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.
>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