Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!wuarchive!swbatl!texbell!uhnix1!sugar!ficc!peter
From: peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: EUnet, unido and USENET
Keywords: unido, costs, contracts
Message-ID: <5263@ficc.uu.net>
Date: 26 Jul 89 12:29:19 GMT
References: <588@odin.cs.hw.ac.uk> <882@corpane.UUCP> <8594@attctc.DALLAS.TX.US> <1018@isaak.UUCP>
Organization: Xenix Support, FICC
Lines: 43

In article <1018@isaak.UUCP>, woerz%isaak@isaak.uucp (Dieter Woerz) writes:
> In article <5084@ficc.uu.net> peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes:
> >	a) Sell feeds at [cost/#feeds]

> That 's the first problem in my eyes. ... the "direct" feeds have to
> pay very high prices... [which] will stop many connections from being
> established in the first time, so the costs will remain high.

So people get on further down the tree. That's not a problem.

> This is a second problem over here. If I remember correctly, most or
> nearly most of the news reading sites are Universities and public
> research organizations [which can't sell feeds]

This is a real problem, then. If you folks had brought *this* up in the
first place, instead of flaming us for being parochial Americans (in my
case, Australian) there would have been more light and less heat.

Perhaps encouraging a few commercial sites would help...

> >	c) Sit back and watch a richly-connected network grow
> >	   thanks to the invisible hand of market forces.

> Perhaps some of you got now a better understanding, why there is no
> such "richly-connected" network as in the states.

Yeh, between the German Government and you you're not letting market
forces work. It's not entirely your fault, but surely something could
be done. Sight...

> An other problem may lay in the fact, that EUnet (or dnet) is not too
> well known here. I think, that in most Universities here, most
> students are not allowed to read or post mail and news, because the
> cpu-time is billed to the project they 're working on.

Surely your systems can't cost so much that you're still billing by CPU
time. I've got more CPU power at home than an undergraduate would ever
need.
-- 
Peter da Silva, Xenix Support, Ferranti International Controls Corporation.
Business: peter@ficc.uu.net, +1 713 274 5180. | "...helping make the world
Personal: peter@sugar.hackercorp.com.   `-_-' |  a quote-free zone..."
Quote: Have you hugged your wolf today?  'U`  |    -- hjm@cernvax.cern.ch