From: Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz (Shmuel+gen@patriot.net)
Date: Thu Oct 17 2002 - 07:25:47 CDT
Please do not send two copies of your replies.
In <20021016105812.H3266@main.templetons.com>, on 10/16/2002
at 10:58 AM, Brad Templeton <brad@templetons.com> said:
>But if, as many would contend, our newsgroup names are a relic of an
>early 1980s design and no longer the best solution, why spend a lot
>of effort improving what they can do, espcially if it means making
>much of the software out there have to update?
Well, I regard both the mail and news protocols as hopelessly archaic,
tainted by undue concessions to slow terminals. If it were up to me we
would have binary protocols with no dependencies on character sets or
character sizes. But I see no possibility of the world migrating to
anything that I would consider reasonable; there are too many
transition issues.
So the question is, what improvements can we actually get deployed in
a reasonable time frame. Moving away from a hierarchical name space
would require so many changes that I don't see it happening, and you
would still have the issue of character set.
>For example, if you had an e-mail system like the ones from the 80s
>that required you have a 10 digit numeric ID, would you want to make
>the effort to have it support 12 digit IDs, or would you rather just
>replace it with strings.
I used one of the ones from the 1980s that didn't use decimal integers
for user ids. Of course, I also used one that had octal integers for
ids, but nobody's prefect ;-)
I'm not convinced that a network of news groups is the way to go; I
see the current DAG as being more user friendly. But that's not an
issue to be decided in a brief conversation.
--
-----------------------------------------------------------
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT
Atid/2
Team OS/2
Team PL/I
-----------------------------------------------------------