[svlug] Like Webvan?

[Vince Duperron]

Hello;

I suspect WebVan is a victim here, true there website is clueless, but I'll
bet the it was coded that way for the benefit of another company.  Suppose
your business was convincing people to buy a certain kind of OS, that
all other OS's were inferior.  You might like to force folks who don't
buy the "correct" OS to load extra, useless, data to slow down their
system.  Folks who have the "correct" OS will be rewarded with snappy
downloads of pages created by your companies software.  

A clue that this page was generated by Microsoft software is the 
non-standard character set used in the page.  E.G. We?ve redesigned ...
I think they mean We`ve redesigned... but probably don't even know
the "right thinking" world sees nonsense.  
See http://www.fourmilab.ch/webtools/demoroniser/  for more info about
"smart" quotes and the like.

Vince

PS.  I find it odd that folks would trust a company that has nothing but 
contempt for its customers.  A company that would do nearly anything to 
stay on top, including keeping a fair amount of money out of the hands
of a customer, just to make its competitors look bad.


> 
> On Monday 13 November 2000 00:56, you wrote:
> 
> > Nothing is ever done w/ "is_unix".  So you get 30 lines of wasted code
> > (around 1.8KB of wasted download).  Clever.
> 
> Indeed. Why in *** do companies bother to do this at all? I figure 
> 'standardization' might be a reason to prefer some browsers over others, but 
> this cruft seems like the companies are saying "we don't want people to get 
> the idea that non-MS platforms are really useful" or some such nonsense. Talk 
> about unfair restraint of trade...
> 
> -- 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> David E. Fox                              Thanks for letting me
> dfox at tsoft.com                            change magnetic patterns
> David.Fox at entex.com                       on your hard disk.
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> _______________________________________________
> svlug mailing list
> svlug at lists.svlug.org
> http://lists.svlug.org/mailman/listinfo/svlug
>