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: <1990Aug9.152043.29100@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> <1990Aug7.180710.3872@zoo.toronto.edu> Date: Thu, 9 Aug 90 15:20:43 GMT In article fitz@wang.com (Tom Fitzgerald) writes: >This is probably a serious underestimate... >... mail-to-news gateways ... >...[avoidance of] super-jumbo message IDs... >... NNTP posting agents ... Yes, it's very difficult to assess these things. However, message-ID analysis has the enormous virtue that it's quite cheap, unlike the fairly drastic step of sending out a "version" control message. Message-IDs only give us a sample of the net, rather than a complete census, but it's something we can afford to do regularly for trend tracking. If we're feeling masochistic some time, we may try a "version" message to try to measure the sampling error. :-) It's always going to be difficult to figure out what's running at sites whose news traffic is gatewayed through from other software -- be it mail or NNTP -- that generates its own message-IDs. The super-jumbo-ID problem will be reduced somewhat when we start using a more compact ID format (it's coming), although we do plan to continue making the IDs distinct enough for this sort of analysis. -- It is not possible to both understand | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology and appreciate Intel CPUs. -D.Wolfskill| henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry