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GeneralRe: Google Chrome users may have been impacted by a massive spying campaign, report says Pin
W Balboos, GHB21-Jun-20 1:10
W Balboos, GHB21-Jun-20 1:10 
GeneralRe: Google Chrome users may have been impacted by a massive spying campaign, report says Pin
obermd19-Jun-20 6:58
obermd19-Jun-20 6:58 
QuestionHow would you send a project to a customer in a way that he would be forced to send and acceptance message or at least that leaves constance of being sent Pin
Joan M18-Jun-20 9:03
professionalJoan M18-Jun-20 9:03 
AnswerRe: How would you send a project to a customer in a way that he would be forced to send and acceptance message or at least that leaves constance of being sent Pin
Fernando_Costa18-Jun-20 10:27
Fernando_Costa18-Jun-20 10:27 
AnswerRe: How would you send a project to a customer in a way that he would be forced to send and acceptance message or at least that leaves constance of being sent Pin
Nelek18-Jun-20 20:11
protectorNelek18-Jun-20 20:11 
JokeRe: How would you send a project to a customer in a way that he would be forced to send and acceptance message or at least that leaves constance of being sent Pin
kalberts18-Jun-20 22:16
kalberts18-Jun-20 22:16 
GeneralRe: How would you send a project to a customer in a way that he would be forced to send and acceptance message or at least that leaves constance of being sent Pin
Nelek18-Jun-20 23:20
protectorNelek18-Jun-20 23:20 
GeneralRe: How would you send a project to a customer in a way that he would be forced to send and acceptance message or at least that leaves constance of being sent Pin
kalberts19-Jun-20 1:58
kalberts19-Jun-20 1:58 
X.400 was designed with the intention that the mail transfer system, the MTAs, were managed by a recognized, public athority. It was developed by the ITU (or as it was called then, CCITT), considering the network of MTAs the way they considered the network of telephone switches: Of course you may, within your company, have an internal distribution system to each employee - a PBX for phone, maybe a company database for the email.

For voice phone, there is a well defined Network Termination point: The network provider has the full responsibility upstream from this point, the customer has the full responsibility downstream. For email, there was a similar point referred to as P3.

This splitting into a mail network provider and mail user was not very popular among Internet people - they want every single developer to be able to manage the whole thing, run its own mail network of MTAs, free to be modified as the developer wants. That's how SMPT nodes are run, by just anyone who cares to set it up. Why should anyone tell us that X.400 assumes a stricter discipline? We don't want discipline in the Internet - Internet is free!

So the guy whose X.400 address is revealed in the Wikipedia article, Harald Alvestrand, said with a smile when working with X.400 at the Uninett research institute: "Sure, we use the ITU X.400 document in our everyday work, but we've got a copy of ISO 10021 available, in case someone points out that we are not a telecom adminstration - the documents are technically identical, but the ISO version has deleted the paragraph stating that MTAs are operated by recognized telecom administrations" Smile | :)

(Another thing from the same guy: He entered IETF work going from X.400 into MIME, which was still in the design discussion phase at that time. When a new problem area was brought up, Harald suggested that they adopted the solution already designed for X.400, both to save the design effort and to ease interworking between the two email systems. He was immediately and forcefully turned down: No matter what qualities the X.400 solution had, we are not going to do anything the way of the OSI stack! ... So (some parts of) MIME was deliberately designed to be different from, and incompatible with, X.400. That is how the netork wars were like, thirty years ago.)

The critisism raised in the text you quote seems to ignore X.500 completely. In the 1984 "Red Book" recommendations, the directory system we now mostly know as LDAP. (LDAP was originally an access protocol to a "real" X.500 directory.) X.500 is designed for global distribution, in a way resembling DNS. If X.400/X.500 had succeeded, there would have been not only a national but a global database of users.

It seems as if the author(s) of the Wikipedia article has never used a decent X.400/X.500 implementation. I never saw anyone type in the recipient address in the "To:" field, like you do in SMTP: You look up the address in the (globally distributed) database, by any combination of database keys identifying the recipient uniquely, mouse selecting from list of partially matching alternatives if you prefer that to typing. Just like you used to jot down in your little red book the phone numbers of people you met, a successful hit in the large X.500 directory could by a mouse click be transferred to (or referenced from) your electronic rotary, part of the mail system. In the X.400 system I used the most, I could append a tag to the rotary entry, so that I could specify the tag when preparing a mail, and the full address would be retrieved from the rotary by the mail system.

Similarly, when then authors state that "the X.500 protocol proved to be every bit as complex and unwieldy as X.400", their attitude is clearly shown. LDAP is (or I should say: was) nothing but an Internet protocol adaptation of the X.500 DAP. The complexity of the protocol semantics is identical; the essential difference is tne encoding. If you - the Internet Way - expect to create the BER encoding by hand, telnetting to the X.500 server, then you are lost. Very few Internet people spent more than five minutes to reject ASN.1 and BER encoding: If it ain't ASCII, but designed to be generated by software rather than from a keyboard, then it is "complex and unwieldy". ... There again you have the rhetorics of the network wars.

There is no realistic chance of "The revenge of X.400". Yet I find it dispiriting, again and again, see the Internet struggle with problems that were solved many years ago - but that was by the enemy. We close our eyes, we don't want to see it. We won't spend any effort on understanding it. It wasn't invented here, withing the Internet community. Some of the solutions sneak in, behind the curtain, now that noone knows that they really originated in the trenches of the enemy. Often the theft is half-baked and partial, the result looks patchy and full of wreckage from now abandoned solutions. But we'll just have to learn to live with it.
GeneralRe: How would you send a project to a customer in a way that he would be forced to send and acceptance message or at least that leaves constance of being sent Pin
Nelek19-Jun-20 2:49
protectorNelek19-Jun-20 2:49 
GeneralRe: How would you send a project to a customer in a way that he would be forced to send and acceptance message or at least that leaves constance of being sent Pin
kalberts20-Jun-20 4:16
kalberts20-Jun-20 4:16 
GeneralRe: How would you send a project to a customer in a way that he would be forced to send and acceptance message or at least that leaves constance of being sent Pin
Nelek20-Jun-20 4:52
protectorNelek20-Jun-20 4:52 
AnswerRe: How would you send a project to a customer in a way that he would be forced to send and acceptance message or at least that leaves constance of being sent Pin
Kiriander18-Jun-20 21:15
Kiriander18-Jun-20 21:15 
AnswerRe: How would you send a project to a customer in a way that he would be forced to send and acceptance message or at least that leaves constance of being sent Pin
super19-Jun-20 0:10
professionalsuper19-Jun-20 0:10 
AnswerRe: How would you send a project to a customer in a way that he would be forced to send and acceptance message or at least that leaves constance of being sent Pin
Member 1486763219-Jun-20 1:05
Member 1486763219-Jun-20 1:05 
AnswerRe: How would you send a project to a customer in a way that he would be forced to send and acceptance message or at least that leaves constance of being sent Pin
W Balboos, GHB19-Jun-20 3:15
W Balboos, GHB19-Jun-20 3:15 
AnswerRe: How would you send a project to a customer in a way that he would be forced to send and acceptance message or at least that leaves constance of being sent Pin
dandy7219-Jun-20 5:53
dandy7219-Jun-20 5:53 
AnswerRe: How would you send a project to a customer in a way that he would be forced to send and acceptance message or at least that leaves constance of being sent Pin
Member 289602019-Jun-20 8:16
Member 289602019-Jun-20 8:16 
AnswerRe: How would you send a project to a customer in a way that he would be forced to send and acceptance message or at least that leaves constance of being sent Pin
Ethia19-Jun-20 14:46
Ethia19-Jun-20 14:46 
GeneralRenaming of Tables Pin
MadGerbil18-Jun-20 6:46
MadGerbil18-Jun-20 6:46 
GeneralRe: Renaming of Tables Pin
ZurdoDev18-Jun-20 7:38
professionalZurdoDev18-Jun-20 7:38 
GeneralRe: Renaming of Tables Pin
Slacker00718-Jun-20 7:59
professionalSlacker00718-Jun-20 7:59 
GeneralRe: Renaming of Tables Pin
David Crow18-Jun-20 8:06
David Crow18-Jun-20 8:06 
GeneralRe: Renaming of Tables Pin
OriginalGriff18-Jun-20 8:06
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GeneralRe: Renaming of Tables Pin
obermd19-Jun-20 6:52
obermd19-Jun-20 6:52 
GeneralRe: Renaming of Tables Pin
Robert/Not The Pirate19-Jun-20 10:32
professionalRobert/Not The Pirate19-Jun-20 10:32 

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