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Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!genrad!mit-eddie!think!harvard!bu-cs!root
From: root@bu-cs.UUCP (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: net.lan,net.news
Subject: Re: words to live by
Message-ID: <510@bu-cs.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 20-Jul-85 16:34:32 EDT
Article-I.D.: bu-cs.510
Posted: Sat Jul 20 16:34:32 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 21-Jul-85 23:24:46 EDT
References: <740@utcs.UUCP> <205@redwood.UUCP>, <466@aaec.OZ>
Organization: Boston Univ Comp. Sci.
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Re: Fine suggestion to distribute USENET on floppies (or some such.)

Re: Re: Problem is Post Office lossage

You mention that you are not in the US, the US Mail is not in my
experience very bad about reliability (I know, flame flame, but really,
about 99.9% gets where it's supposed to w/in 2 or 3 days.)  The
alternative exists for a dollar or two to special handling which ups
reliability considerably (again, favorite horror anecdote to /dev/null,
its rare, not rare enough, but rare.) Also, so it got lost once a year,
so you get another copy sent, this gets closer to the real problem...

WHO EXACTLY IS GOING TO SIT AND MAKE THESE FLOPPIES? The beauty of the
current scheme is that while all good children are asleep (or up
hacking) the news gets silently delivered, a phone is dialed, a phone is
answered, chug chug, done. Yes, there is maintenance involved, but I
doubt this will reduce it for the SUPPLIER sites (someone still has to
keep it coming in to get it onto floppies.)

If someone is willing to copy floppies, god bless 'em, I think tho this
is the major stumbling block to the scheme unless a data-duplication
service is involved which probably puts the price back to where you
started.

However, for example, if one site would feed a foreign site who would in
turn UUCP to local sites (eg. transatlantic) this might be made to work,
but I doubt that is what people are talking about.

	-Barry Shein, Boston University