Subj : perl before swine To : tony summerfelt From : mark lewis Date : Mon Mar 28 2005 04:16 pm MK>>> this far more useable. Whoever invented this messaging MK>>> structure ought to be ashamed. ml>> you need to stop and realise/remember that the format is taken from ts> also remember that 20 years down the road hindsite is 20/20 :) absolutely! ts> take a look at the smtp format. worked great back then, but ts> now spammers exploit the format for their own ends... well, kinda... they exploit the openness of the original internet... thanks to them, folk are having to implement security into the servers and tools used on the internet... ts> for all the talk about reinvening the ftn, nobody has done it ts> AND started using it... yes, i noted this over 10 years ago in the NET_DEV echo when specs for new PKT formats were being worked on and posted... no one actually wrote a tosser to use them and so they languished... one of the type 10 formats uses objects and can even carry multimedia stuffs ;) ts> and the tools needed to be written. back then turbo pascal ts> and qb were the easiest languages to learn and write in. ts> an ftn tool in tp, could be written and released in a day. ts> once a particular piece of software takes a foothold it ts> stays... yup! ts> ftn technology works and it's here to stay...and because it ts> was all done on dos systems it's very small setup, an entire ts> bbs setup can be done in well under 10 megs. for the most part, sure... my small system carries some 2gig of files available for download and the JAM bases take some 68megs of drive space (not counting slack space)... ts> i think two of the 'newest' entries in ftn technology were ts> jam format and binkd protocol...i didn't think either of ts> those would take off... but they did and have done an excellent job of doing what they do ;) i've been all JAM since it was first available in RemoteAccess betas... was really loving it when joho finally got FD all rewritten and FM had JAM capabilities... then came TimED and i was really in heaven... ts> and of course the main reason nothing new will be done on the ts> ftn tech front is because (wait for it carl). fidonet is dead. nah... its not really dead... but it is fading... ts> it took WAY too long to adapt/move to the internet and it ts> suffered because of it. very true... ts> mainly because of the ego's involved (if i had to take a wild ts> guess) i think that would be a good guess... that same reason is also what i believe will finally kill fidonet when it dies... FIDONEWS and FN_SYSOP are perfect examples... )\/(ark * Origin: (1:3634/12) .