1467: Email - Revision history

2001:1C01:3BC4:9500:649B:2FA2:14A4:7C8A: Add missing word

2025-11-14T18:10:13Z

Add missing word

172.71.178.40: /* Explanation */ Direct link (and grammatically superior)

2024-05-31T13:02:14Z

‎Explanation: Direct link (and grammatically superior)

Apollo11: Undoing this part of psychos "grammar" edits

2024-05-30T21:08:26Z

Undoing this part of psychos "grammar" edits

Psychoticpotato: grammar-freaking. sorry.

2024-05-30T18:40:02Z

grammar-freaking. sorry.

172.70.131.64 at 10:45, 10 February 2024

2024-02-10T10:45:51Z

Green: Undoing vandalism

2022-05-26T19:32:42Z

Undoing vandalism

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Donald Trump: Reverted edit by anti-crap user

2022-05-26T19:04:05Z

Reverted edit by anti-crap user

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CRLF: Reverted vandalism with User:CRLF/OneClickUndo.js

2022-05-26T17:58:33Z

Reverted vandalism with User:CRLF/OneClickUndo.js

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Donald Trump: Crapped page

2022-05-26T17:16:32Z

Crapped page

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172.70.210.125: Undo "crap bot"(tm)

2022-05-20T23:47:21Z

Undo "crap bot"(tm)

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@@ Line 10: / Line 10: @@
 A [[:Category:New Year|New Year comic]], where [[Megan]] asks [[Beret Guy]] if he has any {{w|New Year's resolutions}}, and even though this is just before the {{w|New Year}} of 2015, he resolves to find out what an email is!
-Despite being in popular use since 1998 when free email providers appeared and having existed since before 1982 when {{w|SMTP}} was established, Beret Guy apparently doesn't understand what {{w|email}} is, even though he maintains a web page that includes his email address. Megan wonders how else he expects electronic messages to be sent. She explains that one must check email regularly, making a slight at {{w|voicemail}}, which she implies is not worth ever checking.
+Despite being in popular use since 1998 when free email providers appeared and having existed since before 1982 when {{w|SMTP}} was established, Beret Guy apparently doesn't understand what {{w|email}} is, even though he maintains a web page that includes his email address. Megan wonders how else he expects electronic messages to be sent. She explains that one must check email regularly, making a slight jab at {{w|voicemail}}, which she implies is not worth ever checking.
 Beret Guy offers two alternatives: {{w|Fax}} and {{w|Snapchat}}. Megan refers to Snapchat as "the naked pic thing", calling to mind how many of its users send naked pictures of themselves over the Internet. Beret Guy replies that people use fax machines for more than just "faxting" (a made-up term similar to {{w|sexting}}), implying not only that many people send sexual content via fax, but also that he associates fax machines with such acts rather than Snapchat, despite faxing being a technology that predates SMTP by more than a century. Beret Guy knows what a fax is, which implies he is very behind in the technology world, so it makes sense he doesn't know what email is. But he also knows what Snapchat is, which was very popular around the time of this comic. Either Beret Guy heard about it in a similar way to email, or he definitely knows what it is and/or uses it. What's strange is that if Beret Guy knows what Snapchat is, he should know what email is as well, since you need to provide an email account in order to create a Snapchat account.

@@ Line 8: / Line 8: @@
 ==Explanation==
-A [[:Category:New Year|New Year comic]], where [[Megan]] asks [[Beret Guy]] if he has any {{w|New Year's resolutions}}, and even though this is just before {{w|New Year's}} 2015, he resolves to find out what an email is!
+A [[:Category:New Year|New Year comic]], where [[Megan]] asks [[Beret Guy]] if he has any {{w|New Year's resolutions}}, and even though this is just before the {{w|New Year}} of 2015, he resolves to find out what an email is!
 Despite being in popular use since 1998 when free email providers appeared and having existed since before 1982 when {{w|SMTP}} was established, Beret Guy apparently doesn't understand what {{w|email}} is, even though he maintains a web page that includes his email address. Megan wonders how else he expects electronic messages to be sent. She explains that one must check email regularly, making a slight at {{w|voicemail}}, which she implies is not worth ever checking.

@@ Line 12: / Line 12: @@
 Despite being in popular use since 1998 when free email providers appeared and having existed since before 1982 when {{w|SMTP}} was established, Beret Guy apparently doesn't understand what {{w|email}} is, even though he maintains a web page that includes his email address. Megan wonders how else he expects electronic messages to be sent. She explains that one must check email regularly, making a slight at {{w|voicemail}}, which she implies is not worth ever checking.
-Beret Guy offers two alternatives: {{w|Fax}} and {{w|Snapchat}}. Megan refers to Snapchat as "the naked pic thing", calling to mind how many of its users send naked pictures of themselves over the Internet. Beret Guy replies that people use fax machines for more than just "faxting" (a made-up term similar to {{w|sexting}}), implying not only that many people send sexual content via fax, but also that he associates fax machines with such acts rather than Snapchat, despite faxing being a technology that predates SMTP by more than a century. Beret Guy knows what a fax is, which implies he is very behind in the technology world, so it makes sense he doesn't know what email is. But he also knows what Snapchat is, which was very popular around the time of this comic. Either Beret Guy heard about it in a similar way to email, or he definitely knows what it is and/or uses it. What's strange is that if Beret Guy knows what Snapchat is, he should know what email is as well, since you need to provide an email account to create a Snapchat account.
+Beret Guy offers two alternatives: {{w|Fax}} and {{w|Snapchat}}. Megan refers to Snapchat as "the naked pic thing", calling to mind how many of its users send naked pictures of themselves over the Internet. Beret Guy replies that people use fax machines for more than just "faxting" (a made-up term similar to {{w|sexting}}), implying not only that many people send sexual content via fax, but also that he associates fax machines with such acts rather than Snapchat, despite faxing being a technology that predates SMTP by more than a century. Beret Guy knows what a fax is, which implies he is very behind in the technology world, so it makes sense he doesn't know what email is. But he also knows what Snapchat is, which was very popular around the time of this comic. Either Beret Guy heard about it in a similar way to email, or he definitely knows what it is and/or uses it. What's strange is that if Beret Guy knows what Snapchat is, he should know what email is as well, since you need to provide an email account in order to create a Snapchat account.
 The title text, which could be [[Randall]]'s New Year's resolution for 2015, refers to various date/time formats. In programming, a point in time (e.g. the current system time) is usually stored and processed as a single number that represents the count of seconds that have elapsed since a given starting time known as "epoch" (the Unix standard epoch is January 1, 1970 at midnight, {{w|UTC}}). To make sense to people, this number must be converted to a human-readable format, but programmers must choose a format that best meets the needs of their users. This can be a complicated problem to solve, given that there are many different standard formats for different regions, different levels of precision for different applications, and differences between "universal time" and a user's local time zone. Randall has previously advocated for widespread adoption of the {{w|ISO 8601}} format as a universal standard.

@@ Line 8: / Line 8: @@
 ==Explanation==
-A [[:Category:New Year|New Year comic]], where [[Megan]] asks [[Beret Guy]] if he has any {{w|New Year's resolutions}}, and even though this is just before {{w|new year}} 2015, his resolution is to find out what an email is!
+A [[:Category:New Year|New Year comic]], where [[Megan]] asks [[Beret Guy]] if he has any {{w|New Year's resolutions}}, and even though this is just before {{w|New Year's}} 2015, he resolves to find out what an email is!
 Despite being in popular use since 1998 when free email providers appeared and having existed since before 1982 when {{w|SMTP}} was established, Beret Guy apparently doesn't understand what {{w|email}} is, even though he maintains a web page that includes his email address. Megan wonders how else he expects electronic messages to be sent. She explains that one must check email regularly, making a slight at {{w|voicemail}}, which she implies is not worth ever checking.
-Beret Guy offers two alternatives: {{w|Fax}} and {{w|Snapchat}}. Megan refers to Snapchat as "the naked pic thing", calling to mind how many of its users send naked pictures of themselves over the Internet. Beret Guy replies that people use fax machines for more than just "faxting" (a made-up term similar to {{w|sexting}}), implying not only that many people send sexual content via fax, but also that he associates fax machines with such acts rather than Snapchat, despite faxing being a technology that predates SMTP by more than a century. Beret Guy knows what a fax is, which implies he is very behind in the technology world, so it makes sense he doesn't know what email is. But he also knows what Snapchat is, which was very popular around the time of this comic. Either Beret Guy heard about it in a similar way to email, or he definitely knows what it is and/or uses it. What's strange is that if Beret Guy knows what Snapchat is, he should know what email is as well, since you need to provide an email account in order to create a snapchat account.
+Beret Guy offers two alternatives: {{w|Fax}} and {{w|Snapchat}}. Megan refers to Snapchat as "the naked pic thing", calling to mind how many of its users send naked pictures of themselves over the Internet. Beret Guy replies that people use fax machines for more than just "faxting" (a made-up term similar to {{w|sexting}}), implying not only that many people send sexual content via fax, but also that he associates fax machines with such acts rather than Snapchat, despite faxing being a technology that predates SMTP by more than a century. Beret Guy knows what a fax is, which implies he is very behind in the technology world, so it makes sense he doesn't know what email is. But he also knows what Snapchat is, which was very popular around the time of this comic. Either Beret Guy heard about it in a similar way to email, or he definitely knows what it is and/or uses it. What's strange is that if Beret Guy knows what Snapchat is, he should know what email is as well, since you need to provide an email account to create a Snapchat account.
-The title text, which could be [[Randall]]'s New Year's resolution for 2015, refers to various date/time formats. In programming, a point in time (e.g. the current system time) is usually stored and processed as a single number that represents the count of seconds that have elapsed since a given starting time known as "epoch" (the Unix standard epoch is January 1, 1970 at midnight, {{w|UTC}}). In order to make sense to people, this number must be converted to a human-readable format, but programmers must choose a format that best meets the needs of their users. This can be a complicated problem to solve, given that there are many different standard formats for different regions, different levels of precision for different applications, and differences between "universal time" and a user's local time zone. Randall has previously advocated for widespread adoption of the {{w|ISO 8601}} format as a universal standard.
+The title text, which could be [[Randall]]'s New Year's resolution for 2015, refers to various date/time formats. In programming, a point in time (e.g. the current system time) is usually stored and processed as a single number that represents the count of seconds that have elapsed since a given starting time known as "epoch" (the Unix standard epoch is January 1, 1970 at midnight, {{w|UTC}}). To make sense to people, this number must be converted to a human-readable format, but programmers must choose a format that best meets the needs of their users. This can be a complicated problem to solve, given that there are many different standard formats for different regions, different levels of precision for different applications, and differences between "universal time" and a user's local time zone. Randall has previously advocated for widespread adoption of the {{w|ISO 8601}} format as a universal standard.
-The title text also probably references a twitter outage that took place on December 29, which was blamed on an [http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/dec/29/twitter-2015-date-bug error in a date format string].
+The title text also probably references a Twitter outage that took place on December 29, which was blamed on an [http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/dec/29/twitter-2015-date-bug error in a date format string].
 Most programming languages provide functions to create a custom date-format string using "tokens" that represent different parts of the date/time. Here, Randall appears to have used one of these functions with the string "%Y-%M-%D %h:%m:%s", which looks like it should produce a date and time as "Year-Month-Day Hour:Minute:Second". However, he used the wrong tokens for this:
@@ Line 33: / Line 33: @@
 Randall previously addressed date/time formatting in [[1179: ISO 8601]] and [[1340: Unique Date]] (the latter of which uses a formatting string correctly).
-This was the second comic in a row with Megan holding a smart phone, the first being [[1466: Phone Checking]]. The comic before that one was also about smart phones: [[1465: xkcd Phone 2]].
+This was the second comic in a row with Megan holding a smartphone, the first being [[1466: Phone Checking]]. The comic before that one was also about smartphones: [[1465: xkcd Phone 2]].
 ==Transcript==
@@ Line 58: / Line 58: @@
 The Unix timestamp is a standard method of keeping time by counting the absolute number of seconds that have elapsed since a set point in time known as "epoch", defined as midnight on January 1, 1970, Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Epoch, in {{w|ISO-8601}} format, is "1970-01-01T00:00:00Z", where Z indicates UTC.
-The timestamp in this comic's title text (1420001642) is 1,420,001,642 seconds since epoch. The process of converting that number into a human-readable time is as follows:
+The timestamp in this comic's title text (1420001642) is 1,420,001,642 seconds since the epoch. The process of converting that number into a human-readable time is as follows:
 *Years since 1970 = 1,420,001,642 seconds / 60 seconds per minute / 60 minutes per hour / 24 hours per day / 365.25 days per year
 **This yields 44 years plus 31,467,242 seconds.
 **The year for the timestamp is 1970 + 44 years = '''2014'''.
-***Note: The year calculation specifies 365.25 days per year to account for {{w|leap year|leap years}} (every fourth year adds an extra day).  Also note that 2014 is not a leap year.
+***Note: The year calculation specifies 365.25 days per year to account for {{w|leap year|leap years}} (every fourth year adds an extra day).  Also, note that 2014 is not a leap year.
-*Days since start of year = 31,467,242 seconds / 60 seconds per minute / 60 minutes per hour / 24 hours per day
+*Days since the start of the year = 31,467,242 seconds / 60 seconds per minute / 60 minutes per hour / 24 hours per day
 **This yields 364 days plus 17,642 seconds.  Given January 1 is considered the ''first'' day of the year, this means we are on the 365th day of 2014.
 **The 365th day of a non-leap year is '''December 31'''. December is the '''12th month''' in the Gregorian calendar.
 *The remaining seconds can be converted into a time:
-**Hours since start of day = 17,642 seconds / 60 seconds per minute / 60 minutes per hour = '''4 hours''' plus 3,242 seconds
+**Hours since the start of the day = 17,642 seconds / 60 seconds per minute / 60 minutes per hour = '''4 hours''' plus 3,242 seconds
-**Minutes since start of hour = 3,242 seconds / 60 seconds per minute = '''54 minutes''' plus '''2 seconds'''
+**Minutes since start of the hour = 3,242 seconds / 60 seconds per minute = '''54 minutes''' plus '''2 seconds'''
 Thus, Randall's timestamp represents the time "'''2014-12-31'''T'''04:54:02'''Z" (again in ISO-8601 format).

@@ Line 12: / Line 12: @@
 Despite being in popular use since 1998 when free email providers appeared and having existed since before 1982 when {{w|SMTP}} was established, Beret Guy apparently doesn't understand what {{w|email}} is, even though he maintains a web page that includes his email address. Megan wonders how else he expects electronic messages to be sent. She explains that one must check email regularly, making a slight at {{w|voicemail}}, which she implies is not worth ever checking.
-Beret Guy offers two alternatives: {{w|Fax}} and {{w|Snapchat}}. Megan refers to Snapchat as "the naked pic thing", calling to mind how many of its users send naked pictures of themselves over the Internet. Beret Guy replies that people use fax machines for more than just "faxting" (a made-up term similar to {{w|sexting}}), implying that many people send sexual content via fax, a technology that predates SMTP by more than a century. Beret Guy knows what a fax is, which implies he is very behind in the technology world, so it makes sense he doesn't know what email is. But he also knows what Snapchat is, which was very popular around the time of this comic. Either Beret Guy heard about it in a similar way to email, or he definitely knows what it is and/or uses it. What's strange is that if Beret Guy knows what Snapchat is, he should know what email is as well, since you need to provide an email account in order to create a snapchat account.
+Beret Guy offers two alternatives: {{w|Fax}} and {{w|Snapchat}}. Megan refers to Snapchat as "the naked pic thing", calling to mind how many of its users send naked pictures of themselves over the Internet. Beret Guy replies that people use fax machines for more than just "faxting" (a made-up term similar to {{w|sexting}}), implying not only that many people send sexual content via fax, but also that he associates fax machines with such acts rather than Snapchat, despite faxing being a technology that predates SMTP by more than a century. Beret Guy knows what a fax is, which implies he is very behind in the technology world, so it makes sense he doesn't know what email is. But he also knows what Snapchat is, which was very popular around the time of this comic. Either Beret Guy heard about it in a similar way to email, or he definitely knows what it is and/or uses it. What's strange is that if Beret Guy knows what Snapchat is, he should know what email is as well, since you need to provide an email account in order to create a snapchat account.
 The title text, which could be [[Randall]]'s New Year's resolution for 2015, refers to various date/time formats. In programming, a point in time (e.g. the current system time) is usually stored and processed as a single number that represents the count of seconds that have elapsed since a given starting time known as "epoch" (the Unix standard epoch is January 1, 1970 at midnight, {{w|UTC}}). In order to make sense to people, this number must be converted to a human-readable format, but programmers must choose a format that best meets the needs of their users. This can be a complicated problem to solve, given that there are many different standard formats for different regions, different levels of precision for different applications, and differences between "universal time" and a user's local time zone. Randall has previously advocated for widespread adoption of the {{w|ISO 8601}} format as a universal standard.