J.Crowcroft@CS.UCL.AC.UK (Jon Crowcroft) (12/13/89)
>"The Final Soapbox" is the last section in the book, and is as its name implies >a sermon on problems and pitfalls of the standards process and its players. >PPS Differences of opinion gladly entertained, flames ignored. I agree with comments on the first sections of the book - i've just got round to reading it and its definitely the most useful practical book on OSI by a very long way. [nearest runners in my opinion are Larmouth et al - Standards for OSI, BSP professional books, ISBN 0-632-01868-2, and Halsell, Data Comms, Computer Networks and OSI, Addison Wesley, ISBN 0-201-18244-0, neither of which show any where near the depth of example/experience in implementation]. The final section of the book is very US oriented (wont say biased) - there are a lot of European players not included; however the principle of nitwits (= junior management) and faberge egg-heads (= senior management) determining the course of things to come is also well known this side of the Atlantic - i await the distribution of ISODE along with the book, by the publishers a la minix/xinu op sys books!! i think its a shame that there isnt a counterpoint book on comms and distributed systems that says "here's an open distributed system we prepared earlier which has no design flaws and this is how we built it in practice, and by the way its heterogeneous and free". jon btw: what can you expect of a bunch of people will invent (who dont have computer science degrees and all speak different natural languages) but ASN.1? wait for ASN.2 p.s. the ultimate test of a grad student - get them to modify tcpdump to pretty print the presentation level "of" packets traversing your ethernet, using an ASN.1 template as the pkt parser driver - and probably get free lunches for life telling anecdotes about debugging it!
karl@asylum.sf.ca.us (Karl Auerbach) (12/14/89)
> btw: what can you expect of a bunch of people will invent > (who dont have computer science degrees and all speak different > natural languages) but ASN.1? wait for ASN.2 ASN.1 is a growth on X.409 which came out of the work of IFIP WG 6.1 which came out of the internet community. Please don't be so down on ASN.1 itself -- it makes a great deal of sense when used to hold multi-media documents and electronic mail (things which you don't have to parse in real-time). The dummy is the one who decided that ASN.1 is the vehicle for virtually all upper-level exchanges in OSI. --karl--