Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2001 19:06:42 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: brad.knowles@skynet.be (Brad Knowles) Cc: lowell@world.std.com (Lowell Gilbert), freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FEP RFC Message-ID: <200104171906.MAA26150@usr09.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <p0510013ab7022a19ca4c@[194.78.241.123]> from "Brad Knowles" at Apr 17, 2001 07:17:48 PM
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> >> http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc3093.txt > >> > >> (In case it doesn't sink in right away, look at the date on it.) > > > > I'm not sure that I agree with the "very, very, very dry" assessment, > > at least in the large view. I'd actually call it very *pointed* > > satire. > > I caught the humour when I first read it. Problem is, I fear > that the humour is sufficiently subtle that many people *won't* get > it, and will actually take that one at least semi-seriously -- thus > perhaps actually worsening the problem that they were trying to > lampoon. It's extremely common to tunnel things over HTTP to get around anal-retentive security types in control of the firewalls, who would rather have their networks be entirely secure, rather than allow the company to do the business for which it was incorporated. Many of these people would like nothing better than to take a pair of wire cutters to the power cords, and bury the machines six feet down in cement, thereby making them "safe". The primary use of XML within IBM corporate is routing around people who are so anal retentive that, if you stuck a lump of coal up their posterior in the morning, when you retrieved it the evening of the same day, you would find that it had been transformed into diamond. > > I wrote to Scott Bradner about this issue, and he responded that: > > we were told to make it look serious and maybe we over did it > > > > Anyway, this issue has certainly dampened my appreciation of the > particular document in question, although I don't believe that it > detracts from the humour of the overall series. IP over avian > carriers, indeed. ;-) I think they intentionally left the best parts ambiguous, and rendered it a bad protocol design in the process, to prevent anoyone from actually implementing the thing. If the headers weren't so stupid, and if they had referenced RFC 2043 and specified BASE64 content trandefer encoding, I swear I would have implemented the damn thing, just to be a pain in the ass for the firewall types who get between me and other engineers, and getting my/their job done. This actually would have been better done as a MIME type... Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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