http://www.marginart.com/misc/bofh/13may98.html

"Managers are stack-based," I explain. "Rule one is that they have, at most, a two-item stack limit. Mention a technical term and they'll push it onto their mental stack. Mention another, they push that up there as well. Mention yet another and they stack overload and reboot. That is, they think about what they're going to do after work, how sore their bum is, whether the marketing assistant knows her blouse is almost see-through, and so forth."

Yes, those two lines are physically next to each other on the contract. Look it up on their website if you don't believe me.

I actually thought they changed the contract on me since I remembered reading "nearest" and then saw "up to the next"

I don't know why you all are so confused. The contract is pretty unambiguous to me:

> megabytes sent or received
> using Mobile Web (including
> advertising) will be aggregated each month, rounded up to the next
> megabyte, and billed at
> $1.99/MB.
> Rates are rounded to the nearest whole megabyte. One megabyte is equal
> to 1024 kilobytes.

This would imply a charge of $0 in your case. It would also charge you $2 when rounding up to the whole megabyte.

Using my verizon math skills, I can see that adding these two charges together gives us $2 + 0 = $20.
It would appear that you managed to save a whole 18 cents.

This strategy to stop leaks is brilliant! While we waste our time reading and discussing this document, we won't have time to notice any other leaked documents.

I definitely agree with you. In fact byte streams being a fundamental part of POSIX is one thing I love and make use of every day, for example piping output between programs/sockets. My post was not very clear, but I was trying to say that users developing application protocols should not be using BSD sockets directly any more--people usually write or use libraries for that sort of thing.

As far as new protocols go, you can build basically anything using UDP (and UDP is far less likely to be firewalled than any custom IP-level protocol you make up). I think such a protocol could only ever be practically implemented user-space library anyway

I would be curious what the article thinks is so fundamentally wrong with the sockets paradigm.

I honestly had never heard of SCTP before, and I'm surprised that it is not used more widely since it has been around since 2000. It looks to be more complicated than what I was talking about since it covers more issues (talking to multiple hosts). Do you happen to know of any uses of this protocol in real applications?

BSD Sockets themselves are very flexible, I suppose I was complaining about the read/write semantics in stream sockets. Either way, it is possible to layer protocols even at the application level so it's not a big deal. Sadly I didn't get a chance to read the article before acm.org died.

BSD sockets have a limitation of only a single stream at a time (for example, if you are loading a website over HTTP and you get stuck loading a huge image, you have no choice but to open up another socket connection or else wait). They are also stuck around the paradigm of only supporting byte streams, which means that users are always forced to write the same code over and over to create packet headers or delimited messages.

I would highly recommend checking out Structured Stream Transport. I'm not from MIT and I wasn't entirely satisfied with their sample implementation, but the paper is really insightful and explains how you can develop basically a smarter version of TCP that is both more efficient and also more flexible. And I'm sure there are other systems being developed with similar ideas in mind.

We definitely need to keep bsd sockets, if not just because I'm a regular user of netcat :-p, and also because they are what allow the creation of more advanced protocols, but I don't think most applications should still be using such low-level protocols today.

Ah please disregard the last part of my post--I didn't read it very closely. Still the passive voice makes it unclear and it doesn't indicate any evidence that shows this is related.

Central Processing Units? Firewalls? Scanners? "Computer access codes"? Protocols? Brochures? Books (doesn't say even computer-related)??? They might as well take this guy's whole bloody house! I mean, what's to say that my toaster can't store digital data, or my oven, right?

Aside from "All objects capable of storing digital data in any form" not being very "particular", how can they even justify stealing half that stuff.

If I'm accused of using Linux, how can they have a right to take all books I own? To rip the CPUs off my computer motherboards? To boot up my computer to search for iptables rules? Are there no laws that specify when a search warrant is legal, and what is allowed to be searched?

How can Detective Kevin M. Christopher get away with signing this? I would hope that he's going to have to justify his motives in court.

Another funny, if not so sad line:

And that breaks which law exactly?

I had a 4GB FAT32 flash drive that I used as storage for a mail server attached to an OpenWRT router. It required renaming and deleting files all the time (every time it got an e-mail)--so I think it wore down pretty quickly.

One day, the storage for the flash drive stopped working (from one hour to the next, without being touched, the computer acted like I had just yanked the drive out)--it would be recognized but report a "no media in drive" error when you tried to access it, like an empty CD drive. In fact I think Windows would say "Insert CD" or "No disc in drive F"

It's only been compiling for just a bit over 4 years, so I'm hopeful. It's not like it has crashed or anything... no that wouldn't make any sense...