Things that I Hate, Part I: Download links that aren’t
Dear anonymous webmaster: If you have a download link that ends in, say, .bz2, it should not lead to an HTML page, even if the purpose of said HTML page is to beg me for a donation. No, if the URL ends in .bz2, accessing it should provide me with a bz2 file.
Better yet, don’t ask me for a donation just yet. At this point in our relationship, I haven’t even decided if I like what you’ve done. I’m not going to make a donation on the basis of a screencast. And while we’re on the topic of screencasts, can you please get someone that can a) type and b) speak to do the screencast next time?
Furthermore, not everyone browses the web from the goddamned server on which they might want to install your product. Especially when your product primarily runs on UNIX servers that very often don’t have a GUI installed.
So no, I’m not going to donate to your sodding open source project. Not after you wasted ten minutes of my valuable time wgetting half a dozen files before I finally get one whose file type matches its extension.
Oh, wait, never mind, it still doesn’t match. The bz2 file I eventually downloaded is called “donation=complete”. Complete, my ass!
NIC1138 wrote:
That is really annoying. Something else that I hate is how audio and video files can’t never be simply there as a regular file, but always inside some nitty witty player applet, or inside those pls files… Why can’t people simply let the files be transfered, and end of story??…
Posted on 2008-04-30 at 11:24 pm | Permalink
Joe Philipps wrote:
NIC1138: that’s pretty simple, at least in the pls case. That’s a playlist, and it CAN (but sometimes isn’t) set up so that your software tries several sources for the media. That way if one server is down, the software will either time out (server totally “gone”) or move on to the next quickly (server daemon not running so you get ICMP port unreachable (connection refused)), thus a crude form of redundancy. However, more than once this has also been used for a beg-intro (like some public radio stations that stream).
Posted on 2008-05-20 at 5:15 pm | Permalink