Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!intercon!news From: amanda@mermaid.intercon.com (Amanda Walker) Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp Subject: Re: Paths and Precedence (Re: Question about From: lines) Message-ID: <26A3CFD1.67F@intercon.com> Date: 18 Jul 90 02:56:17 GMT References: <[$6je2.vl6@smurf.sub.org> Sender: usenet@intercon.com (USENET The Magnificent) Reply-To: amanda@mermaid.intercon.com (Amanda Walker) Organization: InterCon Systems Corporation, Herndon, VA Lines: 29 In article , peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) writes: > routing everything through the internet is expensive. That 10-hop > path might be cheaper than sending the mail up the hierarchy and a few > thousand miles to the friendly internet site you leach off, only to have > it beamed back to a location 30 miles away. Cost is relative, though. For example, I once sent a package less than 50 miles via Federal Express. It would have been cheaper by one metric (cash outlay) to just drive out and drop it off. On the other hand, the extra couple of bucks were well worth it terms of time and reliability. Sometimes it really does make more sense to bounce a message around the planet, for performance or administrative reasons. To take another example, my brother works at a NASA center just across the city from me. When he sends me mail, it goes from GSFC to Ames (other coast) to U.S. Sprint's X.400 gateway to the Internet to UUnet to me. It would be "cheaper" to have his machine call mine (it's just a local call, after all), but it would not be even close to cost effective to do so. Sending those bits across the country a couple of times has negligible marginal cost, either in terms of either money or administrative overhead. If we were shipping megabytes of data around every day, then it might be worth it. For a similar reason, most of my mail to OSU goes over the Internet, even though I have the ability to UUCP directly to osu-cis for picking up files (when, that is, I can get through to the lone Trailblazer+). -- Amanda Walker InterCon Systems Corporation