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From: javoskamp@watnot.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp,news.admin
Subject: Re: Scary Thought ...
Message-ID: <12570@watnot.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 7-Mar-87 13:40:14 EST
Article-I.D.: watnot.12570
Posted: Sat Mar  7 13:40:14 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 8-Mar-87 12:00:46 EST
References: <919@smeagol.JPL.NASA.GOV> <1112@altnet.UUCP>
Reply-To: javoskamp@watnot.UUCP (Jeff Voskamp)
Organization: U. of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 53
Xref: utgpu comp.mail.uucp:307 news.admin:209

In article <1112@altnet.UUCP> edc@altnet.UUCP (Eric D. Christensen) writes:
|In article <919@smeagol.JPL.NASA.GOV> earle@smeagol.JPL.NASA.GOV (Greg Earle) writes:
|>Recently, two people at JPL became recipients of Lauren Weinstein's `uulink'
...
|>clamoring to be part of Usenet.  From both an administrative and logistical
|>viewpoint, it seems to me like this could present a problem of major
|>magnitude if everyone and his mother jumps on the bandwagon and starts running
|>these programs and announcing themselves to news.newsite.
|
|Scary thought is right!
What would probably be useful would be to have a local version of news.newsite
(say within a subdomain, once they get going properly).  While they would be
posted within the local area, other areas would only find out about them if
they wanted to (say by sending in a request for new local sites).  As long as
you can send mail to george@my_pc1.foobar.com reasonably, who cares if we 
know how to get there directly.
|Not that I'm anti PC or anything, but the number of PCs in the world is huge. 
|I'd be willing to be that a good percentage run modems, and a good percentage 
|of those would like to get on the USENET.
Darned right there are.
|
|Now I don't have any problem with that except for one thing. What's going to
|happen to the limited bandwidth available to the uucp links if we suddenly 
|doubled or tripled the number of hosts. Also, is it right for a system to tie
|up someones modem for 2 or 3 hours a day when only one or two users have 
|access? I would tend to say not. Multiuser installations are able to serve
|many users and provide additional services (i.e. forwarding articles, gateways,
|mail routing, source archives, etc.) that a PC host just won't be capable of.
Don't forget that not all the PCs will have to call up, and not all the news
will have to be downloaded.  I'm sure with a little work the local users could
decide who would read what from the host and redistribute internally later.
We'd just end up with a zillion more (nearly-)leaf nodes on the net.  The 
actual load on any given existing host need not increase by all that much.
|
|I think that these issues need to be discussed. I would hate to see PCs banned
|from the net. Equal access is one of the fundamental principals of the net, but
|I'm afraid that a VAX is a bit more equal then a PC-XT in this case. (For that
|matter, what about the ATs running Xenix with ony one or two users?)
|
|I would hate to see the net collapse under it's own weight, but I'm afraid that
|is the direction we are headed in. Let's see if we can kick around some ideas 
|to help solve this problem (hopefully without cutting anyone off).
Yes, let's.  Why should I have to spend "n" hours a day at the office
(university, etc.) reading news when I could do it at home during my 
"free time" at night. :-)
Seriously, access to the net is fairly important to me and I'm sure it is to
others as well.  The question is how can we keep it flexible enough to survive
and still quick enough to be useful.
-- 
        The opinions expressed herein are accurate.  
     The same cannot be said for spelling and grammar.
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