Asklemmy

43945 readers

623 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

1139

I'm the author of an April Fool's Internet Standard, AMA (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by Two9A@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

189 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Let's get the AMAs kicked off on Lemmy, shall we.

Almost ten years ago now, I wrote RFC 7168, "Hypertext Coffeepot Control Protocol for Tea Efflux Appliances" which extends HTCPCP to handle tea brewing. Both Coffeepot Control Protocol and the tea-brewing extension are joke Internet Standards, and were released on Apr 1st (1998 and 2014). You may be familiar with HTTP error 418, "I'm a teapot"; this comes from the 1998 standard.

I'm giving a talk on the history of HTTP and HTCPCP at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress in Berlin later this month, and I need an FAQ section; AMA about the Internet and HTTP. Let's try this out!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] foggy@lemmy.world 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've heard that the internet is a series of tubes.

Can you confirm?

[–] Two9A@lemmy.world 44 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I never understood the beef people had with that. The Internet is a series of tubes, of various widths and sizes, with inputs at random points in the stream.

Plumbing analogies are apt.

[–] Nollij@lemmy.fmhy.ml 25 points 1 year ago

It's because of the very impassioned speech by then-Senator Ted "Tubes" Stevens, where he demonstrated that he clearly had no idea how any of it worked. You could hear the lobbyists in every bit that he parroted, without absorbing it. He also had formed a strong opinion already, despite clearly having just been told how it works.

It's not that it's a bad analogy. It's that it's (somewhat) reductionist, and most famously associated with an idiot.