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...
- Can't send email more than 500 miles: http://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles
- Open Office won't print on Tuesdays: 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
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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
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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?
"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:
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.