Yuckk! Why put all the intelligence in the central system. Look at the
What central system? Did I say central system?
Internet, dumb routers and packet switches flipping data bits all over the place with all the intelligence in the hosts at the periphery. Paul has a mail server at vixie.sf.ca.us that receives his mail and if he really needed access remotely, he can just run a POP server there and pick it up anywhere there is a net connection. Or if he cares about where the mail lands, he can have vixie.sf.ca.us forward all his mail via UUCP and then poll via TCP/IP or modem from wherever he happens to be located.
POP servers and mail forwarders are friends of mine. I use both every single day. All I am trying to say is that I think we should decouple the complexities of the Internet system from what a user sees, while at the same time increasing the functionality. Setting up and running and whatever a POP server and such is no problem with me, but, for example, my kids prefer to just have things work, and finding what they are looking for, and them not having to worry about arbitrary complexities. Not that they would not care, but they should not *have* to.
On Fri, 28 Jul 1995, Hans-Werner Braun wrote:
Yuckk! Why put all the intelligence in the central system. Look at the
What central system? Did I say central system?
Yup. You talked about cellular auto-roaming, about something (a central system) that maps names to locations.
POP servers and mail forwarders are friends of mine. I use both every single day.
The essence of POP servers and mail forwarding is that the intelligence is distributed, not in the central system.
All I am trying to say is that I think we should decouple the complexities of the Internet system from what a user sees, while at the same time increasing the functionality. Setting up and running and whatever a POP server and such is no problem with me, but, for example, my kids prefer to just have things work, and finding what they are looking for, and them not having to worry about arbitrary complexities. Not that they would not care, but they should not *have* to.
This can still be solved at the fringes by making better configuration and administration tools for existing technology. I see some of this with things like IBM's SMIT on AIX systems, RedHat Linux's admin tools, the Caldera Network Desktop (http://www.caldera.com) by former Novell employees. Sun is moving in this direction from what I hear. I know that SCO's latest release includes the first cut at a simple graphical admin system based on Visual TCL. And once NT and MacOS get their Internet services working properly, that will be another example. Your LC575 at home will be able to forward your mail to your Powerbook in Puerto Rico with no rocket science required. Michael Dillon Voice: +1-604-546-8022 Memra Software Inc. Fax: +1-604-542-4130 http://www.memra.com E-mail: michael@memra.com
participants (2)
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Hans-Werner Braun -
Michael Dillon