Subject: RE: Last Call: SMTP Svc Ext

From: "COLES, RICHARD J. (JSC-EV) (LM)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 2002 14:10:28 -0500

Dave,

Thanks for the vote of confidence.

I have replied to a few people privately (including Messrs. Hodaka, Abley &
Richardson , et al), all of whom wrote to suggest scanning the document,
then sending it e-mail.  One respondent chided me for being for being
"US-centric".  I work at a Federal Government installation.  How am I
supposed to think?  Mongolian-centric? (don't answer that...)

I know that many of you on the list are not in the US.  Claudio is not even
in the Western Hemisphere.  That does not mean that I am ignoring their
needs, just as I don't want them to ignore my needs.

Even so, I would like to thank all of them for their suggestions, but I will
also list below the reasons (for everyone else) why we don't do much
scanning.

First, I must admit that I think a small percentage of people around NASA
(including their contractors) have the attitude of "we have always done it
this way", thus they are not interested in change.  I am not one of them.
If I was, I would not be on this list.

Second, we do not have a lot of scanners in our network (not much
requirement for them), so we must either buy one (not easy to do with our
current budget), or find someone to do it for us.  These people are few &
far between, and usually too busy to assist us, or they are doing so much
scanning of their own that they tie up their equipment.  And for security
reasons, NASA (at least in Houston) does not like for us to use each other's
computers without the "owner" being present.  Either way, this ties up 2
people for one scanning job.  And that slows things down quite a bit versus
faxing a document to the end user.

Third, and possibly the most significant reason is that we send things that
are one-time-only requirements.  If we know in advance that we need to send
this to a lot of others, we could scan it & create a PDF, instead of POLL
faxing.  Polling would take longer, depending on the number of recipients.
The delay to the users on the bottom of a long POLL list could be excessive,
thus scanning might be a good alternative.  However, this is a very rare
case around here (in my experience).

Fourth is storage space.  If we scanned every document we thought we might
need, it would require a StorageTek data warehouse like the one used in the
Harrison Ford movie "Clear & Present Danger".  Most of the documents we
would be scanning will never need to be sent to anyone via e-mail.  All of
that scanning would be a waste of labor in a tight-budget environment.

Fifth.  Most of the people to whom the document is sent require a hard-copy
for a data package or some other file, so they would print the electronic
document on the other end, anyway.  Fax is a lot faster than scanning on
this end of an e-mail & printing on the other end.

I must admit that the resolution from the sender's 600 dpi scanner & the
recipient's 1200 dpi laser printer is probably better than the average fax,
but we must always be aware of the extra time requirements for e-mail
transmission versus fax.  Sometimes, the document is needed so quickly on
the other end that scanning here & printing there could cost us a launch
deadline (an extreme example, to be sure, but a possibility, nonetheless).

So, I will repeat a previous posting:  NASA needs FAX.

Think of the money to be saved, everywhere in the world, when governments &
businesses (and individuals) can send fax via the Net & not pay
long-distance rates.

Thanks again & regards to all,

Richard Coles

-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Crocker [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: Sunday, July 07, 2002 1:18 PM
To: COLES, RICHARD J. (JSC-EV) (LM)
Cc: [email-masked]; [email-masked]
Subject: RE: Last Call: SMTP Service Extension for Content Negotiation
toP roposed Standard

At 11:39 AM 7/3/2002 -0500, COLES, RICHARD J. (JSC-EV) (LM) wrote:
>I just wanted to be sure that everyone knew how important
>FAX is to NASA (and, I suppose, to other agencies of the
>Federal government).

Right.  Folks often do not realize that even Telex is still a critical
infrastructure service, for portions of the world.  My guess is that we are
looking at 10-20 years before fax is truly relegated to a minor role.  Fully
replacing well-established infrastructures takes a very long time, no matter
how quickly a new one emerges.

One reason for doing fax over the Internet is for cheaper and faster fax
service, but another is to integrate the fax and email communities, as much
as is reasonable.  (Personally I have a third goal, which is to provide
email with a target service level that is more demanding that Internet mail
has provided until now and is known to be useful for business; with fax we
get that, and we do not need to debate the philosophy of business
communications.)

d/

----------
Dave Crocker  <mailto:[email-masked]>
Brandenburg InternetWorking  <http://www.brandenburg.com>
tel +1.408.246.8253;  fax +1.408.850.1850

---

From: Robert Elz <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 2002 13:23:55 +0700

Date:        Wed, 10 Jul 2002 14:10:28 -0500
    From:        "COLES, RICHARD J. (JSC-EV) (LM)" <[email-masked]>
    Message-ID:  <[email-masked]>

  | So, I will repeat a previous posting:  NASA needs FAX.

Since I'm the one who started this meaningless discussion with a side
comment to another message, let me perhaps finish it as well...

What I said was that fax was dead technology, not that fax was going to
vanish soon (I mean, how would anyone stop NASA from using FAX if we wanted
to, you already have the equipment, the only way to stop you using it would
be to take away all your phone lines...)

But it is no longer worth doing lots of work to try and make fax better,
that isn't the right direction to move (nor to make Telex better Dave...)
Certainly it is going to take a long time to fade away (perhaps longer than
the 10-20 years Dave estimated), but that's OK.

Your requirements for the internet and fax seem to be to save money
(that's fine, even if they're not my tax dollars you're saving...), without
increasing delays at all, and e-mail is no good, as it can have delays...

If that's true, you're talking about some completely different technology
than what has been being discussed here - which is precisely using e-mail
to ship around scanned images (whether the source of the image is a low res
scan from a piece of equipment labelled "fax machine", or from a hi-res
colour scanner doesn't really matter - what has been being discussed here
is how to have the sender match that image to the capabilities of the
recipient, who might be a hi-res colour printer, or a crappy "fax" printer,
or something between).

kre