Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!seismo!sundc!hadron!inco!mack
From: mack@inco.UUCP (Dave Mack)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: The death of USENET
Message-ID: <2355@inco.UUCP>
Date: 15 Jun 88 16:43:35 GMT
References: <2645@rpp386.UUCP> <56228@sun.uucp> <2350@inco.UUCP> <56250@sun.uucp>
Reply-To: mack@inco.UUCP (Dave Mack)
Organization: McDonnell Douglas-INCO, McLean, VA
Lines: 68

In article <56250@sun.uucp> chuq@sun.UUCP (Chuq Von Rospach) writes:
>>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.

And your solution to an ingrown toenail is to amputate at the knee. Slick!

As it turns out, it *was* a panic reaction. ihnp4 will continue to serve
as a news feed. It just won't pass on third-party mail.

>>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? 

True, there's no administration, no enforcement mechanism, but there is a
culture, of sorts. Currently, the ethic is that if you get a feed, and
you can afford to, you provide feeds for free. I'm suggesting that we
should change this. If the sites you feed won't take a part in the survival
of the net, cut them out of it. Obviously, there would still be leaf sites:
it's topologically unnecessary (did I really write that?) to have every
site provide a feed to some other site, but the element of responsibility
should be present.

>>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. 

Bull! My home system has a 72 Meg disk. If I could store the articles in
a compressed form, I could afford to take a hell of a lot more groups that
I'd like to get. We don't all have Fuji Double Eagles hanging off of our
machines. And the machine cycles would be taken up by the newsreader, not
the transmission mechanism. So you have to wait a little longer before
the next article comes up. I could live with that.

>And then you would have to rewrite the software to accept the new format.
>Which takes time to design, implement, test and distribute.

Whereas it's trivial to solve the problem by hacking out two-thirds of the
news group hierarchy. Just great, Chuq. Yes, of course, it will mean
doing some work. Where do you think all of this software came from in
the first place? 

Progress usually involves some effort.

>>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.

Mail isn't. Is it? Yes, most news is sent batched/compressed. I'm arguing
that *everything* should be. Incremental gains add up. Apparently, the
burden of passing *uncompressed* mail through ihnp4 was enough to make
AT&T decide to kill the service.

Dave Mack
...uunet!inco!mack
...sun!sundc!inco!mack