Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!bbn!diamond.bbn.com!mlandau
From: mlandau@bbn.com (Matt Landau)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Posting Binaries vs. Sources
Summary: Missing the point
Message-ID: <11055@jade.BBN.COM>
Date: 20 May 88 15:05:25 GMT
References: <3116@charon.unm.edu>
Reply-To: mlandau@bbn.com (Matt Landau)
Organization: BBN Laboratories Incorporated, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 61

The issue isn't particularly whether binaries are good or bad in some
absolute sense, nor whether PC users are weenies compared to the rest
of the Usenet community.

The real issue is whether binary postings are of sufficient utility
to a sufficiently large part of the net to justify their aggrgate 
posting costs in terms of money, communications bandwidth, and disk
use on thousands of machines all over the world.

My own opinion is that the answer is "no, they are not."  I say this
not because binaries aren't inherently useful to some people -- they
certainly are -- but because the existence of alternate communication
and distribution channels for binaries makes it *unnecessary* to 
post them to the net at large in order to get them into the hands of 
people who really want them.

To take just one example: the ready availability of Brian Reid's archive 
server makes it possible for virtually any Unix machine on the net to 
provide a cache of interesting binaries that can be encoded and MAILED 
upon request to any site capable of sending and receiving mail (and if 
you can read/post news, you can probably send/receive mail!)  

Examples of people or groups using archive servers to distribute material
include Brian himself (for alt.recipes), the Sun-Spots mailing list (for 
all sorts of things), the X11 developers at MIT (for distributing code 
patches), Larry Wall (for all the wonderful toys he's given the net), 
one or more comp.sources.* distribution points, etc.

With this kind of distribution mechanism available, it's not NECESSARY
to post large binaries (in multiple parts that get lost, generating an
endless stream of "please repost part 7 of frobnitz" messages).  Instead,
one can post POINTERS to binaries -- descriptions of the available
software and email addresses of the archive servers that are willing to
provide it.  

A network of archive servers supplying access to large binaries, in the
same way the currently provide access to sources, would have some 
considerable advantages:

  * The amount of news traffic would decrease significantly, and
    we could save the bandwidth for more interesting things.

  * The number of repost requests and other noise postings would
    drop if people knew how to go get things for themselves.

  * The aggregate savings in disk space across the net would be
    tremendous.  (Maybe my news spool wouldn't overflow once a 
    month :-)

  * We could put an end to the endless arguments in news.admin
    about binary postings :-)

So how about it?  People have been clamoring about wanting binary news
groups, binary news hierarchies, a GIF images group (imagine the volume
*that* could take!), etc.  Does anyone want to take the bold step of
withdrawing the call for a newsgroup and experimenting with an archive
server instead?  You'd be doing the net as a whole a service, and maybe
even starting a trend for the future...
--
 Matt Landau		    The happiest cold and lonely guy 
 mlandau@bbn.com	          stuck in the Yukon without a dog.