Cookies...don't we all hate them!

[Ark86]

I was trying to download something off of www.download.com today and it said "As a frequent user of download.com, please fill out this registration form to continue downloading programs for free" or something like that. I thought they were going to make their users register before they download anything now, but the words "frequent user" caught my attention. I went and wiped out some cookies off of my computer. Guess what, I could download it without the registration now.

I hate it when companies try to do that. (Especially for the people who don't know what cookies are and will fill out the form anyway.)

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[Grizzly]

Heh, yeah cookies can be a pain at times, but all in all they do the net a great service. Having written a few shopping carts myself...I know how great and useful cookies can be. Cookie's do more good than harm, but when they DO actually do harm, it's usually really obnoxious.

[hobbes2112]

cookies....I like cookies...when I am at a place that I like.

I really like being able to turn them off though when venturing out into the DMZ!

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Why Yes! I am a proud member of the SF Linux Hippy Club.

[Ark86]

Yes, I do agree with you guys. I really do like cookies, but when they are used like that they can get annoying. I agree with what Grizzly said that "cookies do more good than harm", because without them things like shopping carts wouldn't be possible. I might have sounded like I hate cookies all out, but I don't really. Sometimes they just irritate me with some websites.

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My new computer:

Celeron 700 mhz
Sound Blaster Live!
128mb ram
Case with lots of ports in the FRONT. Really cool.
32mb Radeon LE video card
30gb western digital hd
Delta 12x DVD-Rom drive
Acer 10x8x32 CD-RW drive

[e_dawg]

Originally posted by Ark86:
Yes, I do agree with you guys. I really do like cookies, but when they are used like that they can get annoying. I agree with what Grizzly said that "cookies do more good than harm", because without them things like shopping carts wouldn't be possible. I might have sounded like I hate cookies all out, but I don't really. Sometimes they just irritate me with some websites.

You can make a shopping cart without them -- I've worked on one before -- but, it takes a lot more work, and it is very (read: extremely/painfully) difficult to do and make it secure (even with SSL).

Cookies can be a pain for the person that is using them on the server side, too... but, that is another story.

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Everything you ever wanted to know and see about e-dawg...

[Grizzly]

Yeah I worked a site once which was developed a couple years ago in PHP. I'm thinking that at the time PHP-3 was the version they were using, since PHP-3 doesn't support sessions.

The guy that cranked the code has some *amazingly* complicated methods for handling sessions. It got *real* messy, and *real* quick. I had to modify a majority of the code on that site....and man those home-made server-side sessions gave me headaches. The guy could've written better code too. Nothing was commented, and all variable names were things like "j,q,lp,z,foo,var,tmp,i" so thumbing through some of his functions were a nightmare, it took a good couple days before I know what the heck was going on!

But anyways...
It gave me a "true" appreciation for PHP4, and their built-in session handling. It's soooo much easier. Even without cookies you can handle a PHP sessions pretty easily, but cookies are an added convienance.