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Admin
Spoiler: Rosebud is the [spoiler]frist.[/spoiler]
Admin
How did I know that this was going to be a @Remy story, even before I clicked the link?
Admin
With Rosebud and Rich and Blaine...this is a really mixed up set of references...
Oh well. We'll always have Xanadu. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow but soon and for the rest of our lives.
Admin
To be sodding continued?
It doesn't take me any more than a couple of minutes to read the stories on TDWTF, so generally they're a handy distraction at work, where I regularly have a couple of minutes to spare. This only works if the story is complete; without closure, I've simply wasted two minutes without any actual entertainment value... I could have actually done something useful in that time.
Seriously, you are not AMC, and this is not The Walking Dead. You simply do not have the material required to serialise these stories, and even if you did, you really shouldn't.
Admin
Anyone else getting broken image links?
[image]Admin
Fine here...
Admin
Someone did yesterday.
Admin
nope. looks good here.
Admin
I was until earlier today. The DNS for img.thedailywtf.com hadn't resolved for me yet.
Admin
Now that you mention it ....
Yep, that's my problem. Did they really need to host their images on a separate sub-domain?
Admin
I kind of assumed they were hosting them on a separate server, but the IP addresses seem to be the same. Not sure why they chose to use a subdomain, but if there's a technical or SEO related reason, I'd be interested to hear it.
Admin
Me too. At the very least they should have waited a few days for the DNS entries to globally populate before putting it into prod.
Admin
They're running thin on submitted stories, so now they're generating original content.
Admin
Since May 19th!
Admin
Blaine was finally tracked down, and said "He's not that shaggy".
Admin
Technical. The aim is to allow the page to complete downloading faster.
Subdomain hosting of elements of the page results in potentially faster loading of the page since the browser (in theory) only concurrently downloads a limited number of things from one host at a time (2-4 is the number typically quoted.)
Putting images on a different 'host' allows (again, in theory) the browser to double the number of concurrent requests for a page since it is now downloading from two hosts.
Some random site with pretty graphics to expound on it if I'm not being too clear: http://gtmetrix.com/parallelize-downloads-across-hostnames.html
Of course this all goes to pot if your DNS isn't set up properly...
Edit - 'domain sharding' is apparently a useful term to stick into Yahoo Search*
* Other search engines are available...
Admin
Why can't the browser just be that smart.
Meaning, load the page, then start loading the images.
Oh wait, it does.
Hmm.... how about that?
At the very least, just put some damn dimensions on the image so your page doesn't flop around while it loads.
Admin
Yes, please do this.
Admin
What's worse are the pages that "one-box" things like twitter posts, which at first load as text, then build the frame later. With enough of them, I give up on trying to read the article as it bounces all over....
And those "X things you didn't care about, but we made a list anyway" articles that paginate every image so they can give a higher click count to their advertisers. Then fill the page up with ads so thick that it lags out the site.
And sites that popup boxes saying, "Wait, did you really mean to leave". GAH, Yes I meant to leave.
I seriously need to start up a UI consulting business.
Admin
You also get a slight performance boost from serving images on a different domain (or subdomain) because (a) your browser won't send unnecessary cookies to the image server to get back static content and (b) some proxies won't cache requests which used cookies
https://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#cookie_free (via http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/08/a-few-speed-improvements/)
Admin
And the CSS, and the javascript, and whatever else is referenced in the initial load.
The sharding is an attempt to extend the limits which appear to be a feature of RC2616: http://webdebug.net/2013/12/browser-connection-limit/
Admin
Sharding the javascript when you have script that operates on page load, seems.....
Admin
I suppose that might make more of a difference on Discourse, where different parts of the content might be loaded concurrently. For a normal page I can't imagine it helps much, because you've got to process the initial response to find out which images to fetch before you can start requesting them. By that point, the initial request has probably finished, so there's no benefit in getting all of the images from some other domain.
You might reduce contention by fetching CSS and JS from one domain and images from the other, but in most cases the CSS and JS will be cached after your first visit to the site, so shouldn't really affect later page loads.
Edit: Woo, some serious Hanzoing going on here...
Admin
Well I did sprinkle a few 'in theory's in my first reply - I'm not - personally - sure of the benefit of doing it these days unless it's a special case and you're a page-image-heavy site sharding your images over multiple servers.
Of course, there may well be another reason that the main site is doing that - I was just explaining the main reason it's been done everywhere in the past.
Admin
Interestingly rosebud was reputed (by Gore Vidal?) to be William Randolph Hearst's nickname for his mistress Marion Davies' 'tender button', though it's unclear (at least to me) what that might have to do with the sledge in Citizen Kane and whether that had any significance.
Admin
+1 QFT etc.
Admin
The real "fun" ones are the ones that constantly load new ads via AJAX and shove the old ads offscreen left so if you keep the page open for any length of time the DOM gets so huge your browser craps its pants trying to deal with it....
Admin
No, I will tell you what the "real" "fun" ones are: I used to whitelist wowhead.com in ABP. Then I noticed that if you left a tab open, after about 5 minutes (or so? I never timed it) it would regularly start an autoplay video ad. So you'll be sitting there reading another tab or listening to/watching a video, or even back in WoW, and all of a sudden boom, there's a new voice. Once I figured out which site was doing it and that it wasn't a one-off thing, well, fuck them, back off the whitelist they go. I should probably email them because how are they gonna know otherwise?
Admin
Those two extensions compliment each other well. since autoplay ads tend to be flash (i'll have to add HTML5 video or hope flashblock adds it if that changes)
that way you can whitelist ads on a site but they still can't play flash.
Admin
I had to give up on firefox. I even set to 'factory' settings, and it still craps out on youtube videos.
Only chrome works for me now.
But chrome has a different problem. It eats up resources and holds them forever.
When I want to load a game, I have to go and kill all chrome processes.
Wonder if my pc is just aging past it's expiration.
I can't figure out what "resource" is being used up. Memory looks good, processor is at 10%, yet everything is laggy when I have a game running.
Maybe my disk is struggling with paging memory.
It looks like it's the handles. The processes with the largest handles, seem to run the slowest.
Admin
QFT
Admin
I'm not that great with OS and hardware. Any ideas?
Admin
I'd love a resource timer thing. If the browser hasn't needed a resource in X time, release it.
Admin
look here: if that number next to the red arrow goes over 1 regularly and for extended periods of time you do have a disk IO bottleneck.
Admin
Ok, but I have a laptop. What does that mean for me? Is it one of those things I can't fix?
Ok, most of the topics were about developing apps to make efficient use of the disk.
But I did read an article about disk defrag.
Oh no.... I haven't done that.... ever. The more modern a PC is, the more I forget to do those things. I guess I naturally expect things to become obsoleted over time.
Admin
well you'll likely only have C:\ and not E:\ in that case
as for fixing it, that depends on whats causing it. you can get good results replacing your spinner HDD with a solid state drive if it's just a matter of throughput and you don't store enough to need the extended capacity of the spinner
if it's not just throughput then that's going to take a bit more thinking, but at least your computer will be much snappier when it isn't taking an unscheduled tea break.
Admin
I don't use adblock but I do use flash blocking (builtin nowadays, so I no longer have to deal with the occasionally-unstable addon). Wowhead is one of those ones where I have to remember not to start youtube vids on their news page, as that'll release all flash on the page...
Admin
thats why i stick with the addon. it might be buggy on occasion but i can release only the flash i want to release.
Admin
Isn't "infinitely flexible" a euphemism for "inner-platform effect"?
And I was expecting Blaine to be manually updating a kludge of a system to make the numbers appear correct.
Admin
That's a first. Maybe they'll charge us for episode 2?
Admin
It's indeed true that users adore schlepping the data into Excel. At the very least, be prepared to rename your text output file to something with
.csvas an extension.Admin
This is one of my current pet peeves. I'm trying to read the text that was already loaded, but it's almost impossible because the page is still loading billions of images, ads, videos, and other spit...and the text is down...down..scrolled off so I scroll down...down...up (what's that about?)...down...up...down...down...down...down...down...up...down...
...and I just want to scream: "Either dimension the spit or else stop f***ing loading spit!"
Admin
First world problems.
Admin
Free-mium articles?
Admin
At that point, everything I actually want to see has been loaded, so I just Esc.
Admin
Every web dev that doesn't do that deserves a punch in the nuts, or the equivalent thereof. Especially on mobile where the page will scroll up or down on you, moving what you were in the middle of reading off the screen. No! Stop that, you fucker!
Admin
If only my phone had an Esc.
Admin
Ah, mobile. Discourse is not the only thing that sucks on mobile.
Admin
Is it just me or are the front page articles going to shit?
Admin
"going to?"