I think the reason for all that complexity in what's allowed by the standards is the need, at every stage of the standardization process, to preserve compatibility with all the "legacy" address formats that have ever been used before, and might possibly still be in somebody's address; and that's a huge number of formats given that the Internet mail format standards derive in a continuous progression from standards used on various academic and research networks as far back as the early 1970s.
Posts made by dtobias
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RE: The email address you have been using for 10 years is not valid
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RE: How do you spell sungard?
There were those old commercials about "How do you spell relief".
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RE: Programmers trying to talk to non-programmers without getting sidetracked by trivialities? IMPOSSIBLE!
@BC_Programmer said:
3.Other people dickweed around the meaning, saying that the semantics and language aren't known so it's not a good idea to make assumptions
I don't see anything "dickweedish" about that. After getting the straightforward answer out of the way, people in the forum used it as a launching point to get into deeper discussion of the philosophy of computer language syntax and structure. That's how geeks are, and it's odd to attack this attribute on another geek forum like this.
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RE: Mail oops
It's kind of a staple TV sitcom plot to have a character send a message he/she later regrets and tries to recall, whether it's paper mail, a phone message, an email, a text message, a carrier-pigeon note, whatever.... to their boss, girl/boyfriend, the entire office/school, etc... leading to a bizarrely convoluted plot to intercept the message before it's read. Even the Flintstones did it once, so it goes back to the Stone Age.
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RE: US Postal service - International...
Second-class (back when they still used numbered classes other than First Class; eventually the Marketing Types at the USPS decided it would sound better to use different names) was what is now Periodicals.
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RE: Most games are written in Excel
Way back in the early '80s, I wrote (in Applesoft Basic) a Pac-Man-style game implemented in text mode on a spreadsheet-style screen designed to resemble the then-popular VisiCalc... it was called Calc-Man, and published on an issue of the diskmagazine Softdisk.
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RE: Nazis aren't good with data types
The matter of Excel screwing up data is something I have to deal with constantly at work... office-worker types constantly insist on opening up perfectly good CSV files in Excel and saving them out again, resulting in damage ranging from mild (like strippnig out leading zeroes in zip codes) to utterly destructive (when things like phone numbers and account numbers get converted into exponential notation).
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RE: Technical knowledege fail
@Mason Wheeler said:
@DaveK said:
SQL like a pig, boy!
I've heard people pronounce SQL as "squirrel" and "skull", but never "squeal".
I've always felt like "HDMI" ought to be pronounced to rhyme with "sodomy".
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RE: Thank you for dumbing me down, youtube
@SEMI-HYBRID code said:
So me (the user) is forced to write like an idiot
They're just enforcing standard YouTube comment house style.
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RE: Required www
@RHuckster said:
Also, regarding the whole email us at www.domain.tld/contact, what irks me even more are radio ads that pronounce the "http://" in their address. That's 5 seconds of valuable radio commercial time completely wasted. 6-7 seconds if they erroneously pronounce it "backslash" instead of "slash." Ugh, you'd think someone during the process of developing the commercial would have told them the http part is unnecessary.
Technically speaking, it's not a proper URI without the scheme.
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RE: Required www
@Qwerty said:
Well, it's less-worse than someone writing an address as person@www.example.com
In my experience, the clueless lusers tend to write addresses (both their own and that of whomever they're trying to reach) as www.person@example.com.
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RE: Thunderbird 5
I still use Pegasus Mail, as I've been doing since 1995. (I've upgraded the version many times, though.)
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RE: Malware author does not understand random numbers
Inflation and deflation both can help some people and harm others in the short run, but it seems to me that in the long run it's better for everybody to have a stable currency that maintains consistent value (on the average; obviously, individual commodities and other products will rise or fall by supply and demand) without any long-term trend for prices to go either up or down.
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RE: SMS "Network message" spoofing WTF
@Zemm said:
@El_Heffe said:
<font style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" face="courier new,courier" size="3">So this is like the net send</font><font style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" size="3"> command from Windows 2000</font>
net send was well before 2000. I remember doing that at my high school's lab in 1994: 486s running DOS and Win 3.11 on Netware.
Heck, I was doing something similar with the printing Teletype-style terminals at my high school's lab in 1980, connected via 110/300-baud acoustic couplers to a mainframe at the state university. I think I may have first found out John Lennon was shot that way.
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RE: The UK's Super-Secret-Extra-Double Injunctions
@intertravel said:
Secondly, here in the UK this all comes from the EU Convention on Human Rights (written into UK law as the Human Rights Act 1998, if anyone cares).
Yeah, a lot of the violations of important human rights (such as free speech/press) these days are committed by institutions with "Human Rights" in their names. Very Orwellian. -
RE: The UK's Super-Secret-Extra-Double Injunctions
If the injunction is only binding on people who are informed of its existence (even if they're not parties to the case involved), but one of its provisions is that nobody is allowed to be informed of the existence of the injunction, then how would anybody ever be brought under it in the first place other than those actually in the courtroom at the time it's issued?
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RE: I hate Chrome
A big problem, as alluded to above, is how marketers abuse things like unload events to do highly annoying crap like asking you "Did you really want to exit our site? Didn't you know that you can get an exciting trial offer..." (and I've had to endure bosses ordering me to add crap like that to sites I was working on development for). This leads to a demand that browser makers block some of the more annoying permutations of those things, which can have collateral damage.
And there's also the "privacy freak" crowd who hates all sorts of analytics regarding their own web browsing, too.
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RE: NIST is really, really hip
@Power Troll said:
...why is this a text file? Why is there no consistent column numbering? Why are there comments associated with tildes and hyphens?
Why hasn't this been updated since nineteen fucking ninety?!?!
Maybe there haven't been any counties / state subdivisions (parishes in Louisiana, etc.) added or dropped since then?
What's wrong with plain text as a data format? It's much more portable than some proprietary thing like M$ Excel.
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RE: Bad news, everyone
If all this crap is predestined anyway, why does God or Satan or anybody else care what anybody does now with regard to it? It won't change the ultimate outcome, anyway.
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RE: Should I laugh or cry?
We're mostly using Firefox here.
The intranet/extranet stuff I've implemented has, from day one, always been done in a standards-based way aimed at working in all browsers. In the earliest days of it (around 2000), there were some around here still using Netscape 4, and it worked in that too.
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Open-then-Save-As is *not* the same as copying a file!
Does anybody have any idea how I can possibly train non-techie office workers, who sometimes in the course of their jobs need to send files to me that need to be run through some program, imported into a database, etc., into giving me the file in the form in which it is originally received by them (e.g., comma-separated-values), unmangled by a trip through the digestive tract of some program that Windows chooses to open the file in (Excel, Notepad, etc.)? 25 years of point-and-drool operating systems seem to have thoroughly expunged any concept that people may have ever had to the effect that the proper way to give somebody a copy of a file is to actually copy the file, at the raw operating system level which does not involve slurping it into some application and then barfing it out again. Instead, people end up with computers configured to open the files automatically (from their web browser, email program, or however they received the file in the first place) in whatever Windows thinks is the right application for it (so they're stricken totally clueless if the file has a weird extension that doesn't open in something they're familiar with), and from there they use "Save As" to save the file in order to do further actions with it like upload or attach it for me. Often this will work out OK, but when it doesn't they have no clue about what they did to cause it. Some ways files get messed up this way include their getting truncated (with big parts of the data missing) if they're bigger than the program they're loaded into can handle, as well as the many ways Excel screws up data (from stripping leading zeroes from zip codes to more destructive things like converting account numbers into exponential notation).
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RE: Completely fictitus made up story for everyone!
@Nagesh said:
We should stop these CEOs from playing golf. That is source of much trouble.
Supposedly, the whole Marvel Age of Comics got started through one of those "CEOs playing golf" incidents... around 1961, the bosses of Marvel and DC Comics were playing golf and the DC guy happened to remark about how successful their Justice League of America comic was, and that superhero team comics were the new "in" thing. Marvel at the time was still publishing mostly teen romance, sci-fi/monster (of the tame variety permitted after the imposition of the Comics Code), and other non-superhero comics because they still believed the conventional wisdom that superheroes went out of style after World War II. However, after that golf remark, the Marvel boss got convinced that his company had to put out a superhero team group comic, so he ordered his writers and artists to do this, and the result was the Fantastic Four.
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RE: The Nigerians are thinking of you...
What I don't understand about all of those scams is how they expect people to believe that somebody is, out of the goodness of their heart, entering you into big-money lotteries and sweepstakes all around the world and nicely informing you when you win, all without the necessity of you actually taking any action to buy a ticket or enter a contest.
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RE: Dave, you've not filled out your timesheet.
Fortunately, I don't have to fill out a timesheet at present... my employers over the last 25 years occasionally succumbed to the timesheet fad and tried to get workers to fill them out in various styles, but it always died on the vine after a few weeks when it turned out that management didn't want to be bothered to actually try to do anything useful with the information on the sheets so they just piled up unread.
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RE: A cluttered taskbar
@EJ_ said:
She ended up formatting my netbook because of it: on boot, it had a message that said something along the lines of "Hit F2 to enter system recovery mode" where it does an automated nuke/pave.
Calling a "nuke/pave" function "system recovery mode" is something of a WTF itself.
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RE: Never let a client touch a CSV file! Even if they insist!
Where I work, people will invariably open up CSV files in Excel, even when no changes to them are needed, and if you need a copy of the file to import into something they'll give it to you by saving it out of Excel, which mangles all sorts of things, such as converting account numbers into exponential format and dropping leading zeroes from zip codes.
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RE: PowerUsers of StackOverflow, not always worth their reputation:
@piskvorr said:
Well, welcome to the Internet - I can call myself MegaSupremeRulerOfTheWorld, does that make it real? Also, 1) you can get to 1600 rep by giving mostly uninspiring answers to anything (see the user's profile), 2) 1600 is not that much, 3) non-zero SO rep is an indicator of participation, not really a guarantee of quality, and most importantly 4) the answer in question is now at -4 and counting. Nothing to see here, move along.
Why should Internet sites be any different from the real world? At work, I often find nobody cares about stuff I spend hours or days working on, but they wax enthusiastically about my brilliance in doing something I tossed off in a couple of minutes.
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RE: Marketing FTW
@valerion said:
1 - It won't run on an iPad. It won't run on anything other than IE for that matter (yes, I realise is 2010....)
That sounds like The Real WTF.
Everything I've ever developed for the Web, from 1995 to the present, has been done in a platform/browser-independent way.
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RE: Military Training
@frits said:
Funny thing is "jim_bob@gmial." passes most email address verifiers.
And some of the ones it fails also reject perfectly legitimate addresses, such as ones in .name and .info domains (because the author thought that top level domains shouldn't be more than three letters long).
On a tangentially related issue, why do so many people stick a spurious "www." on to the beginning of e-mail addresses (both their own and that of others they're trying to send to) when they type them (e.g., into web forms, which is where they come to my attention when reviewing responses to websites both personal and work-related)?
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RE: Elemental: War of Magic
@blakeyrat said:
ASCII you know is good forever.
Though text-based documents aren't always ASCII, and confusion involving UTF-8, ISO-8859-1, WINDOWS-1252, and other encodings and proprietary code pages, and attempts by ignorant users/developers to shove characters (like curly quotes) in documents encoded in a format that doesn't technically support them, can cause problems.
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RE: Priorities
@blakeyrat said:
And then you guys make fun of *us* for not adopting metric? Fuck. We may not have metric, but at least our currency has made sense since 8:00 AM day one.
But do you know all the units of it, as originally devised?
10 mills = 1 cent
10 cents = 1 dime
10 dimes = 1 dollar
10 dollars = 1 eagle
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RE: Foreign Key Fail
@bannedfromcoding said:
Anyone here remembers Pegasus Mail?
I still use Pegasus Mail.
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RE: Last login: before the Internet
@NSCoder said:
So anyway, let's all debate whether 1970-01-01 is before the internet or not.
The ARPAnet, which eventually turned into the Internet, existed; it started in 1969 (when the Hotel California wine steward hasn't had that spirit since).
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RE: Foreign Key Fail
Oh, yeah, the Firebird database system... that has a place in history as the reason why the Firebird browser (then recently renamed from Phoenix) had to change its name yet again to Firefox, thus losing its parallel naming with Thunderbird and Sunbird.
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RE: Chrome just had to go and break things.
The "Be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you put out" principle implies that, while the URL bar should make an effort to interpret all sorts of incomplete and nonstandard URL formats in a reasonable way (e.g., bare hostnames with no protocol), it should actually display the URL of the site it has just accessed in its fully-qualified RFC-compliant way with no shortcuts.
If, as some have stated, the new Chrome displays URLs with the protocol invisible, but includes that part in the copy buffer when you copy/cut from it, then that's itself a usability issue; people wouldn't expect what winds up in the copy buffer to differ from what they highlighted on the screen.
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RE: Chrome just had to go and break things.
As a matter of general principle, I don't like to have technical details hidden from me, the way Windows does with its stupid default behavior of hiding file extensions (much loved by malware authors who use files with double extensions like .gif.exe).
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RE: $0 per month? Why, you're overpaying!
Too many stores these days won't let you complete an ordinary transaction of any sort without bugging you with sales pitches to try to get you to join their Loyalty Card Program, or sign up for a Branded MasterCard/Visa Credit Card, or some other gimmick or other; they also want your phone number and email address.
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RE: Symantec is worse than many viruses
So one of the real WTFs is that this site is implemented in a manner that causes form contents to be lost when you use the back button and then go forward again, something you have to work hard at to defeat the normal browser behavior of preserving this info.
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RE: Dr. Doom Strikes again
@SQLDave said:
Also, RE the SQL query: SHAZAM!
Comic Mismatch Error: SHAZAM! is a DC comic, not Marvel.
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RE: Font Sensitive Password
@hellgate said:
A client of our company was having trouble logging into our custom-build client extranet website.
After finding no errors in the logs, first I asked the client to upgrade from IE6 to IE8.
Upgrade him to Firefox!
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RE: Not exactly what I expected...
@chikinpotpi said:
@dtobias said:
plus they tend to think that proprietary M$ formats like Word and Excel are reasonable data exchange formats.
They are.
If you are doing work for me and gripe about the openness of a document format, I am left to assume 1 of 2 things:- you are 16 and your office is your parents house, so you cant afford "M$" office
- you are 22 and your office is a dorm room, so you are retardedly idealistic, and waste time arguing about trivialities rather than get work done
Either way, I would take my business to a big boy who plays with big boy toys. Software is a tool, and it does what you make it do, which judging form your post is very little
If you're setting up automated data imports/exports that go through Perl scripts running on Linux machines, plain-text-based formats like CSV are much more suitable for this than some proprietary binary data format. Not to mention how Excel does idiotic things like stripping leading zeroes from zip codes, or worse, putting credit card and telephone numbers into exponential format, making me feel like committing some highly violent crime on whoever was responsible for perpetrating it.
(And I'm 46, so I'm a curmudgeonly old man who remembers when computers had only a few kilobytes of memory, and stored data on 5.25" floppies if not on cassettes, so bloatware was not an option.)
- you are 16 and your office is your parents house, so you cant afford "M$" office
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RE: Not exactly what I expected...
When I've had to deal with external clients, vendors, partners, affiliates, etc., with whom I had to implement data-exchange systems, often instead of talking directly with the tech-type at the other place, I've had to channel the communication so it goes from me to a marketing type here to a marketing type there, and finally to the actual tech guy. Passing through two marketing types tends to garble all messages to the point of incomprehensibility, plus they tend to think that proprietary M$ formats like Word and Excel are reasonable data exchange formats.
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RE: Lenovo Australia never ceases to amaze me with their ineptitude...
@vyznev said:
Although you can still see the telltale signs of the clean outsourced design slowly but inevitably losing ground in its struggle against hamfisted company staff wielding HTML editors.
For some balance, I'll note that as an inhouse staff person I've often fixed up absolutely atrocious nonstandard HTML generated by outsourced so-called web designers, and sometimes even got it to validate.
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RE: IMTRWTF
There are way too many things around that beep at you. I've had the experience on a number of occasions of hearing intermittent beeping and having to figure out what it is; the culprits have varied from smoke detectors to cell phones to the dishwasher (which had the door opened before a cycle was completed and proceeded to complain about it indefinitely until it was reset).
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RE: Clearly the Welsh government have nothing better to do.
Is Jeli Cwpanau Bach a little-known relative of J. S. Bach (similar to P.D.Q. Bach)?
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RE: No security at all
The ASCII standard actually offers some control characters (unfortunately little-used these days) to provide for separation of data fields; there are File Separator, Group Separator, Record Separator, and Unit Separator (1C through 1F) to allow four hierarchical levels of structured data, as well as some other data-separation control codes like Start of Header (01), Start of Text (02), End of Text (03), and End of Transmission (04).
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RE: No security at all
@henke37 said:
I just wish that my version of Excel would actually accept coma separated values in csv files instead of insisting on semicolon separated values.
Your values are separated by comas? Their hospital bills must be pretty high (will Obamacare help?).
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RE: I guess that is one way to do it but why?
Any computer language with "visual" in its name turns me off immediately, as it seems to indicate that those who released it care more about "purty pictures" than creating stuff that actually works.