Newsgroups: news.software.b Path: utzoo!henry From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) Subject: Re: Upgrading Usenet (was Re: Who pays the bill?) Message-ID: <1990Aug7.180710.3872@zoo.toronto.edu> Organization: U of Toronto Zoology References: <1990Aug1.230858.3264@iwarp.intel.com> <29103@becker.UUCP> <1990Aug04.171540.29439@looking.on.ca> <26BCDA30.21C@intercon.com> Date: Tue, 7 Aug 90 18:07:10 GMT In article <26BCDA30.21C@intercon.com> amanda@mermaid.intercon.com (Amanda Walker) writes: >... Look at C news--it's ingratiatingly compatible >with B news, and the only people that seem to be picking up on it are us >performance weenies out here :-). It's only gaining widespread acceptance >very slowly, and that only because it's a fairly "invisible" upgrade... Actually C News isn't doing too badly; based on analysis of message-IDs in our history file, C News is running at 600+ sites, about 12% of the active subset of Usenet. This method inherently can't measure the passive subset -- the sites that rarely or never post anything -- but we know C News gets substantial use among them too. (The rest of the active subset is currently split about 50-50 between B News sites and sites generating weird message-IDs that aren't obviously either B or C. There is no single dominant form of weirdness. :-)) Both the count and the percentage for C News are growing steadily. However... Amanda is right, steady it may be, but it's also slow. It would probably be somewhat faster if we were sysadmin-compatible with B News, because learning new procedures increases the conversion effort. This bodes ill for any change that involves incompatibility of a more serious kind. Yes, a lot of this is sheer inertia, as witness the sites that are still running B2.6, but each obstacle to conversion greatly magnifies that inertia. A seriously-incompatible news system will have little chance unless it offers really major benefits to make up for the hassle. -- The 486 is to a modern CPU as a Jules | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology Verne reprint is to a modern SF novel. | henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry