Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!plaid!chuq From: chuq@plaid.Sun.COM (Chuq Von Rospach) Newsgroups: news.admin Subject: Re: The death of USENET Message-ID: <56250@sun.uucp> Date: 12 Jun 88 19:33:29 GMT References: <2645@rpp386.UUCP> <56228@sun.uucp> <2350@inco.UUCP> Sender: news@sun.uucp Reply-To: chuq@sun.UUCP (Chuq Von Rospach) Organization: Fictional Reality Lines: 67 >>o Commercialization of USENET: >> A major cornerstone of the future of USENET has to be services like uunet. >Agreed, except that the cost is too high currently. This is not uunet's >fault, the problem is telecomm costs. What this country needs is a good >cheap long distance phone system. There's nothing inherently more (or less) expensive about uunet than about the rest of USENET. The only difference is that uunet doesn't allow you the priviledge of (1) hiding the expenses in the budget, or (2) hiding the expenses in someone else's budget by relying on someone else's willingness to fund the net for you. What the country needs (or doesn't need) is immaterial. If you can't afford USENET with the current long distance system; if you can't afford uunet, you should seriously ask yourself if you can afford USENET at all, because someone else on the net is funding part of your cost. And as we're seeing, the bills are coming due. USENET HAS to shift to an "everyone pays their way" mentality to survive. >> o rec.all -- maybe keep rec.arts.sf-lovers. >Shouldn't there be a smiley face after this line? Actually (and this is, I'm sure, controversial) no. Why? SF-Lovers has an extremely large readership across both USENET and Internet. If it were removed from USENET, lots of the burden of SF-L would shift to E-mail links, which doesn't really solve anything. This isn't true of any other rec group. And, in case it wasn't obvious, while I'm arguing for sf-l, note that I haven't said a word about rec.mag.otherrealms. That's not accidental. >This strikes me as a panic reaction. Why don't we wait and see what impact >the disappearance of ihnp4 actually has? Because the lost of at&t isn't a cause, it's a symptom. If the walls don't tumble down with at&t, they may well do it with the next backbone dropout (which WILL happen as folks try to shift their free-net to other willing dupes, only to find out THEY can't afford it anymore, iether....). Or the next. If you get gangrene, you don't wait to see if it'll stop with the toe, or the ankle. You do something before you lose the entire leg -- or the body. >1) Require that each site that accepts a feed to pass the groups it accepts > on to at least one other *long-distance* site. How? There's no administration, no rules, no bylaws. There's no enforcement mechanism. How do you create one? >2) Store the articles on disk in a compressed (possibly batched or tarred) > form. Hack the newsreader software to accomodate it. Disk size is trivial in the problems. Besides, you trade off large amounts of CPU cycles to get the disk savings, and most USENET systems these days don't have spare CPU cycles, either. And then you would have to rewrite the software to accept the new format. Which takes time to design, implement, test and distribute. >3) Get rid of uncompressed transmission for both news and mail. We would > probably have to tack on some form of ECC. See 1. Realisticaly, almost all transmission these days already IS compressed. Chuq Von Rospach chuq@sun.COM Delphi: CHUQ Robert A. Heinlein: 1907-1988. He will never truly die as long as we read his words and speak his name. Rest in Peace.