The 20th Anniversary of the Internet

Al Gore is celebrating by very · 2002-12-31 14:47 · Score: 2, Funny

as the inventor of the internet, Al Gore is celebrating by not running for President.

Re:Al Gore is celebrating by Anonymous Coward · 2002-12-31 14:57 · Score: 5, Informative

After all this time one would think that this ridiculous, ignorant, petty Republican FUD would have been laughed out of existence. For the nth time, read it and this time please try to understand:

http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nett im e-bold-0009/msg00161.html

Couple of significant quotes from Bob Kahn and Vint Cert:

"VC> Bob and I believe that the vice president deserves significant credit for
VC> his early recognition of the importance of what has become the Internet."

"...But as the two people
>who designed the basic architecture and the core protocols that make the
>Internet work, we would like to acknowledge VP Gore's contributions as a
>Congressman, Senator and as Vice President. No other elected official, to
>our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of
>time."

So yes, Al Gore did take a position of leadership in the creation of the Internet. He helped keep penny-pinching nearsighted legislators from killing it, because he was one of the few people in power who "got it". /rant

Happy new year everyone!
Re:Al Gore is celebrating by markov_chain · 2002-12-31 15:43 · Score: 2

It's good to be suspicious of authority and all, but I would prefer a thousand Al Gores and nerds that suck up to him than one policitician paid off by the media cartel striving to destroy the freedoms that our general-purpose computing and networking technology provides us today.

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Re:Al Gore is celebrating by operagost · 2002-12-31 16:14 · Score: 2, Interesting

I'll stop making that joke if you leftist radicals will stop saying Bush "stole" the election.
By the way, if you want to see why people started making this joke, you have to give his exact quote:
During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet.
CREATING CREATING CREATING CREATING!
Whatever, he MEANT to say, the numbskull said CREATING, and he sure as hell didn't have anything to do with turning it on- he showed up after it was CREATED and gave it a push. Maybe it was just a slip ... but it's out there for all you authoritarian fanboys!

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Re:Al Gore is celebrating by John+Hasler · 2002-12-31 16:16 · Score: 2

I think we should give him credit for creating Network Solutions instead. I wonder how much Verisign stock he ended up with?

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Re:Al Gore is celebrating by /dev/trash · 2002-12-31 16:40 · Score: 2

Awwwww.
Can no one have a joke, these days with out it being all the evil mean republicans fault?
Re:Al Gore is celebrating by Tony-A · 2002-12-31 18:46 · Score: 2

Creating.
You sit at a keyboard and create a program. Right?
You did not make the keyboard.
You did not design the layout of the keys.
You did not design the conventions of which pulses mean which character.
Most everything involved in the creation of that program you did not create.
However, you are responsible for the creative whatever that makes the difference between whether the program comes into existence or not.
Without Al Gore's initiative you would not have the internet. You *might* have a few unused pieces gathering dust in a few university labs.
Would you say that Eisenhower created the Interstate Highway system? Seems reasonable even if he never poured any concrete.
Re:Al Gore is celebrating by jnana · 2002-12-31 22:33 · Score: 2

Perhaps if the evil mean republicans -- as you refer to them -- were not totally destroying the country and systematically undoing two hundred years of progress in expanding the scope of civil liberties and making equality for all more than just a pipe dream, then, perhaps, it would just be a joke. Or if perhaps you suffer under the illusion that the systematic erosion of our most basic civil liberties is just something to be joked about at a cocktail party, then, too, indeed it is a joke.
If you think I'm over-reacting, then I can only say that we are as Germany was in 1936. Sure, it could, possibly, turn out okay, but things are likely to get incredibly ugly from here on out. Pretend otherwise at your own peril....
Re:Al Gore is celebrating by ch-chuck · 2003-01-01 01:14 · Score: 2

If we took every touchdown scored by a team during the year and added them up, then compared them to all the other teams, what would that prove? If a strong team played a weak team and scored very high, and that total was added in, it would give that team an unfair advantage at the end. If two strong teams played each other and the score was really low, those teams would suffer because their total scores would be low. Does that mean the higher scoring team, in this instance, is better, and the lower scoring teams are has-beens? I don't see it that way.

The series, World, NFL, whatever series, is won or lost not on the total number of touchdowns, or runs, or goals, but on the number of games won or lost. The President, under the Electoral College, wins or loses not based on the total number of votes, but on the number of states he or she wins. Counting the people voting for that person in each state would be like counting the number of runs scored by each team in the whole world series, and would not result in a winner, except on paper. What if the Giants and the Sox played a world series? And the Giants were ill from traveling all the way to, say, Japan, and on their first game they lost by, say, 21 to 1. Then they got their act together and the rest of the games resulted in scores of 2-1, 3-1 and 3-2, with the giants winning all 3. Now they are ahead three games to one, but they are way behind in total runs scored. The sox have 25 runs and the Giants have only 9. To win the series they would have to beat the Sox by a score of more than 16 to 0. We have seen from the last three games that the teams are evenly matched and what are the chances that the true heroes will be recognized? What are the chances that they can score 16 runs against this team which is, after all, almost as good as they are overall?

So, in a Presidential race, over a country as vast and diverse as ours, the founding fathers wisely told us that we should not count the number of runs scored, but rather how many games are won or lost by each side. Now, do you still want to abolish the Electoral College? Whether you do or not, how about an opinion?

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Re:Al Gore is celebrating by /dev/trash · 2003-01-01 06:39 · Score: 2

Hold on, I have to put on my tin-foil hat.

If they are so bad, how do they get elected? Really, how?

The thing that ruined this country was the New Deal. It created the whole welfare state. Now we have to live with it.
Re:Al Gore is celebrating by Zeinfeld · 2003-01-01 06:52 · Score: 2

I'll stop making that joke if you leftist radicals will stop saying Bush "stole" the election.
OK Bush didn't steal the election. Renquist, Scalia, Thomas and the other traitors on the Supreme Court stole the election for him.
Regardless of which we now know that Bush told repeated lies for the sole purpose of getting elected. He clearly never meant to keep his repeated environment pledges. He clearly never intended to keep his repeated pledges to balance the budget. He has even continued lying after the election, remember the 'trifecta' claim?
Al Qaeda murdered 3,000 people in New York and are still at large. North Koreat has torn up the agreed framework and is building nuclear weapons. so of course we are going to start a war with Iraq even though the UN arms inspectors have found nothing.
Using the Presidency to persue a personal family vendetta when there are far more serious threats to national security is beneath contempt, it is certainly not 'leadership'.
Of course because of the Internet I can say things like that and reach a very large audience. More importantly you, me and everyone else in this thread can come to our own assesment fo the merits of the failure in the Whitehouse, we don't have to simply sit back and accept the views fed us by the mainstream media and its Republican echo chamber.
During the first gulf war people were using the Internet to find out the news that the mainstream media was not telling. That cut both ways, people in Europe and the US could see the stuff that CNN and ABC didn't broadcast, but equally people in Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq were findign out information their news services were not reporting. It will be interesting to see how the US media reports stories of the inevitable attrocities that result from war this time around. Will Bush's popularity rating survive bombing a couple of schools and hospitals when the pictures of the injured and dead children being carried out are circulating the Internet?

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Re:Al Gore is celebrating by Zeinfeld · 2003-01-01 07:04 · Score: 2

Repeat this to *yourself*: the Internet would most likely be here in the same form, with or without Gore
I was there, you are wrong, we could have ended up with something that is much less.
The Internet was very different in structure to the 'information highway' plans laid by the international telcos and the cable companies. Under their model the cable companies and big business would be the content providers. You me and everyone else would be mere 'consumers'.
The 'Interactive TV' pushed by these interests consisted of nothing more than a huge projection TV where the interactivity consisted of the ability to buy stuff while watching the screen. There was no keyboard, no slashdot, no google and definitely no personal web pages.
As soon as the Gore folk like Tom Kalil and Jock Gill saw the Web they helped put a spike into the mouldering OSI plans and went full bore promoting the Internet as the future. Gore himself led the charge to get the US federal govt. up online and the Whitehouse. The Whitehouse site was actually one of the very first to be created, however Gore decided that the Whitehouse should not go online until every other agency had, thus forcing even the NSA to have a Web site.
OK folk were thinking about the Internet long before Gore and Gingrich. However they both deserve a considerable amount of credit for the contribution they made. The 'Gore invents internet' media moment was creatd for the sole purpose of denying Gore a campaign theme on which he could speak with considerable authority, it was a deliberate calculated smear.
At the same time that Gore was helping us create the Internet the failure in the Whitehouse was pleading no contest to a DUI charge. Which would you pick?

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Re:Al Gore is celebrating by Zeinfeld · 2003-01-01 07:18 · Score: 2

It evolved over time but yes it was in Article 2, Section 1. We should pass another amendment disbanding the College or, as someone else pointed out, mandate that the electoral votes be split according to the popular vote, rather than the winner-take-all system.
Ok waaaay offtopic but yet to see much ontopic.
The electoral college system does have one redeeming feature. It means that in general it is very difficult for electoral fraud in an isolated part of the country to affect the outcome.
So the police stop and searches used to prevent black voters going to the polls in the Florida panhandle, North Carolina etc would only affect the vote if they took place in a swing state. Since the Dixicrat states where this type of thing goes on tend to be sold Republican it has less effect. If there was an absolute majority system then states like North Carolina could stuff the ballot and affect the national count.
The counter argument is that states would have a much greater incentive to ensure people voted if there was a simple majority system. It would end attempts to disenfranchise voters by taking away voting rights from convicted criminals and as happened in Florida under Katherine Harris, disenfranchising voters who happened to have the same name as someone who was convicted of a crime - Jeb would have had a much harder time getting reelected if Florida had not waited till after the mid term elections to reinstate voters whose voting rights had been stolen.
In the wake of Lott's racist gaffe more people realise that Klan sympathies are still present in souther politics and that Nixon's 'Southern strategy' was largely an appeal for racist votes through coded support for symbols of seggregation such as the confederate flag and Bob Jones University. Before the election however I watched a group of washington reporters on TV laughing at a report of a GOP dirty trick used to keep black voters from the polls, a notice saying that the vote was on a different day.
The Florida mess and the GOP desperation to stop the votes being counted was not an abberation, it was simply a demonstration of the contempt they hold for the ideals of democracy and the US constitution, the same contempt that they show on as Bill Clinon put it 'the back roads of the south' at every election.

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Re:Al Gore is celebrating by scrytch · 2003-01-01 09:49 · Score: 2

If you think I'm over-reacting, then I can only say that we are as Germany was in 1936.

You lose.

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Re:Al Gore is celebrating by autopr0n · 2003-01-01 13:27 · Score: 2

And post 9/11, I'd pick Bush hands down over Gore. And I'm a Libertarian. Gore would be down at ground zero doing an environmental impact study instead of taking decisive action. Even Democrats seemed relieved that Gore lost.

Decisive action? What decisive action? Shaking his dick at Iraq? Pissing on the constitution? Gore would have the same thing with Afghanistan, almost anyone would have (maybe not Nader...) to say otherwise is idiotic.

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Re:Al Gore is celebrating by Zeinfeld · 2003-01-02 03:08 · Score: 2

Bush formed a coalition of countries (that naysayers said would never happen) and dismantled the Taliban. Bush made his Axis of Evil speech...which was *incredibly* decisive. I know liberals *hate* this sort of thing, but it's necessary. Reagan said the same thing of the Soviet Union, and we all saw the results.
Bush has managed to alienate every US ally with the exception of the UK and Israel. The axis of evil speach was devisive, not decisive.
The North Koreans appear to be making the only logical response to Bush's stupid phrase, they are building a nuclear weapon. The only logical interpretation of Bush's stupid phrase is that after launching its attack on Iraq they will attack North Korea and Iran, so those countries had better make sure they get the bomb before Bush has finished in Iraq.
Before his inadequacy made his stupid speech the modernisers in Iran were doing pretty well. In the aftermath of September 11th the unelected hardline theocrats were on the defensive and the democratically elected modernisers were gaining real power. Bush's idiotic phrase completely cut the legs from under the pro-US groups and allowed the hardliners to reassert the power that they had lost post 9/11.
So as a result of his stupid posturing we now have two problems, North Korea and Iran that are measurably worse than would have been the case had he kept his big ignorant mouth closed.
No, Al Gore would not have done what Bush has done. He would probably would not have spent 9/11 flying arround on his private jet and we would not have had William Safire telling fantasy tales about threats of nuclear attack to cover up the presidents cowardice. We certainly would not have had to wait almost a week before a credible speech to the nation.
We certainly would have invaded Afghanistan, if you have any doubts on that score you are a complete fool. The one major difference that might have happed would have been co-opting Iran as an aly instead of or in addition to Pakistan whose military dictator had been the principal backer of the Taleban. Musharaf deposed the democratic government in Pakistan after the legitimate government sacked him for refusing to stop support for Islamic terrorism in Kashmir which had almost lead to a war with India.
We certainly would not be looking to start a war with Iraq at this point. The US military would still be focused on eliminating Al Qaeda and the Taleban. It would still have the support of Europe, Russia and China.
So no, Gore would not have handled the crisis in the stupid and incompetent manner of Bush. He would not have created unnecessary crises and he would be focused on the real enemy, Al Qaeda.
One other thing, if Gore was pushing for a war with Iraq because of an alleged attempt to build a bomb it would be possible to believe Gore. The problem with Bush is that he has zero credibility, he has proven time and time again that he will make any lie to justify his agenda.

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Re:Al Gore is celebrating by Zeinfeld · 2003-01-02 05:57 · Score: 2

We'll see...everyone called Reagan stupid and ignorant and heaped invective on him for his Evil Empire comments -
And we later discovered he had been suffering from Altzheimers.
Bush's feeble attempts to ape Reagan don't count because they are just that, an attempt to gain credibility for his hollow schemes on the basis of a rhetorical appeal to the past.
The Soviet union fell apart because the system had died under Krushchev and just took 20 years more to finally fall apart. You have the mechanism partly right, the US spent the USSR into the ground, only the war was won by Kennedy, not Reagan. There is nothing that the rest of the world could do however that would match the problems the communists created for themselves.
Also, about your comments about "alleged" bomb building
I didn't comment on alleged bomb building. We know that North Korea is building a bomb, have done sisnce last July. We have yet to see evidence that Iraq is building a bomb and the state department is busy telling people that they don't expect the inspectors to find anything.
The GOP has been on the wrong side of history time and time again. They installed murderous dictators such as Pinochet and coddled dictators like Suharto and yes Saddam. The situation in Iraq and Afghanistan is simply the legacy of failed Republican imperialism of the past.

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Re:Al Gore is celebrating by Zeinfeld · 2003-01-02 08:14 · Score: 2, Offtopic

well, there goes any credibility you might have had. There isn't *any* "imperialism" in either party's foreign policy.
You don't know what imperialism is.
The British Empire worked in two parts, the formal and the informal empire. The formal empire, the parts of the map colored red were under the direct administration of Britain. That was not the preferred solutions.
Far better was informal empire, the country concerned accepted the protection of the British navy and opened its markets to british trade. In other words Britain received all the material benefits it was after without having to go to the bother of occupation which was costly and inefficient.
Bush's adventurism in Iraq is about cheap oil, control of the gulf and national prestige. It is classic imperialist adventuring justified in classical fashion. We've got the men, we've got the arms, we've got the money too.
It is most likely to come apart for the same reason the Vietnam adventure did. The US people don't support imperialism and they will rapidly withdraw support for a war if they even suspect it may be be being fought for the wrong reasons.

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Oh let me get my popcorn! by reaper20 · 2002-12-31 15:08 · Score: 5, Insightful

Too bad that the last five years have seen the decline of the original intent of the internet to degrade to a cesspool of spam, RIAA/MPAA crap, popups, overmarketization, the ZD "stupidity factor" and other pure bullshit that we put up with every day.

Anyone else harking for the days of gopher and html 3.2? Sure, the "market capitilization" was horrible, but you know what, NNTP was actually useful back then. No google? Some industrous person on would point you to the right place, as a common courtesy. Sharing of knowledge. Ahhhh ... the good old days.

Now we're deluged with a flash-crippled web with no regards to any kind of standards, where any moron can masquerade as a "developer" and make a ton of money for being an idiot. yeah, I may sound stupid in today's context, but someone like Alan Ralsky was impossible back in the day.

Bring back the meritocracy of the internet - you remember? The place where you were entitled to an opinion if you were intelligent enough to actually learn and connect.

Discriminatory? Hell yes, mod me down. Being more intelligent than the average Joe never hurt anyone....

Re:Oh let me get my popcorn! by Magus311X · 2002-12-31 15:23 · Score: 2

Ah...

The days of using a 2400 baud modem on my 486 to dial in to the local high school. You had shell on a VAX, you used lynx and kermit.

All for $10 a year! This was when ISPs where still hourly!

Ah... I remember upgrading to 9600 baud, and 14400 (PPP!). Those were the days...
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Re:Oh let me get my popcorn! by plugger · 2002-12-31 15:31 · Score: 2, Interesting

Forums, irc channels and newsgroups still exist where knowledge is shared and people learn. Yes, in general there is a lot of noise, but there are still places where the majority are intelligent and courteous.

An interesting thing I noticed was that when I started using Linux, setting up web bookmarks for FAQs, HOWTOs, etc, the web seems less and less commercial. I guess it looks like whatever you are looking for (if that makes any sense).

btw, it's the early hours of New Year's day, so no apologies for rambling on :)
Re:Oh let me get my popcorn! by miu · 2002-12-31 15:44 · Score: 2

Anyone else harking for the days of gopher and html 3.2? Sure, the "market capitilization" was horrible, but you know what, NNTP was actually useful back then. No google? Some industrous person on would point you to the right place, as a common courtesy. Sharing of knowledge. Ahhhh ... the good old days.
And you could talk to very cool people on Usenet or though email: Vinge, Effinger, Abrash, and Hawking.
Microsoft had never even thought about the Internet, Spamford and his ilk were not yet at work, AOL was in it's own little ghetto, no javascript, no P2P, and no one was around to interupt our own little elitist world. I do miss some of the things about the weird old days.

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Re:Oh let me get my popcorn! by evilviper · 2002-12-31 15:58 · Score: 5, Insightful

Now we're deluged with a flash-crippled web with no regards to any kind of standards

I'm not! If I come across a 'crippled' web-site, I won't use it, nor will I go there again.

YOU make the web. So, next time you feel like complaining about how terrible flash is, uninstall it from your computer instead. Next time you get annoyed by a pop-up, (of if you, like myself, have the slightest concern for privacy and security) disable javascript and be done with it.

If you don't like distracting animations, disable GIF animations, and you won't be bothered again.

For all your complaining, you haven't accomplished anything. I was annoyed like you by many MANY things on the web... but instead of complaining on slashdot, I installed Privoxy (before it was even under that name) and wrote up a few regex filters that eliminate almost every annoyance I've ever come across. CmdrTaco (and most other webmasters) may not be smart enough to dump the white backgrounds (in favor of any other color that you can look at without feeling like your eyes are being crushed) but that doesn't mean I have to be forced to look look at it that way.

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Re:Oh let me get my popcorn! by JaredOfEuropa · 2002-12-31 16:49 · Score: 5, Insightful

"Anyone else harking for the days of gopher and html?"

The Internet of those days to me is more or less the same as today's Internet: a means of data transport. For what it's worth, that transport now reaches much more people than it did way back when, and at greater speeds also. Don't fall into that delusion that many ISP's suffer from: that they somehow have to offer content as well as transport.

"Bring back the meritocracy of the internet - you remember? The place where you were entitled to an opinion if you were intelligent enough to actually learn and connect."

The great achievement of the Internet is that it has given a voice (or medium or whatever) to whomever needs one. Sure, that includes the crackpots, spammers, lousy web designers, Flash users, and so on and so forth. Internet is no longer the plaything of the elite at universities and defense organisations, as it was 10 years ago. As a result, there is more worthwhile stuff on the Internet than ever there was in the past, but there is a corresponding increase in crap, which one has to sort through to get to the meat. But the crap goes hand in hand with the good stuff... culling the crap would probably mean curtailing essential freedoms that leads to the good stuff.

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Re:Oh let me get my popcorn! by mocular · 2002-12-31 18:02 · Score: 2, Interesting

Yea, I liked those days when my professor gave me his username and password so I could surf gopher space on my 1200 baud modem...when the web consisted of a couple of hundred pages of esoteric text put up by quantum mechanics reaserchers.
The net has changed and mostly for the better. Sure there's plenty of crapola on the net these days but there's also lots of interesting, educational, and enlightening pages out there for everyone.
Its better now than it was and the good stuff will still increase with the caca. Its more democratic, its widely available. The simple minded user is not stuck on prodigy, he's mixing it up with the uber webbies (via AOL) and that cant be all bad.
Happy b-day to the net....it's survived through infancy and is becoming an adult (hence all the p*o*r*n spam?).
Re:Oh let me get my popcorn! by m00nun1t · 2002-12-31 23:15 · Score: 3, Funny

Gopher? Luxury!! Aye, when I was a lad we used to dream of the day we'd 'ave gopher. I'd 'ave to get oop at 4am, stick an ethernet cable oop me nose and sniff in binary just to get me email.

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Re:Oh let me get my popcorn! by richie2000 · 2003-01-01 01:34 · Score: 2

You had Ethernet cables? Luxury! We had damp strings between the phones! We didn't have modems, we had to make the noise ourselves! A terrible racket it was, but we were happy with it!

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Re:Oh let me get my popcorn! by richie2000 · 2003-01-01 03:21 · Score: 2

Cycle? We didn't have no stinken' cycles! We had to walk - by hand, carrying the bits in our mouths. And if there was even a little bit of slobber on the bits, we would get a good thrashing, that's for sure. Aye, you young whippersnappers had it too easy, lemme tell ya. Once every three weeks we'd get a lump of cold poison to chew on. Getting up at 2 am my foot, we could've got up at 2 am on our days off, except we didn't have any friggin' days off! We worked all days from sunrise to sunrise and God help us if we ever let one of the Suns go down! Those were the good old days - 28 hour workdays, paying the manager tuppence a week for the privilege of working and when we got home our father would kill us, dance on our graves and sing hallelujah!
When you try to tell that to the young poeple of today, they won't believe you!

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Re:Oh let me get my popcorn! by Frater+219 · 2003-01-01 05:52 · Score: 2

Anyone else harking for the days of gopher and html 3.2?

Let me tell you about two services which no longer exist: DEC ftpmail, and anon.penet.fi.
I got on the Net when it was about half its current age, by this measure. Well, I wasn't on the Internet -- "the Net" meant Usenet much of the time then, and I had a dial-up shell account on a hobbyist system which had a UUCP news and mail feed from an Internet host. Mail and news came in once a day. The site I was on moved from bang paths to domainist email addressing that year.
(Bang paths were a style of email address which didn't rely on Internet DNS and MX records. You specified the path from machine to machine that the mail should take -- yes, those were open relays! -- separated by a ! character, like so: bigvax!smallhost!mybox!myname, where bigvax was a machine that "everyone" knew how to reach. Addressing got more complicated still if you wanted to email someone on BITNET, FidoNet, CompuServe, or another email network that gatewayed to the Internet somewhere.)
Since we didn't have a "real" Internet feed, and the sysop didn't let ordinary users request files by UUCP, we used a public service run by DEC. (Yes, they'd started calling themselves d|i|g|i|t|a|l, but nobody listened.) This was called "ftpmail", and the way it worked was that you sent email to a daemon on decwrl.dec.com, with the name of an FTP site to connect to, and a sequence of commands to issue. If you sent an ls, you'd get back a file listing ... and if you sent a get, the daemon would email you back the file, chunked up and uuencoded.
There are very few ftpmail services still in existence. Gee, I wonder why.
Soon after I got on the Net, I discovered that it wasn't always a great idea to post things to Usenet in one's own name. Some people had better reason for anonymity than I, of course -- people posting about their experiences surviving sexual abuse, or how to grow marijuana, or things their employers might not want traced back to the office VAX. So someone invented the anonymous remailer.
The first anonymous remailer was anon.penet.fi, run by Julf Helsingius. It was a rather clever system, really -- send email to alt.sex@anon.penet.fi and your message would be posted to alt.sex under an obvious pseudonym -- an12345@anon.penet.fi or some such. But the server retained a hash that allowed it to process responses -- if someone replied by mail to your post, it would come back to your real address, anonymized as well, and with Reply-to: set properly.
Once the spammers and the Scientologists got hold of it, the service was not long for this world. Even the next two generations of remailers -- the Cypherpunk "Type I" remailer and the Mixmaster -- seem to have vanished, under the profligacy of email accounts that people maintain these days, and the threat of spamming.
Sigh.
Re:Oh let me get my popcorn! by scrytch · 2003-01-01 09:43 · Score: 2

> Anyone else harking for the days of gopher and html 3.2?

You. Feel free to use them. Anyone who cares will join you. You don't need to ask anyone's permission, and the protocols are quite well documented with RFC's. When/if IPv6 becomes the standard, you can go tunnel IP4.

HTML 3.2 was the "good old days", eh? They sure get their grey hairs early, this crowd.

BTW, if I had mod points, I would mod you down just for whining about maybe being modded. Put your point out there or don't.

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Re:NCP and TCP/IP by Russ+Steffen · 2002-12-31 15:09 · Score: 5, Informative

Ummm, no.

While NCP can also mean Netware Core Protcol, in this case it means "Network Control Protocol", a much older protocol that dates back to the beginning of the ARPAnet circa 1970, and has squat to do with Netware.

NCP is documented in RFCs 55, 60, 215 and several others.

Filk inspiration! by KC7GR · 2002-12-31 15:11 · Score: 5, Funny

I just can't resist. Remember what you all need to sing at midnight in your respective time zone...

Should older packets become dumped
and never brought online,
Let newer packets take their place
on all our T-1 lines!

(I wonder if my older karma will be forgotten?)

--

Bruce Lane, KC7GR,

Blue Feather Technologies

Re:Help from the UK? by I+Am+The+Owl · 2002-12-31 15:21 · Score: 2

No.

--

--sdem

And Goodbye Privacy by smagruder · 2002-12-31 15:24 · Score: 2

We will look back at the birth of the Internet as the beginnings of the death of privacy, for better or worse. My friends, we have entered the Transparent Age.

We are quickly headed toward a time where economic advantage will be directly proportional to how much privacy is given up. Those who will work the hardest to keep everything in their lives private will become the new underclass.

--
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist

Re:And Goodbye Privacy by thogard · 2002-12-31 17:53 · Score: 2

Its not the death of privacy, it jsut shifts the people "in the know" from the local town gossip to the people who know how to use the net.

Yay, happy birthday Internet! by wackybrit · 2002-12-31 15:26 · Score: 2, Funny

Rather conveniently, only those geeky enough to celebrate this anniversary get to learn this news, since everyone else is out on the biggest party night of the year.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY INTERNET!!

--
mogorific carpentry experiments

January 2nd by E-Rock-23 · 2002-12-31 15:26 · Score: 2, Funny

The day after the Internet was born is also a red letter date in the online world. It brought with it the following historical firsts:

The First Blog.
The First Troll
The Basic Concept of goatse.cx was allowed to begin forming.
A Synapse in Rob Malda's head fired, marking the beginnings of what would become Slashdot.
The First Pirate dipped his toe into brave new waters.
The First Internet Download Queen, Billie Jean King, was crowned.
The Fires of Mount St. Helens rumbled in faraway Washington, signaling the rise of the Dark Lord Gates and the writing of the One OS
Al Gore said that the second day of his greatest invention was going very well.
The birth of the first newsgroup, alt.news.cultureclub (hey, it was the 80's!)
The First "Stephen King, Dead at 35" Post
One year later, George Orwell, You Do The Math

Happy New Year, everyone. May your night be moderated +1(Kickass)

--
Blog Prophyts - Right On, Man

Re:January 2nd by John+Hasler · 2002-12-31 16:25 · Score: 2

> The birth of the first newsgroup,
> alt.news.cultureclub (hey, it was the 80's!)

Usenet was well established in 1983. It can and did operate independently of the Internet.

--
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Re:January 2nd by Anonymous Coward · 2002-12-31 17:51 · Score: 5, Funny

A Synapse in Rob Malda's head fired, marking the beginnings of what would become Slashdot.

Jan 1, 2003: The second synpapse in Rob Malda's head fired, resulting in a duplicate article.
Re:January 2nd by TheOnlyCoolTim · 2002-12-31 18:21 · Score: 2

I've read stories that once a week, they would ship all of Usenet to Australia on tapes and pick up some tapes with all of Australia's posts.

Tim

--
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.

Re:NCP and TCP/IP by AtrN · 2002-12-31 15:35 · Score: 2

Others got NCP luckily and the "T" in "TCP" doesn't stand for "transfer". See,

RFC: 793

TRANSMISSION CONTROL PROTOCOL

NCP eh by evilviper · 2002-12-31 15:37 · Score: 3, Funny

So, the internet left NCP 20 years ago... How long until Novell figures it out?

Repeat after me... It's a Joke, It's a Joke, It's a Joke. And when you tell me about factual inaccuracies, guess what I'm going to tell you?

--
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant

IETF info by ScubaS · 2002-12-31 15:38 · Score: 2, Interesting

Bob is a great member for the IETF's mailing list. It is not everyday that people are actually watching out for special occassions such as the 20th aniversary of the Internet using the TCP/IP protocol. The NCP protocol is so old that it is basically unheard of today. I know that there will be more than one New Years Eve for us this week! Nobody can predict what the internet would be like if ARPANET was still using the NCP protocol for internet communications. All I can say about that is, maybe it is time for the Internet's Rebirth and phase out TCP/IP for something that is easier on the internet's precious bandwidth and high latency.

The next 20 years by buttahead · 2002-12-31 15:42 · Score: 2, Insightful

So who can guess where we will be 20 years from now? Wide scale broadband using IPv6? Small scale super broadband using an IP replacement?

What's going on with the Internet v2.0? Will it also be spun into a commercial media frenzy?

Anyone care to venture some guesses? Now taking bets; I'm sure you will be able to track me down 2 decades from now.

Funny. by mindstrm · 2002-12-31 15:43 · Score: 5, Insightful

If you mean the web.. fine.

Nowadays though..
you can route your PBX through a VOIP provider and get really cool phone service, and rates, from anywhere you can get bandwidth.
We trade entire movies online like it ain't no big thing.
Same for music.

Videoconferencing. You may not have seen high quality video conferencing via the internet.. but I sure have.. and it is indeed impressive.

Education. It's easier than ever to look up any kind of information now than ever before.. increased advertising yes.. but also increased information. Howstuffworks.com and it's type are awesome learning tools, for all ages.

Open forums, debates, person info like blogs, are huge now. Don't care? Maybe not.. but it's fairly easy to see what othe rpeople really think. Go back to reading magazines if you want... think some guy who failed highschool, has an iq of 40.. you don't want his opinion on something? Don't want to know what he thinks? You should, because he votes.

Etc.

Re:Funny. by Arandir · 2002-12-31 16:25 · Score: 2

route your PBX through a VOIP provider and get really cool phone service... We trade entire movies online like it ain't no big thing... You may not have seen high quality video conferencing via the internet

Somehow I'm guessing you're not using a dialup like the majority of users still are. Heck, you're not even using DSL or cable.

--
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Re:Funny. by jandrese · 2002-12-31 17:31 · Score: 2

While videoconferencing isn't so easy on Cablemodem/DSL because of the upload cap (damn you Comcast and your 16 KB/s upload cap!) trading movies online is extremely feasable these days. Just look at the usenet. It's time for you to dump that old crappy modem and upgrade to something with real bandwidth.

--

I read the internet for the articles.
Re:Funny. by WasterDave · 2002-12-31 19:18 · Score: 2

think some guy who failed highschool, has an iq of 40.. you don't want his opinion on something? Don't want to know what he thinks? You should, because he votes.

And buys things.

Dave

--
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.

Re:NCP and TCP/IP by evilviper · 2002-12-31 15:44 · Score: 2

You know something, ships had ports for hundreds of years before electricity was even discovered.

Electrical devices had ports decades before computers were invented.

Computers had ports lone before TCP was invented.

And don't even get me started on 'dongles'.

And please allow me to point out the irony that you, yourself, are one of those people who are NOT "in the know".

--
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant

Re:some people value fact over humour by kraksmoka · 2002-12-31 15:54 · Score: 3, Insightful

i'm a dem sympathizer (i would sooner admit being a miami dolphins fan too), and have voted more dems than backwards racists party.

agnostic reply below

al did do alot on the legislative side. just like (this gets little recognition) Dan Quayle was the legislative sponsor (and fought hard for i'll add) the Patriot missile as a senator. he does deserve credit for seeing the future way back then . . . .

even tho i voted Gore in y2k, i still think the humor (and a better spelling too i might add) is really funny! didn't you people see SNL couple weeks back?? i'm sure even Al likes it at this point.

what are all you Lusers doing debating this old issue on /. on New Years EVE fur gosh sakes??????

t - 01:07 remaining in year.

i'm smokin sum good stuff and going out. laters everyone, have fun

--
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel

Evolution rather than revolution by wiggys · 2002-12-31 15:56 · Score: 2, Interesting

The last major net revolution was probably in the mid nineties. By then we had animated .gifs, jpegs, database-driven web pages, Flash, Java and Javascript.

Has there really been anything new since then? I mean, since the WWW was born, the internet hasn't really advanced much. Sure, we've seen gradual improvements in bandwidth, HTML, CSS, scripting languages and so on, but there hasn't really been anything NEW.

--

Sorry, but my karma just ran over your dogma.

Re:Evolution rather than revolution by TheOnlyCoolTim · 2002-12-31 18:23 · Score: 2

P2P and, with increasing bandwidth, the increased development of the whole pirate information (mp3, warez, books, movies, porn) underground.

Tim

--
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
Re:Evolution rather than revolution by Alien+Being · 2003-01-01 08:46 · Score: 2

What we need now is good multicast support.

A speaker/writer/performer ought to be able to pay for just enough bandwidth to deliver one copy of his msg up to the backbone and have the rest of the distribution costs payed by the individuals who choose to receive it.

Re:OMFG!!! TERRORIST ATTACK IN NYC! by HeyYou82 · 2002-12-31 16:04 · Score: 2, Insightful

this is not funny. in fact, i read that, and my heart dropped. i wish i had some mod points. get a friggin life.

--
- HeyYou

The Internet was up well before 1983 by Animats · 2002-12-31 16:19 · Score: 5, Interesting

The Internet was up well before 1 JAN 1983. That was just the date that the old ARPANET NCP people had to switch over. I had machines on the Internet more than 20 years ago, and so did others.

Here's an Internet host list from 1981:

Date: 5 Oct 1981 1358-PDT
From: POSTEL at USC-ISIF
To: mike.bmd70 at BRL

27-May-81 16:52 JBP
GATEWAYS
- DCEC-EDN/ARPA
- MIT-LCS/ARPA
- BBN-RCC/ARPA
- BBN-SAT/ARPA
- NDRE-SAT/ARPA
- COMSAT-SAT/COMSAT
- UCL-SAT/UCL
- UCL-SAT/NULL
- UCL-UCL/RSRE
- RSRE-NULL/PPSN
- RSRE-NULL/PPSN
- SRI-PR1/ARPA
- SRI-PR2/ARPA
- BBN-BBNPR/ARPA
- Bragg-BraggPR/ARPA
COMPUTERS
- ALTA-COMA
- BBN-UNIX
- BBN-VAX
- BBNA
- BBNB
- BBNC
- BBND
- BBNE
- BBNF
- BBNG
- EDN-HOST1
- EDN-HOST3
- EDN-UNIX
- ISIB
- ISIC
- ISID
- ISIE
- ISIF
- MIT-DevMultics
- MIT-Multics
- UCLA-CCN 3033

Reminising by peterdaly · 2002-12-31 16:41 · Score: 3, Interesting

My first collection of bookmarks was scrawled on paper, and titled "Servers", since none of us had heard of "Bookmarks" yet.

Anyone have an old copy of the Internet Yellowpages sitting in their shelf? (Or in their basement...)

I remember how cool we though it was to download gif images of weather maps from University of Michigan. We didn't have to wait for the news to see an up to date weather map! Think of how commonplace that is today.

-Pete

--
Soccer Goal Plans

Re:Reminising by zaren · 2002-12-31 16:53 · Score: 4, Interesting

My first collection of bookmarks was scrawled on paper, and titled "Servers", since none of us had heard of "Bookmarks" yet.

My collection was scrawled on the labels of various 1.4 meg floppies. This was back when archie was still popular, and my primary method of Internet access was dialing into my college's Prime mainframe (before most people knew they could get Internet access through their Fortran programming account) with a 2400 bps modem. I still like the sound of a 2400 connecting the best :)

--
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!

*toasts* by kien · 2002-12-31 17:00 · Score: 4, Insightful

Here's to free-thinkers...may they continue to retain the right to question things.

Here's to academics...may they continue their research.

Here's to the hacker ethic which played a large part in the creation of the Net.

And here's to all of you /. people, whether friend, foe, or freak; you make me think.

Happy New Year!

--K.

--
Sig: Bad people happen. Try to avoid being one of them.

Ah, I remember getting my first CRT. . . by kfg · 2002-12-31 17:13 · Score: 4, Interesting

and thinking, " You know, someday this will be in color, and text will be WYSIWYG and the screen will look like *paper*, with black text."

I was a visionary in my 30's. And I was right. We got it, and it was good, in fact it was awsome.

I was also a naive twit in my 30's. Nowadays I've "devolved" into reading mail in text mode using mutt. Dark background, white 80 column text you can read from halfway across a thirty foot room, and it's good. In fact, it's awsome.

A CRT isn't paper. Different rules apply. Your eyes, and the eyes of your readers, will thank you for realizing this.

Ah well, at least it's better than those websites that print black text on a textured navy blue background.

KFG

Re:Ah, I remember getting my first CRT. . . by evilviper · 2002-12-31 18:14 · Score: 3, Interesting

Dark background, white 80 column text you can read from halfway across a thirty foot room, and it's good. In fact, it's awsome.

I `inherited' an old qvt-109 terminal (new, in box)... It's been so long, I didn't remember how much nicer amber was on the eyes. It's a damn shame modern monitors (anything with more than 16 colors) don't have the good ol' monochrome button in the back. If something like that was released today, it would be considered a revolution in ergonomics.

But still, nobody figures it out.

A CRT isn't paper. Different rules apply. Your eyes, and the eyes of your readers, will thank you for realizing this.

I always explain to people that reading black text from a white page on a computer screen is like reading the label of a flourscent lightbulb. In fact, the only difference between the two is the refresh rate.

The difference between paper and screen is quite simple... Books aren't backlit, so the light you see when reading, is polarized.

I'm leading up to something here

What that means, is that we need monitors that are NOT backlit. I've heard that the color gameboy screens do exactly this, and are very low-power to boot. So, I can't help but wonder why no one has come forward with a `front-lit' monitor, and sold each for several times what they are worth. That, in fact, is the only barrier left to the paperless office/home. Hey, if everyone's eyes weren't getting burned by looking at a computer screen, they just might read an e-book, rather than printing everything out, just so they can read it once and throw it away.

Meanwhile, millions is spent on ergonomics, electronic paper, tablets, etc. Just manufacture one new monitor, and you too can change the world.

Hey, at this point, I'd be happy with a 10 inch, Black & White, LCD display. It's ironic that the high-end handheld do away with the much easier to read greyscale LCDs.

Ah well, at least it's better than those websites that print black text on a textured navy blue background.

Actually, I don't mind that very much. Hit CTRL+A and all the text will be highlighted, giving the text the contrast it needs.

Dark pictures on dark backgrouds are another story.

But... White backgrounds are everywhere... I don't run into any other terrible design decisions even 1/10o0th as much.

And yet, nobody ever learns. I still don't know why. It's a monkey-see-monkey-do mentality, I suppose.

--
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Re:Ah, I remember getting my first CRT. . . by Zontar+The+Mindless · 2003-01-01 00:33 · Score: 2

I remember when HTML email first came out, I was thrilled... for about two weeks. Now I use Moz in text-only/images-disabled mode and bitch at friends who insist on sending me anything but ASCII.

My first contact with the Net (or anything like) came in 1980 or '81 when I had an account on the DELPHI sytem. Then I did other stuff for about 15 years, and by the time I came back to computing, the WWW was there.

--
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Re:Ah, I remember getting my first CRT. . . by evilviper · 2003-01-01 07:14 · Score: 2

That's all fine and good, but how long until real monitors fuction that way?

I'm not going to do everything on a Zarus, as I do on my desktop/notebook.

--
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Re:Ah, I remember getting my first CRT. . . by Phil+Wilkins · 2003-01-01 13:50 · Score: 2

I've heard that the color gameboy screens do exactly this, and are very low-power to boot. So, I can't help but wonder why no one has come forward with a `front-lit' monitor, and sold each for several times what they are worth.

If you'd used one, you'd know why.
Re:Ah, I remember getting my first CRT. . . by evilviper · 2003-01-02 10:05 · Score: 2

Well nothing would stop them from including a front-light. Don't judge the idea based on one bad implimentation. I only mention the gameboy as it shows the possiblity.

--
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant

Just 1 more year... by ThresholdRPG · 2002-12-31 17:14 · Score: 3, Funny

... until you're old enough to drink, Internet!

Until then, I guess you have to stick to what you're best at: porn and gambling.

Happy Birthday Internet!

--

-Michael
Threshold RPG

Well, I hate to say it, but. . . by kfg · 2002-12-31 17:27 · Score: 4, Insightful

that's generally a sign of maturation of any technology. It happens. There's only so much "new" to go around, and then you've used it up.

You can see signs of it throughtout the entire computer industry too. They're starting to sell chrome like it's a technological feature. They only have to do that when they've run out of *actual* new technological features to sell. "Buy our OS, it's got prettier widgets and shit."

There was that "smell-O-vision" thingy that someone said they were working on a while ago. Man, just wait to you get hit with a "popup" perfume ad with that sucker. Maybe nothing new is a Good Thing?

KFG

Re:sigh... someone's gotta troll... by smartfart · 2002-12-31 17:30 · Score: 2

This article states otherwise: "[r]epublicans made Southern Democrats drop the race nonsense when they entered the Republican Party".

As far as your last point goes, do you have any data that backs this up?

--
Need a Linux consultant in New Orleans?

Gore did something, but not what he said by Brian_Ellenberger · 2002-12-31 17:32 · Score: 2

From: http://www.snopes.com/quotes/internet.htm

"During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system."

The problem I have with his statement was that he said he "created" the Internet. Not sponsored legistation. Not funded scientists. Not *helped* but *created*.

His statement just came off as way too arrogant to the point of being silly. Which is why everyone makes fun of it. No one person or organization created the Internet. Heck, no one politician was responsible for its funding. Ronny was president January 1, 1983 and I believe LBJ was president during the initial ARPA funding. His statement gave no credit to anyone else whatsoever. Heck the Internet would be nothing without the WWW and that came out of Europe's CERN. His statement sounds like he sat in a back room with a computer and cooked up the Internet all by himself.

The worst part is that this speech was obviously written and wasn't some off the cuff remark. It was deliberate and is a great example of why polticians suck. I'm reminded of the King in Dragonslayer who comes up to the remains of the dragon, sticks his sword in, and takes the credit for everything.

Brian Ellenberger

Re:sigh... someone's gotta troll... by kraksmoka · 2002-12-31 18:13 · Score: 2

well, i'm replying after one hellofa party. i'm trashed, but lucid none the less, which is bad news for you pal.

i know my history (my second degree) and i can tell u that yes, the Southern Dems were racists after 1900 thru Mr. Strom "ageless wonder" Thurmond. He left the party because it turns out, the GOP suited his affiliation better than the dems who shunned his racist rhetoric.

lincoln was the last GOP president who did anything for blacks, and if you'll recall, he was also one of the earliest Repubs (actually, there before the term GOP). i think W isn't a racist (hate him otherwise), has a mixed cabinet, etc. but, last time i checked, David Duke was out there stealing republican votes from rebuplican voters. wake up, smell the roses, the GOP has been anti-immigration for years, and if you think it was just an economic stupidity, you're wrong.

screen's lookin a little fuzzy right now

itunes screen saver, don't fail me now.

sh>cd happy
sh>ls new year

--
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel

Re:Standard of new Era? by TheOnlyCoolTim · 2002-12-31 18:18 · Score: 2

If you've ever read "A Deepness In The Sky" by Vernor Vinge, he has a spacefaring human society many thousands of years in the future, and their computers still count time from 1970.

Tim

--
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.

It seems like just yesterday... by mtec · 2002-12-31 18:30 · Score: 3, Funny

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and there was no Spam.
And the Spirit of God moved slowly through modems.
And God said, Let there be speed: and there was speed.
And God saw the speed, that it was good: and God divided the slow from the fast.
And God called the speed true Broadband Internet, and the slow he called AOL.
And the evening and the morning were the first day.

(apologies)

--
Cake or Death? Cake Please!

Re: I'm with you. by King_TJ · 2002-12-31 19:28 · Score: 2

For my first message post of the year, I'll have to say I'm in agreement with you. Despite all the nostalgia for the days of Veronica, Gopher, etc. - those were the tools used because they made the most of the commonly available hardware of the day.

When graphics cards and processor speeds started making multimedia viable - it just made sense things would evolve beyond plain text-based tools.

"A picture's worth a thousand words." has much truth to it. By extension, a well-done animation/movie has the power of 1,000 still pictures.

learn English by DABANSHEE · 2002-12-31 20:58 · Score: 3, Insightful

I took the initiative in creating the Internet

That has 2 interprestations:

1/ I took the initiative by creating the internet

2/ The initiative I took led to the creation of the internet.

Obviously he ment interpretation 2, as, if he meant interpretation 1 he would have just said it. The fact is the difference between in & by means alot, even though those definitions overlap.

Vint Cerf is a spineless worm. by autopr0n · 2003-01-01 13:14 · Score: 2

a political hack who sold out the internet to the Icann cronies. I wouldn't listen to a word he says.

Gore's bills helped the internet, true. but if you actualy read them it's pretty clear he had no idea what the internet actualy was when he wrote them. If you looked at the bills, they were mostly about building a network for trasfering data between supercomputers for scientific research, not the person-to-person, PC network that the internet became.