In all honesty, what are you talking about? You can pick up OCaml right now and I/O is just fine. Period.
Yeah, yeah and you could write programs in ANSI Pascal, problem was you could not do it without a lot of hassle.
Under dotNET there are no second class languages (well apart from C++), they all can access the same runtime. That is a major advance. OK you could write to the Java bytecode but anything other than Java will always be a second class language in that environment.
It's OCaml for the.NET CLR. Not a new language. Nothing to see here. Move along.
Yes, but the problem with most ML implementations is that they are academic toy languages. You can't do anything useful with them because you can't connect them to real I/O and if you can you can't distribute the code as noone else has the environment.
Adding the dotNET classes to ML means you have a real programming environment for a functional language.
Re:That censorship thing.
on
I, Spammer
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· Score: 1
Fair comment. I fail to see why your comment was modded as a troll, however.
Maybe as an ironic comment?
The whole post was pointing out that you cannot necessarily trust people you don't know to censor your email without allowing their own prejudices to creep in.
It does not matter if it is done by the government or private individuals, it is equally bad. The Hayes code and the British Board of Film Censors were both industry created boards acting with quasi government authority.
One of the things I discovered when I started to try to do something about spam was that there are a heck of a lot of vested interests. And not the ones you think, not the big corporations, the little ones. Worst of all turn out to be non-profit volunteer outfits who thing that because they are unpaid nobody has a right to criticize them - even when they block other people's legitimate email on their own caprices.
At least with slashdot the meta-moderation layer does have an effect of sorts. Although I often find that out of ten meta-mods seven will just be modding down first posts and goatsex trolls and half the other three are likely to be iffy. Most of the iffy moderations give 'over-rated' which I suspect is their way of trying to avoid the metamoderation penalizing them.
Wow! Better treatment than under the Democrats? I can't wait to see how many crooks get a pardon 3 minutes before W leaves office!
Maybe he will start by pardoning himself for his DUI criminal conviction and for deserting the National guard during Vietnam?
It is curious that those criticising Clinton saw nothing wrong in the midnight pardons given out by Bush mkI to pardon the contragate indictees.
One of the Contragate convictees is John Poindexter, currently head of the Hoover-like Total Information Awareness program. Oh yeah he did eventually get off on a technicality but he did admit the crime.
while pure 802.11g networks will have actual data rates of around 20Mbit/sec.
Yeah but that is with the TCP/IP stack on top. You are comparing actual throughput with the raw theoretical throughput.
The real throughput would be much less than 56Mbit on the original spec. You have the parity, stop, start bits, framing for TCP, IP and the wireless layer, you have the beacon stuff going on.
The article admits that 802.11b gets less than half of the 11Mbits/sec raw speed. So what was the rate without the new spec?
The article basically says everything but the info we actually need.
Re:Early parts overclockable?
on
802.11g Slows Down
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· Score: 2, Informative
I wonder if any early-produced products will be somehow unlockable to the faster speed.
The early parts don't seem to work too well in mixed 802.11b/g networks, seem to go at the.11b speeds all the time. So the real question is whether you still get a hit in a pure.11g network, which is unclear from the article.
That censorship thing.
on
I, Spammer
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· Score: 0, Troll
Well, it is. I hereby formally reserve the right to censor my own email. Anybody who violates that right had better not get too close to me, or I'll nail his hide to a fence.
Yep, censorship is not a bad thing when it is carried out with the full consent and knowledge of the person receiving the information. I have Postini censor all my mail, damned useful too, means my RIM pager is actually worth something rather than giving me three screens full of spam. Postini is currently blocking about 300 spams a day for me. It does make mistakes but I go through and fish them out. I now lose less mail overall than I did before when good mail was often overlooked as junk
The censorship thing is real though. There are plenty of anti-spam crusaders who are worse than the spam senders. They abuse the trust that users have in them. One blacklist was closed down because the maintainer blacklisted his ISPs after they threatened to cut him off for not paying bills. It is not an isolated case, DCC is regularly abused in similar ways. Vernon Schryer reports posts from people he does not like on the IRTF anti-spam list as spam.
So no the spammer guy's complaint is not valid. But the problem of censorship is real. There are groups who organize campaigns to get opposing mailing lists blocked. The EFF reported that MoveOn.org's list was hit in that way. I'll bet that Rush Limbaugh has the same problem.
The basic problem is that people have got so worked up on 'stop spam at any cost' they are willing to allow their mail to be censored by people they have no knowledge of at all and no reason to trust. It can't be long before we find a blacklist being run by a spam sender, that would be a cool move, people would help you find open relays, you could blacklist your competition and whitelist yourself.
They just changed the terminology (VM+core classes == CLR, IL == bytecode, JIT == JIT,...). The only difference being not to have to use one syntax (java C#, VB,...)
No, that is pure sophistry. The sophists were a bunch of Greek philosophers who argued that black was white bu defining black to be a shade of grey, white to be a shade of grey and having redefined both as grey concluded black was white.
Yes there is a VM concept in every compiled language, Fortran is a VM concept. However there is a big difference in implementation, in Java the bytecode is an actual microprocessor instruction set. In CLR it is an annotated code tree. That does not mean that.NET has a concept that is analogous to the Java sandbox VM model, it does not.
I hated every minute of it because it's a pain in the ass and antiquated and outdated. We have an entire department dedicated to the maintenance of IBM MVS 390 systems that basically run the entire school.
Yep, old story. The problem is that people who don't understand computers believe that the cost of writing the program is the same as the cost of coding it. If you have the COBOL source and a reasonable idea of the architecture it is a lot easier to recode the application than it was to write it.
The big barrier is testing. But even that can be done reasonably efficiently. If you have a stack of cobol that hasn't been touched for twenty years the chances are it is costing you much more than the risk of a few bugs.
Ever wondered why it takes three times as long to check in on US Air than other airlines> The real reason they went bankrupt is they based their business on a twenty year old creaky IT infrastructure.
But.NET runs in a VM and is supposed to be sandboxed.
Actually the.NET code model is not a VM. The only reason you think that is that you believe the FUD that.NET is simply a Java copy. It isn't.
There is a sandbox, but it is enforced by the O/S controls not the byte loader. The security model does not undertake to protect private members.
Re:Posted on BugTraq
on
Hijacking .NET
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· Score: 4, Informative
Isn't this a security bug, you think that you've hidden some code, but infact it isn't.
No, not really, the private keyword is not meant to be a security mechanism. If you want to secure the data from program access you have to do it at the Kernel level.
You can view this info in the debugger if you have the source for the class.
The reason for making a method private is that the programmer does not undertake to preserve the API contract in future releases. So basically what this guy is doing is no different from those early MSDOS programs that bypassed the BIOS calling interface to call code directly. It was fast, you avoided the overhead of the context switch. However it also meant that the code was likely to fail on the next release of the PC.
Plain text may not be as pretty, but it's eminently readable, and can be used absolutely everywhere. It's also trivially easy to turn in to the proprietary dog's breakfast of your choosing. Unlike even HTML, it will be just as readable and usable in another 20 years as it is today.
Well lets consider for a moment the probability there might be a problem of reading HTML in 20, 100 and 1000 years.
Twenty years is a no-brainer, there are plenty of books on FORTRAN and COBOL in the bookstores, they are still being bought and still being written. Is there a large probability that HTML will not be supported in at least the same degree in 20 years time? I very much doubt it.
A hundred years is slightly harder to justify since we don't have electronic computer systems that old. We have tabulators that old however and the dimpled chads being counted in Florida were based on exactly that technology. If people are interested in the RFCs they will make sure they can be read.
A thousand years is much harder. It is impossible to say with certainty that the bomb throwers won't win in the meantime and destroy civilization. Let us imagine for a moment they suceed, the biggest difficulty in recovering RFC information is likely to be the storage medium.
Let us imagine we can read the bits but have forgotten HTML. How long is it likely to take someone to work out the text? Since we used edit the documents by hand I doubt it would take very much. Perhaps a couple of days to work out what the ASCII codes were and another couple of days to put together an HTML code dictionary.
Of course if you have the RFCs to work on you could even find the HTML 2.0 RFC which describes the format.
I do agree with your statement that plaintext will be just as readable in 20 years though. I expect HTML, even HTML4.01 vintage to be MORE readable in twenty years. HTML abstracts the content from the formatting, so it is not limited by the technology of its day.
I was not involved in the working group, and while I appreciate the efforts of all who do contribute in those discussions, I do wish you would not try to make that fact justify everything you say.
Actually I was pointing out that you should not call people liars when they have direct knowledge of an issue and you do not. You raised your book as your credentials.
Your original post appeared to ridicule someone who simply recommended "reading up" on HTTP at the W3C's Web site.
If you read the post more carefully you would have seen that I was actually addressing the same point you were trying to raise. There is a value to secondary sources as documentation of the applications that are out there.
In addition, you seemed to undermine the importance of the very RFCs you claim to have contributed to
The RFCs are merely a means to an end, the definitive specification of the Web is the code of the applications that are in use. The RFCs only obtain importance by being read and understood. Hence my point about the format mattering. There is little that can be done about the prose style that is necessary in a specification, the typography is quite a different matter. There is no excuse for bad typography.
I merely found it amusing that Tim has apparently become as fed up with the RFC format as I have. In the past he would have insisted on there being a hypertext link rather than copy the entire document.
HTTP was created long before it was handed off to be maintained by the IETF. It existed prior to the RFC that you claim to have co-wrote. The only reason that exchange was made is because HTTP is viewed as a piece of the Internet's infrastructure; in fact it is essentially where the Internet and the Web intersect.
Well yes, before there was HTTP 1.1 there was HTTP 1.0. There was also an HTTP 0.9 that was arround before that...
HTTP was NOT handed off to the IETF by the W3C as your post appears to imply, there was no W3C at that time. HTTP was taken to the IETF to get recognition as a protocol standard. There was no 'handing off', the same people continued to work on the protocol as before. The only significant change was that the mailing list changed, www-talk had become very noisy by this time. The IETF has change control in a nominal sense, they can write new versions of the spec and call them HTTP, but so can anyone else, they just might have more difficulty getting others to recognise them...
That is the reason there are two sets of acknowledgements in the spec. The first set is the original authors, the second the set of people who worked on the draft after the IETF process started.
I don't seem to remember your name from any of the Web working groups I have been associated with. It is unlikely that if you know as much as you claim to about the Web that you don't know mine. I don't think that publishing a book about my work gives you the right to accuse me or for that matter anyone else of being a liar.
Perhaps if you actually read what I wrote rather than what you think I wrote you might not have made such a fool of yourself.
I wrote part of the HTML 4.0 spec so you can thank me for deprecating the tag. I think you can guess who I am.
Well you don't sound like Dave Ragget.
I don't think that we can give you the credit for deprecating BLINK. That situation was over-determined.
I can't find any statement about Blink in HTML 4.01. That does not suprise me since it was never in the spec in the first place. It was originally put in as a easter egg by Lou and Eric.
And yet, as has been pointed out, you can indeed find it on the w3 site.
That is not actually RFC 2616, the standard for HTTP. It is RFC 2616 that has been converted into HTML. According to the IETF rules the authoritative version is the unreadable plaintext version.
Anyone care to guess why Tim might have the RFC up in HTML?
For bonus credit, anyone care to guess which version the members of the working group actually reviewed?
Or, you could just check out the W3C and read up on it without the need of someone making edits to the explanations of the actual specs.
Where do you think you can find HTTP on the W3C site?
HTTP was standardized in IETF process, not W3C. HTML started in IETF process and then we yanked it out and did it in W3C. IETF process is not the place to work on something where there are religious wars, the SGML folk were big on religious wars.
The RFCs on HTTP are useful if you are writing a server or client, however they are less useful as a guide to how what is out there works. One of the big problems with the IETF is that the RFCs look like shit, they are designed to be printed in a fixed width font because thats the way they did things in Babbage's day. So not surprisingly engineers tend to go for documentation that is easier on the eye, even if it turns out to be wrong.
The other issue with the specs is that they describe what the WG came up with. That does not necessarily represent reality, the group took seven years to complete. If you want to know what will work you need more information than is in the RFC.
I wrote parts of the HTTP spec and even I would want more information than just the spec. I am not sure about the 'advice' about working arround older broken proxies, I tend to think its not a bad thing if folk running obsolete software lose every so often. But it is useful to know that it can be an issue.
SCO most certainly can revoke a license if they can show that IBM materially breached a contract they signed regarding that license.
That is very unlikely, the type of contracts that are signed arround O/S code are typically structured to prevent any claim of that sort.
SCO is attempting to claim under copyright law independent of the contract because the contract will deprive it of pretty much any form of redress. See the Sun/Microsoft case for an example of the standard terms. Sun only got away with that case because they found a pliant judge who was willing to disregard the contract terms that strictly prohibited any sort of injunction. The case was brought on the underlying copyrights, not the contract.
Which kinda points out why SCO's case is ultimately futile. If Microsoft had thought there was anything there they would have bought SCO and then sued Sun.
I would agree, except that I don't see the end of this case being years off. SCO has stated a deadline by which they want IBM to buy them out -- June 13 -- or face having their Unix license for AIX revoked.
IBM signed its license agreement with AT&T long ago. There is nothing SCO can do to revoke it.
SCO can say that they can revoke it but they simply don't have that power. IBM on the other hand DO have the power to tell Caldera 'sit on it and spin'.
This is nothing more than the death throes of a company looking to get bought out.
Selling the patent license to Microsoft is kinda cute, Microsoft probably didn't have to pay too much and there is probably some piece of SCO technology somewhere that would allow a claim to be made they infringed. SCO could not make the claim because Microsoft can say the same of them. If however SCO is liquidated the patents could be bought by a private patent-extortion outfit.
Remember "Deep Throat", the anonymous informer who uncovered Nixon's Watergate scandal? I believe there's a good reason that the informer chose to remain anonymous...to this day
Yes, Bush Minor would probably not want to invite Henry K. round to the whitehouse and have him sit on defense committees if he knew he was the traitor.
Now that the Nixon tapes are public we can even have a pretty good idea what the motive was. Nixon probably just made one of his anti-semitic remarks in Henry's earshot.
If it was anyone other than Henry K. they would have had every incentive to step forward by now. Only someone who wanted a continuing place in the GOP would need to be anonymous. That narrows it down to henry K., Pat Buchannan and William Safire... The last two didn't know enough to squeak and if they had known they would have kept quiet.
I'm a scuba diver, and one of the first things you learn about are decompression related injuries, such as the bends. Every thirty feet you decend, you add one atmosphere of pressure.
Yeah, I don't think that anyone was claiming that being in a vaccum was a good thing. Sure if you depressurized fast it could blow out your eardrums. You would probably get nitrogen bubbles in your blood and internal organs would probably start bleeding.
You would also have a mild case of death from the lack of oxygen.
But they certainly would not have any difficulty finding you all in one piece to put in the coffin.
You're looking at pressure the wrong way. It isn't the zero pressure that's actually the problem. Its the pressure of the gas in the bubble. The same thing with human beings.
The whole bit about humans exploding in a vaccum is false. Arthur C Clarke did a whole thing about this, that is why they don't have people exploding in 2001 when HAL severs their air line.
Besides, it would be much easier to put the disk in a nitrogen atmosphere than a vaccum. Nitrogen is practically inert at normal temperatures and pressures. Thats why the Harber process to fix nitrogen took so long to develop.
They claim that enough of the SysV code in linux was cut n' paste of their code.
Frankly, I think they could be right, and the zealots would be wise not to dismiss everything SCO says and does as stupidity.
The problemo that they have though is that 'SCO' is really Caldera inc which in turn used to sell Linux. There is a big problem with distributing linux if you intend to get heavy on the IP trip. As Bill Gates observed, Linux was released under a viral license which in effect strips away most of SCO's intellectual property rights.
The only things that Caldera can enforce its rights on at this point is code that is in the SCO code base AND a Linux distribution AND NOT in any Caldera distribution that shipped after the SCO acquisition.
The other tricky problem they have is detrimental reliance. Oh and don't discount the fact that getting into an IP pissing contest with IBM or Microsoft or any of the really big players is suicidal for any technology company, those guys have more patents to fire back in self defense its not funny.
The only reason SCO is doing this is that its their last gasp survival attempt - get bought by someone big.
A much cheaper way to do the same thing would be to put the company up for sale on EBay.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, yeah and you could write programs in ANSI Pascal, problem was you could not do it without a lot of hassle.
Under dotNET there are no second class languages (well apart from C++), they all can access the same runtime. That is a major advance. OK you could write to the Java bytecode but anything other than Java will always be a second class language in that environment.
Yes, but the problem with most ML implementations is that they are academic toy languages. You can't do anything useful with them because you can't connect them to real I/O and if you can you can't distribute the code as noone else has the environment.
Adding the dotNET classes to ML means you have a real programming environment for a functional language.
Maybe as an ironic comment?
The whole post was pointing out that you cannot necessarily trust people you don't know to censor your email without allowing their own prejudices to creep in.
It does not matter if it is done by the government or private individuals, it is equally bad. The Hayes code and the British Board of Film Censors were both industry created boards acting with quasi government authority.
One of the things I discovered when I started to try to do something about spam was that there are a heck of a lot of vested interests. And not the ones you think, not the big corporations, the little ones. Worst of all turn out to be non-profit volunteer outfits who thing that because they are unpaid nobody has a right to criticize them - even when they block other people's legitimate email on their own caprices.
At least with slashdot the meta-moderation layer does have an effect of sorts. Although I often find that out of ten meta-mods seven will just be modding down first posts and goatsex trolls and half the other three are likely to be iffy. Most of the iffy moderations give 'over-rated' which I suspect is their way of trying to avoid the metamoderation penalizing them.
No, for going AWOL from the guard for over a year. That sir, is called desertion. And it is not covered by the Carter amnesty.
Maybe he will start by pardoning himself for his DUI criminal conviction and for deserting the National guard during Vietnam?
It is curious that those criticising Clinton saw nothing wrong in the midnight pardons given out by Bush mkI to pardon the contragate indictees.
One of the Contragate convictees is John Poindexter, currently head of the Hoover-like Total Information Awareness program. Oh yeah he did eventually get off on a technicality but he did admit the crime.
Yeah but that is with the TCP/IP stack on top. You are comparing actual throughput with the raw theoretical throughput.
The real throughput would be much less than 56Mbit on the original spec. You have the parity, stop, start bits, framing for TCP, IP and the wireless layer, you have the beacon stuff going on.
The article admits that 802.11b gets less than half of the 11Mbits/sec raw speed. So what was the rate without the new spec?
The article basically says everything but the info we actually need.
The early parts don't seem to work too well in mixed 802.11b/g networks, seem to go at the .11b speeds all the time. So the real question is whether you still get a hit in a pure .11g network, which is unclear from the article.
Yep, censorship is not a bad thing when it is carried out with the full consent and knowledge of the person receiving the information. I have Postini censor all my mail, damned useful too, means my RIM pager is actually worth something rather than giving me three screens full of spam. Postini is currently blocking about 300 spams a day for me. It does make mistakes but I go through and fish them out. I now lose less mail overall than I did before when good mail was often overlooked as junk
The censorship thing is real though. There are plenty of anti-spam crusaders who are worse than the spam senders. They abuse the trust that users have in them. One blacklist was closed down because the maintainer blacklisted his ISPs after they threatened to cut him off for not paying bills. It is not an isolated case, DCC is regularly abused in similar ways. Vernon Schryer reports posts from people he does not like on the IRTF anti-spam list as spam.
So no the spammer guy's complaint is not valid. But the problem of censorship is real. There are groups who organize campaigns to get opposing mailing lists blocked. The EFF reported that MoveOn.org's list was hit in that way. I'll bet that Rush Limbaugh has the same problem.
The basic problem is that people have got so worked up on 'stop spam at any cost' they are willing to allow their mail to be censored by people they have no knowledge of at all and no reason to trust. It can't be long before we find a blacklist being run by a spam sender, that would be a cool move, people would help you find open relays, you could blacklist your competition and whitelist yourself.
No, that is pure sophistry. The sophists were a bunch of Greek philosophers who argued that black was white bu defining black to be a shade of grey, white to be a shade of grey and having redefined both as grey concluded black was white.
Yes there is a VM concept in every compiled language, Fortran is a VM concept. However there is a big difference in implementation, in Java the bytecode is an actual microprocessor instruction set. In CLR it is an annotated code tree. That does not mean that .NET has a concept that is analogous to the Java sandbox VM model, it does not.
Yep, old story. The problem is that people who don't understand computers believe that the cost of writing the program is the same as the cost of coding it. If you have the COBOL source and a reasonable idea of the architecture it is a lot easier to recode the application than it was to write it.
The big barrier is testing. But even that can be done reasonably efficiently. If you have a stack of cobol that hasn't been touched for twenty years the chances are it is costing you much more than the risk of a few bugs.
Ever wondered why it takes three times as long to check in on US Air than other airlines> The real reason they went bankrupt is they based their business on a twenty year old creaky IT infrastructure.
Actually the .NET code model is not a VM. The only reason you think that is that you believe the FUD that .NET is simply a Java copy. It isn't.
There is a sandbox, but it is enforced by the O/S controls not the byte loader. The security model does not undertake to protect private members.
No, not really, the private keyword is not meant to be a security mechanism. If you want to secure the data from program access you have to do it at the Kernel level.
You can view this info in the debugger if you have the source for the class.
The reason for making a method private is that the programmer does not undertake to preserve the API contract in future releases. So basically what this guy is doing is no different from those early MSDOS programs that bypassed the BIOS calling interface to call code directly. It was fast, you avoided the overhead of the context switch. However it also meant that the code was likely to fail on the next release of the PC.
Well lets consider for a moment the probability there might be a problem of reading HTML in 20, 100 and 1000 years.
Twenty years is a no-brainer, there are plenty of books on FORTRAN and COBOL in the bookstores, they are still being bought and still being written. Is there a large probability that HTML will not be supported in at least the same degree in 20 years time? I very much doubt it.
A hundred years is slightly harder to justify since we don't have electronic computer systems that old. We have tabulators that old however and the dimpled chads being counted in Florida were based on exactly that technology. If people are interested in the RFCs they will make sure they can be read.
A thousand years is much harder. It is impossible to say with certainty that the bomb throwers won't win in the meantime and destroy civilization. Let us imagine for a moment they suceed, the biggest difficulty in recovering RFC information is likely to be the storage medium.
Let us imagine we can read the bits but have forgotten HTML. How long is it likely to take someone to work out the text? Since we used edit the documents by hand I doubt it would take very much. Perhaps a couple of days to work out what the ASCII codes were and another couple of days to put together an HTML code dictionary.
Of course if you have the RFCs to work on you could even find the HTML 2.0 RFC which describes the format.
I do agree with your statement that plaintext will be just as readable in 20 years though. I expect HTML, even HTML4.01 vintage to be MORE readable in twenty years. HTML abstracts the content from the formatting, so it is not limited by the technology of its day.
Actually I was pointing out that you should not call people liars when they have direct knowledge of an issue and you do not. You raised your book as your credentials.
Your original post appeared to ridicule someone who simply recommended "reading up" on HTTP at the W3C's Web site.
If you read the post more carefully you would have seen that I was actually addressing the same point you were trying to raise. There is a value to secondary sources as documentation of the applications that are out there.
In addition, you seemed to undermine the importance of the very RFCs you claim to have contributed to
The RFCs are merely a means to an end, the definitive specification of the Web is the code of the applications that are in use. The RFCs only obtain importance by being read and understood. Hence my point about the format mattering. There is little that can be done about the prose style that is necessary in a specification, the typography is quite a different matter. There is no excuse for bad typography.
I merely found it amusing that Tim has apparently become as fed up with the RFC format as I have. In the past he would have insisted on there being a hypertext link rather than copy the entire document.
Well yes, before there was HTTP 1.1 there was HTTP 1.0. There was also an HTTP 0.9 that was arround before that...
HTTP was NOT handed off to the IETF by the W3C as your post appears to imply, there was no W3C at that time. HTTP was taken to the IETF to get recognition as a protocol standard. There was no 'handing off', the same people continued to work on the protocol as before. The only significant change was that the mailing list changed, www-talk had become very noisy by this time. The IETF has change control in a nominal sense, they can write new versions of the spec and call them HTTP, but so can anyone else, they just might have more difficulty getting others to recognise them...
That is the reason there are two sets of acknowledgements in the spec. The first set is the original authors, the second the set of people who worked on the draft after the IETF process started.
I don't seem to remember your name from any of the Web working groups I have been associated with. It is unlikely that if you know as much as you claim to about the Web that you don't know mine. I don't think that publishing a book about my work gives you the right to accuse me or for that matter anyone else of being a liar.
Perhaps if you actually read what I wrote rather than what you think I wrote you might not have made such a fool of yourself.
Well you don't sound like Dave Ragget.
I don't think that we can give you the credit for deprecating BLINK. That situation was over-determined.
I can't find any statement about Blink in HTML 4.01. That does not suprise me since it was never in the spec in the first place. It was originally put in as a easter egg by Lou and Eric.
That is not actually RFC 2616, the standard for HTTP. It is RFC 2616 that has been converted into HTML. According to the IETF rules the authoritative version is the unreadable plaintext version.
Anyone care to guess why Tim might have the RFC up in HTML?
For bonus credit, anyone care to guess which version the members of the working group actually reviewed?
Where do you think you can find HTTP on the W3C site?
HTTP was standardized in IETF process, not W3C. HTML started in IETF process and then we yanked it out and did it in W3C. IETF process is not the place to work on something where there are religious wars, the SGML folk were big on religious wars.
The RFCs on HTTP are useful if you are writing a server or client, however they are less useful as a guide to how what is out there works. One of the big problems with the IETF is that the RFCs look like shit, they are designed to be printed in a fixed width font because thats the way they did things in Babbage's day. So not surprisingly engineers tend to go for documentation that is easier on the eye, even if it turns out to be wrong.
The other issue with the specs is that they describe what the WG came up with. That does not necessarily represent reality, the group took seven years to complete. If you want to know what will work you need more information than is in the RFC.
I wrote parts of the HTTP spec and even I would want more information than just the spec. I am not sure about the 'advice' about working arround older broken proxies, I tend to think its not a bad thing if folk running obsolete software lose every so often. But it is useful to know that it can be an issue.
John Mallery at the MIT AI Lab used the mechanism in 1992 for the political participation project.
There are probably even earlier uses. Lots of mailing lists were using the idea simply to validate addresses.
That is very unlikely, the type of contracts that are signed arround O/S code are typically structured to prevent any claim of that sort.
SCO is attempting to claim under copyright law independent of the contract because the contract will deprive it of pretty much any form of redress. See the Sun/Microsoft case for an example of the standard terms. Sun only got away with that case because they found a pliant judge who was willing to disregard the contract terms that strictly prohibited any sort of injunction. The case was brought on the underlying copyrights, not the contract.
Which kinda points out why SCO's case is ultimately futile. If Microsoft had thought there was anything there they would have bought SCO and then sued Sun.
IBM signed its license agreement with AT&T long ago. There is nothing SCO can do to revoke it.
SCO can say that they can revoke it but they simply don't have that power. IBM on the other hand DO have the power to tell Caldera 'sit on it and spin'.
This is nothing more than the death throes of a company looking to get bought out.
Selling the patent license to Microsoft is kinda cute, Microsoft probably didn't have to pay too much and there is probably some piece of SCO technology somewhere that would allow a claim to be made they infringed. SCO could not make the claim because Microsoft can say the same of them. If however SCO is liquidated the patents could be bought by a private patent-extortion outfit.
Yes, Bush Minor would probably not want to invite Henry K. round to the whitehouse and have him sit on defense committees if he knew he was the traitor.
Now that the Nixon tapes are public we can even have a pretty good idea what the motive was. Nixon probably just made one of his anti-semitic remarks in Henry's earshot.
If it was anyone other than Henry K. they would have had every incentive to step forward by now. Only someone who wanted a continuing place in the GOP would need to be anonymous. That narrows it down to henry K., Pat Buchannan and William Safire... The last two didn't know enough to squeak and if they had known they would have kept quiet.
Yeah, I don't think that anyone was claiming that being in a vaccum was a good thing. Sure if you depressurized fast it could blow out your eardrums. You would probably get nitrogen bubbles in your blood and internal organs would probably start bleeding.
You would also have a mild case of death from the lack of oxygen.
But they certainly would not have any difficulty finding you all in one piece to put in the coffin.
The whole bit about humans exploding in a vaccum is false. Arthur C Clarke did a whole thing about this, that is why they don't have people exploding in 2001 when HAL severs their air line.
Besides, it would be much easier to put the disk in a nitrogen atmosphere than a vaccum. Nitrogen is practically inert at normal temperatures and pressures. Thats why the Harber process to fix nitrogen took so long to develop.
The problemo that they have though is that 'SCO' is really Caldera inc which in turn used to sell Linux. There is a big problem with distributing linux if you intend to get heavy on the IP trip. As Bill Gates observed, Linux was released under a viral license which in effect strips away most of SCO's intellectual property rights.
The only things that Caldera can enforce its rights on at this point is code that is in the SCO code base AND a Linux distribution AND NOT in any Caldera distribution that shipped after the SCO acquisition.
The other tricky problem they have is detrimental reliance. Oh and don't discount the fact that getting into an IP pissing contest with IBM or Microsoft or any of the really big players is suicidal for any technology company, those guys have more patents to fire back in self defense its not funny.
The only reason SCO is doing this is that its their last gasp survival attempt - get bought by someone big.
A much cheaper way to do the same thing would be to put the company up for sale on EBay.