hidden. However, when talking about computer processes or interfaces, it always means quite the opposite, "invisible to the user". So tiles used it correctly when he commented on how SPDY usage was transparent because he (the user) was unaware of it.

Indeed. It's a word that can be perceived in two ways, with radically different meanings. Better to use another one.

Auto-antonyms! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-antonym

Depends. tiles used:

  > The transparency with which Chrome did this
  > was actually a problem for me

"with which Chrome did this" -- to me -- inferred that he was referring to the development group when he said "Chrome" (and also was referring to the process with which they executed said upgrade). This would imply transparency in the 'apparent or not hidden' sense being applied to the Chrome development group and/or the process that they were using.

Just sayin'. The choice of words was a little ambiguous in that it could be taken either way, and that wildly changes the meaning of the word 'transparent.'

Not to be pedantic, but your message should read, "I know I'm being very pedantic, but ..."

commenting on the linguistics here. the reason why this is confusing is that you refer to the way Google did it. transparent behaviour means accountable behaviour.

if you had instead said that "the transparent implementation was a problem for me" people would have been less confused.

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