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Comment by lloydde

11 years ago

And this is why we can't have nice stories.

I felt for the author as I got deeper into the faq, and recognized this pattern of cynicism, then decided the author was so generous and thorough, not out of obligation (make the emails stop!), but because that is the type of detailed person he is -- and good at dinner parties too!

8 comments

lloydde

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ceequof  11 years ago

Writing stories for a technical audience is tricky. I've been doing it for going on 10 years now, and I'm still not very good at it.

A critical rule, however, is to omit detail, (a reader is unlikely to question an explanation they make up themselves) and most importantly, to omit details you know to be wrong. (It is impossible to nitpick a statement that is never said)

  An odd feature of our campus network at the time was that it was 100%
  switched.  An outgoing packet wouldn't incur a router delay until hitting
  the POP and reaching a router on the far side.  So time to connect to a
  lightly-loaded remote host on a nearby network would actually largely be
  governed by the speed of light distance to the destination rather than by
  incidental router delays.

He knew this was largely wrong, and didn't really improve the story, yet he said it anyway. It should have been summarized in a single sentence, leaving out all the problematic assertions that the slashdot trolls leaped on.

  • TreyHarris  11 years ago

    Hi, ceequof, the original author here. I agree with you completely in concept; it was a stupid thing to include and I should have cut it.

    But as I wrote in the FAQ, I fired off that email in under an hour in reply to a fast-moving thread on an email list where people knew me by reputation and wouldn't question my skills; the totality of my "research" was trying to reproduce the original numbers from memory ("500 miles" stuck in my head, but the distances to the places I remembered pinging did not); and I didn't ask anyone else to edit it for me.

    All of that would have been ridiculously unprofessional of me as a writer for something intended for as wide an audience as it went to. But I had no idea it would be forwarded so much and so often (nor so many years later, now decades after the original event!).

    And that's why I really prefer it when people link to the canonical version I maintain at http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html with a link to the FAQ.

  • chatmasta  11 years ago

    Reminds me of the old saying, "it's better to stay silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and confirm it."

    It's also a reason why short business emails are better than longer ones. You can always go more in depth. It takes skilled restraint to touch on only the most relevant details without losing the larger point.

chatmasta  11 years ago

Yes, I found this to be one of the most refreshing technical anecdotes I've ever read. The tone and style actually put a smile on my face as I read. I enjoyed how the author guided us through the process of discovery, one which we all know so well, driven by an insatiable curiosity to go continually deeper down the rabbit hole until we find the bottom.