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This word, or the adjective "RECOMMENDED", mean that there may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances to ignore a particular item, but the full implications must be understood and carefully weighed before choosing a different course.

This word, or the adjective "OPTIONAL", mean that an item is truly optional. One vendor may choose to include the item because a particular marketplace requires it or because the vendor feels that it enhances the product while another vendor may omit the same item. An implementation which does not include a particular option MUST be prepared to interoperate with another implementation which does include the option, though perhaps with reduced functionality. In the same vein an implementation which does include a particular option MUST be prepared to interoperate with another implementation which does not include the option (except, of course, for the feature the option provides.)

People keep posting about the fact that M$ broke the TCP/IP standard (not even close!) or the dhcp standards. The broadcast bit that the MS KB article talks about is part of the RFC. People need to read more before they start talking about things they don't fully understand.

http://faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2131.html - Section 4.1 (Broadcast Bit)

My $0.02 CDN

> Furthermore, there's a good chance that many people will blame the Linux servers and the company that deployed them, rather than Windows Vista.

As they should.

The fault is in the Linux servers, not in Windows Vista.

Windows Vista correctly implements the DHCP standard BROADCAST flag,
which some poor-quality software mishandles.

Here is the link that Lundis Energi provides to it's Vista users that
explains Lundis Energi's problem with the DHCP BROADCAST flag:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/92823 3

And here is the link to the DHCP RFC 2131 which shows that Microsoft
Vista is implementing the standard BROADCAST flag correctly and that
the Linux servers are at fault:

http://faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2131.html

From RFC2131

A client that cannot receive unicast IP datagrams until its protocol
      software has been configured with an IP address SHOULD set the
      BROADCAST bit in the 'flags' field to 1 in any DHCPDISCOVER or
      DHCPREQUEST messages that client sends. The BROADCAST bit will
      provide a hint to the DHCP server and BOOTP relay agent to broadcast
      any messages to the client on the client's subnet. A client that can
      receive unicast IP datagrams before its protocol software has been
      configured SHOULD clear the BROADCAST bit to 0. The BOOTP
      clarifications document discusses the ramifications of the use of the
      BROADCAST bit [21].

My question: is there ever a case for letting national security issues dictate the limits of an open source project?

"Yesterday morning, I received word from Assistant U.S. Attorney William Keane in San Jose, California, that the government's three-year investigation of Philip Zimmermann is over."

Article here. More info here.

Someone dissing Linus? Protect the Queen!

http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/

If you want a better understanding of the Unix philosophy then read eric steven raymond's The Art of Unix Programming. If you come from the windows GUI / Apple GUI world, it's a bit overwhelming / subtle to appreciate the elegance of the Unix principles. Besides, the pics of Ken/Dennis and a PDP show who's the Ubergeek.

Linux has been a powerful force, to be sure, but Ken and Dennis came before (they were mavericks too) and others will pick up the banner later.

Distros will rise and fall, applications will wax and wane, but the kernel is the engine that makes it all possible, thanks to the Linux team for making such a difference!

With all the libraries and the plethora of features, it also has a large measure of Perl's problem: "Some designs that are not compact have enough internal redundancy of features that individual programmers end up carving out compact dialects sufficient for that 80% of common tasks by choosing a working subset of the language. Perl has this kind of pseudo-compactness, for example. Such designs have a built-in trap; when two programmers try to communicate about a project, they may find that differences in their working subsets are a significant barrier to understanding and modifying the code."

The summary, here: "When all is said and done, however, C++'s most fundamental problem is that it is basically just another conventional language. It confines the memory-management problem better than it did before the invention of the Standard Template Library, and a lot better than C does, but the confinement is brittle; it breaks unless your code uses objects and only objects. For many types of application its OO features are not significant, and simply add complexity to C without yielding much advantage. Open-source C++ compilers are available; if C++ were unequivocally superior to C it would now dominate... Consider using C++ if an existing C++ toolkit or service library offers powerful leverage for your application, or if you're in one of the application areas mentioned above for which an OO language is known to be a large win."

With all the libraries and the plethora of features, it also has a large measure of Perl's problem: "Some designs that are not compact have enough internal redundancy of features that individual programmers end up carving out compact dialects sufficient for that 80% of common tasks by choosing a working subset of the language. Perl has this kind of pseudo-compactness, for example. Such designs have a built-in trap; when two programmers try to communicate about a project, they may find that differences in their working subsets are a significant barrier to understanding and modifying the code."

The summary, here: "When all is said and done, however, C++'s most fundamental problem is that it is basically just another conventional language. It confines the memory-management problem better than it did before the invention of the Standard Template Library, and a lot better than C does, but the confinement is brittle; it breaks unless your code uses objects and only objects. For many types of application its OO features are not significant, and simply add complexity to C without yielding much advantage. Open-source C++ compilers are available; if C++ were unequivocally superior to C it would now dominate... Consider using C++ if an existing C++ toolkit or service library offers powerful leverage for your application, or if you're in one of the application areas mentioned above for which an OO language is known to be a large win."

If it happend with Carrier Pigeons, I am sure with RFC 1149 they will link it to the Internet and use it as a proove to have more control over data.

He3+He3 fusion on Earth, seriously? I don't think that's a realistic fuel; the reaction cross-section is extremely small, even at solar temperatures. Nobody talks about doing He3+He3 fusion. Are you perhaps thinking about D+He3 fusion?

D+He3 fusion (and other aneutronic fusion, like p+B11) certainly is nice, but we're not going to get there anytime soon. Why? These fuels don't "burn" easily; the cross-sections for aneutronic fuels are lower than DT's, and peak at substantially higher temperatures. I suspect we won't be able to do aneutronic fusion until we master DT fusion.

See the Fusion FAQ, question H.
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/fusion-faq/section1-physi cs/

Regarding your scheme for producing He3, DT fusion reactor designs envision a "lithium blanket" where tritium will be bred by the neutron flux. Perhaps someday DT reactors will supply the fuel for D+He3 ones.

Alternatively, you could implement RFC 1149

Oh snap!! I wish I wasn't absent when they taught metric the one day ever in my Soviet American school... Now I will never know what that means!!!!!

Last I checked, most American schools teach how to convert. Usually around the same time you start to learn simple algebra equations with fractions.

For the rest of those, they can use Google for km to miles and kilograms to pounds.

100 kilometers = 62.1371192 miles
3.6 kilograms = 7.93664144 pounds
Of course, that doesn't help much as I have no real reference of pounds to miles as I'm use to fluid measurements. I suspect that the 3.6kg are similar to 'one gallon' in that they consider how many kg's fill a 'tank' on a similar car with petrol.

Of course, if that's true, then a car with an equivalent "15 gallon tank" will take about 120 lbs of hydrogen fuel to fill. Compared to gasoline, which weights ~6.25 lbs per gallon (depending on temperature) will weight in around 93 lbs. for 15 gallons. That is, of course, assuming that 3.6kg take the same percentage of space as 1 gallon of gas in an average car tank.

Cheers,
Fozzy

If galaxies are close enough, they can collide. Generally, a gravitationally bound system will resist the Hubble expansion (which is why our solar system and galaxy are not expanding at the rate the universe does). Only when the bodies are spread far apart and not gravitationally bound to each other does the universe's expansion dominate. See this FAQ and this and this for details.

Indeed, as TFA notes, there is "something wrong with our thinking", or at least with that of the author.

First, interstellar colonization? Unlikely. It makes nice SF, but there's no good economic basis for it. A civilization that survives long enough to reach the technological level necessary for interstellar spaceflight will have stabilized its population and learned how to use local resources to make their home world a paradise. Why go anywhere else? The expense is enormous, the payoff non-existent. (They're working on stellar engineering, of course, so there's no worry about their sun going nova.) Childish species who still imagine faster-than-light loopholes might dream of going swashbuckling across the galaxy, but grown-up races are content to follow more mature pursuits. TFA's claims about "intelligent life's ability to overcome scarcity, and its tendency to colonize new habitats" are simply handwaving, generalizing from one species of half-bright monkeys into sweeping statements about all intelligent life.

Second, there's the question of signal detection. Contrary to popular belief, radio and TV transmissions probably couldn't be detected at interstellar ranges. We've only sent a handful of signals into space that are detectable at long ranges - and mostly that's content-free radar signals. Why do we assume others are more chatty than we are? I imagine a galaxy full of listeners, each waiting for someone else to start talking. Additionally, compression and encryption make signal indistinguishable from noise.

Third, recognition of "mega-engineering". TFA claims "we see no signs of their activities in space". How would we know? We assume a "natural" explanation for phenomena - as we should - but if we assume the existence of greatly advanced tech, who knows what we think of as "natural" and take for granted out there that's actually engineered?

a compromised syslog can overwrite a file on a remote machine

You don't put something in a specification and not define how it works. It has no place in the specification. That's the whole point.

If they weren't in the spec, it wouldn't be the complete OOXML spec used by by Office '07.

So here we have Microsoft working backwards. They take what they did and try to create a specification for it instead of creating a specification and then programming to it. Then they leave out parts of what is actually done in Office '07 so that other parties can never be compliant with the "specification". That would be akin to the TCP specification saying that bit 2 in byte 14 is a flag that says the checksum should be calculated like Windows 95 does it, without specifying how that is. This is just ridiculous. Do you not understand that some documents (probably all docs imported from Word 95 which I know is in the spec, I'm not sure about Word 97) WILL use this tag, and therefore anyone trying to comply with this specification will not be able to make the documents appear as they will in Office 2007? When importing a document from Word 95 or 97, Office 2007 should convert it completely to values defined in the specification, there should be no need for these tags for "backward compatibility".

If the specification has no way to make the spacing look the same, I would say that it is an incomplete specification (although it is 700+ pages). If there are certain quirks of Word 95 and Word 97 that would make the specification hard to understand, it doesn't matter. They should be defined exactly anyway so that ANYONE implementing the specification (and only the specification) will be able to produce documents that look the same.

RFC 1149

Please go read up on NAT. Of course the destination IP is there. Nat is supposed to be transparent for the computers involved.

TCP/IP over Avian Carriers (qith QoS) is nothing new..
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2549.html

Quite reliable, actually..

every time you request a packet you have to ACKnowledge its receipt

TCP has supported Selective Acknowledgement for a very long time now. It's even on by default in Windows (since 2000, I believe). Essentially, this TCP option allows the receiver to ACK a range of packets received with a single ACK packet. It even allows multiple ranges to be ACKed, so the sender knows exactly which packets to retransmit. I would assume Linunx and BSD support it as well.

You'll note that I never said every packet has to be individually acknowledged, only that every packet has to be acknowledged. The problem with torrent networks is that they provide so much backscatter and generate so many packets they quickly outstrip home user grade Internet connections.

But thanks for the reference. I'm sure some readers found it useful. ;)

every time you request a packet you have to ACKnowledge its receipt

TCP has supported Selective Acknowledgement for a very long time now. It's even on by default in Windows (since 2000, I believe). Essentially, this TCP option allows the receiver to ACK a range of packets received with a single ACK packet. It even allows multiple ranges to be ACKed, so the sender knows exactly which packets to retransmit. I would assume Linunx and BSD support it as well.

Been there, done that - used ows (http://www.faqs.org/faqs/compression-faq/part1/se ction-9.html)

The comparison was also between the .NET api printed on 3x5 note cards, and between POSIX printed 8.5x11 paper (double or single sided?)

Single-sided, POSIX comes out to less than 16 feet, .NET System to 40 feet. (Check my math.) And, again, the POSIX spec contains a lot more than just the kernel interface, and includes commentary and design rationales.

Oh, and the programming paradigms are vastly different as well.

I think we're in violent agreement there. And I didn't say POSIX was perfect, just much easier to develop for. For example of the problems, see here.

You really do need to read The Art Of Unix Programming, don't you?

"Today we are ready for the official release of the .NET Framework 2.0. Tabulating only MSCORLIB.DLL and those assemblies that begin with word System, we have over 5,000 public classes that include over 45,000 public methods and 15,000 public properties, not counting those methods and properties that are inherited and not overridden. A book that simply listed the names, return values, and arguments of these methods and properties, one per line, would be about a thousand pages long.

If you wrote each of those 60,000 properties and methods on a 3-by-5 index card with a little description of what it did, you'd have a stack that totaled 40 feet."

Meanwhile, the entire POSIX spec, suitable for fully implementing a POSIX system including the utility apps, with commentary and rationales for design decisions, fits in about two and a half feet of binders.

Intellisense is practically mandated if you want to work with an interface as baroque as Win32. And it's nice even when you're working with your own defined classes and structures. But it has its own drawbacks, as Petzold notes:

"For example, suppose you're typing some code and you decide you need a variable named id, and instead of defining it first, you start typing a statement that begins with id and a space. I always type a space between my variable and the equals sign. Because id is not defined anywhere, IntelliSense will find something that begins with those two letters that is syntactically correct in accordance with the references, namespaces, and context of your code. In my particular case, IntelliSense decided that I really wanted to define a variable of interface type IDataGridColumnStyleEditingNotificationService, an interface I've never had occasion to use."

I develop for many platforms at work. It's a core part of my job. I mostly enjoy writing code for Unixish platforms, and tolerate the Windows stuff. The APIs on Unix are small, well-thought-out, have few if any side effects, and tend to be thoroughly documented. I find very few interfaces on Windows have even a majority of these traits, let alone all of them.

I've rarely felt the need for more debugging support than Linux comes with. The problems tend to be simpler and more easily uncovered. Eclipse is nice, and appears to take many of the good things about Visual Studio and leave much of the bad behind. For some projects, it's very useful. For others, it's overkill.

Another item worth reading - the whole book, really - is The Art Of Unix Programming. For a Windows developer's perspective on the book, see here. Needless to say, I don't agree with everything he writes there, but you might find it interesting.

Leave it to someone who doesn't know what they're talking about to determine what should be considered "fraud". Do you implement the evil bit? I hear it's supposed to prevent hackers and fraud and all that...

One of the great questions of "Blade Runner" is whether Deckard (Harrison Ford) is, or is not, a replicant himself.

"Knowing" Phillip K. Dick (through reading most of his works) I think personally the answer is a yes, but the debate has raged on for a long time, at least when the subject comes up. Others say no, and that's the greatness of the movie: you can't be completely sure.

Read #14 of the Blade Runner FAQ here and ponder it for yourself.

For...

Ridley Scott and Harrison Ford have stated that Deckard was meant to be a
    replicant. In Details magazine (US) October 1992 Ford says:

                "Blade Runner was not one of my favorite films. I tangled
                with Ridley. The biggest problem was that at the end, he wanted the
                audience to find out that Deckard was a replicant. I fought that
                because I felt the audience needed somebody to cheer for."

Against...

- Could you trust a replicant to kill other replicants? Why did the police
    trust Deckard?

- Having Deckard as a replicant implies a conspiracy between the police and
    Tyrell.

And so forth and so on...

2.3.1. Preferred name syntax

...

<domain> ::= <subdomain> | " "
<subdomain> ::= <label> | <subdomain> "." <label>
<label> ::= <letter> [ [ <ldh-str> ] <let-dig> ]
<ldh-str> ::= <let-dig-hyp> | <let-dig-hyp> <ldh-str>
<let-dig-hyp> ::= <let-dig> | "-"
<let-dig> ::= <letter> | <digit>
<letter> ::= any one of the 52 alphabetic characters A through Z in upper case and a through z in lower case
<digit> ::= any one of the ten digits 0 through 9

However, pretty much everyone allows underscores in machine names now, so I'm patching Slash to allow it.

It's a partial simplification of terms. The 2 is actually an exponent. They could just as easily called it P3. Here's the RFC not to be confused with P4.

Plan 9 failed simply because it fell short of being a compelling enough improvement on Unix to displace its ancestor. Compared to Plan 9, Unix creaks and clanks and has obvious rust spots, but it gets the job done well enough to hold its position. There is a lesson here for ambitious system architects: the most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough.

Here's a link to RFC 3514, for those wondering about this.

Overheard at the meeting of The InterNet Cabal (TINC).

Ok, here's the plan:

Comcast, make sure all your bids end in "1" followed by 0's.
ATT, you bid ending in "2" plus 0's.
Time-Warner, you get "3."

If you see a bid ending in 4-9, it's not one of us.

Bwuhahahahaha.

A single file contains the schema and data.

Personally I wouldn't be too worried about the memory footprint, but I guess this means that they're dropping the text based configuration files in favour of a binary format? - If that's the case, I sincerely hope they'll reconsider, from The Art of Unix Programming:

When you feel the urge to design a complex binary file format, or a complex binary application protocol, it is generally wise to lie down until the feeling passes.

I had hoped that the mess that is the Windows Registry had taught people to avoid odd binary formats if at all possible...

As I recall, back in 94-ish when the Internet was being commercialised, address spaces were allocated away in blocks. The size of the address space you got depended largely on how well you could negotiate and show a need for them (and whether you had a few fingers in the right pies, no doubt). The people lucky enough to get large amounts of an increasingly valuable resource aren't going to just hand it over, though they may sell it at a premium. There have been RFCs written detailing observations on this and possible answers for it, and appeals to return unused IP addresses going back to at least 1996.

We will need IPv6 if the Internet gets much bigger. Maybe not right now, but at some stage IPv4 will run out no matter how efficiently addresses are allocated. There will simply be more machines than address space. I imagine that the big players who decide when it's time to do something will wait until the last possible moment before making any big (and expensive) changes. That and there'll be less excuse to charge high prices for additional IPs.

Actually the version designator of "5" was used for the Internet Stream Protocol, which is one of the reasons why they skipped from IPv4 to v6.

ST2 is apparently a protocol for setting up QoSed streams between computers for doing video and audio. Given that I've never heard of it, I'm going to go out on a limb and bet it was a flop.

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1918.html

If I'm reading it correctly your ISP treats you like you are part of their corporate intranet and then pipes your traffic out. I'd expect the ISP have a similar traffic footprint and pattern to a largeish college campus that doesn't assign every PC an outside IP.

Your description reminds me of the greylisting and "could you please try sending that again in an hour or so" approach of Jef Poskanzer. Read more about his troubles here.

Oh, and remember: address@example.com is a better choice for email addresses used in examples, as it uses one of the reserved domains from RFC2606.

Only if you had a Beowulf cluster of pigeons to do the networking.

If bad network traffic couldn't be used to attack computers, no one would bother buying a firewall.

Sounds like a good reason to implement the Evil Bit for all IP traffic from now on. (Of course, if you own stock in a firewall distributor or other security company, better diversify before they implement this RFC.)

You want shortcut keys for all the country-code TLDs? For that, you'll probably need an extension (not to mantion a space cadet keyboard!).

On the other hand, having a standard shortcut key for one of them (i.e., the one corresponding to the current locale) might be useful...

Actual emo is stuff like Rites of Spring, Saetia, and /maybe/ groups like Alkaline Trio or the Weakerthans.

Emo is supposed to be the maturation of punk style into an art form to express the full human experience (and not just a platform to speak out against the Establishment, inequality, racism, etc., like real punk was/is).

Of course, there are plenty of watered-down, craptacular bands that cater to the high-school teenage depression market. The*Ataris are perhaps the better of the selection out there, as they actually can write some decent music, but things just get worse from there.

More people need to hear some fucking bands like Dead Kennedys, Bad Religion, Dillinger Four, and Anti-Flag.

And while we're on the subject, all the kids calling themselves straight edge who have no idea of the history behind Minor Threat are helping to miscommunicate their original message. (read this, and maybe this)

Music is supposed to be glorious and amazing---not limping and ugly.

Spreading knowledge through anger since '98
-- doughnut hole

Well, clearly RFC 3514 will play an important role in the New Internet.

I hope this proposal fails. They probably know it will fail but this is a "make work" project -- just a method of researchers to spend grants so that they will get further grants like governments do at end of fiscal.

When they talk about "The internet" they mean layers 4 and 5: IP and TCP (or TCP/IP).
[Points about the internet]
- The author of that article knows nothing about the internet; not once did he mention any of the layers.

[[Important]]
Just because the internet is old does not mean that it is by any means bad; in fact, for most users, this "older version" is better.

- IP was formalized back in the 1980s; it was designed back when memory was expensive; it was designed when every bit and byte counted. A new "version" of the internet would in fact be much slower than the current IPV4. IPV6 for example has more over head than IPV4.

Read about the formalized protocol here
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc791.html

The paper may seem a little complex; however, realize that the purpose of IP is for simply routing messages so that one machine on the internet can reach another

-- Final comments --
The only service which the "old" internet does not offer is functionality for quality of service (technically it does, but those bits are not used).

And this is a good thing. No quality of service prevents ISPs from gouging their users. How would you like it if your ISP implemented IPV6 and then said "Oh, and if you want your latency below 200ms that will be an extra $20/month).

That is the type of functionality they are looking to add into the "new internet". Anything else can just be built ontop of TCP.

---

Also, to clarify the IP running out of addresses issue: TCP/IP supports 4 billion address. Only 1 or 2 are in use. Why is there a shortage problem you ask? Because of the method in which IP addresses are assigned. IP addresses are assigned in classes of A, B, and C (do further research for understanding this).

For example, Stanford university has more IP addresses than all of china.
http://news.com.com/5208-1028_3-0.html?forumID=1&t hreadID=190&messageID=26576&start=-1

IPv6 is stable and ready for deployment. It has been for a long time.

Will it be compliant with RFC 1149?

Our interweb browser says the file doesn't exist:

http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWTO/ADSL-Bandwidt h-Management-HOWTO.html

Someone should mod you down. I bet you were hiding a virus with that filename. Good that IE kept us from seeing it.