Subj : MMTerm? To : Jim Hanoian From : Ed Williams Date : Mon Apr 09 2001 12:27 am Hello, Well it does help to know your underlying thinking that you are entertaining. I can say that I never said that the program should only do dialup, in fact it should do telnet. And I'm not demanding that anyone do anything, I'm doing what I can myself, and looking for people who are inclined to be helpful, I do not believe that I can do it myself, and so far I've only one other person ready to help. Also the project would set a standard interface for plug in app's. This is helpful in many way's. The concept I'm trying to preach is that we as Fidonet need to band together to provide free tools to contact all the BBS's in Fidonet and use them properly. An integrated BBS dialer with QWK support, file viewing, and extracting, text editing, etc would be a boon to fidonet. And a plug in standard to allow adding to the console would encourage more people to write programs for fidonet. That kind of setting of standards to which we can build the network's usage on rests solely in software development. That is my point entirely, and Fidonet is sorely lacking in this regard. JH>Further, the future of Fido is not in dial-up BBSing, it is BBSing JH>that takes advantage of the internet. Only by riding the freely JH>available highway does the dream of joining us together become a JH>reality. Some say that the internet was the death of BBSing, but JH>look at the boards that are available via telnet sitting on the JH>end of a cable modem. Look at the file transfers and accessibility JH>that everybody enjoys. The problem, as I see it, came from the JH>us versus them fight that developed in the early meetings... if JH>we had learned to live together in the beginning, we wouldn't have JH>the problems we have now. Now this pretty much solves all my confusion over your point. Granted you may have had some isolated incidence of an asshole in your net that decided he was god, this was fostered most often by the fact that Cost often superceeded common sense as far as net structure. It came to fidonet as a great cost when those with the biggest equipment in the net provided cost recovery plans, and then demanded that anyone who wanted to replace them match their equipment. The standard of the one with the most rules was a devastating concept to Fidonet, especially when those big boy's moved onto the internet and left Fidonet completely. However, I stand by the fact that the Fidonet structure provides allowances for IP Only nodes as points, and as point lists it is easier to move them around on older front end mailers, rather than change the existing nodelist structure and alienate half the net that no longer has front end mailer support. People who complain that they could not be nodes are only interested in their own petty interpretations of the facts which are far from realistic. Lastly, I realize you are sold on the Internet as the Communications Network of the Future. While this may eventually prove true, it is not currently the case, and it is highly doubtful that BBS's will be able to keep up the pace of development to keep up with the coming changes of the internet, especially as devices replace the computer entirely for Internet access and ISP's who provide dial up computer based services wane to a minimum. Everyone knows the day's of Telnet access are now a dying species because the new devices won't know telnet from a piece of toast. And cable or DSL connections won't make much of a difference because they will only duplicate the things the devices do, only badly. Telnet itself does not have the intense support it needs to be put inside those devices and thus will not be supported over the cable/dsl systems much longer. So I continue to insist that Fidonet needs to band together to support the standards that it CAN rely upon and build on, whatever that may be. You may choose to stick your head in the sand until things are all doomed, and bitch that people should have supported telnet better, and rallied the computer industry to put telnet access into their HDTV converters, much like you now do about how Fidonet didn't change their nodelists to allow undialable nodes. But I choose to encourage everyone in Fidonet to take time to insure that our standards are in OUR hands so that we can survive, and thrive. I believe we can. Ed. --- þ OLXWin 1.00b þ A production of the digitally insane. * Origin: The Goblin Reach BBS/www.goblinsreach.org/719-522-1488 (1:128/148) .