webtechgal

Going off at a bit of a tangent here, but this reminds me of something that I find quite interesting:

I believe history has it that the querty keyboard layout was intentionally designed to slow down the typing speed, because the mechanical efficiency of the first gen/early typewriters (1860/70?) was fairly low, causing the moving prongs to jam if typing was done rapidly.

I also believe the dvorak layout (which got invented later and never gained much popularity) allows measurably faster typing (never used it myself). I think the older Apple keyboards used to have a qwerty/dvorak switch on the backside. Any dvorak users/fans here, I wonder?

I disagree. A site can get (a decent amount of) traffic from Google even without giving it (Google) the open access to ALL the activity taking place on the site by way of using the Webmaster Tools.

And before the switch, the traffic used to be around 3k UV/day? If so, this is definitely a (big) problem. If you share your URL, I'll take a look and give you some input.

How long since you changed to https? It may take Google a few weeks to fully recognize the changed/redirected URLs. During this period, the rankings frequently drop but once everything settles down, the rankings and traffic should gradually come back to normal.

If it has been a while (at least a month or two) since the changes were made and the traffic has not returned, that would be a cause for concern.

Sorry to hear that, but academically very interesting.

Did you try to recover the traffic? If yes, what did you try and did it work?

Also, after setting the permanent redirect, I believe it would be a good idea to update the internal navigation of the site so that all links are formed with https. That way, both the crawlers and the web server will have less work to do and eventually, the entire site will be indexed/updated in the search engines with the https protocol.

> some do 500mW you can multiply that if you add custom antennas...

I am somewhat confused here. How can an antenna (a passive device) multiply (or amplify) the power? Yes, it can effectively increase the range by allowing the signal to propagate farther, but actually multiply the power? I don't think so, unless it also includes a signal amp/booster.

Lived all my life here in (various parts of) India but never seen or even heard about the gangster / street children phenomenon. Some more info on this would certainly be useful.

> ...but people went berserk for them (eeepc).

And how!!! My ex-boss read the press announcement on a flight (sometime in 2011?) and went gung ho. On coming back, he got me to inquire with our regular/local hardware vendors. Turned out nobody (in our small city) had even heard of it, so the inquiry was escalated to the largest city of our state. Still nothing. Finally, he actually got a staffer to fly to Mumbai and get him a piece.

Within the next few weeks, he bought not less than 7 more, to gift them away to family and friends!! Yes, berserk is right. :-)

> ...refrigerators? I doubt it, unless you were an ice man.

Perceived threat to vested/commercial interest? Spot on.

Out here in India, until the early 1980s, there were only two types of (largely indigenous and engineering-wise inferior) cars available in the market. Then, the then prime minister allowed a domestic company to manufacture (more) sophisticate cars in collaboration with Suzuki. The model they started with was far superior as compared to the two ancient mechanical atrocities.

Since the car mechanics at large here had never even seen any piece of engineering like that, leave alone the matter of repairing it, they all generally used to say: Yes, this car is a marvel of technology blah blah... BUT... it won't work on our roads!!

Why we often hate new stuff?

Original piece tl;dr.

My simple, stupid take:

A combination of the law of inertia + fear of the unknown.

Yes, driving a nail with a sledgehammer is usually not a very good idea. :-)

Here is my take on this:

1. MVP vs. scalability: While building scalable product/s right from the MVP stage is generally a good idea, it may not be particularly beneficial or applicable to most scenarios. I mean

a) how many typical startups happen to scale to 500k or 1M users within days from launch?

b) most founders would be needing an MVP mainly for market validation, as a proof-of-concept and for the purpose of attracting seed/startup funding

c) many founders - especially non-coders - may not have the luxury/resources to have scalability built in to the MVP

2. The original story goes to reconfirm my belief, based on multiple past experiences going back many years, that database continues to remain a (huge) bottleneck for web apps with high traffic volumes and max possible database optimization (right from config tune-up to table structure design/normalization to query optimization) can pay huge dividends in most cases.

> For load balancer health checks, I prefer ones that hit the controller and expect a 200, and nothing more

A very sound strategy, IMO. I subscribe to this KISS practice. If response/status != 200, issue an alert and/or call a deeper health check routine.

Exactly. Some Financial Accounting packages selling here in India back then used that trick.

My former boss (in IT since 1983, from whom I got initiated to hacking) wrote a disk copy program that would copy the source disk sector to sector, ignoring any error along the way, that dealt with the hole in short order. (He used it to make backup copies for legit users, and not for piracy.)

Kinda off topic, but that reminds me of some early virus/es that would run the floppy r/w head re-calibrate command in an infinite loop and if not stopped soon, would ruin the head alignment, rendering the drive permanently unusable.

Ah, so USB is what it is at now! I think one of the first movers in the HASP sector was an Israeli company, called Alladin Technologies or something - don't know if they're still around.

Wasn't there some method where a (physical) hole was made somewhere (presumably in an unused track/sector) in the floppy so that the original floppy would work, but disk-to-disk copy operation would fail?

Then, at some point in time came along those (parallel port pass-through) dongles - I think they used to be called HASP (HArdware for Software Protection).

I remember there being a STEP command to set the increment value. However, when I tested it (on the PCJS sim from the top of the thread) just now, its throwing a Syntax Error!! I am nearly sure that was what the command was, but I don't know what gives right now.

> The first PC Flight Simulator was another astonishing piece of engineering.

True. I remember the feedback a WW2 vet pilot gave after testing PC FS. It went something like 'if flying on a PC got any more realistic, you'd need a pilot's license to do it.' !!

Spot on - so line 30 would never get executed on that code, and a series of '1's will get printed, in an endless loop, until stopped with a Ctrl-C.

Well noted. I recall there also used to be a STEP command in the basic interpreter (basica and gw-basic) with which the line number increment could be set e.g. STEP 5 will auto-increment the line numbers by 5. (The default used to be 10.)

> It seems these services are used as ‘seed followers’ to convince people of their legitimacy.

Crowd begets crowd?

This has been going on for years and presumably, will continue for the foreseeable future. Out of sheer curiosity, I too have tested this personally in the past, and did not find ANY benefits in terms of attracting genuine followers. Anyone with other/different experiences?

Ha! Found a copy of the home page at last, cached just yesterday!! For those curious enough, here is the link:

http://106.10.137.112/search/srpcache?p=http%3A%2F%2Fdennisc...

A couple of open source clients [1] and [2]- both self-hosted and deployable on AWS or any other cloud service, or any other hosting service with ssh root access:

[1] https://squirrelmail.org/about/ [2] https://www.horde.org/apps/webmail

As an aside, VestaCP [3] - an open source hosting admin panel that you can install within a few minutes via ssh - will install squirrelmail automatically:

[3] http://vestacp.com/

> There should be a service that you can pay to have it periodically crawl your website and generate a zip file...

So, essentially, a paid version of archive.org, which would be a _great_ startup idea - something that I've been mulling over for quite some time.

The technical (and infrastructural/logistical) challenges in implementing/executing something like this, however, would be rather steep, imo. In most cases, a simple crawl just won't cut it, as most sites today would have been built using some sort of CMS, with a database backend, so a simple crawl and archive of the public-facing site would leave you with a (horribly) broken version of the site.

As a freelancer, I routinely come across inquiries/gigs where people changed hosts, took a backup of the webroot (and not the database), discontinued the old host and ended up with a DOA site!!

Coming back to the matter of an archiving/backup service, this could be doable notwithstanding the challenges I mentioned above. Something I would _love_ to have a go at, but beyond the means of an ordinary web tech wahm from India. (Any takers? :-))

As a web dev/tech freelancer, I come across typical end-users very frequently and you would be _amazed_ at the amount of ignorance about the issues like domains, hosting etc. prevailing amongst them.

While people like us (you, me, and all others here) take such things in our stride, the scenario is vastly different so far as average end-users at large are concerned.

This January 2016 crawl of the homepage at the WayBackMachine does show an adult content warning so presumably, that (the adult content) was not in violation of Google's TOS at least at that point in time:

http://web.archive.org/web/20160125091732/http://denniscoope...

> first I've heard of COS and (b) I cant find jack on it.

If you can lay your hands on some issues of BYTE and PC Magazine (Ziff Davis) dated between 1985 and 1990, you would find plenty on RM COBOL.

> He was putting the cards into something that looks like a money counting machine.

That is/was the punch card reader, with a metallic hair-comb like contraption (each prong of which was presumably connected to some sort of opto-coupler or a similar sensory component) for sensing the holes in the cards as they would pass under it at high speeds. As a kid, I used to have a lot of fun watching that in operation at my dad's office.

He used to write code (COBOL and Fortran) by hand on those graph paper-like coding sheets, then hand the sheets over to a 'specialist' card punching machine operator (I remember they used to have special courses for that too) who would punch the cards and so it went... :-)

If it is not going to take a lot of time to code, I will build you an MVP (minimum viable product), gratis. Then, you can use it to test/validate your idea more effectively.

Let me know if interested - varma.richa@yahoo.com.