5 ms·

Me too. What a humbling slap-in-the-face, no? Sometimes when an idea sounds silly, and comes from a less technical person, one might disregard it even though

by air7 7y ago

Me too. What a humbling slap-in-the-face, no? Sometimes when an idea sounds silly, and comes from a less technical person, one might disregard it even though it's easily testable/provable.

butisaidsudo 7y ago
I love these kind of issues, here are two classics: - Open Office won't print on Tuesdays: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161/comments/28 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161... - Can't send email more than 500 miles: http://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles http://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles
- hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
  One thing about the famous "500 miles" post that I realized doesn't make sense: ---- An odd feature of our campus network at the time was that it was 100% switched. An outgoing packet wouldn't incur a router delay until hitting the POP and reaching a router on the far side. So time to connect to a lightly-loaded remote host on a nearby network would actually largely be governed by the speed of light distance to the destination rather than by incidental router delays. Feeling slightly giddy, I typed into my shell: $ units 1311 units, 63 prefixes You have: 3 millilightseconds You want: miles * 558.84719 / 0.0017893979 ---- But surely for Sendmail to register a "connect" with a remote SMTP server would require at least one (or many?) round trips to the remote server, so one-way speed of light time doesn't seem like it would really be relevant. Am I missing something?
  - NateEag 7y ago
    Possibly the introduction wherein the author says: "The story is slightly altered in order to protect the guilty, elide over irrelevant and boring details, and generally make the whole thing more entertaining." If memory serves he goes into further detail about the alterations and some common objections to the story in his FAQ: https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html
  - tomcatfish 7y ago
    I believe one version of this story explains that the math (and the situation) has been simplified for the sake of this story in order to make it readable. Makes sense, I can share this story to people without any computer knowledge, but something explaining how connections are established would be wholly incomprehensible to them.
  - jwandborg 7y ago
    The speed of electricity in copper is lower than the speed of light in a vacuum. The speed of light in fiber optics seems to be even lower.
- mywittyname 7y ago
  That last one is brilliant.
- dpkonofa 7y ago
  What in the world could possibly be the reason in that first story for the 'file' program to look for the string 'Tue' and change to the Jam filetype? That's gotta be a very niche case, right?
koala_man 7y ago
On that subject, don't make fun of people who paste screenshots into Word docs and email them. On Windows 95, that was a really good idea! MS Word was one of the few ubiquitous tools that would compress images, and certainly one of the few that people could be counted on to know. MS Paint didn't support PNG until Win98, and even then wouldn't do it by default. If you didn't go via Word, chances are you'd be emailing a 900kB BMP at a time when people used 28.8k modems to access Hotmail accounts with 2MB caps.
- codedokode 7y ago
  Also, MSPaint on Windows XP adds ".PNG" extension in uppercase which is also annoying.

by air7 7y ago

Me too. What a humbling slap-in-the-face, no? Sometimes when an idea sounds silly, and comes from a less technical person, one might disregard it even though it's easily testable/provable.

butisaidsudo 7y ago

I love these kind of issues, here are two classics: - Open Office won't print on Tuesdays: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161/comments/28 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161... - Can't send email more than 500 miles: http://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles http://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles

hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
One thing about the famous "500 miles" post that I realized doesn't make sense: ---- An odd feature of our campus network at the time was that it was 100% switched. An outgoing packet wouldn't incur a router delay until hitting the POP and reaching a router on the far side. So time to connect to a lightly-loaded remote host on a nearby network would actually largely be governed by the speed of light distance to the destination rather than by incidental router delays. Feeling slightly giddy, I typed into my shell: $ units 1311 units, 63 prefixes You have: 3 millilightseconds You want: miles * 558.84719 / 0.0017893979 ---- But surely for Sendmail to register a "connect" with a remote SMTP server would require at least one (or many?) round trips to the remote server, so one-way speed of light time doesn't seem like it would really be relevant. Am I missing something?
- NateEag 7y ago
  Possibly the introduction wherein the author says: "The story is slightly altered in order to protect the guilty, elide over irrelevant and boring details, and generally make the whole thing more entertaining." If memory serves he goes into further detail about the alterations and some common objections to the story in his FAQ: https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html
- tomcatfish 7y ago
  I believe one version of this story explains that the math (and the situation) has been simplified for the sake of this story in order to make it readable. Makes sense, I can share this story to people without any computer knowledge, but something explaining how connections are established would be wholly incomprehensible to them.
- jwandborg 7y ago
  The speed of electricity in copper is lower than the speed of light in a vacuum. The speed of light in fiber optics seems to be even lower.
mywittyname 7y ago
That last one is brilliant.
dpkonofa 7y ago
What in the world could possibly be the reason in that first story for the 'file' program to look for the string 'Tue' and change to the Jam filetype? That's gotta be a very niche case, right?

koala_man 7y ago

On that subject, don't make fun of people who paste screenshots into Word docs and email them. On Windows 95, that was a really good idea! MS Word was one of the few ubiquitous tools that would compress images, and certainly one of the few that people could be counted on to know. MS Paint didn't support PNG until Win98, and even then wouldn't do it by default. If you didn't go via Word, chances are you'd be emailing a 900kB BMP at a time when people used 28.8k modems to access Hotmail accounts with 2MB caps.

codedokode 7y ago
Also, MSPaint on Windows XP adds ".PNG" extension in uppercase which is also annoying.