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From: jabf@castle.ed.ac.uk (J Blair-Fish)
Newsgroups: comp.parallel
Subject: Clarification on eunet.parallel
Message-ID: <12682@hubcap.clemson.edu>
Date: 18 Jan 91 17:28:09 GMT
Sender: fpst@hubcap.clemson.edu
Organization: Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre
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Approved: parallel@hubcap.clemson.edu

[Part of the rancor may be attributed to my comments. I was only trying
 to say that we're not so loaded down that the odd announcement is
 going to kill us. Since Edinburgh is important to our parallel community,
 the wish was for continued distribution.

 Be that as it may, one can certainly have local distributions: we do it
 here. What I would suggest is that you do the local thing, even the
 UK, etc, thing. I have a limited understanding of the posting software.
 Bjorn Lisper and others have suggested reasonable alternatives. Contact
 me with some plan and I'll contact the folks who have the software to
 find out what it takes.
]

There have been a lot messages on the network commenting on the proposed
eunet.parallel newsgroup.  We believe that most of the complaints are
the result of a misunderstanding, due to the wording of the original
posting, which was unfortunately misleading. 

The main reason for proposing the new newsgroup is to provide a medium
for disseminating information which is not appropriate for a world-wide
audience.  Since comp.parallel is moderated from the US, the moderator,
we understand, cannot re-post articles with distributions such as, uk or
ed.  This means that we are unable to advertise lunchtime seminars,
one-day meetings and the like through comp.parallel without wasting a
vast amount of bandwidth by sending details to people thousands of miles
away who are unlikely to have any interest in the posting.  We feel that
some events, such as one-day meetings in the UK, may be of significant
interest only to a European audience, due to the cost of travel from the
US.  The proceedings typically produced from such meetings would, we
anticipate, be advertised on a larger scale. 

There is no intention to restrict information of a wider significance,
such as abstracts, jobs etc, as mistakenly suggested in the original
posting.  We fully recognise the value of a continuing exchange of
information between research communities. 
 
There was certainly no conspiracy of secrecy intended in the original
posting, and we hope readers can see the need for the type of
eunet.parallel we envisage. 

	Malcolm Brown and John Blair-Fish