Path: utzoo!utstat!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!van-bc!skl From: skl@van-bc.UUCP (Samuel Lam) Newsgroups: news.software.nntp Subject: A suggested solution (was Re: When was last?) Summary: It isn't really a "time", but a "magic ticket". Keywords: NNTP, Time, Magic Ticket Message-ID: <81@van-bc.UUCP> Date: 8 Dec 89 01:27:41 GMT References: Reply-To: skl@wimsey.bc.ca (Samuel Lam) Organization: Balliffe International, Vancouver, B.C., Canada Lines: 40 In article , bob@MorningStar.Com (Bob Sutterfield) wrote: >NNTP is the wrong place to manage or communicate time if you intend to >use the time for something that matters to you. But it isn't really "absolute time" that the two NNTP peers are trying to communicate here, it's just a "magic token" that point backs to a point in the server's time. It's like some LISP systems which has a built-in "time travelling machine"; You could ask it to give you a "ticket" for the moment "now" at any time, and you keep that ticket and present it to the time machine if/when you want to go back to that instance in time. In the NNTP world, we just need a way to tell the server that we would like to come back later to this point in time to pick up where we left off, and ask for a ticket which will bring me back here later. What the absolute time of the moment is should only be relevent to the server, if anyone. Having said that, how about having a new NNTP command "TICKET" which may, depending on the implementation, returns the return value of time() in %ld format, and have the "NEWNEWS command extended to optionally accept "TICKET non-blanks" instead of "yymmdd hhmmss" as the go-back-to point? Having the legal value of a ticket being a series of non-blank characters will allows the server to decide how it wants to keep track of the tickets it issued. Of course, a magic ticket is only redeemable at the outlet that issued it originally. And the ticket could be of the form "...@server.domain.name" to ensure that. To the client, the ticket is just a string of characters, and it wouldn't need to know the format of it beyond that. In the ideal world where everyone's clocks are synchronized, this discussion would be irrelevent, but in the imperfect world we live in, we need realistic and practical solutions. ...Sam -- Samuel Lam or {uunet,ubc-cs}!wimsey.bc.ca!skl