Phil wrote: > Unruh wrote: > <snip> > "Those poor students come onto the lists asking questions and > demonstrating that their knowledge level is low, but they are responsible > to putting out the programs that will be used by thousands of people. " > </snip> > > Unruh, Stop and think a moment, as fast as the electronics and software > industry has gone, if you were a full-time student you still couldn't keep
The type of question that I believe he is thinking of often looks like a college homework question and indicates a basic lack of understanding of computer technology and how to find and understand fundamental source documents (there may be some excuse for the latter in that Microsoft documentation tends to lead you in circles around the details, never reaching them and the ntpd RFCs are written for mathematicians, not software developers). Companies should not be using such people without strong supervision. Although I don't know whether it comes from using students, or simply using people good at time and budgets, but lacking technical knowledge, but a lot of commercial internet and web related implementations are clearly done by people who didn't understand the basic philosophy behind the protocols. For example Microsoft stick quotes round the human friendly part of email addresses, because they are sometimes needed to protect special characters. However the whole point of the design of email addresses and email headers in general, is that they should look reasonable when viewed as a memo header. As a consequence, the human readable part is carefully specified such that, in normal usage, quotes should not be used. There are also many travesties of web standards around, which look like they were the result of untrained staff. Microsoft made some significant, but conceptually simple, errors in implementing SNTP in W32Time, one of which is now grand fathered in. (Specifically, I'm thinking of hard coding the stratum at 2, and using symmetric active instead of client request modes.) Unruh's basic point, though, was that, if you buy an NTP implementation and there is any possibility that it wasn't implemented from the reference implementation code, it is very likely that it will contain significant mis-implementations of the protocol and will almost certainly considerably lag behind the current release information (which lags behind the development branch that Dr Mills oversees). In terms of failing to understand protocols. You are using the (original) usenet interface to this forum, but it is actually gatewayed to a mailing list. As a result, quite a few lookups are going to get done on the xxx top level domain. Ignoring the forgery implications, this concentrates excess traffic on a limited number of servers. I use .invalid, which is specially allocated for the purpose of bogus domain names, and, even if they don't actually do so, the root servers could take steps to cause responses to be cached for a very long time. In any case, there are proposals to allocate .xxx. > up with the "progress" and changes. Consider the boy that started ebay, he > cobbled up a bunch of canned scripts for lack of programming experience to > get that thing going. I would say in the end his approach succeeded beyond > his wildest dreams. > > We all get thrust into positions dealing with the relatively unknown, that's But here we are only talking about things relatively unknown to us personally, in which case the correct solution is to research them, but what often happens is people try to get others to give them potted answers to that research (usually without providing enough facts to confirm that what is being asked is even a resonable approach to the underlying problem). > how most of us learn and what eventually leads to innovation. That's also The people we are talking about don't want to learn; they simply want an answer to the current sub-problem. > what got me into electronics in the first place, regardless of how smart you > are, or what you know, you can never learn it all. The day you stop learning > is the day you cease to exist. _______________________________________________ questions mailing list questions@lists.ntp.org https://lists.ntp.org/mailman/listinfo/questions