(Sorry, folks. I'll try to keep this brief, but Peter's note touches on a
rather basic set of issues.)
At 11:56 AM 7/11/94, Peter Williams
> My own experience says that the way things
>converge is that one side wins and the other goes away.
This is the war philosophy; its incompatible with International or
In fact, Peter, it is nothing of the sort. I do understand the reason for
thinking otherwise, but there is a very big difference between wishing for
peaceful integration and actually citing a record of achieving it.
Within our profession of networking, there is little, if any, true
integration. The real style of "cooperation" is to use a
ships-in-the-night approach of multiple, parallel stacks, with the only
"integration" occuring either via different link-level Type numbers or by
application-level translation gateways.
They all are useful, but they have little to do with integration.
To the extent that you disagree with my assessment, please cite true
'integration' efforts that have succeeded in taking two, separate services
and merging them into a new one that is different from either of the
starting points.
In any event, my own comment was intended to offer a pragmatic, engineering
and operations assessment of what works, versus what doesn't. Politics may
dictate direction but they do not dictate feasibility. My comment was
based on the history that I perceive and what it suggests about
feasibility.
National standards making where long-term protocolar agreement (not
short-term consensus) must always be the primary aim. War gaming is the
IETF that was,
and sure it was fun. Time to move on Dave; the younger generation grew
Near as I can tell, your aboves statements imply that the IETF history of
success won't work long-term (or doesn't work now??) and that the IETF has
somehow been playing adversarial games. Wrong on both counts, Peter.
The gun-toting, fontier-mentality in the public and corporate
internetworking is just out-of-date. Its all just too expensive, and
too big to play politics and word-games with. Once the criticality
of a highway, and its invested capital become so important to a
nation, then perhaps it has to be take away from the gun-toting
founders - just like the US railways and Stanford! Or Carnagie
and US steel.
Try to bind, not devide-and-conquer.
Well this was all quite colorful, but I can't figure our what it means.
(By the way, I enjoyed seeing the different between your From address and
the one in your Sender field.)
Dave
+1 408 246 8253 (fax: +1 408 249 6205)