I'll agree with Vadim's assesment. Metcalf can mock Merit and MFS folks all he wants, but they're doing damn good work. I especially liked this quote: rm] Yes, I found pettiness and bureaucratic infighting among the rm] groups I had hoped would be pulling the Internet together. Death of the net, death of the net! The network operators won't all agree, we're DOOMED!!! rm] I stand corrected, but not reassured. Back at NANOG, I was rm] surrounded by people whose lives are about "running code." I rm] twiddled as these people, unaccustomed as they are to public rm] speaking, stood up one by one in front of 350 people without rm] having ever tried their slides on GWU's projection system. We all rm] waited while Windows booted. If you have running code, it seems, rm] you don't have to respect your audience by checking your slides rm] at least once. Or by wearing a suit. Sheesh. I dunno. Does respecting your audience mean "wearing a suit" and having a flawless a/v presentation? Or does it mean presenting encompassing intelligent information? I think the latter, and I think Mr Ethernet failed in this respect in his most recent article in InfoWeek. -alan ......... Vadim Antonov is rumored to have said: ] ] ] >From: Michael Dillon <michael@memra.com> ] >I don't know if you folks are following Metcalfe's columns... ] ] The guy is seriously out of touch with reality. He seems to be ] completely unable to comprehend the fact that packet loss is ] not a malfunction but rather the nature's way to say "you need ] more bandwidth". And the fact that it was exactly suits who ] got Internet to that point; engineers keet screaming about ] inadequate facilities for as long as i could remember. ] ] And if he thinks backbone engineers have time to prepare slides ] (or have secretaries to do that for them) i'd like to move to the ] world he's living in. ] ] --vadim ] ]