🚀 go-pugleaf

 >"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!