From hungary-online-owner Fri May 19 13:37:08 1995 Received: from localhost (daemon@localhost) (fnord) by nando.yak.net (8.6.5/8.6.5) id NAA24780 for hungary-online-out31415; Fri, 19 May 1995 13:37:08 -0700 Received: from localhost (daemon@localhost) (fnord) by nando.yak.net (8.6.5/8.6.5) id NAA24769; Fri, 19 May 1995 13:36:54 -0700 Received: from bruner@ind.eunet.hu () via =-=-=-=-=-= for hungary-online@hungary.yak.net (24767) Received: from ind.eunet.hu (root@ind.eunet.hu [192.84.225.42]) (fnord) by nando (8.6.5/8.6.5) with SMTP id NAA24764 for ; Fri, 19 May 1995 13:36:07 -0700 Received: from [192.84.226.92] (bruner.dial.eunet.hu) by ind.eunet.hu with SMTP id AA05606 (5.67a8/SZTAKI-4.01 for ); Fri, 19 May 1995 22:32:58 +0200 X-Sender: pop029@ind.eunet.hu (Unverified) Message-Id: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Date: Fri, 19 May 1995 22:31:10 +0100 To: hungary-online@hungary.yak.net From: bruner@ind.eunet.hu (Rick Bruner) Subject: (HOL) Narancs, US gov, 'net X-Charset: US X-Char-Esc: 0 Sender: owner-Hungary-Online@hungary.yak.net Precedence: bulk Reply-To: Hungary-Online@hungary.yak.net Greetings Tibor and All, What follows is long and rambling, sorry, including a few online resources relevent to Hungary I've found, plus an aimless screed responding to points of Tibor Beke's Fri, 12 May 1995 posting with the above title. =46irst of all, congratulations to all of you involved in Narancs' Web page. It's a strong effort and a cool site. More power to all of you! =46urthermore, I was very happy to discover via the Narancs pape the HIX and Hungary Homepages. Yes, I'm an unabashed newbie to the Web, and I still find the concept of most of it plainly awesome, but I'm particularly impressed by what a huge volume of Hungarian activity out there. Quality stuff, and almost all with easy English guides. For those of you who have explored these resources even less than I have, here are a few highlights of what I've found in my last couple of tours of these sites: =46irst of all, the starting places for the mass of Magyar resources are HIX Homepage http://hix.mit.edu/cgi-bin/ekezet.html/hix/ and The Hungary Homepage http://www.fsz.bme.hu/hungary/ One particularly nice exibit I found was in the library of the Kossuth Lajos University of Science http://www.lib.klte.hu/konyvtar/index.english.html where there is a collection of some dozen or more historical Hungarian posters, from 50-100 years old. Picture images, so they take a while to load, but well worth checking out. Classic stuff. Similarly, Szeged in Postcards http://www.bibl.u-szeged.hu/szeged/old1.html Also, a few touristic sights of Hungary: Today's Szeged in Pictures http://www.bibl.u-szeged.hu/szeged/today.html a nice write up on Budapest: http://fatime.fsz.bme.hu:80/hungary/budapest/ and Budapest in pictures: http://fatime.fsz.bme.hu:80/hungary/budapest/pictures.html In other wanders, taken there via Netscape's "What's Cool" page, I found a device that will calculate the most direct route from any one of Budapest's metro stations to any other! http://metro.jussieu.fr:10001/bin/select/english/hungary/budapest It's actually part of a worldwide subway station calculation device -- what a fabulously useless application of the power of the Interet: tracking metro stops in Kiev while sitting in Cleveland, Ohio! =46inally, I found something many people here might be interested in -- a networking conference being hosted in Bp next year. Below, find a condensed version of a WWW hyper-linked press release I found. The WWW address and other contact info at the bottom: 7TH JOINT EUROPEAN NETWORKING CONFERENCE MAY 13-16, 1996 BUDAPEST, HUNGARY FIRST ANNOUNCEMENT AND INVITATION "BUILDING THE INFORMATION HIGHWAYS" The Hungarian research and educational community is honoured that Budapest will host the 7th Joint European Networking Conference, organized by TERENA, Trans-European Research and Education Networking Association. ... CONFERENCE CHAIR Bernhard Plattner, ETH Zurich, Switzerland (E-mail: plattner@tik.ethz.ch) ORGANIZING CHAIR P=E9ter Bakonyi, HUNGARNET, Hungary (E-mail: h25bak@ella.hu) SCOPE In line with the established tradition of the previous JENCs JENC7 aims at bringing together individuals from research and education, industry and government who are involved with planning, developing, implementing, managing, funding, and using national, regional and international computer networks for a four day meeting in which state of the art networking issues will be presented, discussed and demonstrated. SUBJECT AREAS (TENTATIVE) User Support and Training, Policy, Economic and Regional Issues, Network Engineering, Network Technology, Application Technology, Infrastructure Developments. ... =46URTHER INFORMATION JENC7 Secretariat c/o TERENA Secretariat Singel 466-468 NL 1017 AW Amsterdam, Netherlands E-mail: jenc7-sec@terena.nl WWW address: http://www.terena.nl/terena/jenc7 or JENC7 Local Organization c/o MTA SZTAKI H-1111 Budapest Kende u. 13-17 Hungary E-mail: richter@sztaki.hu WWW address: http://www.iif.hu/jenc Please excuse if I've already bored most of you to sleep, but I also wanted to respond to a couple of points Tibor made in his recent post. >Rick grumbled that one cannot reach the CIA by email. Not I didn't. I said that the US Information Service web page sucked. It does. Actually, the CIA has a pretty cool web page: http://ciac.llnl.gov And it does have email addresses noted. So there :-P >Something else looms on the horizon, of course, which is that Bill Gates- >meets-cable-meets-MTV-meets-superhypeway-meets-idiotic-cheering-media- >meets-plain-shit wins. You've alluded to similar ideas a few times in other recent posts. What do you mean by "wins"? Are you suggesting that Microsoft Network will acutally *kill* the Internet? I doubt it. I mean, MS is big, but I don't think Gates can afford to piss off 30 million I-net users. I think the momentum behind the Net is already too big for anyone to suplant with one great McNet corporate version. Sure, they have a big market to which they can sell a product, as well, but I think some incarnation of the free-form, anarchistic, open dial-up access I-net is bound to survive, and mature, for a while into the future. >I'm certain they'll have a _market_, and I'm certain of it for a reason >that might open up the floor for furious debate. The US has an immense and >>little-advertised Third World inside. Sorry to disappoint, but you'll get no argument there. The phrase "underclass" was in vogue some years ago. Now maybe it's not PC to speak of such, but it doesn't exactly take a PhD in sociology to recognize it. Little-advertised, maybe, but much advertised to. Just look at Nike, Kool cigarettes, any number of brands of booze, etc. White trash makes up the bulk of it as a market, I suppose. Certainly you're right that if BGates can market online to them, he'll hit the motherload -- but you're suggesting the future of online culture depends on them for its survival? I dunno. Somehow, I think that intellegence and mass culture may be converging once again in human history, here on the Net. It already exists. The Internet today is cool, fun and yet requires a certainly amount of intellegence to use. But 30 million users, and fast growing, is no small market. (How many of them are using the Web would be an interesting piece of info, if anyone has a figure.) I personally see the '90s as the decade of the ascendence of alternative culture. Revenge of the nerds. Seriously, who would have thought it possible that to wear thick glasses, get excited about math and computers, to be labled a "geek" -- your typical Wired reader -- would one day be considered "cool"? Okay, maybe they always did so in Hungary, but you guys are ahead of your time. :) Or switch on MTV (i.e. Music...) and watch the Top 10 countdown. Minimum 30% of it is "grunge" and what was just recently called "alternative" music -- wacked out stuff that would have been cast as "punk" or "heavy metal" or Satan music 10 years ago (Soundgarden, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Bjork), is now just plain Pop music, along with rap and other weird and jarring hybrids that would have had the neighbors calling the police and your parents a shrink just a few years ago. A movie like Pulp Fiction -- great, harsh, alternative film-making -- is a whisker away from Best Picture Oscar. David Lynch makes TV shows. Letterman -- wacky, funny and big bucks. Somehow, we've reached a critical point where the minority fringes are starting to overwhelm the majority. There is no such thing as *the* American Way anymore. The society is so pluralistic today that the fringes -- gays, Blacks, geeks, intellectuals -- are actually finding a place and a voice in the mainstream, and the mainstream will never be the same again. The beauty of the Net, of course, is that it brings alternative-minded folks together like never before. Primarily, it breaks down distribution barriers and flattens production costs. It makes it easy and affordable enough for special interests to come together in mass. I don't think Gates can compete with that. It's a whole new medium that thrives exactly because it's uncontrolled, unmanaged and unmarketed. You seem to have a vision of doom regarding the Net, Tibor. Other than standard Hungarian pessimism, I don't see why. What exactly is threatening its future? Legislation? How could it ever be regulated? Who's jusisdiction? The UN's? =46inancing? That's a real issue, obviosly, if the government's of the world decide they can't underwrite it anymore, but one that I think market forces are already taking are of. The main infrastructure costs for the "free" Internet are hardware, networking (and system maintenance), software and content providers. As for the latter two, forget about the costs, with the sense of service volunteerism (and sponsorship) and shareware already dominating the activity of the Net. As for the fixed costs, I don't see why they can't be amortized into the fees individual users pay to their local service providers, the same as telephone service. As for the commerical potential, it's obviously vast and can offset some of the other fixed costs. And, yes, I think the paradigms to look towards are Netscape, HotWired and the others you mentioned -- the ones who realize the way to make a buck out of it is to attach themselves to the rules of the new environment, not rewrite them. Sure, Microsoft Net *will* exist. Just as AOL, Prodigy and CI$ already exist alongside the Internet. And MS-Net will certainly be the biggest, with the dial-up software loaded on every Win95. But I still don't see that as the death of the Net. My $0.02. Obviously far more than most of you care to read. Sorry. Just got carried away. I'll shut up now. Rick ############# # This message to Hungary-Online@hungary.yak.net # was from bruner@ind.eunet.hu (Rick Bruner) # # To unsubscribe, # send "unsubscribe" to # An announcement-only subscription (less volume) is available # at # Send mail to for more information, # or to if you need human assistance. #############