The page is more than likely a bad Perl program. The localtime function (what most people use to get the date), returns a list with the hour, minute, day, month, etc. It returns the year as the number of years since 1900, hence in 1999 it would have returned 99 and now it would 100.
Erm, localtime in Perl is based on the C library function of the same name and behaviour. So I don't see why Perl programmes are more likely to be b0rked than C programmes.
Maybe AOL did have the right to stop MS using it's servers, but that should have been defined in the licence, and enforced using real security measures.
License? What license? The servers are their property just as my flat (en-US: appartment) is my property. I wasn't aware I had to stick a license on all the doors and windows making it clear that I don't want people trespassing.
A common misconception is that some of the new midspeed connects such as ADSL or Cable give low pings because they have a lot of bandwidth.
High bandwidth and low latency ("low pings") may be connected, but probably no where near as tightly as most people think. It depends on the characteristics of the system in question.
Rather, it's the lack of PPP. PPP adds about 140ms onto the ping time, because of the way it's designed: SLIP looks like it was written on the back of a paper napkin. PPP was.:)
Hmm, I'm loath to shout "Bollocks" in a public forum, but... I get about 160-170ms RTTs over my POTS modem. I don't believe PPP is responsible for 140ms of that. After all, do you think Cable and ADSL providers would be switching to PPPoE if PPP was so bad? I've poked around a bit in the Linux PPP driver, and it looks OK to me (not that I'm an expert in such things).
"Term #3 of the GPL would appear to agree with you. Looks like 3.b offers an escape hatch."
"Making the source available" isn't the same as providing a written offer to do so. Does anyone know if such an offer is included? IMHO this is important because not everyone would think to ask for the source if it wasn't included, and its availability wasn't mentioned.
Also, isn't it fairly stupid not to supply the kernel source? That means you're stuck with the compile-time options the package maintainer chose. Ugh.
"the GPL simply states that src must be made available per request."
Not quite, it says (section 3 (b)):
b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange;
Fittingly enough, I notice the press release was moronized. Uck.
Why are metered local calls "stupid"?
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ISP War in the UK
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Maybe I'm being dim here, but why are metered local calls "stupid"? If you're calling from one line to another on the same exchange, then there's an argument that you're not using any of the telco's resources and so should be charged a flat rate.
However, the "local" call regions in the UK, I believe, cover more than one exchange, and anyway, most ISPs that provide "local" access don't actually have shed loads of real local PoPs. They just have one huge connection to a telco and special numbers (0845, etc.) that are billed the same as local rates. Either way, all the time you're connected you're using resources. Why shouldn't you pay for them?
I've not checked my linux-kernel or linux-fsdevel backlog yet, but I'm guessing that if sct announced anything, it would have been to one of those lists. Check the archives (kernelnotes.org has the lkml FAQ and archives).
God only knows.. You could try having a look at the CREDITS file in your kernel source, but of course that is everyone who has ever contributed (assuming their patch included an update to the CREDITS file ). I don't know how you'd go about producing stats for active contributors..
2.3 is the development version that will become 2.4; all versions where the middle number is odd are development versions (like 2.1). If you're feeling very brave and have backups, you can download 2.3 from the usual places and play with it. Don't be surprised if it eats your filesystems, pets, grandparents, etc., though.
Is it another b0rken firewall their end, or have I tickled an IP masq bug? I can ping the box but not traceroute all the way to it, this looks suspicious. Mind you, my network link seems flaky tonight anyway. OTOH, when I connect to port 80 I get a little data and then a stall, looks like a fragmentation issue to me. *sigh*
This guy is the patch pumpkin? Does that mean he gets passed around from developer to developer? Don't they mean, he's the patch pumpking?
Also, the guy worries me. He works for ActiveState. Blech. Nothing concrete, I'm not on the perl mailing lists, so I'm probably wrong, but that seems a bit.. scary.
The big thing that might have been worth pointing out though, is that the file corruptions some people were seeing in 2.2.9, 2.2.10 was allegedly fixed in -ac10 or -ac11. I don't know the details ATM, I lost track of that thread on l-k a long time ago:(
Naturally, this is a pain in the arse, if not impossible, between different phone companies and/or area codes, but it should work with the same company and code (which is quite common 'round where I am in the US)
Yes, I think BT do number portability here if you're staying within the same exchange area.
The thing that worries me is that OFTEL seem to be about to force mobile companies to allow customers to take their number with them when they change companies. This seems a little stupid.
I don't know about the US, but hear in New Zealand the phone number hasn't had to be used for routing for about 10 years. The phone's real address is some obscure number the user will never see and the phone number you dial is just like a machine name, ie looked up.
Ahh. Just after I posted the first comment I did wonder about that. In which case we could rearrange 'phone numbers to categorise by something more useful than (just) geographic area and call cost.. You could have different codes for personal, government and commercial numbers... All sorts of things..
Re:I dont think we should haveta pay for ip's
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IANA Deploying IPv6
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· Score: 1
every person is alotted say 50 ip's at birth along with your social security number or so. Corps can buy ip's in the current system.
Not really a good idea. The whole point is that your IP addresses depend on where you're linked into the network. Trying to have portable IP addresses would but horrible load on the backbone routers.
Ultimately you should be able to forget about IP addresses and rely on DNS pretty much exclusively -- especially with those 128 bits addresses which will be a PITA to type.
Incidentally, this is why "phone number portability" is so stupid. The phone number should remain something that the switches can route by, just like an IP address. What we need is something like DNS for the phone system -- all phones have a little LCD display, maybe a little keypad. If you haven't got someone's number on quick dial, you can search on their name, and the system would search your local area first and give you a list of matches. Then you could expand geographically if req'd.
Won't work though -- at least not with TCP. We'd have to invent something else that could cope with the latencies. Inter-Planetary Transmission Protcol? It could still be layered over IP, though.
The Evening Standard article on this says `E-mail messages can be read or sent using a personal password via BT's own e-mail service..'. How difficult would it have been to have a simple, generic POP3 client on the thing?
Also from ES: `The Internet is searchable in the usual way, although screened to exclude sites that BT coyly calls "unsuitable".' Great: random acts of censorship by software, which is a Good Thing, honest. I wonder if competitors' webmail services are suitable viewing or not. Don't forget this is the company that searched subscribers' 'phone bills for calls to ISPs and then called them to flog their own internet service.
Video e-mail - users can take a photo of themselves at the terminal and attach it to an e-mail. Yum. Does it also come with a built in, daemon controlled mallet I can use to LART anyone who tries to mail me one of those?
After all, first we generated power by burning wood, oil, coal and gas. So they came along and said this was polluting the environment, causing acid rain and global warming. We start building nuclear power plants but they don't like that either -- though I never quite figured out the arguments against it.
This is certainly going to flip their lids; all they need to see are words like "microwave" and "radiation" and they'll be off their trolleys.
Makes you wonder where they think the juice should come from. Or would they be happy to go back to living in mud huts?
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The page is more than likely a bad Perl program. The localtime function (what most people use to get the date), returns a list with the hour, minute, day, month, etc. It returns the year as the number of years since 1900, hence in 1999 it would have returned 99 and now it would 100.
Erm, localtime in Perl is based on the C library function of the same name and behaviour. So I don't see why Perl programmes are more likely to be b0rked than C programmes.
The IETF has an Instant Message and Presence Protocol Working Group which is looking at this.
Maybe AOL did have the right to stop MS using it's servers, but that should have been defined in the licence, and enforced using real security measures.
License? What license? The servers are their property just as my flat (en-US: appartment) is my property. I wasn't aware I had to stick a license on all the doors and windows making it clear that I don't want people trespassing.
Nice to see the HTML comment-posting code working so well. *sigh*
As I understand it, there are two issues here, and a lot of knee-jerking going on as well. First off, the protocol issue. I think Microsoft / AT&T have every right to try and clone the protocol used by AIM. I think there may even have been legal rulings over in the US about the legality of reverse-engineering protocols. AOL, of course, are entitled to change there protocol, but leaving a gaping security hole (allegedly) in the clients to do so is unacceptable. Secondly, there's the question of access to servers. AIUI, Microsoft's client was connecting to AOL's servers in order to communicate with AIM users. Regardless of what you feel AOL ought to do, those servers are their property. They have the right to decide who should and should not have access. If they decide the servers are for use only by AOL/AIM users, it's their choice. If I understand correctly, Microsoft or its software's users might have been committing an offence under the UK's Computer Misuse Act.
A common misconception is that some of the new midspeed connects such as ADSL or Cable give low pings because they have a lot of bandwidth.
High bandwidth and low latency ("low pings") may be connected, but probably no where near as tightly as most people think. It depends on the characteristics of the system in question.
Rather, it's the lack of PPP. PPP adds about 140ms onto the ping time, because of the way it's designed: SLIP looks like it was written on the back of a paper napkin. PPP was. :)
Hmm, I'm loath to shout "Bollocks" in a public forum, but... I get about 160-170ms RTTs over my POTS modem. I don't believe PPP is responsible for 140ms of that. After all, do you think Cable and ADSL providers would be switching to PPPoE if PPP was so bad? I've poked around a bit in the Linux PPP driver, and it looks OK to me (not that I'm an expert in such things).
"Term #3 of the GPL would appear to agree with you. Looks like 3.b offers an escape hatch."
"Making the source available" isn't the same as providing a written offer to do so. Does anyone know if such an offer is included? IMHO this is important because not everyone would think to ask for the source if it wasn't included, and its availability wasn't mentioned.
Also, isn't it fairly stupid not to supply the kernel source? That means you're stuck with the compile-time options the package maintainer chose. Ugh.
"the GPL simply states that src must be made available per request."
Not quite, it says (section 3 (b)):
b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange;Fittingly enough, I notice the press release was moronized. Uck.
Maybe I'm being dim here, but why are metered local calls "stupid"? If you're calling from one line to another on the same exchange, then there's an argument that you're not using any of the telco's resources and so should be charged a flat rate.
However, the "local" call regions in the UK, I believe, cover more than one exchange, and anyway, most ISPs that provide "local" access don't actually have shed loads of real local PoPs. They just have one huge connection to a telco and special numbers (0845, etc.) that are billed the same as local rates. Either way, all the time you're connected you're using resources. Why shouldn't you pay for them?
I've not checked my linux-kernel or linux-fsdevel backlog yet, but I'm guessing that if sct announced anything, it would have been to one of those lists. Check the archives (kernelnotes.org has the lkml FAQ and archives).
God only knows.. You could try having a look at the CREDITS file in your kernel source, but of course that is everyone who has ever contributed (assuming their patch included an update to the CREDITS file ). I don't know how you'd go about producing stats for active contributors..
What happened to 2.3?
2.3 is the development version that will become 2.4; all versions where the middle number is odd are development versions (like 2.1). If you're feeling very brave and have backups, you can download 2.3 from the usual places and play with it. Don't be surprised if it eats your filesystems, pets, grandparents, etc., though.
1) the joystick and USB ports on the front. Has Compaq patented this?
The Amiga 1500 had this (well, the mouse and joystick ports, no USB obviously), and they've been around for donkey's years.
Okay, I retract that. I did point out that I didn't know anything about this :-)
Is it another b0rken firewall their end, or have I tickled an IP masq bug? I can ping the box but not traceroute all the way to it, this looks suspicious. Mind you, my network link seems flaky tonight anyway. OTOH, when I connect to port 80 I get a little data and then a stall, looks like a fragmentation issue to me. *sigh*
This guy is the patch pumpkin? Does that mean he gets passed around from developer to developer? Don't they mean, he's the patch pumpking ?
Also, the guy worries me. He works for ActiveState. Blech. Nothing concrete, I'm not on the perl mailing lists, so I'm probably wrong, but that seems a bit .. scary.
*nods*
I was wondering that, too. Then I thought maybe I was being over-sensitive, I dunno.
BTW, I think the reason it reminds use of Nazi terminology is that it *was* (or, unfortunately, still is).
The big thing that might have been worth pointing out though, is that the file corruptions some people were seeing in 2.2.9, 2.2.10 was allegedly fixed in -ac10 or -ac11. I don't know the details ATM, I lost track of that thread on l-k a long time ago :(
and/or area codes, but it should work with the same company and code (which is quite
common 'round where I am in the US)
Yes, I think BT do number portability here if you're staying within the same exchange area.
The thing that worries me is that OFTEL seem to be about to force mobile companies to allow customers to take their number with them when they change companies. This seems a little stupid.
Ahh. Just after I posted the first comment I did wonder about that. In which case we could rearrange 'phone numbers to categorise by something more useful than (just) geographic area and call cost.. You could have different codes for personal, government and commercial numbers... All sorts of things..
every person is alotted say 50 ip's at birth along with your social security number or so. Corps can buy ip's in the current system.
Not really a good idea. The whole point is that your IP addresses depend on where you're linked into the network. Trying to have portable IP addresses would but horrible load on the backbone routers.
Ultimately you should be able to forget about IP addresses and rely on DNS pretty much exclusively -- especially with those 128 bits addresses which will be a PITA to type.
Incidentally, this is why "phone number portability" is so stupid. The phone number should remain something that the switches can route by, just like an IP address. What we need is something like DNS for the phone system -- all phones have a little LCD display, maybe a little keypad. If you haven't got someone's number on quick dial, you can search on their name, and the system would search your local area first and give you a list of matches. Then you could expand geographically if req'd.
Won't work though -- at least not with TCP. We'd have to invent something else that could cope with the latencies. Inter-Planetary Transmission Protcol? It could still be layered over IP, though.
After all, first we generated power by burning wood, oil, coal and gas. So they came along and said this was polluting the environment, causing acid rain and global warming. We start building nuclear power plants but they don't like that either -- though I never quite figured out the arguments against it.
This is certainly going to flip their lids; all they need to see are words like "microwave" and "radiation" and they'll be off their trolleys.
Makes you wonder where they think the juice should come from. Or would they be happy to go back to living in mud huts?