On 8/30/06, Steve Summit <scs(a)eskimo.com> wrote:
Well, no, not just "anyone". :-)
Anyone *could*. Most people just wouldn't know *how*.
I would tend to agree. But three people at AOL lost
their jobs
because of something they honestly thought there was "no harm" in
doing. And it's very difficult (if not impossible) to guarantee
that something gets kept for only a day.
If it's possible to guarantee it gets kept, it's possible to guarantee
it only gets kept for a day.
However, this
wouldn't require that, and indeed, a server-side
solution would be impossible: 99.9% of page hits won't go to the
server to start with.
Not sure what you mean here.
What effect would it have if I reloaded the page fifty times? I
wouldn't send fifty messages to the view-logging server instead of
one; I would have a 4.88% chance of sending *one* message, rather than
a 0.1% chance. The server doesn't know that I reloaded the page fifty
times: it just knows that it was told I visited it an *average* of
1000 times (averaging it with non-hits). It can't, therefore, discard
the extra 49 page loads; it never received them. The client has to
discard them if anyone's going to.
But that would be considerably more work to implement,
and would
require arbitrary amounts of state kept in the browser, and would
break down if the browser were restarted (or perhaps just if the
tab or window were closed).
That's not a bug, it's a feature: it shouldn't be the same page hit if
I leave and then return. And more work than "impossible" is rather
difficult.