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From: root@bu-cs.UUCP (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: Re: The politics of groups (of people)
Message-ID: <654@bu-cs.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 19-Sep-85 20:14:09 EDT
Article-I.D.: bu-cs.654
Posted: Thu Sep 19 20:14:09 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 21-Sep-85 04:07:18 EDT
References: <1996@amdahl.UUCP>, <791@vortex.UUCP> <626@bu-cs.UUCP> <1090@ulysses.UUCP>, <131@utrc-2at.UUCP>
Organization: Boston Univ Comp. Sci.
Lines: 78

[have patience folks, if the first part boors you I get completely sidetracked
 fast enough]

> I'm afraid you're grossly underestimating the CPU and disk throughput
> requirements to put netnews on a machine.  2 of our 5 outbound links, on
> a 750 used solely as a communications server (Ethernets, DMR-11s, laser
> printers, etc.), are at high speed.  Guess what -- one uuxqt running rnews
> and there are no cycles left.  If there are two, reading news will become
> unpleasant.  Those two plus a print job will totally kill the machine.

(* This was in response to my suggestion to commit an inexpensive box as a
usenet server at your site, possibly plus working out a faster transport
as a way to alleviate one aspect of news problems, a small one
admittedly, but one that comes up frequently *)

No, I am the one who is afraid (:-)

I am afraid you are grossly confusing price with cpu power by posing your
750 as an example.

It is nearly impossible to buy anything these days much slower than a 750
for more than a few thousand dollars.

My ~$5,000 AT&T 7300 (UNIX/SYSV) apparently will run neck and neck on
your favorite benchmarks with your $200,000 750* (I own a 750 also,
without formal benchmarks I believe the benchmarks that show this just
from using each.) And *THE POINT*: for $5,000 I can use it as an
intelligent USENET modem without much justification (I suspect you use
your 750 for much more than a usenet device.) Even if you believe my
7300 is, what, 25% slower, 40% slower, my argument still is not that
unreasonable as you seem to complain (and it ain't that much slower.)

Wake up, you, like I, own a curious paper-weight of a past age. Sell it
to a VMS user (who doesn't have much choice) at 20c or so on the dollar and
buy something 3-5X the speed (one of the new 68020 boxes with a good winch.)
[I will, any VMS users interested? unlike a uvax, it has real periphs...]

Obsolescence hurts, ouch! Hey, it was a fine box in its time...(vax.)

	-Barry Shein, Boston University

P.S. Some of my remarks are hypothetical at this point, but not without
rationale. To make this work for us I still need an ethernet interface I
think, or some such, but that probably just means a 4.2 box rather than
a SYSV box, as SYSV still doesn't support any useful high-speed
networking (soon, soon, I know.) Have I annoyed 1/2 the net yet :-)?

*NOT floating point, but I don't think that is at issue here.

P.P.S. (sorry) This is more relevant to the discussion than may meet the
eye, yes I considered appropriateness, a *lot* of people (me too) are
suffering bad future shock and missing some viable solutions, a lot of
people sound like the backbone sites must be 1200B PDP11/34's with
RL02's and any solution has to satisfy that configuration. How about
CD's? uWave links?  T1? 9600B async modems w/ error correction?  build
'modems' with 680x0's in them (allowing us to consider more
cpu-intensive compression algorithms, more intelligence in general,
network file systems into your news system, I already have a version of
readnews here in test that accesses a remote /usr/spool/news via TCP/IP,
gee, took me almost most of an evening to get working! It's not ready
for distribution, don't ask yet, but Hint: I just intercept open(),
read() etc before libc.a and look for 'machine:path' in open(), mark the
fd (fd | SOMEBIT) and send requests as a struct to a remote daemon for
read() etc on fd's with that bit set...you can probably do that to, esp
if your clients and hosts are very similar (within an ntohx() of each
other.)

I know, a) a lot of these suggestions have their problems (I know the
problems) b) people like Lauren W. are hard at work at just these types
of solutions (and probably better than I have listed.) It's just that,
well, I'm an incurable technologist, I think this whole damn death-of-the-net
discussion *should* be cross-posted to human-nets, net.dcom, net.lan, net.ai,
net.telecom and a few other places as that's where a lot of the problem
solvers are! This group is becoming incredibly pessimistic when there is
no need to be.

What is that quote? Some look at what is and ask 'why?' other's dream
of what could be and ask 'why not?' (MLK I believe, BU grad? (D.D.?))


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