Talk:Finger (protocol)

My god - is there anyone on here who connected to the net before either web0 or web1?? The lack of historical... memory? is brutally dismaying. "Internet" is NOT a verb yet, and won't be until web 3 and/or the release of the "private" internet to the public. See, after listening to all you newbies even I call it "the internet". What you call 'the internet' is the 'THE NET'. A computer is a computer and it has a name. Connect 2 or more 2gether and you have a 'network' or net. Connect 2 or more nets 2gether and you merely have a bigger network. "To internet" is a verb describing either a) originally the actual process of accessing another network. (as in "Cool, I just connected to uwisc from texas!!! Man, this internetting is neat shit!! It took me -hours- to get that message thrugh Chitown. I actually had to add two hops, manually routing each 8bit pack, just to bypass the darpanet firewall in virginia! (Even then, who wanted the NSA reading your private mail, esp. if it ws to that real cute chick from Boston I met at woodstock... (sigh) ps. for all you bright lights, I just demonstrated how html was developed, with no 'plan' and no 'project'. Anway... (pause, scratch, ponder, ponder) Where was I? Where are you? View the source for this wikipage to see how it responds to <grin> or perhaps my lifelong habit of indenting an important paragraph with 2 spaces...

 Different folks wrote their own mail readers - who wants to directly parse the data stream 1 bit at a time?

{btw, that's why cerfthenet gets all the glory and fame for "inventing applying 1940s packet switching concepts to software.} Very nifty and apropos demonstration.

I've never edited a wiki talk page before but already the Wiki software is smart enough to correctly parse my intentions and emphasize the important info.  The <grin> passed transparently thought, as I imagine these domains automagically block transmission of -any- data string beginning 

Aha Florida. Jimmy we have a bug. Since I've got todays Firefox, i don't know if it mine or yours, but this highlight/indent paragtaph subroutine seems messy.. :( No, he didn't invent the idea or the implementation. "Technical standards" emerge to describe the end result of a collaborative process. Just as folks using the net would personalize the msgs by adding parenthetical comments, such as (grin) to display humour at sending an ironic comment or (rant on/off) or (flame on/off). As different "reader writers" gradually wrote compatible code, standards "emerge". In this case we're describing a "markup language", originally used by editors to "mark up" text. Take hypertext (it came from Apple, all the great ideas there are Wozes, the sexy ideas belong to that marketing guy that everyone thinks runs Apply,) add the concept of a generalized markup language, add a bunch of wise-cracking hackers who know that its IMPOSSIBLE to think "in the box" - you -must- be "out of the box" or your brain will only see what's already there and most people require a kind of tabulas rasa to ponder something gnu... or should we now ponder things agnu - you just read that here for the very first time, I betcha... :)_.

THATS a good point to remember - on the net, standards coalesce around what works, some standards-writer writes it up, and "history is record".  Vinton wrote the "proposal for the standard" by trying to pin down what folks were actually doing. Test the proposal to see if accurately reflects that which was made/found toi work Those who can, do.  The rest seem to either reap the benefits and rewards, while the anally retentive are content to describe it.  Now, where wuzzi?  So, (grin) became a standard.  It expressed how you felt.  Parse the data stream 1 byte at a time, passing everything thru transparently, wait for the open bracket, then scoop the variable and merely look it up on a table.  (Parsing bit by bit, whether in a sentence or in some other data stream, is much harder than merely identifying bytes. Live-parsing variables is so much more 'machine friendly', but most folks can barely debug code based on the errors the compiler reports. Real Programs Do It Live And Interactive.  I dont want to send my batch of hollerith cards out or wait all night for some batch processing time. (Batch processing = no fun.  You want to see how the computer responds to what you do -when you do it. (As in my experiment with the [hardreturn][ascii32][ascii32]wenotreturntothenormaldatastream combo.

letter t othe" is the kind of thing heard in university labs from about 1968-72. Then some geni figured numbers were easier to read by humans... and that was the "end of the world as we knew" yet agasin. resulting in severe limits placed on the nets ability to absorb and process information - apparently. Of course, it actually has no effect but humans like words and phrases and computers like digits. To wrap this short interruption up in a full circle, a binary computer only knows 1 digit. 1. If i finger a computer, i'm shwing it a digit, and it cognizes it and goes "Aha! Nothing changed to Something." Peek and Poke mean different things to different systems: do I want to poke my friend? It didn't stick, it was more fun to finger a host -oops - gotta run - where teh save draft comman??

Use as a profanity

Could someone add something about the user of "finger" in hacker slang as a profane reference to a sexual act? Similar to the use of fsck as a profanity. There are numerous quotes of people humorously promising to "finger and fsck".

Yes, here's a classic. "unzip && strip && touch && finger && mount && fsck && more && yes && umount && eject && sleep"

All are real commands that would be available on most recent *nix environments. --128.119.16.236 (talk) 16:56, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

Why .plan .project?

Anyone know the history behind .plan and .project? It would be interesting to put here as the .plan article redirects here. —Cliffb 06:03, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you mean by the "history" behind these. The names begin with a dot because they are hidden dot-files. And they're called "plan" and "project" because they are supposed to contain your plans and/or projects, shown when you finger another user. Richard W.M. Jones 08:20, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

Redirect from .profile???

Why do I get redirected to this page when I am looking for .profile? CuriousOliver 22:12, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

"The program would supply information such as whether a user is currently logged-on, e-mail address, full name etc. As well as standard user information, finger displays the contents of the .project and .plan files in the user's home directory."

That's why. 88.217.45.254 12:36, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

None of which explains why .profile redirects here, though it would well explain why .plan and .profile would redirect here. .profile is a script file setting up a session, not an info file. Petronivs (talk) 21:31, 9 December 2008 (UTC)