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On Thu, 13 Apr 1995 ProJo@aol.com wrote:

> On April 13, Vin Crosbie said >a lot of things that made a lot of sense.<
> 
> Points well taken, Vin.
> 
> I would hedge my agreement a teeny bit, because I know that there are many
> times when I need a specific piece of information from a specific information
> provider, and it's simply not going to be sitting for free on some
> taxpayer-subsidized, traffic-jammed server out there in Webland, and those
> are the times I have to go to a commercial online service.

You seem to be confused.  Less than 5% of the servers are 
"taxpayer-subsidized".  In fact, the businesses subsidize the archive 
sites directly.  Often, they place information they want to make 
available on these servers and keep the "protected" machines behind the 
fire-wall.

Wais has an array of HP-9000s, SparcServers, and DEC Alphas serving more 
commercial databases than the Compuserve and AOL combined.  The 
price/payment structure is just a bit different.

> Also, there may be 2,143 different topical discussions on the IRC at this
> moment, but 2,141 of them are about sex.  And that's *totally* different
> from the commercial online services. Not. 
Actually, his numbers were low.  Everything has just about doubled.
If you're on the "Chat links" during the day, you can actually see news 
as it's being made.  There are also many "Private" conferences and 
multimedia conferences that you won't see on the IRC List.

The general rule on the internet for commercial servers is "if you don't 
pay, you see NOTHING".  There are commercial servers for Real-estate,
Legal, Accounting, and Employment purposes.  They are used by agents and 
brokers.  Your stockbroker may even access NASDAQ via internet, but he 
has to go through some very sensitive firewalls with a password that 
flashes on a credit card sized "display" and changes every thirty seconds.
The wrong password will lead to an immediate investigation.  Professional 
hackers avoid these boards like the plague.  It's a bit like trying to 
break into Fort Knox while wearing a bright orange "Crazy Eddie" suit.

In addition, you need special clients (telnet, ftp, http, wais...) that 
include patches for 3rd party authenticators.  The source code for these 
is available, on the Linux Distribution Disk, TSX-11, or Sunsite.

> As far as Interchange and MSN... we'll have to wait and see. I will presume
> that my beta copy of Interchange is no different than anyone else's and that
> it is just as excrutiatingly slow at 14.4 for them as it is for me.
> Multitasking on Interchange is too painful to consider.
This is where you may want to consider an alternative to Windows.
MS-Windows is prone to dropping bytes from the receive buffer.  TCP/IP 
will recover them, but only after time-outs.  Even Windows-NT is 
sensitive to thrashing related data-loss.  An operating system that 
processes the driver immediately and signals the application ONLY when 
the application is READY to RUN will have less data-loss.  SCO Unix,
Linux, and Solaris have this type of scheduling.  OS/2 2.1 has better 
scheduling that Windows.  This was largely a result of IBM using OS/2 as 
their 3172 gateway (TCP/IP, APPN, Token to CTC), and AT&T using SysVR4 
Unix in its #5ESS Central Office Switch.  These systems were road tested
on the Communications equivalent of BAJA.  What the Baja 500 race is to 
vehicles, the CO and PU6 interfaces are to Communications oriented Operating 
Systems.  Linux is used as a switch/fire-wall for most internet POPs, it 
also handles the European Trunks.

> I didn't mean to suggest that I don't understand that folks who subscribe to
> Netcom

	Rex Ballard
	(Sending from behind a fire-wall)


From rballard@cnj.digex.net Tue Apr 25 01:31:38 1995
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