[drats_users] Email Proposal

[Nate Duehr]

On Mon, 19 Oct 2009 11:56 -0700, "Dan Smith" <dsmith at danplanet.com>
wrote:
> > All they'd have to do to support D-STAR would be to create another 
> > configuration item that was the same code as their serial port code, 
> > with limits on how much could be transmitted out the "serial port" at
> > a time before an ACK from the far end.
> 
> Well, actually what they need to do is implement the equivalent of my
> software flow control which will allow you to feed data through the
> radio with no buffer problems as long as the radio doesn't melt.  Based
> on their prior issues with Kenwood TNCs, however, this isn't the way
> they normally attack problems :)

ROFLMAO... some people engineer...

> Actually, D-RATS provides an abstracted TCP tunnel transport that would
> let you treat it like an SMTP server, which is even less work for them
> (and should work as-is, unless their software sucks more than I expect).

You're assuming they know to open a local socket!  LOL!

> Don't get me started on that.  I only wish I was visible enough for them
> to hate me :)

My visibility didn't last long.  I only got "visible" because there's
some SERIOUSLY big government money funding ALE projects up in the
Pacific Northwest (hey, that's closer to you than me, how did I end up
debating with them before you did?!  LOL!), and I was dumb enough to get
involved in picking on ALE's inability to share a channel properly,
which led to picking on WinLink which lead to.... 

Well, you get the idea.

> It seems to be something that people want, which is my reason for
> considering it.  The VHF side of Winlink seems rather useless to me, to
> be honest.  Email in D-RATS doesn't make too much more sense, except
> that it would be open, cross-platform, and cross-hardware.

At the end of the day, those are all worthy goals... all depends on how
much you feel like supporting e-mail.  Most sysadmins scream and run
away when presented with "new e-mail challenges" if they've managed to
extricate themselves from the quagmire of spam fighting software, ACL's,
etc... necessary just to keep users THINKING they have "clean" e-mail
services... LOL! 

> And it also happens to be the #1 most expensive[1] way to get 160
> bytes of data from one device to the other.  Hard to call that much
> of a success, but...point taken :)

LOL... that's just public pricing.  It's pretty cheap in the back-end,
actually.  Them telco guys gotta make their profits!  LOL!

Communication has gotten so easy and cheap since I was a kid... how many
people born today will never pay a long-distance charge of $3/minute to
call family? :-)  

(Yeah I know International is still that bad, but there's already plenty
of common-folk ways around paying that price.)

--
  Nate Duehr
  nate at natetech.com