Simetrical wrote:
On 8/30/06, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
Simetrical wrote: If it's possible to guarantee it gets kept, it's possible to guarantee it only gets kept for a day.
False (unless you're splitting hairs).
// If you remove the line after the next or refactor this code, // we will flay the living flesh from your bones $db->write("$IP visited this page, yay") $db->check_if_stuff_is_over_a_day_old_and_deal_with_it();
You forgot
// If you make a copy of $db on your laptop for testing, // we will flay the living flesh from your bones
and more importantly
// We are holding everyone on the planet hostage to ensure // that they never make backups of $db, but if something // happens to us, you're on the hook for that, too.
(2) nobody's trying to deliberately skew the results.
If anybody is, we're screwed anyway if we're doing sampling.
Actually, we were both wrong on that. It's "If anyone's trying to deliberately skew the results, we're screwed if we're doing hashing."
If you're interested in discarding redundant hits, it obviously doesn't matter whether the browser or the server does it.
Except that the server can't do it.
One of us is being very obtuse here, but I'm not sure which.
If I'm trying to count "approximate number of people who have viewed the page at least once", without possibly overcounting people who have viewed the page multiple times, then depending on the numbers it may be true that the server probably doesn't have to, but under other circumstances it might very well have to, and it's certainly strange to say that it "can't".
Saying "the server can't do it" is sort of like saying "Javier Sotomayor can't high jump seven feet".