Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!henry From: henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) Newsgroups: net.news.stargate,net.news.group,net.usenix Subject: Re: Again ... What is it going to COST????? Message-ID: <6975@utzoo.UUCP> Date: Mon, 21-Jul-86 19:07:58 EDT Article-I.D.: utzoo.6975 Posted: Mon Jul 21 19:07:58 1986 Date-Received: Mon, 21-Jul-86 19:07:58 EDT References: <255@dmsd.UUCP> <6929@utzoo.UUCP>, <258@dmsd.UUCP> Organization: U of Toronto Zoology Lines: 141 > Henry, being part of the backbone is a nice status deal... It's overrated. That and fifty cents will buy me a can of Sprite. :-( > ... I write the checks every month. > I forward the news to the local university free of charge as a service. > I KNOW what it costs, you don't have a monopoly on that or the right to > judge those who don't pay as free loaders... My apologies for misjudging your participation; your original article sure sounded like you thought the net was "free". I think if you read my article again, you'll find that the people I judge as freeloaders are the ones who not only don't pay, but don't want to pay and feel free to orate about how the net is a right, not a privilege. > The backbone ONLY SEES A FRACTION OF THE TOLL CHARGES. They have little > right to assume authority of the cost of the net ... Nobody ever said we did. If you dislike what the backbone does (e.g. the renaming of newsgroups, another decision reached by a sinister cabal with minimal public input... deliberately, or we'd still be discussing it in the year 2000), form your own backbone. There is nothing special about most of the backbone sites except good equipment and the willingness to grit their teeth extra-hard when the bills come in. Nobody will argue if you assume as much load as you see fit, and decide for yourself how much that is. Just grant us the same privilege, please. > Heck, I doubt most news administrators on the backbone have seen any > of the phone bills during the last year or know to the even dollar what > the totals are or what each link costs... I haven't asked all of them, but I believe you're badly mistaken. The costs are all too visible. No, we do not have magic ways of hiding them. > > I would assume that Stargate would permit local rebroadcasting... > > THINK -- DON'T ASSUME ANYTHING... Sorry, I know some of the people involved, and refuse to believe that they are stupid or venal. That assumption is on pretty solid grounds. > If they continue to hide behind closed doors with popular support, > then the community will get what they get .... I'd rather have a choice. You will have one, as will we all: the choice of whether we wish to get involved with Stargate or not. If Stargate flops, or doesn't successfully replace the existing Usenet, because it is poorly put together, I fail to see how that interferes with the pursuit of other approaches to the problem. Nobody is pointing a gun at your head and demanding you buy Stargate. > ...Stargate WILL cost more than the current > near free for most sites, and given any choice they will not likely join > Stargate if the same data remains available over uucp based usenet. The intent of Stargate is to offer better quality (i.e. more signal, less noise), not just more of the same. As Lauren has repeatedly pointed out, the transmission medium for Stargate has finite bandwidth that will have to be managed consciously, quite apart from the legal issues (and the human ones of *wanting* to provide better quality). > ... "They *know* that" ... I ask what are they planning to do > about it????? You seem to assume that the answer is "something vague and sinister that we won't like but will have to accept". Please justify this. > This and most of the other questions are so basic that > they demand discussion prior to settling with a proposed vendor... They will certainly have to be discussed before we settle with Stargate about any participation we undertake. I see no reason why they have to be discussed before that is a serious prospect, though. I know, you meant that they should be discussed before Stargate's plans get settled. What I ask is, why? Stargate isn't spending my money, or yours. > How is the vendor going to act if everyone bitches at the last minute??? Any vendor with an ounce of brains will be aware that he's taking a chance on this to some extent. > > ... Usenet *won't* stay intact as a cost free competitor... > > Ahhh .... but the net MUST stay intact to carry items to Stargate via uucp > mail. Also one of the biggest benifits of the current uucp based usenet is > that uucp mail service goes most places. If the current net dries up, > what will happen to mail service??? Uucpnet (mail) and Usenet (news) are not the same. One isn't even a subset of the other. Uucpnet will presumably stay intact, since there is no reason why it shouldn't and every reason why it should. > ... News itself is the problem, the data accesses per article > are only a few percent of the disk traffic ... very inefficent. Notes is > much better in some ways. A new dbms type system needs to be written that > doesn't use one file per message and can directly batch/unbatch streams > with a single fork/exec. The fork/exec problem is already being attacked by C news, which is almost ready for release. It doesn't change the form of the database, partly because its authors believe that the existing database format is perfectly adequate for any reasonable volume of traffic. The problem is that the volumes of traffic are rapidly becoming unreasonable. Even the popular technical groups are approaching the point where the investment needed to read them is not worthwhile. The authors of C news believe that the right way to attack that problem is at the source: the traffic volume. > > Again, are you volunteering to do it? ... > > Don't be so stupid to start discounting suggestions if the suggestor isn't > able to implement it by themselves ... hell stargate wouldn't have > gotten off the ground if Lauren was the only person involved. For a long time he *was* nearly the only person involved. Ideas are not enough; we need implementors too. Lauren not only had a good idea, he's worked hard to make it fly. I don't discount a suggestion just because the suggestor isn't able to implement it by themselves, but I'm afraid we *must* discount suggestions which don't have implementors at all. The Usenix call for proposals was most explicit about wanting to know "who" as well as "what". > Good ideals and goals are much cheaper than false starts. We cannot run ideas and goals on our machines, however. > > In case you didn't hear about it, Usenix solicited proposals of precisely > > this kind recently. I believe they got, essentially, none. > > I and many others in usenet are not Usenix members. I don't remember the > USENIX posting requesting alternative proposals ... I certainly would have > responded. It was <2550@hcradm.UUCP>, posted on April 7th to net.news and net.usenix. There was a bit of further discussion in net.usenix. Perhaps you have a feed problem? Out of curiosity, why aren't you a Usenix member? -- EDEC: Stupidly non-standard brain-damaged incompatible Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology proprietary protocol used. {allegra,ihnp4,decvax,pyramid}!utzoo!henry