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Sunday, March 23rd, 2008
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5:38p - An adventure in hacking, sort of...
The VMS operating system was designed for secure corporate environments with many users and network connections to a central machine. I acknowledge this. Unfortunately, it was later promoted and distributed as a workstation environment to run on MicroVAX and later Alpha hardware. I have two Alpha machines, one at home and one at work, that now operate as workstations. The one at home runs OpenVMS.
( Geekish rant here )
On another but similar topic, could someone please explain to me why FA thinks it has to somehow translate PDF or DOC files into HTML in order to "display" them, and since it doesn't know how, it makes you "download" them instead? Every other website in the world just sends a PDF or DOC or RTF file to the user when clicked, after affixing the proper mime type to it. Most browsers know how to use a plug in or internal interpreter to display PDF or RTF right in the browser window. But on FA, they say "Sorry, we aren't able to display that file" and then make you download it to disk and start up a separate application to view it.
I happened to mention this in a forum discussion there. Bad move. Now I've got one of their coders insisting that they are doing it right and I'm wrong. Only I'm not wrong. My browser will display DOC, RTF, and PDF files right in the browser window as long as the correct mime type is passed with the file. Works everywhere else, guys.
current mood:  irritated (comment on this)
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