Remember when people had secretaries, who kept track of where they were supposed to be, filtered their incoming paper mail, decided what they'd think was important, and handled communications when they were travelling? Most executives still have them, though their titles are often "executive assistant" or whatever, and they can still filter out spam...
But yes, execs do sometimes need handholding. Years ago, while I was still doing sysadmin, the head of one of the neighboring departments would ask me for help when his Mac wouldn't print. Hey, I was a Unix guy, not a Mac guy, though if they'd gotten me a Mac I'd have been quite happy - but 95% of the time it was a matter of rebooting the network printer frob a couple of times and it'd work....
Sigh - after I posted that I got back to the main window with the 15 articles saying the same thing:-) Also, I'd intended to mention James Tiptree, Jr. as another example.
Women authors often use just initials
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A Game of Thrones
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· Score: 1
It avoids the problem that some people might be prejudiced against women writers. Ursula LeGuin said that the only time she used a pen name instead of her real name was "U.K.LeGuin" for a short story in Playboy before she'd really made her reputation. (Of course, this doesn't apply to J.R.R.Tolkien or George Sand:-)
"Lots of swords, not much sorcery" has been my summary of the first two books - gritty and deep. Except for the dragon-related theme, the rest of the magic was subtle and deep and eerie - the Others, if you can exactly call them magic, but none of the "Zap the Level 3 Balrog with your Wand of Zapping!" that too much of the fantasy genre abused. Even the dragons that might be in the castle basement in the dark worked ok.
Maybe if he's doing a six-or-seven-parter the dragons will be ok, but as of book 3 they still seemed mostly like padding, a way of creating an extra story line that's mostly happening somewhere else. Ok, they're sort of a motivation for Danerhys to grow her political position, and maybe that can build some good conflict, but it seems like cheap "You've got to have a dragon, this is a fantasy novel" material, quite in contrast with the rest.
And I'm not going to spoiler the sorcery that shows up in Book Three, but I thought it didn't fit in logically - if it could be used effectively the way it was, it would have been used far more times in far more conflicts, and the politics would be different.
That's the thing about databases - every new database out there can pretty easily be coordinated with every other database out there. And if you've ever bought a house and looked over your credit records, what privacy did you think you still had?
People were scared of that stuff back in the 1960s, when really big mainframes might have cranked at 0.1 - 1 MIPS and 5 MB was a huge disk drive and they used papertape and magtape and punch cards and correlating data was really _hard_.
They were afraid in the 1970s when mainframes were starting to approach the capacity of a current PalmPilot and supercomputers were approaching the capacity of a PocketPC and 9600 baud was Really Blazingly Fast datacomm and a Gigabyte was really a lot of data.
These days a desktop PC can add 160GB of disk for $100, which is ~500 bytes per American or 20 bytes for everybody on Earth, and who'd buy one slower than 1 GHz (that's 4Hz/American:-) and then there's the Internet, so basically any random government employee with a cheap desktop box can do a search in 10 minutes that would have taken the 1970s Census Bureau two years to plan and several weeks to run, and that simply couldn't have been done in the 1960s.
It's much faster and more efficient to correlate data in RAM than disk, and much more efficient using disk than tape. My laptop has more capacity in $70 of RAM than my mid-80s VAX had on two $35000 tape drives, plus the CPU's 1000 times faster.
You can buy national phone number databases on CDROM for ~$20 in your local office-supply store. It takes a couple of CDs, but probably only one DVD.
You can buy CDROMs with MILLIONS of Fresh New EMAIL ADDRESSES REAL CHEAP!! (oh, wait...)
Social Security Numbers make it easy to correlate every record that uses them with every other record that uses them. No they're not perfectly accurate - but that doesn't help your privacy any, it just risks mistakes causing you big headaches.
Driver's Licenses and Car Registration in all US states require the DMV to collect your SSN. They don't have to print it on the license, but it's in their databases, and many states sell most of their DMV data widely, as well as coordinating with other DMVs to prevent multiple registration.
US Banks almost all know your SSN - it's required on interest-bearing accounts, and may be required even on dumb checking.
Credit card companies almost all have your SSN, and if you use credit cards, everybody knows your credit card numbers and your mailing address.
"Deadbeat Dad" tracking laws and anti-Spanish-Speaker laws require employers to collect identity papers from everybody they hire and validate with the Feds to be sure they have permission to work in the US. That's because *you* might be a deadbeat dad, and because all those immigrants are coming here to get on welfare, which is why they're not allowed to get jobs.
Passport agencies want your name, DoB, address, SSN, etc. Just about any Fed can get some excuse to access that database, and it's bar-code-scanned when you enter the country if they can get it.
Unique identifiers like SSNs are useful, but they're much less necessary these days - computers can do character-string matches fast enough, and some combination of name, phone number, address, ZIP code, date of birth, etc. can get pretty close.
If you want a US Post Office Box, the PO wants proof that you're really you and proof of where you really live, because you might otherwise fraudulently get mail for someone else sent to the box.
But if you *don't* want paper junk mail at your house sent to Occupant or Resident, they'll deliver it anyway.
If you want a mailbox from a mailbox company, the Post Office has gotten laws passed in many states that let them get even *more* documentation of your "True Name" and address and two forms of ID. In California, this is ostensibly because many small businesses are run from mailboxes pret
Yeah, fsck that noise. Plus they want you to re-enlist\\\\\\re-register every 4 years, presumably so that they can provide the next President's administration with whatever outrageous data _they_ want.
GAL fairly often brings my MUA to a grinding halt (I'm using real Outlook, currently 2000-SR1 but it's not a new problem.) Not sure if it's crashed it; Outlook has enough ways to be hanging that it can't usefully recover from, but it doesn't fully crash often enough for me to remember patterns of why it happens.
You'll still need _some_ kind of calendar server mechanism, either as an explicit calendar server or a set of appropriately-permissioned files with a file server or a set of LDAP data on an LDAP server or web data with a CGI server or something. But it's not inherently tied into the mail server.
When I was looking for a DSL provider, Speakeasy was one of my two main choices. I went with Sonic.net, because their service plans seemed a bit simpler for what I needed, but both of them had the view that they're selling you service so you can do stuff, and had terms of service that let you pretty much do what you want. In particular, there wasn't any nonsense about whether you could run servers or share multiple computers. Speakeasy seemed to have more focus on gamers (I'm not one) and Sonic.net was doing interesting wireless stuff up in Sonoma County (not near me, but it's cool anyway - they're using Nokia Rooftop Network.) Third choice was Earthlink, who are pretty rational for a national provider, but I'd rather deal with a small company and I really wanted to ditch the Netcom service I've had for 10 years....
I've only fired up one of my four static IPs so far, and my PC hardware has been sufficiently uncooperative that I haven't actually run the server yet, but at least I've been able to plug 1-4 machines behind my little firewall box, and I'm getting about 800kbps downstream bandwidth.
I'm not missing that part at all - it's the fundamental leverage that keeps people stuck using Exchange, and therefore Outlook, and therefore Office. The calendar stuff is pretty good, but it doesn't need to be as tightly wrapped into the email system; a web CGI interface would do just as well with URL hooks to pass appointments.
I found the Global Address List stuff to be highly unreliable. It's not too bad on a desktop machine you never turn off that's got a high-speed connection back to Headquarters, but on a laptop, you have to keep it synced up with the master database, and since it appears to be stored in your big hulking opaque binary.PST file instead of a separate well-documented file that you can edit with other tools, it's hard to figure out what to do if it's not working.
An address book belongs in a file with a documented format (or documented database schema, or these days XML.) If you have to keep it in a shared folder instead of a shared filesystem directory, something's wrong.
They look intertwined because MS Outlook and Exchange put them all together on one pair of platforms and implements them that way.
It means, for instance, that if you want to check your calendar to find the address of someone you're going to see, you either need to start up Outlook on your laptop in your car (including waiting for it to decide that it can't reach the server), or have already downloaded your calendar to your Palm Pilot.
It means that if Pat Smith in your tech support department sent you email that you're forwarding to your customer, your mail headers show "Smith, Pat J (Tech Support)" instead of "pat.smith@techsupport.example.com (Pat Smith)" which your customer could actually reply to, because that's the format your Contacts are in.
It means that if your MS File Server password expired and you need to get onto your PC to open Outlook to get the contact information for the PC Help Desk, it's often quite difficult:-)
It means that if you're working from home on a modem, and want to get at the calendar to get the phone number for the meeting you're going to dial into, it might want to spend 15 minutes downloading the 4MB Powerpoint Slide show that has the singing dancing animated meeting agenda on it before it'll let you grab a separate window with the phone number.
Back when I gave up banging my head against the wall and learned to love the Borg's way of doing email, MAPI was the name Microsoft user documentation used for the interface that was used for a mail client to talk to a mail server. I think the mail server may have been called Exchange by then, but I forget whether the client was called "MS Mail" or "Exchange" or "Outlook" because I've been using the stuff since ~1994. Client reliability and functionality has improved to the point that it's no longer the third worst mail system I'd ever used, like it was in ~1994, and it hasn't even trashed my mail files in a couple of years, though that has more to do with hardware reliability and OS reliability. The protocols do appear to have evolved - my system _almost_ always tries to display the same dialog boxes while downloading on a LAN vs. a modem these days, though not quite always, and it's probably doing almost everything over TCP/IP and not NETBEUI, though I won't swear to NETBIOS being gone.
(The mail systems I'd used that were worse were IBM PROFS, which was absolutely worst, and the original Prodigy 300 baud 24x40-screen client, and after a year or so MSMail finally became more usable than the appalling Kermit-based hackup the place I worked in 93-95 used before MSMail. But Eudora has still been a better mail client since about 1.4 or so.)
Server-based systems are for boring people who work at a desk on one high-speed intranet all day every day. I work in a laptop-based environment. My mail *absolutely* needs to be on my laptop. If there are also copies of messages I haven't deleted yet sitting on a mail server, fine, but if I can't reach something when I'm on the train or an airplane or at a customer site where I'm not allowed to use their intranet or a hotel on dial modems or at home on DSL, then the system doesn't meet my needs.
I use Outlook as my work email environment (thus my rant about the need for real standards, not Outlook/Exchange.) It *does* have a POP-like message download capability, and my mail folders live on my laptop. Unfortunately, Outlook keeps them all in one huge opaque undocumented-format binary file which will lose them all at once if it gets corrupted. You can move things off into multiple files without too much loss of functionality, but my current mailfile with the last 12 months of mail is about 1.2GB, too big to back up easily. (By contrast, my Eudora home email system has about 5 times as many messages, and is under 100MB.) Many other mail systems keep messages in a file system structure where they can be backed up or searched with other tools like grep.
If you need to access your mail from multiple machines, rather than from one portable machine, you need to make an intelligent choice about how much processing lives on the client vs. the server - it sounds like you should use a network-based windowing system like X or one that's a bit more flexible like Sun's old NeWS Network Extensible Windowing System (one of Java's direct ancestors) or a Plan 9 terminal. If you need the email to be central-server-based because you're using multiple clients, then the file systems underneath should also be central-server-based, not client-based, and rather than shove the mail back and forth across the network to process it, you can do that on your host server as well
Sometimes you can only replace one part of a system at a time, so you're stuck with some proprietary vendor's proprietary protocol, but whenever possible, you should use standards-based protocols so you have a choice of products.
SMTP - Outlook Express and Netscape/Mozilla and most other email clients can send mail using SMTP.
POP3 - Older standard for email retrieval, which Outlook Express and Netscape/Mozilla can use.
IMAP - Newer standard for email retrieval, which can manage group and folder types of functions. Many email clients use it; not sure if Outlook does.
NNTP - Usenet standard for groups - works Just Fine, and there are lots of clients, including Netscape / Mozilla's mail clients and newsreaders.
Web Conference Boards - There are *so* many of these out there, and they're often a much better choice than shared folders or similar groupware. Depending on how many messages you're trying to handle, your users will often find simple dumb systems friendlier than powerful complex systems.
HTTP and/or FTP - If you're trying to publish files to people, these are much better standards than email. Some of the web conference board things have convenient uploading interfaces, or otherwise you'll need to do permissions of some sort.
Shared File Systems - SAMBA, etc. - If you're enough of a Microsoft shop to be running Exchange, surely you're also running a file server network of some sort. Set aside a directory for people to drag files into, and tell them to mount it as their "G Drive" or whatever.
Calendar Systems - This is the other hard one to replace, but I've seen a number of calendar systems out there, typically web-based, and you can email people URLs to click on if you want to integrate with email. The one thing MS seems to have done well is encourage Palm and Nokia and other PDA makers to develop tools for syncing their PDAs with Outlook Calendar. I think some of the Linux-based systems have probably done that.
MS Outlook lumps a whole bunch of functions into one program, so if your people get used to using any two of them they tend to be hooked for life. It's not a very good choice, and if you're going to do something like that, it's much cleaner to use a browser as the one big tool you're hooked on.
There are two different issues with text spam - whether the phone company sends it to your phone, and what the phone does with the message once it has it. Phone companies can't, and shouldn't, track your contacts listings, partly for privacy reasons, partly for scalability reasons, and partly because that would require all the phones and phone companies to implement some kind of standard protocol for exchanging that information. They _could_ track numbers you've called (and of course the billing system does, over the short term), but it's not really a good idea there either.
If you want the phone companies to decide what messages to accept and what messages to drop, it's better to have some kind of configurable buddy list, and ideally to have the option for the phone company to offer to maintain a web-accessible reject-bucket for your text messages, because there *will* be messages you might have wanted.
What your phone does with incoming messages is a separate question - you might want to have _it_ decide which messages to alert you about and which ones to just leave in an inbox or reject-bucket.
We have a Digital Wallet from a couple of years ago, from the now-defunct company Minds@Work. It's pretty similar to an Archon Jukebox, and probably they or one of their competitors can do the same job well enough. It has a laptop disk drive, little ~6-line LCD menu screen, a couple of buttons, USB connectors, and a compact flash slot, and a collection of power adapters. This made it possible to upload the day's collection of camera pictures from compact flash into the box, without having to carry a whole computer around. The box had several ways to output data, but the really convenient one was to use USB to connect it to a real computer - it looked to the computer like a USB disk drive, so you could simply drag files back and forth.
Alternatively, some of the Zaurus-like PDAs or Wince machines can read compact flash.
Less unemployment here than EU, too
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Working Hard?
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The last time I saw unemployment information for France and the UK, they were running around 10% or more, in spite of workers taking longer vacations. Here in the US, with the economic crash going on, unemployment is up to about 6%, though here in Silicon Valley, it's over 10%, and among my friends it feels like 50%.
Now, some of that may be a measurement artifact, since "unemployment" figures in the US measure people who've told the government they're unemployed who haven't been reclassified as "not part of the work force because they've been unemployed too long and are discouraged ex-job-seekers", and they're real fuzzy about the status of women who might be unemployed or might be stay-at-home moms who don't want to be working or might be married women who are staying at home because they can't find a job but would otherwise be in the workforce.
Silicon Valley Vacations
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Working Hard?
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It used to be that "vacation" in Silicon Valley meant taking a week or two off when you changed jobs or were finishing one consulting gig and about to start another. These days, "vacation" is the first N weeks of unemployment, while you're still getting severance pay....
I'm in a rare job position here - I've been with a big company for 25 years, so I get 5-6 weeks of vacation. When my wife was working at her last couple of startups, she negotiated three weeks of unpaid vacation in addition to whatever paid vacation they got (usually a week or two), which made things able to balance out. I was laid off for about six months back in the mid 90s, and if I'd known I would have been out of work that long, I should have done some much more serious goofing off than I did.
What, you're doing FTAM and ROSE and all the eleventeen different sublayers at layer 7? No need to shoot you, man, just slip the red tape over your mouth and nose and wait till you stop struggling....
Listening for these things is hard, because they're not something routers are particularly good at, and big core routers are especially not good at it. Listening for IP destinations is easy - core routers usually don't do much more than this, and neither do gateway routers between bigger ISPs. Listening for IP sources is harder, and often burns CPU, and listening for TCP or UDP ports is even more likely to burn router CPU, but is still something routers aren't too bad at. Listening for TCP window size is probably not possible (my Cisco manuals aren't handy right now...). You can do this stuff with TCPDUMP on a computer, but that's not the same thing. Edge routers can do some filtering, because there are more of them and they're handling smaller pipes, but it's still tought to do efficiently.
Better-managed ISPs do filter incoming packets to make sure they're not spoofing the origin address (there's a relatively efficient hack to do this on Cisco routers), but that's usually an accept-or-drop thing that doesn't make it easy to log more than the number of rejects, not the details about them. That strongly limits the kind of spoofing that an end user can do, though it doesn't kill it entirely (e.g. an end-user with a T1 and a Class C/24 address group can pretend to be any of the 254 host addresses at the site, but can't pretend to be from anywhere else.)
A better place to measure this kind of data is the customer-premises router or firewall - if the ISP is managing it, then they can do it, or if the customer's managing it themselves, then it's their problem. For DSL users, the router at the POP might be able to do it.
(I'll flip the coin and decide you're not trolling, because there _is_ something generally useful to say here...)
It isn't actually that every computer has one IP address - it's really that every _network_interface_ has one IP address, but if you've only got one network card that's close enough to the same thing. The IP address has two parts, a network part for the network you're connected to and a host part for your machine itself. On the current IPv4 the address is 32 bits, which was plenty back in 1980 but is looking a bit tight now, while the newer IPv6 stuff that almost nobody uses yet has 128 bits, which really _is_ enough for everybody. The actual storage it takes up isn't very big - the 8 bytes of IP address is a lot smaller than the 4KB of email message you were sending or the 64KB JPG or 4MB MP3 you're downloading.
So your computer knows its IP address, and the space of IP addresses for the local network it's on, and usually the IP address of a router or other host that's smart enough to figure out how to route packets to the rest of the world. There's a protocol called DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) that lets machines that don't know their IP addresses broadcast a request for somebody to tell them who and where they are. There are simple routing protocols like ARP for finding the ethernet addresses of other machines on your LAN, so your machine can talk to the local machines, and a wide range of routing protocols for finding how to get packets to the rest of the world and how to tell the rest of the world that you're there. Usually, though certainly not always, an end-user computer or a server machine isn't running the routing protocols itself - it usually has the address of a router, and sends any traffic that's not for local machines out over to the router to take care of.
A router might or might not have to run routing protocols. In a typical home or small business, there's just one LAN connection and one WAN connection, and any traffic that's not local gets sent out the WAN connection to the ISP. But if you've got more than one connection (e.g. if you're an ISP), then you need to know about the topology of the outside world. Usually this is done with BGP, and what really matters isn't so much how big the addresses are that a router keeping track of, but how many ranges of addresses it's keeping track of, e.g. how many ISPs or big businesses it knows how to get to, and how many outgoing connections it has to get there on.
IPv6 was supposed to do lots more than give us bigger addresses and make IPSEC-like security standard. One of the things it was supposed to do was provide better ways to aggregate information about networks and connectivity to make routing protocols easier to use. I'm not convinced that it really succeeded.
IPv6 more likely to succeed than GOSIP OSI
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U.S. DoD Commits To IPv6
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· Score: 2, Informative
(1998? I assume you mean 1988?) I remember those days, having to deal with conflicting requirements that computers for NASA and DoD had to be Certified C2-secure, POSIX-compliant, use the GOSIP Government OSI Protocol stack, run Ada, and often comply with POSIX standards that weren't finalized yet, like Posix 2.x Real-Time, and still be Commercial-Off-The-Shelf.
One of the big differences between the GOSIP OSI stack (which failed in the market) and IPv6 (which might succeed) was that GOSIP was big, clumsy, generally didn't work, and didn't have lots of applications, while TCP/IP was much lighter weight and had lots of commercial support by vendors and lots of people really developing useful applications (like FTP and SMTP as opposed to X.400.) It's possible that the same thing will happen to IPv6, but if Microsoft and Cisco support it and the DoD's DNS servers support it, it's got a chance of working.
AT&T has a Class A network, 12.*.*.*. Now that we're an ISP, it's useful and reasonable to have it, but the origins were murkier. Apparently the Cray Supercomputer at the Murray Hill, NJ Bell Labs office had a Hyperchannel LAN connecting it to other computers, and the thing wanted to have a Class A address and didn't know how to subnet, and this was the old days before 10.x was available, when big companies could still get Class A addresses. So they did:-)
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But yes, execs do sometimes need handholding. Years ago, while I was still doing sysadmin, the head of one of the neighboring departments would ask me for help when his Mac wouldn't print. Hey, I was a Unix guy, not a Mac guy, though if they'd gotten me a Mac I'd have been quite happy - but 95% of the time it was a matter of rebooting the network printer frob a couple of times and it'd work....
Sigh - after I posted that I got back to the main window with the 15 articles saying the same thing :-) Also, I'd intended to mention James Tiptree, Jr. as another example.
It avoids the problem that some people might be prejudiced against women writers. Ursula LeGuin said that the only time she used a pen name instead of her real name was "U.K.LeGuin" for a short story in Playboy before she'd really made her reputation. (Of course, this doesn't apply to J.R.R.Tolkien or George Sand :-)
Maybe if he's doing a six-or-seven-parter the dragons will be ok, but as of book 3 they still seemed mostly like padding, a way of creating an extra story line that's mostly happening somewhere else. Ok, they're sort of a motivation for Danerhys to grow her political position, and maybe that can build some good conflict, but it seems like cheap "You've got to have a dragon, this is a fantasy novel" material, quite in contrast with the rest.
And I'm not going to spoiler the sorcery that shows up in Book Three, but I thought it didn't fit in logically - if it could be used effectively the way it was, it would have been used far more times in far more conflicts, and the politics would be different.
Rather a happy-ending title, that. (In the context of the main characters of book one.) We'll see.
Yeah, fsck that noise. Plus they want you to re-enlist\\\\\\re-register every 4 years, presumably so that they can provide the next President's administration with whatever outrageous data _they_ want.
You'll still need _some_ kind of calendar server mechanism, either as an explicit calendar server or a set of appropriately-permissioned files with a file server or a set of LDAP data on an LDAP server or web data with a CGI server or something. But it's not inherently tied into the mail server.
I've only fired up one of my four static IPs so far, and my PC hardware has been sufficiently uncooperative that I haven't actually run the server yet, but at least I've been able to plug 1-4 machines behind my little firewall box, and I'm getting about 800kbps downstream bandwidth.
I found the Global Address List stuff to be highly unreliable. It's not too bad on a desktop machine you never turn off that's got a high-speed connection back to Headquarters, but on a laptop, you have to keep it synced up with the master database, and since it appears to be stored in your big hulking opaque binary .PST file instead of a separate well-documented file that you can edit with other tools, it's hard to figure out what to do if it's not working.
An address book belongs in a file with a documented format (or documented database schema, or these days XML.) If you have to keep it in a shared folder instead of a shared filesystem directory, something's wrong.
(The mail systems I'd used that were worse were IBM PROFS, which was absolutely worst, and the original Prodigy 300 baud 24x40-screen client, and after a year or so MSMail finally became more usable than the appalling Kermit-based hackup the place I worked in 93-95 used before MSMail. But Eudora has still been a better mail client since about 1.4 or so.)
I use Outlook as my work email environment (thus my rant about the need for real standards, not Outlook/Exchange.) It *does* have a POP-like message download capability, and my mail folders live on my laptop. Unfortunately, Outlook keeps them all in one huge opaque undocumented-format binary file which will lose them all at once if it gets corrupted. You can move things off into multiple files without too much loss of functionality, but my current mailfile with the last 12 months of mail is about 1.2GB, too big to back up easily. (By contrast, my Eudora home email system has about 5 times as many messages, and is under 100MB.) Many other mail systems keep messages in a file system structure where they can be backed up or searched with other tools like grep.
If you need to access your mail from multiple machines, rather than from one portable machine, you need to make an intelligent choice about how much processing lives on the client vs. the server - it sounds like you should use a network-based windowing system like X or one that's a bit more flexible like Sun's old NeWS Network Extensible Windowing System (one of Java's direct ancestors) or a Plan 9 terminal. If you need the email to be central-server-based because you're using multiple clients, then the file systems underneath should also be central-server-based, not client-based, and rather than shove the mail back and forth across the network to process it, you can do that on your host server as well
- SMTP - Outlook Express and Netscape/Mozilla and most other email clients can send mail using SMTP.
- POP3 - Older standard for email retrieval, which Outlook Express and Netscape/Mozilla can use.
- IMAP - Newer standard for email retrieval, which can manage group and folder types of functions. Many email clients use it; not sure if Outlook does.
- NNTP - Usenet standard for groups - works Just Fine, and there are lots of clients, including Netscape / Mozilla's mail clients and newsreaders.
- Web Conference Boards - There are *so* many of these out there, and they're often a much better choice than shared folders or similar groupware. Depending on how many messages you're trying to handle, your users will often find simple dumb systems friendlier than powerful complex systems.
- HTTP and/or FTP - If you're trying to publish files to people, these are much better standards than email. Some of the web conference board things have convenient uploading interfaces, or otherwise you'll need to do permissions of some sort.
- Shared File Systems - SAMBA, etc. - If you're enough of a Microsoft shop to be running Exchange, surely you're also running a file server network of some sort. Set aside a directory for people to drag files into, and tell them to mount it as their "G Drive" or whatever.
- Calendar Systems - This is the other hard one to replace, but I've seen a number of calendar systems out there, typically web-based, and you can email people URLs to click on if you want to integrate with email. The one thing MS seems to have done well is encourage Palm and Nokia and other PDA makers to develop tools for syncing their PDAs with Outlook Calendar. I think some of the Linux-based systems have probably done that.
MS Outlook lumps a whole bunch of functions into one program, so if your people get used to using any two of them they tend to be hooked for life. It's not a very good choice, and if you're going to do something like that, it's much cleaner to use a browser as the one big tool you're hooked on.If you want the phone companies to decide what messages to accept and what messages to drop, it's better to have some kind of configurable buddy list, and ideally to have the option for the phone company to offer to maintain a web-accessible reject-bucket for your text messages, because there *will* be messages you might have wanted.
What your phone does with incoming messages is a separate question - you might want to have _it_ decide which messages to alert you about and which ones to just leave in an inbox or reject-bucket.
Alternatively, some of the Zaurus-like PDAs or Wince machines can read compact flash.
Now, some of that may be a measurement artifact, since "unemployment" figures in the US measure people who've told the government they're unemployed who haven't been reclassified as "not part of the work force because they've been unemployed too long and are discouraged ex-job-seekers", and they're real fuzzy about the status of women who might be unemployed or might be stay-at-home moms who don't want to be working or might be married women who are staying at home because they can't find a job but would otherwise be in the workforce.
I'm in a rare job position here - I've been with a big company for 25 years, so I get 5-6 weeks of vacation. When my wife was working at her last couple of startups, she negotiated three weeks of unpaid vacation in addition to whatever paid vacation they got (usually a week or two), which made things able to balance out. I was laid off for about six months back in the mid 90s, and if I'd known I would have been out of work that long, I should have done some much more serious goofing off than I did.
What, you're doing FTAM and ROSE and all the eleventeen different sublayers at layer 7? No need to shoot you, man, just slip the red tape over your mouth and nose and wait till you stop struggling....
You're missing the "sell karma on eBay" step which lets you get to "... Profit!!"
Better-managed ISPs do filter incoming packets to make sure they're not spoofing the origin address (there's a relatively efficient hack to do this on Cisco routers), but that's usually an accept-or-drop thing that doesn't make it easy to log more than the number of rejects, not the details about them. That strongly limits the kind of spoofing that an end user can do, though it doesn't kill it entirely (e.g. an end-user with a T1 and a Class C /24 address group can pretend to be any of the 254 host addresses at the site, but can't pretend to be from anywhere else.)
A better place to measure this kind of data is the customer-premises router or firewall - if the ISP is managing it, then they can do it, or if the customer's managing it themselves, then it's their problem. For DSL users, the router at the POP might be able to do it.
It isn't actually that every computer has one IP address - it's really that every _network_interface_ has one IP address, but if you've only got one network card that's close enough to the same thing. The IP address has two parts, a network part for the network you're connected to and a host part for your machine itself. On the current IPv4 the address is 32 bits, which was plenty back in 1980 but is looking a bit tight now, while the newer IPv6 stuff that almost nobody uses yet has 128 bits, which really _is_ enough for everybody. The actual storage it takes up isn't very big - the 8 bytes of IP address is a lot smaller than the 4KB of email message you were sending or the 64KB JPG or 4MB MP3 you're downloading.
So your computer knows its IP address, and the space of IP addresses for the local network it's on, and usually the IP address of a router or other host that's smart enough to figure out how to route packets to the rest of the world. There's a protocol called DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) that lets machines that don't know their IP addresses broadcast a request for somebody to tell them who and where they are. There are simple routing protocols like ARP for finding the ethernet addresses of other machines on your LAN, so your machine can talk to the local machines, and a wide range of routing protocols for finding how to get packets to the rest of the world and how to tell the rest of the world that you're there. Usually, though certainly not always, an end-user computer or a server machine isn't running the routing protocols itself - it usually has the address of a router, and sends any traffic that's not for local machines out over to the router to take care of.
A router might or might not have to run routing protocols. In a typical home or small business, there's just one LAN connection and one WAN connection, and any traffic that's not local gets sent out the WAN connection to the ISP. But if you've got more than one connection (e.g. if you're an ISP), then you need to know about the topology of the outside world. Usually this is done with BGP, and what really matters isn't so much how big the addresses are that a router keeping track of, but how many ranges of addresses it's keeping track of, e.g. how many ISPs or big businesses it knows how to get to, and how many outgoing connections it has to get there on.
IPv6 was supposed to do lots more than give us bigger addresses and make IPSEC-like security standard. One of the things it was supposed to do was provide better ways to aggregate information about networks and connectivity to make routing protocols easier to use. I'm not convinced that it really succeeded.
One of the big differences between the GOSIP OSI stack (which failed in the market) and IPv6 (which might succeed) was that GOSIP was big, clumsy, generally didn't work, and didn't have lots of applications, while TCP/IP was much lighter weight and had lots of commercial support by vendors and lots of people really developing useful applications (like FTP and SMTP as opposed to X.400.) It's possible that the same thing will happen to IPv6, but if Microsoft and Cisco support it and the DoD's DNS servers support it, it's got a chance of working.
Yes, I already did the no-karma-whore-bonus to mod myself down :-)
AT&T has a Class A network, 12.*.*.*. Now that we're an ISP, it's useful and reasonable to have it, but the origins were murkier. Apparently the Cray Supercomputer at the Murray Hill, NJ Bell Labs office had a Hyperchannel LAN connecting it to other computers, and the thing wanted to have a Class A address and didn't know how to subnet, and this was the old days before 10.x was available, when big companies could still get Class A addresses. So they did :-)