...

Or is it simply time to declare NANOG yet another bastion of closed minds, and closed protocols?

There's not much rocket science in this, if someone was to get together an open product that did this things may be different. So far most of the systems have been coming out of start ups that end up going for the money. The MBONE tools are OK but from where I sit are useless as the end users don't have MBONE. This is an operational issue and you can programme your Cisco's to do it :) If MBONE is to be a serious contender the ISPs must deliver it, then us content providers that are wasting tons of net bandwith could become nicer netizens and wouldn't use the unicast products that end users are asking for. Of course the ISPs may not take as much money off us as we wouldn't need quite so much bandwidth (perhaps there's a reason there?)

I would be happy if there was actual support for non-Intel/non-MMXprocessors, aside from Macintosh.

I happily run the player and servers on Sparc/Solaris boxes. No Intel, no Microsoft, no problem. It wouldn't hurt to see more platforms though, Real could do with being a bit more open and not trying to do everything themselves, there's plenty that'd help them out (most platforms have some good hacker zealots that'd do a port).

As it is, everything since their version 3 release has been "Error 88" in our office since they won't support these so-called 'orphan' CPUs.

I think people are getting a bit heavy with the not so bad guys, it could be worse - you could be looking at a Microsoft only system instead. I've found Real to be more receptive to cross platform support, if a little tardy in following it through to delivery. Brandon -- Brandon Butterworth phone: 01737 836592 BBC Research & Development fax: 01737 832336 Kingswood Warren, Tadworth email: brandon@rd.bbc.co.uk Surrey, KT20 6NP URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/