[HN Gopher] Can an email go 500 miles in 2025?
___________________________________________________________________
Can an email go 500 miles in 2025?
Author : zdw
Score : 242 points
Date : 2025-07-04 16:49 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (flak.tedunangst.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (flak.tedunangst.com)
| robin_reala wrote:
| If you're one of today's lucky 10,000 and haven't heard the
| original 500-mile email story, you can read it at
| https://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles.
|
| (discussed previously on HN 5 years ago -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23775404 - and 10 years ago
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9338708)
| hahahacorn wrote:
| Even after reading the 2025 updated version, reading the
| original made me absolutely giddy at the end.
|
| I can only imagine the euphoria of reconciling the inputs of
| "the things I know to be true of computers and email" and "my
| emails won't send further than 500 miles". What a great story -
| thanks for posting the original.
| ericpauley wrote:
| I have a tough time deciding a favorite between this story
| and "the ultimate in garbage collection": https://devblogs.mi
| crosoft.com/oldnewthing/20180228-00/?p=98...
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Does this system release all the memory it allocates?
|
| Yes, it releases it at about 200 meters per second.
| vghaisas wrote:
| I collected a list of fun stories of this form a while ago!
|
| - Car allergic to vanilla ice cream:
| https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~wkw/humour/carproblems.txt
|
| - Can't log in when standing up: https://www.reddit.com/r/tal
| esfromtechsupport/comments/3v52p...
|
| - OpenOffice won't print on Tuesdays: https://bugs.launchpad.
| net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161...
|
| - The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining:
| https://predr.ag/blog/wifi-only-works-when-its-raining/
| hinkley wrote:
| "WiFi doesn't work in the summer" is one of the first
| anecdotes I learned about WiFi when it was still brand new.
| You set up WiFi between two buildings in the winter, spring
| comes and the water in the leaves blocks the signal.
| madcaptenor wrote:
| This also happens with satellite TV.
| salviati wrote:
| Monitor switches off when I sit down deserves to be on that
| list (even if it's hardware, not software): https://old.red
| dit.com/r/techsupport/comments/2rsivw/monitor...
| vidarh wrote:
| It's not quite in the same league as any of this, but when
| I was a child, we sent our Commodore 64 in for repairs
| _several times_ because it started "writing" by itself.
| Gibberish would slowly appear as if someone was randomly
| hitting the keyboard.
|
| Each time it took several days before they repair centre
| got to it, and they then contacted us to tell us there was
| nothing wrong with the computer at all.
|
| After we picked it up, eventually, when it started
| happening again for the third or fourth time, we realised
| the problem:
|
| The "large" (a whopping 26") CRT TV we'd recently started
| placing it under when not in use caused it... A few days
| away from the TV to dishcharge it, and it was fine - hence
| why the repair technician didn't find anything.
| llimos wrote:
| - A Story About 'Magic'
| http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html
| abejfehr wrote:
| This site has a collection of them: https://500mile.email/
| markstos wrote:
| I once had a desktop computer that had great uptime, but
| started to consistently crash when I got up and left the
| room to get a drink of water.
|
| Turns out it was old building with loose floorboards. The
| vibrational force of standing up was enough to short out a
| failing power supply. As long as I sat my desk, it was
| fine.
|
| But I had a co-worker who had a worse problem with getting
| up to get a drink of water. Once while she was kitchen, an
| eight foot steel lighting ballast came loose from the
| ceiling and felt right onto her chair.That what-if memory
| still haunts me.
| lloeki wrote:
| > The vibrational force of standing up was enough to
| short out a failing power supply
|
| Or, was it?
|
| https://superuser.com/questions/1406140/monitor-screen-
| that-...
|
| (not disclaiming that it wasn't, but that "chair piston
| causes EM surge" had me driven crazy for the longest time
| til I was able to pinpoint the cause)
| duped wrote:
| I saw this in an office while working on an embedded
| project where our dev boards had no EM shielding.
|
| Standing up from the chair was enough to cause it to
| crash.
| anton-c wrote:
| I wonder if the feeling is excitement or horror when you
| encounter one of these weird problems that seems like it
| has to be the user.
|
| Not computer related really, but I'm reminded of when my
| Mom was helping set up macs in the lab at my middle school.
| I, a 4th grader, tagged along and hung out in the other lab
| across the hall. I got very incredulous looks when i
| claimed that there was a lizard in there. It was the
| Midwest over summer break! I was obviously a kid seeing
| things. There's no lizards here.
|
| Then I produced it, caught under a bin. It was a brown
| anole that had come back in a plant sent from Florida. I
| wasn't crazy _that_ day.
| jwrallie wrote:
| Since you mentioned your mom, mine is not as tech savvy.
| At one point she needed a computer to type something and
| print it, a simple use case so I came up with this idea
| of setting up a computer that would give me no tech
| support trouble, since I was living in another state. I
| installed CentOS, libre office and made sure the printer
| was supported.
|
| I told my mom to keep the system up to date and set up an
| ssh connection for remote access just in case.
|
| A few months go by and one day I receive a phone call
| that she cannot find the system updater shortcut anymore.
| I started to think how I could get Gnome to load over
| ssh, I was sure she moved the icon accidentally or
| something but decided to google it just in case.
|
| Lo and behold and there is a bug report that due to some
| bug in package management dependency resolution the
| graphic software updater GUI could remove... itself... if
| the user performed a routine system update. It seemed to
| even affect RHEL at the time if I'm not mistaken.
|
| A yum install command away over ssh and it was solved but
| that was the day I realized that no matter how stable a
| distro is famed to be or how much support it has from a
| company, there was still lots of work to be done until
| Linux could be seen as friendly enough for the end user.
| d--b wrote:
| I had one of these myself. WiFi wouldn't work when my wife
| was using her laptop in bed. As soon as she gave it to me,
| it started working again. She thought it was the magic
| touch of the engineer, but it turned out that when she was
| in bed, she pulled her knees up and set the computer on her
| lap, while I would lay down completely and let the computer
| rest on my chest. Her knees blocked the WiFi signal enough
| to be quite noticeable.
| Tarsul wrote:
| there's also the story that wiggling the mouse in Win95
| when installing something really _does_ make it go faster.
| https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/11533/wh
| y...
| rft wrote:
| There also is the (somewhat) famous caps lock gamble in
| XCOM 2 [1].
|
| Quote: "Hitting the key, through a rube-goldberg-esque
| series of events, forces all outstanding load requests to
| be filled immediately in a single frame. This causes a
| massive hitch, and potentially could crash the game. If
| you don't care about those adverse effects the
| synchronous load is faster."
|
| [1] https://www.eurogamer.net/a-single-button-press-
| skips-loadin...
| b3lvedere wrote:
| I've seen some weird technical glitches in my career. One
| that i will always remember is that a customer was very
| happy with his new big computer, but could not work for
| multiple hours on it, because his office would get colder
| and colder when he kept using it. After some mailing and
| talking over the phone i suggested a visit to his office
| where i quickly found the cause of the problem: The big
| computer fan was aimed directly at the thermostat knob of
| the radiator, so it assumed the entire office was well
| heated and closed.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| At one point, my scanner only worked when my daughter was
| awake - never when she was asleep (nighttime or napping).
| lilyball wrote:
| Most of these are good, but "can't log in while standing
| up" is just too implausible. I can't possibly be led to
| believe that every single one of a whole group of
| technically-literate touch typers failed to notice that
| keys were swapped.
| redbell wrote:
| As seen on HN:
|
| _Car allergic to vanilla ice cream_ :
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37584399 and
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13347852
|
| _The Wi-Fi only works when it 's raining_:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39896371
| mtillman wrote:
| "...even of a relatively impoverished department like
| statistics."
|
| Perfection.
| ableal wrote:
| I got curious what Trey Harris (the original 500 mile story
| teller) was up to these days, but Google mostly finds me a
| football player born around that time (2002).
| jhalstead wrote:
| Presumably this is the author given their UNC and SysAdmin
| background: https://www.linkedin.com/in/treyharris
|
| I found it via a "trey harris sage.org" search on Google.
| lesser-shadow wrote:
| First time I'm hearing about this actually, thank you.
| thenobsta wrote:
| Thanks for letting me be one of the lucky ones.
|
| Obligatory xkcd 10,000 lucky people explainer:
| https://xkcd.com/1053/
| dgritsko wrote:
| And if you're one of today's lucky 10,000 and haven't heard of
| the concept of "lucky 10,000", you can read the relevant XKCD
| here: https://xkcd.com/1053/
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 9,999 remaining.
| kibwen wrote:
| And if you're one of today's lucky 10,000 who haven't heard
| of XKCD: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/xkcd
| jeffhuys wrote:
| > units 751 units, 62 prefixes You have: 10 miles
| You want: meters * 16093.44 / 6.2137119e-05
|
| Huh. Never knew that was a thing!
| bqmjjx0kac wrote:
| I always want to reach for `units`, but I'm perennially
| baffled by the output! What's up with the * and /?
| Arnavion wrote:
| The * value is the result of converting 10 miles to meters,
| as requested.
|
| The / value is the inverse of that in case you wanted that,
| ie 0.1 meters in miles.
|
| It's explained in `man 1 units`
| bqmjjx0kac wrote:
| Oh, I know it's explained in the man page. I read it
| every time and promptly forget because I can't
| internalize the choice of notation.
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| * multiply
|
| / divide
| bqmjjx0kac wrote:
| I am familiar.
| spacepotato wrote:
| If you find the output a bit hard to parse at times (as I
| do), you might want to try qalc instead, I use it all the
| time from the terminal to do conversions:
| $ qalc > 3 millilightseconds to miles
| 3 milliLightSeconds [?] 558 mi + 1491 yd + 0.1692913386
| ft
|
| I'm not sure if it has all the same units as `units`
| does, but it replaced my use of it entirely as it can do
| other useful operations as well
| barnas2 wrote:
| the * is denoting the conversion from your first unit to
| your second, the / denotes the other way.
|
| You have: 1 miles You want: feet * 5280 / 0.00018939394
|
| In the above example, 1 mile is 5280 feet, and 1 foot is
| 0.00018939394 miles
|
| If I do 2 miles to feet, the values are doubled (or halved
| for the reverse conversion)
|
| You have: 2 miles You want: feet * 10560 / 9.469697e-05
| Symbiote wrote:
| I usually call it non-interactively: $
| units 1500DKK USD * 236.76653 /
| 0.00422357
|
| in which case it's always the first line I want.
|
| (The second line is telling me 1USD is 0.00422357 of
| 1500DKK.)
|
| Note if you use the currency conversions,
| systemctl enable units-currency-update.timer
|
| is needed to keep them up-to-date.
| bspammer wrote:
| It's one of my most used utilities, as someone who can't help
| but nerd-snipe myself on the regular. Example questions that
| I've used it for, just in the last week:
|
| If I work 42 hours/week, how many minutes is that per year?
|
| I've downloaded 4.91GB in the last minute, what's that in
| Mbps? How long will it take to download a 76GB game?
|
| This AWS feature costs $0.045/hour, how much is that per
| month?
|
| This guy I read about traveled 58,000km in 27 years, what's
| his average speed in m/s?
|
| How much would a 10cm sphere of gold be worth in GBP?
|
| If a 36 inch pipeline can deliver 25580 acre-feet of water in
| a year, how fast is the water flowing in m/s?
| jmoggr wrote:
| > How much would a 10cm sphere of gold be worth in GBP?
|
| Is there some trick to this? Or do you have to input it
| like:
|
| You have: 4/3 _pi_ (10 cm)^3 _19320 kg /m^3_45000 GBP/kg
|
| (What ChatGPT gave me)
| bspammer wrote:
| units has (I assume room temp/pressure) densities for all
| elements, as well as some precious metal prices and
| currency exchange rates (you need to run the units_cur
| program regularly to update the database for these). It
| also has tab completion to make discovering these a bit
| easier.
|
| The invocation is
|
| You have: goldprice * golddensity * spherevol(10cm/2)
|
| You want: GBP
| jmoggr wrote:
| Neat! Thank you!
| thedrexster wrote:
| TIL -- thank you, brother!
| sneak wrote:
| You can just save a step and ask ChatGPT the answer. It
| can google the current spot price of gold.
| lazide wrote:
| Sure, but then I need to do all the math to verify the
| answer it gives me isn't gibberish anyway.
| jjice wrote:
| Thank you for linking this - I need to save this locally
| because I reference this all the time. This is one of my
| favorite internet stories - it's just a great arc!
| firefax wrote:
| reminds me of the magic/more magic switch story
| jekwoooooe wrote:
| Easily my favorite story on the internet
| redbell wrote:
| This was the highest-voted submission, posted two years ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37576633
| strangescript wrote:
| Reading the title and knowing exactly what this is about kind of
| makes me feel old to be honest.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > Reading the title and knowing exactly what this is about kind
| of makes me feel old to be honest.
|
| Let's go for experienced and ready to educate the young'uns.
| jraph wrote:
| You could have discovered that story yesterday :-)
| cs02rm0 wrote:
| If it makes you feel better, I'm so old I read the title and
| 3/4 of the original story before I realised I'd read it before.
| r0uv3n wrote:
| I think this is enough of a classic to be widely known even
| among younger people. I'm 23 (doing math msc) and I think all
| the CS people that I know would instantly recognize the 500
| miles title.
|
| Though I do somewhat envy the possibility of having read the
| article close to publication and feel in some sense part of the
| history when it crops up again like this.
| jancsika wrote:
| Is there a library to re-introduce relevant delays into a CDN so
| that all users experience their own geographically-appropriate
| response times?
|
| I mean, I want reliability. But I also want Europeans to be able
| to taste that authentic latency they'd expect from a fledgling
| startup running out of a garage in San Jose.
| lesser-shadow wrote:
| Don't get it
| voidUpdate wrote:
| Data can only go about 500 miles in 3ms, and in the original
| story, that's how long the system took to time out, and would
| fail to send the email
| justusthane wrote:
| It's a test of an old probably apocryphal story about a
| university that couldn't send an email more than 500 miles:
| https://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles
| vidarh wrote:
| Both the person who supposedly configured Sendmail, and the
| person who wrote the story, have defended the truthfulness of
| it on HN in the past.
| justusthane wrote:
| Good to know! I do love the story.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| It's a nerd story about short timeouts. Effectively a what is
| the speed of light or electricity in copper and over
| infrastructure. It's a joke that doesn't make any sense because
| 3ms was clearly bullshit devised for example. Don't think about
| it too hard, it doesn't suddenly snap into anything meaningful.
| vidarh wrote:
| Why do you think it's "clearly bullshit"?
|
| connect() will take time. Either you then fail on reiceiving
| EINPROGRESS, or you attempt a select() with 0 for the
| timeout, which will also take time. That that time could add
| up to 3ms on a mid-90's system also used for other things
| seems entirely plausible to me.
| renrutal wrote:
| I clicked the story wondering if the speed of light has changed
| since the late 90s.
|
| Apparently not.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| It's still speed of light in a medium, which is not speed of
| light. Electricity over copper it is 2/3 iirc.
| deadbabe wrote:
| HFT firms have entire infrastructure that runs very close to
| the speed of light, beating the competition that runs on
| antiquated copper.
| hhmc wrote:
| There's no competition that's running on copper -- even
| competitors without latency sensitivity with still be
| running over fibre because that's just the baseline
| infrastructure in datacentres, transatlantic etc.
|
| Of course, yes, the HFT firms will be using also the
| standard tricks of microwave towers, shortwave radio,
| weather balloon etc, to beat the fibre route.
| deadbabe wrote:
| There's always competition running on copper, shitty
| little traders that think they can beat the big firms.
| hhmc wrote:
| I don't think the switches connecting to any real
| exchanges support this
| ta1243 wrote:
| speed of packets over copper I think is actually faster than
| fibre
| layer8 wrote:
| It seems to depend on the cable type: https://en.wikipedia.
| org/wiki/Velocity_factor#Typical_veloci...
| connicpu wrote:
| ~200,000km/s is the speed of light in fiber optics.
| Electromagnetic propagation in copper is more like 99% c.
| layer8 wrote:
| The insulating material significantly decreases the
| propagation speed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_f
| actor#Typical_veloci...
| welder wrote:
| I thought this was about consolidation of email providers so your
| email never leaves a single datacenter:
|
| "10 years ago we couldn't send an email 500 miles, but these days
| we can't send it 500 miles because it just routes internally."
|
| Too bad, I think that would have been more interesting to read.
| banannaise wrote:
| This is the first roadblock the author runs into - lots of
| universities ping at <2ms, likely because everyone's on the
| same datacenter.
| geocar wrote:
| > There's a lot to the story that's obviously made up...
|
| Obviously? I think I've had this phone call myself a few times,
| although in my experience it was never from a statistician and
| they didn't give me as much data, but I'm pretty sure the story
| is mostly accurate.
|
| > I think this is nonsense... why would an invalid or incomplete
| sendmail configuration default to three milliseconds?
|
| This is a wonderful question, and perhaps much more interesting
| than anything else in the page, but first, let's reproduce the
| timing;
|
| My desktop, a 2017 Xeon E7-8880 (144 cores of 2.3ghz; 1tb ram)
| with a load of 2.26 at this moment: $ time
| sleep 0.001 real 0m0.004s user 0m0.001s
| sys 0m0.003s
|
| On my i9-10900k (3.7ghz) current load of 3,31:
| $ time sleep 0.001 real 0m0,002s user
| 0m0,000s sys 0m0,001s
|
| (In case you think I'm measuring exec; time /bin/echo returns 0's
| on both machine)
|
| Now as to why this is? Well in order to understand that, you need
| to understand how connect() actually works, and how to create a
| timeout for connect(). Those skilled in the art know you've got a
| number of choices on how to do it, but they all involve multiple
| steps because connect() does _not_ take a timeout as an argument.
| Here 's one way (not too different than what sendmail does/did):
| fcntl(f,F_SETFL,O_NONBLOCK);
| if(-1==connect(f,...)&&errno==EWOULDBLOCK){ fd_set
| a;FD_ZERO(&a);FD_SET(f,&a);
| if(!select(f+1,&a,&a,NULL,{.tv_sec=0,.tv_usec=0})) {
| close(f);return error; } }
|
| If you read this carefully, you only need to ask yourself how
| much time can pass between the top of connect() and the bottom of
| select(), and if you think it is zero like tedu does, you might
| probably have the same surprise: Computers are _not_ abstract
| machines, but made out of matter and powered by energy and thus
| subject to the laws of physics, and so _everything_ takes time.
|
| For others, the surprise might be that it's still 3msec over
| twenty years later, and I think _that_ is a much more interesting
| subject to explore than whether the speed of light exists.
| lordnacho wrote:
| I thought the 3ms was more or less what a low-granularity clock
| would give you. So, not the clock that gives you nanos, but the
| big standard one that is useful if you just somewhat care that
| some timer has run out. Perhaps you use it to count frames
| (120fps ~ 8.3ms) or check whether some calendar event has
| happened.
|
| A 333 Hz clock seems like something you might have on computers
| going back to those days, even if not for the CPU.
| MadnessASAP wrote:
| > 144 cores of 2.3ghz; 1tb ram
|
| I can't help but feel that's somewhat excessive for a desktop.
| Have you considered closing a few browser tabs?
| geocar wrote:
| > I can't help but feel that's somewhat excessive for a
| desktop.
|
| I got it on ebay for EUR2k. You can't _not_ expect me to use
| it as a desktop.
|
| > Have you considered closing a few browser tabs?
|
| No? I mean actually no: I made a brotab+wofi script that
| allows me to search tabs, and I find it a lot more convenient
| than bookmarks.
|
| Here's the relevant bits: brotab_filter='{
| split($1,A,"."); t=$2; gsub(/&/,
| "\\&",t); gsub(/</, "\\<",t); gsub(/>/, "\\>",t);
| print "<span size=\"xx-small\">"A[1]"."A[2]"</span><span
| size=\"xx-small\">."A[3]"</span> <span
| weight=\"bold\">Firefox</span> <span>"t"</span>" }';
| ( # more stuff is in here brotab list | awk -F" "
| "$brotab_filter" ) | \ wofi -m --insensitive --show
| dmenu --prompt='Focus a window' | sed -e 's/<[^>]*>//g' | {
| read -r id name || exit 1 case "$id" in
| exec) exec "$name" ;; [0-9]*) swaymsg
| "[con_id=$id]" focus ;; [a-z]\.*) brotab
| activate "$id"; sleep 0.2; swaymsg
| "[title=\"${name#Firefox }\"]" focus ;;
| esac }
|
| Works fine on 19,294 tabs at the moment...
| lazide wrote:
| I think I love you.
| chimeracoder wrote:
| > Obviously? I think I've had this phone call myself a few
| times, although in my experience it was never from a
| statistician and they didn't give me as much data, but I'm
| pretty sure the story is mostly accurate.
|
| Yeah, the original retelling even states up-front:
|
| > 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.
|
| It's pretty common to alter minor details of stories in order
| to make them easier to follow, not to mention that the entire
| account is also written several years after it happened, when
| details are presumably less likely to be completely accurate.
| Obviously the dialogue is reconstructive for narrative ease; no
| reader would look at that and assume it's intended to be a
| verbatim transcript.
|
| Unless the author here can cite specific things that make it
| truly impossible for anything of that shape to have occurred,
| I'm not seeing anything that justifies the conclusion "there's
| a lot to the story that's obviously made up".
| throw310822 wrote:
| Never got this, honestly.
|
| Well, first light does 500 miles in 3ms, but the connect signal
| needs to come back, right? So it should be 250 miles, at most?
| But this is just a detail.
|
| More importantly, because it seems to assume that all other
| operations besides the signal actually reaching the destination
| are instantaneous. As you point out yourself, computers are not
| abstract machines, so the actual response time between the
| signal being received by the destination (even assuming it's
| just one straight line with zero electronics in between) and
| the destination replying is not zero. I imagine there can be a
| large variation between physical installations and different
| types of hardware, so much as to make it very hard to detect a
| clear 500 miles boundary.
|
| Or am I missing something?
| ndiddy wrote:
| The author wrote an FAQ several years after the original
| story that answers most of your questions.
| https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html
| throw310822 wrote:
| Yes I think I had read those FAQ at some point, they're
| terribly handwavy though.
|
| "Should have been 6ms instead of 3 for the ACK to come
| back? Yes, sorry, it was too boring to add"; "Should it be
| much more and variable because of the routers in between?
| Yes sure, I probably pinged them and added up the delays";
| "Shouldn't plenty of deliveries have failed for
| destinations much closer than 500 miles? Yes sure, but that
| must have been the limit..." Etc.
| lilyball wrote:
| The "destinations much closer than 500 miles" was
| explicitly handled in the story, I don't know why that
| was even in the FAQ except that the asker failed reading
| comprehension.
|
| > _" There are a number of destinations within that
| radius that we can't reach, either, or reach
| sporadically, but we can never email farther than this
| radius."_
| vidarh wrote:
| > The poll timeout is 3ms, as specified by the lore. I think this
| is nonsense, why would an invalid or incomplete sendmail
| configuration default to three milliseconds?
|
| The answer is that per the original story, it was _not_
| defaulting to three milliseconds. It was defaulting to _0_ , and
| the 3ms was just how long it took the system to check for a
| response with a 0 timeout:
|
| > Some experimentation established that on this particular
| machine with its typical load, a zero timeout would abort a
| connect call in slightly over three milliseconds.
|
| This is a very different scenario, as it's not clear there should
| be a poll() there at all (or more likely select() given the age
| of the story) to match the original, but if there was, the select
| would have a timeout of _0_ , not 3ms, and would just happen to
| be unable to distinguish between 0 and up to 3ms.
| banannaise wrote:
| Yeah, the article is a good one overall, but the truthering is
| obnoxious, especially since it hinges on a basic misreading of
| the original story.
| CrazyStat wrote:
| The original story is also about the statistics department,
| not the university president. It would be nice to get such
| details right.
| xp84 wrote:
| I really wouldn't have predicted the extreme amount of
| centralization, and arguably unnecessary centralization, that we
| have today for things like university email and web servers. Even
| 20 years ago when I was in college, the servers I interacted with
| including email, were all in our school's /16. They did have
| software packages for LMS and stuff, but those were mostly
| deployed on-prem.
|
| Today the websites are hosted on third party cloud servers (my
| school's main website is some company that hosts your Wordpress
| or Drupal site so you don't have to) and the email by Microsoft
| or Google. Same for every school it seems. I guess the IT
| department that used to run all the infra is now probably just a
| few people in charge of ordering new laptops for faculty/staff
| when they break, and replacing Wi-Fi access points every 5 years.
| sombrero_john wrote:
| You answered your own question. IT staff is expensive, a SaaS
| subscription less-so.
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| You, sir, obviously have not dealt with enterprise SaaS
| subscriptions
| rtkwe wrote:
| Spam is another reason most places don't bother with
| selfhosting email now. Big providers like GMail aggressively
| filter unknown servers so if you attempt to host your own and
| don't setup everything perfectly (or even if you do and you
| trigger their filter ban threshold) all your email will
| silently fail to deliver or be blackholed to the Spam folder
| for the largest email providers and you might never find out or
| have a way to get them to reconsider.
| anonymfus wrote:
| You totally could make that prediction just by thinking about a
| number of schools in the world, a number of /16s in ipv4 and a
| rate of ipv6 adoption.
|
| Typically that "IT department" was just a few CS teachers, who
| assigned some slacking students creating a webpage as a
| homework, and replacing a bad memory in a server computer as a
| lab work, and then gave up when that become impossible.
| ta1243 wrote:
| We have a program which the company who developed lost the
| ability to rebuild the app for some reason.
|
| It has a 500ms timeout to load some settings from a server in the
| UK via TLS. If it goes more than that 500ms (or something, it's
| unclear the exact timeout cause) the app just vapourises.
|
| This is fine in the UK, TLS needs about* 3 times RTT to complete
| though, so an RTT above about 160ms and it's screwed.
|
| Almost all our users are in the UK, europe, mid-east or east
| coast USA, and in that 160ms RTT range.
|
| We ran into issues when a dozen people tried to use it in
| Australia, so the principal still happens with some badly written
| code.
| YesThatTom2 wrote:
| > there was a university president who couldn't send an email
| more than 500 miles, and the wise sysadmin said that's not
| possible, so the president said come to my office, and lo and
| behold, the emails stopped before going 500 miles.
|
| NO. NO NO NO.
|
| How can you get SO MANY facts wrong when the freaking story is
| googlable?
|
| Here's the original email:
| https://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles
|
| Here's the FAQ that covers the ambiguous parts:
| https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html
|
| This annoys me because I know the original author and I remember
| when this happened (he told the story a few times).
|
| Let's recap:
|
| > there was a university president
|
| NO! It was the chairman of the statistics department.
|
| > who couldn't send an email more than 500 miles,
|
| True. Being in the statistics department he had the tools to make
| actual maps.
|
| > and the wise sysadmin said that's not possible, so the
| president said come to my office
|
| Kind of true. There was an office involved.
|
| > and lo and behold, the emails stopped before going 500 miles.
|
| True.
|
| > There's a lot to the story that's obviously made up,
|
| NO! Zero of this story was made up.
|
| ALL the people that were involved in the story are still alive.
| You can literally get them on the phone and talk to them. We're
| not debating whether or not Han Solo ever used a light saber.
| THIS SHIT REALLY HAPPENED.
|
| Sheesh.
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