>> Sure. But people often reverse the word "niche" as a kind of polite
>> way of saying "hopelessly unsuccessful". ;-)
>
> I can't help people don't know english. :-)

I love the way people use "legacy" to mean "that ancient hunk of junk 
that we somehow ended up still having to support".

>> People claim that Unix (or maybe specificaly Linux) is insanely
>> reliable, and that's almost all pure C.
>
> I've never heard anyone claim that. I've heard Linux people bash
> Windows, and I've heard people brag about how reliable Linux is,

When Linux first became popular, this was *the reason* to switch to 
Linux. Everything is so reliable and works perfectly without crashing 
every 12 seconds. (Never mind that they don't have drivers for your disk 
controller yet, never mind your graphics card... who cares about that?)

> but
> it's certainly not reliable enough that it'll run ten years worth of
> upgrades without a reboot or loss of service, unless you go to something
> like a Tandem.

I can't say I've tried.

>>>> Some people might refer to that as "luck". ;-) Apparently there are
>>>> Windows 95 systems with this kind of uptime.
>>>
>>> No there aren't. All the 16-bit Windows machines had a seconds counter
>>> that wrapped after 42 days and crashed the computer.
>>
>> Got a reference for that?
>
> I'm sorry your computer can't get through to Google. I hope your
> connectivity gets restored soon.
>
> http://news.cnet.com/2100-1040-222391.html

...which links to http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q216641/ which says 
that they fixed this problem 10 years ago.

>>> And if A connects to B, then B
>>> passes a connection to C to A, A needs a connection to C anyway.
>
>> What makes you think that?
>
> Because B may pass to A a connection to a mailbox on C.

Sorry, I misread your sentence.

> Oh, I see what you're asking. I assume they're smart enough not to send
> passwords in the clear to machines that haven't proven they already know
> the password.

I'd like to believe that... *shuffle*

>>> Why do you make mistakes like that? How often do you write code and use
>>> reserved works as variable names?
>>
>> More often than you'd think.
>
> Wow.

Hey, we all make mistakes...

(Like the time I discovered that "default" is a reserved word in 
Haskell. I had to look at the language spec to find out what it's 
actually for, since nobody ever actually uses it.)

> C was designed to be a portable that was *not* abstracted from the
> machine. Therefore, it got ported a lot, often as the first HLL ported
> to a new architecture. The other languages only got ported to
> architectures being used for that particular type of computing.
>
> When people tried to make better languages than C, they tended to pile
> so much extra stuff into it that would make it appropriate for both
> machine-level stuff and high-level applications that it turned into a
> monster.

I guess the answer is only obvious in retrospect...

>> Wait - the CPU on my PC *doesn't* process the incomming packets??
>
> Not packets not destined for your machine, no. WTF do you think a MAC
> address is for?

For telling you which machine a packet is addressed to? You still have 
to *read* the MAC address to find out if that's you, surely.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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