name resolution

[Liam Proven]

On 26 November 2017 at 14:22, Xen <list at xenhideout.nl> wrote:
>
> The entire IT industry. But nothing changed for me.
>
> Well, USB, yes.
>
> There were no people in my vicinity that had Apples. I had never even seen
> one.

I heard that in Brno, too. But actually, they are there, there were
multiple small shops selling them, others repairing them.

People take "I don't notice anyone using Apple kit" with "nobody uses
Apple kit."

>
> You only use your superior position of factual knowledge to claim you are
> always right.

I don't claim I'm always right. I'm frequently not. :-)

> Why is that so relevant. If it was introduced in 1995, and there was no
> hardware until 1996, then how could windows 1995 have shipped with usb?
>
> You seem to hold it against Microsoft. What's the point of this?

The point is, for 3y it was shipping. Nobody could use it, because MS
didn't even offer drivers for it.

MS added drivers. _Still_ nobody used it. It remained rare and obscure.

Then Apple made it the only way to get stuff in and out of an iMac
except over the network, and suddenly, USB was everywhere.

>> I was working for an Apple dealer in 1988. All schools in my country
>> then switched to Apple Macs in the late 1980s.
>
> What country?

The Isle of Man.

Yes, a very small nation, but a nation, not part of the UK or of Britain.

> I know Macs were popular for hackers or those who wanted to get on BBS in
> the 80s.

They were only introduced in 1984. Before that, I suspect you may be
thinking of the Apple II.

> I am talking about the lifetime of USB.

Yup -- from ~1996 to date. Pre Mac OS X. Apple was a very significant
force, from that time, and shaped the PC and Windows and the whole
industry, not just its own little niche.

And it still does. For example your Ubuntu machines print via CUPS, an
Apple product. And Ubuntu machines find local printers via a standard
that Apple implemented and made popular, even though Apple didn't
write it or create it originally.

> And after that first card I carefully picked motherboards that had it
> because I wanted to have it, but during the late 2000s this was (already)
> hard.
>
> Practically all harddisks were USB, very few firewire.
>
> But then, I never owned video equipment?
>
> You can say what you want; no one in my vicinity ever used the stuff, and I
> went to university during that time, so I also saw hundreds, you could say
> thousands, of computers, and not one of them had it.

All Sony. All Toshiba. Probably other Japanese makes -- Fujitsu?
Others too. I guess it was big in Japan. But no, it wasn't a big
success, you're right.

> From 1995 till 2003 when I was *VERY* busy with computers as hobby, with
> friends and at university, NO one every even mentioned the world AppleTalk.

No, because as you keep saying, you didn't use Macs and didn't know
anyone who did. It's an Apple protocol for Macs to talk to other Macs
and Mac printers and nothing else.

> AppleTalk included the ability of computers to self-organize.
>
> That is the aspect we are talking about.

So did everything in the early, pre-Internet, pre-router days.

> Your system, your beloved system (?) takes control away from me and from
> anyone.
>
> Then we have to evade and seek shelter elsewhere.
>
> You consider that fair?

Yeah.

A previously-meaningless name, not a TLD, never available to real
routed networks talking over the Internet, only available  inside
internal networks, suddenly meant something.

My home LAN was called KEEPIER.LOCAL. I had to rename it. But that was
about 15y ago. Long time.

> What I meant was that even though AppleTalk was successful its ideas and
> concepts did not permeate the Windows world.

Why would it? Windows had its own protocol. Netware had its own too.
WfWg and 9x supported both, out of the box.

> Unless you say that SMB/CIFS was inspired by it.

Totally different thing.

AppleTalk was a network transport protocol, like NetBEUI and IPX/SPX.

SMB is a file sharing protocol, like AppleShare and Netware Core
Protocol and NFS.

Different things.

> I am saying that we did fine without their mDNS-like features.

Pre-mDNS, if you had no name server, you had no name resolution.

Windows had a solution. Unix didn't.

Post-mDNS, Unix had a solution too. A solid, reliable, standards-based one.

It just means you can't use _one_ make-believe invalid TLD internally.
This is a very small price to pay.

> Do I really have to go quote Wikipedia for you Liam?
>
> "Connected AppleTalk-equipped systems automatically assign addresses, update
> the distributed namespace, and configure any required inter-networking
> routing."
>
> It is all about automatic, decentralized, peer-to-peer configuration.
>
> The entire topic of this debate.
>
> I am saying that the Windows world semi-mostly did without that yet still
> did fine.
>
> You are now today saying that it is a MUST.
>
> To have server-less auto-configuration.
>
> Yet 90% of the world DID FINE.

Yes, it was fine, on Windows, on Netware, on AppleTalk.

But it didn't scale. As Ken said, once you got to hundreds of nodes,
it got slow. With thousands, it got very very slow or failed.

The Internet has _billions_ of nodes and it still works.

We *needed* different technologies for a different scale.

Yes, they are more work. In that sense, they are inferior. But the
Internet could not have been built on anything else.

There was only ever 1 serious rival: OSI, also known as IEC 7498.

It bombed totally, and good thing too, because it was an over-complicated mess.

> You are not free to do what you like.

Oh, get over it!

You can't call yourself the President of the USA or King
Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands. You can't call your LAN
xen.local.

This is not destroying your freedoms!

> I said "don't", plural. I meant that virtually no one runs a serverless
> system.

That is utter nonsense.

Every home LAN is a serverless network. I have no home server. (Well,
OK, I do, but [a] I'm a geek and [b] it's not even plugged in and
hasn't been since I moved to Prague in August. And it doesn't have a
DNS server installed, because I don't want to maintain one.)

> Unless you just want to connect phones, everyone has a router in their
> homes.

That's not a server.

Some routers have services, but not all. It's not a defined part of
the standard.

I know people who turn off their router when they want to work
undisturbed. Your proposal means that then they could no longer print.
_This is not an improvement_.

NOTHING you have suggested is an improvement. You are suggesting
over-complex kludges, which are totally unnecessary and will break
under common circumstances.

What you're proposing is _worse_ than what we have.

All because you've got your knickers in a twist because an Internet
standard stops you calling your home network whatever you want.

It's _ridiculous_. You are being absurd.

> I am not attempting to argue. I am arguing :).

You _think_ that...


> Why are you doing this?

I'm not for much longer. This is wasting my time and effort.

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
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