So, once again, Asia is ahead of North America. You see, I’m trying to get a Canon MP560 working with Linux, and I needed the drivers, but going to the North American sites (US and Canada) yielded only Windows and Mac drivers. So off I went to search the Internet, and low-and-behold, I found some Linux drivers—that are released by Canon—on Canon’s South & Southeast Asia site:
Why? Why is it that these same drivers can’t be found on the North American sites? Is the continent allergic to Linux? Does Canon think we’re morons?
Actually, come to think of it, comparing the South & Southeast Asia site to the North American sites I noticed something telling: the North American sites rely heavily upon images of the products to guide the user, while the South & Southeast Asia site is almost all text-based drop-down menus, that are more technically specific. Clearly Canon is of the opinion that North Americans can’t handle the technical details and need flash cards to find what they’re after—and I’m not certain I disagree.
Most people on this continent are about as computer savvy as a chimp is at playing the piano (sure—he can make noise, but does he have any idea how the noise is made, or even care), and sadly enough, the plebeians are happy in this state, and corporations lose no money by catering to the lowest common denominator.
I suppose I should be thankful that there’s still some part of the world where flash cards aren’t the primary means of communicating with potential clients, and where I can get drivers compatible with my choice of operating system, but it feels like a defeat anyway. Shouldn’t we be able to expect the same kind of access and consideration?
Well, at least I’m not trying to get a Lexmark to work…
Oh, and for a wider choice of options, here’s Canon’s South & Southeast Asia Support and Download page (just in case you want the drivers for something other than an MP560): http://support-asia.canon-asia.com/
(Ok, why not! One more page dedicated to the gopher protocol. This time it’s the record of a brief conversation that I had with Asa Dotzler that resolved nothing, but did give me a few cheap thrills.)
This is the record of a short comment discussion I had with (someone who may, or may not, have been) Asa Dotzler, Mozilla’s head of QA, on the subject of removing gopher support from Firefox. It was originally a blog post over on www.noneotheabove.com (before I allowed they site to die), and has been preserved here for posterity (assuming they would want anything to do with it at all). It was originally posted 30 August 2007.
With the exception of changes to characters due to character encoding difficulties, and adjustments made to the layout to render the text more readable in txt format, no changes have been made. The words that appear here are exactly the same as they were back when they were first written.
I wandered over to the floodgap gopherspace to see what was new, and I noticed a directory comment that said “updated 21 August 2007″. Checking the directory title, I was shocked to see “Keep Gopher support in Mozilla Core”. Surely the Mozilla folks couldn’t be thinking of taking gopher support out of Mozilla-based browsers, I thought. Such a thing would be preposterous. It’d put them on par with Internut Exploder. But following the link, my fears were confirmed: some no-brain hack (or group of no-brain hacks, I’m not sure which) wants to take gopher support out of Mozilla-based browsers.
They’ve even got two bug reports dedicated to this effort:
* Bug 388195-Remove gopher protocol support for Firefox
* Bug 351748-Remove UI for Gopher proxy settings
I must say that this is very disturbing. As it is, the only thing that really keeps me using Firefox over Konqueror is the fact that it has native gopher support (likewise for Camino on the Mac). And while the average web user might have no clue what gopher does (it’s a protocol, like http), or has (a lot of archived information, but also a lot of new stuff; it’s still alive folks, just smallish) I can’t see what advantage there would be in removing gopher support from the Mozilla core.Apparently their reasoning has something to do with a potential security vulnerability. Of course no protocol is supremely secure; that’s wishful thinking. Http has it’s problems, and yet no one’s talking about removing support for it from the Mozilla core.
Even more disturbing; a couple months ago there was a debate about removing ftp support from the Mozilla core. Why: for security reasons, and because it had a small user base. How long will it be before that’s revisited (and implemented)?
For now I shall cross my fingers and hope that the Mozilla developers will see the light, otherwise, I guess I’ll be looking for a new and better graphical web browser with real protocol support.
(Well… I sound positively shrill… Like some kind of demented harpy, convinced that the loss of gopher will open the gates of Hell, and usher in the apocalypse… Oh youth, how I want to smack you with a clue-bat. In any case, on to the responses. Arguably the best part of this post.)
4 Responses to “Seems a Gopher just can’t get no love…”
1.
Asa Dotzler Says:
August 30th, 2007 at 1:09 pm
What’s your definition of “a lot of archived information” and “a lot of new stuff”? thousands of archives? hundreds? dozens?
- A
2.
dan Says:
August 30th, 2007 at 3:51 pm
I must admit I’m slightly surprised that this garnered a response. But a question’s a question, so I shall (try to) answer.
I’ll start by stating the following: I don’t operate a gopher server, or site. My interest in gopher has as much to do with how different it (and its underlying culture) is from the realm of http, as it does with whatever information I find. I find it to be sort of a zen garden in a sea of noise and clutter (this site no doubt adding to such clutter).
Now to the question (had I known someone would call me on my statements, I would have chosen my words with a bit more care (probably…) — lesson learned: “teh internetz = srs bsns”).
So, a definition is sought. It probably wouldn’t serve to claim 100 documents is “a lot of archived information”. Truth be told, I’m not sure I can give an appropriate definition for what constitutes “a lot of archived information” (henceforth: “aloai”). I’m not sure that an appropriate definition could be provided for the http based web. Does porn count as “aloai”, or forums debating the relative merits of Kirk, Picard, Sisco, and the two ladies? Is it of value? I don’t know. Suffice it to say, I’d call “aloai” 100,000 documents. It’s a small number compared to the rest of the net, but vast compared to most personal libraries.
I can say with certainty that I’ve found information in gopherspace that I never managed to find within the realm of http. That’s not to say it wasn’t there, but the sheer quantity of information stymied my efforts to locate it (it was probably on page 44 or 45 of Google’s search results).
As to “a lot of new stuff” (did I really say that… crap…), that was probably a poor choice of words. A better statement likely would have been: “and new stuff being added”. This I shall blame upon misplaced overzealousness. I was having a good morning. Still, there is new stuff that’s added to gopherspace, and personally, on average it seems more useful (or at least entertaining) than what’s added to the http servers.
And of course there’s the history to think of. Won’t someone please think of the child… history.
3.
Asa Dotzler Says:
August 30th, 2007 at 6:18 pm
:D
Thanks for the honest and entertaining answer. These kinds of decisions are difficult to make. Every piece of unowned code, especially in the lower levels like networking and layout, is scary. More capability in those lower levels means increased attack surface so you’ve got the trade-off between security and functionality with no one responsible for managing that risk (an owner for that piece of code). For Gopher, where the functionality is, as best I can tell, only interesting to a very small population of users, but the security risk is there for all users, the balance is going to lean towards removal.
On top of that, Mozilla, Microsoft, and other software vendors have of late come under a lot of fire for exploits in specific protocol handlers or mechanisms for content handling handoffs between different programs. With increased scrutiny, it makes a lot of sense to either audit and own well the existing niche protocol handlers or to push them out of the product.
The cool thing about Mozilla though, (well, one of the cool things) is that our networking stack has very extensible protocol handling capabilities. That’s why we even have Gopher there to start — because it was pretty darned easy to implement. We had/have finger:// support too. One thing that I think results from this pluggable protocol handler architecture is that it shouldn’t be too difficult for someone to build a simple protocol extension for Firefox that added Gopher support back in. It could probably be done in JavaScript, making it cross-platform. Then, anyone that wanted Gopher support in Firefox could install a simple extension while the other 99.99% of Firefox users would be somewhat safer.
- A
4.
dan Says:
August 31st, 2007 at 7:02 pm
It does all makes sense. Not that I wouldn’t/won’t be a bit sad if/when gopher support is pulled from Mozilla core. But under the light of realism, there doesn’t seem to be an alternative. If 30 or 40 percent of web surfers used Gopher, there probably wouldn’t be this move to pull support (of course with that kind of support, Gopher would be searchable by Google… To dream the impossible dream…).
Ah well. I shall hope for the best, prepare for the inevitable and salute Gopher with a pint when the fateful day arrives (whenever that might be). And then I’ll find a Gopher plug-in.
(This is the remainder of the old page I wrote of at the beginning of ‘So You Want to Surf Gopherspace‘. Now to find MORE gopher-related pages!)
I first came across the gopher protocol in the fall of 1999, about 3 or 4 years after first stumbling about the internet (courtesy of my high school), and well after the gopher protocol had faded from the public’s mind. But for some particular reason, I was favourably disposed towards the protocol, more so than I was to http.
Gopherspace was what I imagined the internet, prior to commercialisation, was like: a vast sea of text documents, some pictures, perhaps a video, or sound clip, or two, and nary an advertisement in sight (excluding those websites maintained by corporations, which may or may not qualify as ads). There was something elegant about the stark simplicity of gopherspace, and that elegance appealed to my spartan nature.
And so it remains, almost ten years later, that gopherspace still holds the same appeal for me today, as it did when I first came across it. Granted I have yet to setup my own gopher server (a long-standing, but unfulfilled, goal), so until then, this page will have to serve as my small contribution to the promotion of the gopher protocol.
Ave Goopher://! A Short & Incomplete History
The gopher protocol began its life at the University of Minnesota way back in 1991. Developers there were looking for a way of efficiently sharing documents amongst academics and researchers using a consistent interface, and lo-and-behold they came up with gopher.
Gopher is a network protocol that organises files in hierarchical, text-based lists, and uses the following item-types (which include the original item-types, the gopher+ item-types, and common but unofficial item-types) to identify different files and items that appear in the hierarchy:
0 – text file (original)
1 – directory (original)
2 – CSO phone-book/name server (original)
3 – error
4 – Macintosh HQX (BinHexed) file (original)
5 – PC (DOS) binary (original)
6 – UNIX unencoded file
7 – full text index (gopher menu) (original)
8 – telnet session (original)
9 – binary file (original)
+ – redundant server
: – bitmap image (Gopher+)
; – movie type (Gopher+)
< – sound type (Gopher+)
c – calendar (original)
e – event (original)
g – GIF image (original)
h – HTML file (original)
i – in-line text that is not an item
m – BSD format mbox file
s – sound file (original)
I – image (other than GIF) (original)
M – MIME multipart/mixed message (original)
P – PDF document
T – tn3270 session (original)
For the next few years, gopher was THE protocol of the internet, and gopher servers began to spring up all over the place. By 1995, you couldn’t swing a dead cat on the internet without hitting a gopher server. Unfortunately for gopher, 1995 also marked the year that http began to overtake it due to the ability to integrate text, images, audio, and video, into one page, and the lack of a strict hierarchical file organisation structure.
But even http’s technical advantages need not have spelled quite the doom that gopher has since suffered. Unfortunately (again) for gopher, the University of Minnesota began charging a licencing fee for gopher servers. Thus http’s rapid rise to dominance was assured.
Fortunately, the University of Minnesota eventually had a change of heart, releasing gopher under the GPL in 2000, and while wide adoption of gopher is likely not going to happen (the University of Minnesota has even shut down their gopher server), there are still dedicated hobbyists and enthusiasts out there, tending the remaining gopher servers, helping to keep an important part of electronic history alive.
Origins Of The Name
I have seen three theories as to the origin of the gopher name. Any one, or combination of, which might be true.
It is a play on the words ‘go for’;
Information is accessed through a serious of menus that are analogous to a gopher warren;
It was named in honour of the University of Minnesota’s sports teams, which are named the ‘Golden Gophers’.
Documents
I have accumulated most of these trying to find a definitive guide to the item-types that gopher+ added to the protocol (something I have been partially successful in). The list starts with RFC documents, moves into man pages for gopher, and a couple associated programmes, and concludes with those texts that do not fall into either category.
(Note: I have copies of all of these, but they have not been uploaded yet, so there are no links yet. As they are uploaded, links will be added. Once the last one is up, this note will vanish into the mist.)
Name a world leader that has lost all grip on reality (here’s a hint).
I really don’t think he has the slightest understanding of what’s going on. He doesn’t even have full control over the Libyan military anymore. I’m guessing he missed the poli-sci class where the prof covered Machiavelli’s The Prince, and where it advised not to be so feared that people feel they’ve got nothing to lose by fighting.
Oh Muammar… I wonder what they’ll do with you? I’m going to venture out on a limb and suggest that his end will mirror Benito Mussolini’s. Sure, there might be a trial, and it may even be recorded for posterity—all 5 minutes of it. Then off to the gallows for him, while the partisans enjoy an afternoon snack of wine and cake.
So what are the odds on any particular day being The Day? Well, I’m not sure, but just for fun I’ll give odds of 50/50 that The Day will fall sometime within the next two weeks.
And where will this spread next? Well—I’m not sure, since it seems to be everywhere, but I’m going to go with Syria. It sounds like a place that should be in open revolt.
(Surprise! Another post resurrected from a deceased site. This was originally part of a much longer page on one of my dead sites. It covered all aspects of the gopher protocol that I could find. But then I decided to move things over to LinuxQuestions.org, with the full intention of regularly updating the blog… Yeah—that didn’t go so well. It’s still there, it just doesn’t get any love. But here it is again. Ready to be poked and prodded all over again.)
Anyone remember the Gopher protocol? I don’t—at least, I don’t remember it at its height. I first came across gopher in 1999, but only really started exploring it about five years ago, well after most nodes had been shuttered and their content moved to http. But even in its reduced form, there was a charm about gopher that drew me in, and which has taken root. And so, every so often, I wander through gopherspace, just to see what might be new, or old, or forgotten, or simply to enjoy the peace and quite of a hierarchical content structure.
Browsers With Full Gopher Support
Lynx – provides the most extensive support for gopher.
Firefox – full support from version 1.5 to 3.x. Support discontinued from version 4. More robust support can be had by installing the Overbite extension.
Seamonkey – full support since before version 1.0 to 2.0.x. Support discontinued from version 2.1.
Kazehakase – full support, but not the most stable browser.
Starting in Mozilla 1.9.3 (the core of Firefox), support for gopher will be removed completely, so future versions of Firefox, Camino and Seamonkey will not support the protocol either.
For more detailed information on the removal, read the following bugzilla reports:
Elinks – by default, it calls on lynx to access gopher sites. It can have reasonable support (but can have difficulty getting page information and menus in certain instances), if you are willing to compile it form source. The features.conf file will need to be edited before compiling; just locate the line that says CONFIG_GOPHER=no and replace that no with a yes.
Internet Explorer – support was available up to version 5. Support was disabled in versions 5.* and 6, but can be enabled by editing the Windows registry by adding the following entry:
Writing about the CRTC and the media landscape of Canada also got me to thinking about copyright law.
Currently, the government of Canada is looking to amend the country’s copyright law. Now there are improvements in the bill, but theses are essentially wiped out by the inclusion of anti-circumvention measures along the lines of those that exist in the U.S.
Canada is already viewed as a haven for ‘pirates’ by large media corporations, and I take a certain amount of pride in that label. If any business model deserves to be ‘pirated’ to death, it’s the entertainment industry. Seriously guys, the 19th century phoned, it wants its business model back!
So rather than reward those companies that chose to wallow in the decaying carcass of their 100+ year old business practices, I say Canada should take a bold step into the 21st century.
Not only should we NOT adopt any form of anti-circumvention, I say we should also adjust copyright terms.
In Canada, a copyright lasts for, oh—50 years. I say we slash that—by two thirds… At least. And it should be implemented immediately for all works created before—2001. Let’s get Mickey Mouse into the public domain. Let’s get Captain Kirk, and Hans Solo, and all the others out of their government imposed ruts. Let’s take them out of corporate storage; free them from the shackles of shill whoredom. Let them have strange, and new adventures, courtesy of the vast creative potential that exists within the populace. It’s how new stories and ideas get created.
And if the newly legit fanfic fails to sell—well, history is full of that to. We just don’t remember it—it sucked bad enough that no one wanted to remember.
The future awaits. Let’s piss off some multinational corporations.
The old technophobes in the CRTC (Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission) are at it again, putting on beautiful and elaborate displays of idiocy, ignorance, and world views firmly rooted in the the 1970s. Why, I bet they still think people use rotary phones, and have to get said phones from Bell for the low, low cost of an arm and a leg.
I really do get tired of this song and dance routine. Canada seems destined to be a land where the citizenry get gouged for telecommunication services (mobile, Internet), while the very agency that’s supposed to protect them (the CRTC), bows to whatever whim Bell, or Rogers, or Telus, or Shaw has. Hell, sometimes the bowing is pre-emptive!
Throw in the fact that, more, and more often, people are getting their entertainment and news, from around the world, courtesy of the Internet, instead of from broadcasters, and what role is there for an organisation like the CRTC, who has as one of its many endeavours, to ensure that there is enough ‘Canadian Content’ on Canadian television and radio stations? Especially when the only requirement for content to qualify as ‘Canadian’ is that there be a Canadian involved!
So let us be done with this farce. Let us be rid of this dead weight. Let us cast off this shackle of parochialism, and at the same time cure Canada of the gouging that it is currently subject to.
It’s a very simple, two-step process.
Step 1: Abolish the CRTC.
Step 2: Nationalise the telecommunications infrastructure (copper, co-ax, and towers), and have it operate as a neutral carrier. This will break the monopolies and duopolies that riddle the country like giant suppurating sores, and allow all companies access to all markets.
And while I’m at it, maybe I’ll throw in a step 3 (because everything is better in 3′s).
Step 3 (optional): Have the Competition Bureau go on a little trust-busting jaunt, and break up the horizontally integrated media empires (BCE-CTV-Globemedia) that are carving digital empires out of the country. Either that, or open up the market to foreign competition. Though with the CRTC gone, the market would be open by default, so…
(I still wouldn’t mind seeing Bell carved up like a turkey. That thing has grown so monstrously huge, it has its own gravity well.)
A few days ago, I was trawling the Internet in a mindless stupor, when a wave of loss and confusion swept over me. I was perplexed by this sudden onslaught, and locked myself in a closet to work through the pain and anguish.
I was about 3 hours into my exile, and chasing hallucinatory rabbits down the gullet of a whale-bird to save the Princess from disk brakes when a light broke through the gloom and the land was bathed in clarity: I hadn’t watched Zero Punctuation in a while!
Immediately my mood brightened, I broke out of the closet, and raced to my computer. This could not wait!
And so, for the next hour or so, I gorged myself on reviews of games I will never play, just because the geometrically clean heads of the e-people in the videos gave me a warm, fuzzy feeling. But even in this state of bliss, I took special note of Yahtzee’s review of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm because—well, it was completely, and utterly true to life.
Now this isn’t a review of a review. And it definitely isn’t a point-by-point rebuttal because—well, as I said before, I agree with just about everything in the video. But there were some cues that just seemed to call to me, demanding that I give them some kind of attention. This is the result.
Free Bird: I had to look this up on YouTube for, while I’d heard it mentioned in the past, I’d never actually heard the song. I’m not sure I can truly put into words the way it made me feel, but in brief, I managed to get through 3.5 of its 9 minutes before I had to shut it off or be overcome by a visceral urge to commit terrible acts of violence against all things cute and cuddly.
I kid not. There is some aspect of that song that reaches into the deepest part of my brain and starts wailing on the button marked: Go Crazy!
Entertainment Value: As a solo game, I don’t really find World of Warcraft all that entertaining. If it were a straight up adventure game where you split you time exploring for treasure and going from one boss fight to another, with each being successively more awesome and gory, then yes, it would be glorious fun. But most of the time, it’s about gathering, or mining, or looting, or escorting (and not the fun, sexy kind, but rather the boring, walk-beside-some-moron-until-he-gets-attacked kind). And while looting’s fun when you first get into the game, it’s lost a lot of its appeal by the time you’ve done it the 10 000th time.
WoW vs Hanging: It is so true. At least there’s escape with hanging. With WoW, the grind just continues.
Horde vs Alliance: Alliance sucks.
Productivity: How productive can a dead dog be? The answer: not at all. WoW certainly gives the illusion that something has been achieved. You spend an evening trying to finish some irritating quest that you swore would only take 15 minutes. But after all the e-suffering and e-struggle you went through, you feel like you’ve gained something tangible, it’s just a matter of nailing down precisely what…
Meanwhile, all the things you could have achieved, and gained a tangible object in the process, remain unfinished. In fact, they’re starting to pile up; become overwhelming. Just thinking about them is sapping the life from you. Better fire up WoW to get a little relief from all this ‘reality’…
And so on.
Warcompulsion Loopcraft: A few months ago, I read an article about Zynga games and how they were nothing but giant compulsion loops designed to suck money from the impatient and easily suckered, and the same basic idea can be applied to World of Warcraft.
You start by buying the game, and they give you the first month free. After that month you sign up for more months because you’ve developed a raging hard-on for Lady Sylvanis and you can’t stand the idea of not seeing her, or hearing her dulcet tones; and because you’ve already thrown money away on the actual game (which is probably why they don’t give the client away for free). You may have even developed a fondness for you character(s), and want to see them grow, and succeed, and find love and happiness, and retire to a sunny villa in Stranglethorn.
There’s just no easy escape. You have to force your way out, or risk becoming one of the unwashed, unmoving, spheroids that have forgotten what the world beyond the cold, dead glow of the computer screen looks like.
Clashing items, or super numbers: It’s definitely about the numbers. I’ve not payed any mind to what my characters look like. They strip the corpses of the best gear, and swap it for their existing crap, like an Athenian host coming upon the remains of a German panzer division.
Fashion is not high on the order sheet.
A Non-Conclusion Conclusion: I started playing WoW because my fiancée plays it. She’s got a couple of high level characters (one of them being just shy of 85), while mine hang about in the 10 to 50 range at the time being.
I’ll keep playing solo until one of this lot manages to reach 85 (time to pick one of these buggers, and stick with them), and has done the Indiana Jones parody quests, but after that, I think I’ll switch to playing in a group. I don’t really find the game all that enjoyable when there’s no one else around. And I don’t just mean online.
There can be a whole host of people online to chat with, by I have a rare genetic condition that prevents me from seeing the chat box unless I stare directly at it. I’m the kind of person that needs to have other people in the same room with me, playing the game at the same time, and preferably on the same server. Otherwise, it just seems lonely and pointless.
Well, unless it involves killing Alliance players. There’s always 5 minutes for that.
This post has had a long history (in Internet time), and has been variously known by the titles: An Alternative Model of Classifying Sub-Stellar Celestial Objects; Pluto is NOT a Planet and; There. Are. 7 planets! At no point was I truly satisfied with the results.
The original article was written in early September of 2006, shortly after the IAU had announced their official definition of what a planet was. Rather than including Eris (whose discovery in 2003 had set the whole procedure in motion; it appeared that it was bigger than Pluto, and so was either the tenth planet, or Pluto was not a planet at all), they decided to drop Pluto from the planet category and shuffle it into the newly-created dwarf-planet category (along with Eris, and Ceres, and no doubt more to come), and gave the world this definition of the word planet:
(1) A “planet”1is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.
(2) A “dwarf planet” is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape2, (c) has not cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit, and (d) is not a satellite.
(3) All other objects3, except satellites, orbiting the Sun shall be referred to collectively as “Small Solar System Bodies”.
———– 1 The eight planets are: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. 2 An IAU process will be established to assign borderline objects into either dwarf planet and other categories. 3 These currently include most of the Solar System asteroids, most Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs), comets, and other small bodies.
———–
I had wanted to try my hand at creating a whole new method of ‘classifying sub-stellar celestial objects’, and while the result was a reasonable first almost-draft, it became clear as I worked on it, that there were two many variables, and to little detail regarding extra-solar objects. And so my enthusiasm waned, and the project died.
My desire to reclassify the planets was spurred again—briefly. At least until I sat down and gave the whole matter some thought. It was at this point that I remembered a comment that Neil deGrasse Tyson made (somewhere—I wish I could remember where) about the whole issue of what a planet was. Briefly, he said that one day, what are now known as planets will (or should) be classified by properties, instead of using a three- to four- thousand year old word imported from ancient Greece. And it makes sense.
Jupiter and Saturn have significantly more in common with each other than with Earth, or Mars. And Pluto has more in common with the comets of the Kuiper Belt (and other objects of a more stayed orbital pattern) than it does with any object lying closer to Sol.
It was this line of thought that eventually lead me to the perfect definition of the word planet: a natural object that, to the unaided eye on the surface of a world, appears to move across the static background of the stars.
This is essentially the definition that was used by the ancient Greeks, for whom the word ‘planetes’, meant wanderer. Certain constraints have been added to account for the development of the telescope, and other detection methods, that helped to redefine the word in the first place, and to prevent the same from occurring again.
So we come back to the first definition of the word, and the planets of Earth are: Sol, Luna, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.
But the word is not restricted to Earth. Travel to Pluto, and its planets would be Charon, Nix, Hydra, and Sol (at the least). And Pluto would be a planet of each of its moons.
It becomes both a constrained word, and a limitless one. Anything can be a planet, just not necessarily of the world you are currently standing on.