On Tue, Jan 08, 2002 at 10:40:58PM -0800, Larry Price wrote:
>
>I know that I've had occasion to use [finger] a fair bit at efn (not sure if
>it's available outside this particular goldfish pond)
>
Which is a shame, since there isn't really a good replacement for the
mission of finding out if someone you know is available for online chat.
In this it's like UUCP - antiquated, but lacking a good successor. [0]
>Soon it'll be a thing of the past like buggy whips and telnet, ah well.
They've been saying that about UNIX for twenty years...
[0] The UUCP function that is sorely missing is the ability to push
an arbitrary file to an arbitrary remote user. In practice people try
to get by with email attachments, which is fundamentally insane from the
admin's point of view - MIME was an afterthought to enhance the basic
mail mission of sending messages, not a tool for propagating kernel binaries.
>From the user perspective, however, it's the only obvious way to send a
file to someone - and in Windoze, the obvious solutions are the only ones
available at all.
--
Keeping UUCP running is starting to seem a lot like keeping a 130-year-old
man who smokes 4 packs a day on life support because he's the last person
on Earth who knows how to do the cha-cha, but he won't tell anyone.
-- Ryan Tucker
