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Wikimedia telnet interface

meta.wikimedia.org

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Re: Wikimedia telnet interface

#41

Post by dmd »

digi_owl wrote: post #39
zeveb wrote: post #26

What's funny to me is how incredibly much faster the joke telnet interface is than using a web browser. Well, 'funny': it's actually pretty sad that we slow down our network usage so badly.

It seems that as hardware improves, software degenerates. This in most part because software keeps being abstracted from the "hardware". Also, graphics. As bandwidth has gone up we have gone from newline encoded ASCII to video at 1080p or higher. I "love" it whenever i want to look up something and what i get pointed at is not a simple text document, but a 30+ minute video on Youtube of someone basically reading the…

I know people (mostly under 25) who look at a text document like that and complain "why isn't this a YouTube? I don't want to read shit"

Re: Wikimedia telnet interface

#42

Post by dorfsmay »

digi_owl wrote: post #39
zeveb wrote: post #26

What's funny to me is how incredibly much faster the joke telnet interface is than using a web browser. Well, 'funny': it's actually pretty sad that we slow down our network usage so badly.

It seems that as hardware improves, software degenerates. This in most part because software keeps being abstracted from the "hardware". Also, graphics. As bandwidth has gone up we have gone from newline encoded ASCII to video at 1080p or higher. I "love" it whenever i want to look up something and what i get pointed at is not a simple text document, but a 30+ minute video on Youtube of someone basically reading the…

Graphics are no longer the issue. The issue these days is that your browser has to download an entire is apps with all it's dependencies before it can start rendering the few KB of text.

Re: Wikimedia telnet interface

#43

Post by digi_owl »

dmd wrote: post #41
digi_owl wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that as hardware improves, software degenerates. This in most part because software keeps being abstracted from the "hardware". Also, graphics. As bandwidth has gone up we have gone from newline encoded ASCII to video at 1080p or higher. I "love" it whenever i want to look up something and what i get pointed at is not a simple text document, but a 30+ minute video on Youtube of someone basically reading the…

I know people (mostly under 25) who look at a text document like that and complain "why isn't this a YouTube? I don't want to read shit"

Ah youth, and their fervent belief that they can multitask...

Re: Wikimedia telnet interface

#46

Post by digi_owl »

dorfsmay wrote: post #42
digi_owl wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that as hardware improves, software degenerates. This in most part because software keeps being abstracted from the "hardware". Also, graphics. As bandwidth has gone up we have gone from newline encoded ASCII to video at 1080p or higher. I "love" it whenever i want to look up something and what i get pointed at is not a simple text document, but a 30+ minute video on Youtube of someone basically reading the…

Graphics are no longer the issue. The issue these days is that your browser has to download an entire is apps with all it's dependencies before it can start rendering the few KB of text.

While i agree on the "app" thing, and something i tried to capture with the comment about abstraction, i have seen way too many sites default to massive images that they expect the client to scale as needed, taking up both bandwidth and client hardware resources.

Re: Wikimedia telnet interface

#47

Post by digi_owl »

arca_vorago wrote: post #27
mtdewcmu wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was hoping that telnet was making a comeback. It feels like an old friend.

Its called ssh. Telnet is pretty much dead to me.

Yes and no.

Telnet is perhaps the internet's debugger.

While the most common use was to access a CLI Somewhere, most of the "traditional" internet protocols can be operated via telnet.

Note btw that there is no login needed to access this "joke". Just enter the address and presto.

SSH is a single use tool in comparison.

Re: Wikimedia telnet interface

#48

Post by tyingq »

_toastie wrote: post #4

Yeah, kind of sad that this is an April Fool's joke and not a serious interface. I would love to be able to quickly look stuff up from the terminal.

html2text and a bash function seem to do okay.

  $ sudo apt-get install html2text

  $ function lookup() {curl -sL http://wikipedia.com/wiki/$1|html2text -ascii|less;}

  $ lookup node.js
Edit: Replace spaces with underscores for multi word lookups, like George_Washington. Or fix the function.

Re: Wikimedia telnet interface

#49

Post by salgernon »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #40

Great stuff! A bit like the old BBS days albeit not as great an interface. Someone with a sniffer should see what traffic size is during article load on Telnet vs web version w/ cache cleared. I'm curious if it's more or less efficient. On a related note, I was digging up info on old systems. OpenVMS this time. One company that still supports terminal ("green screen") and web apps had interesting things to say. http:…

I keep reposting this comment, but whenever telnet is mentioned (fun simulation of 1980s):

telnet telehack.com .... . usenet

I with they had trn installed.

Re: Wikimedia telnet interface

#50

Post by cscottnet »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #32

It's case sensitive :-( That's worse than it sounds thanks to Wikipedia's archaic capitalization constraints, so it's neither going to be the "official" case-sensitive name of the page nor the Title case, you could very well need to do SomeTHING like_THIS to read an article.... and then it gave me the German version for some reason? I wish it had search. >>> easybcd easybcd Sorry! Could not fetch "easybcd" for you. N…

Fixed!
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