Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!alembic!csu
From: csu@alembic.acs.com (Dave Mack)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Is USENET stagnating?
Message-ID: <1989Oct30.040015.3272@alembic.acs.com>
Date: 30 Oct 89 04:00:15 GMT
References: <40056@looking.on.ca>
Reply-To: csu@alembic.acs.com (Dave Mack)
Organization: Alembic Computer Services, McLean, VA
Lines: 74
UUCP-Path: uunet!alembic!csu

In article <40056@looking.on.ca> brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) writes:
>Now the object of this article is not to have everybody list some minor
>new thing that's happened to USENET.  I want to find out why we aren't
>watching *major* changes, and why we aren't watching a lot of them.
>And what we can do about it.

Why no major changes? Three reasons:

1) Despite the flaming and gibberish, it works. It allows people all 
   over the world, with incredibly different computing and networking
   resources, to communicate.

2) Standards. They help ensure compatibility, but they also stultify.
   People on the net quote RFC822 and RFC1036 as if they were carved
   in stone. A change that conflicts with one of the standards, even
   if it's an improvement, is not likely to succeed.

3) The hardware environment. There are still people sucking this stuff
   through 1200 baud modems into ASCII terminals. We use everything from
   PCs through Crays to implement Usenet. Point out a single major change
   that can be made that will leave the net usable by all the current
   users.

>I do know one reason, and it comes from my own experience as (I think) one
>of the few people to try to do completely new things in this network
>environment.   You get pointlessly flamed whenever you try to innovate.

What innovations are you referring to? r.h.f? ClariNet isn't part of
Usenet, it's a commercial service that uses the same transport mechanism.
Newsclip might be considered an innovation if it were available to anyone
on the net, not just ClariNet subscribers. Ultramoderated newsgroups...
What the hell are ultramoderated newsgroups?

>People have forgotten what USENET should be about.  USENET is about
>*doing* things in computer networking.  Not thinking up arguments why
>people shouldn't do them.

Horseshit. Usenet is about communication. Saying "Usenet is about *doing*
things in computer networking" is like saying "writing is about putting
strings of letters on paper." It's true at some level, but it misses the
point entirely.

This came out flamier than I'd intended. Brad has made some valid points
here. If we are to make major improvements to Usenet, I believe it will
be at the cost of access to quite a few of the users. I suggest that the
way to do this with minimum disruption to the rest of the net is to
do it in another hierarchy - effectively a different net, with different
rules, that doesn't try to cater to the lowest common denominator, that
will set standards rather than obeying them.

Three major areas that we might attack are:

1) Data transport. Right now we have UUCP, NNTP, and probably others
   I know nothing about running through phone lines, Ethernet, Decnet,
   etc. Is this the best we can do? What happened to stargate? What
   happened to the idea of regional nets based on CATV?

2) Article selection. How do we decide which articles to read and which
   not to? Brad's NewsClip, or something like it, might be a step forward.
   There has to be a better route than kill files and rn macros.
   Better article classification, as per Barry Shein's recent proposal,
   falls under this heading as well.

3) Article composition and presentation. Don't all of you sitting out
   there reading this in monochrome and monofont on a high-resolution
   bit-mapped color terminal think something's wrong? Would it be so
   difficult to implement a WYSIWYG PostScript(tm) editor and display
   PostScript newsreader? Crispin Goswell's {x}ps program is a major
   chunk of the latter. 

The suggestion box is open.

-- 
Dave Mack