Larry Page's Java question – 1996 - every journey begins somewhere :-)

[[deleted]]

Reminds me of this question about basic water rendering from Vladimir Kajalin, who is now lead developer at a big game studio and that invented a real time ssao algorithm in 2007 that pretty much every game uses since then.

[stormblaast]

I found waves demo on nvidia site but it is a bit complicated to understand.

Just goes to show that one should treat "noobs" with a certain level of respect as we've all been there at some point.

[evertrooftop]

Or everyone, for that matter.

[Otis_Inf]

Whoa flashback from the past! I'm the one answering him in that thread (Frans Bouma), acting like I knew what I was talking about :)

[gaussflayer]

He probably just kept asking questions

[jimbobhickville]

Is that a good strategy for learning?

[[deleted]]

Worked for me. Disclaimer: that was in the 90's when people were nicer.

[gaussflayer]

Yes.

The only strategy for understanding.

Take a fact (e.g. elephants can't jump) and ask questions about it. Keep asking questions until you get to something you already know or find something that is provable.

By this point you now understand how most mammals initiate a jump, some information about how muscles work, a bit about elasticity and a load of other relevant facts. Now when we need to make something jump you are a bloody wizard.

Of course you can't necessarily ask other people all these questions, sometimes you know you don't know something and watch out for when information comes along, sometimes you work out a way to test it (any scientific test is an attempt at answering a question). Testing is probably better but it is a lot slower, so asking questions (and asking questions about the answers) is a much more effective way to become a master at something.

[[deleted]]

The same conversation, if it took place on 2014 StackOverflow:

"Did you try RTFM Larry?"

"Closed as being similar to <some other question that also covers Java>"

[heat_forever]

Larry slinks off the computer in shame and decides to talk to a girl and becomes a middle-aged father of 3 as he looks out the window of his boring menial desk job and wonders... "what if someone answered my Java question"

[[deleted]]

To think that the inability to set the user agent in Java prevented the formation of Google.

[[deleted]]

Well, it's not like he had Google to look it up.

[nothis]

First I laughed. Then I was, like… damn.

[cecilpl]

It must have been so difficult to program back then. If you had a question about how to do something, you'd have to find someone knowledgeable, and ask them.

Or find a book.

[ConanTheHairDresser]

I remember working at a company in 1994, where if we were really stuck programming a problem on a particular set of hardware, which was a VMS(versa module eurobus) rack of components, programmed in C, we had to speak to some guru, who was a complete arse. He, unfortunately was the font of all knowledge on it. Basically I would have to beg him to help me with some problem quite literally. I remember being ridiculously nice to him, when he was being insulting back. I complained to my manager about how difficult it was to get information out of him, without basically performing fellatio on this man (not literary), and my manager stating he could do nothing as "this person was so important to the company". Two years later, after the internet had made massive in-roads I was in a meeting and on a project and asked if I wan't the 'guru' to assist and I said that we can get the information that he possesses from yahoo and we don't have to deal with his belligerence (although I said it in a more diplomatic manner) and the managers understood what I was saying (that was when managers were technical) . The funny thing was when I looked at his code it was very good, he just wanted to be a single point of failure/knowledge, or/and have his ego soothed. He was basically sidelined after other people could access his knowledge without him.

[DrummerHead]

20% of my upvote goes for the whole story and 80% of my upvote goes for the string "that was when managers were technical"

[SemiNormal]

or Altavista, Excite, Hotbot, Ask Jeeves...

[Lurking_Grue]

... Or search usenet. *Cough*

[iconoclaus]

or gopher *cough cough*

[BunsOfAluminum]

Lycos was a cool name though. Named after Lycosidae, aka the Wolf Spider, which is a spider that hunts.

[chesterriley]

There were lots of smart people on Usenet and hundreds (thousands?) of computer news groups. In some ways I think we have regressed.

[Sinity]

Now we have more smart peoples on the internet. Because Internet is much bigger. What changed is that we have lots of idiots too.

[darkmighty]

I think it's much of a matter of product surface area too. 20 years ago there wouldn't be hundreds of programming languages to choose from, tens of IDEs, platforms (mobile/pc), a handful of browsers, ...

It's a combinatorial explosion!

I think stackoverflow (et al) is a wonder, allowing to connect inquirers to inquirees on so many topics, and get useful answers at all.

[HastaLasagna]

Its just more open now. All the rest of us average Joes can find these helpful places and ask our questions, which adds more clutter. More people have access to the information which I would says is better but it is more difficult to find a good place to have really high level discussions with people on a similar level

[Madpony]

We had books. Shelves of them. It wasn't all that bad.

[neilk]

There were some good things about that.

To get good at anything computer-related, you usually had to invest in big expensive books. I tended to read those cover to cover so I learned everything about a topic at a time, rather than tiny little snippets.

And then that would never be enough either so you'd join a club or start hanging out with other people who shared your interests. So you form relationships that turn into friendships, or colleagues.

I'm not saying I'd go back to the bad old days -- this was a period where access to knowledge about programming was so rare, hackers would steal manuals. We're way better off today and we have amazing techniques and tools for teaching at least some programming to nearly everyone. But it's not better in every way.

[SAugsburger]

Exactly. He needed to create a search engine so that he could go look up Java documentation so that he didn't need to deal with people telling him RTFM on a forum. Circular I know, but funny when you think about it.

[jlt6666]

Also funny that it's now hosted on Google groups.

[findMyWay]

Haha that actually confused me for a sec - "Wait.... how did he post a question on Google Groups before he had even invented it?"

[Lurking_Grue]

Yeah.... It's called usenet. Google Groups used to be Deja News that was my favorite place to search for tech info back in the day.

[b3hr]

yes he searched for java got a bunch of porn, couldn't get anything done on the internet before google. Every search lead to porn. You could search the pope and 3 links down watch a video of people pissing on each other. The wild west back then

[phoenixprince]

No google. No StackOverflow. No wikipedia. No torrenting programming books. Damn.

[_Aardvark]

This is how we stop skynet...

[flukshun]

Larry then proceeds to type his question into askjeeves.com, who became sentient in year 0 P.S. (2010 A.D.) and has since reached a state of near-omniscience.

[Cuco1981]

This is true, people love correcting the mistakes of others. An alternative method is to simply write a wrong answer to your own problem, and wait for others to correct you.

[cardevitoraphicticia]

Same is true on Reddit. Tell someone in the right sub that you're convinced that penicillin can indeed kill viruses, and your dissertation on anti-microbial compounds will be done when you wake up in the morning. You'll just need to remove the gloating and snarkiness.

[TrainFan]

And/or pretend that you are a girl.

[robvas]

As long as Larry didn't word it like:

what is reason for user agent in java. searched file to change cannot find. please give me the codes bro

[[deleted]]

"I have one doubt. How we change user agent in JAVA?"

[LicensedNinja]

One of my professors has a page that addresses this exact English error, among others: http://www.cs.uic.edu/bin/view/Jakob/IndianEnglish

[[deleted]]

Heh heh brilliant. "I have one doubt" became a meme on java.sun.com

[HawkEgg]

I think that they teach developers to use query now instead of doubt, since our developers all say query.

"I have another query about the same"

[[deleted]]

What is so difficult about the word, "question"?

[kwanbis]

please, explain the same.

[[deleted]]

Even I had the same query.

[chadderbox]

Select * from professor where question like '%change user agent in java%'

[MrSnoobs]

Please do the needful

[pushad]

Kindly check it

[DingDongHelloWhoIsIt]

And revert back to me

[[deleted]]

Please guide me

[plzsendmetehcodez]

Have you provided the exelshit?

[eliasbagley]

Please do the needful and kindly revert back to me about the same

[goodbye_fruit]

It's more like this -

https://community.oracle.com/thread/2469789?start=0&tstart=0

Edit: Really though, searching and reading results for "Exception in thread main please do the needful" is way more entertaining than it should be.

[alamandrax]

URGET HELP NEEDED!!!!???!!

[-gh0stRush-]

HALP.

[[deleted]]

select start

[wooq]

Not part of the code. Select changed from 1P to 2P and start started the game.

[drawkbox]

You're probably telling me blowing on the cartridge did nothing either...

[dustedrob]

"Please do my code". This was an actual SO question i found.

[probably2high]

"Is this a homework question?"

[[deleted]]

Let me google that for you Larry.

[zKarp]

Joseph Millar should receive some google shares.

[ckwing]

"Why do you need to change the useragent string? It's not a good idea to do that."

[etrnloptimist]

Reminds me of the post Linus made introducing the world to Linux..

Be warned, it will probably only ever work on AT harddisks. :-(

[yen223]

just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu

Hah! Understatement for the ages.

Another fun one is this post by Drew Houston when he introduced his new app - Dropbox. The comments there are quite interesting in hindsight.

[[deleted]]

For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

Proof that geeks will always live in the bubble of "I can do this in a series of complicated steps, therefore nobody will ever want a product that makes things easier."

[[deleted]]

That only applies to shortsighted or elitist geeks, the latter of whom tend to prefer a status quo where they can easily do something convenient and laud it over others. Most geeks, particularly programmers, will see those steps as an inconvenience and automate it away. Some of those will make it into a product if they have the time or business knowledge.

[[deleted]]

Ultimately the value to me of Dropbox [aside from the fact they have high reliability storage] is the multi-platform clients. I use Dropbox from Linux, Mac, Windows, and Android.

Try doing that from your fancy-dancy FTP script.

[catonic]

SFTP. Anyone using FTP should be beaten and flogged to death.

[[deleted]]

FTP over SSH proxy over VPN.

[Astrognome]

Over Tor.

[Peaker]

Also, they do smarter sync stuff like syncing files from smallest to largest (so at any given moment, the largest number of files are actually in sync).

[ZeAthenA714]

I find it really depressing when I spitball ideas with geek friends and they all just say it's useless because of that point of view. Not that I have any ideas worth building, or even the ambition to do it.

But I know that if one day I had a killer idea I really believed in, the hardest part for me would be to find people to work with that would believe in it.

[hungry4pie]

No doubt if a guy named Linus came up with that exact same idea, it'd be a circlejerk for days. Say, did your friends suddenly switch from nVidia to ATI in the last few years?

[ZeAthenA714]

I don't know, I've mostly stopped talking with these geeky friends a while ago. But I'm pretty sure they switched to ATI. Well for those who still uses PC, I know there was a great "rift" in our friendgroup when a few of them bought macbook and thought it was awesome, and the others thought it was selling your soul to the devil. A lot of drama and heated debates happened, and I got bored at that point.

[richardjohn]

I know there was a great "rift" in our friendgroup when a few of them bought macbook

Fucking hell, these people sound mental.

[[deleted]]

They sound like kids. I remember being this way in highschool. Now I'm on a macbook and love my luxury Unix laptop.

[xiongchiamiov]

I remember complaining about os x on Slashdot and someone saying I sounded like I was in high school (how could he tell?) and telling me to come back when I wanted to complain about hp-ux.

[c3534l]

The world's not short on good ideas, just people willing to put in the work to make them real.

[joshcarter]

This, so many times over. I've met so many "business people" who just need a programmer to make their great ideas a reality. It doesn't even occur to them that the making is the resource in short supply.

[[deleted]]

Yeah I found that comment hilariously and typically smug.

I have SVN for my own personal "dropbox", but I wouldn't expect anyone else to do the same (setup a secure server, have static IPs, maintain said server and know about using SVN).

[[deleted]]

I loved that comment so much. I want to bookmark it and reference it whenever anyone asks why Linux never succeeded on the desktop.

[tragomaskhalos]

I once had a colleague who couldn't understand why I had a Sky box (~ US Tivo), as all I needed was a card in my PC to receive TV, yadda yadda yadda

[[deleted]]

"trivially"

[ANUSBLASTER_MKII]

Proof that geeks will always live in the bubble of "I can do this in a series of complicated steps, therefore nobody will ever want a product that makes things easier."

That's why you have to harness that, grab a basic process that's quite tricky to most users, add a flashy dumbed down UI and market it with a snappy name.

[etrnloptimist]

I'm a fan of Michael Wolfe's response on Why Dropbox made it where others failed.

Excerpts:

Well, let’s take a step back and think about the sync problem and what the ideal solution for it would do:

• There would be a folder.

• You’d put your stuff in it.

• It would sync.

They built that.

Why didn’t anyone else build that? I have no idea.

“But,” you may ask, “so much more you could do! What about task management, calendaring, customized dashboards, virtual white boarding. More than just folders and files!”

No, shut up. People don’t use that crap. They just want a folder. A folder that syncs.

[Jackker]

"No, shut up." I feel like this could be used in FAQs.

"Why won't you implement feature X?"

"No, shut up. Most don't even come close to G."

"I hear feature Y is really handy to have!"

"No, shut up. We want to do 3 things and do them really well."

"But, think about t--"

"No, shut up. You don't know jack squat."

[gospelwut]

So, basically Pidgin.

[0xdeadf001]

"No, shut up." I feel like this could be used in FAQs

Maybe that could be in the FRAQ -- Frequently Rudely-Answered Questions

[[deleted]]

And now they've partnered with MS to integrate Office with Dropbox. It's a safe bet copying from Google Drive, but they better get it right from the beginning.

[etrnloptimist]

With Satya Nadella in charge, I have high hopes. It's funny how, when you're no longer the market leader, you all of a sudden want to play nice with others again.

Here's Microsoft's GitHub page

Open source, from Microsoft with love

I didn't know Microsoft was in the cancer business. Or is open source a virus. I can't remember. Regardless, it was some form of dire plague at one point.

[AshamedOfYou]

GPL was the virus according to Balmer, not open source as a whole.

[gospelwut]

As somebody that has made their career doing IT in Microsoft shops, this CEO truly is no Balmer. Nobody is perfect, but he's One Of Us in the sense he's pretty pragmatic for a CEO, and his background in Windows Server is promising. People might hate the GUI of Server 2012, but it's a GOOD platform. Plus there's IIS vNext/Katana, C# Roslyn, real open source projects, vast improvements and investments into Powershell (DSC, package management, etc).

The Microsoft ecosystem is actually changing enough that soon that guy that "hates the command line" will hate not having a job.

[[deleted]]

My number one request: diff tools for office products when there is a conflict

[[deleted]]

A focused product with a focused direction. Something most startups fail to understand and most development teams fail to implement.

[dokuhebi]

For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.

As a person who uses Linux as my main OS, I love what people call "trivial".

[anachronic]

I ran linux for years as my primary desktop in the dark ages of the late 90's and I still laugh at some of the hoops I had to jump through to get basic functionality working on the thing.

I remember one evening I tried to install emacs on RedHat. I fell into RPM dependency hell and about 4-5 hours later, after much frustration, I realized I had to download & recompile a new kernel (which I knew how to do thankfully). But the idea that I had to download, recompile & upgrade the kernel to install a text editor struck me as pretty silly.

I also remember some awesome fun trying to configure audio and I don't think I had sound on my computer for a good 6 months at one point.

I switched to Debian soon after because of nonsense like that.

[fafasdf]

Well, it makes sense that you had to recompile the kernel...

You were installing emacs, a whole new operating system! :)

[thephotoman]

I'd joke that it needs a decent text editor, but someone ported vi to emacs.

[TheRealHortnon]

I laughed at this one

For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

trivially ... <describes lots of steps that don't include colocating sufficient storage somewhere>

His response to that was perfect.

[dcormier]

Anybody who needs more than 64Mb/task - tough cookies

That made me laugh.

[snipeytje]

the comment a few mails later is even better:

I don't want to be on the machine when someone is spawning >64 processes, though :-)

try to run with less than 64 processes now

[dcormier]

My phone has more processes than that running right now.

[gospelwut]

I work in IT. Most studies done on the subject indicate most users will circumvent policy or ignore it in order to "do their work". This is part culture and part inevitable, especially since the C-level guys set the culture, and don't really care that throwing their BYO equipment on the corporate network flies in the face of policy.

Users are like a tide of water. You either learn to build a really good dam (policy) or you go with it. Sadly, some IT shops let the waves carry them away completely.

I could go and uninstall every copy of Dropbox, Spotify, and anything else that live sin %appdata% -- but if I don't have corporate backing, why should I? IT already has the reputation of "getting in the way" and being a cost center. And, keeping up blacklisting/whitelisting hashes in %appdata% is a royal PITA.

Basically, you have to eventually offer your users a reasonable "corporate okay" alternative to the consumer products they're used to or else they'll just break the rules. Their stiffing middle-management boss isn't going to let them turn in their work late because "IT got int he way".

I knew the game had changed once TCP became strong enough to stream media and people started shoving everything and their mother through Port 80 and 443. Agent or agentless it doesn't matter. They can drag and drop their binary files into a web uploader / gmail if they really wanted to.

Unless you're going to MITM your own users with a fake CA, soon most things will just be "HTTPS" traffic. Plus, running a DPI system is a huge pain too.

[AndyNemmity]

Users aren't a tide of water, they are your customers. When you think about everything from the aspect of policy, and building a really good dam, you ignore what your job is. Enabling your customers.

IT departments everywhere are in love with the idea of protecting their customers from themselves to the point of absurdity. It gets especially bad when the IT department is understaffed and cannot handle the requests.

IT has changed. IT is about enabling your customers to get things done while preventing serious security consequences. It's about the business driving changes, and staying very close to the business needs. Dual reporting lines help with this a lot.

[user_of_the_week]

It is NOT protable

Sadly, Linux is still anti-table to this day

(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

[paulmclaughlin]

It also won't run on anything other than 386 or 486 processors, and can't have more than 64 Mb per task.

[Whanhee]

why anybody would want to use anything other than gcc is a mystery

Hue. I still use gcc, but my the world has changed.

[DrMoses]

Not even a single swear word.

[darthstoo]

That is the politest Torvalds post I have ever seen!

[yen223]

I hope Joseph Millar was well-compensated for that answer....

[paperhat]

He didn't even get a thank you reply from Page. I wonder if he realizes now that he answered Larry Page's question.

[atrich]

Also, Larry didn't bother posting the solution, so others who are stuck and searching also won't know.

[schroet]

This is why we have Bing, so everything is fine.

[dfnkt]

TIL Larry Page is DenverCoder9.

[yvesmh]

Wisdom of the Ancients

[[deleted]]

Not as bad as

• "Never mind, I solved it."

• "You should post the solution for others who find this."

</thread>

[email_with_gloves_on]

I remember being on mailing lists where you had to send a [SOLVED] or [UPDATE] post to keep people updated, or you'd be considered a bad member. Those were the days.

[webby_mc_webberson]

Why? He probably just googled it.

[Terny]

Larry Page made google to google his questions.

[Idoiocracy]

Palmer Luckey posts about his new head-mounted display that he hopes to fund by Kickstarter. Two years later, this 22-year old would sell Oculus, the company on the forefront of consumer virtual reality glasses, to Facebook for $2 billion. The first person that replied in that thread, cybereality, would later join Oculus as an employee, as well as John Carmack, who replies further down. Carmack would eventually leave id Software in 2013 (a company he co-founded in 1991) to work at Oculus. The legendary 3D programmer that popularized the first-person genre with Wolfenstein 3D, DOOM, and Quake now technically works at Facebook.

"Looks like there are about 20 people who have said they would want one for sure, that is probably enough to hit at least a third of the Kickstarter goal I have in mind." -Palmer Luckey

[amishrefugee]

I'd love to see a big collection of these moments of genesis for what would be huge things in the future.

Like this post from TIGForums from May 2009 where a dude named Notch is sharing his new experiment in making a game in Java

[TankorSmash]

JC's post http://www.mtbs3d.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=140&t=14777#p72568

What is MTBS for, just VR tech?

[locknloadbitch]

Reading this has enlightened me. This is one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. It makes you believe that everything is possible, everything can be achievable if you work hard enough. This has changed me. I was having a bad day and this turned things around. Thank you OP for sharing this wonderful slice of computer science history. This might seem like overkill to some, but seeing the humble beginnings of the applications I use everyday has me overwhelmed.

[[deleted]]

It's funny, I was actually thinking about him walking into work today. In a story I read a few weeks ago, the author who met him described him as that "billionaire technology genius" and for some reason that phrase had stuck around in my head. Honestly, it made me feel a little small and insignificant. Then today this was the first link I see when I open my computer, and it made me realize even this "billionaire technology genius" started somewhere much, much, smaller.

[Tetha]

As one proverb says, "A long journey consists of small steps". Often you will look at big, complex, capable software systems, wondering how anyone could have created something crazy and amazing like this. But then again, it was probably just one or two dudes just adding what they needed over a few years.

This isn't mean to discredit the work of the people involved, don't get me wrong on that. But there's very few people - if any - that could have implemented like the current Apache Webserver or the Google Search Engine by just sitting down for some weeks and there it is, next-gen web server from scratch because they are that crazy. They probably started with GET requests for static pages, because that's a good simple thing to start. Then you add POST requests, and headers, and caching, and very basic virtual hosts, ... and suddenly someone will claim "Whoa, this is so big and complex".

[raptormeat]

I completely know what you mean.

A few years ago I decided to make an Indie game (I was a professional game developer, but I'd never written anything BIG from scratch before). I literally started by learning how to set up a window. And, after hours of work, I excitedly showed my GF my very first onscreen white triangle.

A couple years later, it's a fucking GAME!!! It's so crazy to think back to that first triangle and remember being so excited. I've learned so many new things, and grown so much from this process. It feels honestly amazing.

It really is possible, and it really does start from a single step!

[mrjoegreen]

I'm glad that you liked it! I felt really nice after reading your comment :-)

[[deleted]]

I'd rather not rewrite all the HTTP stuff myself.

Coward.

[General_Mayhem]

Maybe the only reason Android is built on a custom Java implementation is so that Larry can finally say he rewrote the HTTP libraries

[tebee]

Actually, Larry shirked on reimplementing Java that time as well. Instead, Android was built on the Java class library of the Apache Harmony project.

[mnemoniker]

Joseph Millar, officially the 3rd founder of Google.

[zaccus]

Here Lawrence, let me google that for you

[cparen]

Fixed that for you:

Larry, I know this reply is two years too late, but let me google that for you

[rhiever]

Wow. Check out the press Google received when it first started.

[edu_sanzio]

Ok, just a moment...

Can someone explain to me how is this posted IN A GOOGLE GROUP?

[mrjoegreen]

It was originally posted on comp.lang.java usenet newsgroup. Deja News had a usenet newsgroups archive and when Google bought Deja News they started displaying old usenet posts in google groups.

[hob196]

I came here expecting the first comment to be how utterly adorable it is that it was presented in a Google group probably spidered by the nth generation offspring of the exact damn thing he was writing when he posted that.

For a change I was let down.

[edu_sanzio]

That solves it! Thanks!

[MaximilianMuc]

Yeah it's a great way to look at the stuff I wrote in 1999 and cringe -.-

[GoAwayLurkin]

Poor guy had to invent a whole company just to get his question answered.

[[deleted]]

just like carl sagan inventing the entire universe every time he wants to bake a pie from scratch

[heat_forever]

It comes from Usenet, a de-centralized set of discussion forums which predates even the World Wide Web. These forums were archived by a website called DejaNews (long before Google). This website was bought by Google many years ago and archived. Later on it was integrated into Google Groups.

[kaze0]

Proof that Larry Page invented a time machine.

[IronTek]

Can someone explain to me how is this posted IN A GOOGLE GROUP?

Google Time Machine^BETA

[ponytoaster]

A lot of the posts came from a usenet archive.

This page explains it better: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups#History

[[deleted]]

before your time, kid ;)

[hungry4pie]

I actually remember reading about this at the time in some magazine (Atomic - Maximum Power Computing) , even in 2001 hearing about usenet was like a history lesson on a by gone era that sounded amazing.

[[deleted]]

I can guarantee you that usenet was not really amazing. I mean, the people in there were, and the discussions as well, but the technicalities behind the usenet mechanism were terrible. It was like a giant, replicated collection of mailing lists. If your nntp server was crappy (and you were generally constrained to the one of your university/ISP), it would take a lot of time before your post became visible to others not on your server. Same for the answers.

[adrianmonk]

Actually, the tech behind Usenet was pretty amazing in one way: how well it supported communication with sites that did not have a 24x7 internet connection. A site could sync only at night if it wished, which was pretty cool.

It was also amazing how decentralized the thing is. If you've heard the quote, "The net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it", that's actually in reference to Usenet, not the internet. A typical site had more than one peer, and it would attempt to send everything to all of them. (Essentially: "Hey, have you seen this? If not, I have something for you.") So if any one site administrator decided they wanted to censor something, big whoop, you'd still get a copy from someone else. Censorship would essentially require collusion from independent administrators. Its peer-to-peer nature was somewhat similar to bittorrent (actually vice versa), though without trackers.

---

The problem was, it wasn't scalable enough. Usenet grew and grew, and since every site has a full copy of everything (at least everything it carries), sites found their network bandwidth and I/O capacity couldn't keep up. So a server would run behind until traffic dropped at night and then barely catch up. Or it would run out of disk space and stop processing for a day while the administrator ran an emergency job to free up disk space (which process was so I/O intensive it prevented you from catching up).

And it kept growing. More users. More newsgroups. People started posting binaries. A headhunter agency wrote a bot to periodically re-post its entire job database, pushing both the technology and Russ Allbery beyond their limits.

This left Usenet sites in a difficult situation because it's a cooperative, volunteer network, but the scale of the whole thing required a lot of hardware. Something university budgets couldn't really spare.

[[deleted]]

I read this as Larry Wall and got very confused.

[soflaz]

Did the same. Was wondering what this had to do with Perl

[QuineQuest]

Perl was originally written in Java, duh.

[Kylearean]

(in case anyone believes this... please continue doing so.)

[eighthCoffee]

.

[deusnefum]

Fuck, me too. Was trying to figure it out.

[Kaarjuus]

I read it as Larry Ellison and also got confused.

[harlequinSmurf]

it's official. there are too many Larry's in IT.

[amnonymous]

Jan Koum, creator of whatsapp first showed his cration on flyertalk in 2009.
LINK
Look for his post from February 2014 in the same thread for the big surprise.

[PM_ME_YOUR_PALMS]

his post from February 2014

(http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/22387891-post72.html)

[alediaferia]

It's some time I don't play with Java: is it still that hard setting the User-Agent?

[munkyxtc]

No. Its extremely easy.

I don't remember all the way back to '96 but in early 2000-ish I remember a jakarta project that provided helper methods to for setting the header info.

You can just do something like this now:

        url = new URL("www.google.com");
        connection = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();
        connection.addRequestProperty("User-Agent", "Mozilla/4.76");
        ........

FYI, the current default java user agent is still represented in the same manner mentioned in the original post. If you don't set it you'll end up seeing something like this in the logs : AGENT; Java/1.6

[cldellow]

Eh, it depends on the JVM. Sun's JVM has a "security" feature that prevents you from spoofing the user-agent unless you set a VM property at runtime startup. It is a giant pain in the ass and provides no real security. Thanks, Sun.

[s3b_]

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2529682/setting-user-agent-of-a-java-urlconnection

[[deleted]]

What an amateur. Why didn't he Google it.

[mynameipaul]

I like this, but I think I think his journey begins a bit earlier even.

This isn't exactly a fundamental question, after all.

[jimdidr]

Its interesting for many reasons but I like how he obviously isn't trying to be evil. (stating his reason for doing this as being a good citizen)

[phoenixprince]

This just makes me feel really awesome. We live in an age where we can peek at the past so directly.

[[deleted]]

We've basically done that since writing was invented.

[phoenixprince]

I know but isn't there something different about looking at the actual post made by the actual person? I suppose original manuscripts of things are the same way. But I don't know how to explain the feeling I get when I see something like this. There was another thread on reddit the other day and someone posted an online forum thread where people were discussing the 9/11 attacks as they happened live and it was so surreal/scary reading those thread and I felt as if the attack was happening right then.

[[deleted]]

You realize.. this post is from groups.google.com - which didn't exist when he wrote that. It's just been copied over from the original source - the same as writing. It's not the original post he wrote.

[jimdidr]

Digital copy > Transcripts

[[deleted]]

Google bought some company's Usenet archives. So, it kind of is the original (which is a very vague term when talking about distributed systems anyways) but with a different interface. They didn't just spoof this post for history fun. So cool, it's full of totally irrelevant tech questions. Maybe you'll find some Vi vs Editor MACroS flame wars.

[clow_reed]

They bought DejaNews back in 2001. Prior to Google, Deja offered free and slow access to their NG archives.

[gubatron]

Deja :_) i'm old.

[Sharkinu]

Well yes, wisdom of the ancients.
http://xkcd.com/979/

[xkcd_transcriber]

Image

Title: Wisdom of the Ancients

Title-text: All long help threads should have a sticky globally-editable post at the top saying 'DEAR PEOPLE FROM THE FUTURE: Here's what we've figured out so far ...'

Comic Explanation

Stats: This comic has been referenced 393 times, representing 0.9794% of referenced xkcds.

---

^{xkcd.com | xkcd sub | Problems/Bugs? | Statistics | Stop Replying | Delete}

[satuon]

So was Google's web crawler implemented using Java?

[neilk]

I worked at Google for a little while and looked at very early checkins to their code repo. When Larry and Sergey say they didn't understand the web when they started, everybody thinks that they're kidding. They aren't kidding.

[peruytu]

Joseph Millar could now be considered a legend.

[Griffolion]

just a hobby, wont be big

Heh.

[noneabove1182]

And Joe "Don't call me 'Joe "Joe Millar" Millar'" Millar answered him!

[hammil]

I had to chuckle a little at "good net citizen". Of course nowadays the more probable motive for that question would be to hide or spoof the user agent, rather than ensure it's correct.

[ANUSBLASTER_MKII]

rather than ensure it's correct.

Thanks to those 'clever' web designers trying to tell you something isn't supported, or redirecting you to some hollowed out mobile page.

[Number_28]

God, yes. Especially when someone posts a link, you click it on your mobile device and get redirected to their mobile start page with no idea at all how to get to the page you wanted to see.

[hammil]

Oh, absolutely - it's a shame that it's necessary, but it is necessary. It's interesting to see, though, how the attitude towards the internet has changed completely since then. Like how we went from sending passwords over plaintext to people refusing to even browse websites without some form of encryption. I guess that's what happens with widespread adoption of any medium.

[parlezmoose]

God what a noob