peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) (06/07/90)
In article <1990Jun6.064024.11432@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> xanthian@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Kent Paul Dolan) writes: > Sadly, this is touted as a "feature"! Some clever person decided to add > a bit of authentication to news articles by encrypting the article numbers > into printable text... Sorry, Kent, but that's incorrect. The reason C news message-ids are so weird is because C news doesn't maintain a separate sequence file, depending instead of uniqueness of the process-id/date pair of numbers. Usually this is done by having the date and process id in clear text, but this leads to aggressively long ids like "1990Jun6.064024.11432". Some folks decided to encode them in hex, and got things like "266A8933.4EDE". A few of us figured that since it's just a unique string, why not use an even bigger base and make it smaller, thus you get things like "VQU34O3". > forgetting that being able to determine the order in > which a set of articles was sent is sometimes necessary to the human reader > for understanding context or for for understanding the articles as a set. You mean like "<1990Jun6.064024.11432@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG>"? > You can lead some programmers to keyboards, but you can't make them think. No kidding. -- `-_-' Peter da Silva. +1 713 274 5180. <peter@ficc.ferranti.com> 'U` Have you hugged your wolf today? <peter@sugar.hackercorp.com> @FIN Dirty words: Zhghnyyl erphefvir vayvar shapgvbaf.