Subj : seeking pure and simple
To   : August Abolins
From : Dennisk
Date : Thu May 14 2020 08:27 pm

-=> August Abolins wrote to Dennisk <=-

 AA> Hello Dennisk!

 AA> ** On Monday 04.05.20 - 11:08, Dennisk wrote to Richard Menedetter:

 AA> At first, I was proud of myself when I managed to build up my Win ME pc
 AA> to a point where I could burn MP3 CDs, configure the pc as a "server"
 AA> providing a gateway to the internet (poking holes in the firewall) for
 AA> a couple of other pcs on my network, tweek the settings to get very
 AA> close to the 2GB max ram that the pc harware supported, use it to
 AA> support via remote control, and a few other things - all the while
 AA> still only having dialup!

Win Me?  Oh, I still feel the scars from that OS, and I didn't even use it,
just provides a little support for it.  I moved to Linux in 2000, gradually.

 AA> But a new reality gradually creeped in when some websites wouldn't
 AA> cooperate with the current browser I was using. And newer versions of
 AA> browsers simply weren't available for WinME.   :(

 AA> I managed to overcome that limitation by installing Ubuntu. The pc
 AA> worked reasonably well for a couple years after that.  But the max 2GB
 AA> ram proved to be a limitation after a few more Ubuntu updates.  And
 AA> again, the browser program was the first sign of "not good enough".

An alternative was simply to never update your OS, which is what I did.  It did
mean not updating browsers, and software as well, but I was able to use Red Hat
Linux 7.3 up until 2009 on a 700MHz machine with 384M RAM.  I don't do that
now, as its probably not a good practice.

 AA> I don't know what they're doing on Facebook, but it takes at least 15
 AA> seconds to load the main page while it takes another 15 secs for all
 AA> the tracking shit to settle down before I can succeed to do my first PG
 AA> DN. And this is using a modest 3Mbps 4G/3G mobile data service via my
 AA> cell phone as a hotspot.  Consequently, I rarely bother with FB
 AA> anymore.

I think part of it is that the HTTP protocol wasn't designed to handle small
packets of traffic going back and forth.  It was designed for occasional
requests of documents.  People developing more active webpages simply abused
the protocol and HTML, and browsers had to bloat to support it.  As a result,
problems which shouldn't have existed were created, and instead of rethinking
the basic technology underneath, people invented new wrong solutions.

FB is horrible design.  I joined because someone was too lazy to simply send
e-mails.  A good example of design is the D Language Forum at forum.dlang.org. 
It's web based, simple and FAST.  But better still, it's actually a front end
to an NNTP backend, so you can use a newgroup reader to access it as well. 
Good use of existing technology to solve a problem.  This is the way it should
be done.

.... Dennis Katsonis
--- MultiMail/Linux v0.52
 * Origin: Mind's Eye BBS - mindseye.ddns.net - Australia (3:633/416)

.