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Before investing in Carier Pigeon NET I suggest you acquaint yourself with the following

RFC1149 A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1149.html

I Kid You NOT!

While interesting, That doesn't seem relevant to the solution.

Many ISPs have configured their DNS servers (possibly using split-horizon techniques) so that when SOME of their customers do a query, rather than returning the appropriate NXDomain result (See RFC 1035, section 4.1.1 - RCODE 3), they return an address of a webserver which will typically accept all URLs and serve a "useful" search result page full of targetted spamvertising.

This breaks a whole lot of things, like the integrated search functionality in certain web browsers.

Apologies if I've missed your point. (I agree with many other posters - the Right Thing is to use only the internal DNS server (possibly configured as split-horizon) when the VPN link is active.)

This seems to dance a bit too close to Networking Truths 6a, 11, and possibly 12. I will reserve judgment until I see solid real-world evidence.

Twitter has a very well known brand-name, probably about half of which comes from people bitching about it, or cracking jokes ("ok poop is coming out"). The application itself is nothing short of a status message, which where defined as early as May, 1993 (RFC 1459, Section 5.1) or earlier (RFC 742, December 1977 - finger w/plan), and there are dozens of "microblogging" sites out there already.

If anyone buys Twitter, it will only be for the most over hyped and thus well-known up-and-coming brand names of the last couple years.

Twitter has a very well known brand-name, probably about half of which comes from people bitching about it, or cracking jokes ("ok poop is coming out"). The application itself is nothing short of a status message, which where defined as early as May, 1993 (RFC 1459, Section 5.1) or earlier (RFC 742, December 1977 - finger w/plan), and there are dozens of "microblogging" sites out there already.

If anyone buys Twitter, it will only be for the most over hyped and thus well-known up-and-coming brand names of the last couple years.

Ok, we need to put a stop to this myth like thirty years ago.

THE AIR ON PLANES ISN'T RECYCLED.

It seems your information is outdated. Once again, Google to the rescue:

http://www.scientificjournals.com/sj/espr/Pdf/aId/2518

Quoting:

Today some 50% of commercial passen- ger aircraft use recirculated air for ventilation of the passenger cabin

also here: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/travel/air/handbook/part3/section-3.html

Newer airplanes recirculate part of the cabin air (up to 50%) to save fuel, in contrast with older planes, which use all fresh air ventilation.

and a small article here:

http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Health/story?id=1213901&page=1

They missed the RFC 1918 memo

[T]he VA is run entirely by the government. What the rest of the US is going to wind up with is a huge train wreck of competing standards and products by proprietary vendors who don't want to interoperate.

Once again it's probably worthwhile to note that this was a major part of the motivation behind the original ARPAnet project which grew into the Internet. The US Dept of Defense was trying to deal with a growing problem. They were collecting all sorts of fancy electronic gadgets that generated and consumed data, but most of them would only talk to other gadgets from the same vendor. It was clear that this wasn't an accident. Every vendor wanted a to be the sole supplier, and one way they all saw to do this was via proprietary data formats.

The ARPA gang's solution was to build what they called Interface Message Processors (IMPs), whose job was to talk to a proprietary gadget in its native language, translate the gadget's messages into a standard format, and transmit that to another IMP, which would translate it into the native language of another recipient gadget. They knew from long experience that their vendors wouldn't cooperate with this, and would do everything in their power to sabotage the ability of other vendors' gadgets with their own. So the ARPA people farmed out the task of building the IMPs to people who had a history of successful communication with their competitors, the people in academia.

That was about 40 years ago. Now, with four more decades of experience, we can clearly see that the problem hasn't gone away. There is no prospect that gadgets or data systems built by different corporations will ever interoperate sanely. Private companies have a strong motive to sabotage such communication whenever they can get away with it. So, as in the past, the only way we can get useful medical data systems is the same was we've done it with the Internet. We need government-run projects to develop and enforce the standards. Building the low-level gadgets can be a job for the corporate world. But if we ever want to be able to use the data for any meaningful purpose, we must make sure that the corporate world can't control it.

Actually, of course, we have no guarantee that government agencies will do the job right, either. There's no shortage of incompatible data formats in government databases. Unless the job is handled by people as competent as ARPA was back in the 1960s and 70s, it'll still be a huge, expensive failure. Sorta like the medical data systems we have now, which were mostly developed in-house at hospitals, and even the nonprofit hospitals have a poor record of interoperability. (Yes, I've worked on some of their systems, and it's not a pretty sight.) So we should be watching how the governments deal with the problem, and be quick to criticise the crappy standards that we know they'll design.

Otherwise we'll end up with medical records based on a standard similar to the Avian Carrier Protocol, but it won't have been published on April 1. You should also read the wikipedia article to read of a real implementation. But most managers in both corporate and government circles don't have a sense of humor good enough to prevent such things from becoming actual standards.

You have dial up? You lucky, jammy bastard! I'm using Carrier Pigeons!

In no way was OS/2 a "launch point" for Windows (either DOS-based or NT).

You and history disagree on this point - I have only (sadly) wikipedia at this point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2

Initially, the companies agreed that IBM would take over maintenance of OS/2 1.0 and development of OS/2 2.0, while Microsoft would continue development of OS/2 3.0. In the end, Microsoft decided to recast NT OS/2 3.0 as Windows NT, leaving all future OS/2 development to IBM.

Unless by launch point I mean - renamed a rev of OS/2 to WinNT.

As for OS/2 Warp not being a complete re-write, your objection to my language use may be correct - the re-write was complete and features such as true preemptive multi-tasking appeared in Warp. So, my comment stands - the hallmark of the completed re-write corresponded to the name change. BTW, the multi-tasking improvement in Win95, released LATER, didn't measure up. If you found Warp and 95 to be a toss-up, then YMMV. If you're comparing pre-Warp to Win95, you're unfair.

Original OS/2 was as much IBM as MS is true if and only if you weigh setting requirements as equal to code production.

In any case, you might enjoy this walk down memory lane - I did. http://www.archive.org/details/CC518_multitasking

I was flat wrong in my timeline on one thing - and as you say, it's important - OS/2 joint development was announced in 1987, and by 1988, the date of the above Computer Chronicles broadcast, OS/2 Presentation Manager, Windows 386 - Windows 2 - were all already in existence. Windows 1.0 was released in 1985. It was not a full OS by any means, and I am not splitting hairs or re-hashing the DOS/Win95 controversy. Windows 2 was Win1 with memory management.

Win3 did not appear until 1990. I would contend that that was an OS in its own right. OS/2 was already out by then.

So, I was not saying and did not say that MS didn't start any Windows anything until their engagement with IBM, but I worded what I said so poorly that I'll bow to the hits and criticisms.

My overall chronology and points against illegal and predatory activities stand as amended with rev numbers. As a footnote - http://www.faqs.org/abstracts/Business-general/Microsoft-hampered-OS-2-IBM-official-tells-court-curbs-on-software-develvopers-are-faulted.html

rfc 1149:

A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers

aka tcp/ip over pigeons

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1149.html

Discussion

      Multiple types of service can be provided with a prioritized pecking
      order. An additional property is built-in worm detection and
      eradication. Because IP only guarantees best effort delivery, loss
      of a carrier can be tolerated. With time, the carriers are self-
      regenerating. While broadcasting is not specified, storms can cause
      data loss. There is persistent delivery retry, until the carrier
      drops. Audit trails are automatically generated, and can often be
      found on logs and cable trays.

RFC2 might be older, but the first page is missing.

My favorite RFC of all time: 1438. The rule "once everyone has approved the document by falling asleep over it, the process ends and the document is discarded" has been a guiding light for corporate management nationwide.

Perhaps someone here can tell me is there a way I can avoid being logged...?

You could always look into RFC 1149. It's supposed to be well nigh untappable.

Thanks for this. I will see that I can update the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol

See RFC 3514. :)

I have a simpler solution for them right here:
RFC 3514

because real men disassemble Ubuntu on a friend's computer, read it, then type the commands in all over again on their own from memory.

Real men would build a robot to disassemble Ubuntu, instead of sneakernet send it over trackerwheel-net, train mice to memorize a datapacket, and transfer it using RFC 1149.

In France, Paris, you have a real man who wanders around the Notre Dame, leeching off of wireless communication based on RFC 1149.

I find the big blue room so much nicer when there's a sun in it. Don't you?

I wouldn't know, I only wear my sunglasses at night.

I find the big blue room so much nicer when there's a sun in it. Don't you?

You can use the instructions here to install the same copy of windows into two different partitions on the same machine. I use this on my laptop; one image for everyday use, and one for logging in to my company's VPN (which requires specific software that I don't want to have running all the time).

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/space/controversy/

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE SATURN V PLANS

Despite a widespread belief to the contrary, the Saturn V blueprints have not been lost. They are kept at Marshall Space Flight Center on microfilm. The Federal Archives in East Point, GA also has 2900 cubic feet of Saturn documents. Rocketdyne has in its archives dozens of volumes from its Knowledge Retention Program. This effort was initiated in the late '60s to document every facet of F-1 and J-2 engine production to assist in any future re-start.

The problem in re-creating the Saturn V is not finding the drawings, it is finding vendors who can supply mid-1960's vintage hardware (like guidance system components), and the fact that the launch pads and VAB have been converted to Space Shuttle use, so you have no place to launch from.

By the time you redesign to accommodate available hardware and re-modify the launch pads, you may as well have started from scratch with a clean sheet design.

P1: I wrote my first /bin/sh script on 9/10/1984
P2: I'm still in touch with the other intern from that phase, who calls me and asks things like, "Is it 2>&1 or 2&>1? I never can remember..."
C: Long term usage does not imply expertise.

I like to think I'm pretty good, but I still review Csh Programming Considered Harmful for more esoteric usage of /bin/sh, when I have only that old tool available.

But this is old news now, Windows has a CLI. I hear it's pretty powerful too. I don't spend enough time on Windows to bother learning it, but I'm glad they have it. If there are any useful ideas there, I'm sure they'll make it into Bash or ZSH or whatever.

Doubtful (that there's anything new in this so-called powershell). At least no one has posted anything so far that can't be done easier in a modern Unix shell.

I'm a little less than impressed with bash, but zsh is like manna from heaven and has been so since I first discovered it in 1990 (and it's gotten better since).

Steven Bourne deserves a lot of credit. A WHOLE lot of credit. He was the person who innovated a user interface as a full-fledged programming language and made it work. Well.

The BSD guys came later and attempted to make a csh with better programming features.
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/shell/csh-whynot/
I will not detail my own personal pain and suffering as an emacs maintainer due to the gross misdesign of .cshrc.

At one time I was receptive towards learning csh, but openly laughed when a coworker who was attempting to show me the "power" of csh typed a very long command substitution line that was not only longer than the original command line, but had an error in it so it had to be retyped any way. (Later on, I still ported a copy of csh & tcsh sources to a System V box, of course with a subset of features (sans BSD-only features), just for the learning experience).

Of any fundamental programming interface design error, csh has probably caused more losses than any other single non-Microsoft program. (The default to printing an error message when an unsuccessful glob is "attempted" is #1).

The CLI shells that have proved successful in the long run (ksh, bash and zsh), have all been based off of Bourne's work. The Bourne Shell, even unextended from its successors is incredibly powerful. Let's see PowerShell programmers do

A BASIC interpreter:
http://www.mtxia.com/fancyIndex/Tools/Scripts/Bourne/basic.html
An Adventure game, suitable as a Unix shell:
http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/shells/advshell.shar.Z

"and i have yet to see a mms that a reasonably modern phone cant read. now, if you send from a recently bought phone to a phone that was new when mms was first introduced, you may have issues. but hey, thats always a problem with legacy equipment."

"Really? I can send email to machines from the 1990s and they'll read it just fine!"

If you send E-Mail conforming to RFC 822 you'll be fine, bit if it uses MIME (RFC 1521) you will have at best a 50/50 chance. You see the MIME standard wasn't written until 1993, and it wasn't deployed instantaneously and globally. But hey, thats always a problem with legacy equipment^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H software.

"and i have yet to see a mms that a reasonably modern phone cant read. now, if you send from a recently bought phone to a phone that was new when mms was first introduced, you may have issues. but hey, thats always a problem with legacy equipment."

"Really? I can send email to machines from the 1990s and they'll read it just fine!"

If you send E-Mail conforming to RFC 822 you'll be fine, bit if it uses MIME (RFC 1521) you will have at best a 50/50 chance. You see the MIME standard wasn't written until 1993, and it wasn't deployed instantaneously and globally. But hey, thats always a problem with legacy equipment^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H software.

It is the Unix philosophy, as expressed in many places like The art of Unix programming or here (first paragraph, "small, sharp tools") or the Pragmatic Programmers (under Occam's razor).

The idea was filesharing over email.

In the olden days, files were actually transferred this way. Check out UUCP. But you were not anonymous, even if you encrypted the files.

The situation hasn't changed much today, except that most people go through the bottleneck (or should we say choke- and surveillance points) of ISPs instead of calling each others with modems directly. But the problem of privacy and anonymity is just the same.

I guess the question then is, what do we use as an alternative? What can we even do?

IP over Avian Carriers! I'd like to see them do a man in the middle attack on PIGEONS!

To sum up:

1) There is no spec limit for GET lengths. Microsoft decided to make one up. And they made it tiny.
2) mailto is not a GET request. According to the spec, "No additional information other than an Internet mailing address is present or implied." Microsoft decided to interpret it as a GET request, probably due to lazy coding.
3) HTTP/1.1 RFC applies to *http*. Mailto is not http.

Their choice of behavior is both in violation of specs *and* a big annoyance. And it's just one random example out of hundreds that I've encountered. 9 times out of ten, if one browser isn't working and every other one is, that one is IE.

I bet few here know that the famous RFC 1149 has actually been implemented.

RFC1149 has been around for awhile now. Get out much? It was based on the older military protocol involving homing pigeons. See? A great deal of tech has a decidedly military bent to it! Brilliant!

I try to use carrier pigeons, smoke signals, semaphore flag towers, and the telegraph whenever possible.

I bet few here know that the famous RFC 1149 has actually been implemented.

I'm working on a writeup for a semaphore based system. Still not sure how to handle bad routes due to German invasions.

Hm. I read the RFC, and it seems patently insufficient when discussing necessary granularity. Clearly, time should be represented in Planck units, as this is the (currently theorized) maximum necessary resolution to describe a timepoint.

Current estimates on the age of the universe indicate that approximately 10^61 planck times have elapsed. This puts us at a present need beyond 128-bit time.

Assuming the ultimate fate of the universe is heat death with proton decay, then 256-bit time should cover the span of the life of the universe to beyond the presence of matter (~10^100 years).

For the truly pedantic, Planck-resolution time structs could be coupled with meta-size header concept from the I-TAG described in RFC2795, which would yield arbitrary representation in the case of future needs, such as if the universe does not die on schedule.

It is left as an open question to decide where the zero-point of the calendar should be fixed, given the imprecise knowledge of the birth of the universe.

and add extra features to decades old service without breaking standards.

But they are breaking the standard. In particular rfc2308,

under 8:

Negative caching in resolvers is no-longer optional, if a resolver
      caches anything it must also cache negative answers.

      The SOA record from the authority section MUST be cached. Name error
      indications must be cached against the tuple .
      No data indications must be cached against tuple.

Note the absence of statements like "lookup failures should silently map to A records that point to webservers serving spam".

but with this protocol any user should be aware of sniffing with machine guns...

http://www.faqs.org/qa/rfcc-361.html

RFC1178 - Choosing a name for your computer
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1178.html

Wow, why has nobody posted this yet? Too obvious? I doubt it, considering the awful ways I've seen people name computers;

RFC1178 - Choosing a name for your computer

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1178.html

Lots of good, timeless advice.

Why? RFC 1178.

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1178.html

But then too there is rfc 2100 on "The naming of hosts.".

I highly suggest reading The Art of UNIX Programming to see why the CLI is still [highly] relevant, even for desktop users. Granted, I am probably in the minority, but my job would be significantly harder if I weren't able to just string long chains of arbitrary commands together. I'd probably spend a lot more time programming and a lot less time working. xargs is a fucking godsend, let me tell you.

Saw this in an article on Plan 9 and it pretty much applies to the Zune.

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.

Except the iPod and iTunes are more than 'just good enough' they're really good for most people

Always wondered why MS doesn't just come to slashdot for help. We could save them a lot of wasted time and money :)

The law applies in the case of an argument where one party uses a comparison to Hitler or the Third Reich as an ad hominem or to attack their opponent's stance.

In this case, NYCL uses the analogy to refer to the actions of a third party not involved in the discussion. Also, this jab is intended to be humorous and poingnant, rather than a mean-spirited barb. Therefore, Godwin's law cannot be applied here and the conversation is neither over nor lost.

Reference:The Godwin's Law FAQ

The chances of it all still being active isn't high, but: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/internet-services/access-via-email/

Keyhole and compuserv jokes aside, there's a long tradition of methods to access the Internet via email, with (at least, 10+ years ago) some good systems set up. You might browse http://www.faqs.org/faqs/internet-services/access-via-email/ and see what's still available.

There's still lots of ways to access stuff online via email.

FTP by mail, web browsing by mail, so on, so forth. It will take some experimentation to find out which (if any) of these services are able to avoid using MIME attachments and just uuencode files into the body of the message. And then, it's still a quick Perl hack away for you or a geekier friend to produce a filter turns MIME attachments into inlined uuencode...

I used to do this a long time ago, with (of all things) dial-up WWIVnet. Send a carefully-prepared email, wait a few days, get the data you've asked for. I imagine it's probably a great deal quicker than that these days.

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1149.html

With the size of microSD these days, you might be able to send really big packets too...

many for no particularly well found technical reason I will add, some have technical justifications, but many just think it's 'old'

I don't know anybody who hates X because it's "old". It would be very weird if they did, since X almost always runs on top of Unix (or Linux, which is Unix for all purposes except trademarks). And how old is Unix? Pretty darn old.

There are plenty of good reasons to dislike X. It was designed by a committee and looks it. Working with it is nightmare upon nightmare: User Interface contentions, APIs, config files, protocols, all are obscure and complex. Whenever I work with it (and I use X-based apps every day) I end up in the mode of some computer noob who treats the technology like a tarbaby, afraid to try anything for fear of what I'll break. If it works, I'm careful not to touch anything I don't have to.

From day one, people have looked at X and said, "there's got to be a better way". For James Gosling, the nightmare of X coding for Solaris is what convinced him that existing GUI development models had gotten out of control. I've heard other complaints about X's weirdness and complexity for as long as I can remember. There's no "it's just old" about it.

Effective C++ and More Effective C++. I haven't read Effective STL, but I'm guessing it's good as well.

Also remember: The Art of Unix Programming and of course Joel Spolsky is a favorite, too.

I guess everyone should read The Fifth Disciple, as well.

And then there's of course Crucial conversations

One way pagers did exist, and so did cameras, but they required this non-digital stuff called "film"

What kind of "film" did you use in your pagers?

No I think the "pager" used a carrier pigeon.

I think you're referring to this http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1149.html

It seems he patented Times New Roman size 12pt too!