Xref: utzoo news.admin:2216 comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d:275
Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!bellcore!tness7!killer!pollux!dalsqnt!rpp386!pigs!haugj
From: haugj@pigs.UUCP (John F. Haugh II)
Newsgroups: news.admin,comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d
Subject: Re: 417K waste of money postings (was: Re: PICNIX V3)
Summary: not so much a complaint about content as about VOLUME
Keywords: Binaries, MS-DOS, Evil
Message-ID: <123@pigs.UUCP>
Date: 17 May 88 16:36:17 GMT
References: <1559@slvblc.UUCP> <111@pigs.UUCP> <435@rd1632.Dayton.NCR.COM> <107@skep2.ATT.COM>
Organization: Big "D" Home for Wayward Hackers
Lines: 41

when one considers the cost to transmit the 770K PSPICE and 417K PICNIX
postings, plus the various other ones whose size i didn't count, every
member of the net was slapped with what amounts to a big $$$ charge for
what other writers, notably john gilmore and bill stewart, have refered
to as throwaways.

certainly in a vacuum PSPICE and PICNIX would be of such a great value
that the distribution costs would be tolerable.  however, such a
vacuum does not exist and these goodies do in fact exist in other forms
and from other sourcs.  duplicating THAT effort, i.e., the distribution
itself, is wasted energy.  while the content may indeed be very useful,
which for PICNIX i will conceed quite readily, broadcasting megabytes
of data is an inefficient distribution method, cost wise.

providing pointers to the binaries would seem far more productive and
far less expensive to the USENET community.  since middle february i
have been providing some collection of the more popular source postings
for anonymous uucp.  while the initial costs were high to me, the
monthly expense of maintaining an ever increasing collection of
connections, anonymous and otherwise, is very small.  furthermore,
all of the users accessing the system are required to pay their own
way.  there are no ``hidden'' costs being exploited or overlooked.
what i see on my phone bill, and what they see on theirs is the sum
total of the expense.

more sites of this nature are needed, along with a means of coordinating
this new network.  USENET may well be the most effective tool at hand
for distributing information pertaining to non-Unix software.  already
a newsgroup heirarchy exists for this purpose.  the pubnet distribution
is extremely underutilized but would seem to be The Place for such
information to collect.  before more posters claim USENET as their
local BBS, how about seeing some interest in pubnet?  persons interested
in pubnet feeds should contact myself or someone else in their area
who is receiving pubnet.

- john.
-- 
 The Beach Bum                                 Big "D" Home for Wayward Hackers
 UUCP: ...!killer!rpp386!jfh                            jfh@rpp386.uucp :DOMAIN

 "You are in a twisty little maze of UUCP connections, all alike" -- fortune