Microsoft Patents Everything! March 26, 2001 9:09 PM Subscribe
Microsoft Patents Everything! Oh dear lord, what will we do now? Has Mr. Gates finally found a way to take over the world? posted by stew560 (14 comments total)
For those of you who haven't figured it out. It's a hoax. Look here and here.
Had me fooled for half a second! posted by stew560 at 9:11 PM on March 26, 2001
Gee, i remember when the @-sign URL-masking trick was interesting... posted by harmful at 9:11 PM on March 26, 2001
I give it 36 hours 'til CNN has fired off their boilerplate cease-and-desist copyright-infringement volley. Anyone else want in? posted by youhas at 9:33 PM on March 26, 2001
Oh, and it's a direct lift from The Onion! An infringement two-fer! Argh. posted by youhas at 9:39 PM on March 26, 2001
...For the unkowing (read- stupid like me) how does the @-sign thing work, in hostname resolution terms? posted by stew560 at 3:35 AM on March 27, 2001
On the second picture I expected Bill to say:
ALL YOUR BASE BELONG TO US!
Bill does seem like the world-conqueror Spaceball type. posted by Stretch at 6:07 AM on March 27, 2001
Stew, first, the part after the @ sign is just a wacky representation of an IP address that had a purpose back when the internet was originally set up. The @ sign can be used to pass a username/password to a website (not recommended, of course, because you can leave it in referrer logs and such). So it's all supported parts of the HTTP and TCP/IP specifications. It's just highly unorthodox and mainly useful for situations like this. posted by dhartung at 6:11 AM on March 27, 2001
Warning--this doesn't work in all browsers and in fact crashes mine (IE5/Mac). If you must look at this, use the first "here" link in the body of stew's post. posted by rodii at 6:38 AM on March 27, 2001
I don't think this is funny. Bah. posted by azazello at 7:30 AM on March 27, 2001
"a wacky representation of an IP address that had a purpose"
I could be wrong (it's happened before) but I don't think that ever had a purpose, but rather was just a quirk in the way IP addresses are handled. I believe the "dotted-four" notation gets translated to the full decimal equivalent internally anyway, though I'm not sure. posted by CrayDrygu at 7:40 AM on March 27, 2001
Yeah, decimal IPs don't seem to resolve on any Macs, from what I understand. (The @ symbol trick works fine with a normal "dotted-four" IP, though.) posted by waxpancake at 9:06 AM on March 27, 2001
No Cray, it's right there in the RFC, uh, somewhere (OK, maybe not, I couldn't find it). The dotted-decimal form is just syntactic sugar. Anything a router can resolve to 32-bit binary is theoretically OK (at least according to Cisco). I think "dotted binary" is pretty cool.
That still doesn't mean there was ever an actual purpose for it =)
(P.S. Ever see the RFC for TCP/CP [TCP over Carrier Pidgeon]?) posted by CrayDrygu at 11:16 AM on March 27, 2001
Dotted-decimal has always baffled me - eight hex digits would be shorter, easier to remember, and much simpler to deal with. It's just such a weird hybrid - it's a 32 bit number, represented byte by byte, and yet each byte's value is specified in decimal...? What's WITH that? Is there somebody in the IETF who actually thinks that way?
Had me fooled for half a second!
posted by stew560 at 9:11 PM on March 26, 2001