Microsoft Patents Everything!

March 26, 2001 9:09 PM

Microsoft Patents Everything! Oh dear lord, what will we do now? Has Mr. Gates finally found a way to take over the world?
posted by stew560 (12 comments total)

For those of you who haven't figured it out. It's a hoax. Look here and here.

Had me fooled for half a second!
posted by stew560 at 9:11 PM on March 26, 2001

Gee, i remember when the @-sign URL-masking trick was interesting...
posted by harmful at 9:11 PM on March 26, 2001

I give it 36 hours 'til CNN has fired off their boilerplate cease-and-desist copyright-infringement volley. Anyone else want in?
posted by youhas at 9:33 PM on March 26, 2001

Oh, and it's a direct lift from The Onion! An infringement two-fer! Argh.
posted by youhas at 9:39 PM on March 26, 2001

...For the unkowing (read- stupid like me) how does the @-sign thing work, in hostname resolution terms?
posted by stew560 at 3:35 AM on March 27, 2001

On the second picture I expected Bill to say:

ALL YOUR BASE BELONG TO US!

Bill does seem like the world-conqueror Spaceball type.
posted by Stretch at 6:07 AM on March 27, 2001

Stew, first, the part after the @ sign is just a wacky representation of an IP address that had a purpose back when the internet was originally set up. The @ sign can be used to pass a username/password to a website (not recommended, of course, because you can leave it in referrer logs and such). So it's all supported parts of the HTTP and TCP/IP specifications. It's just highly unorthodox and mainly useful for situations like this.
posted by dhartung at 6:11 AM on March 27, 2001

Warning--this doesn't work in all browsers and in fact crashes mine (IE5/Mac). If you must look at this, use the first "here" link in the body of stew's post.
posted by rodii at 6:38 AM on March 27, 2001

I don't think this is funny. Bah.
posted by azazello at 7:30 AM on March 27, 2001

Yeah, decimal IPs don't seem to resolve on any Macs, from what I understand. (The @ symbol trick works fine with a normal "dotted-four" IP, though.)
posted by waxpancake at 9:06 AM on March 27, 2001

No Cray, it's right there in the RFC, uh, somewhere (OK, maybe not, I couldn't find it). The dotted-decimal form is just syntactic sugar. Anything a router can resolve to 32-bit binary is theoretically OK (at least according to Cisco). I think "dotted binary" is pretty cool.

Links to: the old Metafilter thread and a good article.
posted by rodii at 10:32 AM on March 27, 2001

Dotted-decimal has always baffled me - eight hex digits would be shorter, easier to remember, and much simpler to deal with. It's just such a weird hybrid - it's a 32 bit number, represented byte by byte, and yet each byte's value is specified in decimal...? What's WITH that? Is there somebody in the IETF who actually thinks that way?

-Mars
posted by Mars Saxman at 11:50 AM on March 27, 2001