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For a little overview on how cool IBM has become try The New Face of IBM at InternetWorld.

He even looks like "SATAN"

Jeremiah

Newsmaker: Thomas Penfield Jackson
http://w ww.internetworld.com/print/1998/10/12/news/1998101 2-newsmaker.html

Jurist in Microsoft case opinionated, tardy in decisions
http://www.mercurycent er.com/business/microsoft/trial/judge/

The second article has more about Judge Jackson's life before becoming a judge.

-- Chris Goldman

Nothing prevents you. Do you remember AlterNIC and their .earth and .biz domains? They had a whole network of TLD nameservers, that actually also incorporated pointers to the normal country TLDs and .com/net/org/edu/gov/mil, so you didn't need any other nameservers in your resolver.

But it failed, and you know why? If half of the world implemented this system, but the other half didn't, half of the net's email would go into limbo because on its route it would find a nameserver that has no clue where to find the MX for yourdomain.earth.

Also, t his article has some good reasons why you should not have a fragmented DNS.

This could be what you were referring to.
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If I remember correctly, IE 4 and 5 downloads were and are both hosted on ConXion -- though they are of course served from NT machines.

That said, they handled the ie4 download fine. Of course, back then 500mbps public and private peering with other backbones was considered pretty good..

Yes, I knew it was a joke.

towerj + linux is faster

I've refused to shop at Spamazon for quite some time due to their penchant for spamming. Cases in point go back at least as far as early 1998 and are widely documented on Dejanews.

A better write-up of their business practices can be found at the page of Peter Seebach, a long-time n.a.n-a.e (news.admin.net-abuse.email) regular.

Finally, there's Spamazon's practice of shilling for themselves on USENET - an "astroturf" campaign eerily reminiscient of Micros~1's "independently-written letters to the editor" stunt. (Available through Dejanews - Start here or search for Message-ID <3584e5cc.1368345@news.sirius.com>.

While I'm as disgusted at the "purchase circles" idea as anyone, I'm not at all surprised. Spamazon doesn't think in terms of customers; merely in terms of targets for additional marketing. Take your business elsewhere. (Many on n.a.n-a.e have recommended Powell's. I concur.)

I just received my new copy of Internet World with my friend Jim Rutt's face on the cover. The headline reads "The Demise of Dot Com: And the political storm ahead for Network Solutions' James Rutt." It's not online at Internet World yet so I can't give a specific pointer.

Anyway, it's about time the Commerce Department started closing on this issue. NSI's position has a certain amount of appeal from a self-dealing point of view, but is completely contrary to the intent and the blackletter of the 1993 agreement. They are supposed to manage the whois database in public trust, not convert it to private intellectual property for their own convenience and profit.

The analogy with phone numbers is wrong. Like it or not, the phone company does own your number, although there are some gray-area issues there too.

This issue is fundamental to the autonomy of the global Internet from control by NSI or any other entity. ICANN has problems too, but they are separate.

Let me state this very clearly: we don't know what NSI's intentions are, so we have to separate speculation from reality. But the possibility exists that a privatized whois database would be the leading edge to privatizing the Domain Name System as a whole. What would we do in 1999 or 2000 to overcome such a development?

I urged Jim Rutt in private and reiterate in public my plea for NSI to drop this issue and get to the business at hand: improving NSI's service to its customers, which is widely and correctly regarded as being crummy. They have many advantages as a result of being awarded "first mover" position in the market by virtue of their current government contracts. They would do well to defend that advantage through superior service rather than lawsuits, political arm-twisting and worse.

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Is in this "internet world" article. http://www.in ternetworld.com/print/current/news/19990628-critic s.html

The author basically calls people who lie on web-forms "hackers." Truly astonishing. :]

Read it and you'll understand just how complex a setup EBay has. One of them performs the searching for the site.. "We had search vendors come in and tell us they had a great product, and we'd point a little of our load at it and it would melt into a puddle of metal on the floor."

When has the code ever stopped being free? XFree86 was ready to proceed without The Open Group when they changed the license. The code you and I were using was still free and open.

The GPL will not save you from code forking. EGCS and GCC make a good example. The GPL does not have a clause saying forks are not allowed.

Well, the original UNIX forking is one example, as is X (display postscript, for example). The cost of the damage caused is difficult to calculate, but the forking has caused little but incompatiblity for programmers and problems for system administrators. As you may be tired of the GPL religion, I'm dearly tired of discovering subtle differences in every UNIX, even tho their heritage has so much in common. If the GPL will do through force what enlightened self interest didnt do for compatibility, then I'll take that.

The GPL does, indeed, not forbid forking of the code, but it does take away a lot of the incentives to fork (IE, making a proprietary version, including a new feature and competing on 'Buy our stuff. We have FOO. They dont.'). Since that leaves only serious technical disagreements as a reasons to fork, it happens more rarely (and never in a proprietary fashion, allowing backports and discouraging incompatibility).

Embrace-and-extend becomes a lot easier when you can just take the code supporting the protocol and add your own stuff, rather than having to reimplement it from scratch.

As regards the conceding of the desktop, there is was a recent interview with Jordan Hubbard at http://www. internetworld.com/print/current/webdev/19990412-fr eebsd.html. I also remember reading similar sentiments on usenet several times. Mr Hubbard and some other fairly outspoken BSD advocates may not represent the BSD community, but in such a case the other developers should speak out too, because this idea appears to be fairly prevalent. I most certainly hope the BSD crowd would join in in the quest for the desktop, because together we'd be stronger.

And, as far as the tightness of control, since it appears people have differing opinions on this, I'd guess it's just a matter of how involved you are and what you mean with 'control' :). 'Linux' probably has a lot more than 150 people 'in control' because the separate packages tend to be maintained by separate and unorganized people. The different packages in themselves have a lot fewer of course (some control the kernel, some glibc, some gcc, etc). And in the end, the distribution creators have control over what happens in the integrated end result. The same is, of course, true of BSD in some fashion, because the BSD distributions include external software too. I guess it's just a matter of opinion in the end :).