Re: MS and help files

[Robert Mark Waugh <rmw@netscape.com>]

  > 
  > >This may have come about in a fairly innocent fashion when ISP's were
  > >running out of fixed IP addresses from the internic
  > 
  > Is that what happened? I always thought the fixed IPs were eliminated
  > because they provided too much opportunity to hurt the bottom line of the
  > long distance phone industry. Didn't anyone else find the timing of the
  > end of the fixed IP and the acquisition of the Internet by MCI, Sprint,
  > etc. to be suspicious?
  
  The "end of fixed IP" (which I quote because there are still several ISP's
  that do provide fixed IP's, but with the understand they can't get any more
  class C addresses until IPv6 is widely implemented) is soley because of the
  limitations of the address space built into IPv4.  With the advent of CIDR,
  these problems have been resolved up to a certain point, but by providing
  dynamic ip, ISP's can reduce the number of required IP's to about 1/8th the
  level.  That just staves off the exhaustion of address space by another few
  years.
  
  I think any conspiracy contrived here is mere paranoia, although I'm sure
  there are people who have benefitted from this technically necessary solution.
  
  One interesting note, however, is the fact that MS has stalled upgrading their
  crusty, leaking, buggy IPv4 stack to handle the upcoming shift to IPv6. 
  Another example of paying only lipservice to the Internet and it's standards. 
  Without Microsoft's support, IPv6 will never become a reality... and without
  IPv6, the Internet as we know it will fall apart in the next 5 or so years.