First off most language design has always been open source. Microsoft Visual Basic is a rare example of a closed development process over an extended time. Java being the only other that comes to mind (there is a 'standards body' but Sun retains a veto).
I don't see any attempt at a formal definition of the language. Before designing a programming language you should know about operational semantics, denotational semantics and all that good stuff.
There are severe problems with the syntax. The reason the flexible syntax of FORTRAN and COBOL was abandoned was that it introduced bugs. There is a space probe lost on the wrong course because of DO FOR I = 1, 10 being mistyped and interpreted as DOFORI = 1.10.
Program modularity hacks tend to be just that. Multiple inheritance was wildly popular in academia and an utter failure in commercial programming. MIT undergrads could hack it on a student project but when applied on an industrial scale the result was utter confusion. The more someone likes multiple inheritance the more difficult it is to decipher their code.
I don't think we need a new declarative programming language. What would be nice is a good revision of C. C++ was a disaster, give me C any day. Objective C was promising but lost. Java is unfortunately tied to Sun's strategic objective of dislodging Intel and Microsoft (why not have a go at Cisco while they are at it).
If Microsoft was to get the idea of doing a gcc front end for C# they might just get traction. It has all the programming advantages of Java without the four fold loss of performance caused by compiling to a virtual machine based on an obsolete SPARC chip. [yes I know the best java coders can write code that is faster than the worst C coders, the best C coders are a very different story].
What we are really lacking in the Internet age is a language with good handling of communications and parallelism - particularly loosely coupled multiprocessors. Now that Tony Hoare is at Microsoft I guess we can hope that some CSP/OCCAMish features might make it into C#
When developers (Pike + friends) needed an efficient, processor-independent language for systems programming, they created C
Actually they took an existing language called BCPL and wrote a subset called B, then they added a few features back to create C. BCPL was in turn a subset of CPL the all singing all dancing replacement for ALGOL 68 which was a little too good at being all singing and dancing.
In the case of C they wrote the language arround the compiler and vice versa.
The security in 802.11b is worse than useless, it claims a degree of security it does not provide. That is why most large corporations deploying 802.11b don't rely on WEP, they use IPSEC or PTPP to add security that was not broken at birth. Go to Redmond washington and every MSFT conference room has IEEE802.11b, but they don't use WEP.
Driving arround town there are a lot of 802.11b networks that are left open on purpose. I could care less about someone sending bits over my broadband pipe. Media one might mind but that is a different matter.
If it wasn't for the fact that if I did leave the access point open someone like the author of the article would be bound to post the fact on the net as 'security expert hacked' I would have no problems leaving it open. My internal systems are all behind a firewall in any case.
To use a basketball analogy, Salon seems to think that Felten falling down will convince the referee to call his opponent for a foul.
The RIAA did try a foul. The fact that it afterwards claimed not to have is simply lies on top of lies.
First Ammendment infringements are subject to a very strict standard of review since the courts recognize that the threat of frivolous lawsuits is an effective means of censorship
But, do you seriously expect the world to believe that the H1B program is what saved the US from rampant inflation during Clinton's presidency?
No, I believe that were it not for imigrants comming in that wage inflation would have started at which point Alan Greenspan would have raised interest rates and killed the boom.
The H1B program had a small part to play here, illegal immigration from Mexico probably had the greatest effect keeping wages down.
Microsoft is one of the few US companies that has made a voluntary agreement to apply the data protection act to all the data it collects.
Microsoft is probably not that bothered about the effectiveness of the disclaimer in the EU. Unlike the US civil trials do not have juries awarding inane amounts of money for coffee thats a bit hot.
Nor do class actions exist in which a bunch of crooks^h^h^h^h^hlawyers file a suit for damages on behalf of a class, then settle for $100 million in money off coupons for the class and $30 million in hard cash for their own extortion^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^hlegal fees.
In other words the legal system in the EU is not as corrupt and incompetent as that of the US.
From SalonOn Thursday, Oppenheim released a backpedaling statement: "The Secure Digital Music Initiative Foundation (SDMI) does not -- nor did it ever -- intend to bring any legal action against Professor Felten or his co-authors.
A blatantly untrue statement. Or rather it is true to the extent that the creep does not claim that they did not threaten legal action, merely claiming that the threats made were unfounded. However as the Salon article points out the RIAA realized it had screwed up big time.
With the first ammendment implications of the DMCA being debated next week the last thing the RIAA needs is a proof that the act is unconstitutional and being used to chill free speech.
Proof that the RIAA and SDMI folk are not as smart as the cryptographers. Which is pretty much as expected. I mean if you are going to pick stupid fights best not choose folk whose entire mindset is attack and counter measure to six or seven degrees out.
I am on an H1B visa. Last year I paid $500,000 in tax.
Oddly enough the H1B visa is issued by the government of the paleface imigrants and not the native americans that might have a point about imigration.
My company maintains an office for me 2,500 miles from our HQ because I don't want to live in Palo Alto. If the US govt is not going to give me an H1B visa then I'll simply take the job and the office back to Europe and pay taxes there.
The Clinton boom was fulled by the Internet boom which in turn was possible only because it was possible to hire the best people and bring them to the US. Without the ability to bring in high paid technologists and low paid domestic staff the US economy would have seen massive inflation instead of four percent growth for eight years straight.
My company is still hiring and is likely to continue to do so. If were were prevented from hiring workers in the US we would probably begin moving parts of our engineering dept to India.
If you can't hack it against the best in the world, you simply don't deserve the job. Our market is global and so is our workforce. If you have to depend on discrimination because your parents got off the boat a few slightly earlier against a better qualified candidate you have no place in my organization.
At this point the key strategy should be to encourage SDMI members to resign.
This is not as hard as it may appear since most of the members are technology companies looking to hawk their technology. Those whose watermarks etc. have not been choosen are thus likely to be looking for an excuse to withdraw on principled grounds.
If an industry standards group is not going to endorse my technology then it is not exactly in my interests to continue to endorse them but resigning for that reason is going to look kind of bad. Give such folk an excuse to dis SDMI without looking bad and they will be out.
Another group that might well be detached is the second tier of device manufacturers. Sony is the only company to have tried to deliver an SDMI compliant device, an MP3 player that was a spectacular failure until the SDMI component was disabled.
The plain fact is that the record labels have not lived up to their side of the deal, they have not made their content available to download even if you do implement SDMI.
Another company that might be detachable is Microsoft. They have their own DRM package which works pretty well without the SDMI schemes. If Microsoft were to leave SDMI it would effectively be dead.
The fact is that SDMI has met none of the goals it set out to meet. The technology missed what the promoters admitted was the critical market window. We are now in the post Napster period in which the RIAA and labels are getting complacent about the net again, believing that the court case will kill Napster. The court case probably will kill Napster but the replacements will be even harder to deal with.
Having failled to come up with a secure scheme and having resorted to threats of lawsuits to supress discussion of the flaws in the scheme it is going to be very hard for SDMI to credibly claim that it will deliver a security scheme good enough to entice the labels to permit their content to be sold over the net. Without that key belief SDMI is nothing. Chiariglione would not be stepping aside as director if SDMI was coasting along to a huge success.
The statements in the hearings by the congressmen are very significant. They establish the fact that it was not the will of Congress to empower the SDMI group to act in this manner.
The fact that the act would be unconstitutional if that was the intent is also relevant of course.
There may have been threats, or implied threats, yes. But no one stopped them from publishing their material
Censorship is any attempt to control publication of information. In this case the threats were successfull, it would have been a censorship issue regardless.
The fact that it is a threat of a civil lawsuit is irrelevant. One of the oldest censorship laws still in operation is the English Libel law which was expressly intended as an effective means of censoring the press.
Self censorship is still censorship. The audience at the conference was prevented from hearing the paper.
Not sure what you're smoking, but FTP is considerably more efficient for data transfer than HTTP. (Just try timing downloads of something like, say GNOME using both FTP and HTTP - you'l find that FTP will almost always win...)
FTP requires two separate connections for a data transfer, HTTP requires only one. Packet for packet there is no circumstance in which FTP does not require more packets than HTTP.
There are many inefficient HTTP servers arround, mainly those that try to do intelligent processing of some sort on the content. Also HTTP servers are usually designed to handle lots of requests for small chunks of data rather than infrequent requests for big blocks at a time. Equally comparing a GUI based HTTP client against a line mode based FTP client is ridiculous. Use a good line mode HTTP client and it is much faster than FTP.
Protocol efficiency has nothing to do with implementation efficiency. HTTP is the more efficient protocol.
There are many 'protocol jocks' who think they could have done better. Many are full of it. I don't know anyone seriously suggesting FTP as a design exemplar who has actually coded it (as I have BTW).
BEEP and HTTP-NG address a set of problems that simply do not exist in the FTP world. There is no reason to multiplex sessions onto a single conection for file transfer. The processing overhead of HTTP ASCII headers is common to most IETF protocols and is negligible.
FTP is intentionally designed the way it is so that it would force the TCP stacks to mature much faster than they would have otherwise...
Opening and closing TCP connections has a dramatic negative impact on performance. Each time a TCP connection is opened the van Jackobssen slow start begins from scratch. That is the limiting factor for transfer. Ever wondered why when transferring files on a broadband conection the transfer speed continues to accellerate for 10 to 15 seconds?
I don't think the story is true by the way. It was simply a joke told round the IETF.
There are two bugs here, first the fact that SMTP design means that a list server requires a list admin.
The other bug is that the standard does not differentiate between normal replies and automated replies.
If mailers implemented SMTP correctly and only accepted mail they could process the SMTP codes would suffice. Unfortunately email has acquired a whole set of pathologies, in particular spurious relays. There is no reason my email client cannot effectively deliver mail itself. Instead most email clients insist that the mail be passed to an outgoing mail server, introducing the need to report failed mail.
If this was the SMTP design the authors should have provided for a proper protocol for handing off mail to a mail forwarder. This would provide for reporting of asynchronous error codes.
And removing people automatically as you propose causes even more problems. Even your mail quota can be exceeded;-)
What the list serve does with the error report is its own business. The most sensible approach is to track send failures and dump the user after a certain period.
Moving to a mailer that displays HTML would be a downgrade, not an upgrade. (And worthless, as my.procmailrc bins HTML on incoming mails wherever possible anyway).
The reason you make such ignorant statements is probably because your procmail filters out all mail with a clue as well.
There is no problem reading HTML on a VT100. If you use an obsolete mail client then that is your problem.
I don't use them on my home machines, but I often wish I had - and that is with two users, both of whom know the root password.
When I did sysadmin type stuff I used them extensively.
NT ACLs are very usefull since if you run IIS the file permissions map right through to the web server.
I agree however with a point raised by Butler Lampson several times, ACLs are a pain to manage they should not apply to files. Instead individual users should be allowed to define named access policies via an ACL and then apply the policy to the file.
What this would mean is that if you decide to kick Alice off the system you can revoke all her ACLs at one time, or if you decide to give her special privs you can do it all in one.
Re:But Microsoft will decide to invent their own..
on
New Mail RFCs Released
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· Score: 2
But Microsoft will decide to invent their own standard that they say is better but and not support the new standard. This way _everyone_ will have to have a Windows machine to send email to other people with Windows machines
Mod this chump down, kneejerk Microsoft flamming without cause should have a penalty. Save it for cases where they actually have done something bad.
Microsoft has recently re-engineered Exchange from the ground up so that it uses IETF messaging standards instead of the X.400 derrivatives it was originally designed arround.
Like every other X.400 vendor Microsoft modified X.400, for the simple reason that as specified X.400 did not work - even if you did have an OSI network stack.
Like every other vendor Microsoft also implemented a variant of SMTP, attempting to maximize compatibility with exisiting systems. The whole purpose of the DRUMS group was to take account of the fact that implementing 822 was not sufficient to guarantee interoperability. Microsoft has no vested interedt in having its mail systems fail to interoperate with those of competing vendors.
Of course Microsoft might add in a couple of proprietary extensions with additional functionality, but that is absolutely OK by IETF rules.
now that this work is done perhaps the issues associated with replies to list traffic can be tackled. but the problem isn't as simple to solve as it seems at first, and most of the popular approaches are naive.
I get pretty pissed in the IETF when folk use that line unless they can then follow up with a statement of what the additional problems that need to be considered are.
The whole premise of SMTP is that a naive (Simple) approach to email is sufficient. In many cases the problem is solved simply by the statement of a uniform approach.
Any solution that is not simple is certainly not going to work.
I've seen all the posts about how this really isn't anything new; but, I found something in it that's my personal pet peeve. Section 2.3 "Body" states that the message MUST be limited to 998 characters plus the CRLF and SHOULD be 78 plus the CRLF.
That is my pet peve as well, only in reverse I don't give a crap about your ability to read mail on a DEC Teletype made in 1964 you bought at a car boot sale. In other words go get yourself a client that can display text properly on your cruddy screen, don't expect the rest of the world to cope with your crappy software.
The automatic line wrapping is a pain, especially when you get forwarded mail. You end up getting posts with paragraphs where alternate lines have 78 characters and one word. It also screws up digital signatures
However trying to get people to rewrite text based mailers is probably futile at this point. People who are prepared to upgrade are probably already using HTML capable email clients.
HTML mail can be rendered to any device, including speech. Provided that is that the text is really HTML and not HTML plus one of the braindamaged and intrinsically scripting languages we never needed.
It bothers me that they spend more time on SMTP. SMTP and FTP combined are probably two of the hardest protocols to implement correctly, as is evinced by the numerous vulnerabilities on almost all servers designed for either protocol.
SMTP works. FTP has been effectively replaced by HTTP which is more efficient than FTP for any transfer - with the sole exception of the rarely used ability to initiate a third party transfer.
I have never heard of Internet Mail 2000 and having read the page I can't say I am impressed. I disagree with the premises stated, there is no link to any substantive information. Redoing everything from scratch just isn't an option. There are hundreds of one man bands with ideas that would be great if there was no established infrastructure.
The revision to RFC822 should eliminate most of the implementation difficulty of SMTP and many problems with NNTP.
I remember one case in which the Old Testament was used as prior art. It was a case involving use of urea as a cleaning agent in a dye process. Turns out that it is referenced in the Book of Armaments or some such.
The application being in the UK the prior art was brought to the examiners notice during the one year review period and the application struck out accordingly.
Anyone remember the 3D tank maze game that used to be run on the CYBER cluser at Manchester University?
It must be at least 25 years old but I am pretty sure it represents prior art for the patent.
The patent is probably invalid in any case on account of vagueness. 3D multiplayer games have been arround for many years. The ability to render complex scenes in 3D from unconstrained viewpoints is new but that has nothing to do with the scope of the invention claimed.
The technique of dropping items from a display to reduce processing costs has been used in 3D for at least 30 years.
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I don't see any attempt at a formal definition of the language. Before designing a programming language you should know about operational semantics, denotational semantics and all that good stuff.
There are severe problems with the syntax. The reason the flexible syntax of FORTRAN and COBOL was abandoned was that it introduced bugs. There is a space probe lost on the wrong course because of DO FOR I = 1, 10 being mistyped and interpreted as DOFORI = 1.10.
Program modularity hacks tend to be just that. Multiple inheritance was wildly popular in academia and an utter failure in commercial programming. MIT undergrads could hack it on a student project but when applied on an industrial scale the result was utter confusion. The more someone likes multiple inheritance the more difficult it is to decipher their code.
I don't think we need a new declarative programming language. What would be nice is a good revision of C. C++ was a disaster, give me C any day. Objective C was promising but lost. Java is unfortunately tied to Sun's strategic objective of dislodging Intel and Microsoft (why not have a go at Cisco while they are at it).
If Microsoft was to get the idea of doing a gcc front end for C# they might just get traction. It has all the programming advantages of Java without the four fold loss of performance caused by compiling to a virtual machine based on an obsolete SPARC chip. [yes I know the best java coders can write code that is faster than the worst C coders, the best C coders are a very different story].
What we are really lacking in the Internet age is a language with good handling of communications and parallelism - particularly loosely coupled multiprocessors. Now that Tony Hoare is at Microsoft I guess we can hope that some CSP/OCCAMish features might make it into C#
There are plenty of indentation mode packages arround for emacs already.
Actually they took an existing language called BCPL and wrote a subset called B, then they added a few features back to create C. BCPL was in turn a subset of CPL the all singing all dancing replacement for ALGOL 68 which was a little too good at being all singing and dancing.
In the case of C they wrote the language arround the compiler and vice versa.
Driving arround town there are a lot of 802.11b networks that are left open on purpose. I could care less about someone sending bits over my broadband pipe. Media one might mind but that is a different matter.
If it wasn't for the fact that if I did leave the access point open someone like the author of the article would be bound to post the fact on the net as 'security expert hacked' I would have no problems leaving it open. My internal systems are all behind a firewall in any case.
The RIAA did try a foul. The fact that it afterwards claimed not to have is simply lies on top of lies.
First Ammendment infringements are subject to a very strict standard of review since the courts recognize that the threat of frivolous lawsuits is an effective means of censorship
No, I believe that were it not for imigrants comming in that wage inflation would have started at which point Alan Greenspan would have raised interest rates and killed the boom.
The H1B program had a small part to play here, illegal immigration from Mexico probably had the greatest effect keeping wages down.
Microsoft is probably not that bothered about the effectiveness of the disclaimer in the EU. Unlike the US civil trials do not have juries awarding inane amounts of money for coffee thats a bit hot.
Nor do class actions exist in which a bunch of crooks^h^h^h^h^hlawyers file a suit for damages on behalf of a class, then settle for $100 million in money off coupons for the class and $30 million in hard cash for their own extortion^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^hlegal fees.
In other words the legal system in the EU is not as corrupt and incompetent as that of the US.
A blatantly untrue statement. Or rather it is true to the extent that the creep does not claim that they did not threaten legal action, merely claiming that the threats made were unfounded. However as the Salon article points out the RIAA realized it had screwed up big time.
With the first ammendment implications of the DMCA being debated next week the last thing the RIAA needs is a proof that the act is unconstitutional and being used to chill free speech.
Proof that the RIAA and SDMI folk are not as smart as the cryptographers. Which is pretty much as expected. I mean if you are going to pick stupid fights best not choose folk whose entire mindset is attack and counter measure to six or seven degrees out.
I am on an H1B visa. Last year I paid $500,000 in tax.
Oddly enough the H1B visa is issued by the government of the paleface imigrants and not the native americans that might have a point about imigration.
My company maintains an office for me 2,500 miles from our HQ because I don't want to live in Palo Alto. If the US govt is not going to give me an H1B visa then I'll simply take the job and the office back to Europe and pay taxes there.
The Clinton boom was fulled by the Internet boom which in turn was possible only because it was possible to hire the best people and bring them to the US. Without the ability to bring in high paid technologists and low paid domestic staff the US economy would have seen massive inflation instead of four percent growth for eight years straight.
My company is still hiring and is likely to continue to do so. If were were prevented from hiring workers in the US we would probably begin moving parts of our engineering dept to India.
If you can't hack it against the best in the world, you simply don't deserve the job. Our market is global and so is our workforce. If you have to depend on discrimination because your parents got off the boat a few slightly earlier against a better qualified candidate you have no place in my organization.
This is not as hard as it may appear since most of the members are technology companies looking to hawk their technology. Those whose watermarks etc. have not been choosen are thus likely to be looking for an excuse to withdraw on principled grounds.
If an industry standards group is not going to endorse my technology then it is not exactly in my interests to continue to endorse them but resigning for that reason is going to look kind of bad. Give such folk an excuse to dis SDMI without looking bad and they will be out.
Another group that might well be detached is the second tier of device manufacturers. Sony is the only company to have tried to deliver an SDMI compliant device, an MP3 player that was a spectacular failure until the SDMI component was disabled.
The plain fact is that the record labels have not lived up to their side of the deal, they have not made their content available to download even if you do implement SDMI.
Another company that might be detachable is Microsoft. They have their own DRM package which works pretty well without the SDMI schemes. If Microsoft were to leave SDMI it would effectively be dead.
The fact is that SDMI has met none of the goals it set out to meet. The technology missed what the promoters admitted was the critical market window. We are now in the post Napster period in which the RIAA and labels are getting complacent about the net again, believing that the court case will kill Napster. The court case probably will kill Napster but the replacements will be even harder to deal with.
Having failled to come up with a secure scheme and having resorted to threats of lawsuits to supress discussion of the flaws in the scheme it is going to be very hard for SDMI to credibly claim that it will deliver a security scheme good enough to entice the labels to permit their content to be sold over the net. Without that key belief SDMI is nothing. Chiariglione would not be stepping aside as director if SDMI was coasting along to a huge success.
The fact that the act would be unconstitutional if that was the intent is also relevant of course.
Censorship is any attempt to control publication of information. In this case the threats were successfull, it would have been a censorship issue regardless.
The fact that it is a threat of a civil lawsuit is irrelevant. One of the oldest censorship laws still in operation is the English Libel law which was expressly intended as an effective means of censoring the press.
Self censorship is still censorship. The audience at the conference was prevented from hearing the paper.
Don't forget filing RICO charges as well.
If you have a large quantity of data the overhead of either protocol will be negligible.
The human interface of FTP is better for some tasks, however it is still pretty crappy.
Why not have an interface that allowed the FTP site to simply be mounted as a remote file system in the manner of automount NFS?
FTP requires two separate connections for a data transfer, HTTP requires only one. Packet for packet there is no circumstance in which FTP does not require more packets than HTTP.
There are many inefficient HTTP servers arround, mainly those that try to do intelligent processing of some sort on the content. Also HTTP servers are usually designed to handle lots of requests for small chunks of data rather than infrequent requests for big blocks at a time. Equally comparing a GUI based HTTP client against a line mode based FTP client is ridiculous. Use a good line mode HTTP client and it is much faster than FTP.
Protocol efficiency has nothing to do with implementation efficiency. HTTP is the more efficient protocol.
There are many 'protocol jocks' who think they could have done better. Many are full of it. I don't know anyone seriously suggesting FTP as a design exemplar who has actually coded it (as I have BTW).
BEEP and HTTP-NG address a set of problems that simply do not exist in the FTP world. There is no reason to multiplex sessions onto a single conection for file transfer. The processing overhead of HTTP ASCII headers is common to most IETF protocols and is negligible.
FTP is intentionally designed the way it is so that it would force the TCP stacks to mature much faster than they would have otherwise...
Opening and closing TCP connections has a dramatic negative impact on performance. Each time a TCP connection is opened the van Jackobssen slow start begins from scratch. That is the limiting factor for transfer. Ever wondered why when transferring files on a broadband conection the transfer speed continues to accellerate for 10 to 15 seconds?
I don't think the story is true by the way. It was simply a joke told round the IETF.
There are two bugs here, first the fact that SMTP design means that a list server requires a list admin.
The other bug is that the standard does not differentiate between normal replies and automated replies.
If mailers implemented SMTP correctly and only accepted mail they could process the SMTP codes would suffice. Unfortunately email has acquired a whole set of pathologies, in particular spurious relays. There is no reason my email client cannot effectively deliver mail itself. Instead most email clients insist that the mail be passed to an outgoing mail server, introducing the need to report failed mail.
If this was the SMTP design the authors should have provided for a proper protocol for handing off mail to a mail forwarder. This would provide for reporting of asynchronous error codes.
And removing people automatically as you propose causes even more problems. Even your mail quota can be exceeded ;-)
What the list serve does with the error report is its own business. The most sensible approach is to track send failures and dump the user after a certain period.
The reason you make such ignorant statements is probably because your procmail filters out all mail with a clue as well.
There is no problem reading HTML on a VT100. If you use an obsolete mail client then that is your problem.
I don't use them on my home machines, but I often wish I had - and that is with two users, both of whom know the root password.
When I did sysadmin type stuff I used them extensively.
NT ACLs are very usefull since if you run IIS the file permissions map right through to the web server.
I agree however with a point raised by Butler Lampson several times, ACLs are a pain to manage they should not apply to files. Instead individual users should be allowed to define named access policies via an ACL and then apply the policy to the file.
What this would mean is that if you decide to kick Alice off the system you can revoke all her ACLs at one time, or if you decide to give her special privs you can do it all in one.
Mod this chump down, kneejerk Microsoft flamming without cause should have a penalty. Save it for cases where they actually have done something bad.
Microsoft has recently re-engineered Exchange from the ground up so that it uses IETF messaging standards instead of the X.400 derrivatives it was originally designed arround.
Like every other X.400 vendor Microsoft modified X.400, for the simple reason that as specified X.400 did not work - even if you did have an OSI network stack.
Like every other vendor Microsoft also implemented a variant of SMTP, attempting to maximize compatibility with exisiting systems. The whole purpose of the DRUMS group was to take account of the fact that implementing 822 was not sufficient to guarantee interoperability. Microsoft has no vested interedt in having its mail systems fail to interoperate with those of competing vendors.
Of course Microsoft might add in a couple of proprietary extensions with additional functionality, but that is absolutely OK by IETF rules.
I can answer that /dev/null
Sending automatic error emails is the cause of most email problems and the solution to almost none.
In the case of a mailing list nobody cares that alice did not get the email.
I would however support a proposal to formalize this situation:
Error-Reply-To: /dev/null
OK, maybe, just maybe
Error-Reply-To: http://listserv.test/kick_off_list/that_idiot_alic e
I get pretty pissed in the IETF when folk use that line unless they can then follow up with a statement of what the additional problems that need to be considered are.
The whole premise of SMTP is that a naive (Simple) approach to email is sufficient. In many cases the problem is solved simply by the statement of a uniform approach.
Any solution that is not simple is certainly not going to work.
That is my pet peve as well, only in reverse I don't give a crap about your ability to read mail on a DEC Teletype made in 1964 you bought at a car boot sale. In other words go get yourself a client that can display text properly on your cruddy screen, don't expect the rest of the world to cope with your crappy software.
The automatic line wrapping is a pain, especially when you get forwarded mail. You end up getting posts with paragraphs where alternate lines have 78 characters and one word. It also screws up digital signatures
However trying to get people to rewrite text based mailers is probably futile at this point. People who are prepared to upgrade are probably already using HTML capable email clients.
HTML mail can be rendered to any device, including speech. Provided that is that the text is really HTML and not HTML plus one of the braindamaged and intrinsically scripting languages we never needed.
SMTP works. FTP has been effectively replaced by HTTP which is more efficient than FTP for any transfer - with the sole exception of the rarely used ability to initiate a third party transfer.
I have never heard of Internet Mail 2000 and having read the page I can't say I am impressed. I disagree with the premises stated, there is no link to any substantive information. Redoing everything from scratch just isn't an option. There are hundreds of one man bands with ideas that would be great if there was no established infrastructure.
The revision to RFC822 should eliminate most of the implementation difficulty of SMTP and many problems with NNTP.
The application being in the UK the prior art was brought to the examiners notice during the one year review period and the application struck out accordingly.
It must be at least 25 years old but I am pretty sure it represents prior art for the patent.
The patent is probably invalid in any case on account of vagueness. 3D multiplayer games have been arround for many years. The ability to render complex scenes in 3D from unconstrained viewpoints is new but that has nothing to do with the scope of the invention claimed.
The technique of dropping items from a display to reduce processing costs has been used in 3D for at least 30 years.